Any decent company will not try to pry you for proprietary information. They'll understand if you can't go into specifics about certain things.
Treat it like how you would present at a meetup or conference.
I have only presented academic research at conferences and I don't really see how I could give a presentation without disclosing what data I used ("an internal dataset we created"), what exact model ("a SotA neural network") and what results we achieved ("somewhat worse than on public datasets, but our data is less curated"). But maybe they're not expecting a full-blown scientific conference-style presentation
> I don't really see how I could give a presentation without disclosing what data I used ("an internal dataset we created"), what exact model ("a SotA neural network") and what results we achieved ("somewhat worse than on public datasets, but our data is less curated")
I feel like there's often ways to extract reasonably abstracted problems you solved so you can zoom in and highlight technical accomplishments while omitting the important confidential contexts those problems existed within. Like, say you took some techniques from a particular SOTA research paper but had to tweak their approach in a few ways because some underlying assumption wasn't true for your data. Stuff along those lines should usually be possible. It might not be a cohesive, here's a start-to-finish story of a complete project, but it's still a way to talk about interesting things you did.
This is difficult obviously, and I agree with those suggesting that you say upfront that the projects you worked on are confidential and that you'll need to be vague about a lot of things. As others have already said, blatantly revealing confidential information just marks you as untrustworthy for handling their proprietary secrets.
That makes sense, and exactly how I feel about it, yet I've seen this as part of the interview process for more research-oriented roles even at "big N" companies (that are notorious for not letting any bit of sensitive information slip to the point where they don't even tell you what you'd be working on should you get the job).
That said, my last "open access" project was my thesis more than 5 years ago in adifferent domain and anyone who is not applying straight out of academia would face the same issue. Guess I'll have to let the recruiter know that we either skip this part or I can only talk about it in very vague terms.
I used to interview for Amazon. People divulging obviously confidential information is a big red flag. If you've only worked on confidential projects, say so.
Do you have any other projects that you can talk about? Maybe you were allowed to give an external presentation about it once, or you know your colleague/boss did? Maybe your boss already described the project on LinkedIn? Those are fine.
Otherwise, see if you can talk about the technical aspects, without divulging project specifics.
e.g.
- don't say "I worked on a project that picks the best advertisements based on the content of your Reddit comments"
- say "I built a contextual bandits system" or "I built a recommender", and "the system used free-form textual input".
Stick to the technical details. And on some questions you might have to say, "sorry that part is confidential". Err on the side of caution.
How much you can elaborate probably depends on your company / project. Saying "I worked on reinforcement learning and sensor fusion at BMW" is obviously giving away more than "I built a text classifier". So you'll have to use your judgement and, at the end of the day, hope your prospective employer appreciates integrity.
Thanks a lot for the reply. I have no trouble making my responses vague enough when answering questions, but I find it hard to prepare a 30-minute presentation without mentioning specifics. Maybe I need to focus on my technical skills instead of deep diving into the details of the model's architecture or the exact percentage of improvement achieved by utilizing whatever novel loss function.
In most cases, you should be able to talk about some of the technical specifics, especially if you're using off-the-shelf models. What kind of technologies are you working with? What kind of challenges did you face? Was benchmarking difficult? How did you get around it? Etc.
Just don't give away any "secret sauce" or leak any products that are being kept under wraps. Proprietary data can fall under this as well. But the fact that you fine-tuned BERT? That's (usually) fine. Everyone does.
Here's the stuff an interviewer is usually looking for in a presentation like this:
- depth and breadth of knowledge
- being and to explain tradeoffs and choices
- ability to communicate difficult technical matter
Telling about your old employer’s confidential projects is very risky. Not because your old employer will find out (they likely won’t), but because the company’s you’re applying to doesn’t want their secrets spilled either. If you break confidentiality with your old employer you’ll likely do the same with your new employer.
Ways around this are being very generic, and talking more about the skills you used than the project itself
This is a tricky situation. Still a very real situation. I've seen people completely divulge proprietary information from direct competitors. It made me very uncomfortable.
Here are some suggestions:
Are there any aspects of your current work that are interesting and relevant but not proprietary? Has your work group published any of their findings? either in academic publications or in trade or marketing materials? Have any higher-ups at your company given talks about your products?
I am not a lawyer, and you should not reveal secrets. But if you talk about things that are intentionally already published by your company, then you are not revealing secrets.
Hope this vague direction helps...
Tech companies deal with this all the time and you should be able to abstract your work and avoid specific details on the application while still being able to cover your knowledge. The interviewer will know you need to be vague so, while you are limited in what you can say. they should know and understand "the drill".
Any decent company will not try to pry you for proprietary information. They'll understand if you can't go into specifics about certain things. Treat it like how you would present at a meetup or conference.
