My most awkward recruiter interaction?

Just graduated college and got 'suckered' by an programming position ad that turned out to be a recruiting company. It was fine since they charge the company for their services and not me.
After a couple of weeks of waiting (they initially promised I would/could have at least 3 interviews a week, which hadn't happened.) I decided to start looking again on my own, found a position, and I was hired.

About two months later I get a phone call:

<skipping the pleasantries>
R: "I see you are working for D, congratulations. I've started the paperwork for our reimbursement."
Me: "Reimburse for what? I found that job on my own."
R: "D is one of the companies we work with and when we submitted your resume, they told us you were already hired."
Me: "And?"
R: "And you signed a contract and now its time to pay. The fees only start at $500"
Me: "Not me. I have the contract, it states, in the second paragraph, I am not responsible for any hiring fees."
<couple of seconds of silence>
R: "Yes, but that is only if we negotiated the contact. Since you went behind our back, we couldn't start the process"
Me: "And?"
R: "And its a breach of contract."
Me: "I'm not a lawyer, I don't understand what you're saying. It says right here on the contract I signed, I don't pay any fees. No where does it say I'm not allowed to look for a job on my own. Right?"
R: "Um..yea..right..right...but you were hired by one of our contracted companies."
Me: "No way I would have known that. Maybe you should have set up an interview long before now."
<R is getting pretty angry at this point>
R: "I'm sure we gave you list of companies we work with. Contacting those companies is a breach of contract. Unless you want our lawyers to get involved, the fee is only $500. Failing to honor your side of the agreement and we'll be forced to contact your employer and begin garnishing your wage until the fee is paid. You don't want that, do you?"
Me: "There was no list and I am allowed to find a job on my own. Again, I'm not responsible for you not setting up an interview so do whatever you think you can do. Have a good night"
<I hang up>

About a week later..

Boss: "Got a phone call from XYZ Recruiting requesting a wage garnishment. Do you know anything about that?"
<I explain the situation>
Boss: "Oh good grief. We've worked with them a couple of times and we contact them on an individual basis for new hires. You're fine"
Me: "You're not going to garnish my paycheck?"
Boss: "No no no, that's not how this works. He was probably trying to scare you into paying their crazy fees."
Me: "What if they get their lawyers involved? I don't want to cause any trouble"
Boss: "Ha ha...XYZ Recruiting is a couple of guys in an office and we have lawyers on the 3rd floor who eat and breath this shit. They know that and you won't hearing from them again."

Job interview for junior dev position:

Recruiter: Implement stack
Me: Here you go *typical C++ stack implementation, struct node, push, pop*
Recruiter: This is classical over engineering, you should just inherit from std::stack
Me: wtf?

Just sharing my experience of my spontaneous interview with Facebook. I'm not good at writing these but here you go :)

- I was working as an Android dev and didn't have much knowledge in algorithms nor competitive programming, never ever interviewed with big companies.
- a random day on LinkedIn, a recruiter from Facebook contacted me
- I ignored it for few week because I thought it's so out of my league, then somehow, out of blue, I had a thought of giving it a try, so I did
- passed first round
- start studying algorithms a little for phone interview in 3 weeks
- recklessly took the phone interview
- passed
- start studying intensively (while working fulltime) for the on-site interview in 2 months
- almost got the job, they gave me one more chance by a followed up interview
- messed up the last chance real bad
- failed!!!
- Initially I just wanted to give it a try, but the fact that I failed at very very last chance, frankly, bothers me a bit. Maybe I will interview with FB or big companies if I have chance later, but I know for sure that the studying had made me a much better dev. All the code I write now is much more efficient (I think), I can and not anymore afraid of reading complicated code.
- Overall, it does takes a lot of time (~4 months studying while working fulltime), but also benefits myself a lot though I didn't get the job, so basically, good experience, but better if I got the job 😁

Oops, wanted to write a few lines and it's a long post already.. I should stop here :D

Recruiter emailed me later this day. (had my first job interview today for a Linux Support Engineer position).

He said he thinks he might have some good news. I am nervous. Fingers crossed 😰

Applied for the job, recruiter got in touch with me and setup an interview.

Interview went well and heard I was hired after two days!

Yes, good recruiters, they exist ;)

I had a prospective employer be late to every single interview we had scheduled. I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt, but they simply didn’t value my time.

I was in the process of moving and a recruiter called me to tell me a job I had been submitted for wanted to do a phone interview that day. Even though I was driving across the country in a box truck, I agreed to the interview. We arranged for the employer to call me at 2 PM. I figured it would give me a break from driving in the middle of the day anyway.

I pulled over at 1:45 and waited. At 2:15 I called the recruiter to verify the time. He said he would get in contact with the employer and call me back. At 2:45 I called the recruiter and told him I needed to get back on the road and we’d have to reschedule.

We rescheduled the call for a few days later at 1 pm. This time I got the phone number of the employer, so at 1:15 I called him. He apologized and said he lost track of time. Whatever, let’s just get this interview going.

He liked me on the phone, so he wanted to meet in person the next day. I was a bit irritated by the situation, but I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I showed up for my in person interview 15 minutes early and checked in with the receptionist. 30 minutes later I asked the receptionist when they were going to be with me as my interview was supposed to start 15 minutes ago. I was finally seen 5 minutes after that.

The interview was supposed to be a several hour affair where they were going to have me sign an NDA and show me some of the issues they were having to see if I could solve them. I had cleared my scheduled meetings for the afternoon so I could attend this lengthy interview.

After about 45 minutes of interviewing, the manager suddenly said that they needed to cut the interview short because he had just realized they needed to get something done that afternoon. He asked me if I would come back the next day to finish the interview.

I shook his hand and left, shaking my head the entire time. When I called my recruiter after I had calmed down, I let him know that I would under no terms be interested in a job with them. If they refused to acknowledge my time was worth something as a candidate, they would never respect it as an employee.

They still offered me the job and couldn’t fathom why I was upset about the situation. I’m very glad I didn’t take that job.

I'm 20, and I consider myself to be as junior as they come. I only started programming seriously in June 2016,and since then, I've been doing mainly Android Work, and making my own servers and backends(using AWS/Firebase nd stuff).
For the first time in life, I was approached by a recruiter for a company on linkedIn. They "stumbled upon" my Github profile and wanted to see if I was interested in an internship opportunity. This company is an early stage start up, by that I mean a dude with an idea calling himself the CEO and a guy who "runs a tech blog" and only knows college level C programming (explaination follows).

So they want me to make the app for their startup. and for that, I ws first asked to solve a couple problems to prove my competence and a "technical interview" followed.
They gave me 3 questions, all textbook, GCD of 2 numbers, binary search and Adding an element to the linked List, code to be written on a piece of paper. As the position was that of an Android Developer, I assumed that Java should be the language of choice. Assumed because when I asked, the 'tech blogger' said, yeah whatever.
But wait, that ain't all, as soon as I was done, Mr. Blogger threw a fit, saying I shouldn't assume and that I must write it in C. I kept my cool (I'm not the most patient person), and wrote the whole thing in C.
He read it, and asked me what I've written and then told me how wrong I was to write 2 extra lines instead of recursion for GCD. I explained that with numbers large enough, we run the risk of getting a stackoverflow and it's best to apply non recursive solution if possible. He just heard stackoverflow and accused me of cheating. I should have left right then, but I don't know why, I apologized and again, in detail explained what was happening to this fucktard. Once this was done, He asked me how, if I had to, I'd use this exact code in my Android App. I told him that Id rather write this in Java/Kotlin since those are the languages native to Android apps. I also said that I'd export these as a Library and use JNI for the task. (I don't actually know how, I figured I can study if I have to).
Here's his reply, "WTF! We don't want to make the app in Java, we will use C (Yeh, not C++, C). and Don't use these fancy TOOLS like JNI or Kotlin in front of me, make a proper application."
By this I was clear that this guy is not fit to be technical lead and that I should leave. I said, "Sir, I don't know how, if even possible, can we make an Android App purely in C. I am sorry, but this job is not for me".
I got up and was about to leave the room, when we said, "Yeah okay, I was just testing you".
Yeah right, the guy's face looked like a howling monkey when I said Library for C, and It has been easier for me to explain code to my 10 year old cousin that this dumbfuck.
He then proceeded to ask me about my availability, and I said that I can at max to 15-20 hours a week since my college schedule is pretty tight. I asked me to get him a prototype in 2 months and also offered me a full time job after I graduate. (That'd be 2 years from now). I said thank you for the offer, but I am still not sure of I am the right person for this job.
He then said, "Oh you will be when I tell you your monthly stipend."
I stopped for a second, because, money.
And then he proceeded to say 2 words which made me walk out without saying a single word.
"One Thousand".

I live in India, 1000 INR translates to roughly $15. I made 25 times that by doing nothing more than add a web view to an activity and render a company's responsive website in it so it looks like an app.

If this wasn't enough, the recruiter later had the audacity to blame me for it and tell me how lucky I am to even get an offer "so good".
Fuck inexperienced assholes trying shit they don't understand and thinking that the other guy is shitsworth.

Happened with a friend of mine
*Before interview*
My advice: Try to ask about the company, the recruiter, the job. Look curious.
*Interview about to finish*

I: So do you have any questions?

F: Uhh, yeah, sure. Where do you work?

Me talking to a recruiter (even though I am not looking for a job)

Me: If I walk into an interview, and they ask me to reverse a binary tree for a frontend Reac or Vue position or something along those lines, I will end the call and/or walk away from it.

Him: I get similar feelings from other programmers, I don't quite understand why the notion is as common

Me: Because it is fucking useless, it servers no purpose to a dev to know about that when building frontends with react, I link my github profile, for which they can find advanced backend-frontend related projects, compiler and interpreter projects, plus the title I currently have at my workplace and a bunch of other shit, I am not interviewing for a teaching position at an institute, but an actual place of work, for which if they want to know about DS and A they can review my profile which has a repo of DS and A in about 5 different languages including plain C++. I do not need to be offended by such notions since they server no purpose on the frontend, and neither do other devs. If anything it should be a casual conversation during the interview, not a basis for employment.

Recruiter: .........thank you for explaining this to me, I am sure I can bring it up to the agencies doing the reviews and interviews. Are you still interested?

Me: Are they going to give me a coding assignment for a project or a bs question like what I mentioned?

Him: I don't know

Me: then I am not interested

!rant
Dream Interview
-recruiter. Where is the 2nd page of your letter of application?
-me you now can get it as a DLC for Just 4.99!
-recruiter you're hired, welcome to EA Games!

Here's the time an Amazon recruiter scheduled a call with me just to tell me I wouldn't be getting the job.

A few years ago, I left Uber after the seemingly non-stop public snafus they were getting themselves into (I have a lot of rants about Uber if anyone is interested, some of them mind-melting). I decided to take a two month break given that my financials looked decent for once and I was tired of 100 hour weeks.

During that time, I of course started perusing the typical job-seeking sites I had remembered from before. Somehow, from one of the profiles I set up, I caught the eye of an Amazon recruiter. They emailed me and I agreed to set up a date and time for an introductory chat.

They already had my CV. They already had my StackOverflow/Github information. This wasn't a technical interview, and the recruiter wasn't part of any of the tech teams. This is important information moving forward.

A few days later, I got the call from the recruiter. He introduced himself as the person from the emails, thanking my for my time, etc.. Things started out pleasant with the smalltalk and whatnot, but then the recruiter said "so I have some concerns about your resume".

Under one of the sections I had a list of things I was skilled with - one of which, regrettably, is PHP. Completely ignoring Java, Javascript, C# and C++ knowledge and all of the other achievements I have with those technologies, the recruiter really wanted to drill me about the PHP.

"Do you work a lot with PHP?"
"No, not anymore - from time to time I have to do something with it but it's not my main language anymore. I know it quite well, though."
"Oh okay well we aren't looking for any PHP roles right now, unfortunately."
"Okay, no problem."

Perhaps I could have said more, but from my end of things, I meant "I don't see a problem here, I don't write a lot of PHP and you don't need a lot of PHP".

After a pause that felt like an hour, the recruiter broke the silence and said "Okay well thanks for your time today, I'm sorry things didn't work out."

Bewildered, I asked which technology stack they were using on the team.

"Not PHP, unfortunately. Thank you for your time." and then an abrupt click.

The recruiter found me himself, looked at my resume (assumably), sought out to contact me, arranged a time for a call, and then called me, just to tell me I wouldn't get the position due to knowing PHP at some point in my career.

Years later, the whole interaction still shocks me. Somewhere in my drafts I have a long letter to the recruiter basically going over my entire career history explaining why his call was incredibly... well, fucking weird. Towards the end of writing it I realized it was more therapeutic for me to deal with whatever it was that just took place and that it probably wouldn't change my odds of working at Amazon.

So yeah. That's the story of the time Amazon set up a recruiting call just to tell me I wouldn't be working for them.

I applied to a backend position that requested one of the following technologies: PHP, Java or .NET ( I work on .net btw)
So far so good, the hr recruiter schedules a talk and ask a lot of standard questions like what is your greatest accomplishment, what is good code and so on.
After what seemed to be about an hour of questioning she then tells me that I am to take a technical test from backend javascript. I pause for a second and I specifically tell her, lady, the ad said .NET, Java or PHP, wtf? And she tells me, no worries, we will train you. You can imagine that I completely blew the technical interview to later get an email that my knowledge (in javascript) is not sufficient for the position. Gg guys, good company values :))

So I got a call from a recruiter this morning, about a job for a C++ developer what experience developing for embedded systems.

He sent my resume off to the company and they actually want an in person interview the same day.

I'm going to this interview in 2 hours, I'm really nervous, I haven't had an interview in years...

Wish me luck!

Man, I think we've all gotten way too many of these.

Normally most interactions that I have are through email. Eventually some would try to contact me via phone. These are some:

"Hey! We are calling you from <whatever company name> solutions! (most of them always seem to end on solutions or some shit like that) concerning the Ruby on Rails senior dev opportunity we were talking about via email"
<niceties, how are you doing, similar shit goes here...eventually>

So tell us! how good/comfortable would you say you are with C++?"

Me: I have never done anything serious with c++ and did just use it at school, but because I am not a professional in it I did not list it in my CV, what does it have to do with Rails?

