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)
How about the other way around, I had this guy come in, he had been out of the business for a while and decided to go and be a mechanic for a few years. One winter in particular he decided that he was kind of tired of doing the mechanic stuff and wanted to come back.
I interviewed him on a phone screen. His knowledge was appropriately dated but he was not bad. I figure he’d be able to come in and get up to speed pretty quickly.
My company does kind of a nightmare scenario where they interview you all day long and you literally meet with everyone in groups.
First thing in the morning first group came through said he was great.
Second group came through asked him some questions and he was a little bit more cagey but still not bad.
The third group was the lunch group, They took him out to lunch and he threw out a bunch of racist stories and while people watching, made fun of people as they came into the restaurant for their ethnicity or their weight, or what car they drive or whatever else they could find.
The lunch crew came back and did a hand off but no one raised the flags right away so we went into the first after lunch crew. A couple of people from the lunch crew pulled me aside while he was in his next set of meetings and said they were extremely uncomfortable being around him and recounted the stories.
I had to bust up the interview and send him on his way. The person that was uncomfortable with what he said is one of the most IDGAF people I’ve ever met.
Years earlier we had a developer come in with a fantastic resume. They brought him in first thing he was rude, and we’re not talking autistic doesn’t know what he’s doing rude he was clearly making a lot of generalizations about people and being nasty about the questions. Skill wise he was absolutely fantastic and he would have been fabulous to be a lead in front of a complicated project, But he was impossible to be around. Toward the end of the Early interview they told him that they had all they needed. He asked him if it was because of his attitude and they said that it was a team job and they needed somebody that was capable of working with a team. He said they could just put him in a one-man team and have him architect things or do other work by himself. There was simply no chance they were going to hire him. You don’t willingly bring that much toxicity in the workplace if you can help it.
I retired as a programmer five years ago and now I drive a school bus. The difference in acceptable workplace behavior is pretty stark. In my software companies, nobody ever came anywhere close to saying anything even vaguely racist; meanwhile in the bus garage people routinely use the n-word and the g-word. And it’s not like this is Mississippi or anything - this is a suburb of Philadelphia where the entire transportation department would probably be sacked if parents were ever to become aware of how their bus drivers talk.
Oh, we know. We’re in a mixed race community and you can see the distaste on the bus drivers and teachers faces. We can see them ignoring the bullying, and we get to hear the stories when they go to tell the teacher or bus driver something going on and they just shut them down and tell them to go back to their seat.