The worst job interview I ever had(oliverio.dev) |
The worst job interview I ever had(oliverio.dev) |
It was all disclosed up front, so no surprises. Not really that bad.
For interview questions like these, they can only tease about what they are really after - finding employees who "go the extra mile" or "stay late" or "don't give up in the face of adversity". They are looking for you to find evidence of these patterns to corroborate your story. If they drove you to the answer they were after, it wouldn't be a passing score in their interview summary write-up.
They make us write essays and life stories and reject in 24hrs.
Felt the exact same frustration.
One job they got offended to ask for a negotiation, despite it was them who changed the original job posting. Another job took 4 interviews (plus one redundant, as it seems they forgot they had that interview with me) over 4 months only to send a generic “thank you” email. Another job, the interviewer seems was hostile just to have the interview. Another one the questions in the first interview were stupid, supposedly technical but extremely shallow, like tabs or spaces.. yeah, I got asked that! Another one refused to change a word in the contract because it’s a “template”, it felt like applying to a service rather than a job. And many other stories, like a company sent me a ticket for an interview in another country, only to find the team is disconnected from what the recruiter wants, they paid for the trip tho.
European companies seem slightly better than North American ones, but for some reasons bringing up the money talk early is a taboo topic? Had few calls and noticed that, they got shocked asking such question, even though it’s great to know so we don’t waste our time.
I never negotiated money, funny how that sounds, but it isn’t my no1 priority, all I wanted is a mature workplace and working with goal oriented people where nothing else matters that much than delivering the results, it seems it was impossible.
Sometimes, if the hobby shows leadership etc, it might be relevant even if the domain isn't.
And this was for a mental health startup!? Please name-and-shame them. Awful.
First, in 2023 I interviewed for a startup as a lead architect.
They had me do some virtual whiteboard stuff, and so I was drawing rectangles and cylinders and mentioning things like "database" and "message queues" as generically as I could.
They would interrupt me and say stuff like "Which message queue? Where do you download that?". The interview went on for a long time, with many bizarrely-specific questions for a whiteboard interview, but I figured that it was just their way to make sure that candidates didn't bullshit them by handwaving away important details.
They did make me an offer a few days later, but not for as much as I wanted. That's fine, no hard feelings over that.
But then a week later the CEO emails me asking for technical help on a question. I was on the train when I got it. I don't remember the exact question but it was something to do with RabbitMQ and Redis, and it was pretty easy, so I just typed out a quick answer to my phone and replied without even really thinking about it. Then another half-hour later he responds back to my reply asking for more detail on everything.
After his last reply I sent a response like "I am happy enough to continue this conversation but I'm afraid I will need to start billing the time it takes for me to reply. Give me a call and we can discuss the rate.
He didn't reply.
And then I realized something: this company was using interviews as unpaid consulting. That's why they were asking for bizarrely-specific stuff during the interview, and that's why the CEO was still trying to get free consulting out of me even afterward.
Really pissed me off, and I am very glad I didn't accept their offer. I am generally a person who is happy to help answer technical questions for free [1], but I felt like my trusting nature was kind of weaponized.
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Second was last year at a big bank.
I was really excited for this job, so I showed up to the interview in my best (and only) suit, made sure everything looked nice, and had studied for many of the technical questions I thought they were likely to ask the previous night.
Off to a bad start, it was one of the hottest days in NYC of the year, and I sweat a lot by nature, so in combination with the full suit, by the time I got to the building I was already kind of drenched in sweat.
Once I get in, they start giving me some conceptual algorithm questions on the whiteboard. I don't remember the exact question, but I remember they asked the runtime complexity of my solution and I said "Looks like O(n + log m) where n is the length of list A and m is the length of list B". One of the interviewers very confidently corrects me an says "You got your n and m backward".
I look at the board, go through my solution, and, no, I actually hadn't gotten the variables backward.
I have no idea what you're supposed to do in a situation where you're right and the interviewer is wrong [2], so I just do a trace through my solution and explain that, no, my variables were appropriately assigned. He still confidently "corrected" me again.
