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)
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.
“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.
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.
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’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.
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
I know people don’t like the technical interview, but for me, it’s not about knowledge but process. I don’t care that you don’t have something memorized or don’t know the syntax without your linter. I want to see how you figure it out. I was interviewing for a junior web developer, and I gave them the task of fizzbuzz. I told them it was OK to use Google or any other tool. The interview ended with the prospect in tears. I felt very bad and told them they could finish it outside the interview and send it to us (they didn’t). Somehow, they were still on our shortlist.
Yep, this is exactly it. Always hire the smart noob over the experienced idiot.
I once did a coding interview. They had me write a MVC. It was on bitbucket so private repo. They merged my code then didn’t get back to me. They forgot that I had access so I got to see the company using interviews code for a real project. They didn’t last long so bullet dodged. But it was very silly. I eventually let them know I had access and within the hour they took me off the project despite never giving me an email in response.
i got an interview as an embedded software engineer for a company that makes wireless camera flashes. high-precision real-time programming. i wanted to dive further into that area.
the first task was… reading comprehension, basic arithmetic, and pattern matching. i was flabbergasted. i wrote a really negative passage in their feedback form about how they apparently don’t trust their engineering candidates to be able to read, and how those pattern matching iq tests are bullshit since you can up your score by like 20% if you practice.
they called me back and explained that the reason they have everyone from cleaning staff to C-level take the standardized test is to create a workplace of “objective equality”. also they were really confused about my stance on the test because apparently i had scored in the top 5%. that’s the fastest i’ve ever noped out of an interview process.
That is pretty insulting tbh, going in assuming everyone is a moron. I kind of get what they were going for, but it’s something that could be easily solved just with a normal interview. They probably got burned once and decided “This is our standard going forward, everyone will suffer now”
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 = Pleasuring Her Poosay
PHP stands for Pleasuring His Partner.
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.
Dude, so much of your experience resonates with me! I was applying to a small start-up and they were like “oh, our new CEO is former Amazon so you’ll be doing a half-dozen hour-long interviews over the course of a couple days.” Wut? Other times the company would claim they don’t care that most of my experience is in Java and then after final interviews they’ll turn me down because most of my experience is in Java and they think it’s not possible for someone to use a different programming language or something. And people who reach out to ME then ghost me.
Sadly I’m still trying to find a new role.
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.
I interviewed for a shop in Ottawa.
I was working at the time, but it was declining situation so I was Motivated.
So I show up a the appointed time, and I meet a guy who can best be described as ‘a little grizzled’ and ‘a little stressed’. We go over my resume, first off the bat.
“These are the things we need from you,” he said, tapping items on a list. “And these are places you suck,” he said, tapping the same list.
I basically checked out at that point; there was no way I was suitable for this post. I could learn it, but it was a lot. And while I had a lot of other skills that showed up on the job desc and my CV, missing so many important pieces was insurmountable. It wasn’t a super-fun experience no matter how interesting he was - he was a great lead hand - and I left without much fanfare. Great rambling talk about all kinds of things, but it’s the worst I’ve ever flamed out in an interview; and the fastest.
Imagine my surprise when he 'strong-hire’d me. I actually said to the recruiter, “Yeah, you’ve got it wrong. No no, and it’s totally okay, but you’re off by one or something. You mean to call the name above mine or the name below mine, and that guy is probably gonna love this job. But you don’t mean to call me. No stress, all good, but yeah, I’m not the guy you wanted to call.”
It was a great job and that guy was my lead. Brutal honestly is fabulous if you can take it.
One time I have applied for a role in one of the big companies. Microsoft/Apple/Google/Amazon like big (for the record, none of the above). The process took almost two months, I had 7 or 8 interviews with various department heads - HR, hardware and software engineers, support. I had to take an IQ test disguised as personality test, one more “soft” test, did the homework assignment based on sent requirements and docs. Now, the role I was applying for was a mix of sysops, devops and sys architect. I would be working with the bare metal. I was so deep in the sys/ops world I failed on fairly simple task. During the final interview I was tasked with a live coding problem - “using the language of your choice, write a program that calculates the fibonacci sequence”. I was not prepared for that. Usually I could do this with my eyes closed after a night of heavy drinking but in this case I was so deep in systems architecture I totally blew it. Lesson I learned was to be prepared for most unusual tech questions. Ever since I always prepare for both, dev and ops parts even if it’s strictly ops role.
Did you forgot how the sequence worked, and the interviewer not tell you/didnt let you look it up?
Because its logic only requires a loop where you keep adding i and j, where j is the previous value of i.
Needless to say, must be very unlucky.
I don’t come from a developer background but that honestly sounds ridiculous.
If this type of thing is standard in software development, I feel bad for anybody in the industry.
I can only talk about my experience, not sure how it reflects the whole industry. But all the big companies I applied for had a multistep recruitment process. On the other hand, the company I work for at the moment, was more than chill during the interview process. I had two interviews, one with the HR 3rd party and one with the CTO and the founder. I didn’t do any homework and most of the time we talked was a casual small talk with some tech questions. The more I think about that conversation, the more I think that I didn’t read between the lines. I guess the people who I talked to were really good t judging the character.
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.
I had an interview like this, it was supposed to be Pair Programming which i had been doing very well for 5 years in RoR.
I get to the interview and they haven’t actually done any pair programming, they WANT to.
And the interview was ‘write a tic tac toe game in ruby on rails in one hour’
And they literally had nothing, we were in the zoom call the guy was like ‘okay go’ but every time i asked him any questions he told me to just do whatever i thought was right and he didn’t want to influnce me.
I got RoR and dependencies and apache installed and either finished or almost finished mariadb in that hour but i was doing it all over my own home internet so didn’t really get very far and they seemed really annoyed!?!
Then the best part was the senior programmer told me that they don’t have time to do code reviews and all the engineers just merged whatever they wanted into master, but it was fine that way. I think he didn’t like having anyone review his code.
LOL
That last part is a nightmare
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
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.
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.
When I was in Uni, we had the opportunity to apply for co-op at Black Berry when they still made phones with their own OS.
I was getting into mobile dev at this time and applied and got an interview.
I didn’t know what I was expecting but what I got was a 10-20min sales pitch for their phone and I wasn’t asked a question… I don’t think. From what I gathered afterwards they just wanted to hire/rehire one guy and had to interview others to be in the co-op program.
Believe it or not I wasn’t sold on black berry after that.
Went in for an in-person prescreening with HR that turned into a surprise panel interview with the tech leadership, which sounds like a good thing, but I’m a severe introvert, so it tilted me to the point that I had a hard time regaining my internal composure.
Conversion was friendly and softball, and whiteboard was a super simple rdbms outer join scenario, but in the moment I couldn’t really think straight, so I didn’t see any of this.
I’d actually been practicing DSA so one of those problems might have actually been engaging enough to get me to focus.
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.
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 thst 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.
I retrospect, it was a good thing. I would not have been a good fit.
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!
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.
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 ;-)
