Ask HN: Tell me about how you bombed a technical interview

All of the people who admit their process is flawed A) don't change the process and B) don't hire people who point it out

I've had very good luck interviewing but when I was looking for jobs in college I bombed not necessarily from the technical portion but from the soft skills.

Was interviewing at a super friendly seeming company that happened to also do a ton of government and security work. They asked me how I've dealt with someone on a team I didn't work well with and I mentioned someone from a senior project who wasn't pulling their weights. I basically said pulled up his slack and moved on but then "destroyed him during reviews." I didn't realize how much of a faux pas this was for this type of interview and was told I didn't get the job because of issues working with others.

Having conducted hundreds of interviews now I realize the error of my ways but I still maintain writing a bad review of someone is not that bad when compared to the other unhealthy ways to handle it.

In the end I lucked out because that would have put me in the world of high clearance government worked that I've grown to hate these days, they may have been able to Stockholm syndrome me into liking that kind of work.

Bombed more than one technical interview but here's one example.

Phone screen interview with Google. Interviewer asked about how I would keep track of the nth highest value in an infinite stream of values. I said I would use a heap. Then interviewer asked to me write the code for that heap in a Google Doc. I can't remember what I wrote, but I'm pretty sure that I barely got started. Boom.

Lesson here is that simply knowing something in general might not be enough. If you think you know something, try implementing it from scratch to be sure.

I applied to one company that's well known in my broad field around 5 times before getting a phone interview. The job was for a developer of scientific software and they were looking for people with a stronger domain science background, not developers in general.

The core of the interview was a series of puzzle questions, some of which were domain questions, some of which were not. The interviewer would frequently answer a question before I had sufficient time to think about it. I could have figured out the answers had they not been fired off in rapid succession. I think they believe these questions are fundamental in some sense, but I'd question the importance of most of them. And scientific software developers rarely need to solve problems 30 seconds after hearing the problem statement.

People say that the interviewee should be interviewing the interviewer too, so after the interview I wondered how they might have reacted if I started asking them some puzzle questions that I think are fundamental as well. I want to make sure that they know their stuff too, right? I bet they would have absolutely bombed that.

I think their process selects for people who memorize answers to questions, as I skimmed the company's Glassdoor before the interview and saw many of the questions posted on there. So I doubt this process is actually selecting the most qualified candidates. Plus, these days I think ChatGPT might do a fair job of quickly answering these questions...

I came into this thread to comment about a similar experience. Had a call set up with the company founder for a consulting role, for me generally this means an informal chat where they share the pains they're experiencing, I share my background and thoughts related to fixing those kind of pains and, if we both determine we can see it working, I put together a proposal.

However, instead of the founder, an engineer ambushes me in the zoom call and starts a full on technical interview. In retrospect I should have ended the call there and then but I had already committed the time and it was only 30 minutes so I did my worst technical interview ever.

I'm still annoyed at their behavior, the company ended up folding so that's the silver lining.