At this point I really don't know what I'm supposed to do, because I'm not going to just lie and say "oh you're right", but if I'm wrong, then I do want to know why so I don't repeat the mistake in the future. So I ask him "Ok, let's trace through this again because I really don't think my understanding is wrong here".
It was this bizarre gaslighting experience, because he would agree with every premise of why I thought the answer was O(n + log m), and every reasoning step along the way, but then still insisted I got the answer wrong. I do really know my Big O complexity, I have been doing this for a very long time, so eventually I just said something like "I guess we need to agree to disagree" because my time for that interview was almost up.
Then there was another interview immediately afterward. The interviewer started asking me very specific questions about Java Spring MVC (like about which annotations to use and whatnot)
Now, I don't have Java Spring on my resume, I haven't touched Java Spring in more than a decade, and Java Spring was not in the job listing. I didn't even consider studying Spring MVC because the listing didn't even mention that this would be web-based.
So I tell the guy something like "umm, I don't really know Spring. I know how a web request works so I'm happy to answer conceptual questions on the whiteboard, but I'm afraid I would have to learn the specific syntax".
And he responded "Well this is not a junior role. You shouldn't have to learn."
So of course I get the specific Spring questions wrong, and fine, if they wanted a person who knew Spring, that's ok, even if they should have put that in the job posting.
But then he asked me to, on the whiteboard, design a basic web request where there was a global counter [3]. I use an AtomicLong, which to my understanding is what pretty much every human who writes Java uses for counters.
He asked me why I used an AtomicLong, and I said "because it's what everyone uses, and because it doesn't block and because compare and swap for a small surface area like that is pretty cheap".
The guy then, corrected me, and told me to use a mutex. I said "I don't think a mutex is necessary here, if it's just a counter I think an atomic is fine."
He was very insistent, and told me to rewrite it with a mutex, and at this point I am starting to question my own competence, so I yield and just rewrite it with a ReentrantLock, which he again "corrected" me saying that I should use `synchronized`, and at that I push back and say "no, ReentrantLock is fine".
I left the interview feeling like a moron; I was so sure about this stuff before, but maybe I didn't have the understanding I thought I did.
I'm friends with a few graybeard C and C++ programmers on Discord, so when I got home I told them the questions and asked them how they'd solve them, and they solved the problems in the same way I would have.
Then I realized that this interviewer, who was principal level, didn't know what an atomic was, and I think he also had no idea how to use ReentrantLock, and so when I used them he just assumed I was wrong. Moron.
[1] And that's still true; feel free to email me if you want to geek out about software :)
[2] And it seems like the answer I get for that varies between each person. I'm not sure anyone knows.
[3] With, to be clear, no further arithmetic or anything being applied to it, before someone asks.
All interview questions - unless it’s impossible to twist your answer to fit this - is scoped to “… at work”. Nobody who asks “tell me about yourself” is asking you to talk about how you met your partner, how many cats you have, or that experience you had, that one time, at band camp. It would be redundant and awkward to literally say “… at work” at the end of every question. It’s totally 100% the intent of the interviewer.
This is interviewing 101 and unless this is your first ever interview I would find it odd, and stop you immediately and say “I meant, worst day at work”. They should’ve done that.
Unless they explicitly and unambiguously say “tell me about the day your mom and dog died in the same day when you found out you had cancer” they mean “tell me about your worst day _at work_.” And even if they ask about the time your dog died (they won’t), they are not asking you “tell me about the worst day you’ve had in your life”. They are asking “tell me about a time you experienced adversity and overcame it, exhibiting problem solving, resilience, and grit AT WORK. (Or - if you are operating in executive mode or you like to live dangerously - some non-work context that maps obviously and unambiguously to a work context).”
You failed the “knows how to interact with people in a professional setting” part of the interview. Or the “this person knows how to interview” part (which generally, but not always, correlates with experience and emotional maturity). Or the “read between the lines” part.
Yeah, inartfully asked questions - but also totally flubbed the answers.
Sorry, chalk it up to you had a bad interview or day or whatever, and never, ever forget the entire thing is scoped to “…. at work”.
