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The worst job interview I ever had

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Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#171

Post by albedoa »

cwnyth wrote: post #151
Aurornis wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> asking a young person (I don't know that he was young, just saying) "what was the hardest day of your life" is a pretty standard question. Like on a college application, they expect you to answer it. This is not a standard job interview question at all. In fact if you tried asking this at any company with a legal or HR team, you'd get pulled out of interviewing people until they could train you appropriate job inte…

Keeping in mind the context of the original parent comment, yes it is 100% standard to ask about the "hardest day of your [working] life." I wouldn't ever put it like that, but asking about difficult challenges and how you overcame them is completely normal. The blog post reads to me as someone who is oblivious about the subtext of these questions. When I ask that kind of question, I'm not asking you to share about a…

> Keeping in mind the context of the original parent comment, yes it is 100% standard to ask about the "hardest day of your [working] life."

The original comment says:

> Like on a college application, they expect you to answer it.

I don't know if that changes your interpretation, but if the other replies are any indication, yours is not the default.

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#172

Post by consp »

anyfoo wrote: post #149
pan69 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just a formality and a friendly chat That was not the case in this scenario. I was told I would be offered the role if I came out favorable with the CEO (did he like me or not? did I jump when the said "jump"?). To me this meant that the CEO doesn't trust the people he hires. He clearly didn't trust the hiring manager's jugement and/or respected their position. The CEO delegated a task and responsibility but then f…

You know better, as you have all the information and we merely have a shadow of it, but that in itself still sounds like “standard boilerplate” to me. I remember from my friends who worked at Google at the time, that everyone’s always been told that “every new hire’s contract lands on Larry Page’s desk, he has to sign off on it”, and you can probably bet your bottom dollar that Larry Page didn’t spend a lot of time o…

I'd argue I won't work there. "The buck stops here" is never true when shit hits the fan so it's just kabuki theatre in all other situations just to take credit.

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#173

Post by gobdovan »

I always wanted to tell the story of my weirdest interview. It's bad in a different way from OP's. This was for a "Machine Learning Engineer" contractor position.

- Hi, I'm gobdovan. How are you? says I.

The interviewer doesn't bite:

- How many prompting techniques do you know? (ok?..)

After a couple confused seconds, I respond with 2-3 techniques and ask if I should explain them, but the interview engine is already running at full speed:

- What is PEFT? How many PEFT techniques do you know?

I say I know LoRA and start to explain it, but the interview had no patience for answers longer than their acronyms. Before I knew it, I heard frantic clicking.

- He starts sharing his screen while I am still talking about LoRA in the background. Puts up an empty car from Google Images and commands: "Model the relationships between cars and people positioned inside the cars over time."

Uncertain of how to satisfy the inquiry, I start foolishly questioning what the task is supposed to be: vision? simulation? dataset labeling? self-driving cars?

But the interviewer doesn't budge. Doesn't give a specific task or context. Simply ignores the questions and stoically refuses to elaborate. The stars speak to me, and I guess he wants a relational mapping of some kind. Turns out I am right. This was supposed to test basic SQL table modeling.

At this point, I decide I'd sit through the interview just so I can collect all the questions. I am not disappointed:

- How many agentic frameworks do you know?

- What is the name of OpenAI's embedding model, and how many dimensions does it have?

- Then, the last ordeal lands: interviewer takes out a piece of cardboard that has "context engineering" written on it and asks: "What does this tell you?". His camera is unfocused, I ask if he could read what it says. Instead he repeats: "What does this tell you? What does this tell you? What does this tell you?".

I ask if he is the ML team lead. Turns out this absolute Chad is a mobile dev the client asked to interview candidates for the MLE role.

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#174

Post by consp »

atoav wrote: post #159
genewitch wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you think that's what it was? The people with 100% of the power in this situation did everything 100% correct and you're not victim-blaming at all?

It was a textbook example of the double contingency of communication¹. In communications it doesn't only matter what each side is objectively saying. It matters what the other side expects them to hear. And that goes both ways. In this case the interviewer asked these questions to get to know the candidate in a professional setting, so they expected a diplomatic or professional answer. The candidate however misjudged…

> In this case the interviewer asked these questions to get to know the candidate in a professional setting, so they expected a diplomatic or professional answer

And there is no bias in this assumption whatsoever?

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#175

Post by thaumasiotes »

johnfn wrote: post #89
sdenton4 wrote: post #27

I fail to recall the exact wording of the discussion topics, but they were, in fact, non-technical — covering such lovely topics as the hardest day of my life, my biggest life challenges, and other similar “trauma-baiting” questions. Ha, I don't think anyone who asks these questions expects that you'll respond in a fully unfiltered way... These kinds of questions are part and parcel of non-tech interview processes. Y…

You are technically correct. But you must admit it sounds pretty bad to say "Yeah, the idea of the behavioral technical interview is the interviewer asks questions that look like they admit honest answers, but you should actually lie to them, and they expect you to lie, and actually it's a charade you play with your interviewer, and if you don't understand this (which is never explained to you) then you will immediat…

I paid for interview coaching at interviewing.io. This is the coaching I got about the behavioral interview:

- "There is no place for honesty in a behavioral interview. No one is going to check your story."

- Tell a story about a time when you got into a dispute, ideally with your boss, over a work-related issue, and you won the dispute.

- If you have no relevant story, I [the coach] will write one for you to memorize.

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#176

Post by npodbielski »

donatj wrote: post #81

I've been working as a dev for over twenty years now and have had my fair share of interviews. The very worst I ever had was about six months ago. I'd had a fantastic initial interview, it seemed like a perfect fit and interesting tech. Overlapped a lot with some work I'd been doing recently. They made it sound like my experience was a great match and they were exited for me to move forward. I was the most excited I'…

He probably perceived you as a competition. If you do not like playing politics that probably was for the better.

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#177

Post by tsukikage »

Genuinely opening up is a mistake. The incentives for these clearly mean that they actually select for candidates who are capable of glibly blagging their way through an extended conversation without saying anything inconsistent, weird, compromising or of substance.

This isn’t usually a required engineering skill. I’m guessing the interview was designed for salespeople and/or middle management.

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#178

Post by thaumasiotes »

gherkinnn wrote: post #158
morkalork wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then strangers shouldn't fucking ask questions that could have answers that make them uncomfortable. Just a thought.

"How are you?" "How was your weekend?" It is common for people to ask a personal sounding question but expecting an impersonal answer.

And they should stop doing that. Who benefits?

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#179

Post by p0w3n3d »

I am sorry to hear this. If you were perceiving the space as safe and then you felt abused, I think this is something you should report. Maybe people working in mental health startup are experts in mental health, but there are very strict rules and guidelines that forbid abusing this "power" with other people, especially when unwanted, uncertain etc. During my therapy I've learned that the therapeutist is having monthly update on their actions with their supervisor, so they wouldn't do things that are for example unethical, or direct me in the wrong direction for some reason.

As other people mention in comment, this surely have been error of the interviewer, and in my opinion the feedback should be left.

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#180

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

The problem seems to be that you treated a professional job interview like a therapy session and showed yourself to be a person who brings up situationally inappropriate subjects without a filter.

> I’m a little ashamed remembering myself talking about failed relationships, family struggles

It sucks what happened, but, yeah, you need to establish filters for yourself. No matter what they ask you, it's an absolutely terrible idea to bring up your failed relationships in an interview. Something tells me they did not ask for that private information specifically and you just decided it would be a good idea to volunteer it, otherwise the story would have said so.

It does not matter what you think they asked. You are the one in control of the words that come out of your mouth. This was poor judgement all around.

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