How to Fail a Job Interview in 10 Minutes or Less
There was a time when we were all family.
We are family / Get up, everybody, and sing / We are family
The ubiquitous question in job interviews (once you had survived the inverted-binary-tree challenge) was: “We are all like family here… why are you excited to work with us?”
Saying that you simply found a job listing and that your skills seemed like a reasonable match for what they needed was a red flag. Instead, you had to perform excitement and demonstrate significant knowledge about the company. Working for a wage was not allowed; you could only join if you shared the same feverish enthusiasm as the cofounders - who, at the end of the day, would benefit quite handsomely from your work and your knowledge. I always wanted to answer with a question of my own: why are you excited to work with me?
Things changed. AI is the new family.
Computer love, computer love / Another lonely night / Stare at the TV screen / I don’t know what to do
The new ubiquitous question in job interviews is: “how do you use AI?” I once answered honestly: “It’s a tool. I try to understand where it works and where it fails, and I have a couple of years of real experience with it.” Red flag. Fast track to the end of the interview.
These days you must perform excitement about AI; and it will land well even if the interviewer privately shares none of it. Nobody gets fired for buying IBM… er, AI. So the only correct answer is a verbal masturbation about AI, delivered while gazing into a software engineering future where your ego commands an army of agents that tirelessly produce line after line of code.