Pinterest Machine Learning Engineer Tech Phone Interview Experience

A bizarre experience: I applied to this company quite late; several onsite interviews were already completed, while this one had just started its phone interview. I'm currently an AS at a major compan

A bizarre experience: I applied to this company quite late; several onsite interviews were already completed, while this one had just started its phone interview. I'm currently an AS at a major company. 7.5 years of yearly experience, with about 5-6 years of LLM experience from the BERT era to now. My interviewer was an SDE from a South Asian country. He seemed a bit distracted throughout, constantly replying to messages, and we didn't seem to be on the same technical wavelength. The questions were generally quite simple: a brief chat about my experience, and quick answers to some very basic ML questions, such as what overfitting is, what a decision tree is, and whether it's linear or nonlinear. The coding wasn't a LeetCode problem; it asked me to implement a system to determine if an IP address is on a blocked list, and then discuss the complexity, improvements, etc. I felt I answered very well; the implementation, optimization, and code cleanliness were all fine. The next morning, I received an email saying, "Emal decided not to move forward." I've now become the first person I failed out of nearly thirty interviews in this job-hopping wave. I had to come here and vent.