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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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.
Ha!
Jesus. Good on you for not having any of that bullshit.
Would have been nice to ask that question in the application. Would have saved everyone a bunch of time.
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.
That sucks. Fuck them.
Hi welcome to GM please go build a Chevy at home so we can evaluate your skills.
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.
I mean, the pay is still way ahead of anything outside FAANG, really.
Depends entirely on the business, subjective as hell.
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.
Having read some of the comments from the interviewer perspective in this thread, I am glad they got you and not one of the yahoos other interviewers got.
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.
I had one interview where they literally got me to fix their Sendmail server while I was there.
I seriously hope you got the job.
I did.
I was there 5 months before heading back to grad school.
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
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.
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.
Sometimes you don’t have to solve it but instead ask them about what approaches they tried so far and suggest a new one. Just showing interest
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?
Interlinked
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.
That is a very logical way of replying to someone telling you you’re the sort of person to flip a turtle. In other words, found the replicant.
Because there’s some tortoise torturing dickhead narrating a fake story about me
A tortoise? What’s that?
You know what a turtle is? Same thing.
a) you hate tortoises,
b) you don’t want to burn your fingers on the tortoise, and you also hate tortoises.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.
It was the Swedish social insurance agency with these parts of the recruitment process probably outsourced to the lowest bidder.
Imagine if you just had to scroll down to get to the other options like “Does not describe me”, and they are still talking about "The biggest psychopath we’ve ever interviewed - just out of morbid curiosity. "
I fucking hate these “personality assessments”. This is from one I just took the other day. One of around 50 questions.
Holy shit, I kind of love that actually. I wouldn’t love to see it on an interview I’m doing, but that it exists and someone somewhere believes that the answer you provide for that will give them some kind of insight into your value as an employee?
As the interviewee?
I show up at their office for a round of interviews. IIRC it was 4 interviews of about an hour each. Every single interviewer comes in 5-10 minutes late. They all look completely exhausted. Unprompted, they all commented that “yeah, this is a start-up so we’re expected to work 80 hour weeks. That’s just how it is.” I did not take that job.
Another place wanted to do a coding “pre-screening” thing. You know, where you go to a website and there’s a coding question and you code it and submit your answer. THIS place wanted you to install an extension that took full control of your browser, your webcam, your mic, etc. So it could record you doing the coding challenge. No, thank you.
As the interviewer? omg, the stories I can tell.
We had a guy come in for an hour interview. We start asking him the normal interview questions. Literally everything he says is straight up wrong or he says, “I don’t know” and then just gives up and doesn’t try to work out a solution or anything. But we have a whole hour with this guy and as interviewers we’ve been instructed to use the full hour otherwise candidates complain that they weren’t given a fair chance even when it’s TOTALLY obvious it’s going to be a “no-hire.” So we start asking this guy easier and easier questions… just giving him basic softball questions… and HE STILL GETS THEM ALL WRONG. We ask him what type of variable would you use to store a number? He says, “String.” WHAT?! I’m totally flabbergasted at this point. So finally I get a brilliant idea: I’ll ask him an OPINION question! There’s no way he can get that wrong, right? Looking at his resume, it has something like “Java Expert” on there. So I say to him, “It says on your resume you’re a Java Expert. What’s your favorite thing about Java?” His response? “Oh, I actually don’t know anything about Java. I just put that on my resume because I know they used that at a previous company.” So now on top of this guy getting every question wrong, we’ve established he has also lied on his resume, so basically just red flags EVERYWHERE. Finally, after a grueling 45 minutes we decide to give up asking questions and just end with the whole, “So we like to reserve the last bit of time so you can ask us questions. Do you have anything you’d like to ask?” Without missing a beat, this guy goes, “When do I start? I feel like I NAILED that interview!”