That's vastly overstepping commonly accepted boundaries. Sure, some surface level smalltalk is normal and expected: "Any hobbies? Ah, you like hiking? Nice. Where do you like to hike? Oh, I did that, too. Might I suggest hiking there and there? I bet you'd like it. Anyway, moving on!" Common ground helps conversations flow.
But an employer asking about your personal relationships? Your needs, fears, and desires outside of any technical context? (My needs, fears, and desires from compiler toolchains are totally within scope.) Your traumata? That's a level of intrusiveness crossing into "rude" territory. They have no business of asking.
OP didn't say that, he said "hardest day of my life, my biggest life challenges" and then characterized it (his opinion) 'similar “trauma-baiting” questions'
asking a young person (I don't know that he was young, just saying) "what was the hardest day of your life" is a pretty standard question. Like on a college application, they expect you to answer it. Young people often don't have enough other experience to fall back on, and in a context in which you are expected to make yourself look good, the filter that is expected is to emphasize something that you were successful/resourceful at.
I think that "generally..." is a little harsh.
The person might just not have worked in a stereotypical corporate drone environment before.
Or they might normally have been able to handle the corporate drone interview theatre, but are overextended by the context (e.g., laid off in this job market, which can easily be more stressful and existential than most actual work situations), and a bad interview hazing just yanks on that.
There's going to be more and more overstressed people showing up to tech job interviews, and people on the other side of the table will need empathy and understanding, if they're going to make good assessments despite the context.
you are stating your opinion as fact, and I don't think there is a basis beyond your opinion, you simply don't know.
I agree with you the interviewee could have handled the questions better to not be so revealing about himself, setting boundaries the interviewer was crossing, but it might have been precisely the intent of the mental health company interviewer to elicit responses like that to stay away from emotionally wounded people.
Ha, I don't think anyone who asks these questions expects that you'll respond in a fully unfiltered way... These kinds of questions are part and parcel of non-tech interview processes.
You can redirect with some subtlety "Well, my hardest ever day at work was..." to avoid talking about dead babies or whatever. Your interviewer doesn't get to look over your whole life history and determine whether your /truthfully/ chose the actual hardest ever day. So really it's a chance for you to say "Here's a [big] challenge I once faced, and here's how I survived/overcame it."
The screening and technical interviews on site were all fine and dandy. At the end of the onsite interviews I spoke with the director in charge of the team. I asked some general questions like, "What's the team's work-life balance like?"
He chuckled and said something like they work 60+ hour works. I looked at him and said flatly, "Yeah, I'm not doing that."
The HR person called me after the onsites and was completely puzzled. She said she never seen a candidate pass technicals and not get an offer. She suggested sending me to another team (I declined).
I'd had a fantastic initial interview, it seemed like a perfect fit and interesting tech. Overlapped a lot with some work I'd been doing recently. They made it sound like my experience was a great match and they were exited for me to move forward. I was the most excited I've ever been after a job interview.
The second interview a couple days later was a one-on-one with the CTO. After about five minutes of pretty friendly get-to-know-you chitchat he asks if I have any questions about the position. I ask about what my day to day would look like and he replies "I don't know, and that's the problem. I don't like to lead people on, I'll be honest I don't see a position for you here."
It was such a sudden slap in the face that my brain just completely shut off. I kind of just stammered out an "Oh... Um... Thank you for your time"
I didn't get to talk about my experience ... at all. Not a single mention of my twenty years of across multiple tech stacks my resume doesn't even begin to scratch. I've never been judged so quickly or so blindly.
Later that day, out of sheer frustration I email him back trying to explain that I'd felt like I didn't get a chance to talk about myself and all the ways I'd felt like I was a great fit based on the previous interview and how my experience applied.
I never heard anything back.
Half way through the interview, I had an epiphany. I really didn't want to work there. It was cultural, it just wasn't going to fit.
I didn't waste any more time. Half-way through a white-board challenge, I put down the marker and said, plainly, "okay, I've seen enough, I don't want to work here - thanks and let me not waste any more of your time", picked up my coat and left.
