as a CS undergrad i interviewed at PwC or a similar firm one day. The lady hands me one of their 2 page publications on IT and asks me to write a summary. She gets back and I explain that the publication makes no sense and is full of inaccurate bullshit. Needless to say I didn’t go work there.
Ask HN: What's the biggest red flag you've encountered during a hiring process?
31–40 of 278 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the biggest red flag you've encountered during a hiring process?
#32Circa 2000, I was invited for a lunch interview. I walk into a completely dark and empty cubicle space, one lit office in the back. Lunch meant the interviewer ate a Hot Pocket off a paper plate as we talked. Didn’t even offer me any. First interview I walked out of.
Ha I've had more than one of these (nothing this bad, but still). Turns out for a lot of recruiters "lunch interview" means interview that is scheduled during lunch, not interview in which lunch is provided.
Re: Ask HN: What's the biggest red flag you've encountered during a hiring process?
#33I was once asked “why do you want to work here?” while interviewing at a Hardee’s as a teenager.
I figure that at the level of fast food, the "why do you want to work here" and similar questions are really just to filter out someone that cares so little they can't even make up an answer. It doesn't have to be a good answer, even a "I like cooking food" is usually fine enough. But a decent amount of people will just shrug.
Re: Ask HN: What's the biggest red flag you've encountered during a hiring process?
#34This isn't quite what they asked about, but much of my work has been freelance contracts from the internet. One of the biggest red flags for a project description is when they mention that the project is "very simple" or "easy for someone who knows what they are doing". That just means they are dirt cheap and looking to rationalize the way they squeeze contractors.
Another red flag is that it's a freelancing site.
Re: Ask HN: What's the biggest red flag you've encountered during a hiring process?
#35I once was interviewing for an internship at a quant firm in Chicago (I was in my Sophomore year I think at UIUC) and my interview went pretty well up to the point of my second-last interview of the day. Then, I sat down with the VP of engineering, and he opened the interview with "so, what do you think it is we do here?" And I naturally stuttered through a canned answer about how they use arbitrage opportunities in…
Which firm was this?
Re: Ask HN: What's the biggest red flag you've encountered during a hiring process?
#36[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What's the biggest red flag you've encountered during a hiring process?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nvidia, like many other tech companies, has many people/teams/departments/division. Is very hard to get a clear view of the world from a single point. Who knows, maybe if you joined you would have hated it too, or loved it ! The story you shared is likely shared by many other companies that went through hyper-growth TLDR: Stuff is hard!
NVidia was truly a spectacular opportunity. So was Microsoft, Databricks, etc. I picked a dud, and didn't realize it until it was too late (just now). Question is .. what are the obvious winners today, and for the next 10 years? Some opportunities I missed but they didn't go anywhere: Docker, Qualcomm. Consumer Devices is a general dud I think. Software and data is where it is at. I dunno?
Robotics
Re: Ask HN: What's the biggest red flag you've encountered during a hiring process?
#38I had an interview for a large well-known bank software internship maybe 15 years ago. One interview was a role-play in which I was attending a meeting in lieu of my boss with someone from another division of the bank to discuss a behind-schedule project.
Role-play starts and this guy storms in, slams the door and starts shouting about how the software department are useless and how are we going to proceed. At one point he yelled that without his department we wouldn't have money to keep the lights on.
In retrospect, I'm sure this was a lot of fun for him and it might have been a good filter but I also am more than happy that I did not proceed to the next round if this is what they wanted to show me about their culture.
Re: Ask HN: What's the biggest red flag you've encountered during a hiring process?
#39I was once asked “why do you want to work here?” while interviewing at a Hardee’s as a teenager.
That's a legit question for a throw-away fast food job. Since most of these jobs are fungible, it can be useful to know why someone picked your greasy burger joint over the one down the road.
"It's close to where I live / I can walk here" = You probably don't have to worry about their "car breaking down" or general issues getting to work.
"My friends work here" = You're going to have a bunch of teenagers dicking off if you're not running a tight ship.
And there are a whole bunch of neutral responses too. "I need a job and you all are hiring" is a perfectly acceptable, accurate answer to this question that literally every applicant can provide.
Re: Ask HN: What's the biggest red flag you've encountered during a hiring process?
#40Years ago I was interviewing for a software engineering role. At the end of one of the interviews I asked how they liked working there. And the interviewer caught me off-guard with "it kind of sucks". She went on to explain that the company recently promoted a bunch of youngsters into VP roles through a combination of nepotism and early start dates, and they didn't know what they were doing. I thanked her and politel…
If "promotes people to upper management who don't deserve it" was a disqualifier then you would be left with exactly zero companies to work for. Ultimately you have to be able to tell whether it's a systemic problem or just one disgruntled employee.
You're right of course. However, interviewing is a game of limited information and I consider all signal I get from the company (after all, they're doing the same with me). I think a few things had to be broken in order for an employee to feel strongly this way, end up in the interviewing panel, and feel comfortable to share their views.
Nowadays it may be easier somewhat to get some insight into inner workings, but in 2006 there was no Blind, Glassdoor, etc. Sometimes the positive signals outweigh the negative. In my case they did not.