Ask HN: What's the biggest red flag you've encountered during a hiring process?

I can understand having this policy in place for projects that directly compete with a company. Working on a search engine at home when you're working on search at Google, or working on a banking product for farmers when you do the same thing at work could be a direct conflict of interest and incentivize unethical or possibly even criminal behavior. I think setting some guidelines in place for that kind of thing is reasonable.

But some companies take this to an extreme.

I was working on a niche clothing brand at home in my spare time for example when I wanted to work for a gaming startup. They were giving me such a repulsively hard time about my side project even though the clothing had literally nothing conceivably close to the company's business model.

It's so stupid because companies should try and hire people that have diverse experiences and are working hard to achieve something.

Admitting the company is involved in drug trafficking.

EDIT: illegal drug trafficking

In retrospect: hiring managers having Ayn Rand books at work.

I was summoned to a nondescript industrial building, found my way upstairs and wound up in a grubby room posing as a lobby. I was seated on a low futon and had several discussions with my knees nearly level with my ears. The conversations were overly casual but with some oddly specific IT security questions. I seriously contemplated walking out of what was clearly an amateurish, shoestring operation.

Nope... I have worked there 20 years so far.

My first job was to evict the former sysadmin, and within the first 90 days I was relocating the whole company, building out the new IT infrastructure.

So in the spirit of the recent post about Charlie Munger killing a lot of pilots I would suggest not judging the company solely by its lobby. Make a list of real deal-breakers and consider overlooking the rest.

I should have spotted it but didn't: They took me out skiing one day between interviews (they were courting me pretty hard, and good snow was a selling point for the region) and I met the CEO for the first time on the slopes.

He wore a full motorcycle-style helmet with a mirrored face visor which he refused to open; it was like talking to a member of Daft Punk. It had fake hologram bullet-holes on it.

More importantly, he skied like an asshole: cutting people off, sudden stops or changes in direction without checking if anyone else was coming, cutting ahead in the lift line, stopping to readjust his gloves or whatever directly in the lift exit ramp, shouting at people who he felt were in his way -- just totally self-absorbed and borderline dangerous.

It turned out to match his management style 1000%.