Interview Preparation for IBM

Introduction

Come up with a list of topics that I should research and understand to prepare for the first IBM interview. This interview will likely be more behavioral as well as testing to see how much I know about IBM. 

Six Important Thing during Interview

Bonita C. Stewart (Vice President of Global Partnerships)

1. Talk about transferable skills and experience
2. Ask open-ended question, lots of them
3. List accomplishments, but don’t make it all about yourself
4. Take ownership of your mistakes
5. Personal agility with creative strategies
6. Show that I work well with others

[Reference]

IBM Analytics Cycle to Drive Better Decision

• Planning: What is our plan?
• Descriptive: What happened?
• Diagnostic: Why did it happen?
• Predictive: What will happen next?
• Prescriptive: What should we do?

[Reference]

Online Recording Pre-interview

• Behavioural:

  • Tell us about yourself.

    • Hi, I am Wang Yang. I graduated at National Chung Hsing University, and I majored in Applied Mathematics. I have one year working experience at KKBOX and Cinnamon AI. I became extremely interested in open-source technologies and how they can be applied to buisness use cases. In consequence, I came here to United Kingdom to pursue my Master degree in Computer Science. My strength is I’m creative and really open to trying my new ideas in the data field. I believe this is the step to driving the expansion of diversity and inclusion in IBM. What I am looking for is a company that I could add value to, that I can produce a positive return, where I could join a strong team, I believe this is what IBM is looking for.

  • Can you speak about the past or current projects you’ve worked on?

    • I would love to talk about my dissertation project, although I’m still working on it. My dissertation is about to predict the buy-and-sell signal for cryptocurrency market using Natural Language Processing and Technical Indicators. This project seeks to combine fundamental and technical aspects in order to predominantly guide traderes and investors’ decisions for crypto coins. Finally, I will develop a classifier for buy-and-sell signals using both text data and technical indicators for fundamental analysis and technical analysis, respectively, to mimic the behavior of an actual human being who is interested in investment.

  • Talk about a project in which you had to work as part of a team. What were your roles and responsibilities and how did you balance the work with your team members?

    • I worked on a project, which is held by Made with ML. They launched this data science incubator project in 2020. In this project, I was able to build an end-to-end ML app with a team from different countries. So everyone is remote, and it’s a diverse team. In this project, we focus on research applying Natural Language Processing in the finance domain. We scraped tweets from Twitter related to forex, then applied sentiment analysis to generate investment insight. I was assumed the leadership on this project because the whole project came from my idea. The biggest challenge is time differences, we have people from China, Zimbabwe, and America. They also have different technical backgroud, so I have to learn how to assign appropriate job for each team member regarding to their expertise. Also, I set up a weekly meeting to disucuss our progress, just like running scrum, but without daily stand-up meeting.

  • Talk about a failure or a short-coming and how you responded to that.

    • When I was conducting the Made with ML incubator project, we end up with a poor result. We backtested our strategy on forex market, it didn’t show a promising profit. There was only like having around 1 month left to meet the deadline. So I decided to set our meeting on a daily basis, and discuss the solution to our problem. We thought that the main reason why our result is not good enough is becuase we focused on the model itself too much. Therefore, we dug into the data itself to generate more insight and did more exploratory data analysis. Even we completed our project before the deadline, we still can’t improve the performance of our model. But for exchange, we gained lots of extra insights from the data. I am grateful that we met this challenge, so that we can apply problem-solving and critical-thinking skills to this, and developed a growth mindset. A growth mindset and strategies help us to grow continually in today’s ever-changing landscape. As the saying goes, “No pain no gain, so no failure no success.”

  • Why IBM?

    • There are two reasons why I choose IBM. First, I’ve used one of IBM product when I did research for my dissertation project. I utilised Cloud Pak suite, specifically Cloud Pak for Data. Tone Analyser is quite an interesting tool, I can use it to do sentiment analysis for my work. Because it has a limited API usage, I even created six accounts so that I can increase the capability to my project. Cloud Pak runs on Openshift, and it tackles the entire ene-to-end AI pipeline, and this is really trying to solve the customers’ problems. IBM is really innovating in this space, and the mission at IBM is to digitalise the client’s buisiness, most businesses have heard of AI and ML and want to use it but have no idea how. This is where IBM comes in and supports the clients in their journey, and this is also the reason why I want to work on this product and expose to it. Second, I’ve worked on my dissertation project with Demian, a data scientist at IBM. We have meetings on a weekly basis. Demian really helps increase my critical thinking skills and makes me do brainstorming on every different aspects. We also talked about his works and projects which he’s been working on recently, and told me about the responsibility of his job. I’m super interested in the working environment at IBM, which is the place I can leverage diversity and inclusion. Everyone in here can be who they are, they don’t have to pretend to be someone they aren’t. Diversity of thought in teams, and diversity of culture and different academic backgroud, can have lots of emphasis on building diverse team, and this has been proven to be more successful to overcome challenges. This is the second reason why working at IBM is appealing and promising for me!

  • Describe a tool that helps you deal with things recently, any kinds of tools.

    • Off the top of my head, I would say Hexo and GitHub page. I’ve been doing tech writing since 2018 when I’m stressed or when I have free time. I used Jekyll to build my blog before. But recently, I found that Hexo provides a better looking framwork for building frontend website. It is a fast, simple, and powerful blog framework, powered by Node.js, and it allows me to write articles using Markdown syntex. It also works well with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. So, I would say that Hexo is mostly for developers who love to create their blog easily.

  • Describe the thing that you’re most interested in.

    • Blogging is the most interesting thing I’ve been doing since 2018. At first, I thought that tech writing can serve as a kind of diary of my technical growth. As me getting better at programming, the problems I try to solve will become more complex and complicated, and the technical challenges will become more difficult. So, I decided to start writing articles. And recently, I found out that blogging is great for stress relief for me. When I start to think or writing as my personal way to navigate stressful times, it starts to be seen as great form of relief, helping me to overcome my life pressure.

Scrum in Agile

• 3 Roles:
  • Scrum Master
  • Product Owner
  • Development Team
• 4 Meetings:
  • Sprint Planning Meeting
  • Standup Meeting
  • Review Meeting
  • Retrospective Meeting
• 3 Artifacts:
  • Product Backlog
  • Sprint Backlog
  • Burndown Chart

[Reference]

Team with Scrum

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
1st week			Plan Meeting	Daily Meeting	Daily Meeting
2nd week	Daily Meeting	Daily Meeting	Daily Meeting	Code Freeze	Daily Meeting Refinement Regression
3rd week	Daily Meeting Regression	Review Meeting Regression

Conclusion

I will have this AI pre-interview on 29th March. If there’s anything else mentioned in the interview, I will update on this article.

References

1. https://thoughtsforthursday.wordpress.com/2018/08/02/concede-conquer-or-compromise/
2. https://www.ibm.com/uk-en/products/cloud-pak-for-data