9 ms·
I always wanted to tell the story of my weirdest interview. It's bad in a different way from OP's. This was for a "Machine Learning Engineer" contractor positio
by gobdovan 5mo ago
I always wanted to tell the story of my weirdest interview. It's bad in a different way from OP's. This was for a "Machine Learning Engineer" contractor position.
- Hi, I'm gobdovan. How are you? says I.
The interviewer doesn't bite:
- How many prompting techniques do you know? (ok?..)
After a couple confused seconds, I respond with 2-3 techniques and ask if I should explain them, but the interview engine is already running at full speed:
- What is PEFT? How many PEFT techniques do you know?
I say I know LoRA and start to explain it, but the interview had no patience for answers longer than their acronyms. Before I knew it, I heard frantic clicking.
- He starts sharing his screen while I am still talking about LoRA in the background. Puts up an empty car from Google Images and commands: "Model the relationships between cars and people positioned inside the cars over time."
Uncertain of how to satisfy the inquiry, I start foolishly questioning what the task is supposed to be: vision? simulation? dataset labeling? self-driving cars?
But the interviewer doesn't budge. Doesn't give a specific task or context. Simply ignores the questions and stoically refuses to elaborate. The stars speak to me, and I guess he wants a relational mapping of some kind. Turns out I am right. This was supposed to test basic SQL table modeling.
At this point, I decide I'd sit through the interview just so I can collect all the questions. I am not disappointed:
- How many agentic frameworks do you know?
- What is the name of OpenAI's embedding model, and how many dimensions does it have?
- Then, the last ordeal lands: interviewer takes out a piece of cardboard that has "context engineering" written on it and asks: "What does this tell you?". His camera is unfocused, I ask if he could read what it says. Instead he repeats: "What does this tell you? What does this tell you? What does this tell you?".
I ask if he is the ML team lead. Turns out this absolute Chad is a mobile dev the client asked to interview candidates for the MLE role.
- skrebbel 5mo agoDid you get the job?
- gobdovan 5mo agoNo, but I gained something just as valuable. After the interview, the recruiter who introduced me to this job said they had another role for me. But first, he wanted links to the other positions I'd applied to, what those positions were paying, and how far along I was with each one. I told him I wouldn't do that and he said that it was ok. Haven't heard from them in a year or so, but I'm sure that other interview is in the bag.
- skrebbel 5mo agoHahah excellent. I love that the terrible job interview came through a terrible recruiter, it just fits perfectly.
- Dumblydorr 5mo agoWhy would a recruiter expect you to give that?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- drewnoakes 5mo agoSounds like a shameless attempt at market research.
- tonyedgecombe 5mo agoI expect some people are so desperate to please that they will hand over any information. For those that don't understand why an external recruiter is asking for that detail they are trying to find new clients to sell their services to.
- ljm 5mo agoThey'll frame it as not wanting to waste anybody's time by submitting you as a candidate if you're already mid-flight on other positions, but they can still figure that out without having specifics on the actual company, role, salary, etc. They're banking on you offering it because saying no would rule out any mysterious prospects they have to offer, but really they're looking for new leads and if it comes from a candidate then it's warmer. Just have to be polite when you give them vague info and say you're not able to share more than that.
- MBCook 5mo agoAlso, other positions they now know are open and can see if they can recruit for.
- 5mo ago
- sirnicolaz 5mo agoI hope for his mental sanity that he didn't
- janussunaj 5mo agoIt's also pretty sad that now "ML engineer" means prompting...
- Dumblydorr 5mo agoExactly. Not 4 years ago I was rejected from a job for not having enough NLP experience. Can you imagine that today? Someone being hired to do NLP in the market of LLMs?
