The worst job interview I ever had

I had a really weird power-trip interview once, and it was the CEO who was joined by a contractor who was ostensibly the technical lead for the project. There was nobody in engineering who worked full-time on the job, everybody was contracted. I was also going in as a contractor so I was aware that the interview would be a bit lighter on process as a result.

The questioning very quickly veered away from technical stuff and into stuff like, "where do you stand spiritually?" and other questions probing into whatever bizarre cosmic insights I could pull out of my ass at the time. He was the really intense kind of boss who wants to make sure you know of it with the hard back/shoulder slaps and micromanagement, and I could see his office from the boardroom which basically had an array of monitors all wired up to CCTV so he could watch (and hear) people from the comfort of his desk.

If any of that wasn't a red flag, getting hired literally 5 minutes after leaving the office was probably the biggest. I lasted about 6 months and even trying to leave was an ordeal.

They'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.

On 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.

Two years ago I applied for a position in the Swiss Federal Gov's IT departement. The interview rounds went well, I liked the team and the atmosphere was good. They told me that I was the best fit from the people who have applied for the position. Before the last interview, which was with the HR and the "boss" of the departement, i got an email which described how the onboarding happens. So I went there on the next day and they started grilling me. I didn't put my pre University education in the CV and they thought that I'm hiding something from them. They also thought that i'm like 20 years younger than I am, although I told them multiple times how old I am and my age was as well in the CV. It ended without a contract signed. I had to send them all that stuff, like old school certificates (20 years old!) that weren't relevant for that position at all. After a month or so they told me that they do not want to proceed with my application since they found someone who better fits the position. The dude from the team called me and told me that the HR had vetoed me out. Crazy shit. You better don't throw your elementary school grades away!

I think it is. My hunch is that in most EU countries the labor laws are good enough that, in general, it just doesn't become a problem.

I don't even remember (been a while since I did lots of interviews) if you're allowed or not allowed to ask any of the aforementioned things but I can tell you from experience that about half the candidates would mention their partner and/or kids anyway, because it just is usually not a problem. But it's not such standard fare that someone not mentioning would raise a flag either. I guess most of us just don't think about it.

Also, tech is a bit different and I am not that old - but in Germany you could see a ton of personal details absolutely no one is interested in on CVs, but it's getting better. (What your parents do for work, if you are married, what name you had before marrying, if you have a driver's license for a desk job, what primary school you went to, etc.pp)