In the summer of 2024, I had an interview with this company. Their field of operation happens to be the same as that of a company I previously worked for — in fact, I was one of the founding engineers there, and we were the first to work on this type of solution. I developed many of the core algorithms myself. Because of this, I believed I had far more experience and insight into the topic than anyone at this company, and I was confident I could deliver faster and more effective solutions.
That is, until I interviewed with their team lead. From the very beginning of the interview, it was obvious that s/he was determined not to hire me. S/he came across as cold, distant, and deliberately harsh with the questions. My impression is that s/he didn't want to hire someone more experienced than her/himself, possibly to protect her/his own position. A friend of mine also interviewed with her/him and said s/he had the exact same feeling.
The strangest part of all this was that s/he conducted the interview alone. Which, in my opinion, is absolutely absurd — if Karpathy himself had sat in that interview, s/he would’ve rejected him too and simply reported “technical insufficiency.” In reality, maybe s/he just didn’t like the candidate’s hair, or maybe s/he saw him as a threat. Who knows?
Rather than focusing on what I could bring to the table — considering I had already built a similar system before them — or getting excited about how I could contribute, s/he bombarded me with increasingly difficult technical questions. Toward the end, s/he asked questions so extreme that even an expert deep learning researcher wouldn't be expected to know them (not even Geoffrey Hinton, frankly). As I had suspected, they eventually came back with a rejection.
In my opinion, the whole thing was a waste of time. The decision was clearly made by a team lead acting unprofessionally and prioritizing personal motives over actual merit. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t have accepted the offer even if they had made one — I wasn’t too keen on doing such work at a smaller company again anyway.
