Interviewing a junior dev.
> Make this function return false.
> junior: deleted all code in function replaces it with return false;

Literally no words.........

Interviewing a Data Scientist

Not a coding test, but:

Them: So you are interviewing for a programmer opening. Do you like programming?

Me: yes.

Them: do you make logos?

Me: ...I can...?

Them: good because you won't always be writing code here.

Me: I'm out.

UPDATE: I have my dream job.

About a year ago I commented on Devrant that I was having some hard luck interviewing for development jobs.
Shortly after my post I decided to lower my expectations and took a job at a tech support call center.(3 month contract)
After getting a little experience(Not just a degree) I was able to land a hardware support job at a fortune 500 company.(Not what a programmer really wants 😂)
I worked hard and started writing tools at home to help with the job. I started giving them out to the other techs and put them on a little internal website for easy access.
About 3 months ago I just became a software engineer within the company.(after 6 months of hardware repair.) The main reason I got the job was because I showed them how much overtime and extra work I had done and that the techs relied on my software to do there jobs and that I was dependable.

It was hard work but it was worth it. And I built software that I never would have done if I hadn't taken this "lower job"

So keep your chin up and your fingers on the keys, I was in your shoes a year ago. 😉

Interviewing a candidate for a dev position.

Interview is over and handshakes commence.

After the interview we have a debrief in a room that has hand sanitizer in it (just coincidence).

I squirt some and it comes out like a rocket ship; getting all over one of his resumes we printed. It looks like jizz...

One of the head guys walks in a says:

“I hope he didn’t hand you the resume like that.”

To which one of our ops people, let’s call her Sara, says...

“No, leanrob just REALLY likes his resume!!!”

> I almost fucking died from laughter

So i've been a dev manager for a little while now. Thought i'd take some time to disambiguate some job titles to let everyone know what they might be in for when joining / moving around a big org.

Title: Senior Software Engineer

Background:
- Technical
- Clever
- Typically has years experience building what management are trying to build

Responsibilities:
- Building new features
- Writing code
- Code review
- Offering advice to product manag......OH NO YOU DON'T CODE MONKEY, BACK TO WORK!

Title: Dev Manager

Background:
- Technical
- Former/current programmer
- knows his/her way around a codebase.

Responsibilities:
- Recruiting / interviewing new staff
- Keeping the team focused and delivering tasks
- Architecture decisions
- Lying about complexity of architecture decisions to ensure team gets the actual time they need
- Lying about feature estimations to ensure team gets to work on critical technical improvements that were cancelled / de-prioritised
- Explaining to hire-ups why we can't "Just do it quicker"
- Explaining to senior engineers why the product manager declined their meeting request

Title: Product / Product Manager

Background:
- Nothing relevant to the industry or product line what so ever
- Found the correct building on the day of the interview
- Has once opened an Excel spreadsheet and successfully saved it to a desktop

Responsibilities:
- Making every key decision about every feature available in the app
- Learning to ignore that inner voice we like to call "Common sense"
- Making sure to not accidentally take some advice from technical staff
- Raising the blood pressure of everyone below them / working with them

Title: Program Lead / Product Owner

Background:
- Capable of speech
- Aware of what a computer is (optional)

Responsibilities:
- Sitting down
- Talking
- Clicking random buttons on Jira
- Making bullet point lists

Title: Director of Software Engineering

Background:
- Allegedly attended college/university to study computer science
- Similar to a technical product manager (technical optional)

Responsibilities:
- Reports directly to VP
- Fixes problems by creating a different problem somewhere else as a distraction
- Claiming to understand and green light technical decisions, while having already agreed with product that it will never happen

When interviewing a dev, ask them what they think about time zones. If their answer is "fuck time zones", hire them immediately.

*during my final job interview*

*holding the folder that contains my cv*
interviewer: Wait, before I open this I would like to guess which position you're applying to.
me: Hmm okay sir? Which position?
interviewer: I see you're applying as a back-end developer?
me: Yes sir, I am.
interviewer: Aha! That's because you have a long hair? Like it is a requirement for every devs to grow their hair?
me: *laughs* i think so?
interviewer: Well our devs here also has long hair. You'll meet 'em soon.
...

That sets the mood of my interviewing process that leads me the job offer. LOL.

My interviews to hire a Junior Dev will begin this week. Here's how its gonna go down.

Me: Star Trek or Star Wars?

My Supervisor: WTF? How is that relevant?

Human Resources: Let's see what he says.

Applicant: Battlestar Galactica

Me: Nice. I can deal with that.

Me: Tabs or spaces when indenting your code?

Supervisor: ... ?

Human Resources : ...

Applicant: Spaces.

Me: GTFO you imbecile! Next!

Just interviewed a guy with ~8 years of experience:
Me: *Asked him to write a simple algo logic on a paper*

Him: I don't do much of algo design. I'm much of a design patterns and software design guy.

Me: How would you design a singleton class in Java?

Him: *writes a sloppy code*

Me: Hey, thanks for your time. Our HR will get back to you with further updates.

Moral: Interviews can be very short when the candidate doesn't code.

Root interviews for a job

So I've been interviewing for fun lately (and for practice), and it's been going mostly well. This one company in particular looks interesting, and they seem to really like me. This morning was interview #4 with them; tomorrow morning is #5.

The previous interviews were pretty enjoyable, especially the last one where I interviewed with one of the senior devs who gave me his "grumpy old man rails quiz." He actually asked some questions I wasn't able to answer! (Mostly dealing with Rails' internals.) Also when showing me the codebase, there were a few things I hadn't seen before, so it's exciting that I'll actually be able to learn something if I sign on. We ended up talking for almost an hour past our allotted time, and we got along famously. He said he was very surprised I did so well on his quiz because most people don't. Everyone else I interviewed with so far has liked me and gave positive reviews, too.

