I Got Rejected By A 22-Year Old CEO

are you doing four-way no Cruz and uber yeah so what we've done at scale is built the data platform for AI so AI is really built on top of data and these algorithms require billions and billions of examples of labeled data to be able to perform in a safe reliable way so this 22 year old interviewed me for a full-time position and rejected me just kidding he was 19 when he interviewed me and rejected me that was three years ago and that was a senior at Waterloo well in my defense they never actually explicitly rejected

me they just go at me after the interview I'll show you the emails later let's take a look at their old website this company used to be called scale API and it wasn't focused only on labeling training data they built an API for human labor we're gonna go back to August 2016 oh I don't think that's it okay that's more like it so kind of like TaskRabbit but with without the in-person stuff so like phone surveys transcription ecommerce tagging some categorization outsourcing [ __ ] work essentially now they only focus on categorization aka labeling for

model training so refine the pitch work scale was founded by Lucy Coe and Alexander Wang if he does the name looks like a startup anyways back then there were only two co-founders and they were looking to hire their first engineer so I applied here's the email exchange we had Lucy Kroll I actually matched with her on tinder a year ago she didn't respond to me but but then again my opening message wasn't that great so apparently my resume stood out because I did a lot of different roles so that's good as a startup we look

for someone who can wear many hats well that's good they quickly hit me up with a take home project oh [ __ ] well I mean it's too late now the project asked me to create post endpoints for them so their customers can send annotation box requests aka send images and then we or CIO API will have their contractors drop boxes around whatever they want and then send them back to the customers where they will probably use it for some machine learning model or something so this project just focuses on this part and the UI

for the scale contractors to actually draw the boxes actually I think I still have the code for this let me whip it out all right so here's what I built so that the contractors can use to draw boxes all right let's send us some requests so here we see there's four images or four requests I'm sending all right and then we'll see this and here you go so you could see now that you have a few requests and here you see a picture of a few cows and here it says you have to annotate baby

cow and big cow and then the instructions it says draw a box around each baby cow and big cow so that's cool so I think it's pretty simple you just you know draw them baby cow baby cow baby cow oh no that's not a baby cow so you know you can exit out switch to big cow and then annotate the big cow then you can also reset it you could also say it's broken I don't know if ever it's broken and then here's also the urgency here you could also sort by urgency if you want

so here you go you have urgency sort by urgency sort by date you can also click another one if you don't want to do this one right now yeah I think that's pretty much it so let me just annotate this baby cow baby cow baby cow and then mama cow this will be saved in the database and sent to the customer and the customer receive will receive these things and then you just submit and then you submit it and then here's another example I think this is a picture of a k-pop group called notes okay

I know it's like pink okay I know it's black pink so here it says draw a box around the best black pink member and then the objects is like my bias okay um let's see okay [Music] okay and then oh [ __ ] are you serious all right so I think you get the point and they also told me to use the mean stack if I can but to be honest I wasn't much of a front-end guy so I ended up using the men stack you know very patriarchy of me I had some angular but

it was clear that I wasn't really using the framework right but I mean they said they loved it though but I have a feeling they didn't look at the source code until later on when they goes in me so no hard feelings though i mean i i'd ghost myself too i would have been a trash employee what's poppin guy here's a day in the life of an early start employee so here's me coding right now so they invited me for an interview and alexander the CEO interviewed me we just chatted and then he asked me

an algorithm question the question was fine median in the data stream question he had to give me a hint for me to solve it so that probably didn't help my chances and unfortunately he didn't respond to me after the interview and then as you can see here's my last desperate attempt after a month oh no actually actually that was my last attempt you