# good question… thinking back to pre-LLM interviews I experienced （before 2019）… they were all in-p…

- 来源：Saining Xie (@sainingxie)
- 发布时间：2025-08-29 09:00
- AIHOT 链接：https://aihot.virxact.com/items/cmnxjn7y700fksl9oc5pv5tv4
- 原文链接：https://x.com/sainingxie/status/1961232442720706705

## AI 摘要

好问题...回想起我经历过的前 LLM 时代面试（2019 年之前）…都是现场面对面，没有「LLM 作弊」的可能，各个地方差异很大，而且不知怎的更令人难忘。

## 正文

good question… thinking back to pre-LLM interviews I experienced （before 2019）… they were all in-person on-site， no chance of ''llm cheating，'' very different across places， and somehow way more memorable.

> old deepmind had brutal ''quizzes'' -- 2-hour marathons with 100+ math/stats/ML concept questions.

> meta FAIR was basically academia interview with a bit of coding， but the highlight was chatting vision research with piotr， ross and kaiming.

> google brain/research was similar. the @NoamShazeer was my coding interviewer， who kindly kept it simple with just a two-pointer q. we spent most of the time discussing research， where I explained how I had applied something called a transformer to visual data （point clouds） -- a topic that， at the time， hardly anyone cared about.

> but the coolest？ openai in 2018： whiteboard coding， a research talk， and a *~5-hour* session in a tiny room to work on an RL problem （variance collapse in cross entropy methods）. I knew almost nothing about RL， but that was the point. They handed you a self-contained problem description， handwritten by @johnschulman2， and expected you to learn， research， solve， write up in a notebook， and present.

feeling a bit nostalgic. makes me wonder if interviews like that still happen anywhere. If they do， I'd love to know. ：）

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