R Interview Questions for Developers

Popular in the statistical computing and graphics domain, R has a very active open source community and strong data visualization library that makes it popular in academic and scientific applications.

By statisticians, for statisticians — R was built specifically for statistical work by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman of the University of Auckland, New Zealand in the early 1990’s.

http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/downloads/JCGS-1996.pdf

We have developed practical coding assignments and interview questions tailored to evaluate developers’ R skills during coding interviews. Furthermore, we have compiled a set of best practices to ensure that your interview questions accurately assess the candidates’ proficiency in R.

R example question

Help us design a parking lot

Hey candidate! Welcome to your interview. Boilerplate is provided. Feel free to change the code as you see fit. To run the code at any time, please hit the run button located in the top left corner.

Goals: Design a parking lot using object-oriented principles

Here are a few methods that you should be able to run:

• Tell us how many spots are remaining
• Tell us how many total spots are in the parking lot
• Tell us when the parking lot is full
• Tell us when the parking lot is empty
• Tell us when certain spots are full e.g. when all motorcycle spots are taken
• Tell us how many spots vans are taking up

Assumptions:

• The parking lot can hold motorcycles, cars and vans
• The parking lot has motorcycle spots, car spots and large spots
• A motorcycle can park in any spot
• A car can park in a single compact spot, or a regular spot
• A van can park, but it will take up 3 regular spots
• These are just a few assumptions. Feel free to ask your interviewer about more assumptions as needed

Best interview practices for R roles

For successful R interviews, it is essential to consider various factors, such as the candidate’s background and the specific engineering role. To facilitate a fruitful interview experience, we recommend adopting the following best practices:

• Develop technical questions that reflect real-world business scenarios within your organization. This approach will effectively engage the candidates and help determine their compatibility with your team.
• Cultivate a cooperative environment by inviting candidates to ask questions throughout the interview.
• Make sure your candidates know how to work with large datasets to show they can handle efficient data manipulation.

Moreover, adhering to standard interview practices is critical when conducting R interviews. This involves adjusting the difficulty of the questions to match the candidate’s abilities, providing timely updates on their application progress, and allowing them the opportunity to ask about the assessment process and collaborating with you and your team.