- nkozyra 5mo agoOn the one hand I understand this fairly deeply. I started doing "ML" ~ 20 years ago building classifiers people would laugh at today and even at the time barely impressed people when they were 95% correct. I moved into NLP and built NERs that missed 2-10% of named entities per document routinely. Best of breed approaches and models rarely fared better. Learned the cornerstones in school for ML; linear regression, ANNs, traditional RL, image classifiers, A* bots, etc, most of which got baked into transformers later on. Then the transformers went from interesting novelty to useful. I couldn't build a useful one locally, but the toys versions were still fun to play with. Then the novelty LLM went from useful to generally applicable. Then they became a silver bullet. I still can't build one locally. I can distill or build or fine tune if you give me some rented GPUs. But to call this ML is very much a stretch. I still use the traditional ML a lot, but mostly for evals and analysis. I get being naturally bummed by this but I can't justify feeling anything but vaguely nostalgic about it. Someone with a $20 subscription can mog anything I can build with the skills I picked up. If someone hands you a silver bullet you'd be a fool to decline it and spend your time hand casting a crude piece of brass. If the difference between 95% and 99% means you know how to aim or oil the gun, that's the world we live in. Building a good RAG pipeline or prompt optimization or LLM consensus is dumb stuff that produces a better result than anything I could do from my 2010 ML/AI textbooks. I don't lack the knowledge or capacity to compete, I lack the compute. That's the job now for 99% of companies.
- randoments 5mo ago> I get being naturally bummed by this but I can't justify feeling anything but vaguely nostalgic about it. Someone with a $20 subscription can mog anything I can build with the skills I picked up. Welcome to the data science job market of the 2015-2023 where everybody with a $20 online course could become a proficient data scientist in only 4 weeks!
- zeafoamrun 5mo agoHolding up a cardboard board in a video interview? This is so deranged.
- ludicrousdispla 5mo agoI wonder if the letters were hand-written or cut and pasted from several magazines.
- andrewflnr 5mo agoI bet if they'd been cut out they'd be easier to read.
- bilekas 5mo agoThat is quite funny, I would have certainly left. > Turns out this absolute Chad is a mobile dev the client asked to interview candidates for the MLE role Those elite frontier mobile devs and their overwhelming power!
- tracker1 5mo agoTBF, your current title/project isn't the same thing as what you're capable of... I have a lot of experience with both front end and backend systems. I was brought into a new job as a UI expert, but still had some opinions on the backend approach... I overheard a conversation that included, "what does he care about the backend, he's just a UI guy." I don't think I've been quite that pissed off any other time in well over a decade at a workplace.
- supriyo-biswas 5mo agoI've had an interview like this in the past. At the time, I chalked it up to a power trip and the indignant behavior that comes along with it, as it is especially embedded in the culture of the country that I'm based out of. Having said that, talking to a relative, I found out that this style of "interviewing" is often done when they already have someone for the position, but need to show (for compliance reasons, or otherwise) that they tried finding candidates, and only their preferred one qualified.
- akdor1154 5mo ago> I chalked it up to a power trip and the indignant behavior that comes along with it, as it is especially embedded in the culture of the country that I'm based out of. That's a very globally-conscious way to refer to the USA!
- halapro 5mo agoMy mind raced to the letter I instead
- supriyo-biswas 5mo agoImmediate parent is correct.
- hlynurd 5mo agoThe Isle of Man’s toxic culture of dominance shines through again...
- simonask 5mo agoIs it Iceland? Ivory Coast? Ireland? Indonesia?
- fakwandi_priv 5mo agoYou're guesses are getting somewhat closer each time, almost there.
- matwood 5mo ago> Turns out this absolute Chad is a mobile dev the client asked to interview candidates for the MLE role. Until this line I assumed this was a screening by HR.
- ordu 5mo ago> "What does this tell you?" Why didn't you answer, that it tells you that his camera is unfocused? I don't understand how people tolerate this for so long, I'd start trolling the guy after his third question. If he wants to be rude, then I'd retaliate and make sure I have a laugh while he is wasting his time.
- teiferer 5mo agoHard to claim the moral high ground if you do eye for an eye. Always be nicer than the other side. Even for practical reasons. If they think you are a prick, the blast radius can be substantially wider than this specific interview. And for what? The lulz? I'm not saying to accept rude behavior, but one can leave such situations without being rude back or making a scene.
