ByteDance Machine Learning Engineer Interview Experience — Interviewer Late Both Rounds, Then Rejected

I interviewed with ByteDance's Compliance Team (based in Singapore), for an MLE position.

Overall the interview experience was pretty bad. Let me start with the process:

1. Round one: the interviewer was 5 minutes late, then spent about 40 minutes asking about my project in a lot of detail. The coding question was Maximum Product Subarray, which I solved right away.
2. Round two: the interviewer was 15 minutes late, then spent almost 40 minutes again asking about the same project I'd already covered in round one — even more detail this time. The coding question, when it finally came, was computing semantic similarity, and by the time he gave it to me there were only 5 minutes left. He even asked if I wanted to attempt it, whether I could answer it.

I looked at it and said there was no way I could finish it in 5 minutes, but I could walk him through my approach. Whether you use a Sentence Encoder or Average Embedding with Cosine Similarity, neither of those can be coded in 5 minutes — the best I could do was pseudocode.

Now for the complaints.

This interview happened because various ByteDance HR reps kept messaging me on LinkedIn. I'd heard ByteDance works you really hard, so I hadn't been that interested. But this HR said someone had referred me, and I was curious, so I got in touch with them and ended up deciding to interview.

But both interviewers were late. The second round interviewer was even worse — he was 15 minutes late, which meant there was basically no time left for the coding question. And on top of that, he asked me whether I wanted to attempt it, whether I could do it.

Also, in the second round, the interviewer turned his camera on once at the start, then turned it off, and kept it off for the rest of the interview. That made for a pretty bad experience.

After the interview, I went to HR and raised these issues — that there hadn't been enough time for the coding question and that the interviewer wouldn't turn his camera on. HR told me it was due to an equipment malfunction. I thought: if it was an equipment malfunction, why could he turn it on at the start but not later? But I didn't push back on it. I never expected that in the end they'd reject me anyway.

And the funnier part is, just yesterday I got another message on LinkedIn from a different ByteDance HR, who also claimed there was an external referral for me. Now I'm starting to suspect this is just a line they use.