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The worst job interview I ever had

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Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#341

Post by ubermonkey »

Years ago I interviewed at a company that later became infamous owing to a series of posts on TheDailyWTF (https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Virtudyne_0x3a__The_Foundin...).

It was... weird. I had a friend who was working there, and I needed a gig. At the time, in the city I was in, this constituted a pretty big advantage.

The role would've been customer facing but technical, which is where I've spent my career. I answered some reasonable panel questions, and then they had me give a preso on any technical topic I liked. I'm good at that, so I aced it.

Then we got to other questions: specifically, questions from me.

"Are you currently profitable?"

They were not. This, in and of itself, isn't a problem, but it leads to the next question.

"At your current burn rate, how many months of operating cash do you have on hand?"

(murmuring) "Two, but our founder funds us as we need it."

"Are there specific milestones that are tied to additional capital infusions, or any formal agreement, or is it all just at his discretion?"

"It's discretionary but he's very committed to the company."

Having already had negative experiences with one-rich-dude companies, I thanked them for their time and left. I was VERY surprised when they called me a couple weeks later to MAKE A SERIOUSLY LOWBALL OFFER, which I literally laughed at. At least the dude who made the call seemed to understand the company was insane.

My friend jumped ship shortly after. He had more tolerance for Weird Startup Shit because of family money, but it got too weird even for a guy who didn't need the income, if that tells you anything.

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#342

Post by elzbardico »

simoncion wrote: post #154
genewitch wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dale Carnegie floating around this thread a lot. Remembering (and using!) someone's name is a magic spell, too.

> Remembering (and using!) someone's name is a magic spell, too. When it's done to me, it's the magic spell of "I Distrust You". A time or two is fine, as is its usage if one is -say- in a group conversation where it can be difficult to understand to whom one is speaking, or -say- one needs to get my attention when I'm focusing on something else. In my many years of personal experience, I've found that people who beh…

In defense of Dale Carnegie he always said that for this to work, you need first to learn to GENUILY CARE about other people.

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#343

Post by Kim_Bruning »

shantnutiwari wrote: post #256
gobdovan wrote: post #173

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…

" but the interview engine is already running at full speed:" I dont know if this is a recent thing, but I had a similar thing where an interviewer was racing forward, and would only accept the answers he had in mind. In Python, he asked me how to search for substring. I was thinking but he started hurrying me. So I said regex and started writing a regex. "No, there is an inbuilt method" I couldnt remember the method…

   if "needle" in haystack:
      print ('haystack.__contains__("needle")')
Is probably the obvious/canonical answer to the question of trying to find a substring.

So obvious that -to be fair- I blanked for a moment too. But 'in' is an operator, not a method (even though it calls __contains__ under the hood) . The question might have been slightly malformed?

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#344

Post by porknbeans00 »

two stories.

fun one first.

I once did a coding interview entirely in bash. and the poor software engineer giving the interview did not have that as a skillset. so he was deeply confused when I spent like 70% of the time building a massive sed awk xargs one liner. then proceeded to answer every question in order with it.

I thought he was so confused by it that's why I never heard back. Turns out it was much stranger. The recruiter died. Took them months to figure out his backlog.

2nd story.

I am the responsible party for some poor persons worst interview. And I still feel awful about it. Like they were panicking cause they really wanted the role, and honestly the interview questions were unnecessarily hard and designed to induce stress ( not my call just company decision. personally I can see some of the logic for it but I question the efficacy ). result is this poor kid was spiraling. So I tried to throw them some confidence builder questions... but they were so far into the spiral they bombed those too. And like... I KNEW they knew the answers from previous parts of the interview. But like, they just lost it mentally.

I was told later they spent like 10 minutes in the bathroom recovering before doing the next stage of the interview.

I fucking hated that interview. I still think about it. Wish I coulda just sat down with em after and just apologized and told em they didn't do anything wrong. They just had a bad day and that's fine. It happens. They can try again. Like... I hate someone took it that badly. I hate I was unable to get em that confidence boost they needed to show off their skill.

Experience sometimes just plain leaves scars for everyone.

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#345

Post by dataengineer56 »

15 years ago a FAANG flew me from England to the US for a grad interview. The HR recruiter met me for a coffee before the tech interviews started and said she'd ask me some gentle questions to ease me into the day.

She opened with "do you believe in god?" Not knowing laws or workers' rights in a foreign country then I had to give a very stunted, mumbled response. I complained after I got back home and was told she should not have asked that question.

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#346

Post by i_am_a_peasant »

gobdovan wrote: post #173

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…

This is the best thing I've read all day thank you. I laughed so hard!

Oh man imagine if they asked the janitor to interview you and he just goes at it like it's the defining moment of his entire career.

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#347

Post by NickC25 »

antran22 wrote: post #274

I have had my fair share of terrible interview as well. The key thing I learnt is that the interview is an opportunity for me to understand the culture of the company and judge my fit there as well. I know that the phrase "dodge a bullet" is used to death in those kind of situation, but if the interviewer is behaving unprofessionally you can safely assume the people in the company will be unprofessional in a lot more…

>Moral of the story: if the interview feels wrong, email them and decline going forward right away. Give yourself the satisfaction of consciously dodging a bullet.

I wished I had known this earlier in my life.

I once interviewed at a healthcare startup ran by the brother of someone very closely related to the current occupant of the White House. This was 3 weeks after I graduated college.

I went through the first round, no problem. 2nd round, it was Halloween, and a nurse dressed up as a cow (spotted makeup and all) comes into the room and asks me to role play a situation where I have to deny life-saving insurance claims to a cancer patient who's been given a life threatening diagnosis.

Halfway through the exercise I asked the interviewer - "so, this is an insurance company, and the insured has been paying premiums for a while, probably 10s of thousands of dollars, and they have what is otherwise effectively a terminal diagnosis...and you're asking me to deny this person their only chance at survival?". I was given the response of "that's how insurance works"

Sad.

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#349

Post by tombert »

trusted_bro wrote: post #153
tombert wrote: post #41

I have a two way tie for the worst interviews I've ever had, for very different reasons. First, in 2023 I interviewed for a startup as a lead architect. They had me do some virtual whiteboard stuff, and so I was drawing rectangles and cylinders and mentioning things like "database" and "message queues" as generically as I could. They would interrupt me and say stuff like "Which message queue? Where do you download th…

Dodged a bullet. There are good banks (eg Goldman) and shitty banks (eg Bank Of $Large_North_American_Country) and not a lot in between.

I don’t want to say the bank’s name, but let’s give the pseudonym of “Morgan” to the first, and “Stan” for the second.
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