- ordu 5mo ago> Hard to claim the moral high ground if you do eye for an eye. I do not claim the moral high ground. My moral is more flexible, than just "an eye for an eye" or "be nicer than the other side". I can do any of that depending on a situation. I'm starting any communication with the latter, it is a consequence of my upbringing, but if it doesn't work I may do anything. I want to note, I know that "be nicer than the other side" works oftentimes, people are entering into a communication in some emotional state and with some expectations, and these things can change during the communication. So I let my upbringing to try it first not just because of upbringing, but because I know the value of it. > one can leave such situations without being rude back or making a scene. One can. And I can. However there are situations when I just don't want to. A series of interviews that took my time just to end with the rudeness, so I just wasted my time is one of these situations. If they wanted to hire pushovers they could write it upfront in the requirements for applicants, I wouldn't bother them.
- rambambram 5mo agoBeautifully spoken, you take the words out of my mouth.
- 5mo ago
- AJRF 5mo agoWhy doesn't stuff like this happen to me, i'd have so much fun with a guy like this >:)
- babafun 5mo agoYou have to respect this guy's patience tho
- shantnutiwari 5mo ago" but the interview engine is already running at full speed:" I dont know if this is a recent thing, but I had a similar thing where an interviewer was racing forward, and would only accept the answers he had in mind. In Python, he asked me how to search for substring. I was thinking but he started hurrying me. So I said regex and started writing a regex. "No, there is an inbuilt method" I couldnt remember the method. He asked me to google it, but there are dozens of string methods. "I could use a regex?" I said and tried to show him how. He ended the call, and 5 min later the agent called me to say my Python was sun-standard so they wouldnt be going forward. This guy was a permanent employee and supposedly an expert
- stemchar 5mo agoI probably would've done the same. "I don't remember what the function is called" would've been fine-ish, but reaching for a regex is just insane.
- cucumber3732842 5mo agoIt kind of depends on the substring and problem context. Arbitrary substring in arbitrary text vs extracting embedded plant code from product serial numbers. As long as you've got a good explanation for what you chose and why you chose it and the pro/con it's probably fine.
- roenxi 5mo agoA regexp basically comes with a compiler. Who knows what sort of optimisations they've built in under the hood. It wouldn't be surprising if there was a special fast-path for efficiently searching for a substring; that'd be effective in practice. But more importantly it is hugely context sensitive on how often the function is going to be called and what IO needs to happen around it to decide if speed matters at all. Using a regex as a first attempt is entirely reasonable. Especially in an interview about Python. If we care about efficiently doing substring matching Python isn't the language of choice. If a programmer just wants to remember how regex work and get on with their day they'll do fine at handling string problems.
- randusername 5mo agoI had an experience like this. I showed up and was handed a 50 question pen-and-paper exam on C# trivia, like the result of cursed operator precedence chains. I am not a C# programmer. No small talk, no discussion of the role, no discussion of my experience or interest in the position. I kept trying to decline and open up a more conceptual conversation on relative importance of things in software, but they really cared about grading my work. Easily 2 out of 5 interviews I've taken expose spectacular miscommunications between HR / management and future coworkers.
- Xunjin 5mo agoWhat the actual F lol
- haspok 5mo agoI had such an interview once. The recruiting agent explained to me beforehand that this is kind of a "stress-technical" interview, supposed to test my real knowledge as I would have to answer the questions without thinking, almost instinctively. My interview happened on the phone while I was commuting on a crowded train, and was extremely successful - at the end, we both agreed that we were not looking for each other :) This was back when leetcode was just coming in full swing (early 2010s), which since then replaced it completely. I think the (startup - coincidence?) company that was trying to hire simply didn't have the money to pay for a leetcode hosting service, a phone call costs nothing after all, only time...
- i_am_a_peasant 5mo agoThis is the best thing I've read all day thank you. I laughed so hard! Oh man imagine if they asked the janitor to interview you and he just goes at it like it's the defining moment of his entire career.
- misja111 5mo agoWhenever I'm in an interview (almost) like this, I happily remind myself that interviews work in two directions: they are also for me to evaluate my possible employer.
- giancarlostoro 5mo agoI don't know what I would do, I've never had to hang up on an interview, but I just might have especially after how it ended.
