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)
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.
- 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.
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’d like to phone a friend
No you just start by marking all nodes as unvisited and perform a search from a random starting node. you store the current bfs set of vertices in a sorted datastructure. Repeat until there are no more unvisited nodes.
Bingo. For each node if it’s 0 continue if it’s 1 then bfs to get everything. Store that group temporarily and mark which nodes you’ve seen. For the remaining nodes check if they are 1 and you have not seen it and continue. O(n log n) I believe, since you still iterate over everything and check
Thanks friend!
I think this is basically testing:
- If you have been practicing your leetcoding recently, and
- If you’re decent at leetcoding under pressure
Correct! I don’t like it, but gotta play the game if you want to make the cash
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
“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
Now I need more details, you said they can use whatever language they want, if you do
print(stringlist)in python it will print something like["first string", "second string"]and not an object reference.
