I interviewed at Cisco once, with two managers. They started arguing with each other during said interview.

I didn’t get the job, and I didn’t want it, either.

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.

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.

I had an on site interview with the owner of a small IT company. He was 30 minutes late (and I’d arrived 10 minutes early to be… ya know, punctual).

He offered no apologies and had this whole arrogance surrounding him. Complained that he had to drive to the office for this. Then after 5 minutes, it was obvious he didn’t even bother to look over my CV and was completely unprepared for the interview. … and somehow this was my fault.

Of course, the interview didn’t go well (for either of us). He offered a lowball 30% less than the average salary, I was looking for 30% above. I rolled my eyes, shook hands and left.

Later, I got a call back from the recruiter “I had no idea you were asking that much. From what X (the owner) said, this was a complete disaster.” I said, “I agree” and politely hung up.

In hindsight, I should have probably insisted on rescheduling (or just left) after 20 minutes. But, I was young and didn’t have many interviews under my belt. So, I took it as a learning experience.

One time I have applied for a role in one of the big companies. Microsoft/Apple/Google/Amazon like big (for the record, none of the above). The process took almost two months, I had 7 or 8 interviews with various department heads - HR, hardware and software engineers, support. I had to take an IQ test disguised as personality test, one more “soft” test, did the homework assignment based on sent requirements and docs. Now, the role I was applying for was a mix of sysops, devops and sys architect. I would be working with the bare metal. I was so deep in the sys/ops world I failed on fairly simple task. During the final interview I was tasked with a live coding problem - “using the language of your choice, write a program that calculates the fibonacci sequence”. I was not prepared for that. Usually I could do this with my eyes closed after a night of heavy drinking but in this case I was so deep in systems architecture I totally blew it. Lesson I learned was to be prepared for most unusual tech questions. Ever since I always prepare for both, dev and ops parts even if it’s strictly ops role.

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 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 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.

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.

I interviewed for a shop in Ottawa.

I was working at the time, but it was declining situation so I was Motivated.

So I show up a the appointed time, and I meet a guy who can best be described as ‘a little grizzled’ and ‘a little stressed’. We go over my resume, first off the bat.

“These are the things we need from you,” he said, tapping items on a list. “And these are places you suck,” he said, tapping the same list.

I basically checked out at that point; there was no way I was suitable for this post. I could learn it, but it was a lot. And while I had a lot of other skills that showed up on the job desc and my CV, missing so many important pieces was insurmountable. It wasn’t a super-fun experience no matter how interesting he was - he was a great lead hand - and I left without much fanfare. Great rambling talk about all kinds of things, but it’s the worst I’ve ever flamed out in an interview; and the fastest.

Imagine my surprise when he 'strong-hire’d me. I actually said to the recruiter, “Yeah, you’ve got it wrong. No no, and it’s totally okay, but you’re off by one or something. You mean to call the name above mine or the name below mine, and that guy is probably gonna love this job. But you don’t mean to call me. No stress, all good, but yeah, I’m not the guy you wanted to call.”

It was a great job and that guy was my lead. Brutal honestly is fabulous if you can take it.

At university, a prof for theoretical CS (the kind of professor who thought CS students don’t need computers) was looking for someone to program something for him. The requirements really showed that he had no clue about programming. His assistent, sitting beside him, obviously knew that, too.

I basically told that prof that he had no idea what he was talking about, and suggested that he should attend a basic programming course before I left.

As the interviewee?

I show up at their office for a round of interviews. IIRC it was 4 interviews of about an hour each. Every single interviewer comes in 5-10 minutes late. They all look completely exhausted. Unprompted, they all commented that “yeah, this is a start-up so we’re expected to work 80 hour weeks. That’s just how it is.” I did not take that job.

Another place wanted to do a coding “pre-screening” thing. You know, where you go to a website and there’s a coding question and you code it and submit your answer. THIS place wanted you to install an extension that took full control of your browser, your webcam, your mic, etc. So it could record you doing the coding challenge. No, thank you.

As the interviewer? omg, the stories I can tell.