At another company I worked at, we would do online interviews that took only an hour. The coding portion of the interview had a single question: “Given a list of strings, print the contents of the list to the screen.” That was it. Sure, we could make the coding question harder if they totally aced it, but the basic question was nothing more complicated than that. The candidate could even choose which programming language they wanted to use for the task. That single question eliminated half the candidates who applied for the job. Some straight up said they couldn’t do it. One person hung up on me and then when I tried to call back they said the fire alarm went off at their place and they would reschedule. They never did. Many people forgot that I could see their screens reflected in their glasses and I could see them frantically Googling. There was one candidate that did so insanely poorly during the interview that we believe it must have been a completely different person that had gone through the initial phone screen, so basically they were trying to bait-and-switch.
I have a bunch of other stories but this post is already getting quite long.
Unprompted, they all commented that “yeah, this is a start-up so we’re expected to work 80 hour weeks. That’s just how it is.”
lol I’m walking out the minute they say that.
Seriously. There’s no way I would continue 3 or 4 more hours after that comment.
I’m genuinely terrible at not falling for sunk costs and have a bad habit of just letting inertia take me.
But unless you’re offering me 100k a week (in which case I’ll work for maybe a month before burning out), I’m not working a fucking 80 hour week.
At the time it was like watching a train wreck. This was much earlier in my career and I was like, “there’s just no way, right?”
I did get lunch out of it.
I resonate with so many of these. I hate the tech prescreen, but morons, cheaters, and liars make it necessary. The prescreen is purely there to weed out a good, like you said well over 50% of candidates right there.
And I’ll throw a thorn at you, I do store numbers as strings… When I’m dealing with currency lol. I’m 100% sure that’s what he meant of course, because he was thinking about float precision and how you wouldn’t want to risk currency imprecision during serialization or anything! Should have given them the job! /s
“Given a list of strings, print the contents of the list to the screen.”
print(stringlist)or if you want to get fancy:
print(", ".join(stringlist))When do I start? I feel like I nailed it.
/s
lol. I kid you not, someone did that. Then completely imploded when I pointed out that it’d just print the object reference and not the list contents.
Can you start next Monday? :p
Now I need more details, you said they can use whatever language they want, if you do
print(stringlist)in python it will print something like["first string", "second string"]and not an object reference.The candidate said they were going to use Java. I asked them if perhaps they weren’t coding in Python instead? They insisted it was Java. I forget the details but they proceeded to “fix” their code by doing some stuff that made absolutely no sense no matter what language they were using.
Was the string list an array or something?
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 had an interview where they asked me to set up 3 micro services (with full functionality), a Kafka broker, a frontend and to configure everything to run on Kubernetes.
According to them this would take “more or less 4 hours” and those hours would obviously not be paid.
I’m still not sure whether they were just trying to get free work out of people or if their expectations for what a software engineer is supposed to do in half a day are completely absurd.
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That last part is a nightmare
Oh my god I hate that, just set up an entire infrastructure before you even get to the question. The very least they could do is set up the cluster for you so you wouldn’t have to spend the time
If they are familiar with these task a solution can get outlined with words easily.
The author summarized it perfectly.
The biggest red flag is how all over the place the task is. They were trying to test every single thing they could come up with at the same time.
I had a similar task to
“Set up a web service, load balancer and infrastructure to scale it to handle a large amount of requests. Harden the security of it to the best of your ability. Document how it works, how to scale it, why you built it the way you did, what measures you took to harden it and why, and any future improvements you would suggest. All code and documentation should be production quality. This should take about four hours.”
Maybe you can write this code in four hours, but all this documentation and motivation as well? Fuck off.
They also asked for a made up report from a security audit (this was for a security engineer position) containing a dozen realistic vulnerabilities with descriptions, impact assessments, and remediation suggestions. Once again of production quality. This is at least six pages of highly technical, well researched, and carefully worded text. Four hours is tight for this task alone.