Them: "Oh the applications of this position must be ready to take in additional duties which sometimes happen to be C or C++"

Me: Well that was not anywhere in the offer you sent, it specifically requested a full stack Rails developer that could work with 3 different frontend stacks already and like 4 different databases plus bla bla bla, I did not see c++ anywhere in it. Matter of fact I find it funny, one of the things that I was curious about was the salary, for what you are asking and specifically in the city in which you are asking it for 75k is way too low, you are seriously expecting a senior level rails dev to do all that AND take additional duties with c++? cpp could mean a billion different things"

Them: "well this is a big opportunity that will increase your level to senior position"

Me: the add ALREADY asks for a senior position, why are you making it sound that I will get build towards that level if you are already off the bat asking for seniors only to begin with?

Them: You are not getting it, it is an opportunity to grow into a senior, applicants right now are junior to mid-level

ME: You are all not making any sense, please don't contact me again.

=======

Them: We are looking for someone with 15 years experience with Swift development for mobile and web

Me: What is up with your people not making these requirements in paper? if I knew from the beginning that you people think that Swift is 15 years old I would have never agreed to this "interview"

Them: If you are not interested in that then might we offer this one for someone with 10 years experience as a full stack TypeScript developer.

Me: No, again, check your dates, this is insulting.

===

* For another Rails position

Them: How good are you with Ruby on Rails in terms of Python?

Me: excuse me? Python has nothing to do with Ruby on Rails.

Her (recruiter was a woman) * with a tone of superiority: I have it here that Python is the primary technology that accompanies Rails development.

Me (thinking this was a joke) : What do you think the RUBY part of Ruby on Rails is for? and what does "accompanies Rails development" even means?

Her: Well if you are not interested in using Rails with Python then maybe you can tell us about your experience in using Javascript as the main scripting platform for Rails.

Me: This is a joke, goodbye.

====

To be fair this was years ago when I still didn't know better and test the recruiters during the email part of being contacted. Now a days I feel sorry for everyone since I just say no without even bothering. This is a meme all on itself which no one has ever bothered to review and correct in years for now. I don't know why recruiters don't google themselves to see what people think of their "profession" in order to become better.

I've even had the Java/Javascript stupidity thrown at me by a local company. For that one it was someone from their very same HR department doing the rectuiter, their shop foreman was a friend of the family, did him the service of calling him to let him know that his HR was never going to land the kind of developer they were looking for with the retarded questions they had and sent him a detailed email concerning the correct information they needed for their JAVAscript job which they kept confusing with Java (for some reason in the context of Spring, they literally wanted nothing with Spring, they wanted some junior to do animations and shit like that on their company's website, which was in php, Java was nowhere in this equation)

I think people in web development get the short end of the stick when it comes to retarded recruiters more than anywhere else.

got a call from a recruiter for a job. said "wokey, let's see what you got to offer"
get to the interview, the first question is "why do you want to work in our company?"
me: i don't know, you called me!

Told the recruiter about 4 times before my lunch interview that I was a working student (I could only take part time jobs).

Just as we sat down and got our food he asked me where I currently worked, and I gently reminded him that I was still, in fact, a student.

He had this weir look on his face as I had tried to trick him into a free lunch, as all the positions he had was for full time jobs.

Still ate the lunch and had awkward small talk the entire time.

Recruiter: are you interested in a client side java role?

Me: yes, here is my client side resume please submit me

Recruiter: sorry the hiring manager said they are looking for more of a back-end engineer

Me: you told me it was a client side role, please resubmit me with my back-end geared resume

Recruiter: yes that's correct, it's client side, we'll keep you in mind for the future but you should know there is a difference between mobile devs and web devs

Me: what you just said is not relevant to this conversation. I would be happy to discuss the diff between front-end and back-end, client vs server, etc.

Recruiter: I'm just relaying what the hiring manager is saying to me

Me: your [lack of] ability to relay technical information is quite apparent :/

*lesson learned*: interview recruiters before they start interviewing me

Unbelievable waste of time, how do these people even make a living? FML!

I got laid off from my previous position as a Software Engineer at the end of June, and since then it was a struggle to find a new position. I have a good resume, about 4 years of professional dev experience and 5 years of experience in the tech industry all together, and great references.

As soon as I got laid off, I talked to my old manager at my previous company, and he said that he'd love to hire me back, but he just filled his last open spot.

In order to prepare, I had my resume reviewed by a specialist at the Department of Labor, and she said that it was one of the better resumes that she had seen.

There aren't a huge amount of dev jobs in my area, and I got a TON of recruiter emails. But they were all in other states, and I wasn't interested in moving.

I applied to all the remote and local positions I could find (the ones that I was qualified for,) and I just got a bunch of silence and denials from all my applications. I had a few interviews that went great, but of course, those companies decided to put the position on hold so they could use the budget for other things.

The silence and denials were really disconcerting, and make you think that something might be wrong with you or your interviewing abilities.

And then suddenly, as if the floodgates had opened, I started getting a ton of callbacks and interviews for both local and remote opportunities. I don't know if the end-of-year budget surpluses opened up more positions, but I was getting a lot of interest and it felt amazing.

Another dev position opened up at my previous company, and I got a great recommendation for that from my former manager and co-workers. I got a bunch of other interviews, and was moved onto the next rounds in most of them.

And finally, I got reached out to regarding a remote position I applied for a while ago, and the company was great about making the interview process quick and efficient. Within 2 weeks, I went from the screening call, to the tech call, and to the final call with the CTO. The CTO and I just hung out and talked about cars/boats/motorcycles for half the interview, and he was an awesome guy. AND THEN I GOT AN OFFER THE NEXT DAY!

The offer was originally for about the same amount as I made at my previous job, but I counteroffered up a good amount and they accepted my counteroffer!

It's a great company with offices all over the world, and they offer the option to travel to all those offices for visits if you want. So if you're working on a project with the France team and you think that it'd be easier to just work with them face-to-face, then the company will pay to fly you out to Paris for the week. Or you can work completely remotely. They don't mind either way.

I'm super excited to work with them and it feels great to be back in the job world.

Sorry about the long post, but I just wanted to tell my story and help encourage anybody out there who's going through the same thing right now.

Don't get discouraged, because you WILL find an awesome opportunity that's right for you. Get somebody to go over your resume and give you improvement recommendations. Brush up on your interviewing skills. Be sure to talk about all the projects you've worked on and how they positively impacted people and/or companies.

This is what I found interviewers responded the best to: Be sure to emphasize that you love learning new things and that you love passing along that knowledge to other people, and that your goal is to be an approachable and reliable source of knowledge for the company and to be as helpful as possible. It's important to be in a position that encourages both knowledge growth and knowledge sharing, and I think that companies really appreciate that mindset in a team member.

Moral of the story: YOU GOT THIS!

Le me at the end of an interview

Recruiter: What is your salary expectations

*trying to find a good number but without exaggeration*

Me: well, about x USD.

Recruiter: that's ok for us.

Me inside: oh I should asked more than that! Stupid me.

I found this posted by a recruiter and I liked it:
| hired someone that didn't shake my hand firmly during the
interview - he rocked as an employee.
| hired someone with three typos on their resume. - She was
the most detailed oriented person l’ve ever worked with.
| hired someone without a college degree- He was way
smarter, innovative, and creative than mel!
| hired someone with four kids- Never met someone so
devoted and committed to her career.
| hired someone who had been incarcerated as a young adult.
- He's a VP now.
| hired someone over 60- she taught me some tricks on excel
that | use to this day!
Can we please throw out all those silly assumptions and rules that we've made up in our head about what a person needs to
be, look like, have accomplished, and do, to succeed?
In my experience, as an HR leader and as a hiring manager, it's those that typically don't get a “shot” who tend to kick butt
in the workplace!
So before you throw that resume away because they don't have every certificate and degree - or - don't call back that candidate because they didn't give you a firm handshake - think about trying something new. Someone new.

Once a recruiter called me

Recruiter: Hi, We are looking for an Android developer with n+ years of experience

Me: Umm ok. Actually I am not a full fledged native Android developer, but I can work on hybrid platform where we can create an App for Android using Web Technologies like html and javascript

Recruiter : ohh I will talk to our tech team and get back to you

Me: Sure. Thank you

-Next day-

Recruiter : so you can create an Android application right

Me: yes but using web technologies not JAVA

Recruiter : ok your interview is scheduled on x date and you will get an email

Me: ok cool. Thanks

-Interview day-

Interviewer : so lets start with the technical round, tell me what are Fragments

Me: :| i know what is a Fragment but I am not a native developer but Hybrid application developer like in phonegap - cordova using javascript

Interviewer: ohh but our App is in native Android and native IOS

Me: da faq :| (why the fuck did you call me then)

Interviewer : nice meeting you man

Me: :|||

- Next day same Recruiter again called me-

Recruiter : So how was your Interview?

Me: Actually they are looking for native developer, i told you i dont work on native

Recruiter : So your interview WENT BAD!

ME: What da FUCK :||||||

-Again same day after sometime-

Recruiter : So can you make Apps for IOS?

Me: What the fuckin fuck... :|||||||¦

Fuck ever working for a company that doesn't know shit about the worth of a developer ever again.
> be me
> just got my first class masters in Soft Eng that I worked hard as fuck to get
> get a job for a pretty well known medical company here
> offered a bit less than what I was expecting but fuck it, it's a job straight out of uni doing what I want to do
> fuckitwhynot.mp4
> stay for a year with no bonus programme, no pay review, no objectives, no perks, literally fuck all
> see literally every other position in the company be promoted and actually supported from IT & the developers
> feelsBoomerMan.jpg
> get the hail mary recruiter "you'd be great for this role" linked in DM
> follow it through and go to the interview
> nailed it
> comes to negotiating a starting salary and they actually laugh at my current rate and immediately raise it by about 30% with bonuses, reviews and all that shit occurring regularly
> later virgins

Ask questions during interview.
Ask about trainings - it's usually a good sign when company offers training budget. Ask about specifics - sometimes it's a shared pluralsight account, and nothing else, which means that that had an idea and half assed it into existence.
Ask tech recruiter about overtime, a good sign is when they have no idea or say that it must be budgeted and scheduled - it means that it does not happen often.
Ask if it is possible to select and change projects, and how often it happens - if often, it may be bad low level management, or people learning new things and jumping between projects.
Also make sure to ask about rules for promotions and pay rises. Good company wił have a clear set of rules in place.
All of the above apply to mid to large companies.
For small company, i'm sure it will be different.

Recruiters are fucking unbelievable sometimes.

With about one year experience I applied to company A and company B. Kinda competitors in what dev skillset they're looking for.

Company A reviewed my CV and decided I don't have enough experience without giving me a chance to present my actual knowledge.

Company B tells me screw your CV come along show us what you got. I rocked the interview with an offer the next day which I accepted, absolutely thrilled.

Fast forward 7 months I get an email from company A, same recruiter, inviting me to an interview as they're "impressed with my profile and feel like I've gone a long way" (definitely just because company B hired me and I passed my probation)

Ah the joy responding to them that as I value honour and honesty quite highly I don't think I would be a culture match for company B where it is a norm to reject candidates and come back pouch them after they pass probation at competitors.

Eek.. instant apologies email and of course explaining it's not poaching but "exploring opportunities".

Screw company A, honestly.

on my first job interview(7 years ago when Android wasn't populer yet) the recruiter was like "so, you know Android?" and I was like "yeah I got 3 months of experience" so he just told me immediately "great, when can you start"
that was the shortest interview in my life so far.

*The interview wasn't off to a good start, as the recruiter forgot he invited me for an interview, so he just led me to some empty office after letting me wait for good 15 minutes. *

Them: Here, write some pseudocode to find a value in a tree.

Me (thinking): Interesting question; DFS / BFS would be really simple here, but nobody uses trees for that - perhaps I should ask about characteristics of the tree in question?

But before I realised, the interviewer already rushed out the office, so I just picked up my jacket and left...

A recruiter rang me up on my birthday (Friday)

Had an interview (Tuesday)

Started work (Wednesday)

recruiter of a company i was dying.to work in calls while im at work in a job i hated.

recruiter: hello, i saw the several applications you sent using our careers portal.

me: (rushes to bathroom ready to talk about scheduling the first interview) yes that is correct thank you fornbcontacting me !

recruiter: please stop applying several times, you have been rejected and need to wait a minimum of 3.5 years for us to re evaluate your resume in the future.

This is not an interview test just an awkward experience in general regarding interview.

This happened two years ago when I was a fresh university graduate looking for a job in UK as an immigrant (Im EU national).

Went to an interview for a web dev+tech support position. Two fat guys with tshirts met me and started interviewing me for a sysadmin position. Started asking me about disaster recovery and stuff.

Turns out recruiter messed up not only companies but positions as well. Also these two guys didnt bother to check anything.

I pulled out the job ad for which I applied originally, interviewers had a look at it and still proceeded questioning me while knowing that I prepared for completely different position interview.

Needless to say, it went terrible and I didnt get the job. I dont know if its just me or Im unlucky, but I had a lot of encounters in UK with so many incompetent recruiters.

I interviewed to this small company. It was a position requiring a lot of experience they said. They did Microsoft SQL server and their technical interview questions were so easy it took me a lot of time to answer them because I was looking for traps, like for real. Think I might've answered too complex for them as well.

In the non-technical interview they joked about how they'd need to reserve two saunas in team events (Finnish thing) as they were all male and I would've been the first female.

Then they asked questions about my *children*. "Who takes care of them when they're sick?" Ummm, yeah, illegal much.

In the end they didn't hire me but they took two interns from the vocational school (or applied sciences). Yeah, so hard a job a Master of Science in Software Engineering with (at that point) three years of full-stack experience couldn't handle but some not even graduate interns could do?

Oh, and fun thing was. A couple months later a recruiter called me about the same company. I told *her* the story and she said she's gonna drop that company from her list and said no wonder they complain about not getting people for them. xD

I also send a tip to my unions discrimination department. They used my case as an example in presentations so suppose this experience served a purpose. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Not really a recruiter but at interview at one place I was given a printed code example and told that there was 8 bugs and that I shield treat it like a code review.

I found 16 bugs and 4 bad practices and explained them all to the director of software engineering and team lead (that set the test), they agree that I was correct; the director turned to the team lead and said ... Are you are your a senior

I tried not to laugh lol

So I got an e-mail from a recruiter (a.k.a. recruiter spam) today looking for a candidate with four "essential skills" and my head almost exploded when I read what they were. I have regained my composure just enough to be able to write this rant, but I'm still not myself. I recommend sitting down for this. Are you ready?

