Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it Iceland? Ivory Coast? Ireland? Indonesia?
You're guesses are getting somewhat closer each time, almost there.
[flagged]
The worst job interview I ever had
421–430 of 589 posts
Re: The worst job interview I ever had
#422Would be funny if the interviewer wrote the exact same blog post; "I had the worst candidate interview today, I asked him a simple ice-breaker question before getting into more technical stuff, and he just went off about his family and relationships for an hour; weirdest interview I ever gave."
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.
From the details I read in the post you are almost certainly wrong, not to mention being reallying condescending.
The interviewer has control over the room. They steer the conversation. They could have stopped this at any point. Instead they encouraged OP to go deeper for 90 minutes.
That wasn't OP misunderstanding a question, that was an interviewer enjoying the power trip.
Re: The worst job interview I ever had
#423I 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…
Step 1: https://www.google.com/search?q=list+python+string+methods
Step 2: Parse the output with your eyes. The method is literally called "find".
This one-trick pony failure mode could perhaps have been fine for a guy who did Java and nothing but Java for 10 years, but you are supposedly the person who runs "pythonforengineers" website...
100% correct call by the interviewer.
Re: The worst job interview I ever had
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They specifically asked personal questions - parents stuff, relationship, etc. In the US any employer who asks you about personal relationships during an interview is opening themselves up to an illegal discrimination lawsuit.
Even just an IQ test [1] or teacher licensing test [2,3] opens them to illegal discrimination, so that's not saying much. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co . [2] https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/black-latino-teachers-... [3] https://teachercertification.com/nystce/multi-subject-arts-a...
Working in selection, I can say it’s more nuanced than that. Any measurement can be used as long as it is relevant to the business and related to performance. For example, you’re fine to reject people based on height if you’re hiring basketball players and being higher predicts scoring more points. Or even reject people based on gender (or other protected classes) if you can demonstrate that that specific group is absolutely necessary for you e.g. you want a counselor working with sexual trauma survivors and have evidence that matching patients to counselor on gender gives meaningfully better results for said patients.
The specific cases you mention and the finer point is how do you demonstrate the necessity of a measure? Is high general IQ absolutely necessary for SWEs? Or is it enough to have a high logical reasoning, but don’t need spatial? Do you really need high IQ or is it enough to have a lot of practical experience with hands on skills? Do you need higher IQ to do zero to one development vs code maintenance? The devil’s always in the details with these kinds of questions, and it’s definitely not a blanket “you can’t use anything”.
Re: The worst job interview I ever had
#425Reading through these comments is pretty sad. I didn't know how bad it had gotten. Haven't had to look for few years.
Re: The worst job interview I ever had
#426Earlier 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.
You can talk about it at work, after you're hired, like with your coworkers. The company can't ask you about a lot of things in an interview without exposing them to a significant amount of legal liability.
Re: The worst job interview I ever had
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was also part of this sort of interview once. They specifically asked personal questions - parents stuff, relationship, etc. Definitely not work related. It was indeed a very strange and exhausting experience. I could've definetly refused to answer some of the questions or drop out of the interview altogether, but not sure why I haven't. So yeah, this type of interview exists so I highly doubt the interviewer inter…
Rejecting the question is actually how you pass. Open with "I leave everything private at home when at work hence my answer for the work position is: [here the answer but scoped and formulated to your work life and NOT to your private life]".
You don't want to pass an interview like that.
Re: The worst job interview I ever had
#428Wth, are you people crazy? Never, under any circumstances, don’t share personal details during job interviews.
Instead have a list prepared with the BS question list like: what is your greatest achievement, what is your biggest failure, how did you deal with some difficult relationship in the team, how did you unblock some item etc etc. Use chatgpt for preparation, what you say there has to be very vague and not pointing to any of your previous employers or colleagues.
No way this part of the interview process should be something where you, excuse my French, display your underwear, but instead you should be able to prove that you are capable to deal with some difficult inter human situations.
Re: The worst job interview I ever had
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
" 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 lang…
I don't understand how you jumped to the membership test instead of literally the .find() method on a string?
The interviewer is not asking to solve a problem here, they're asking for a simple ability to follow instructions, hence the offer to use Google to find the correct answer.
You could make a very solid case for using "in" (it is 2-4x faster), but only after you've solved the task at hand, this is what is expected in interviews. Not knowing the interview meta makes an average Joe basically unhireable in this market.
Re: The worst job interview I ever had
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
" 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?
No, there's literally a "find" str method.
str.find(sub[, start[, end]])
"Return the lowest index in the string where substring sub is found within the slice s[start:end]. Optional arguments start and end are interpreted as in slice notation. Return -1 if sub is not found."
Your instinct to resort to "in" is correc,t as it's generally slower than the "in" membership test, but the interviewer has even allowed the use of Google. Blanking out after that is really bad.