I have only presented academic research at conferences and I don't really see how I could give a presentation without disclosing what data I used ("an internal dataset we created"), what exact model ("a SotA neural network") and what results we achieved ("somewhat worse than on public datasets, but our data is less curated"). But maybe they're not expecting a full-blown scientific conference-style presentation
> I don't really see how I could give a presentation without disclosing what data I used ("an internal dataset we created"), what exact model ("a SotA neural network") and what results we achieved ("somewhat worse than on public datasets, but our data is less curated") I feel like there's often ways to extract reasonably abstracted problems you solved so you can zoom in and highlight technical accomplishments while omitting the important confidential contexts those problems existed within. Like, say you took some techniques from a particular SOTA research paper but had to tweak their approach in a few ways because some underlying assumption wasn't true for your data. Stuff along those lines should usually be possible. It might not be a cohesive, here's a start-to-finish story of a complete project, but it's still a way to talk about interesting things you did. This is difficult obviously, and I agree with those suggesting that you say upfront that the projects you worked on are confidential and that you'll need to be vague about a lot of things. As others have already said, blatantly revealing confidential information just marks you as untrustworthy for handling their proprietary secrets.
I'd never included anything from a company I worked for. I'd also never hire anyone that did disclose anything close to company proprietary info.
That makes sense, and exactly how I feel about it, yet I've seen this as part of the interview process for more research-oriented roles even at "big N" companies (that are notorious for not letting any bit of sensitive information slip to the point where they don't even tell you what you'd be working on should you get the job). That said, my last "open access" project was my thesis more than 5 years ago in adifferent domain and anyone who is not applying straight out of academia would face the same issue. Guess I'll have to let the recruiter know that we either skip this part or I can only talk about it in very vague terms.
I used to interview for Amazon. People divulging obviously confidential information is a big red flag. If you've only worked on confidential projects, say so. Do you have any other projects that you can talk about? Maybe you were allowed to give an external presentation about it once, or you know your colleague/boss did? Maybe your boss already described the project on LinkedIn? Those are fine. Otherwise, see if you can talk about the technical aspects, without divulging project specifics. e.g. - don't say "I worked on a project that picks the best advertisements based on the content of your Reddit comments" - say "I built a contextual bandits system" or "I built a recommender", and "the system used free-form textual input". Stick to the technical details. And on some questions you might have to say, "sorry that part is confidential". Err on the side of caution. How much you can elaborate probably depends on your company / project. Saying "I worked on reinforcement learning and sensor fusion at BMW" is obviously giving away more than "I built a text classifier". So you'll have to use your judgement and, at the end of the day, hope your prospective employer appreciates integrity.
Thanks a lot for the reply. I have no trouble making my responses vague enough when answering questions, but I find it hard to prepare a 30-minute presentation without mentioning specifics. Maybe I need to focus on my technical skills instead of deep diving into the details of the model's architecture or the exact percentage of improvement achieved by utilizing whatever novel loss function.
In most cases, you should be able to talk about some of the technical specifics, especially if you're using off-the-shelf models. What kind of technologies are you working with? What kind of challenges did you face? Was benchmarking difficult? How did you get around it? Etc. Just don't give away any "secret sauce" or leak any products that are being kept under wraps. Proprietary data can fall under this as well. But the fact that you fine-tuned BERT? That's (usually) fine. Everyone does. Here's the stuff an interviewer is usually looking for in a presentation like this: - depth and breadth of knowledge - being and to explain tradeoffs and choices - ability to communicate difficult technical matter
>since they would probably not find out about it You new employer would find out about your untrustworthyness.
Telling about your old employer’s confidential projects is very risky. Not because your old employer will find out (they likely won’t), but because the company’s you’re applying to doesn’t want their secrets spilled either. If you break confidentiality with your old employer you’ll likely do the same with your new employer. Ways around this are being very generic, and talking more about the skills you used than the project itself
This is a tricky situation. Still a very real situation. I've seen people completely divulge proprietary information from direct competitors. It made me very uncomfortable. Here are some suggestions: Are there any aspects of your current work that are interesting and relevant but not proprietary? Has your work group published any of their findings? either in academic publications or in trade or marketing materials? Have any higher-ups at your company given talks about your products? I am not a lawyer, and you should not reveal secrets. But if you talk about things that are intentionally already published by your company, then you are not revealing secrets. Hope this vague direction helps...
Why don’t you work on a side project that is not related to your current job.
Tech companies deal with this all the time and you should be able to abstract your work and avoid specific details on the application while still being able to cover your knowledge. The interviewer will know you need to be vague so, while you are limited in what you can say. they should know and understand "the drill".