The four "essential skills" were:
Java, Jenkins, Eclipse, IntelliJ

I don't know where to begin. Motherfucker, where do you get off telling me which IDE to use? Oh wait, you didn't, you expected me to be an "expert" with two completely different ones, you numb nuts. Why the fuck would I be? I swear to fuck these idiots would probably screen out the best programmer in the world because s/he uses VI/emacs/Atom/Sublime/fucking-Notepad.

I can hear them saying "oh, you don't know IntelliJ? Sorry, we need an expert in that."

Fuck off you filthy cunt! No, sorry, I take that back, I shouldn't be mean to the mentally disabled.

Also, Jenkins? Really? Any developer can pick up how to use Jenkins to its full effect in a matter of hours, or a couple of days at most.

Why do companies hire these jackasses to do a job as important as recruitment? Why do they write job specs that are so incredibly stupid? I almost replied to express interest so I could go to the interview and throw a bucket of red paint on them (because they're making me bleed inside).

Where's the Tylenol?

Wan't to hear my ridiculous recruiter story? I am originally from MA, and been on a small town since I was 4 (Born in Brazil). Well after years and years on the same town, always going back (MA) when a job here and there wouldn't work out. Going through some depression, and just got tired of everything. Well one day I found a recruiter on linkedIn and he knew a friend of mine. So he said he had a possible job offer but it was in Florida, anyhow he would later contact me and in the mean time for me to send him some examples of my work. Well in the mean time I packed my stuff and called him letting him know I was on the way. He was shocked and didn't know what to say. Went to the interview with him, got the job. 9 months later :) I don't regret taking my changes, it was all I had. I'm currently employed, love my job, and if it wasn't for my ridiculous recruiter... I don't know where I would have ended up. Long story, sorry /: ... here is a potato :) (9gag reference)

* Recruiter says he has a nice proposition

* I say that I'm not comfortable switching jobs yet, but I'd be up for a short phone interview to hear him out, out of pure interest

* Recruiter explains a lot about the company, and then asks if I am up for "a short Teams introduction with the team lead to hear more"

* I say yes, though still stating that I do not intend on switching, but want to know more in case of a future possibility

* Recruiter says I need to send my full CV / Resumé plus grades from every school I ever intended (including the early ones that doesn't even matter)

* I say no since 1) I'd have to dig them out from the basement, 2) I am not looking for a job right now, and 3) This request is absurd to me, and NOT a norm in my part of the world when I am not applying.

* He says I HAVE to, since I could be lying
(I am mostly self-taught and have very little actual education, so this logic made NO sense to me)

* I continue to say no, stating that it's simply not worth the time finding the old grades in the basement for a job I will not be taking, and that I am mostly self-taught so grades wouldn't matter

* He starts getting angry, accusing me of "purposefully wasting his time", and says he'll warn the company about me.

Fair point. I'll warn my contacts about you then. Have a nice day, you f*cking prick :)

-Welcome to our entry level positing with Xyz company. I know we told your recruiter we are very hands on with developers. But we aren’t. Also you will be the only developer and there is no team.

-uh…. Okay..

-for the first part of your interview we are going to have you write a program in node that will reach out to our api and sort medical data with our clients.

-so you want me to create something live, and you’re going to be using it before you hire me in the actual work place?

-if it works, yes. Then we will decide on if we will hire you or not.

Wtaf?

2nd interview today for a job. I thought it went well but I could tell one guy did not like me. They said they were done after 20 minutes. They told the recruiter I was not senior enough. I have been a dev since 2001. I answered all of their tech questions. Really frustrating.

I'm a lead engineer, I design, I code, I debug, I test, I struggle, I deliver, I'm just a basic building block in my company, hardly involve in product roadmap planning. This is pretty clear in my LinkedIn profile. Jp Morgan recruiter called me for Vice president role. VP? Seriously? me skipping 4-5 levels, just with an interview process? Are you kidding me?
I asked her two times "...are you sure?", I lost my words, somehow gathered courage and asked, "what's the portfolio looks like, how many people will report to me?" Then she, calmly revealed that it's just an ic dev role and they name it that ways in their company.

What the actual ducking-duck-duckkk!

P.s. not sure about jpmc rest of the world but that's how it is in jp Morgan india.

Had a job interview for a front end dev (Involving a technical test). After couple of days, recruiter says - Unfortunately they say that you are too focused on best practices so they want to pass.

In january 2023 i was contacted by a recruiter offering me a job position.

I DID NOT ASK FOR A JOB.

I WAS NOT LOOKING FOR A JOB.

THEY contacted ME.

Ok. So i went along with it and see how it goes. They probably wont hire me nor would i give a shit. Chatted with this recruiter for a while. She forgets to answer my message for 5 fucking days. Twice. Once because she was doing God knows what and the second time because she was on paid vacation. Fine i don't give a shit about you at all anyways.

So this recruiter chatting has been stretched out for several days. I think over a WEEK. So she forwarded me to their lead developer.

I applied to work as a full stack java spring boot backend + angular frontend engineer.

So:
- java backend
- angular frontend
- full stack
- shitload of devops
- shitload of projects i built
- worked with clients
- have CS degree, graduated
- worked a job at their rival company

What could go fucking wrong with all of these stats right?

During technical + hr interview (3 of us on google meets) they asked me what salary I'd be comfortable with.

I said $1500/month straight out.

keep in mind:
- In my country $500 or $600 is a salary for engineers per month
- You get a raise of +$150 which is around $750 after working for 1+ year
- You can earn $1000+ after you work for +2 years
- Rent here is $200-300 a month at minimun. And because of inflation its just getting worse especially with food. So this salary is not for living but for survival.

Their lead engineer gave me a WHOLE ASS FUCKING PROJECT TO BUILD and i had to code it within 10 days. Great so at least 17+ days of my fucking life to waste on these fucktards who contacted ME.

The project was about building a web app coffee shop literally what mcdonalds has when you order via those tablets. I had to build this in java spring boot and angular. I had to integrate:
- docker, devops
- barmen, baristas, orders
- people can order at the table or to go
- each barista can take 5 orders at a time
- each coffee has different types of fields and brewing time
- each barman brews each coffee different period of time
- barista cant take more than 5 orders for to go until barman finishes the previous order
- barista can take more than 5 orders but if those orders were ordered from table, and they have to be put in queue
- had to build CRUD admin functionality coffee's
- had to export them all of the postman routes
- had to design a scalable database infrastructure for all of this alone
- shitload of stuff more

And guess what. After 10 painful days I BUILT THE WHOLE THING MYSELF AND I BUILT EVERYTHING THEY ASKED FOR. IT WAS WORKING.

Submitted it. They told me they'll contact me within 7 days to schedule the final Technical interview after they review what i built. Great so another 17+7 days of my fucking time wasted.

OH and they also told me to send them THE WHOLE GITHUB REPOSITORY AND TRANSFER OWNERSHIP TO THEIR COMPANY'S OWNERSHIP. once you do this you cant have your repository back. WTF? WHY CANT YOU JUST REVIEW THE CODE FROM MY PUBLIC REPOSITORY? That was so weird but what can i fucking do argue with these dickheads?

After a week of them not answering i contacted them via email. They forgot and apologized. Smh. Then they scheduled an interview within 3 days. Great more of my time wasted.

During interview i was on a google meets with their lead engineer, 1 backend java spring boot engineer and 1 angular frontend developer. They were milking me dry for 1 whole fucking hour.

They only pointed out the flaws in what i built, which are miniscule and have not once congratulated me on the rest of the good parts. I explained them i had to rush those parts so the code may not be perfect. I had other shit to do in my life and not work for your shitty project for $0/hour for 10 days you fucking dickriders.

So they quickly ran over to theory. They asked me where is jwt token stored. Who generates it. How the backend knows to authenticate user by it. I explained.

What are solid principles. I said i cant explain what is it but i understand how it works, why its needed and how to implement it (they can clearly see in the project i just build that i applied SOLID principles everywhere) - but i do admit i dont know the theory behind it 100% clearly.

Then they asked me about observables and promises in angular. I explained them how they work and how subscribe method is used (as they can clearly see that i used it in the code). Then they asked me to explain them under the hood of how observables work. The fuck? I dont know and dont care? But i can learn it as i work there?

Etc

Final result: after dragging this for 1 fucking month for miserable $1500/month they told me: we can either hire you now but for a much lower salary which you probably wont be happy with, or you can study more these things we discussed "and know why the car leaks oil" and reapply back to us in 2-3 months!

2 weeks ago: I received a call from a recruiter. After the interview, she said I was the right profile for the oportunity...

Last week: I went on the interview with the manager... In the end he also said that it was very good and I would receive a call in the next week to start the paperwork...

Today: I receive an e-mail saying that they decided to focus in a different path with the job, but will keep my data for future opportunities...

Really?!

To the recruiter who "got me an interview," that you knew was 5 hours away for me, on a Saturday, at 9am. I hope you get fucked by a leper horny bear! General recruiting drives from 9-5 are not interviews! I could have shown up anytime, and O was not even qualified! You lied to them about me, and they politely told me to fuck off! FUCK YOU!

- Get invited to apply to job
- Technical interview, guy shows up late starts small talk wasting time and gives me the exercise
- Start implementing the first algorithm, finish it passing min test cases then realize there's a solution that would make both algorithms a breeze
- I pitch my solution realizing there's no much time left, cuz we lost almost 20 min of my test hour talking about BS plus the almost 10 min he arrived late, and reassure the interviewer it can be developed faster
- Interviewer says it doesn't matter, we should finish edge cases
- Kay no problem, finish the first algorithm successfully and explain pitfalls on the second part with the current implementation
- I tell him there's a better solution but he doesn't seem to care, he says time's up

Now here's the funny part.

I get called by the recruiter today (2 weeks later) and she says "They are happy with your soft skills but feel there are some gaps with your coding, they would like to repeat the technical interview because they didn't feel there was much time to assess the 'gaps' ".
Interviewers, either I'm competent enough to work for you or not, your tests must be designed to assess that, if you see you can't fit the problem you want in the time you have left change the problem, reschedule or here's an idea...LEAVE THE BS CHITCHAT TILL THE END AND START THE INTERVIEW ON TIME. When I do interviews I always try to have one complete free hour and a one algorithm exercise because I expect the candidate to solve it, analyze it and offer alternatives or explain it, I've never had someone finishing more than 2 an hour.

You can keep your job I'll keep my time. I'll write a similar problem on the comments to pass on the knowledge for people who enjoy solving these kinds of problems, can't give you the exact same thing, also tip guys don't do NDA's for interviewing it makes no fucking sense trust me no one cares about your fizz buzz intellectual property.

Had a LinkedIn recruiter contact me a few months ago, I usually get one of these a week at minimum and usually more frequent the moment a start a new position. I hate that!

Anyway, story and rant:

The recruiter sent me a position that was pretty good, lots of benefits, not too far to drive, some remote days. With the usual list of responsibilities that they themselves dont know what half of them are but put them on anyway, I would automate those anyway if I wanted to work there.

All looks great, I ask if they can send me more details and the budget they company has for the position.

This was for a Senior position so I thought they would know what industry standard is.

The recruiter replies with a budget: $2000

I actually couldn't believe that they thought that was acceptable amount of money for the amount of responsibilities they wanted this new senior guy to do, no wonder the previous guy left.

I respond and told her that the amount is extremely low for what they want and I dont think they will find someone with the skills they need at that amount. I would be willing to talk for a minimum of $4000 and thats not guaranteed until I can go for a formal interview to find out exactly what the company needs.

The recruiters replay was probably the rudest anyone has ever been to me online, lol! She insists its industry standards and any Senior would be lucky to get such a great paycheck, the company has been in business for years and their developers have always been happy and paid industry standards.

I respond again and tell her that im getting $3800 at this small company where I currently am and if the "international company with clients all over the world" wants to have my skill set why is it that they cant pay premium salaries!? As well as the graphs for my Country on what the current industry standards are for salaries in my industry.

She never replied, but I kept tabs on the company she was recruiting for. They are still looking for a senior dev, its been 8 months now and no one has applied.

I am so happy more developers are standing up for themselves and not taking agencies bullshit with low salaries, crazy overtime and bad technical specs.

Note: Amounts are made up, was just to show comparison.

Boyfriend just got rejected after spending 45 minutes annotating a video using a company's shitty product they asked him to learn and utilize for the interview itself.

He did a fine job, if I do say so myself.

He was rejected today, with no reason other than a list of "common things that might have triggered a rejection".

Oh and the classic "we're sorry, we can't tell you why we rejected you - but we look forward to you re-applying in 45 days!"

Why the fuck not? If you're a recruiter and you do this shit, go royally fuck yourself. It's so beyond unprofessional and there's zero reason for it.

If he fucked up and failed, fine. At least tell him why. Be fucking adults. Your shit fucking stinks just like everyone else's, this isn't American Idol or the Hunger Games; you're not President Snow, and even Simon will tell you why you suck.

Fucking aggravating.

Recruiter story.. hilarious stuff..

I have an interview in next fifteen minutes and was setting up for it.

Recruiter calls me to remind me of the same.

I ask her to tell me who the interviewer would be, because she did not mention in the invite and also did not respond when I asked her over the email.

Her response: sure, wait a minute... Actually we are not allowed to disclose interviewer.

LMAO WTF!!

Recruiter is contacting me out of the blue for a vague job position. Tells me he is very interested in my skillsets as they are apparently difficult to find.

I don't hate my current job but it has some problems. My interest is piqued.

I ask for more details and tell him what minimum benefits I would expect, given I won't quit my job for less. I tell him I have a very tight schedule at work and at home right now but I could fit in some time for a 1-2h interview.

He tells me I'll get more details in the next interview and tells me there will be a little coding test. Ok sure...

Dude proceeds to send me a test description by email. It consists in designing an actual small python project. Would take at least 1 full day of work (tests, doc and functionality included). I have 3 days to complete it.

fuckThat.jpg

Is this guy for real? In this market?

That feeling when a company HR person (recruiter) tells you after your interview that this has been the best interview so far and you have made her day

:)

I applied for a developer position and got the email response about candidates available that were a better fit. No big deal.

Three days later, contacted by a recruiter for an exciting opportunity in my field (aren't they all?) Said, "What the hell?" and played along.

Made it past a screening phone call and a screening Skype session. Made a date to interview in person.

