81–90 of 130 posts
Consequently, you don’t get the kind of employees who are good at solving the problem, rather they are good at social chit-chat and taking your asinine…
Truly, truly asinine… “Test”
Worst interviews are ambushes. Things are going fine, you're discussing tech stuff, guy decides you need to "code" right now in an alien coding environment. First time, guy asks me how I'd do some problem, I talk him through it, I mention there's an easy O(n^2) way but with a bit of thinking there's probably an nlogn way. He doesn't want to let me think for half a minute, just rushes me into the inefficient solution.…
So I didn’t prepare at all, anticipating a chat where they did most of the talking and I maybe talked a bit about my work history.
I get on the call and the guy starts peppering me with specific questions about a technology I had said I liked but hadn’t worked with for like 5 years.
I made the mistake of BSing a few things. the guy immediately caught on to the BS and seemed to have a good time calling it out. Very embarrassing. It felt like I was getting cross examined or something. After about ten minutes I managed to get off my back foot and end the interview, salvaging some of my dignity.
He weirdly became extremely friendly after I said I didn’t think this was a good fit. Still not quite sure how to interpret that.
During a remote interview I was asked to code up Fibonacci, an algorithm I'd implemented plenty of times before. The interviewer wanted me to share what I was thinking as I did the work.
I struggled and struggled and just couldn't get it. I lost my train of thought every time I described what I was doing.Eventually I was told I could stop.
After I hung up the call, I banged out the correct code in thirty seconds.
It's easy to walk someone through my code after it's written. But apparently I don't get to consider a problem space in $LANG and in English at the same time.
Got contacted by a FAANG recruiter, had a nice general chat and she said she wanted to get me together with the hiring manager to learn more about the role. She emphasized that it would not be a coding interview, which I interpreted to mean it would not be a technical interview. So I didn’t prepare at all, anticipating a chat where they did most of the talking and I maybe talked a bit about my work history. I get on…
or possibly he thought - yes I've won and the pressure was off humiliating you
I've come to realise with time, keep your BS down to a low level, and if caught out out admit the truth - DO NOT DIG DEEPER
I learned that I can't talk through my thought process while in the middle of writing code. During a remote interview I was asked to code up Fibonacci, an algorithm I'd implemented plenty of times before. The interviewer wanted me to share what I was thinking as I did the work. I struggled and struggled and just couldn't get it. I lost my train of thought every time I described what I was doing.Eventually I was told…
I didn’t even bother. I just said I didn’t know the answer, and that them asking those kinds of questions made me not want to work there.
I guess that counts as bombing, but I really could not have cared less.
In one interview, I was asked to check if a string was equivalent to its reverse in python. I was so excited because I knew the one-liner to do this (string==string[::-1]). But once I did this and the interviewer wasn't happy, I was super confused. I struggled to figure out what the interviewer wanted, and it wasn't until the end when he just told me what he was looking for. Which was to use a two pointer solution, a…