I applied through a referral. The HR contacted me within a week of submitting my application and scheduled the first round. It was supposed to be a techno-functional round, i.e they would focus on my skills, experience, projects, business use case and solution, and how it aligns overall with the JD. I joined the first round 5 minutes early, the interviewer joined a few minutes late and asked me to turn on my camera, while keeping his off, I didn't mind that. He seemed a little on edge and uninterested right from the moment he joined. How the interview process went: - Interviewer: "Give me a brief introduction" - I gave a brief introduction of my experience in Data Science and AI Engineering (3.5 years of industry experience). - Interviewer: "Okay, can you explain any one of the projects you have worked on?" - To which I started explaining how I developed the RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) for an enterprise client, as it was highly relevant to the role I had applied to. I started explaining the problem the RAG solved before moving on to the technical implementation, to which he rudely said: - Interviewer: "I don't need to know all this, why are you explaining the business use case? I'm not a business person, tell me what you did technically". - I didn't mind his rude and inconsiderate statement as I thought he must be expecting something else, so I started explaining the technical details. As I was explaining how I developed the ingestion pipeline, he interrupted me midway and again asked aggressively: - Interviewer: "OK but where's AI in this?" - To all technical people, I don't need to explain what was wrong with this question, but for all non-technical people, Ingestion is the process by which documents are stored in our knowledge base with some pre-defined logic. If a pipeline has poor ingestion logic/architecture, then: 1. It won't scale well 2. The answers generated by the Chatbot will be poor and full of hallucinations. - I politely asked him in response to his question ("Where's AI in this?”): "By AI, do you mean to ask how the answers are generated for a user query and how context is provided to the LLM?" - Interviewer - "Yes" - That is when I started explaining how in the backend, when a user asks a query, we used a smaller LLM model to find out the query's validity, before querying the vector database - Interviewer - "Which small LLM model did you use?" - Me - "GPT-4o-mini" - Interviewer - "When did you work on this project?" - Me - "A couple of months back" - Interviewer - "How can you work using GPT-4o-mini a couple of months back when it was released last month?" - Me - "No, it was released last year, GPT-5 was released last month" - Interviewer - "We're looking for an expert in AI. Not someone who has built pipelines using AI. I'm ending the call" - I saw no point in having a conversation with him further, so I left the call. This was 7-8 minutes after the call had started. The interview was on Oct 9th, 2025. GPT-4o-mini was launched in July 2024. The guy who referred me seemed very helpful and approachable, and the HR was also very helpful. This created an early positive impression of the company. But this guy, who took my first round, was extremely rude, inconsiderate, unprofessional, didn't know his stuff, and I strongly believe he wasn't qualified to conduct any sort of interviews. I don't even feel bad about how the interview went because I know I'm not responsible for people like him. I've brought this up with HR. In case someone else goes through something similar, there's absolutely no need to feel bad about it; it's not you, it's them.