11–20 of 144 posts
Really minor but I interviewed with a big second tier tech company that you’ve heard of and right after asking me the first question decided that would be the best time to raise his standing desk, which was very slow to raise and required him to sort of weird hover and stand in time with the camera as it rose. Not rude but really distracting.
Though I'd still prefer that to the ones that told me that my more than a decade of professional experience isn't useful/valid because my parts of the industry "chose the wrong programming languages". I particularly loved the hypocrisy of getting that criticism from a company trying to win more companies like the ones I've worked for to their Cloud platforms. It seemed pretty obvious why they were having difficulty winning some of them over to their platform if they absolutely just hated the languages they worked with.
Did a live coding and they said something along the lines of being one of the fastest to complete it and scheduled another call. So far so good.
Follow up call with some higher up on "culture". The guy seemed like a parody human, reminded me of PC Principal, 'out here crushin it bra on the daily', that type. Except he wasn't some young out of college bro, but some 40ish guy in a shirt and tie. He really spoke at me the whole time, I don't remember saying much. Maybe he saw my disdain, maybe I rolled my eyes, I don't remember.
About 20 mins after that call I got a rejection email. Very odd experience, but I assume I dodged a bullet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've walked out on a couple of interviews when they tried whiteboard coding. I politely laughed and said I really don't do performance art. I thanked them for their time and left.
What? What would you rather have? A takehome? People find a reason to complain about those as well because the ones administering them become really god damned nitpicky. What I try to give is a three parter simple string parsing manipulation question where you build on each successive part as well as providing both valid and invalid inputs for them to use as test cases. It shows organizational skills and the ability…
I hate algo/whiteboarding myself, especially complex ones, but I think there's some value in doing some minimal in person fizz-buzzing, especially if you work for a very popular company. The amount of people who can talk through interviews all day long but can't code is too high not to at least attempt to filter them out.
What I do is give a very simple question, and make it clear that its not a "gotcha" question and that I just want to talk through with them how they'd solve it, to at least filter out the "deer in headlights" candidates. No one walked out of that to this day.
Lack of presence. Any interviewer that's not giving the interview as much of their full attention as possible (emergencies aside, of course). I've been on both sides of this, and I feel bad for interviews I've given where I was distracted or underprepared. Conversely, my best interviews (and 1:1s) have been with people who are fully present.
I had this happen, i had his resume up on my screen for the interview and i was taking notes and suddenly i got a message that there was some big production issue i had to help with, so yeah i couldn't focus on the interview. I still feel bad about that
Not currently interviewing, but in the past i've failed interviews because I didn't do something that the interviewer didn't ask me to do. This would be something like expecting the interviewee to go in depth about a specific part of the problem that to the interviewee might have thought was trivial, or expecting them to do TDD in a coding exercise when the interviewer never mentioned it. I can brush off overt rudene…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've walked out on a couple of interviews when they tried whiteboard coding. I politely laughed and said I really don't do performance art. I thanked them for their time and left.
What? What would you rather have? A takehome? People find a reason to complain about those as well because the ones administering them become really god damned nitpicky. What I try to give is a three parter simple string parsing manipulation question where you build on each successive part as well as providing both valid and invalid inputs for them to use as test cases. It shows organizational skills and the ability…
They’re all bad options in some way, but at least takehomes simulate how most people actually approach a project, rather than sitting there trying to do something while someone stares at you. Some of us really, really hate that.