It wasn't a bad interview. It wasn't a terrible one. Nor was it because of the whiteboard question, or anything like that.
I just didn't like the guys. That's all it was. And I couldn't stand the idea of working for them - just the way the interview proceeded. I don't need to give details.
It was really the only time I ever got up mid-interview and left.
> hardest day of my life, my biggest life challenges, and other similar “trauma-baiting” questions.
I would take these types of questions as "from a professional standpoint". If the interviewer corrected and wanted personal answers, the interview would be over.
Just in an interview situation, or you will just never be open to a personal friendship with anyone you ever work with?
Building relationships with colleagues is possible but I have tried to be careful. I have made some friends over time that were once co-workers. However, they were only able to move to full friend once they moved on to other teams or companies. I don't see someone I work with day-to-day as a personal friend. I compartmentalize them, keep the relationship professional and cordial.
Moving someone to a personal friend has risks, especially if there is a chance you may work for or with them again. Some personal friendships may be able to outlast work drama, but so far I haven't had that happen for me. I've lost a few along the way due to negative conditions at work.
Have you had a personal friend that stayed around after leaving a bad situation at work? Any pointers?
Many, many of them are "Doctor, heal thyself" type folks. Definitely non-boring people. I am quite sure of this, for reasons that I won't go into, here.
Sorry it didn't work out, but you dodged a bullet. Take it from me.
Then fall down and appreciate that you did not end up in that situation. And tell everyone you know not to apply or work there.
Some interviewers just want to feel special.
Come interview time someone will ask why I want to work there. My answer is: "You called me, why should I want to work here."
Don't think much about it, just believe what I am telling you. It is going to save you a lot of grief.
If you took time to do a little research and validate that you fit more than 'i need a pay check and you have paychecks' that's valuable for the company. Your judgement may be poor, but you self screened, so that's an extra screening.
- Tell me about a time you made a professional mistake. - Tell me about your biggest failure. - Tell me when you last shipped a bug. - Tell me when you took down production.
Never asked me about my accomplishments, or the positives. I'm prepared for being asked about making mistakes, and have a few examples ready to give depending on the job I'm interviewing for, but to get asked so many times in a row was just deflating.
I'm glad I didn't get that job.
The furthest I've gone in these jazz style culture interviews is asking people what they do outside of work for fun. This was for fully remote async positions. And it was important to know you had other stuff going on because the mental/personal health risk in failing at remote work is massive and life altering.
If, through wherever that discussion went, I wasn't 100% sure that you could stand on your own feet and wouldn't sink into the abyss, it was impossible to move forward. It was a tough line to walk sometimes because you don't want to pry personally. But that doesn't appear to be a universal opinion, it turns out.
Even if I wanted to, these questions aren't allowed in the company I work for, along with feedback related to "team fit". This is dictated by execs, dictated by legal, because it has nothing to do with proving competence, and opens up for employment discrimination lawsuits since you're persuading them (you have to understand the power dynamic) to reveal potentially protected info. For example, if a man say "Oh, I go hiking with my boyfriend!", he could also say "They didn't hire me because I told them I was gay!". Or, even "I spend time with my kids." since familial status is a legally protected class where I am.
As a person who does interviews, I have exactly zero interest in what people do for fun. I just want competent people that are nice to work with (in a productivity sense), and I only have 45 minutes to prove that, knowing that nearly everyone fucking lies. I see it serving no purpose other than helping enforce some monoculture within the group, because, genuinely, why else would you ask about free time activities during an interview?
Related, the only time I've asked this was early on when I didn't know how to interview. The only time I've been asked this, and answered, was with people who had just started interviewing (small startups and new hiring managers).
> talking about failed relationships, family struggles, and interpersonal challenges in previous work environments.
I think that's an interpretation that wasn't necessary (though I agree they're terrible and risky interview questions). I'd stick to hard challenges is my professional life, hard problems I had to solve, etc. My personal life is none of their business.
And I think there's the possibility you may have been rejected for sharing too much. But I agree that kind of question does invite sharing too much.
