Ask Lemmy

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.