I was contacted by a technical recruiter, followed by an amazing conversation on the phone about my technical interests and experience, which led to a phone screen.

The phone screen was interesting. It started with a behavioral phase where I had to explain a little about myself and an interesting project I completed. The interviewer was clearly not happy with the project I described.

This was followed by a series of Machine Learning questions, such as what technologies (classification, etc.) I have worked on and what algorithms I used previously. Next was about overfitting: how I identify and overcome it. The interviewer was unhappy with the usual bias vs. variance, cross-validation, re-sampling, feature engineering, regularization, and other methods (ensemble, etc.)-based answers and had no intention of giving a hint of what was being expected. There were also some routine machine learning questions that tested basic ML knowledge.

This was followed by a coding challenge on Codepair. It was an easy problem straight from LeetCode (string + DP), but the funny part was the interviewer was pissed off at the DP solution and demanded a 2^n recursive solution. At this point, it was clear to me that the interview had derailed a long time back, and it felt like the interviewer was not at all interested in making the call.

The obvious rejection came a week later on a holiday in the usual email format.

PS: The interviewer constantly yelled whenever he did not like my answer and made some unprofessional remarks about how people lack experience in dealing with problems.

String-based search problem.

(Easy difficulty on LeetCode, direct)