i ordered a lyft to the place, and it was not what i saw on google maps. it's a big three story house. i went in and sat down and there were 4 people there, and only two familar faces.

i setup my computer, and the first surprise is that the whole company joined my job talk portion of the interview. i talked about my research on excalidraw, and while speaking, i could feel the pressure of not saying something wrong, or my entire cover would be blown, and they would find out that i have no idea what i'm talking about, even though i did everything inmy research.

the second portion was the ml fundamentals. i was thrown a problem, and had to solve it with ml. i had issues explaining what metrics are good to optimize for, and didn't know that AUROC != performance, it's just a balance between precision and recall, and that the threshold you can select is just a number that is decided, depending on whether you want higher precision or higher recall. that was a major red flag i imposed. i kept thinking about this mistake the rest of the day.

the third portion was system design. i came prepared and i was ready. it went well overall, and i just had to explain how to invalidate the cache of the system. but the ml portion the answer was all prepared.

i called with J and A to share about how things went on the way back to the hotel. i planned to sleep and regain some energy, but ended up doing research work. and running some experiments.

the final portion was a dinner. it was at Uchiko 955. i didn't know what to expect, but it was a very casual dinner that didn't really involve me. i mostly chatted with R and E. i didn't really know how to speak up or share any stories or thoughts. but i can feel like the new kid from around the block. i felt like i couldn't fit in. even though everyone was just having fun at dinner, all i could think about was whether i can say something to impress them or make them laugh, which was very draining. i kept thinking to myself 'why am i here', 'what do i do?' and 'im so confused'. my brain can't just relax. perhaps i had a different expectation of how this dinner would go, and it made it hard to just enjoy the night.

i went home and called with mafia again. i dumped all my emotions out. i learned more about myself today, being somewhere that was unfamiliar with people i'm not close with.