We had a guy come in for an hour interview. We start asking him the normal interview questions. Literally everything he says is straight up wrong or he says, “I don’t know” and then just gives up and doesn’t try to work out a solution or anything. But we have a whole hour with this guy and as interviewers we’ve been instructed to use the full hour otherwise candidates complain that they weren’t given a fair chance even when it’s TOTALLY obvious it’s going to be a “no-hire.” So we start asking this guy easier and easier questions… just giving him basic softball questions… and HE STILL GETS THEM ALL WRONG. We ask him what type of variable would you use to store a number? He says, “String.” WHAT?! I’m totally flabbergasted at this point. So finally I get a brilliant idea: I’ll ask him an OPINION question! There’s no way he can get that wrong, right? Looking at his resume, it has something like “Java Expert” on there. So I say to him, “It says on your resume you’re a Java Expert. What’s your favorite thing about Java?” His response? “Oh, I actually don’t know anything about Java. I just put that on my resume because I know they used that at a previous company.” So now on top of this guy getting every question wrong, we’ve established he has also lied on his resume, so basically just red flags EVERYWHERE. Finally, after a grueling 45 minutes we decide to give up asking questions and just end with the whole, “So we like to reserve the last bit of time so you can ask us questions. Do you have anything you’d like to ask?” Without missing a beat, this guy goes, “When do I start? I feel like I NAILED that interview!”

At another company I worked at, we would do online interviews that took only an hour. The coding portion of the interview had a single question: “Given a list of strings, print the contents of the list to the screen.” That was it. Sure, we could make the coding question harder if they totally aced it, but the basic question was nothing more complicated than that. The candidate could even choose which programming language they wanted to use for the task. That single question eliminated half the candidates who applied for the job. Some straight up said they couldn’t do it. One person hung up on me and then when I tried to call back they said the fire alarm went off at their place and they would reschedule. They never did. Many people forgot that I could see their screens reflected in their glasses and I could see them frantically Googling. There was one candidate that did so insanely poorly during the interview that we believe it must have been a completely different person that had gone through the initial phone screen, so basically they were trying to bait-and-switch.

I have a bunch of other stories but this post is already getting quite long.

How about the other way around, I had this guy come in, he had been out of the business for a while and decided to go and be a mechanic for a few years. One winter in particular he decided that he was kind of tired of doing the mechanic stuff and wanted to come back.

I interviewed him on a phone screen. His knowledge was appropriately dated but he was not bad. I figure he’d be able to come in and get up to speed pretty quickly.

My company does kind of a nightmare scenario where they interview you all day long and you literally meet with everyone in groups.

First thing in the morning first group came through said he was great.

Second group came through asked him some questions and he was a little bit more cagey but still not bad.

The third group was the lunch group, They took him out to lunch and he threw out a bunch of racist stories and while people watching, made fun of people as they came into the restaurant for their ethnicity or their weight, or what car they drive or whatever else they could find.

The lunch crew came back and did a hand off but no one raised the flags right away so we went into the first after lunch crew. A couple of people from the lunch crew pulled me aside while he was in his next set of meetings and said they were extremely uncomfortable being around him and recounted the stories.

I had to bust up the interview and send him on his way. The person that was uncomfortable with what he said is one of the most IDGAF people I’ve ever met.

Years earlier we had a developer come in with a fantastic resume. They brought him in first thing he was rude, and we’re not talking autistic doesn’t know what he’s doing rude he was clearly making a lot of generalizations about people and being nasty about the questions. Skill wise he was absolutely fantastic and he would have been fabulous to be a lead in front of a complicated project, But he was impossible to be around. Toward the end of the Early interview they told him that they had all they needed. He asked him if it was because of his attitude and they said that it was a team job and they needed somebody that was capable of working with a team. He said they could just put him in a one-man team and have him architect things or do other work by himself. There was simply no chance they were going to hire him. You don’t willingly bring that much toxicity in the workplace if you can help it.

My first ever software interview was with a small company that made a web app for traveling nurses. It was mainly a calendar with additional functionality to help nurses manage cases.

I was given a pre-interview programming task to complete. The task was relatively simple and would not take long to complete so I agreed.

When I logged in with the credentials they provided it looked like they had a very robust testing environment. There was a complete copy of the app running on the server with fake information in the database.

The code itself did not follow any style guides and was rarely documented. This caused me to spend much more time completing the task than I had estimated. Once I completed the task and verified functionality I notified the company. They checked my work and scheduled an in person interview with the lead developer, CTO, and CEO.

During the interview they attempted to access the test server with my code so we can discuss. My code could not be found on the test server and it was at this time we learned that the lead developer had given me complete access to the production servers including direct database access. The “fake” data that I used in my own testing on a production server was actual patient records. It was a huge HIPAA violation on their part and I withdrew my application for fear that this company will soon be in legal trouble.

I suspect they thought I was going to report them because they offered me $3000 for the “work completed.” It turns out their programming task was a feature that they wanted implemented into production anyways. I think if it were not for the lead developer’s mistake I would not have been paid anything. There was no offer of compensation for the completion of the task before the mistake was revealed.

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.