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)
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?
Yes, it will be the most important thing in my life. I even brought my divorce papers here to prove it.
Ridiculous take home tests are probably the number one reason I decline to continue interview processes. If you think that building a client, an API, wiring it up to some other third party API, then deploying is a reasonable scope for an unpaid interview challenge then you are very bad at scoping software projects and the most important thing I can do for you is tell you as much.
I told one start up if I built what they asked for in the interview, I would pursue funding from their investors and launch it as a competitor- it was that similar to what their actual app did.
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
In this industry, now, why would you stay at a fang? Especially past 2 years!! The only benefit is going to be the line on your CV. Unless you’re in the c-suite you are grossly undervalued,burdened with office politics, and worsening conditions.
My first ever software interview was with a small company that made a web app for traveling nurses. It was mainly a calendar with additional functionality to help nurses manage cases.
I was given a pre-interview programming task to complete. The task was relatively simple and would not take long to complete so I agreed.
When I logged in with the credentials they provided it looked like they had a very robust testing environment. There was a complete copy of the app running on the server with fake information in the database.
The code itself did not follow any style guides and was rarely documented. This caused me to spend much more time completing the task than I had estimated. Once I completed the task and verified functionality I notified the company. They checked my work and scheduled an in person interview with the lead developer, CTO, and CEO.
During the interview they attempted to access the test server with my code so we can discuss. My code could not be found on the test server and it was at this time we learned that the lead developer had given me complete access to the production servers including direct database access. The “fake” data that I used in my own testing on a production server was actual patient records. It was a huge HIPAA violation on their part and I withdrew my application for fear that this company will soon be in legal trouble.
I suspect they thought I was going to report them because they offered me $3000 for the “work completed.” It turns out their programming task was a feature that they wanted implemented into production anyways. I think if it were not for the lead developer’s mistake I would not have been paid anything. There was no offer of compensation for the completion of the task before the mistake was revealed.
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.
I had one interview where they literally got me to fix their Sendmail server while I was there.
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.
The problem is you’re effectively leaving “can I program and work through the kinds of tasks this job entails” and entering “how do you work through a complex theoretical research topic” land.
White board questions should be relative softballs related to the work you’re actually doing to see how you think… Now that’s often forgon for “welcome to a game of algorithm and data structure trivia!” but this is just a much more extreme version of that.
Also if you don’t actually know the answer, how can you judge the direction? Even if you do know the answer for a problem that complicated, can you say the interviewee isn’t solving the problem in a novel and possibly better way?
I presume he was looking for specific terms like DAWG (directed acyclic word graph) and things like that as well… Which I know because he would teach me the names of things as I slowly rediscovered them in conversation. Personally, I don’t put much stock in grading someone on their knowledge of obscure data structures and algorithms either.
When I give interviews, I’m more concerned with the process than the results for some questions. I don’t really do it any more, but I’d sometimes ask one question not related to programming or anything on their CV just to see how someone works through a situation given a little bit of a curveball.
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.
You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
Why did I flip it on its back in the first place? If I was the sort of person to do that, it would be consistent with the behaviour of not turning it back over, but I don’t think I am.
source of this moovie scene
(thanks to GPT 4-o ; i could not fully recal the scene)
This story is a well-known scene from the film “Blade Runner,” directed by Ridley Scott and released in 1982. The character Tyrell poses this question to the replicant Leon as a test to explore his empathy and moral reasoning. The tortoise metaphorically represents vulnerability and the moral obligation to help those in need.
Guess they were looking for sociopaths for that position.
Please share the company name.
I fucking hate these “personality assessments”. This is from one I just took the other day. One of around 50 questions.
