Why I failed my xAI interview
And what I learned during the process :)
Today at 3:12 pm, I received an email. I read it, and shortly thereafter went for a walk.
I walked slowly, as I was in a bewildered state.
I had just been notified that I had officially failed my xAI interview, something which I had anticipated but still hoped was not the case. This is the story of how it happened.
This is a tale of a few lessons, the first of which is the strength of weak ties (I’m writing a full post on this extremely interesting idea soon). The general idea is that in life, many opportunities come from “weak” ties — people you know or know of, but not well. Since these people are outside of your immediate friend group, they provide an important outside source of ideas and opportunities, since your closest friends and family are much more of a self-contained bubble than those outside of it.
The key takeaway of this is that to increase your pool of potential opportunities, you need to increase your number of weak ties!
In my case, my weak tie was my sister’s childhood best friend, who recently started working at xAI (Elon Musk’s AI company). She told my sister about the crazy hiring spree happening at the company, especially for so-called “AI tutors” (these are the folks who fine-tune the output of LLM models, making them more precise and human-like in their responses).
I myself looked at the job listing for these AI tutoring roles, and noticed there was a part-time, fully-remote role as a coding tutor (fine-tuning code output specifically). I thought to myself, “That looks super doable”, applied, and waited to hear back.
And here back, I did! I was automatically sent a coding assessment, got 1000/1000 (what a confidence boost, especially for my first-ever online coding assessment!), and was invited to a first-round interview.
The first-round interview was only 30 minutes long, so I assumed it was a behavioral interview that I could confidently pass with a bit of work beforehand. I naively hoped it wasn’t a technical interview, where I’d be asked to write and analyze code, since I’d already done that in the initial coding assessment.
Within the first 2 minutes of the interview, the interviewer tells me, “Alright, I’ll send in the chat a link for a shared online coding environment, and we’re going to start analyzing code together.”
Uh oh.
I did my best, but without preparing for a technical interview, I was pretty cooked. The next day at 3:12 pm, I received my beloved rejection email from the recruiter, went on my little walk, and sat down on the couch to write this piece before you now.
So what have I learned from this endeavor? A few things:
The strength of weak ties cannot be understated. I would’ve never heard about the role had it not been for a weak tie, and I learned a lot about technical interviewing in the process.
The importance of knowing exactly what you’re getting into. I emailed the recruiter asking for more information about the interview, but unfortunately didn’t hear back in time to prepare. Nevertheless, it was on me to know about the role and what the interviews would look like beforehand.
Hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst. As stated above, I really should’ve prepared more for a possible technical interview by reviewing all of my CS 31/32 notes from UCLA’s very own Professor Smallberg before going into the interview, but I hoped that it wouldn’t be needed (in hindsight, I would’ve done that). You should always hope for the best, but I should’ve also prepared for the worst. In my case here, that was the possibility of a technical interview.
As always, thanks so much for reading, and stay tuned for more! Wishing everyone a lovely start to the academic quarter next week.
Best,
Dennis :)
Dennis’s Picks:
This really cool article my friend Federico sent over. It follows a startup founder who sold their company, became filthy rich, and now doesn’t know what to do with the rest of their life. An extremely interesting piece!
Some more really funny posts and articles about startup founders. Check them out!
You know what they say Dennis, when a cucumber turns into a pickle, it’ll never be a cucumber again