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 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”
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 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.
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
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.
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’m not a swe but I work in technology doing solutions, so semi technical I guess. I recently did 6 rounds with a company with positive feedback after each round. They told me they needed to get through a few more candidates and would have an answer on if an offer was being made the following week.
1 week turned into 2 into 3. At the end of the third week I lied and said I had an offer and told them that I needed an offer from them or to remove me from candidacy. The opted to remove me.
I was working at a job, so I wasn’t stressing it but the process was just gross
Good on you, and great move. They just wanted to see if there was anyone better, I’ve seen way too many hiring processes like that. Shit or get off the pot, it’s a yes or a no
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?
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.
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 ;-)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
Could you share a description of your angel? I think everyone might need that guy.
/s
pls dont share his description
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’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.
Hi welcome to GM please go build a Chevy at home so we can evaluate your skills.
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.
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?
Would have been nice to ask that question in the application. Would have saved everyone a bunch of time.
Yes, it will be the most important thing in my life. I even brought my divorce papers here to prove it.
Ha!
That sucks. Fuck them.
