391–400 of 589 posts
Now I want to know the name. Companies that use psycho-tactics should be known to us.
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> They specifically asked personal questions - parents stuff, relationship, etc. In the US any employer who asks you about personal relationships during an interview is opening themselves up to an illegal discrimination lawsuit.
Which protected characteristic does "personal relationships" fall under? It's vague enough to mean almost anything you want it to be, and I struggle to imagine any sort of successful prosecution.
It is illegal, and in my book also immoral to deny such a candidate, but the other side of the coin is there.
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It's also pretty sad that now "ML engineer" means prompting...
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, AN…
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!
Would be funny if the interviewer wrote the exact same blog post; "I had the worst candidate interview today, I asked him a simple ice-breaker question before getting into more technical stuff, and he just went off about his family and relationships for an hour; weirdest interview I ever gave."
Yep. This is definitely an OP-is-autistic problem, or is perhaps inexperienced. Not an interviewer problem. Keep it professional. If an interviewer asks a personal question then you simply refuse to answer (politely), or steer it back towards a professional context. If they persist then you end the interview.
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…
> "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.
This… was a mistake on both you and the interviewer. All interview questions - unless it’s impossible to twist your answer to fit this - is scoped to “… at work”. Nobody who asks “tell me about yourself” is asking you to talk about how you met your partner, how many cats you have, or that experience you had, that one time, at band camp. It would be redundant and awkward to literally say “… at work” at the end of ever…
If the interviewer did in fact share their personal trauma story as the author says then it would seem to indicate that was what they were asking for.
I know of places where that kind of sharing was the norm.
Interview at Microsoft Serbia, around 2018-2019, for a general Junior Software Engineer position. My expertise was in Machine Learning (this was way before LLMs and the current AI craze). The first guy knew what ML was, but advised me to round up my knowledge with low level coding, cause ML is too abstract and isn't very useful. 2nd and 3rd guy gave me a mix of stupid brain teasers and high school math, coupled with…
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Hard 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.
> 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 othe…
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Always trust your gut. Especially when it comes to people. Don't overthink, never rationalize it. Accept your feeling, it's valid. If I learned anything from all my past mistakes in life, it's this.
I had to check your profile after reading that first line. Fortunately 2016 join date, "No AI used in my comments". But holy cow that was uncanny after months of Claude
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> "what was the hardest day of your life" is a pretty standard I would suggest that this is a misremembering. As someone who's hosted thousands of interviews at companies big and small, all of the questions were scoped to professional work. Why? because when you ask things like "what was the hardest day in your life" you have a non-trivial chance of getting your interviewee tell you about the time they saw someone di…
Asking this sort of question is not great in professional context either. Someone working for the police could say: "Yeah, my boss made me clean up a triple homicide." Or a janitor at a fast food could say: "We found a dead addict in the toilets." Like these are all profession related answers. Yet they are not answers you want. Stop asking dumb questions.