Betrayed by my own blog

21st January

I've been laying down for a few hours now feeling betrayed. Betrayed and sabotaged by my own blog.

I just had an interview where I was completely blindsided and grilled on my writing:

"Why do you only write about AI? Why not engineering?"

"Do you want to be an engineer or a data scientist?"

"We don't need data scientists and a lot of your blog posts are very data science-y"

"How do we know we won't hire you and you'll try to transition to a data scientist?"

Mate, what on Earth is this absolute shithousery.

For context this is the supposed "behavioural round", stage 4 of a multi-stage interview process. The prior stages were:

• Technical background (30 mins) - discussion on the role, my background, asking technical questions based on my cv etc
• Pair programming/leetcode (1 hour) - given a task on an online IDE, screen shared, implement data structure from scratch with specific requirements, OOP + DSA
• System design (1 hour) - whiteboarding, designing the architecture and components of defined system, dynamic as interview progressing, iterating and scoping out users + problem

And only now do you want to grill me on whether I'm an undercover data scientist using a software engineer role to get my foot in the door???

You're telling me I went on your careers page, scrolled through hundreds of jobs, skipped the actual data scientist posts and applied for a Software Engineer role in Applied ML/AI to outsmart the system in hopes of manoeuvering myself into a data science role I could've applied to from the start? Which would have likely been an easier interview process!

Curse you blog! Just because I ENJOY writing about AI, conducting experiments and doing technical analysis in my SPARE AND FREE TIME. I MUST BE A DATA SCIENTIST AND NOT AN ENGINEER.

Okay let me calm down, I was calm in the interview I didn't crash out don't worry. I responded with:

"These are topics I enjoy writing about, I love writing about engineering too but I'm at the stage in my career where I have a lot more to learn from experienced engineers and industry engineering breakdowns (AWS, Doordash, Datadog blogs) so I spend a lot more time reading these articles instead of writing them."

"I mean I'm not going to engineer and spin up an entire distributed system with CloudFormation acruing a £300 AWS bill just to write a blog post, it's a lot easier to launch a marimo notebook."

My exact words btw.

That was how the interview more or less ended. I was coming into this "behavioural round" expecting:

"How do you help colleagues navigate unclear situations at work?"

or

"How do you identify potential risks before deciding on a course of action?"

Instead it began with:

"When and why would you use Kubernetes to manage services? What is a pod? What are docker container layers? Docker best practices?"

Don't get me wrong my gripe isn't with the questions themselves, they're on my CV so I should be able to answer them and I did. It's being caught by surprise and having to context switch in a split-second, multiple times. It really throws you off. Especially when I took the time to prepare for the behavioural round.

Then one of the two principal/lead engineers began pulling up my blog posts to quiz me on the specifics: "How does Google indexing work?", "What is BM25?", "When would you use asyncio.gather()?", "But you wrote about it?". I completely froze, my mind went entirely blank you could've asked me my name I would've said "Uhhhh my name? Hmmm, very good question". Very bad. I understand that I wrote about these therefore I should understand how they work in and out. But the very intention of my blog, especially some of the earlier technical topics, is to write to understand.

This post primarily serves as a comprehensive reference to myself, phrased in a manner that I can instantly understand and recollect and apply. I always always need to look up asyncio stuff, so by having this I don't.

SEE I LITERALLY PREFACE THE ENTIRE POST WITH IT (took it down now. you won)

In every single interview I've ever done, I've been asked about async vs threading. I must have read about the difference maybe 100 times, discussed the differences 50 times and wrote about the differences another 10 times (100 if you include random notes and messages). It's just one of those topics that I literally use day in day out:

• writing Python code with asyncio, aioboto, aiohttp
• manually scheduling stuff on the event loop, creating event loops other than the main thread bla bla bla
• writing typescript, understanding how the event loop works there
• making use of multiple cores when parallelising operations on the cloud
• PANDAS, PYTORCH, MACHINE LEARNING LIBRARIES

Yet it never sticks - if someone asks me on the spot (especially in an interview)

"Yo what is the difference between multi-threading and multi-processing?"

My mind will likely go blank, and I have to rebuild this mental mapping of concurrency/parallelism for the basic building blocks to get to the answer. I managed to answer it, I even referenced the legendary Jason Brownlee from superfastpython because I have literally read his posts 100s of times.

Edit 29th January

I had a conversation with a senior engineer friend a week after the interview while still waiting for a response. Talked him through what happened and he shared his incredible luck interviewing throughout his career and barely having to experience the soul crushing processes I've had from my very first internship through to now simply because I graduated into a shit job market. Alright pack it in with the sob story mate. Anyway. We spoke and I realised something.

Three technical interviews went well, I was feeling confident going into the behavioural interview. I felt as though I had a good connection/vibe with the engineers I had interviewed with, and a good understanding of the role and dynamics at the workplace. Yet that is the complete opposite of what a recruiter or an employer wants an incoming engineer to feel. This means that I'm heading into behavioural and HR contract stages with confidence in my performance thus far and my ability to excel at the role. And it means that I have the upper hand in salary and benefit negotiation. This is horrible for them. THEY NEED to shut me down and bring me down a few rungs before this step. And to edge me for 2 weeks (and counting...) after the supposed final round before I hear anything back.

What is wrong with current-day software engineering interviews man? Seriously how can you expect a candidate to want to work at your company when the interview ends with "Oh yeah thanks see you"... close meeting "Fuck my actual life man" Is it just me that gets grilled to this extent? Do they see my name is Ossama and think "Yeah we'll put him through a Guantanamo-level torture this interview"

What impression does that leave and what can the engineer expect from the working environment? Like damn are engineers no longer a commodity, a useful brain to employ/deploy? Obviously we'll never return to the golden age where swes were pampered, fed 3 times a day, free ubers, scootering between campuses. Born too late for free lunch, too early for AGI-accelerated UBI...

What do you think? Was that a normal interview that I should have expected? I am in the wrong by posting this? Should I nuke my blog?

Edit 10th March

Originally written on 21st January immediately after the interview. Published almost 2 months later after waiting in good faith... good faith that was extended in one direction as I have yet to receive even a basic acknowledgement let alone a response from anyone on the team nor any recruiters involved in the process even after several follow ups on my end. A level of disrespect I could not fathom nor could I ever extend to anyone not even someone I despised. This disrespect is the reason I posted this. It would've remained vaulted had I been treated with basic decency.

Game is the game though (not sure how many of these I have left in me).

Disclaimer: I will NOT mention the company as this may be classed as libel.

A completely unrelated painting by artist Alex Schaefer...

Agree, disagree, love, hate - I'd like to hear it! Shout me -> ossamachaib.cs@gmail.com.