It's the same goddamned position, only now a recruiter gets to feed off my offer (if I get one).

people so damn concerned with what language you have or haven't used

i've been doing this for 10 years, give me the damn language or framework and i'll learn it and be productive in few weeks

sheesh

One of those days when i feel like complete shit and wish i hadn’t woken up.
I heard back from an interview i did last week (one of the faang type) and the recruiter started with “You didn’t impress any of your interviewers”. Man that hurt. I can’t unhear that. He went ahead to say they all recommended a mid-level role for me (they apparently said i had potential and could easily grow into a senior eng) instead of the senior lead i applied for. This is also subject to getting approval to hire mid-level engineers because the team needs more people but they only got approval to hire senior engineers. This cunt also added “dont worry about it. Just go about your usual business and i’ll call you next week if we have gotten the approval”. Ass! All i can do is worry because that is what i do best.
I think i am more sad and disappointed in myself because i thought the interviews went well. Wrote decent code and came up with good solutions on time. Had a good conversation with interviewers. Apparently for a senior, you cannot make mistakes which i did but once the interviewer gave me a clue, i got back on track.
Anyway, i slept with this anxiety, then woke up with tummy ache. On the drive out this morning to go to the bank, i drove my car into a pole and broke off my side mirror. Then my fucking power generator stopped working. And on my way to go and get my fixed mirror from the mechanic, my exhaust pipe broke in half due to a possible pothole i drove into.

Those fucking days where all that could go wrong goes wrong. My head is fucking pounding i can barely move my head without wincing. I am running out of money fast (i support my entire family) and i am worried about not getting a job. This blow to my confidence makes me feel worthless like i am not good for anything. Recruiter suggested i do another senior engineer interview for a different team which i passed the test for but i know the outcome would most likely be the same and i wanted the first team really bad. I just want to lie in bed and cry all day but this fucking headache won’t let me.

Tell me what tilts you the most when you are talking to a recruiter or HR personal. I will start;

Them implying that money should not be important when I am changing jobs- so I can accept their lowball offer.

STFU biatch, I am good at this profession, of course I will go to higher salary or higher comfort or a combination of both. I am not running a charity here!

The story of how I got my dream job.

I was working for a company with a job I got just after graduating university. It was ok, not very exciting tech but I learned a lot by just surrounding myself with professional code monkeys. I was there for about a year when my company bought parts of another company and there was talk about people getting fired. This made me worried since I was the last one to get hired, so I started looking around for other jobs. I received this e-mail from a company saying they were looking for interns, what a coincidence! I adjusted my CV and sent it in.

--A few weeks pass--

It's Friday and I'm at a dinner party, it's 10pm and someone is calling me. I pick up and it's a recruiter from this company. I get very nervous but the alcohol helps me keep my cool, I pass the initial idiot test and they invite me for an interview. Yay!

I go to work on Monday and in a 1-on-1 and I tell my boss about the upcoming interview, he gives me a high-five :)

The interview is approaching and I'm feeling that I'm about to get sick, I refuse to believe this so I start taking a lot of medicine (painkillers, cough medicine etc.). I feel a bit better and thank the gods for medication.

--D-day--

I wake up, put on my nicest clothes and get on the train. I had one hour to spare just in case, which was well needed because the fucking train is late by 30 minutes. I'm still heavily medicated because of my ongoing fever. When I arrive I basically have to run there and somehow I manage to pick up a coffee on the way there which I devour in two seconds. I'm ready for the interview!

Some guy meets me in reception and the first thing he says is "My colleague doesn't speak our language so we'll have to speak english". This is fine, I speak good english but I was not prepared for this so it caught me off-guard and made me even more nervous. We get in and start talking. Things are going OK despite my numbed brain. I try to make eye-contact to make a good impression with the foreign engineer but he keeps staring somewhere which is making me nervous.

We get to the technical part on a whiteboard and this is where my brain decides to stop communicating. I'm presented a simple task which I'm struggling with finishing, and I feel the embarrassment coming over me. "NOOOOO THIS IS MY DREAM JOB, THIS CANNOT BE HAPPENING!" I'm thinking to myself. After making myself look like a complete arsehole for some time we wrap it up and just before I step out the door I say to the engineer "You should checkout my Github page, I have lots of interesting stuff there" and he says "I'll be sure to do that" but I don't believe him.

I leave the office in fury (of myself) and make my way to the train station and even though it's the middle of the day I quickly devour two beers to calm my nerves and make me feel a bit better. I was so damn disappointed in myself, I wasted the opportunity of a lifetime! I go back home to my regular (now shitty) job.

--Two days later--

I get a call from an unknown number. I pick up the phone and it's the same recruiter guy. "So how did you think it went?" he says. "To be honest, I think it went really bad", I replied. "What? Really? Because they loved you, you got the job". (this was an obvious recruiter lie) "... wat, are you sure you called the correct person?" I said and he just laughed. The day after I quit my old job the whole department gets fired - such impeccable timing.

--A few months later--

I finish my internship and they want to keep me. I'm so happy. The engineer that was in the interview works on my team. I ask him "Why did you hire me? You know as well as I do that my interview was horrible". It turns out he _did_ look at my Github profile and that's how he knew I could write code. I also heard later that for my position there was about 2000 applicants and somehow I made the interviews.

I still work there today and I couldn't be happier (Sorry for the long text).

I was looking for a job after graduating. Came across a company who had a open internship role in a position that I’d never heard of. Email the recruiter and have a good talk but she can’t tell me what the direct responsibilities are. Can’t even answer “what software will I work with on a daily basis?” Even though I was a student, I knew something was wrong.

Ended up moving to the next round and got an interview with my potential managers. They still cannot tell me the responsibilities and nervously laugh when I asked. They do tell me that I will be actively programming which is all I really wanted.

Start the internship and find out that the first 3 months I am only supposed to observe video conferences. I can’t ask questions, I can’t even have my video on. Through these conferences, I found out that there’s no programming involved at all. All low-code drag and drop shit. After that I started applying to other jobs during those meetings

Fuck those managers for lying to me and wasting 3 months of my life

Recruiter:
I have an excellent opportunity for you! You're experience is exactly what my client is looking for.

Me: (Just got laid off a week's go) Awesome! Send me the details.

Recruiter: here they are
10+ years experience with Java, Spring frameworks...

My thoughts: Hmm I only worked with java for two years 3 years ago. Since it's been full-stack JavaScript. Total of 5 years in industry...

Me: Nah, doesn't look like my type of position... Thanks though

Recruiter: Just go interview and try it out.
<Proceeds to blow up my phone several times a day for a few days>

To Recruiters: Know when to stop. Also, read my LinkedIn profile. Where it says, looking for full-stack JavaScript opportunities.

A few days ago, I went to a job interview where the recruiter (boss) expected me to fill a position that normally pays $30 an hour elsewhere for $10 an hour. As if that wasn't enough, he acted like he was being very generous with the $10 an hour because I'm a college kid. Smh.

recruiter calls me up about a node position. I agree to a phone interview the next day at 3pm. wait around until 3:30pm...no call. I talk to him and he apologized a bunch and forgot to tell (or confirm the time) with the hiring company. he rescheduled for 2 days later (Fri) at 4pm. I wait around until 4:30pm...no call. this time he tells me I didn't answer my phone and I'm unprofessional. 5 min later I get an email from LinkedIn. (from the ceo of the hiring company) asking if I ever got back to the recruiter because they have been anxious to speak with me after seeing my resume.

He never once actually scheduled anything with them and led us both on.

I recently got into an interview where the interviewer made a huge mistake:

R: “what’s your resignation period?”
Me: “well, long story short I’m working on a contract so it’s actually short, just 1 month”
R: “mhhh could you make it 2 weeks somehow? We may really need to start sooner”

This is a sentence you shouldn’t say as a recruiter as now I know:
- You are desperate to find someone
- You have a time urgency
- You failed to find someone before
- You basically confirmed you want me in

These postings on angel.co

I swear to God it's like I've uncovered a conspiracy theory.

I had been searching for a side project now that holidays are coming and I really don't wanna get bored.

Applied to a few companies. About 5 of them "responded" with an acceptance. I write them my interview timings and all that's required.

Nothing. Nothing for like a solid week and a half.

Meanwhile I applied to more companies and still the same thing.

I decided to manually mail their companies regarding the process, so that I can, preferably, move on to other ones if they have rejected the application (which they obviously hadn't)

I get mails from almost all the companies with some or the other variant of "We were waiting for your reply to proceed"

I tell them I had replied over the conversations and they said they never got a message.

Now feeling that this might be angel.co at fault. I wrote a request to look into the issue. Meanwhile I tested the system using a friend's account as a recruiter and testing myself.

Unsurprisingly it was working flawlessly.

Narrowing it down to the companies then.

I sent a document with my findings to each of the companies and pretty much 50% of them stopped with replying.

The rest confirmed that they hadn't received any mails regarding the same and they saw no mail resembling the one I tested with my friend.

Kinda confusing but I asked them to look into it.

Meanwhile mail from Angel returns saying that their system is working perfectly fine even around my region. So idk what was the problem

I got a mail 3 weeks after the first mail to the company. They had been using a utility to auto-accept/reject profile applications. This util sent a lot of mails, even for rejections, to their mailboxes, filling them.

So they decided to remove these emails automatically by marking them spam. Apparently, the interview confirmation messages also count as these emails and were automatically archived. Thus removing my responses to those companies.

Idk if this is widespread issue because only one company has responded to me yet.

I'm still livid with this shit.

Worst recruiter experience:
Recruiter sets up interview with a company. I get to their office - the most packed place I have ever seen - devs practically sitting on each other, and the QA guys are being used as chairs....

So I wait for 15 minutes near the doot till the interviewer gets to me through the incredibley noisy openspace, and shakes hands. We go into a mess of a meeting room - and he explains that they will be moving to a bigger office soon. I say - looks like you should have moved by now....

Anyways - he askes me to tell him about myself - and I explain my background, Focusing on Android dev experience - The recruiter told me this was a senior Android dev position. The interviewer has a huge question mark above his head, but waits for me to finish. Then he tells me: so... no backend experience? so Now I have a huge question mark above my head...

turns out he is looking for BackEnd devs - Not android devs.

I got call from a recruiter today for a job I applied for on ziprecruiter. The job is listed as remote. He says no, it's Denver, I said ok, well the listing says remote, he says, ok, remote is fine. He then argued with me about salary after I said it depends on the company on where I'm happy to negotiate to, and I'd want to know about benefits etc.. here is what I currently make, etc etc. He kept on trying to make me pick an hourly number.. I said I don't know the company, so he told me the company name.. them started in again about hourly rate (no idea who the company was). Finally he moved on and said he'd email details.

5 mins later, email comes through, please give hourly salary. Then another saying he'd pass my details on and I can just ask for about remote during the interview. And then another email 2 mins later asking for education etc, all of which is in my resume. I looked the company he was recruiting for up to find that it's an IT recruitment firm, looking to fill a clients position. So a recruiter recruiting for a recruiter :|

I'll be so happy when I find a new job and don't have to deal with these idiots again.

The worst interview . . . .

So I wasn't looking for a job, but I wasn't happy in mine, and I would listen to pitches. Recruiter calls me about a Java job. I tell him I know JS and it's probably not a good fit. He insists my resume looks good and that they are happy to train. I know just enough Java to relent. Eventually we set up an phone interview for a day I happen to have off anyway because I'm going out of town. Morning of, I'm waiting around for the call. An hour after the scheduled time, the recruiter calls and tells me they had an "emergency" and wouldn't be able to speak today. One whole hour of my day, making me late to leave town: no one anywhere in the whole company could give me a call, no explanation, no apologies, for a job I had told them I wouldn't be a good fit for anyway.

I left them hanging the rest of the weekend and then take my name out of the running on Monday. Respect people's time and lives!

My most ridiculous experience with a recruiter was when I went to an interview in a top 5 consulting company. In the first interview they told me that I was great. In the second interview they told me that I was great, and in the third interview they told me that they loved me but that I was overqualified for the job they were offering.

tl;dr I was too good, so they rejected me.

Went in for a recruiter led hunt for architect-level positions. Got all the way through two companies, two offers. Then out of nowhere a third offer shows up, way more money, control. Choices were accept a higher offer, or do a final interview with a CTO and let them know there's a more competitive offer for a position I was pretty sure would have no actual authority given the attitude of the people I talked to.

I bailed on the recruiter and took the better gig. Felt a little bad, assuaged guilt with expensive booze, cars.

Well, flu's going around. Decided to hit me hard today. Perfect fucking timing too, right when my best friends have their show's performances (tonight was opening night).

Also today I got a message from a college recruiter (for the one I actually want to go to) wanting to schedule an interview. I ended up explaining my situation to him and he understood, so that'll probably happen sometime next week.

I can say that my web dev adventures have been going fairly well today, at least the time I've been able to work on it (kinda been fading between sleeping and working all day). JavaScript is..kinda dumb sometimes, but nothing I can't handle. Almost started hitting things cause CSS was being dumb earlier with aligning. Overall, it's going well.

I still fucking hate being sick.

Anyone else here with anxieties, depression or what-not? I feel this could get heavy, but I feel this is the only place I could write this. So...

My 18-month-long programming course is slowly coming to an end. Time has come for us to be sent out to job interviews at various companies.
Every single time an interview comes up, I feel the exact same mix of my inconfidence, constant anxiety, "I'm gonna throw up", impatience and whatever else is there in my head. I figured it would get easier with each consecutive interview but it hasn't.
The questions they ask make me sick. The atmosphere is unfathomable. Robots are more humane.

- Why do you want to work with us?
I need money for my meds and something to down them with? I willingly put myself through this shit to become a corporate slave, what else is there to say? I can only hope I'll be writing any code here.

- Where do you see yourself in 2-3 years?
Far away from anything remotely related to an HR department of any sort?

- Had you been a fruit, which one would you be? Whatever would come out of my tears blended with semen? What the fuck is even that question?

Of course those aren't my actual responses, but conjuring the IRL ones to finish the process is a serious burden. And those are only some HR ones. After this barrage of questions they want my lifeless, flaccid body to write code. I mean ok, it's a software dev gig, but I already gave all I had on self-clairvoyance.

We'll be in touch!

Is there a strategy you guys have when you go to an interview? Any tips for taming the acrid beast running around in your brain? Is it too much to talk with a human in a humane language without "15 buzzwords to make the recruiter moist"?

The Setting:

Ola Cabs (One of the biggest competitors of Uber, for those who don’t know) comes to college to recruit software devs:

✅ Pre-placement talk

Now time for the aptitude/code round. Hackerearth used as the solution to run the test and compile code, as well as check the result immediately. Or so I thought.

