javajive

My cofounder and I have been living in the Bay Area for a few years now. We’ve been debating moving to another city. Which US city would you start a startup in and why? (Bay Area included)

I recently attended a data science meetup. I met a woman visiting from an Asian country on a year long internship. A male engineer introduced himself to her. He proceeded to tell her that she was beautiful, something about her eyes being the right shape. However, he then went on to tell her that she should just go to clubs to pick up a hot, successful guy with her looks. He immediately ended the conversation, turned to another male intern, and asked him questions about the program. I was stunned and did not know how to react. At the time, all I could think was, "what the are you saying?". I don't believe that creating a scene would have helped the situation. How would you respond to a situation like this?

I'm new to interviewing. At this point, I've interviewed 5 candidates for the small startup I work at. I like to hear about projects the candidate worked on previously and then ask them to get into the technical details on a component of it. For example, let's say the candidate was scraping web pages for photos of cats. I'd ask them to tell me about it and the candidate starts with an overview of the system. Something like - "We built a process to scrape a set of webpages looking for cat photos. We then store the photos in an s3 bucket and retrieve them later via an api we built out". I'd then ask, "How are you identifying photos of cats on these webpages?". I'll get a fairly generic response, "Deep Learning", or "Photo Titles". I respond to this with, "That's interesting, tell me about the challenges you faced trying to implement that?". This is where I've received a deflection twice in the five interviews I've done. The first time this happened, the candidate responded, "That's too complicated". The second time the candidate responded, "I don't want to bore you with the details".

This is starting to concern me. When this happens in an interview, how do you get around it so the candidate will talk about the technical aspects of their project? Should this be an immediate red flag? Could I be doing something which leads to candidates not wanting to get into technical details?