I had an interviewer hand me an IQ test before they were even willing to speak with me about the position. Awful experience.

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.

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.

Got a couple.

The first bad interview I turned up and had to wait for the owner who rocked up 15 minutes late. We had a discussion and he was happy with my IT skills, we then got into a discussion of how to run the business.

He asked me what would I do if a salesman kept selling Linux support to businesses but the company had no one that had experience of it, I said it didn’t feel morally right to sell something that you can’t actually fulfill currently, put a cork in the salesman regarding Linux support, train/hire staff and when ready then continue to offer it. He said that’s not how his business works and to drive the business the salesman was doing the right thing.

During that interview I saw someone walk into the office that I had worked with in the past, they were incredibly unreliable, bad at the job and were fired, this one guy appearing gave me the final sign this was not the workplace for me. After the interview they gave me an offer that I declined.

The second interview probably a out 2 months later I turned up to was a small company of maybe 3 people. I turned up and it was a shared office space they used, he walked up to the receptionist and asked if there was a meeting room available, she said no. So he led me to the kitchenette area where he offered for me to sit on a sofa not to dissimilar to this…

Having the hum of a vending machine in the background added to the ambience. We got to chatting and it sounded like the guy didn’t really know what he wanted to do with the business or how to run it, generally seemed disorganised.

Towards the end of the interview wouldn’t you know it, the same guy I used to work with walked into the kitchenette wearing the t-shirt of a company in the building, gave me “the nod” and proceeded to use the vending machine, which failed to dispense his choice and he stood there shaking the machine.

This guy must have been some kind of angel in place to stop me from taking bad jobs. I declined the offer they gave me. A year or so later I was telling a friend about this and we checked on the company, it went out of business.

They were bad interviews, but I still got something out of them.

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.

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.

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.

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How about the other way around, I had this guy come in, he had been out of the business for a while and decided to go and be a mechanic for a few years. One winter in particular he decided that he was kind of tired of doing the mechanic stuff and wanted to come back.

I interviewed him on a phone screen. His knowledge was appropriately dated but he was not bad. I figure he’d be able to come in and get up to speed pretty quickly.

My company does kind of a nightmare scenario where they interview you all day long and you literally meet with everyone in groups.

First thing in the morning first group came through said he was great.

Second group came through asked him some questions and he was a little bit more cagey but still not bad.

The third group was the lunch group, They took him out to lunch and he threw out a bunch of racist stories and while people watching, made fun of people as they came into the restaurant for their ethnicity or their weight, or what car they drive or whatever else they could find.

The lunch crew came back and did a hand off but no one raised the flags right away so we went into the first after lunch crew. A couple of people from the lunch crew pulled me aside while he was in his next set of meetings and said they were extremely uncomfortable being around him and recounted the stories.

I had to bust up the interview and send him on his way. The person that was uncomfortable with what he said is one of the most IDGAF people I’ve ever met.

Years earlier we had a developer come in with a fantastic resume. They brought him in first thing he was rude, and we’re not talking autistic doesn’t know what he’s doing rude he was clearly making a lot of generalizations about people and being nasty about the questions. Skill wise he was absolutely fantastic and he would have been fabulous to be a lead in front of a complicated project, But he was impossible to be around. Toward the end of the Early interview they told him that they had all they needed. He asked him if it was because of his attitude and they said that it was a team job and they needed somebody that was capable of working with a team. He said they could just put him in a one-man team and have him architect things or do other work by himself. There was simply no chance they were going to hire him. You don’t willingly bring that much toxicity in the workplace if you can help it.

1. Interview
2. team meet-up
3. 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.

4. negotiations
5. 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.