3 programming questions, 2 hours.

The problem:
Me: *Write the code for the first question* (and I know it’s correct)

Me: Clicks “Compile and run”

Compiler: *Compiling*

*LITERALLY ONE FUCKING HOUR LATER*

Compiler: *Still compiling*

Hackerearth. What a fucking joke. Though the course of the HOUR I waited, I kept questioning the recruiter head from Ola and his response was:

Recruiter: “Try the other program, it’s possibly a problem with your code. I’ll check at my backend also, hold on.”

YOU FUCKING DIMWIT. MY CODE IS PERFECT AND EVEN IF IT WASN’T IT WOULDN’T TAKE MORE THAN A MINUTE (If you’re factoring in absolutely worst cases) TO COMPILE THIS SMALL ASS FUCKING PROBLEM’S CODE.

In the meanwhile I even coded one of the other remaining questions’ solution and the shit still didn’t work.

At the end of the 2 hour time limit, I’d finished code for all 3, the recruiter stops us all from coding and says:

Recruiter: “Just submit your code, we will evaluate it and get back to you.”

Like fucking hell, asshole.

*One hour post interview*

EVERYONE who attempted the aptitude code round (At least 30 of us) receive messages on our phones:

“Unfortunately you did not clear the aptitude round and we will not be able to take your application forward.”

FUCK YOU OLA. IN ONE FUCKING HOUR YOU “EVALUATED” ALL OF OUR CODE? FUCK YOU HACKEREARTH FOR YOUR SHIT FUCKING EXECUTION OF A “SOLUTION”. Maybe test your own fucking product before offering a solution to companies.

Fucking lost opportunity.

Recruiter reaches out to me, he says he saw my LinkedIn and thinks I'd be a great fit.

I say ok and send my resume.

He gets me a phone screen. I do it, I think I do a pretty good job. (I'm able to answer all the questions well, I think I'm onto the coding interview for sure.)

A couple days later I get a generic rejection email.

I'm not sure what happened. They had my resume, I know I did well on the technical questions (I do that kind of thing for my current job all the time.)

No idea why I'm rejected. If it was something about my experience, they could have seen that from my resume. If it was something from my phone screen, I have no idea what it could have been.

Just wanted to rant >:[

I genuinely regret and believed that I just got scammed by recruiter. There's a company wanted me to create a prototype of Social Media App in order to be qualified for the interview , which I completed in weeks, as soon as they got my source code, they went ghosting me.

I woke up in the early morning today, in my WeChat Moment appears to be an advertisement of a "Social Media App" , which the design and the concepts are very familiar.

So technically I just build the an app for their money making scheme, and I am unemployed.

I hate myself for making this decision, I thought the app is for testing my capabilities, but unfortunately that's not it...

我只是棋盤上的棋子...........

Made a LinkedIn profile for the first time since like 2013.

I haven’t put current job on there, only been here a month and if I absolutely have to have to I’ll just mention working here for a month but it wasn’t a good match in an interview.

Start getting the expected recruiter messages once I finished the profile.

One of them is a recruiter at current job.

Fucking lol.

So about 3 weeks ago I was laid off from my dream job due to corporate bullshit. From the feedback received since then it is clear that the company made a mistake hiring a brand new React dev while they really needed an experienced one. Because the consultants who were supposed to be weren't. And the other in-house front end dev was an elitist asshole. And I never received proper feedback until it was too late. Actually I still don't have proper feedback save for some vague stuff which really sounds like the kind of feedback you'd give someone in the middle of their learning process. They even said eventually given more time I could have made it. But alas they felt they had to make a call in the best interest of the company.

Things moved fast since then, I took a week to recover and then I spent time updating my resume before getting back in touch with the recruiter who got me my last job. Great guy and he was happy to help me again. Applied to some positions, got some replies, first in person interview I go to they are immediately willing to take me on.

So now I'm supposed to start tomorrow but somehow I'm having my doubts. The company isn't an IT company but rather a fashion company. They believe in developing in house tools because past attempts with external companies resulted in them trying to push their vision through. Knowing who they worked with I agree, they tried to oversell all the time. But after talking with their developers I noticed they are behind on their knowledge. But so am I. So there was no tech interview which means I am getting an easy way in. And if they honour their word I'll be signing tomorrow for around my old wages.

So you'd think that sounds good right? And yet I'm worried it's going to be another shit show working on software without proper analysis or best practices. I mean the devs aren't total idiots, they are mediors like me and I think their heart is in the right place. They want to develop a good project but it will be just us 3 making a modern .net wpf application with the same functionality of the old Access based system currently in use. I was urged by the boss to draw on my experience and I think he wants me to help teach them too. But I'm painfully aware for my decade since graduating I'm a less than average .net dev who struggles with theory and never worked a job where I had someone more experienced to teach me. I coasted most of the time in underpaid jobs due to various reasons. But I'd always get mad over shitty code and practices. Which I realize is hypocritical for someone who couldn't explain what a singleton class is or who still fails at separation of concerns.

So yeah my question for the hivemind is what advice would you give a dev like me? I honestly dislike how poor I perform but it often feels like an insurmountable climb, and being over 30 makes it even more depressing. On the other hand I know I should feel blessed to find a workplace who seems to genuinely believe that people grow and develop and wishes to support me in this. Part of me thinks I should just go in, relax, but also learn till I'm there where I want to be and see if these people are open to improving with me. But part of me also feels I'm rushing into this, picking the first best offer, and it sure feels like a step backwards somehow. And that then makes me feel like an ugly ungrateful person who deserves her bad luck because she expects of others what she can't even do herself :(

The best way to get an interview call is through referrals.

Recruiters are lazy. They don't want to sift through resumes coming from sites like LinkedIn. Referrals are usually better quality.

I'm not saying this. My recruiter friend is.

I have an interview tomorrow, but I kinda feel like a dick about it.

A former coworker asked for a reference for a job and told me about the position.. I agreed, and a recruiter dealing with them calls to get it. While on the call I leave them a brief blurb about my skillset and we agree that I'll keep his details on file just in case (I wasn't looking to move on, but I do like to keep in touch with recruiters who don't seem to be a pita)

A month goes by and my position is suddenly ending soon, so I call him and ask if there is anything new.. no, but.. the same employer I gave a reference for would like to talk with me about that same position.

I'd never have heard about the job without my former coworker asking for a reference, but on the other hand, if they are still looking after a month, surely my former coworker wasn't really still in the running, right?

Anyway.. awkward conversation ahead should I get the job.

Also, wish me luck 😁

So recruiter scheduled an interview and he gave me the hands on problem they'll ask me to code.

He says I'll get 60-90 minutes... so I tried coding it and I've come up with some questions I will be asking the interviewer before I start:

1. How professional do you want it?
2. Can I use my own libraries so I don't have to write the boilerplate stuff? (That should cut-off about 30 mins and make the logic much clearer)
3. Can I write it on a PC?
4. Can I not write the Imports
5. Can we just skip this? As we all know, you can see 90% of the elements needed for your program in some form in my GitHub repos.

The company who said i passed the interview and got the job is not sending me email from hiring department to schedule interview. They said they gonna do it. But the recruiter told me they have a high demand of interviews so i guess they dont have time to reply to me back and hire me officially? Im still waiting its been a few days.

Or is this a slow sign of these shitfucks pulling back and will ghost me or reject me for no fucking reason even after telling me i passed and got the job but now they changed their minds for no reason?

I got invited to interview with a startup(series B) by a former manager. I told them I had RSUs vesting in six months and that unless they could give me a sign on for their amount I couldn’t leave. The recruiter says “Don’t worry, we can get creative with the sign on bonus”
I go through their whole interview process and get the offer.
Sign on is 15% of the amount of my vesting RSUs, and a base below what I make now.
Why waste my time not telling me the comp range from the start and why lead me on with a comment about a sign on? I told you up front what I made!

I was on a interview two weeks ago, got a mail today that I had been selected to the third round (government intel stuff)

I got clean sheet from the police and the "Security Service" in the country.

And now, in the mail. The recruiter wanted me to give contacts to my current boss. I am one of 4 and I dont want to sacrifice the trust that my boss have on me.

What the '''' should I do?

Worst recruiter experience wasn't mine, but it was one I overheard:

Buddy of mine who, like me, was older does a couple rounds of interviews at a nice place and gets a call back from the company recruiter. He puts the recruiter on speaker phone so I can hear too.

They are very nice and tell him they selected another candidate, bummer but no big deal.

Hey I the age of ghosting at least they called right?

He is still upbeat and asks if there was anything he could do better interview or technical stuff.

She tells him "We weren't sure you would fit into the culture."

This is a bit odd as this guy is outgoing and one of those folks that everyone loves being around and working with, just a naturally likeable guy.

He asks what she meant about culture fit and she responds "Well you're older..."

He thinks he misheard her and asks again "Your older and we don't think you will fit in that way."

Had an interview last week set up by a recruiter. Interview went well, aced the tech part, got on well with the interviewers, etc. They had one more interview the next day and would make the decision. Got feedback from recruiter the next day. I was in the top 2. Was told I had the best experience and skills. Thought I had this. Later that day got told they went with the other candidate because my recruiters presented me for $5000 more than the employer's posted upper limit. The employer just felt my salary requirements would push their budget too much so they went with the cheaper, less qualified candidate.

Not happy with my recruiter at all!

A recruiter presented me to a Company for a 3 months Freelance Position. Unfortunatley I got rejected, however I kept Contact with the Company and i asked for a fulltime employment, they were fine with that and i got a tech Interview Next Week with them. Now my recruiter contacted me and Knew already about everything, they kept asking me what they should negotiate with them. I told them i will negotiate myself as I am looking forward to a full Time employment with them, they tell me it has to be under their name, eventhough it has nothing to do with the agreed freelancing position.. are they allowed to do that ?

As the saying goes "beggars can't be choosers" and I need to get a job.
I got approached by a recruiter in LinkedIn who had attached a PDF brochure.
It seems OKish, but the only part that worries me is "step 3" of recruitment process:
"Invitation to France and have a face-to-face technical interview and meet the team."

Will I be out of bounds if I ask the technical interview (if I ever make it that far) take place into Skype?
There are some savings, but going to France (somewhere between Cannes and Nice in summer period!!!) just for an interview that I might fail is a big gambit for me.

I feel like there should be "dev recruiter" position that people with developer skills could fill. Every time I go to an interview, I just know the person asking me dev related stuff has no fucking clue about anything I'm saying, it's printed all over their faces.

A good developer almost instantly knows if you know your craft or not.

Let's not keep wasting everyone's time

Interviewed for a Mid/Senior developer role and finally got feedback. The company feels I'm not experience enough for the senior role but think I'm a good fit for the company. Bad thing is they don't have any entry level positions available. I honestly feel like I am ready for a mid level role and maybe even a senior role. They say to keep considering them while they try to get approval for entry level position, but this is a massive company and who knows how long that will take. Recruiter said it's not a no, just not a right now. /:

Oh and going off my last rant, I found out that the senior dev was wrong about set interception being '|' in python, I found out that it's actually a method called interception(set). So even the senior dev didn't know off the top of his head. /:

Have some projects in GitHub but my biggest one is a private repo I'm doing the entire backend and even frontend. Can't share that repo or share details because it's a project a friend (his idea) and I are planning on releasing. (:

Overall feeling pretty bummed because I was looking forward to steady work that'll improve my skills even further... I'm self taught so it's a bit tougher to land interviews because of the automated process most companies have with resume filtering. ):

Going to keep doing small contracted projects until I land another interview. In the meantime trying to keep my spirit up. (:

I did an interview last week.

Recruiter asks me about why I want to work for their company.

I'm too honest and tell them I mostly just don't want to work for my current company.

Next day get screened out despite being extremely qualified for the job.

Shouldn't have been so honest in that interview lol.

I got a call from a recruiter yesterday. The employer wants to get me in for an interview. It's for a fairly big company and I'm beginning to feel really nervous. I hate the place I'm at and I need this job. Not just for money but also to retain my sanity.

The interview is with a development manager, I wonder what kind of questions he/she will ask. Ahhhh how do I prepare for the unknown? 😱

So I got a telephone interview for a job that a recruiter found for me. Call went well, comes to the development test. Small application in ruby on rails, haven't used it in about 2-3 years so a tad rusty. Completed the test under two days (was given until Friday) not too bad if I say so myself. It's for a junior position anyway so I'll assume they wouldn't mind giving me a refresher to help jog my memory.

> be me
> studying 1.5 years liberal arts stuff and general education class at community college
> transfer to a 4 year university.
> realize I need a major
> Realize I also I wanted to 9ne day have a family.
> realize family would need money
> "struggling actor" not a great choice
> pray about what I should be doing
> get distinct impression that instead of attending the session on majors at the college of fine and performance arts to go to session with the college of Science and engineering.
> hear pitch for computer science.
> signup for introduction to programming taught with c++.
> A couple semesters down the line take 3 classes all at once Discrete Math 1, Linear Algebra, and database design and administration.
> around week 6 realize that all 3 classes revolved around sets and set logic and set math.
> realize rdbs's are "applied" set math and that Each class a little more "applied" than the former.
> Be genius at SQL and set math
> havereally smart database teacher mentored me
> get introduced to the recruiter at the career fair.
> get interviews
> get flown out for 2md interview
> get internship
> do work, and get project back under budget
> a job offer
> finish senior year
> start as a "real" developer supporting business data and analytics.
> ???
> profit.

had an interview at a place that went good at the technical part but I didn't do great at their 'abstract' questions. the guys interviewing were complete stone faced as well, no personality, pretty sure I wouldn't have liked working there anyways. a few years later and they are still looking for people. the recruiter rings up and I said I wouldn't want to re-interview unless the process had changed. he guaranteed me it had. so I went back in and it was exactly the same. exactly the same technical questions, followed by more abstract questions. different guys but same no-personalities. never going back

Still looking for my first full-time dev role. After being endlessly rejected from every dev job I've applied for, it starts to eat away at your confidence. Makes me wonder if I'm not as competent as I believe I am. :/

Fortunately, I landed a coding interview with Google! It is my dream job to work at Google, so the fact that they even acknowledged me & my skillset makes me so happy and reaffirms my belief in my capabilities. :D

It's pretty odd, that after applying to 20+ open Google positions relevant to my skill level & location and often with references included, then having been rejected from all of them, that I finally got a chance with them when one of their recruiters found me on LinkedIn and liked what she saw. I cleared the screening call, and made it to the first coding interview.