- Aurornis 5mo ago> I ask if he is the ML team lead. Turns out this absolute Chad is a mobile dev the client asked to interview candidates for the MLE role. Some times I run into companies like this: The people you talk to are so visibly inexperienced that you can't comprehend how the company functions, let alone makes money. Some times it's a zombie company. They received funding or got a windfall from some early business moves, hired a ton of people, and now they're floating through the industry transferring money from customers to salaries as long as they can while their customers slowly leave for better options. Some times it's a company with horrible management skills. They promote people who play the game instead of doing the work. The person in charge of the ML initiative only wanted to say that they hired MLE people for a new ML initiative for their resume. They grabbed someone who wouldn't complain or talk back and gave them the job of interviewing MLE engineers. That person ChatGPT-ed some questions and ran through a list in each interview, knowing their job was to go through the motions. The interview filters out everyone who would hate that environment, selecting for more people who know that the name of the game is going through the motions and pretending to do work while avoiding getting fired.
- burnte 5mo agoI've had very few bad interviews, I've had very few interviews that didn't lead to offers, but I've declined a few. One was semi-recent and it was in in-person in-office interview but the CEO joined remotely. We chatted for a few minutes, then the COO came into the room and we began the interview. The CEO asked one question in the beginning, then the COO asked all the questions. The CEO sat on the screen like a lump. I felt weird, and asked him directly a few times if he had questions, he'd shake his head and gesture to the COO. Later I got a call from the recruited saying the CEO was unhappy, that he felt "he couldn't get a word in edgewise" but he was willing to "give the interview another chance." I said I was sorry to hear that, and that if the CEO didn't feel he could speak up freely in a 3 person meeting then I wasn't the right fit for that environment. The COO called me later, the truth was that everything I had said about future planning aligned with their previous CIO who had left after long disagreements with the CEO but that the board liked the plans and my resume. I said no thanks, that the CEO isn't someone I want to work with. If everyone has to constantly cater to the CEO and make sure he feels included, that's not a workplace, that's a kindergarten.
- chadgpt3 5mo agoI had one a bit like this, the interviewer was a nontechnical guy who just had a list of questions.
- muffa 5mo agoI had an interview like this, I got annoyed and just responded with "I don't know" to all of his questions. Then the CEO of the company offered me a position, politely declined ofc
- mojo74 5mo ago"The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping."
- Tangurena2 5mo agoDude, we got this gig from the app Turtle Flipper.
- Tepix 5mo agoIt‘s a quote from Blade runner, testing subjects to see if they‘re androids.
- abustamam 5mo agoI wonder if such companies realize (or care) how much good talent they're losing by keeping bad talent.
- tracker1 5mo agoHard for some to know when they have the ear of higher ups.
- drrob 5mo agoIt's a good job I wasn't being interviewed for this job, as I have not one iota of a smidge of a clue what PEFT and LORA are. And I have no idea what varieties of prompting technique there are.
- minimaxir 5mo agoPEFT is more niche as it's a specific library (https://github.com/huggingface/peft https://github.com/huggingface/peft) that creates LoRAs, but for a machine learning engineer working with LLM models outside of just prompting an API, it's within scope to know why/how a LoRA should be used.
- drrob 4mo agoFair enough.
- tshaddox 5mo agoI kinda wish that the industry norms changed such that it wasn't so taboo to just name and shame these companies.
- bilekas 5mo agoI do think sometimes the interview process can be weird as hell, but if one is to name and shame it doesn't help really, they could change their processes and even take feedback but if there's a constant record of the oddities it can turn off potential perfect fits. I've been shocked how many people will base their approach off of Glassdoor reviews from 5 years ago for example. I think it's fair for a company to improve, plus it makes for funny posts like this! Also I'm not sure it's such a tabboo as it is a stigma on the applicant!
- complianceowll 5mo agoI'm sorry, but that doesn't sound like an absolute Chad. That, sir, is a Giga Senior Alpha Chadus Maximus.
- ksd482 5mo agoLOL! My knee jerk reaction was going to be "dude, it's sarcasm". But you are way ahead of me :)
- complianceowll 5mo agoHAHA....giga Chad to giga Chad, no worries ;) LOL
- bicepjai 4mo agoThis was a fun story. I appreciate your patience, I would have said thanks and left after the cardboard box show