At least when I've done these interviews, they will be extremely friendly, and they will at least act interested in everything you have to say. It's very easy to overshare when you think the audience is actually interested in what you have to say.
I think regardless of whatever you face during an interview, true mastery is to let your humanity at the door and pull up a facade. If you cannot do it in that context, you dodged a bullet imho.. you wouldn't be able to recognize yourself a few years down the line working there with them daily.
Or say "screw that" and go find work that lets you be a human, not a repressed shell. I'm in my 40s now and have followed that my whole life to great benefit. Barring about two months in a open-plan hell hole in my mid twenties which I still look back on and shudder, mostly out of empathy for people who spend their whole working lives that way.
People who can "pull up a facade" are a subset of the population
"Cracked engineer" is throwing me, but maybe I've just never seen the word cracked used this way before. Should it be "crack", like "crack team"?
"He's so good (plays aggressively) he must be on crack" sort of became "he's cracked", etc. Now that the people who were killing CoD lobbies are writing code full time or running companies, its seeped out.
Actually I think "it's cooked" came from this as well.
Funny enough, I've only ever heard 'crack team' used in a professional context.
If 'cooked' diffuses to corporate at the same rate then I'm very much looking forward to 'cooking the ops' during standup in 2035 :P
edit: Looking again, this may be overstated. Apex-era gaming culture likely helped popularize the usage, but considering older idioms like "crack shot," the actual etymological root is more likely there.
"Crack engineer" someone who is an excellent engineer, I feel like this goes back to at least the early 20th century, certainly long before gaming culture.
"Cracked engineer" a damaged person who is an engineer
Shrug. Language changes all the time!
I see a lot of replies that accuse OP of oversharing, and that's bullshit. In any job interview, the expectation is that you answer questions to the best of your ability. If "I'm not comfortable answering that" is an acceptable answer, that is an exception to the norm and it should be made clear ahead of time.
I walk into a darkened cubicle farm, down to the only lit corner office for a 'lunch interview'.
Interviewer is sitting at their desk eating a hot pocket on a paper plate.
Didn't even offer me any.
First interview I walked out of.
Not the last.
Personally asking this kind of personal questions sounds very weird. You can evaluate soft skills and culture fit by asking more relevant, professional questions. Except if the reason to ask this kind of more personal questions was sth else.
Pro tip (for life, not only interviewing): never ask a question you don’t want to hear answer to.
I can definitely understand the perspective of someone who has done few interviews not understanding this and being upset/confused!
If I learned anything from all my past mistakes in life, it's this.
It's a chance for you to meet the actual CEO (or VP or whatever in a larger company), and also for them to get to meet you in advance, instead of effectively getting "blindsided" by a new person (to exaggerate a bit).
Usually, by the time you've gotten to that point, the decision to hire you has well and truly been made. I don't know what then would need to happen for the actually rather secondary function of giving the CEO the opportunity to veto to become relevant. I'd be curious hearing about anyone who's ever experienced it (on whatever side). I guess it can be a safeguard against vastly unaligned values, but I suspect it's very rare.
But primarily, and effectively, it's usually just a meet-and-greet. And it's hard for me to blame a CEO (or VP etc.) for at least getting to anyone who's going to enter a mutual contract to effectively become part of their company.
You're going to find many red flags for any job, perhaps severe flags.
But you need a job.
Or you have to roll the dice because you have deep knowledge of the red flags for your current job.
Who finds 10/10 perfect jobs via an application process?
Note: I probably shouldn't be commenting since I don't need to apply for jobs and conditions here are likely different from yours.
I've interviewed at dozens of companies, received and accepted or rejected at least 20 job offers in my life, and rarely encountered true red flags. This is very different than saying it's a perfect 10/10, all life is about tradeoffs. What GP is saying is that "there are things that are not worth any tradeoff, and you'll know them by ... ", which is good advice, esp for young people, who might be willing to make uncomfortable personal sacrifices to obtain a job.
We may be there someday, but we're not there yet.
