Worst interview experience, stay away from such companies
I just had the most bizarre and aggressive interview experience of my life.
It started with the company rescheduling on me twice because the interviewer, who is the Head of AI, simply failed to join the calls. I finally get him on the 3rd attempt, and immediately, the vibes are off. He has very aggressive body language right from the start.
After the intro, he starts cross-questioning me. It was fine for the first few minutes, but then he starts cutting off my responses and asking these overly ridiculous questions.
I was explaining a project where we implemented a multi-step agentic RAG system. He asks, "Why not use multiple open-source models?"
I told him: "Because of the upfront cost."
He gets dissmissive and says it’s very cheap for quantized models, and that it’s just "converting simple queries to SQL."
I tried to explain: "It might seem simple, but it’s not. You need context like date and domain knowledge etc., which small models can't hand-"
He cuts me off again. "Its just SQL generation. You can run them on laptops."
At this point, I was totally frustrated and just thought, "Ok, leave this sh**." I decided to troll him a bit since the interview was already a disaster. I said, "But we can't send the laptops to the users."
He got visibly angry. He said, "I know we can't send laptops. Don't joke with me, this is a serious interview. I know we can send it in Docker to the user."
I just looked at him and said, "I am not disrespecting you, but the system is orchestrated, so why should we send it to the end user like that?"
After that, he went full aggro. He started drilling me on more and more obscure topics. For some of them, I just pretended to think for a second and then said, "Sorry, I don't know." This happened 2 or 3 times. Eventually, he just said "thanks" and I cut the call immediately.
Bullet dodged, I guess? If this is how the Head of AI acts, I can't imagine what the rest of the culture is like.
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Name and shame bro! Name the company for all of us to be aware from beforehand
+1
Cooked up story for gape farming, else why wouldn't be mention company name, it's not like he is still waiting for next round
I think so too
Yee
Lately, interviews have become more about luck than sheer knowledge—I’ve had quite a few such experiences. That said, you handled your situation pretty well. I usually end up in an argument.
I genuinely don’t understand the taboo around using AI to become more efficient. Why can’t we use the tools available to us today? Converting natural language to SQL is a perfectly valid use case. Unfortunately, some architects are stuck making shallow statements, and honestly, it’s not worth working for such people. In the long run, they only end up making your life unnecessarily difficult.
Yeah. Seems like that guy was stuck in his own bubble.
This happened for me as well in one of my interviews recently. Not all are experts but they think they do have more expertise and ask silly questions.
It's becoming more and more common post 2024.
Same thing happened to me, he is asking text book definition and expecting the same line by line, like define strings, explain list, I explained with examples and comparison, but he expected the text book definition.
Sounds like you had a fun interview!Totally love your presence of mind to mess with him during the interview so he is equally frustrated. Oh sweet revenge!😂
At first I was irritated, then frustrated, then I was like, it is not worth it so why not have some fun. That sarcastic remark was worth it. I had a good laugh afterwards.