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

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

#111

Post by Mezzie »

lordnacho wrote: post #29

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.…

I don't know why you'd ever do an ambush interview for a developer position. Programming is very much a 'think and plan' type of activity.

Actually, I wonder if the prevalence has anything to do with the fact that an ambush interview style has certain advantages if you're hiring an HR person and therefore the people designing interview norms think it's a good idea?

(I can see this style having some utility for positions where the candidate has to deal with high-stakes social situations with very little prep, like HR or PR. "Prove your ability to calmly handle the unexpected and reorient.")

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

#112

Post by croo »

I errored when I accepted two thechnical interviews on the same day - in person, same city. The first went well but it drained me much more than I anticipated and I had no brain power left to function. The second interview was harder, some leet code problem I never encountered before and well... they did not call me back :D it was 10 years ago and I still have frustrations over it. Horrible. I just want to put down that memory and forget about it.

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

#113

Post by bootloop »

Google Interview after my first university year for a masters internship (might not have been the best idea in the first place).

Got asked how to manipulate a collection, showed the interviewer 10 different ways how to do something, each time a bit different as he rephrased the question to get me to the result he actually wanted to see (I knew what it was but tried to be snarky, if that's the right word).

Actually fucked up the right answer at the end because I lost track in the process...

Also forgot that remove(obj) will actually iterate through the whole list each time it wants to delete an element if the element was added last..

The other interview was even worse because communication was bad.

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

#114

Post by kello »

Just last summer I bombed a take-home interview project with Lufthansa Technik. They wanted me to implement Rock Paper Scissors a litte bit "over-engineered." Long story short their definition of "over-engineered" was much more involved than mine. I thought I would just need to implement it such that I showed that I wasn't bullshitting them about being able to do that which I said I could. Maybe 2-3 hours of work. I was wrong. Knowing what I know now, I would have had to spend at least 8 hours on it. They expected me to implement a complete backend, frontend, test suites, and design the application such that they would I would be able to extend it to fit an unknown requirement that they only revealed to me during the review of my assignment.

This culminated in the Engineering Manager saying to me at one point: "Wow, you have a lot of experience, it's sad you didn't show us that in your assignment."

TL;DR: Bombed a take-home assignment with the vague requirements of "over-engineer it on purpose" because my "over-engineering" was not over-engineered enough even though it completely fulfilled all requirements. If you're going to give take-home assignments please define hard requirements up front and avoid vague guidelines like "over-engineer this please k thanks"

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

#115

Post by shyn3 »

sabman83 wrote: post #87

I was fostering a bunch of kittens but one of them caught a bad virus and had to be put down. The very next I had an interview lined up. The question asked was a standard puzzle/algorithm type question, 5 minutes into solving the question my mind went blank. I was still upset over what had happened and I told the person I can't do this and I cut the call.

Sorry for your loss.

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

#117

Post by throwaway675309 »

qsort wrote: post #106
dekhn wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

presumably regarding the string reversing: they probably wanted a reverse in place (then making sure you handle the even/odd edge condition). however, Python strings are immutable, so you'd have to use a bytearray, but if you have a huge string, converting it to a bytearray, reversing the array, and converting back to a string would likely take longer than having python's string reverse function allocate a new string…

> For the 'e' question They were just expecting exp(x) = \sum_{i=0}^{\inf} \frac{x^i}{i!}. Depending on the role it might be useless trivia, but it's not exactly an impossibly high bar tbh.

It's a rather stupid question because there are plenty of libraries that can do it better than you could come up with. It's the kind of thing that if I saw a developer wasting their time with at my company, I would immediately fire them, it's akin to rolling your own cryptography.

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

#118

Post by logicalmonster »

I don't know if I bombed exactly, but here's 2 of my most frustrating technical interviewing experiences that didn't go well for really dumb reasons.

> Had a 6AM interview with a developer in India with a very thick accent and who didn't have a good microphone, which made it very difficult to communicate. He didn't have a copy of my resume, wasn't completely sure what job he was interviewing me for, and started asking me React trivia questions for what should have been a primarily Python role.

> Had a technical interview with a cool startup doing some dumb leetcode style problem. We had some repeated video connection problems and started the interview 15 minutes late because we couldn't get a connection. Because of this, I was pressing and stressed out to finish the task on time and made a few silly errors because I didn't have time to think the problem through. Got most of the task done despite this, but it's frustrating to think that I missed out on this position because of some dumb video chat glitch.

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

#119

Post by voakbasda »

I’m reading all these stories and think that most of them describe good engineers facing unreasonable interviews. Seriously, the processes being described are outright broken for most of these companies, and I would have walked out laughing at most of them. They are actively weeding out great talent. Thus, I would say the companies were the ones that bombed these interviews, not the engineers that were subjected to them.

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

#120

Post by qsort »

throwaway675309 wrote: post #117
qsort wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the 'e' question They were just expecting exp(x) = \sum_{i=0}^{\inf} \frac{x^i}{i!}. Depending on the role it might be useless trivia, but it's not exactly an impossibly high bar tbh.

It's a rather stupid question because there are plenty of libraries that can do it better than you could come up with. It's the kind of thing that if I saw a developer wasting their time with at my company, I would immediately fire them, it's akin to rolling your own cryptography.

That series is the definition of the exponential function, literally high-school math.

As I said depends on the role. Normal SWE? Sure, it's trivia and a rather stupid question. For a more science-y or finance role, I'd be very concerned if the candidate doesn't know it.

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