Of course, even with all the interview prep I've done, it was all practically for naught since they caught me off guard with a crazy conceptual problem anyway. (Well, actually, was I 'caught off guard' if I was already expecting to be caught off guard? o.0) I struggled heavily in the first half of the interview, but found my footing towards the end. So I knew I screwed up and that it was highly unlikely for me to get the job.

Nonetheless, Google had the decency to reject me not via an automated email, but through an actual direct phone call with my recruiter. (The cruelty of the automated application rejection system in our society is a whole rant of its own, for another time.) My recruiter told me that they felt I wasn't ready but they liked what they saw, so they will be revisiting me in exactly a year to reconsider me.

To know that I wasn't fully rejected, and that my dream company Google sees real potential in me, is highly reassuring. It means I'm not a lost cause; I simply need to keep looking. Google will want me more strongly once I have the experience that comes from a fresh grad's first full-time job.

Can someone explain to me what sort of recruitments logic is this?

Me after giving interview: so when can i expect to get a call back about my results?

Recruiter: within a day or two. Definitely before X.

A few weeks after X...

Me: so, any update?
Recruiter: yes. Are you available now for the next round?

Me: .... Couldn't you have said that earlier???!! (in my mind)

Someone wrote to me on linkedin for a php job. I had enough time and accepted the interview. We set it for the next day at a time that both me and the recruiter wanted.
I waited for him to even contact me until 5-6 hrs after the time we set, to tell me he was busy with meetings (wtf you wanted 14pm). I gave another chance and we set the interview the next day at the same time.

I waited for 2-3 hrs. This time he wrote me back even later, it was almost midnight to tell me the same excuse.

Is this a red flag for you? Should I even consider working with this guy?

Got hit up by a FANG recruiter on LinkedIn. Almost went for it, but then I remembered I'd have to spend 3 months prepping for it, since it's been 5 years since I've manually reversed a linked list, back when we did that for funsies in college...

Plus how do you tell your manager you're quitting to "prep" for an interview...and moreover, how do you go back and sheepishly tell them you didn't make it...

Like, that one simple LinkedIn message caused me to re-evaluate my life and seriously consider leaving my comfy job to do something insane like try to work at <insert FANG company here>. And I wasn't going to quit until I had made it.

So the last 2 devs who I really looked up to and respected at my company peaced out within the last 2 months. So I began seriously chasing offers while the market was hot. The new bigwigs that were brought in at the company knew I was one of the biggest flight risks, so they threw more money at me without me asking for it.

I just got an offer from a company that I really like that matched the salary that I was bumped to - to them it exceeds my expectations because they did not know about this preemptive bump.

Best part is, I applied to this company on my own, the old fashioned way. No recruiter as my hype person or negotiator. I made a good impression on them myself.

No, wait, the real best part - they offered me a senior level role after seeing my code in a day-long working interview (virtual of course). I mean I had to do some shit with RabbitMQ, which I had heard about and seen in passing, but never worked with before, which to my own surprise, I got working in a matter of a few hours. Blows my mind that someone outside of my old company actually thinks I'm good.

No, wait, the REAL real best part: I've spent the last 4 years - a large majority of my professional career - at my current company. I experienced a lot of growth, but they shoehorned me into a development manager role, which bummed me out as i found myself getting farther and farther away from the code. I'm so excited to get a fresh start and go back to spotify + code for 10 hours a day.

1. Applied to a company as a senior dev and sent them my prefered rate
2. Got rejected
3. Contacted recruiter and asked why. The rate seems to be not within their budget
4. Knocked down my rate by 15 percent, did their intro and technical interviews
5. Received an email with feedback that on some topics during technical interview I displayed senior knowledge and on others a very strong mid knowledge. Basically they are trying to gaslight me and presented me a final offer with a knocked down rate by another 30 percent this time. Bitch thinks if I reduced my rate I will do it that for second time.

And they are supposed to be US based company. Offering me a rate that I could get 10km away from my home lol.

Gonna ghost them for a couple days and respons them on Monday that I would like to proceed with the original rate that was quoted by them.

Fucking idiots expect a senior to know everything. If there was a person like that he would be charging at least double of what they are offering.

Got my first technical job with no interview. Well, let me explain.

A recruiting firm contacted about my resume that it was impressive. *I didn't have any corporate experience in there. Just school projects, personal projects and internship.

I had a quick phone interview with them and also asked me for an in person interview that same week on Wednesday. After that interview, the guy asked if I could come back for some paperwork because they have found a job for me to start the next Monday. This was exciting.

Monday at the new job, I dressed up in fitted suit and all thinking the company will also interview me. I walked in and the director was like, "welcome, you know you don't have to dress up for this job right? Feel free!" They took me to me workstation with an already clean set up.

I was confused and my stupidity asked: "what time is the interview?". The immediate supervisor I was going to be working with replied, "no need for that. We got you because of your skills. That's all we need so we both went water each other's time".

Long story short, I worked with them for almost a year but due to financial issues they couldn't extend my contract. However, the director got me a new permanent job at one of his friends office and says he will hire me back in a heartbeat if things go well at his place.

I kind of feel bad leaving the recruiter because he was one of those who actually cared and willing to help entry level.

So it turns out I was interviewing for a senior role, when in fact I'm looking for a junior-mid role.

Two days ago I had a bad feeling creep up on me when the HR interviewer mentioned to me that they were looking to fill a senior role. I should have interjected. Instead, I stupidly asked the recruiter after passing the HR interview. He answered that the company would also take a mid-level developer and he thinks that I have a good chance. In retrospective, I'm not sure on what basis he made the judgement call.

I had the technical interview today and didn't get the job as I expected. But the same recruiter told me that the company said they'd take me for an intermediate role in the future, but I didn't make it for the senior role.

Can I take that as "you're not technically sound enough" put in a nicer way to soften the blow? But by the company or the recruiter? Or would they actually consider me for a mid-level role in the future? Who is lying or not lying?

Steam off my head now. Thanks for reading my rant.

Context: I'm still transitioning from another field and barely had one year of web development experience so far, half of which was from where I just learned to hack stuff together. I'm now going to focus on landing an internship or a junior role, without going through recruiters since I'd be waste of their time.

Prequel to my previous post:

I received an offer from a startup that did not meet the originally advertised salary range. In every other aspect this place seemed like where I'd enjoy working the most and each previous interaction made a very good impression on me. So needless to say this was quite a shock.

They immediately apologised and explained the situation. They only now started to expand to and hire from my location (which can be verified) and I would be the very first person from this location (seems true too but I could only really verify this after joining). They explained the salary range I had seen was for their main hub location (accurate too) and said that the recruiter who posted the ad did not adjust it to mine. I asked why tf they didn't notify me of this earlier and they said they are super busy with everything, are new to location based salaries and normally don't check the recruiters posts as it should be her work.

Now, even if this is totally true, it was an awful sudden shock and felt a bit like a scam - totally contradicting my previous impressions.

Here are a couple of other points that I'll just sum to save time:
- before seeing the job ad I had a *reasonable* salary expectation even lower than their actual offering
- on the ad, the bottom end of their salary range far exceeded my reasonable exp.
- the relative level of my position would be even higher up the range that I have seen realised would be top 5%
- having had seen the ad, I started to have an *ideal* expectation being the bottom of the range
- in first interview I told them my exp. is the bottom end of their range +- a bit
- I told this to a dev guy who has no fucking idea about this stuff and I don't blame him but he noted this down to higher management
- generally I have not been very precise of my expectation as previously I only had lower class dev jobs, this would be the first decent.
- Hence I have seen an enormously high variation in salaries offered to me so this advertised range whilst high seemed possible

Now, with all this in mind I posted here a question about what some of you would do in my position.

I received the following group of responses:

- it's a scam, bad place, run
- it's an intentional (common) trick
- people make mistakes like this esp. startups so find out if this is intentional or not
- just decide if their current offering is reasonable for the position and location, ignore the rest
- just decide if the amount is enough
- location based salaries are retarded, don't work there (I kinda agree and also don't)
- if they can afford the higher pay in another place they should have no prob. meeting the range
- it's more important that you'd enjoy it there if the pay is sufficient for general needs
- company culture is generally more important these days
- fuck recruiters and hr people (amen to that btw)

Here is what I did:

Regardless of whether I believe them or not I hyperfocused on the potential scam/trick aspect.
I told them that every other interaction with them was positive and would love to join them but this was a really bad impression and feels like they are playing with me. I made up some bullshit previous examples of companies trying the same trick on me (which obv. never happened).

Then I said that I think to resolve this they should invite me to their main office for a day (all interviews had been online) and if after that they are still not ok to offer me at least the bottom of the adv. range then we can part ways. Otherwise this should ensure both of us that we are a good match, etc.

They seemed to love the idea and said that I should go there for x till y (3 days) and if we don't hate each other by the end I'll get the amount at the bottom of the range and they apologised again about it looking like a scam, etc.

So thanks a bunch again to those of you who provided valuable input.

So just went for an interview that a slimy recruiter set up, 'yes they want experience in C#', great! Finally get back on top of my rent, sort my life out. Get to the interview, fucking C++ job...

I've had enough.

I've been on the job hunt for a developer job for about two months now.

Last Monday I finally got my first response. Later that they a recruiter from a local telecom reached out saying they needed software engineers and wanted to meet.

Tonight is my first interview. Wish me luck. Feeling pretty great right now

I've been trying for the last 3 months to land my first development job. I have a good (over 3 years) amount of experience, but no industry experience and no degree. So it's been a uphill battle. Currently working at a call center making garbage and most of my time and energy is invested into this. Currently am not mobile so most of my money is being geared towards that. It's just frustrating to see all these over glorified job postings that ask so much for just entry levels. I haven't even gotten a damn interview, I feel like in houston it's either you have a degree or you are not even considered for just a fucking interview. If I can get at least one they will be able to see my drive, persistence and skills that have been developed overtime. And fuck recruiters, have been interfacing with them over linkedin and not one of them seemed eager (initially yes) to land me an interview. Most of these fucks don't even fucking understand the technology or buzzwords that are on the job posting. If I were a recruiter I would at least put a little research into what the different technologies are so the process will seem less abstract. The tech will have more meaning and maybe I would be able to get a better success rate with clients if I knew what was really required of them. Not just looking at xyz and seeing if client has experience with them, but really see if they know what they are; that way I will have more confidence sending them into an interview. But of course that's not how it works. "Oh yeah Java and javascript are very similar"... get the fuck out of here.

Okay so here is how my day is going.

Recruiter 1: I have this oppertunity for you and here are a couple of dates for you to have the interview.

Upon arrival:
Bossman: I didn't see the appointment until this morning and normally I won't hold an interview without my two developers. Anyways, here is the introduction to our company.

Recruiter 2 calls in the middle of the interview. After which I call back.

Recruiter 2: got this oppertunity at this company for you and if you wish they are available this afternoon.

Now I'm on my way to that interview. Hope this one goes better.

/Rant

Fucking hell it is so hard to find an internship these days.

Now, I am just an normal student from a small college in India. The companies who are even slightly big/established won't even consider your resume unless you are from one the best colleges or know someone extremely high up in the management. The smaller startups are so disorganised that they just want free labour for a website or an app. Now ok I admit I slacked on my entrance exams and couldn't get a good college, but at least give me a chance. Take an interview, a test something. My mates from even slightly better colleges get internship offers from bigwigs just because their college is better and companies hire from them regularly. They come to campus and also takes interns with them. Meanwhile, here we are. Sitting empty on our assess waiting for a service recruiter to pick us all up.

I feel like it's worthless to slog through this shitty college now. Shitty colleges in India are lost causes. Shitty infrastructure, shitty faculties and the number one thing they care about is ATTENDANCE. Fuck them and fuck the education system.

Oh and did I tell you that the college administration won't let you intern at a no name startup and you need a No Objection Certificate from the Department Head to be able to pursue your internship otherwise it won't count towards your curriculum.

I am sorry if this bothered any of you and sorry if I came out to be a really arrogant person but I needed someplace to vent.

While applying for an Android Developer job position, a recruiter called me and said: i had just received your CV and we are currently looking for Android developer but first you have to do a coding exam just press on the link and you will do the exam if you pass it we will make it up for an interview.

I was extremely satisfied until i saw the exam and it was full of hard alogirthm functions and data structure. In which i don't remember

Do you think after years of experience and projects such exams are still required?

Worst interview experience was a marathon. 3 interviews in a day.

I asked the recruiter to assemble them like that after I had to remind her I was still employed and could go about having interviews all week. I took a day off and departed.

The first interview was with a company that had moved fro their previous address. Since the recruiter obviously checked that, I got to the right place late and with little mojo left.

The second interview was with a company that explained to me how they actually did not need my expertise.

The third was with a company that had just won Apple's Best of the Year award:

Me: So how is it having received the award?

Him: Nah, it's just another one. You get used to it.

[A little more interview]
[We wrap things up and stand up to leave]

Him: Well, thanks for stopping by and talking to us. And sorry we had to do this at our ping pong table. You know, the CEO and I are always playing. He says he's the best, but I always beat him.

All of that sprinkled with a very energising bellyache I had to take to the toilet every now and then (no idea what I ate the night before).

After the marathon, I told the recruiter the third company seemed the most promising, although I couldn't see myself working with someone that pretentious, to which she replied "I thought you had very similar personalities and you have a lot in common".

WHAT?! I've never said anything like that my whole life and now you're telling me you know me from the three fucking phone calls we had?

From that moment on, I've moved away from recruiters and towards networking.

Had a coding challenge for an interview. 2 questions and I passed all the tests on both questions. But I got an email from the recruiter saying that one of my questions didn’t have a working solution??? Wtf it passed all the tests, am I retarded?

I went into interview last Friday and felt great. The recruiter said they needed people urgent, so I'll be hearing from him soon. On Monday he called me saying they liked me and would like me to join the team, so he will prepare a proposal for me.

It's been three days and I haven't received any information or contact with him about the proposal.

How much did it usually takes to create a contract proposal?

Recruiter for a well known company somehow finds my personal email, no biggie - it's not the first time they've contacted me. I decide to give it a shot, phone interview is scheduled, they're a no show. Email them 10 after, they want to reschedule, I do a reschedule. Again, no show. Yeah, it's like that... I haven't even heard back now. Seriously, how do these people even hold jobs?

