The Secret Rules For Getting Hired

I totally agree that these rules are absolute BS.

The goal of a job interview for me used to be twofold:

Can the candidate do the job?

Would I want to work with the candidate?

Unfortunately, I have got the second one wrong as often as not in the past, so now I just try to find anything that would mean that I wouldn't want to work with the candidate, in other words, are there any red flags?

If there aren't then that's good enough.

I don't want to work for someone that tries to trick me!

And if I had to hire a developer, I would want someone with great coding skills, not someone that makes a good impression at an interview.

And then you have the famous Liar’s Poker interview question:

> Investment bankers had a technique known as the stress interview. If you were invited to Lehman’s New York offices, your first interview might begin with the interviewer asking you to open the window. You were on the forty-third floor overlooking Water Street. The window was sealed shut. That was, of course, the point. The interviewer just wanted to see whether your inability to comply with his request led you to yank, pull, and sweat until finally you melted into a puddle of foiled ambition. Or, as one sad applicant was rumored to have done, threw a chair through the window.

At my last job, my manager “tricked” me during the interview. Apparently, he wanted to see how I dealt with criticism. At least that is how the recruiter justified it when I expressed my dissatisfaction with the experience and my hesitation about working for that person.

That manager ended up being all about power trips and it made for a very toxic culture in his team and in interactions with others outside of the team. I left after less than a year despite not having a job lined up.

The only bright side is having found a position at a place that is the complete opposite.

This type of thing is a red flag and allows you to weed out companies that would be bad places to work.

Of course its a problem if you are actually running low on money and need to find a job soon because that might tempt you to try to work there even though you can tell some of them may be jerks.