Land a Job Writing R Code

Steve Mortimer
September 13th, 2017

About Me


I am a Wahoo!

UVA Cavaliers Logo
BA Statistics - Dec '09

MS Statistics - May '11

About Me

Advisory Board Company Logo 2011-2015
Advisory Board Company
Washington, DC
Data Scientist

Homes Logo 2015-2017
Homes.com, Inc.
Norfolk, VA
Senior Manager of Data Science

I'm Interested In

Actionable
R Logo

  • Accessing New Data Sources (odbc, RForcecom, RSiteCatalyst)
  • Creating Webservices with R (opencpu, plumbr)
  • Building Web applications (Shiny)
  • Production Maching Learning Models (caret, broom, aurelius)

Disclaimer #1

Programmer clip art

Sorry, I do NOT have a job for you.

I have no job!

Disclaimer #2


This presentation is an adaption of another presentation by Chris Mar (@cmar) entitled: “ The Art of Ruby Technical Interviews

You're Interested in R

r-stickers r-tshirt

Pick a Project

Love Shopping?
Ebay
Passion is

interesting
Love Fantasy Football?
Fantasy Football

Steps to Success

Build It!
Tell Others about it.
Check it into GitHub.
Put it on your resume, but one thing…

Make a Good README

Know the Community

R is a Community
Interview Tip: Talk about recent community news.
“Hey, what your thoughts on SQL in R Notebooks?”

Know the Thought Leaders


Where are they speaking? What projects are they working on?

Know the Conference Lineup

Know the Tools, Packages, etc.

  1. Must Know
    • dplyr, ggplot2
  2. Should Know
    • knitr, rmarkdown, pander, shiny, httr
  3. Nice to Know
    • data.table, doSNOW, testthat, e1071, randomForest, caret
Interview Tip: Have a preference!
“I’m open to using tibbles, but right now I like data.table.”

Commit to Open Source


Even Tiny Contributions are Valid!

Doing the Job Search


Look for R Skills in
Job Postings

Stalk Employees at
the Company

Tip: Avoid the technology grab-bag
(SPSS, SAS, …)
Tip: Check them out on social media
(Twitter, GitHub, …)

At the Interview


Say you are “Proficient”


Curiousity over Fluency


Work your Angle

Answering Technical Questions

Do NOT say “I could Google it”

via GIPHY

Answering Technical Questions

Do NOT be afraid to ask for help

via GIPHY

Resources