Ask Lemmy

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.

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.

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.

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.

Seems like an American thing to completely overdo the process. We have interviews i Europe too, but they are not insane and you don't have to have algorithm knowledge to be a programmer in most companies.

If you are talking about big tech, sure, they are inventing ways to find the absolute top candidates since they have millions of applications.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.