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The worst job interview I ever had

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Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#401

Post by giancarlostoro »

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…

I don't know what I would do, I've never had to hang up on an interview, but I just might have especially after how it ended.

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#402

Post by giancarlostoro »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #198
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…

I've had an interview like this in the past. At the time, I chalked it up to a power trip and the indignant behavior that comes along with it, as it is especially embedded in the culture of the country that I'm based out of. Having said that, talking to a relative, I found out that this style of "interviewing" is often done when they already have someone for the position, but need to show (for compliance reasons, or…

> Having said that, talking to a relative, I found out that this style of "interviewing" is often done when they already have someone for the position, but need to show (for compliance reasons, or otherwise) that they tried finding candidates, and only their preferred one qualified.

Or they only want candidates from a specific country to apply which is seemingly the case. I've heard from very talented and capable developers that they're getting auto-rejected once the interview reaches someone from a very specific country, no matter how good they did prior. I've also been personally told by people I know wouldn't BS me, that had my name sounded like I was from a particular country HR would have contacted me for an interview, but because I'm none of the countries some companies seem to only hire from, I get ignored. There's a problem with tech hiring and nobody wants to talk about it because most people are unaware.

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#403

Post by [deleted] »

DangitBobby wrote: post #360
neilv wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some good points. Just a heads-up about something interesting I heard/read in training... "Innocuous" icebreaker questions about hobbies, the weekend, or whatever, can be surprisingly problematic. The questions and answers often inadvertently imply things about family status, religion, physical ability/disability, socioeconomic class, age, heritage, etc. that interviews are supposed to steer clear of. For me, this wa…

Why would you want to work somewhere that you can't talk about your life, the things that bring you joy, your hobbies? Sounds miserable.

[deleted]

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#404

Post by Aurornis »

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…

> 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.

Some times I run into companies like this: The people you talk to are so visibly inexperienced that you can't comprehend how the company functions, let alone makes money.

Some times it's a zombie company. They received funding or got a windfall from some early business moves, hired a ton of people, and now they're floating through the industry transferring money from customers to salaries as long as they can while their customers slowly leave for better options.

Some times it's a company with horrible management skills. They promote people who play the game instead of doing the work. The person in charge of the ML initiative only wanted to say that they hired MLE people for a new ML initiative for their resume. They grabbed someone who wouldn't complain or talk back and gave them the job of interviewing MLE engineers. That person ChatGPT-ed some questions and ran through a list in each interview, knowing their job was to go through the motions. The interview filters out everyone who would hate that environment, selecting for more people who know that the name of the game is going through the motions and pretending to do work while avoiding getting fired.

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#405

Post by giancarlostoro »

ljm wrote: post #312
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had an interview like this in the past. At the time, I chalked it up to a power trip and the indignant behavior that comes along with it, as it is especially embedded in the culture of the country that I'm based out of. Having said that, talking to a relative, I found out that this style of "interviewing" is often done when they already have someone for the position, but need to show (for compliance reasons, or…

I had a really weird power-trip interview once, and it was the CEO who was joined by a contractor who was ostensibly the technical lead for the project. There was nobody in engineering who worked full-time on the job, everybody was contracted. I was also going in as a contractor so I was aware that the interview would be a bit lighter on process as a result. The questioning very quickly veered away from technical stu…

> I lasted about 6 months and even trying to leave was an ordeal.

Like finding your next gig or just not showing up ever again? Because I've worked at a place where someone came in, went to lunch, and they never saw them ever again.

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#406

Post by arrowsmith »

eithed wrote: post #300
schnebbau wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. This is definitely an OP-is-autistic problem, or is perhaps inexperienced. Not an interviewer problem. Keep it professional. If an interviewer asks a personal question then you simply refuse to answer (politely), or steer it back towards a professional context. If they persist then you end the interview.

It might be cultural as well; I'm Polish and living in UK made me change my habits of answering "How are you?" questions. Same with Dutch from my experience - there are cultures where people say what's on their mind without the "I'm fine, how are you" bullshit. To be fair though, drama-dumping goes beyond that

How do Poles answer "how are you?" differently to Brits?

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#407

Post by bee_rider »

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…

I’d call this an understandable mistake on the part of the interviewer. “in” is a pretty commonly used operator. But it is also a bit unusual/trivial, in the sense that most languages would have a method or a function instead.

It’s the sort of thing where if you’ve written, like, any Python at all, it’ll be somewhere in the back of your head. It’d surface immediately on the job. But if you’d been using any other language earlier that day, it might not pop up reflexively, or in interview-stress mode.

It’s essentially trivia, and over-indexing on trivia is a mistake. But if they were a Python writer every day, I could see why they’d incorrectly expect everybody to have “in” in their l1 cache.

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#408

Post by MarkusQ »

ljm wrote: post #314
Dumblydorr wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would a recruiter expect you to give that?

They'll frame it as not wanting to waste anybody's time by submitting you as a candidate if you're already mid-flight on other positions, but they can still figure that out without having specifics on the actual company, role, salary, etc. They're banking on you offering it because saying no would rule out any mysterious prospects they have to offer, but really they're looking for new leads and if it comes from a can…

Laugh and say "Nice try. I won't hold it against you, but...seriously? Do you actually expect people to tell you that?"

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#409

Post by pavel_lishin »

I still remember an off-site team building event that I (luckily) skipped the first half of, where our tech lead tried to speed-run some intimacy building by going around and asking what everyone's biggest fear was.

I had just recently become a parent, and if you're a parent reading this, I'm pretty sure that we both have the exact same biggest fear in our lives - and it was absolutely not one I was willing to fucking share, even with those coworkers that I felt close to.

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#410

Post by petsfed »

roenxi wrote: post #291
stemchar wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I probably would've done the same. "I don't remember what the function is called" would've been fine-ish, but reaching for a regex is just insane.

A regexp basically comes with a compiler. Who knows what sort of optimisations they've built in under the hood. It wouldn't be surprising if there was a special fast-path for efficiently searching for a substring; that'd be effective in practice. But more importantly it is hugely context sensitive on how often the function is going to be called and what IO needs to happen around it to decide if speed matters at all.…

Questions like "how would you search for a substring?" are so incredibly dependent on what you're doing on a day-to-day basis, and what you're doing with the data once you've split it. Just because .split(...) is in all the tutorials doesn't mean the codebase you've worked on for the last 5 years actually uses that specific call with any regularity, and it may well be the case that your codebase does use regexs more often (maybe for query-portability purposes).

I write bare metal firmware, primarily in C, and I've had to make it a point to explain, in most every interview I do, that I've only ever used malloc(...) in tutorials. "In my world, malloc is a 4-letter word". So while I know what it does, and how it works, I actually have to google its usage, and I'm not as keyed into its pitfalls, because every system I've ever worked on could not afford the risks associated with dynamic memory allocation.

All of this to say, bad interviewers go looking for a specific answer, good interviewers go looking for good process. All of the jobs I've held are ones that accepted that I was rusty on this or that specific call, but could think about the system holistically.

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