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.
- 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.