A decade ago, I interviewed at a FAANG company. It was basically an all-day affair and a bit grueling, but they did at least try to make it as pleasant as possible. I did have to do binary search on a whiteboard. Also write code to do something on a whiteboard (I had initially been told not to bring a personal laptop and the third or fourth interviewer said that I should use my personal laptop since it would be easier than white-boarding. Uhhhhh…)

A couple companies ago, I ended up at like 5 or 6 total interviews, including the initial HR/fit screen. There were some extra steps including background screenings and the like (healthcare IT). I started the job and almost nothing was what they said it was (though apparently that was because of a change in course between when I started and ended the process). It was actually a decent enough gig and taught me a fair bit, but the interview process was rough in terms of sheer number of calls/meetings and timing. I could swear at one point a guy was typing code I was telling him on the phone to verify that it worked (then again, nearly anything is valid Perl which is the language I started in there).

Another previous company was a clusterfuck of time zones, weird interview times from people in multiple countries, poor communication, etc. Still, I was desperate and went with it. Ended up being the longest job I worked, but boy were there shitstorms that came out of the chaos. It was a start-up spun off an existing entity and just weird in a lot of ways.

My current job was an HR fit check and some basic screening questions about tech stuff, interview with peer, interview with a manager, and interview with head of IT. No projects nor coding tests. I’ve happily been working for them for quite a while now. Pays well enough by Japanese IT standards and, perhaps more importantly to me, is fully remote (though I’m heavily encouraged to bop down to Tokyo for a couple company events per year).

As the interviewer, especially before I was in development and was leading a helpdesk (developing stuff for that job actually got noticed and got me my first developer role), I was heavily into the weird questions (from a book called something like ‘how to move mt fuji’ IIRC), but at least part of my job was assessing people’s approach to situations and questions, how they explain things, how they react under pressure, and so on. Still kinda cringy thinking back to it, but I was in my early 20s at the time in the early 2000s.

As an interviewer for developers, I never gave any assignment I expected to take more than 2 hours in the worst case and only gave those if the person didn’t have something already online to submit (i.e. a github repo or whatnot). I would ask them about choices they made, flow, and anything that stuck out to me. I did ask plenty of questions to make sure the applicants weren’t full of shit and to assess experience; so many people who have SQL on their resume apparently have no idea WTF the EXPLAIN functionality is and have no idea about indexes which is frightening. I always tried to strike a balance between finding out what I needed to know and respecting the time of my interviewees.

Even before AI, I definitely encountered people writing things on their CV with no actual idea about them. During phone interviews, I could definitely hear people furiously typing away (presumably into some search engine) whilst stalling with non-answers. I was not expecting anyone to know everything about everything, but I’d rather they tell me they aren’t sure and give it their best shot than search and give me the same thing one of the first few hits in google or Wikipedia would give (this happened way too often at a previous company that never really screened anybody before taking up engineers’ and managers’ time for interviews).

I’ve also had a couple people be confidently incorrect and either refuse to get the hint or acknowledge this when I gently tried to ask questions that should cause them to realize that what they said was wrong or contradictory. People make mistakes, especially under pressure, but I definitely had some answers that left me in disbelief.