And if those are their expectations going forward they can keep their position. Imagine doing twice that much every day.
it’s definitely free labor for them, they’re incompetent and likely checking notes on how other more competent people would approach deploying in whatever fashion they want to
As an interviewee it’s nothing much, but when they asked me to sort a list, I find that question to be completely pointless, I will never implement a sort IRL, and most people who get it right are because they have it memorized.
As an interviewer, a person who sent their take home as a .doc file inside a zipped folder. I didn’t understood why they sent it that way, but got the code to compile, and found very serious issues. When confronting the person they claim there were no issues, which happens so I pointed out at a specific line, and still nothing, I asked them if they knew what an SQL injection was and his answer was “yes, and you’re wrong, there’s no SQL injection happening there”, so I sent him a link for him to click that would call that endpoint on his local instance, and dropped the entire database for the take-home assignment. No need to tell you he wasn’t hired.
TBH a take home assignment as a
.docfile would have been enough for me to pass. Even when going through resumes (for technical roles), i usually skip anything that’s not a PDF.In hindsight that should have been enough, but at the time I didn’t want to discard a possibly good candidate because of that (reasoning that maybe he had some reason for it). Being subject to SQL injections also is not the end of the world, everyone makes mistakes. Not realizing it even after me pointing the line could also be overlooked as “we need to train this person”. But insisting that there isn’t even after the interviewer tells you there is, means you don’t want to learn, and at that point I can’t help you.
I will never implement a sort IRL
My answer to “what’s the best sorting algorithm” is “the SORT BY clause in SQL”.
I had an on site interview with the owner of a small IT company. He was 30 minutes late (and I’d arrived 10 minutes early to be… ya know, punctual).
He offered no apologies and had this whole arrogance surrounding him. Complained that he had to drive to the office for this. Then after 5 minutes, it was obvious he didn’t even bother to look over my CV and was completely unprepared for the interview. … and somehow this was my fault.
Of course, the interview didn’t go well (for either of us). He offered a lowball 30% less than the average salary, I was looking for 30% above. I rolled my eyes, shook hands and left.
Later, I got a call back from the recruiter “I had no idea you were asking that much. From what X (the owner) said, this was a complete disaster.” I said, “I agree” and politely hung up.
In hindsight, I should have probably insisted on rescheduling (or just left) after 20 minutes. But, I was young and didn’t have many interviews under my belt. So, I took it as a learning experience.
I’ve had some really great third party recruiters. I’ve also had some real white ones like this one. Salary expectations are step one, if they had no idea then they failed at their job and wasted everyone’s time.
Interviewed at two big, well-known tech companies. Had done a lot of mobile dev work at the time, but really wanted to switch to connected hardware and told the recruiters.
Showed up for the first on-site interview. Guy walks in. Explains the actual first interviewer couldn’t make it so he was a last-minute stand-in. Goes: “So, it says here you are intererested in mobile. That’s good. My team is looking for someone like that.”
I explained it was actually the other way round. What proceeded was an awkward hour of bullshit questions about train schedulers and sorting algorithms. Repeat five times that day. Every. Single. One.
Second company a few weeks later. Same thing. Except this time, 2/3 of the way through, a manager in HW group walks in. Grouses why he was asked to talk to someone, checks notes, about mobile. We had the greatest conversation after I set him straight. He wanted me to come back and do another loop just with his group. Except a week later, they announced a hiring freeze and I never heard back.
In retrospect, it was a good thing. I would not have been a good fit.
I interviewed for a part-time web developer role during the summer of my second year at university. The “employer” wanted the interview at their house. No problem, I guess it’s a small operation and I’d work remotely?
The interview was fine. It was a guy that worked with his wife, and they needed someone to pick up some work over a few weeks. Midway through the interview, the guy’s wife came downstairs - in what I can only describe as the kind of dressing gown you’d see in porn.
She walked over, asked if I was “the guy”. The man said, “oh yeah, he looks good don’t you think?”, to which she responded “yeah, he looks like he’ll do the job nicely”. She then came over and put her hand by the back of my neck, and asked if I wanted to help out with a problem they’d been having.
