My Second Worst Interview

November 13, 2025

It started innocently enough. I applied on Indeed. A week later I got an email saying I'd been invited to the next round of interviews, with a link to select a time for the meeting. I knew it was a small company, so I expecting a bit of disorganization when I joined the Google Meet video call. I saw that there were 15 people in the link I joined so at first I thought maybe they'd accidentally shared an internal all-hands meeting link. It took me a couple of seconds to figure out what was going on: this wasn't my interview, it was the interview for a whole pool of applicants, all for the same job.

This would be the first red flag among many... The CEO opened with biographic details: 22 years old, student at McGill, started an "AI" company with 2 friends instead of doing an internship last summer, etc... He'd been an "ML Engineer" since he was 15 years old! His LinkedIn profile claimed he had 7 years of professional software development experience...

A company having young founders isn't, by itself, out of the ordinary but the rest of the details of the company sounded more and more like the monorail-esque pitch of a conman: list of large tech companies and organizations they had allegedly signed deals with, names of famous software engineers they had convinced to come and work for them part-time, they'd raised money to hire "adults" to lead them, raising $450k from investors in their first round but only having vague product ideas (and putting their private fundraising details in a publicly accessible pitch deck on their website — not to mention having a "invest in us" page on their startup website, before having any product.)

Then the other shoe dropped: the interview would be an immense take,home test that we had 48 hours to complete (later extended to Sunday night, as this first interview was on Thursday night). "It will be a lot of work." said the CEO, who bragged about driving 20 hours straight, without sleep, to Atlanta for KubeCon, a sign of how hard he works! He admitted he works harder than employees should; he only expects them to work 80% as hard as him. Very reassuring...

To compensate candidates for the large up-front investment, he promised that the team would spend an equal amount of time reviewing and evaluating the take-home assignment. Furthermore the final step after the take-home would be a single 30-minute interview with the team that following week after which they would quickly make their hiring decision. At this point one of the other candidates raised their hand and asked whta the upside to doing this work was if they were already making more than the bottom end of the salary range advertized for the role. The CEO said they would pay $10k more than what the new-hire was making previously, and would "top up" their salary with equity until their total compensation was $200k/year. This was yet another red flag, as typically in such an early stage startup it is difficult to assign a dollar value to the equity offered, and so it is usually advertized as a % ownership share of the company rather than in $ terms. Not to mention the equity amounts didn't make a lot of sense relative to the $700k valuation of the company quoted by the CEO. If someone took $90k in cash they'd get $110k in equity per year and after 4 years would own 60% of the company?

The red flags didn't end there! The CEO also claimed they would pay 10% profit share out to employees every year. What profits?! The company doesn't even have any revenues yet! And Venture Capital investors usually expect the company to use cash to grow, not to pay out to employees!

In my 15+ years of industry experience, that was my second worse interview so far.