Ask Lemmy

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.

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.

I'm a little ashamed of this one. I really wanted it, and I was a little desperate.

1. HR Interview
2. CTO interview
3. 16-hour take home test
4. 4-hour panel interview where the engineers grilled me on random things
5. CEO Interview

Didn't get it.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.