this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
89 points (97.8% liked)

Ask Lemmy

26591 readers
1630 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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)

(page 2) 18 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 39 points 9 hours ago (7 children)

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.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 15 points 9 hours ago

Oh god I've had an open ended one like that only once, and you're right it's terrible. Those questions would be great things to tackle as a team of peers where you're all working together without the pressure, but dude you hold our careers in your hands. Pull it together

[–] daq@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

Aren't most questions like this are simply looking at what approach you try and not a solution? They've been at it for years so they can easily tell if you're trying something that makes sense or something trivial even if they don't have a solution or even if there isn't one.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Fester@lemm.ee 4 points 8 hours ago

Sorry, but the answer we were looking for is “I’ll need to work on this over the weekend.” That’ll be all for today. We’ll call you.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] afk_strats@lemmy.world 29 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 19 points 8 hours ago

It's funny, the idea to make a thread here was because I was on another thread talking about using ChatGPT for cheating, and I had a student say "Why would I go through the hassle of writing the assignment when ChatGPT could just write it out for me", and I just literally laughed out loud, because they have no idea how fucked they'll be in a real interview environment

[–] Toes@ani.social 15 points 8 hours ago (3 children)

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

[–] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 5 points 8 hours ago

Did you do it? What was the outcome of that interview?

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 13 points 9 hours ago (3 children)

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.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] undefined@links.hackliberty.org 4 points 8 hours ago

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.

load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›