I applied to a particular team while sending out lots of applications online. The first phone screen was a question from the forum: analyze a spent-hours dataset and predict clicks. Since I had prepared it, the interview went quite smoothly.
A week after the interview, I still hadn't heard anything, so I logged into the candidate portal. The position I had applied for was gone, and the interview position had changed to general MLE pooling. In other words, it had changed from hiring for a team to general hiring.
Eventually, HR got back to me and scheduled a virtual onsite: ML fundamentals, coding, ML system design, and a hiring-manager round, each about an hour. At the start of the first round, ML fundamentals, the interviewer said, "I won't ask you to introduce yourself, to avoid bias." Then he started a deep dive into position bias in ranking. I hadn't worked on ranking, and the team I had applied to was related to generative AI, so I was lost right away. I tried hard to remember terms ChatGPT had listed earlier and say whatever I could. The interviewer didn't work on ranking either and clearly wasn't familiar with the topic. He read the questions from the screen. When I couldn't give the answers in his question bank, he just kept repeating the questions and couldn't offer hints. It also felt as though he didn't understand what I was saying. Forty minutes into the interview, he was still stuck on something I'd said at the ten-minute mark.
Unsurprisingly, I was rejected afterward. The recruiter called and canceled the remaining three rounds. I'm fine with being moved into general hiring, but you can't expect a candidate to know everything. At least give candidates a chance to choose a domain. After all, I'd only end up matched with one team anyway.
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