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The worst job interview I ever had

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Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#431

Post by muffa »

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 had an interview like this, I got annoyed and just responded with "I don't know" to all of his questions. Then the CEO of the company offered me a position, politely declined ofc

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#432

Post by sokoloff »

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.

Plenty of time to talk about your life and hobbies once hired. If I’ve got 45 minutes to make a recommendation based on an evaluation, I don’t want to base any of that on your relationship/family status or pets, I certainly don’t want to give the impression that maybe I did that, and therefore, I don’t want to spend any time talking about it in the interview.

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#433

Post by eithed »

arrowsmith wrote: post #406
eithed wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Brits will either say "Fine, thanks" or not respond at all. Poles will tell you that yesterday they went to visit their relatives, and now they're tired, or that their cat is sick, or that they having problems with something.

It's a difference between "asking when you don't care about response" vs "asking because you genuinely want to know how the other person is"

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#434

Post by v0x »

schnebbau wrote: post #261
analogpixel wrote: post #24

Would 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.

I don't agree. While yes, it's definitely possible the interviewee handled it poorly, I have seen enough poorly conducted interviews to say it's just as likely the interviewer was the problem.

My best guess is that as a mental health startup geared toward expanding access to therapy services, they were fishing for candidates who had some kind of experience with the industry, or who could prove their fealty to the mission. For example: "After grieving the loss of my brother, I tried to obtain counseling services. But my private insurance didn't cover that, and when I looked for supplemental insurance, I was stuck in a byzantine maze of options. There was no centralized and easy way to see what might be covered, and for what cost; all of it was hidden behind sales reps you had to contact over the phone. That's when I came to understand the value of the kind of service ACMECORP is looking to introduce into the market."

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#435

Post by mojo74 »

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…

"The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping."

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#436

Post by order-matters »

jmye wrote: post #419
order-matters wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Wasting applicants time should have consequences. I can play along for a little bit to appease people who are intentionally testing how I handle a difficult situation but I am not going to allow an extended waste of time to occur and that's something I want to communicate to potential employers as well

> Agreed. Wasting applicants time should have consequences. This is so funny. "I'll show them by being slightly obnoxious for ten minutes! Then they'll know not to mess with me !" I'm sure they'll really feel those consequences.

the consequences are that they dont get to be in charge of the time anymore and i stop entertaining the interview game. its not about "showing them" or giving them some sort of punishment, it would be about me relaxing into behavior I want do regardless of them. Which for me would likely be a brief statement that they are losing me as a general professional courtesy and then hanging up on them because I almost certainly have better things to be doing with my time

but having already blocked the time off it's also completely reasonable to take 5 or 10 minutes to farm them for some content for my personal life like the other commentator stated, more or less.

it's not a calculated maneuver centered around them. The purpose of stating that consequences exist is because there are people out there who genuinely believe you have to be a monkey and jump through all the hoops of whatever any employer asks and would condemn someone for trolling a blatant tie waster for 10 minutes. My intent with this public discourse is to give the trolling a pass, not uplift it as some sort of standard of justice

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#437

Post by gspetr »

StilesCrisis wrote: post #367
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.

Why? Unless it's an extraordinarily hot code path, it doesn't matter. A regex once compiled will be quite efficient.

It's simple, unless you're given a specific broader context (like we have an enterprise customer data pruning system that needs to handle a broad range of corner cases) then you must not resort to overengineering this early in an interview.

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#438

Post by bee_rider »

gspetr wrote: post #429
bee_rider wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 expec…

The unfortunate answer is just that I didn’t think of .find before thinking of “in,” haha. Nothing too clever going on in my head.

The existence of a more conventional .find method does some damage to my original point. Oops.

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#439

Post by jolmg »

victorbojica wrote: post #150
MattRogish wrote: post #90

This… was a mistake on both you and the interviewer. All interview questions - unless it’s impossible to twist your answer to fit this - is scoped to “… at work”. Nobody who asks “tell me about yourself” is asking you to talk about how you met your partner, how many cats you have, or that experience you had, that one time, at band camp. It would be redundant and awkward to literally say “… at work” at the end of ever…

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…

Besides the point about separating personal and work life, there's the aspect of having the self-respect to maintain your own privacy.

You wouldn't answer deep personal questions from a random stranger on the street. Some questions might've been too invasive to answer were even some family and friends to ask them. Yet, it seems they felt like they should answer some interviewer they just met.

It's ultimately the responsibility of the person answering to select what and how much of themselves to share, depending on the relationship.

If the interviewer were to ask, "tell me your most embarrassing moment you had while having sex with someone", you wouldn't answer that. If they asked "tell me about the hardest day of your life" and the real, real answer was somehow that time you had that embarrassing moment while having sex with someone, you still wouldn't answer that. You would answer with what you'd be comfortable sharing with the random interviewer, if anything, else you can just decline the question.

The "embarrassing sex" is an exaggerated example. You can set your limits differently, in order to not feel

> completely emotionally drained

as the OP put it. Setting your limits such that your personal life is outside of what your comfortable sharing with the random interviewer would be appropriate.

GP comment on separating personal and work life said to imagine they tacked "... at work" at the end. You can also imagine "... that you're comfortable with sharing" as a more general rule.

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#440

Post by at-fates-hands »

sharadov wrote: post #414

Sorry OP you had to go through this - not knowing your circumstances, but golden rule, once the interview starts getting invasive, please cut it short and move on. Recently I had an interview for a contract position. First off, it was a zoom interview where the interviewer did not have his camera on. He promptly asks me to share my screen - which I found odd, since I had no content to share with him. Next - he tells…

Had something similar happen.

I get on the zoom call. Told it would be a general interview and same thing. No camera, then asked me to show my drivers license and social security card to prove my identification.

I asked why they needed this in the first interview. He stammered back and forth and then reiterated the interview would not go forward until I confirmed my identity by showing my drivers license and SS card.

Yeah, sorry bud, that's not happening and hung up. I kept wondering how many others got taken by this scam.

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