Don’t worry. I found a bug in one of their repos, fixed it, documented it, and submitted a PR—four months later, it’s still not merged.
People love to believe that Company A has top-tier engineers while Company B doesn’t based on mostly nonsense interview practices. The best ideas come from deeply thinking through a problem from the customer’s perspective for days and days not from rushed coding interviews.
Starlevel004 33 days ago [-]
This would be a more compelling post if it wasn't written in Linkedin Standard English.
aigoncharov 33 days ago [-]
If only I knew English well enough xD Originally, it was in Russian.
ryandrake 32 days ago [-]
I found OP's English to be fine and the article sounded authentic. Nothing like "LinkedIn fluff".
fnqi8ckfek 32 days ago [-]
[dead]
s__s 33 days ago [-]
Sure. From the employers perspective, I get the appeal of references.
As a candidate I find them to be a huge overstep and will almost never provide them.
No, I’m sorry. I’m not going to pester my friends and colleagues to “hop on a quick call” or fill out a 2 page survey every time I interview somewhere.
Quite frankly, I really don’t need or want my friends to be intimately involved in my job search.
This poor guy had to have all his references book a call, only for them to all be notified shortly after that they weren’t needed any more, because he flunked the interview.
someotherperson 32 days ago [-]
> Sure. From the employers perspective, I get the appeal of references.
Respectfully, it doesn't seem like you do. References in many cases are actually needed for compliance purposes. An example for Anthropic is if the employee might be exposed to medical data, then reference checks can be used as part of a larger validation of employee identity to satisfy HIPAA requirements.
Amazon and others have the importance of reference checks baked into their agreements for those who work with them.
s__s 32 days ago [-]
> References in many cases are actually needed for compliance purposes.
Those aren’t the kind of checks we’re talking about. In any case, those can be performed once an offer is made.
someotherperson 32 days ago [-]
It's the exact same checks. I know this because I've had to fill out some of these compliance documents and implement similar sorts of procedures with the legal dept. In addition to background checks, candidate reference calls prior to onboarding are becoming a checkbox that must be ticked by various external groups.
And to clarify, it's not something I support or that I find it makes a lot of sense to me -- it's just an unfortunate situation of where things are currently at.
s__s 32 days ago [-]
You run legal compliance on everyone interviewing for a job? What a waste of everyone’s time. Very inefficient and expensive. Do it after an offer is extended.
snailmailstare 32 days ago [-]
Don't you mean background checks? A company sees the value in talking to 4 people of the candidates choice for HIPAA is just sad.
blitzar 33 days ago [-]
I don't usually give, as references, people who think I am a useless waste of space.
> I get the appeal of references.
Referals and word of mouth are 1000x more valuable than the references candidates put on their CV.
nunez 32 days ago [-]
So references are popular again? Interesting.
blitzar 33 days ago [-]
I probably would not have hired you based on your description of things, you probably wouldnt have hired you either.
Nevertheless, based on the process, it sounds like they will end up hiring pretty medicore candidates.
ai-christianson 33 days ago [-]
> Nevertheless, based on the process, it sounds like they will end up hiring pretty medicore candidates.
What would you change in order to hire higher quality people?
blitzar 33 days ago [-]
Its the answer nobody hiring wants to hear, spend more (skilled not hr) human time screening and interviewing the candidates.
The process outlined put a stronger emphasis on luck, and catching fire in the 6 minutes you had than skill.
ryandrake 32 days ago [-]
Don't forget the inevitable emphasis on "grinding Leetcode."
blitzar 32 days ago [-]
As usual the best existing employees would fail the interview process.
wiz21c 33 days ago [-]
I doubt so. Open ended questions like "generating ideas" allows the interviewer to judge what your level of reasoning is. If you propose "add more GPU" or "let's tweak the transformer parameters with some quantization, like in this research article published a year ago" it makes a huge difference.
IOW the expectations are hidden from the interviewed person.
blitzar 33 days ago [-]
Open ended questions like generating ideas was the "Culture Fit" session (and if it wasnt or the company doesnt realise it is then it is an even bigger problem)
mannyv 32 days ago [-]
Culture fit is a funny thing. I was set up for an interview and one of the things was a take-home tic tac toe.
