Seems like an American thing to completely overdo the process. We have interviews i Europe too, but they are not insane and you don’t have to have algorithm knowledge to be a programmer in most companies.

If you are talking about big tech, sure, they are inventing ways to find the absolute top candidates since they have millions of applications.

https://agnos.is/posts/tech-recruitment-is-out-of-control.html

This was my experience at the beginning of 2024. It was bad enough that I had to write a blog post about it.

Got a couple.

The first bad interview I turned up and had to wait for the owner who rocked up 15 minutes late. We had a discussion and he was happy with my IT skills, we then got into a discussion of how to run the business.

He asked me what would I do if a salesman kept selling Linux support to businesses but the company had no one that had experience of it, I said it didn’t feel morally right to sell something that you can’t actually fulfill currently, put a cork in the salesman regarding Linux support, train/hire staff and when ready then continue to offer it. He said that’s not how his business works and to drive the business the salesman was doing the right thing.

During that interview I saw someone walk into the office that I had worked with in the past, they were incredibly unreliable, bad at the job and were fired, this one guy appearing gave me the final sign this was not the workplace for me. After the interview they gave me an offer that I declined.

The second interview probably a out 2 months later I turned up to was a small company of maybe 3 people. I turned up and it was a shared office space they used, he walked up to the receptionist and asked if there was a meeting room available, she said no. So he led me to the kitchenette area where he offered for me to sit on a sofa not to dissimilar to this…

Having the hum of a vending machine in the background added to the ambience. We got to chatting and it sounded like the guy didn’t really know what he wanted to do with the business or how to run it, generally seemed disorganised.

Towards the end of the interview wouldn’t you know it, the same guy I used to work with walked into the kitchenette wearing the t-shirt of a company in the building, gave me “the nod” and proceeded to use the vending machine, which failed to dispense his choice and he stood there shaking the machine.

This guy must have been some kind of angel in place to stop me from taking bad jobs. I declined the offer they gave me. A year or so later I was telling a friend about this and we checked on the company, it went out of business.

They were bad interviews, but I still got something out of them.

deleted by creator

I interviewed for a part-time web developer role during the summer of my second year at university. The “employer” wanted the interview at their house. No problem, I guess it’s a small operation and I’d work remotely?

The interview was fine. It was a guy that worked with his wife, and they needed someone to pick up some work over a few weeks. Midway through the interview, the guy’s wife came downstairs - in what I can only describe as the kind of dressing gown you’d see in porn.

She walked over, asked if I was “the guy”. The man said, “oh yeah, he looks good don’t you think?”, to which she responded “yeah, he looks like he’ll do the job nicely”. She then came over and put her hand by the back of my neck, and asked if I wanted to help out with a problem they’d been having.

Being a socially awkward 20 year old CS student, I said something along the lines of “uhh no that’s okay thanks, I’d better get going soon”, and the man escorted me out. I had received an email minutes after to say the job was mine if I wanted it.

I turned the job down, saying that something else had come up. I’m 70% sure that the job was a threesome or some weird cuck thing, and if I didn’t have a girlfriend and wasn’t awkward as fuck I’d probably have gone back and plowed his wife/written some PHP. Either way, that’s my worst interview experience - and probably will be for the rest of my days.

On the other side, one guy I interviewed for a startup was really qualified and we wanted to offer him the role. I thankfully Googled him, and found a Twitter account against his name where he had pics of him balls deep in a blow up doll. We didn’t hire him.

When I was in Uni, we had the opportunity to apply for co-op at Black Berry when they still made phones with their own OS.

I was getting into mobile dev at this time and applied and got an interview.

I didn’t know what I was expecting but what I got was a 10-20min sales pitch for their phone and I wasn’t asked a question… I don’t think. From what I gathered afterwards they just wanted to hire/rehire one guy and had to interview others to be in the co-op program.

Believe it or not I wasn’t sold on black berry after that.

Edit: this is from the perspective of a technical interviewer.

I’ve done around 200 or so technical interviews for mostly senior data engineering roles. I’ve seen every version of made up code, terrible implementation suggestion and dozens of folks with 5+ years of experience and couldn’t wrote a JOIN to save their lives.

The there were a couple where the resume was obviously made up because they couldn’t back up a single point and they just did not know a thing about data. They would usually talk in circles about buzzwords and Excel jaron. “They big data’d the data lake warehouse pivot hadoop in Azure Redshift.” Sure, ya did, buddy.

Yes, they were “pre-screened”. This was one of the BIG tech companies.

I had an interviewer hand me an IQ test before they were even willing to speak with me about the position. Awful experience.

I once did a coding interview. They had me write a MVC. It was on bitbucket so private repo. They merged my code then didn’t get back to me. They forgot that I had access so I got to see the company using interviews code for a real project. They didn’t last long so bullet dodged. But it was very silly. I eventually let them know I had access and within the hour they took me off the project despite never giving me an email in response.

I’m not a swe but I work in technology doing solutions, so semi technical I guess. I recently did 6 rounds with a company with positive feedback after each round. They told me they needed to get through a few more candidates and would have an answer on if an offer was being made the following week.

1 week turned into 2 into 3. At the end of the third week I lied and said I had an offer and told them that I needed an offer from them or to remove me from candidacy. The opted to remove me.

I was working at a job, so I wasn’t stressing it but the process was just gross

I know people don’t like the technical interview, but for me, it’s not about knowledge but process. I don’t care that you don’t have something memorized or don’t know the syntax without your linter. I want to see how you figure it out. I was interviewing for a junior web developer, and I gave them the task of fizzbuzz. I told them it was OK to use Google or any other tool. The interview ended with the prospect in tears. I felt very bad and told them they could finish it outside the interview and send it to us (they didn’t). Somehow, they were still on our shortlist.

Went in for an in-person prescreening with HR that turned into a surprise panel interview with the tech leadership, which sounds like a good thing, but I’m a severe introvert, so it tilted me to the point that I had a hard time regaining my internal composure.

Conversion was friendly and softball, and whiteboard was a super simple rdbms outer join scenario, but in the moment I couldn’t really think straight, so I didn’t see any of this.

I’d actually been practicing DSA so one of those problems might have actually been engaging enough to get me to focus.

I had an interview where they asked me to set up 3 micro services (with full functionality), a Kafka broker, a frontend and to configure everything to run on Kubernetes.

According to them this would take “more or less 4 hours” and those hours would obviously not be paid.

I’m still not sure whether they were just trying to get free work out of people or if their expectations for what a software engineer is supposed to do in half a day are completely absurd.

i got an interview as an embedded software engineer for a company that makes wireless camera flashes. high-precision real-time programming. i wanted to dive further into that area.

the first task was… reading comprehension, basic arithmetic, and pattern matching. i was flabbergasted. i wrote a really negative passage in their feedback form about how they apparently don’t trust their engineering candidates to be able to read, and how those pattern matching iq tests are bullshit since you can up your score by like 20% if you practice.

they called me back and explained that the reason they have everyone from cleaning staff to C-level take the standardized test is to create a workplace of “objective equality”. also they were really confused about my stance on the test because apparently i had scored in the top 5%. that’s the fastest i’ve ever noped out of an interview process.

To kick us off, mine from this week that I wrote down in another thread. In 60 minutes take an adjacency matrix as an input, good old int[][], and return all of the disjointed groups, and their group sizes in descending order.