I witnessed candidate being rejected literally because in his take-home assignment "he did only what we asked for and nothing extra on the top".
Looks like the candidate dodged a bullet.
Ask HN: How are your interviewers being rude to you?
51–60 of 144 posts
Re: Ask HN: How are your interviewers being rude to you?
#52They've been rude in a variety of ways. The big one though is simply ghosting me after 5+ rounds with no explanation. This has happened a variety of times and reaching out usually gets a non response. It's infuriating. The others are just not being professional. Wearing pajamas or not paying attention or acting incredibly disinterested. It's really terrible.
>This has happened a variety of times and reaching out usually gets a non response
Name & shame
Re: Ask HN: How are your interviewers being rude to you?
#53Not 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…
One of the things I’ve written in my book on coding interviews is around expectations and covering off any shortcuts/interview specific things you are doing. It’s annoying but asking:
1. Is there a specific approach or methodology you would like me to take in this test?
2. Saying stuff like “I’m going to do this in functional/OOP”, “I’ll use print for debugging”, “I won’t be using a testing library” etc with a quick explanation goes along way to ironing out these differences
Re: Ask HN: How are your interviewers being rude to you?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> What would you rather have? Ideally? Not to assume my resume/education experience is a lie and to instead assume that I've done enough technical work by this point to merit respect that I don't need to prove some "technical merit" via any sort of whiteboarding exercise that is neither anything like day-to-day technical work nor it is it much more than time wasting busy work to give interviewers plenty of room for e…
> Ideally? Not to assume my resume/education experience is a lie and to instead assume that I've done enough technical work by this point to merit respect that I don't need to prove some "technical merit"
Unfortunately, I have interviewed many candidates who have excellent resume, relevant experience, but who can't write basic string manipulation code which does not even require any advanced algorithms or data structures.
Re: Ask HN: How are your interviewers being rude to you?
#55I've had candidates do their phone interviews by walking out of the office they're working at currently. It was awesome trying to understand their answers as a motorcycle rips past on the street. I think its just a lack of respect and self effort awareness on all sides. Just think about what you are going to be doing ahead of time is all it takes.
That can be difficult.
When I worked in an industrial office park, I could go out to my car to do a phone interview. When I was working downtown, where I didn't drive to work, there was pretty much nowhere to go that wouldn't involve some kind of background noise.
Re: Ask HN: How are your interviewers being rude to you?
#56Re: Ask HN: How are your interviewers being rude to you?
#57Saying that the interview is more of an ‘informal conversation’ then quickfiring 30 questions in an hour while not looking at the screen.
Re: Ask HN: How are your interviewers being rude to you?
#58Not 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…
I've seen the TDD one, and I hate that so much. The last time I interviewed for companies, I started asking "how do you want me to answer this? Are you looking for me to get a complete solution quickly, or write this like I was writing software I planned to maintain?", but I really shouldn't have to - putting your candidates through a guessing game of which you want is a dumb way to interview.
I had a recruiter suggest I do TDD during my coding interviews. When I was in the interviews, I started using TDD. It seemed like the actual interviewer was indifferent about me using TDD. He even seemed surprised, but I did it anyway because the recruiter suggested it.
Using TDD takes longer during an interview, so I didn't get as far into the problem as what I think the interviewer was expecting. I assume people that didn't use TDD performed better because they were able to get farther in the problem.
I didn't get an offer. I'm not sure if it's because of the TDD issue, but I can't think of anything else that could have contributed to the outcome. I sent my feedback to the recruiter after I was notified I didn't get an offer, and I asked for any feedback, but never heard anything.
Re: Ask HN: How are your interviewers being rude to you?
#59I've had candidates do their phone interviews by walking out of the office they're working at currently. It was awesome trying to understand their answers as a motorcycle rips past on the street. I think its just a lack of respect and self effort awareness on all sides. Just think about what you are going to be doing ahead of time is all it takes.
I did that myself. Actually did like 4-5 hours of calls in total like that with one company. I have zero bad feelings and the interviewers were cool about it.
I just can't afford to take 4-5 days off each time someone thinks we might be a good match and needs a 30 minutes (which is always more). When I'm motivated to switch jobs I might talk to a few companies and all interactions are kind of short and in the middle of day. They seldom want to meet at 7 am or at 6 pm. Middle of the day? Sure, but we both understand it means finding a middle ground.
Re: Ask HN: How are your interviewers being rude to you?
#60Earlier 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.
fuck take home work. I am not going to spend three hours of work, when I'd rather be doing something else, only to be fucking ghosted. (times by godknows how many companies.) I got bought out by a FAANG and I am eternally grateful that I "only" had to do four interviews to keep my job. Rather than the real time coding horse shit.
Damn, you got lucky!
A FAANG on the CV without preparing leetcode BS for months!
I had one of the guys I was managing in a startup get into the AI company that Google bought without leetcoding.
I was pretty jelly but still determined not to spend months on leetcoding, dealing with shitty big org politics, performance reviews and having to work from the office (it was still back in the days when people were free to work from the office). Without the cost of leetcoding I could probably tolerate it for a couple of years and resell myself as a Xers for the rest of my career. With leetcoding and the risk of failure, fuck that.