I remember a recruiter reaching out to me after I applied to a company and we set up a phone interview. When the date arrived, she did not call. I emailed her a few days later and she did not reply. A few weeks later she contacted me again, and since I hadn't secured a job yet, I decided to give it another shot and we set up another phone interview. Guess what? She didn't call. Second strike was too much for me, so when she emailed about a couple of weeks later to know if I was still interested, I did not even bother to reply.

A good way to avoid working for a bad company is that you can spot major problems in the interview and pre-employment phase. There are a number of things that indicate a bad culture that you can ask about right off the bat. Dress code, blocked websites, and work from home policy(or a lack thereof) can all indicate what kind of work environment to expect.

But the biggest one of all is a request for your salary history. If a recruiter or hiring manager wants to know how much you are or were making at a previous job, and will not allow the process to continue without the information, run.

Every job opening has a budget associated with it. The employer already knows what they want to spend on the position. They want to know what your current or previous compensation is or was, so they can perhaps save some money of that budget by offering you a very small amount more than the amount you tell them.

If they ask the question, I get suspicious, but then say, "I'd prefer not to disclose that. What is the budget for the requirement?"

If the person who asks you relents and tells you the budget, then all is well, in my opinion. But if they stick to the subject and insist on getting your salary history, then it indicates a culture of arbitrary subordination, which is not a healthy work environment. If it ever goes this way, I politely tell them that I'm not comfortable disclosing that information, and that I would like to withdraw my interest in the position.

There's something super broken about the interview process in our industry. I spent 30 minutes chatting with a hr recruiter. 2 hours on a coding screen. 1 hour for a technical interview. 1 hour talking with the head of engineering. But then they decided to pass on me. Well if things went well then, then I spend an entire fucking day on an onsite.

Wow. Since when did the industry get so bloated until we have to do so much to get a job? Is signal really that unclear so candidates have to jump through hoop after hoop?

BS.

Like I know most like to hate on recruiters, and I guess that’s cause may, maybe even most, are just a pain and don’t really understand development nearly well enough to actually target relevant candidates.

I’ve dealt with a few over the years when looking, this is the first time however one has sent a contract that includes a 3 month default clause.

Not sure about other countries but in mine there is a legal 3 month probation period, which really is there in part to allow either party the ability to terminate the agreement at basically a moments notice.

Maybe I don’t like the company or how they work, maybe I lied my arse off during the interview and copied an assessment off the web, or hek they just don’t like me…

It’s a legal period in which pretty much and any reason is a valid reason.

Yet for this recruiter, no matter the reason, if the employment ends during those 3 month, I would then be liable to pay her 10% of my annual gross.

Like NAF…

A recruiter set me up with an interview for a company I really liked and I thought it went pretty well. But I tried following up with him and he refuses to answer my 3 emails or pick up my calls. It's fine if I didn't get the job but this is the first time a recruiter just completely ignores me without giving me any feedback. Has this even happened to anyone and how do I deal with this?

Just sharing a quick interview tip which helps alot.

Recruiter: Do you know this XYZ technology?

Candidate 1 : I don't know this technology, but if you GIVE ME A CHANCE, I will,
TRY AND LEARN.

Candidate 2 : I don't know this technology, but I am confident enough that I will be surely be able to learn and implement at a very quick pace.

Candidate 2 was hired. And why? Just check the formation of the response from both the candidates.

Remove the phrases like "give me a chance" and "will try" from your vocab in an interview, always form your responses in a positive and confident manner.

Both the above responses are quite the same, but just due to their different formation, candidate 2 succeeded!

I once went on multiple interviews, took multiple tests (IQ and personality) and then went on anothet interview for a job. After the last interview I didn't hear anything more from the recruiter.

A year later the same recruiter contacts me to ask if I have any friends who might be interested in a position.

🖕🏻

Years ago, I would go on forever with my personal projects. I got so much stuff done I almost couldn't believe it. Today, I just can't. My mental health the last 2 or so years has made me lose interest in everything and i can't even describe how much I hate it. What are you supposed to do when a recruiter asks you why you haven't done much the past 2 years? Say you had mental health problems? Sure they're not allowed to discriminate because of mental health concerns, but they do. I feel like I have to lie on the US disability form, no matter how minor the problem is for the company and little it affects my work ethic. But then, when I'm late more than most because I barely slept or couldn't will myself to get up in the morning, now i can't explain myself.

If anyone here does recruiting or interviewing, please realize that happy face we show at an interview is sometimes a mask for deeper problems we feel we can't admit because we won't be hired. I hate that terrible events made my already inbalanced neurotransmitters worse, but that doesn't mean I will be a worse employee. Please look at me for my skills and enthusiasm for software engineering. That one detail shouldn't be what makes you say no.

Network (people not infrastructure)
My first programming job was because of someone I knew in college worked there. Strangely he also got me my fourth programming job.

My fifth job was a recruiter. First time that ever worked. But it does work.

The biggest thing to remember that in an interview you are selling yourself. So you need to understand a little of sales and marketing.

Longest/shortest job interview you ever had?

My shortest was under 10m, i came in for the wrong function via a recruiter.

My longest is 135m the guy just kept on talking and talking and talking and....

This is more of a rant with a question within:

It's International Women's Day and I did not see this hitting me like it is lol, but I have a question for my fellow devs all over:

Do you actually like the system of developers making up fake doctors appointments (or whatever) to go interview with the competitor because they don't feel appreciated at their current company?
Do people actually like sneaking around and telling lies and constantly having to prove yourself to new people instead of just having a process in place to rectify the situation where you work?

And do you actually like having to spend so much time and energy negotiating pay so you don't get ripped off?

I know this happens to all of us, regardless of how we identify. But I once had a recruiter call me the day after she talked to my best friend, a male dev (same experience level), and using his same techniques that we practiced together, she offered me almost $100k less for the same title she offered him the day before, despite the strongest negotiating of my life. She insisted the company simply could not go higher. This affected my friend almost as much as it affected me-- this really does happen. We're not making it up. Sometimes not even the best advice can change the reality.

Shit like that is just depressing, and reminds me that it probably wouldn't be that different if I went somewhere else anyway. But I'm wondering if you like that hustle, or if you too wish it wasn't needed.

Yesterday i have worked from 9 to 5 for $0/hour (they dont call it $0/hour they call it a technical interview)

To which i had to build all alone all by myself a rest api backend in java, bash script to move the jar to other folder a gitlab cicd pipeline and deployment to aws.

Basically for this position i have to work both backend and devops

I passed

Yesterday at 8pm (yes) the recruiter told me i passed and she asked me to schedule the next interview tomorrow morning in 8am.

I didn't open linkedin and then she sent me a word template at 10pm.

Are you fucking kidding me? Was it not enough that i was your slave from the fucking morning till the whole working day for $0/hour and now you want me to reply to your messages outside of work? You want me to be ur $0/hour slave 24/7 and not 9/5? Fuck off. Genuinely get fucked.

I hate the corporate world. This is satan's job. This is the work of the devil. I feel my soul dying. This matrix is killing my soul. I must escape. i need energy to escape but this matrix is sucking all the energy out of me

Went to an interview set up by a recruiter. Company has never heard of them ...or me. Decide to interview me anyway. Surprisingly it did not go well

Had a recruiter contact me about a Javascript Developer position. This job was an on-site job 8 hours away and I have a wife who has interviews for a teaching job in the area we currently lived. So she asked if I knew Javascript well, and I said yes for Web Development. She says, "Well I'm sure it's the same for Javascript applications, right?" I said, "I've never created a Javascript application." She says, "I'm sure it will be fine, do you want to come in for an interview today?" That's when I hung up.

I have my first developer interview next week. I'm really nervous. Its an interview for both a front end role and a php backend role, and they are hiring 9 developers.
I'm a full stack developer, dot net core backend and learning React.js frontend. My html and CSS knowledge is fine but I don't quite have a grasp of js yet. As for php, I know nothing, but the recruiter said they are looking to train someone and I explained that I enjoy learning, not to mention php is very popular so it's a good tool to have knowledge with.
I've been told to look at their site, so I've written a list of about ten aspects of the site that I like and that I would change. From the lack of interactivity to images being larger than necessary, something that could be optimised.
The interview will be an hour and a half long and I'm shitting myself. Im not a confident person as is, plus I suffer from anxiety. I'm mostly worried about being put on the spot with questions like "tell me your best achievement". I will rehearse the obvious questions this weekend.
Doss anyone have any advice? Good experiences, bad experiences etc.

Recruiter reached out on a certain other social network where people seem to be humbled a lot.

First interview (a day later) goes well

Second interview (a week later) also goes well. They tell me there's one more technical interview, but that shouldn't be a problem.

A week later, that interview is a breeze too. Interviewer said they'll prepare the paperwork.

Another week goes by without communication, so I ping them.

A week after that they send me an email saying that they need references they can talk to. A co-worker and a direct manager.
Uncommon in my part of the world in general. But coming up with that idea this late in the process? Really? But ok, I provide those in like an hour.

They take their time, but eventually call the co-worker. Another week after that, they still haven't called the manager, so I ping them again.

Silence for another couple of days, then a very sad email about how the general situation has changed and they've now stopped hiring indefinitely

It was in May and I had a recruiter call be up about an interview for a dev position. I went to the interview, thought it went all right and awaited feedback.

Nothing came... I called the agency a few days later and he said he'd get me something back by end of the week.

Still nothing. I called again and he was all "oh sorry, I forgot, and I'll get it tomorrow".

You can probably guess; nothing. A couple weeks pass so by now I'm pretty confident I don't have the job, so I continue looking.

Then early afternoon on a Friday in November that agency calls back:

Agency: "Hi, how are you?"

Me: "Hey, I'm fine"

Agency: "Excellent, remember that interview in May for that company?"

Me: "Yeah, why have they go another position available?"

Agency: "Better, you start work with them on Monday"

It took the guy 6 months to get back, nothing from him or the company. Then he calls up out of the blue. No idea what he would be done had I already got a job.

I actually did accept, still work there now 4 years later, for now.

A recent interview was quite weird.

I emailed my resume to this company, the recruiter keeps sending me emails for 3 days asking follow-up questions and bunch of irrelevant crap. After that the emails completely stopped, she answers me back after a month saying I didn't get the job. Still wondering about that huge amount of personal questions

Just had my second interview with a French company, recruiter was not able to find my CV so I sent it back to him.

Told me I had a good profile but I didn't know kafka so might be a deal breaker.

Asked me useless soft skills questions then proceeded to ask me if I knew the process to get a work visa for France and when I said no he googled it during the interview LOL, maybe a good sign? who knows at this point.

Honestly no matter how well I do in an interview I find it quite hard that I will be picked while they could just settle with someone who might have a less appealing profile but does not require all this hassle to bring him into the company...it's really quite depressing.

The worst dev experience was having to interview people for job openings. I already dislike having to be the interviewee. I don’t like being the interviewer because I haven’t had a great experience with it. I’ve had a lot of people tell me what they think I want to hear instead of just answering my questions.

Surprisingly, the best was working with a recruiter for our open roles. The candidates from the recruiter were really great. Personally, I don’t have great experience with recruiters when I’m the one looking for a job. But for this case of my employer using one, it worked out. IDK if those candidates would have applied without the recruiter.

This happened during the early months of WFH in the covid pandemic. I had a paired programming video interview and my interviewer had some strange behavior. IDK if he had a weird tick, but his head kept dropping to the side like he was falling asleep and he’d jerk back up again. His eyes weren’t drooping though. It kept happening throughout the interview and I was afraid he’d fall out of his chair. I wondered if he was crashing from an all nighter or his body was shutting down in some way. It was jarring enough that I wondered if I should ask the recruiter to check on my interviewer.

Recruiter question: Recruiter X sets me up with an interview that went extremely well. The Interviewer ( who is also the project manager) says she would call the recruiter the same day and that I was pretty much a shoo-in for the spot. Recruiter calls b.c. a reference isn't answering and she wants another. I give another good one that I know will pick up. Fast forward almost 2 weeks and I still haven't gotten a response, even after reaching out to X via email and calls. Would it be unprofessional of me to contact the PM directly to inquire about the position? It was due to start monday, but we also got hit by hurricane matthew... not really sure how to procede. Any advice would be great.

I've actually already discussed this one on here I believe

I see this job looking for an android developer for Kotlin with UI experience with XD & Figma and experience with Firebase. I have all of these qualifications so I throw my resume into the fray within an 2 hours the recruiters contact me. they have an offer of 76,000 and I'm looking for junior so I'm like, eh whatever, I give them a copy of my resume and we hold discussion for a few days and then radio silence. I then see a job posting EXTREMELY similar but with a "different company" so I throw my resume in and again within 2 hours I get a call only THIS TIME ITS THE INTERNAL HR. She sounds interested we have a good conversation and sets me up for 96,000 and they schedule me for my first interview within the week. Interview goes great, next I meet with the CTO and we have a pretty good conversation, I'm expecting a technical exam but it doesn't happen instead they give me a case study. they send me requirements for an app API to use, architecture, and a week time span to do it. I finish the app with extra features within 6 days, in my understanding of MVVM and I was excited and happy about this app because its JUST NICE. a week goes by and I meet with the tech team. They grill me on my application, scalability, use cases, how would I advertise or place advertisement and I'm answering everything they love the UI (I included mockups I made on XD), they say everything sounds good everyone leaves with smiles they say they have to find out on what team to place me because they have multiple apps and that HR will be in contact with me in the next few days... A WEEK GOES BY and I randomly get the declination email that next Friday. When I asked for feedback they said it wasn't true MVVM. I was devastated until the next week when I was accepted for a higher paying job that didn't require me to move. After I accepted this job guess who calls? THE FIRST RECRUITER and for this long I was wondering if this was the same job due to the very similar job description so I ask "is your client XXXXXXX?" it was I just told him "I'm good" and hung up

okay. Just had an interview for a web application engineer role. It was a catastrophe. Basically, they are taking care only of things I was never worked with, like certification management, ansible deployments, bash scripting. ?? What? Like, what the hell? Guys, I can make you a nice javascript game, or laravel website, eventually mount the routers and switches, configure and automate the networks, but certs... for me ssl is just an extra checkbox when I'm buying a new domain. I asked the recruiter like 5 times, please tell me what the hell is the role about, he doesn't knew... I think, I'll just give up this applying for a jobs stuff, and stay maintenance engineer, dig into plc-s and etherCat even more and forget the IT career completely...

