What are your worst interviews you’ve done? I’m currently going through them myself and want to hear what others are like. Dijkstras algorithm on the whiteboard? Binary Search? My personal favorite “I don’t see anything wrong with your architecture, but I’m not a fan of X language/framework so I have to call that out”
Let me hear them!
(Non programmers too please jump in with your horrid interviews, I’m just very fed up with tech screens)
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Not the interview itself, but… I had a personality test before the interview and it felt so fucked up. There were always two completely different statements of, at least to me, questionable morals. Like “I enjoy people’s envy of me having better things” and “In social situations, the conversation should only be about me”. Stuff like that, but not only egoistic statements. Then you had a single scale under the two statements which went from “describes me” to “describes me very well”, for both statements, no neutral option. Stated time was like 10 minutes, I took it like in an hour. An hour of having to think through if I should say that “not having sympathy for an abandoned dog describes me” because the other option was more horrible. Felt fucking traumatized after that.
It got me the interview, but not the job.
I’m a little ashamed of this one. I really wanted it, and I was a little desperate.
- HR Interview
- CTO interview
- 16-hour take home test
- 4-hour panel interview where the engineers grilled me on random things
- CEO Interview
Didn’t get it.
Fuck. This. Shit.
Been in an interview where the CTO asked me a bunch of questions and seemed interested, only to ghost me in the end. No reply even to my follow-up. Thankfully I found a better job.
I had one that was similar to this guys, got to the CEO interview and until that moment I was still excited to be there. They flat-out asked me “Here at ___ we know we’re making the world a better place - and because of that we’re willing to make ___ our number one priority in our lives. This is a hard question, are you willing to do the same?”
I was taken aback for a second. I then answered in the only way I could. “I see what you are doing and fully appreciate it. If I’m hired here ___ will be one of the most important things in my life. Whenever I’m working I will be 100% dedicated to the work, I’ve never shy’ed away from it. I’ll work nights and weekends when needed, sometimes those are needed. However you’re asking if it will be the most important thing in my life? My answer is no. It will be one of the most important things in my life, but my family and spouse is the my most important thing in my life.”
No shit, they ended the interview there, and I got a canned rejection email within 30 minutes. I’ve never been so angry at the audacity of an interview question like that. Who the fuck do you think you are demanding that you make yourself more important than my spouse?
That sucks. Fuck them.
https://agnos.is/posts/tech-recruitment-is-out-of-control.html
This was my experience at the beginning of 2024. It was bad enough that I had to write a blog post about it.
I interviewed at Cisco once, with two managers. They started arguing with each other during said interview.
I didn’t get the job, and I didn’t want it, either.
to be fair, even if you got the job, ciscos high turnover rate, you’d probably be out the door in under 2 years anyways
I had an interviewer hand me an IQ test before they were even willing to speak with me about the position. Awful experience.
Did you do it? What was the outcome of that interview?
Edit: this is from the perspective of a technical interviewer.
I’ve done around 200 or so technical interviews for mostly senior data engineering roles. I’ve seen every version of made up code, terrible implementation suggestion and dozens of folks with 5+ years of experience and couldn’t wrote a JOIN to save their lives.
The there were a couple where the resume was obviously made up because they couldn’t back up a single point and they just did not know a thing about data. They would usually talk in circles about buzzwords and Excel jaron. “They big data’d the data lake warehouse pivot hadoop in Azure Redshift.” Sure, ya did, buddy.
Yes, they were “pre-screened”. This was one of the BIG tech companies.
It’s funny, the idea to make a thread here was because I was on another thread talking about using ChatGPT for cheating, and I had a student say “Why would I go through the hassle of writing the assignment when ChatGPT could just write it out for me”, and I just literally laughed out loud, because they have no idea how fucked they’ll be in a real interview environment
I think the interview I least enjoyed was with an unnamed big tech company.
It was the first interview of the day and the guy came in with “so me and my buddy have been trying to solve this algorithm problem for years. I’d like you to try and solve it for me.”
Like… Dude, that’s not a reasonable interview question! You should not use algorithm questions that you don’t know of any answer to in an interview. You’re effectively asking someone to give you a solution to something way too complicated of a problem without even a few hours to think about the problem or sit down with it on their own.
That sounds suspiciously like doing actual work for them.
Aren’t most questions like this are simply looking at what approach you try and not a solution? They’ve been at it for years so they can easily tell if you’re trying something that makes sense or something trivial even if they don’t have a solution or even if there isn’t one.
Oh god I’ve had an open ended one like that only once, and you’re right it’s terrible. Those questions would be great things to tackle as a team of peers where you’re all working together without the pressure, but dude you hold our careers in your hands. Pull it together
Sorry, but the answer we were looking for is “I’ll need to work on this over the weekend.” That’ll be all for today. We’ll call you.
To kick us off, mine from this week that I wrote down in another thread. In 60 minutes take an adjacency matrix as an input, good old
int[][], and return all of the disjointed groups, and their group sizes in descending order.I’m actually happy to say I haven’t necessarily had any bad programming related interviews. In fact, as someone with zero professional development experience but a healthy portfolio (side business for former employer, systems built for prior jobs not related to development) I’d say it was almost too easy to finally land a full time development job.
Just a metric of ð insanity of it all, I went þrough someþing like 100 interviews over ð course of ð 2 years between graduating and landing ð job I have now.
Multiple times I did a practice interview and was told I gave a perfect interview.
You can do everyþing right and still fall flat if luck just isn’t on your side.
