when asked about AI, I find it's best to spend at least half an hour going over the pros and cons of random forests and gradient boosting. I just really like decision trees
"Have you built your own AI?" "I just stole all the AI models and datasets and mashed them together... like how they scrape data... so i Ai'd an AI. Does that count?"
A? I? Look lady, I'll make you all 26 letters of the alphabet if you give me this job.
I just had an interview like this. lol, I was entertained about what they expected versus what work the role actually did! đ
I once had a recruiter that said they could geek out about Linux and such, and wanted to know what I had been working on. I talked about kernel modules, writing RHEL kickstarts, ZFS on Linux, etc. They said "but I haven't heard anything about Linux. Don't you just do windows over there?" and that's where things ended.
No, you're missing the 5-10 hours of an "assessment project" they make you do. Including an audit of their current client base, tech stack and competition analysis. All done pro bono of course.
This is the kind of shit that made me have a career crisis and pivot into the medical field instead of tech.
Technical Interviews in 2026: "Why yes, I have expunged all Abominable Intelligence from my OS."
You can just confuse them: âYes, Iâve some experience training and deploying neural networks, and machine learning pipelines. If youâre interested in LLM specifically, Iâve experience in fine tuning BERT and GPT models for specific business questionsâ They will not understand and pretend to do it to not seem stupid.
What really happened in such a situation is that they already hired a relative of one of the high-ranking managers, and need an excuse to quickly get rid of the other candidates.
Years ago I interviewed at a big company that might be in Redmond, the interviewer was ex-navy and kept using these nautical terms, I had to ask him for clarification several times. Afterwords I got feedback from the recruiter that he felt I had a hard time understanding anything.
The most infuriating version of this happened to me when I applied at Starlink. I applied to several positions at once because they were all labeled similarly and I wanted to maximize my chances. Hiring manager calls saying theyâd like to interview me for (bunchanumbers), and me in the middle of the call is like âcool let me just look that up real quick because I applied for a few positionsâ and she immediately goes âItâs for the satellite dish that we build? Are you familiar with what a satellite dish isâ and for literally EVERY interaction from then on I could NOT convince this woman that I obviously knew what a fucking satellite dish was AHHHHHH still pisses me off to this day
Interview: 'Can you write an algorithm to find the shortest distance between two points?' Job: 'Can you give the button 2 more margin?'
major issue with this: it's 2 people talking! all I get are damn spyware "code challenges" that are either way more into the weeds of strings than I've even known anyone to do or some flavor of "build a whole spring program in a few min with no help." because coding isn't half looking up how to do something. great vid either way
as someone having to go back to interviewing for the first time in 9 years im sad
Posting and interview: you'll be at the cutting edge of AI development. You'll be designing and implementing complex data warehouses. This job will be challenging and engaging. Job reality: "hey can you make a dashboard..."
>Junior Systems Admin interview(after spending 4 years as a SysAdmin) > Technical interviewer is 20 minutes late to call and actually takes a call mid interview > Asks me to give a step by step(as in literally name each button pressed and window that pops up) for creating a GPO specifically for restricting opening CMD for certain users > Tells me that I don't seem experienced enough because I can explain processes like the above but can't regurgitate the exact steps verbatim > Tells me point blank they are looking for someone with 5-10 years of SysAdmin experience... for a role that pays $50-55k and ends the call early(late since the meeting started almost 30minutes late)
Some recruiter somewhere just added "must be Son-Goku" to the requirements of the job description.
The problem is that most times, the people hiring/interviewing are not the people who know what the job even is. Back at my previous company, my interview had a technical portion that was a toy problem in Angular, because the software they were building was in AngularJS. Part way through the assessment, I asked the guy, "I'm not incredibly familiar with Angular specifically; what's the best way to do <simple thing I don't remember now>?" And he responded, "...I don't know, I don't usually work on this app or in Angular, they just asked me to give you the technical interview. I think we're done." I got that job. Fast-forward a couple years and another team was struggling to find any decent developers, so they asked me to give the technical interview. I quickly realized that, if I weren't there, they would have hired people who have no idea how to do the job... because the interviewers were the managers who had no idea how to do the job they were hiring for.
@moomie1634