Being a socially awkward 20 year old CS student, I said something along the lines of “uhh no that’s okay thanks, I’d better get going soon”, and the man escorted me out. I had received an email minutes after to say the job was mine if I wanted it.
I turned the job down, saying that something else had come up. I’m 70% sure that the job was a threesome or some weird cuck thing, and if I didn’t have a girlfriend and wasn’t awkward as fuck I’d probably have gone back and plowed his wife/written some PHP. Either way, that’s my worst interview experience - and probably will be for the rest of my days.
On the other side, one guy I interviewed for a startup was really qualified and we wanted to offer him the role. I thankfully Googled him, and found a Twitter account against his name where he had pics of him balls deep in a blow up doll. We didn’t hire him.
It’s certainly a bad sign if you leave the interview and you’re not sure if the job is for writing PHP or pleasuring his wife.
PHP stands for Pleasuring His Partner.
PHP = Pleasuring Her Poosay
I did one where I went through a few rounds of interviews, technical and otherwise. In talking with the developers, they mentioned that they were trying to integrate a certain client side framework into their backend frameworks build process, without success. Get to the final stages, and the director of engineering asks me to work on this take home project to, you guessed in, integrate the js framework into the build process of the backend framework.
I sent them a strongly worded rejection email. It was a realreal eye opening experience.
If it’s not a hassle, could you explain the implications of this request to someone who only understands basic coding?
Imagine you’re interviewing for an Architect position at a company that’s designing a hotel, and your take home assignment is to design a hotel.
Gotcha. Thank you v much!
They were trying to get them to solve a real world problem for free under the guise of an interview (made up) problem.
Hahaha. Oh, small business owners… smh Thank you!
It was a realreal medium sized start up ;-)
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In addition to the excellent hotel analogy, they had a specific conceptual and technical problem, say, how to mix flour evenly into water when thickening a sauce. The challenge was to make a roux and show the steps I used to evenly mix the flour.
Seems like an American thing to completely overdo the process. We have interviews i Europe too, but they are not insane and you don’t have to have algorithm knowledge to be a programmer in most companies.
If you are talking about big tech, sure, they are inventing ways to find the absolute top candidates since they have millions of applications.
Yeah, I’m an industrial automation tech, so my kind of programming is different from what is done in information technology, but I’ve never been asked to complete exercises during an interview.
I switched from controls engineering to information technology - in industrial automation interviews not once was I asked to prove my knowledge about PLCs or anything like that, they trusted my education and experience.
The interviews in information technology were like “make us a working app for free before we have a second round of interviews” even after few years of previous experience in their specific field and a repository to show off my free-time projects.
I switched because I got tired of traveling, but holy shit I miss the job market of industrial automation. I still feel like I got more respect working in automation field than I have ever gotten working as a software developer.
I think industry jobs are more… Grounded. If you look like you’re not an idiot and you’re not lazy, you’re hired; whatever you don’t know can be learned on the job.
At least that’s how it is in my area.
Definitely, good way to put it.
- Interview
- team meet-up
- coding tasks with my thought process
According to the team I nailed it + above expectations. I was asked for my salary: Said at least between X and Y.
I received an offer with X.
- negotiations
- negotiation feedback
They raised it to the middle
I declined. New offer arose: Y.
I declined again since they were cheap and not transparent like me.
Received a flame e-Mail afterwarsa about how I would dare to decline since it is the matching salary. I have wasted their time and effort. THE CEO WROTE THE LAST SENTENCE IN UPPERCASE.
Oh, and I should have been responsible for one year to maintain enums about tax numbers, since everybody started there like this.
Uff.
Sounds like you dodged a bullet, if that’s how the CEO reacts to you declining the offer. Just imagine how they’d react to somone actually making a mistake at work
Düsseldorfer Scheißverein. Meine Zwei Pfennig. Schwer das Ganze im Englischen zu Rekapitulieren.