Early in your career it can be hard to distinguish the two, but once you've joined a company where there really were "red flags" you quickly learn to differentiate.
Many people are reading the author's interview uncharitably as simply misunderstanding how to answer non-technical question, but I have absolutely been through loops (thankfully rare ones) that did have a "let's press on sensitive issues and see how tough this candidate is" round (one place brought in a consultant who bragged about his experience working with hardened criminals and terrorists to build out a true psych profile on candidates, I declined after learning he had had some "trouble" at a previous high profile job)
Sounds like you've never worked for a truly toxic org, which is great. But, especially if you're interviewing with smaller startups (as the author mentioned), there is a lot more variance and some truly messed up teams (and some truly remarkable ones as well) out there. I've noticed that HN increasingly doesn't have people that work at startups any more, so many people are probably less familiar with what's out there.
I’d like some clarity. :)
What we were looking for
- people unwilling to admit they'd ever made a mistake -- red flag
- people who could reflect on the situation and say what they'd do differently in the future
- ideally, people who could use their mistake / failure / bad situation as an example of how they then took initiative to improve things by doing blah blah blah
People who were able to give an ideal response had clearly practised for this kind of question & knew how to play this part of the interview game.
Behaviours valued by one type of potential employer may not be valued by another. Small businesses & startups might value folks who take initiative and have a bias for action. In contrast, regulated megacorps might value folks who are great at consulting stakeholders and getting buy in before making changes, and steer clear of people they believe will go off and do stuff unilaterally.
One rule of thumb for handling these kinds of behavioural questions is "STAR" -- situation, task, action, result. Use the prompt for the question as a way to pick an example, then figure out how to frame an answer that shows you doing something to improve the situation. There's a fair chance that your interviewers are trying to mash your response into a STAR format in their own notes, even if they don't hint for you to respond in this way.
You could for example start talking about how you thought something was a colossal failure only to realize looking back that it was an incredible learning experience and how sometimes the only way to learn big lessons like that is by trying the experiment. And how it's only a failure if you stop. But you kept going so it wasn't really a failure.
Honestly we should probably take a page out of politicians' or media trained people's playbooks and not even answer the question as asked but relentlessly steer towards what you really want to talk about.
I don't think it's good practice for the interviewer to require the ability to dissemble from software engineers, though.
Because they're presumably just trying to call bullshit, since it can sound like such an easy probably oft-recomended 'hobby' to say you have, so it's 'oh yeah well what have you actually read recently then', not actually 'I now therefore expect you to have perfect recall over your read catalogue'.
"The industrial society and its future" - Theodor Kaczinski.
"The communist manifesto" - Karl Marx.
"Rules for Radicals" - Saul Alinsky
"Hitler's War" - David Irving
"The Souls of Black Folk" - W.E.B. Du Bois
"Capital in the Twenty-First Century" - Tom Pickety
"Las venas abiertas da America Latina" - Eduardo Galeano
"The question of Palestine" - Edward Said.
"Grapes of Wrath" - John Steinbeck.
"The conquest of Bread" - Kropotkin
"Problems of Leninism" - Josef Stalin
If adventurous, I'd cite another one I've read that should not be mentioned amongst educated XXI century folks, as they think reading a book means you agree with the author.
Not the last 10 books I've read, but books I've read along my life and that would maybe make the guy think twice before considering making me an offer.
If they're hiding the many red flags, that's the biggest red flag of all!
a) The potential employer vastly overstepped commonly accepted boundaries.
b) It was totally implied that the questions were to be answered in the context of work. "What was the hardest challenge you had to overcome?" in that context relates to e.g. debugging a hard concurrency problem, not your divorce.
What stood out to me is that whatever interpretation is the correct one, the candidate was willing to give (apparently) deeply personal answers. That's just something to adjust for in upcoming interviews, we live and learn.
Maybe I'm wrong, but given the type of company it was (and likely, the C-suite people), I guess that they were doing something similar. I assume that they really did want to know about the person's non-worklife stuff.
I would consider that crossing boundaries. It's also possible that some of the questions might have been illegal (in the US).