A company gave a recruiting agency the requisites and allowed the recruiters to actually hire the people instead of just arranging plans. A recruiter came to me and offered me a senior position with a 50k salary with no interview or anything. I'm not even a graduate yet... I didn't take it cause I want to finish my degree

So i'm a new-baked developer, educated through a company's Accelerated Learning program and starter as a junior consultant this month. I met this guy at a school event and we talked about their company and their future project and we had a good chat. So I asked our recruiters a couple of days later if there was a possibility to be presented as a consultant for the company. A week later or so I receive a call from the recruiter responsible for said company which ends up in a scheduled interview. Yay!

The interview was scheduled for yesterday. In the morning my recruiter calls me and tells me that the interview has been cancelled. She tells me the she had not been given an explanation to why, but that she'll come back to me after lunch with an update. No call..

So after lunch today I try to call her and no response. So I leave a message to show my interest and to aski if she heard anything and if there might be a new date coming up.

The afternoon passes and by the end of the day still no reply. But 2 of my class mates tell me that they're going for an interview tommorrow, after having talked to the very same recruiter on our company. I feel so backstabbed. I started this whole recruitment process and now they've just tossed me out? What the hell is this?!! I'm so raging right now!

Gonna give the recruiter another call tommorrow morning, and after that I'm taking it to her manager. Any suggestions on what to say?

Was hoping someone with experience can provide insight or advice on this. It's a long one, so thanks in advance to everyone who took time.

Received a great job offer a few weeks ago and was told I'd get a contract in January. They seemed pretty switched on about the kind of problems I might be facing and even raised my asking price, so I'm definitely not interested in looking elsewhere.

However, I started getting interview requests Thursday last week, one of which is for next Thursday.

Received and signed contract on Friday. Haven't received copy with employer's signature yet, but it's still early so np yet. However, I still haven't replied to the interview requests.

Should I turn down the requests or accept them and hope I get the contract back in time to cancel? I mentioned to the recruiter that I was receiving interest from other companies and I wanted to seal the deal with this company, but didn't receive response yet advising me whether it's cool to keep my options open.

I don't wanna look dodgy to the dudes I signed with in the unlikely event they find out I accepted interviews. I also don't wanna come across as combative or a pain to work with by pressuring them to sign soon.

However, I also don't wanna have a panic attack in the middle of revision season if I don't hear from these guys for a week (they get pretty busy at times). I feel like I could be sentencing myself to short-term anxiety (and I'm already anxious af in final year) if I start turning down offers before I have a signed contract.

Thoughts?

Shit list

---

Shit
= bullet

Humongous hard shit
= tsar bomb

Diarrhea
= flamethrower

Swarm of sphere shit
= grenades

Shit that makes the whole room stink
= gas bomb

Farts with the smell of shit
= stun grenade

Shitting 10 times a day
= minigun

Recruiter contacting me for interview
= all of the above

I'm in the process of searching for a new job. I've got two interviews in person that were very promising. Both are in the process of talking to other candidates this week. I'll call them Firm A and Firm B.

The recruiter working for Firm A is constantly calling me, almost every other day, and asking about the other interviews I have. I told them I would probably hear back at the end of next week. They are pressuring me to just accept their client's offer of course (despite not having one at the moment).

I won't get an offer from Firm A until I do one more interview with executive staff anyway, sometime during the week of Thanksgiving. Firm B will have their decision to me by end of Thanksgiving week. Am I being unreasonable in wanting to wait for both offers to come up?

Both positions hold their pros/cons in terms of commute, pay, and benefits. I honestly felt a little angry when the recruiter told me "Oh, you don't sound very interested in this position" when I mentioned waiting. I'm the one deciding on my career path here and you have the gall to tell me what my interests are?

My LinkedIn profile lists quite a lot of languages and platforms, but I made sure to not include Ruby there, just because:
1. I never worked with Ruby
2. I never want to work with Ruby because I got fed up with the smugness of ruby developers back in the day so much that I made a promise to myself never to be one of them. Literally anything just not Ruby. I'll even take up COBOL if I have to, in order to avoid Ruby, unless I can justify it as a backup scripting language for small automation stuff where other languages would simply not work. Aaaanyway...

I get this message from a guy:
"""
Hey <Actual first name>,

You got recommended by a person, and judging by your profile you'd make an excellent fit for this company I'm representing who are the leaders in their field, bla bla bla more info on why company is the greatest in the world.
They need an experienced senior Ruby developer for their new web application bla bla bla.
"""

I wonder, if I committed to learn Ruby well enough to pass an interview, faked some Ruby experience in my CV, and they actually hired me, how long would it be until they hang that recruiter for not even reading the profiles of the people he's bothering with messages.

Been worrying all year that I won't find a job next year after I finish my studies im november. So I decided to study for one more year, just to learn a little more of the tech before I enter the real world.

A day after my registration went through and my studies are paid for, I get a call from a recruiter to come in for a interview. Fml

Wouldn't say it was upsetting so much as mind-bending...

Attended an interview with a mid-size web development agency in 2017. The recruiter fed back from this agency that the interviewers didn't think I'd had enough experience of an agency environment. I'd spent six years in the industry at this point, and five and a half of those years were in agencies. The recruiter was as mystified as I was over that one.

Recruiter contacts me on a software dev jobs platform because my profile looks great.

Job is for a fullstack JS developer and they use React, Node.js and some other stuff I've never touched.

Nowhere on my profile is any mention of React.

I thank him for reaching out and politely decline an interview by stating I have zero experience with React.

He says, oh, he thought I'd be willing to learn React since I know vue.js.

Why do people think learning a new JS framework is easy, and that devs who use a similar framework is willing to learn another one, and that "it's all just JS in the end"?

React is not just JS, it's fucking spaghetti. The React code I've read was cognitively demanding to decipher (or maybe I am low IQ lol), because it's not "just JS". It's a nasty spaghetti of HTML, CSS, and TypeScript.

Got called on company phone while being in home office. Somehow through VPN + RDP session it got routed to my laptop, but connection was really bad and we could hardly understand each other, i.e. I had to guess that it even was a recruiter.

Guy however was really nice, but I failed the interview to a job I did not really want.

You know what annoys me...compnies dropping of the face of the earth. Like I take to the recruiter over the email. We set up a phone screen with HR and then with the Dev team, we talk about on site interview, WE DISCUSS THE TIME AND THEN NOTHING. Weeks go by and no emails or replies. Like what am I doing wrong here. This happened for the third time!

Is it normal for US based companies to lowball EU based remote senior hires that much?

Just had this weird experience:

Applied to a US based company as a remote senior android dev.

Told them my rate was 55usd/hour.

Their internal recruiter who is based in Poland told me that their budget is max 45 usd/hour max for a senior role.

I was like ok maybe its worth a shot.

Passed the initial interview, did the technical interview, seemed like I did really great.

Today I receive an offer from that recruiter of 30 usd/hour. Feedback was that Im senior in some areas but in most of them Im a "really strong mid level" so they cant offer senior rate for me. Right now Im thinking of how to respond to that.

What is this? Seniors are expected to know everything 100 percent? Every senior I worked with usually specializes in 2-3 areas and looks up others as he goes. I guess shes trying to lowball me or something.

To be honest this is hilarious for me. If I wanted I could land a contracting gig with same 30usd/hour in my city 5 miles away from my home (Im based in Latvia, capital city Riga). But this is US based company so what the heck? Am I being gaslighted? Or is this rate the new normal?

Maybe Im being delusional here, should I manage my expectations or something?

Can you share your experiences with negotiating hourly rates as a senior dev and what rates you guys charge for EU/US B2B contracts?

Recruiter bailed on my phone interview twice today! Wtf! Getting my first job in tech is tough

A recruiter calls me and asks if I'm interested in an interview with their company. I say yes and she asks how I like programming with C aaaand my resume only mentions C++..

I've got a call from a recruiter and they said they will call me to arrange an interview..

Hope they call me and everything goes well..

False hope in my situation is very dangerous

A call was organised with a company, by a recruiter. I was told this was a fact finding mission and that I don't need to worry.

I answer the call to hear 'Hello and welcome to your first interview'.

Recruiter contacts on linkedIn, and I have to drag some written information out of him, while he asks again and again and again for a phone interview.
I oblige and we schedule a time where I have an open slot in my ridiculously filled meeting calendar.

Then this fucking prick doesn't call, nor respond to messages. At least give a fucking heads up if you're unable to attend. I fucking hate when people are late, and it pisses me off to no end when people do not fucking show.
God fucking damnit.

I didn't even care for the position at all, but now I'm pissed because if it!

Fuck.

After two interviews with the people I might end up working with I'm called out for a third interview, this time with the recruiter (external) I've only talked to over the phone... Weird.

He said the interview will include tests, but not technical. Hmm. What can I expect?

I got approached by a recruiter seeking an individual with extensive Linux experience. When it got to the in-person interview, they asked me how good in VBA I was... turns out the recruiter got a little creative with the given job description.

I have my first tech interview on Thursday and I am very nervous. I am a full stack web dev student at a CC who is finishing my program next quarter. I switched careers so this is not my first rodeo.It's for a role of technology specialist and gave a vague description of uploading data to the mainframe and working directly with developers and QA.Only skill question the recruiter asked was how well I know SQL. Great company and location for me. What can I expect? I know they are going to do an assessment but I am unsure if it will be programming based.

Recruiter either quit or got fired right after my job interview. It took me two weeks to find out i blew the job interview.

Application process:

Interview with internal recruiter
Coding test that doesn't even remotely resemble real world problems
Technical phone screen
Phone call with vp of engineering
More "formal" technical screen
In person interview

FFS, either you want me or you don't. Stop wasting my time.

Job Interview Help!

Hi Devs! Applying for a junior front end developer job here and have been called by a recruiter. He's explained he will:

"be asking some technical questions, so it might be worth a quick bit of revision on your JavaScript knowledge and terms!"

Has anyone come across these before and what level of knowledge would I be expected to know for a junior role?

I'm going to do the test either way as it'll be great experience but a bit of prep is always good!

Anyone heard of a an interview process where you apply through a job site and the first interaction back from the company is a coding project?
I've had it a few times where I'm told there will be a coding project or there has been later in the process, but I've never had it as the immediate first step.
Why would an unknown small startup think that someone would spend a couple of hours effectively working for them without having the slightest idea about the company and culture. An application is usually classed as an expression of interest and a discussion into the wider detail is then usually had with some HR or recruiter representative (or at least that's my experience in the UK)

Recruiter writes to me on LinkedIn for a job

Have an interview with the recruiter, everything smooth

Then interview with the HR of the company, everything smooth

Then the HR talks to the CTO, and the CTO is like "mmmmh this guy works as a consultant, I don't like this. Yeet him".

This absolute madman out there not giving a single flying fuck about consultants, head hunter, HR, only pure coding, literally living the dream.

Recruiter contacted me for interview. I asked them what is the procedure of interviews and how many are there gonna be.

Recruiter listed 5 fucking interviews.

1. HR interview: 30-45 min
2. Technical 1: 60 min general coding live session
3. Technical 2: 60 min backend coding live session
4. Technical 3: 60 min system design coding live session
5. Hiring manager interview: 30 min

All that for $20.3125/hour, with possibility of being more or even less depending on how well i do on these 5 interviews

Should I apply to a job that I am clearly underqualified? For example, I learned a bit about embedded software as a hobby but job requires extensive experience. So the result is certain but can any good come from this interview?

More detail, I will be indirectly applying for the job through recruiter company. My CV and interview with recruiter was also honest about my experience. In fact, recruiter asks if I am interested.

Completed all interview stages with a recruitment firm last month. Passed all the stages. They reach out to me to begin with. They reach out to me saying they are currently waiting to hear back from the partner firm whom they shared my profile with but I was successful in the final stage. I asked the recruiter what's up like a month ago and she said she was waiting to hear back from the partner. It's been 4 weeks now and I don't want to seem desperate so I am holding off on emailing the recruiter again. Do u guys think it is a bust offer? The company is prominent here and I feel they wouldn't make me go through all the stages of interview if they didn't have a placement for me. I am so impatient coz I am basically out of a job rn, haven't been paid in the second month and man I need this job coz I know they pay well. What do I doooo???

I called a recruiter and asked to reschedule an interview because I stayed up all night working on a deadline. He begged me to go anyway but I totally bombed the interview which took place during my lunch break and ran over an hour causing more stress. By the way I didn't want to work there anyway. This is not really a recruiter rant because I should have said no to the interview in the first place.

So an old boss phones and suggests I interview for him at his new company.
A week or so later a couple of his senior guys conduct a virtual interview - which is interrupted by the main guy having to go and stop his sky box downloading so he has enough bandwidth to conduct the interview.
I impress and they disappear for a week. Then I'm finally called by a recruiter to say that they weren't willing to pay my asking salary which was provided to the original ex-boss who contacted me.

Why recruiters are sometimes taking so long to answer? I did my final stage of interview with the companie's client (out of 4 stages in total) last Thursday.

Client came back with positive feedback at Monday at the end of workday. Today is Tuesday and internal recruiter was supposed to call me to make an offer and discuss starting date.

Now again workday is nearly over and no contact from her. Tomorrow is a national holiday so she will get back to me at best on Thursday.

Goddamnit why it takes so long, if Im starting next Monday I need to prepare myself. Im seriously getting second thoughts such as even about declining the offer if they will try to lowball me. Previous week they really rushed the process and I had to do 4 stages of interviews and this week they are wasting my time. Am I being impatient or what?

Got called by a recruiter, the team wanted to know if I am culture fit. They schedule a remote skype interview for 3 hours and check if I am culture fit. Next is onsite interview, they asked me if I want to fly to that location which is 2 hour technical. And one of the guy in previous round mentioned they dont give offer unless they do onsite. But I have to pay out of my own pocket expense. I am approx 4 years experience and the position is Senior SW. I dont know are they really interested?

Hey guys/gals!! I just got a recruiter offer me an interview for a job that would be a demotion AND require me to move 5 hours away! Too good to be true!!! As SUPER tempting as this is, I think I have to pass :-(. I know, bummer, right? But if anyone wants this AMAZING job opportunity that will allow you to step down on the ladder of success, let me know!! 🙄

Before getting this job I was dealing with two recruiters. After having had a job interview, which was more of an introduction because someone who was supposed to do the interview wasn't available, I get a call from recruiter number two.

Planned the interview for a different company the same day which went pretty smooth. Within a month I got the position as a software dev within a growing startup with great people