I asked "uh, what's the point when I can just ask ChatGPT to do this? Is there something else I could be doing?" And I was instantly dinged because I didn't align with their culture. Which I guess is true, since I'm not into time-wasting questions that aren't even fun.
toyg 32 days ago [-]
Or rather, you're not into "following orders without challenging them first". What the order is, doesn't really matter.
aigoncharov 33 days ago [-]
Well, I definitely failed the brainstorming stage. Disappointed with the result, but have no hard feelings. Wish they let me do the take-home assignment, but it is what it is.
Rolled the dice. It was not my day. Will roll it again with as many companies as it takes to get a good gig.
xyzsparetimexyz 33 days ago [-]
That sounds absolutely awful and like you dodged a bullet. Meanwhile deepseek is hiring college grads and the like, for way better tech.
I highly doubt that they've got a better ai but are too scared to show it off. Is there any independent verification of that?
aigoncharov 33 days ago [-]
Thank you or your support! I am disappointed with the result, but, to be honest, no hard feelings. Wish they let me do the take-home assignment, but it is what it is. Rolled the dice. It was not my day. Will roll it again with as many companies as it takes to get a good gig.
> Meanwhile deepseek is hiring college grads and the like, for way better tech.
If only I knew Chinese...
> I highly doubt that they've got a better ai but are too scared to show it off. Is there any independent verification of that?
Nope. Just the rumor
Xmd5a 32 days ago [-]
>Also, 3.5 Sonnet was not trained in any way that involved a larger or more expensive model (contrary to some rumors).
I would rather take the "bullet" but it wasn't my day xD
Tbh, I don't think there was anything substantially wrong with the process. They have a ton of CVs from thousands of the smartest people out there. They have to filter somehow.
I'm certainly sad I did not make the cut, but it's not like the guy next in line is any worse then me.
linotype 33 days ago [-]
Thanks for posting this, interesting to see the process at a large AI company.
spoonsies 32 days ago [-]
yeah, interviews like that are artifical bullshit interviews whose main purpose is ensure conformity with the way the company thinks rather seek innovation. Be glad you didnt make it thru
People love to believe that Company A has top-tier engineers while Company B doesn’t based on mostly nonsense interview practices. The best ideas come from deeply thinking through a problem from the customer’s perspective for days and days not from rushed coding interviews.
As a candidate I find them to be a huge overstep and will almost never provide them.
No, I’m sorry. I’m not going to pester my friends and colleagues to “hop on a quick call” or fill out a 2 page survey every time I interview somewhere.
Quite frankly, I really don’t need or want my friends to be intimately involved in my job search.
This poor guy had to have all his references book a call, only for them to all be notified shortly after that they weren’t needed any more, because he flunked the interview.
Respectfully, it doesn't seem like you do. References in many cases are actually needed for compliance purposes. An example for Anthropic is if the employee might be exposed to medical data, then reference checks can be used as part of a larger validation of employee identity to satisfy HIPAA requirements.
Amazon and others have the importance of reference checks baked into their agreements for those who work with them.
Those aren’t the kind of checks we’re talking about. In any case, those can be performed once an offer is made.
And to clarify, it's not something I support or that I find it makes a lot of sense to me -- it's just an unfortunate situation of where things are currently at.
> I get the appeal of references.
Referals and word of mouth are 1000x more valuable than the references candidates put on their CV.
Nevertheless, based on the process, it sounds like they will end up hiring pretty medicore candidates.
What would you change in order to hire higher quality people?
The process outlined put a stronger emphasis on luck, and catching fire in the 6 minutes you had than skill.
IOW the expectations are hidden from the interviewed person.
I asked "uh, what's the point when I can just ask ChatGPT to do this? Is there something else I could be doing?" And I was instantly dinged because I didn't align with their culture. Which I guess is true, since I'm not into time-wasting questions that aren't even fun.
I highly doubt that they've got a better ai but are too scared to show it off. Is there any independent verification of that?
> Meanwhile deepseek is hiring college grads and the like, for way better tech.
If only I knew Chinese...
> I highly doubt that they've got a better ai but are too scared to show it off. Is there any independent verification of that?
Nope. Just the rumor
Source: https://darioamodei.com/on-deepseek-and-export-controls