I don't know if I want the job, but that's beyond the scope of this rant anyway. The real reason for this comes next.

My interview today was with the VP of engineering. It was more of a monologue, as he wanted to give me perspective to see if I actually wanted to work there, but it was still very much a monologue. He's an old white guy who seems to loves to drone, and he never seemed very happy when I responded, so I let him drone and drone. Good information though.

But he's very set in his ways in some regards, and two of them were pretty insulting. We never really talked about technicals, and he just assumed that since I wasn't old and graying that I was a junior dev. He said, and I'll quote: "We run a lean but senior team, so we typically only hire senior devs here. But the dev team is all old white men. There's no diversity in talent, age, sex, race, religion, etc, and I'm looking to change that." He made several more allusions to my more junior level, too. He made a lot of assumptions (like how I'm not comfortable with structure because I've been the only dev so often) and got annoyed when I countered them.

I realize he has no idea of my skill level -- even though he should if he was listening to his team -- but to just assume that I'm not talented because I'm young, and bloody hire me just because I'm female? I don't want to be your diversity hire, old man. 🤬

So I'm feeling angry.
I might still take the job because the it offers considerable benefits over where I'm working (despite being quite happy here), but it will absolutely be despite him.

What the fuck is this one-way interview bullshit?

"The organization you are interviewing with has come up with a series of interview questions that they have requested you to respond to. This is an on-demand interview which means that you'll be recording your video interview answers at your convenience as long as you submit them before the deadline." -- sparkhire.com

Like seriously?
What if I have questions? I have plenty, and I find those questions considerably more important than whatever bullshit gotchas the company wants to annoy me with.

One-way interview.
Fucking really.

At least have the decency to talk to me.

To become an engineer (CS/IT) in India, you have to study:
1. 3 papers in Physics (2 mechanics, 1 optics)
2. 1 paper in Chemistry
3. 2 papers in English (1 grammar, 1 professional communication). Sometimes 3 papers will be there.
4. 6 papers in Mathematics (sequences, series, linear algebra, complex numbers and related stuff, vectors and 3D geometry, differential calculus, integral calculus, maxima/minima, differential equations, descrete mathematics)
5. 1 paper in Economics
6. 1 paper in Business Management
7. 1 paper in Engineering Drawing (drawing random nuts and bolts, locus of point etc)
8. 1 paper in Electronics
9. 1 paper in Mechanical Workshop (sheet metal, wooden work, moulding, metal casting, fitting, lathe machine, milling machine, various drills)
And when you jump in real life scenario, you encounter source/revision/version control, profilers, build server, automated build toolchains, scripts, refactoring, debugging, optimizations etc. As a matter of fact none of these are touched in the course.
Sure, they teach you a large set of algorithms, but they don't tell you when to prefer insertion sort over quick sort, quick sort over merge sort etc. They teach you Las Vegas and Monte Carlo algorithms, but they don't tell you that the randomizer in question should pass Die Hard test (and then you wonder why algorithm is not working as expected). They teach compiler theory, but you cannot write a simple parser after passing the course. They taught you multicore architecture and multicore programming, but you don't know how to detect and fix a race condition. You passed entire engineering course with flying colors, and yet you don't know ABC of debugging (I wish you encounter some notorious heisenbug really soon). They taught 2-3 programming languages, and yet you cannot explain simple variable declaration.
And then, they say that you should have knowledge of multiple fields. Oh well! you don't have any damn idea about your major, and now you are talking about knowledge in multiple fields?
What is the point of such education?
PS: I am tired of interviewing shitty candidates with flying colours in their marksheets. Go kids, learn some real stuff first, and then talk some random bullshit.

I was interviewing this guy who's been a dev for 12 years. Apparently got laid off in his small town company because of covid.

So I asked him to write an algorithm that loops through a list and returns the largest number.

Not only could he not do that after trying for 15 minutes, but he also spent an entire minute ranting about how algorithmic questions were dumb and unnecessary in this day and age and you can google these things without having them memorized anyway.

The point of an algorithmic question in an interview is not to see if you can memorize the fucking thing. It's to see if you're methodical enough to reason through what you don't know and arrive at a decent solution all the same.

What do you guys think? Was I somehow the asshole here? It was a JavaScript job and the product was fairly complex, not just HTML bullshit.

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.

After interviewing tens of candidates, finally found that one guy who doesn't start the conversation by mentioning jQuery 😂

Too many people started off with jQuery and didn't even bother to learn more about Javascript itself.

Watching the Dutch government trying to get through the public procurement process for a "corona app" is equal parts hilarious and terrifying.

7 large IT firms screaming that they're going to make the perfect app.

Presentations with happy guitar strumming advertisement videos about how everyone will feel healthy, picnicking on green sunny meadows with laughing families, if only their app is installed on every citizen's phone.

Luckily, also plenty of security and privacy experts completely body-bagging these firms.

"It will connect people to fight this disease together" -- "BUT HOW" -- "The magic of Bluetooth. And maybe... machine learning. Oh! And blockchain!" -- "BUT HOW" -- "Shut up give us money, we promise, our app is going to cure the planet"

You got salesmen, promising their app will be ready in 2 weeks, although they can't even show any screenshots yet.

You got politicians mispronouncing technical terminology, trying hard to look as informed as possible.

You got TV presenters polling population support for "The App" by interviewing the most digitally oblivious people.

One of the app development firms (using some blockchain-based crap) promised transparency about their source code for auditing.... so they committed their source, including a backup file from one of their other apps, containing 200 emails/passwords to Github.

It's kind of entertaining... in the same way as a surgery documentary about the removal of glass shards from a sexually adventurous guy's butthole.

Imma keep watching out of morbid fascination.... from a very safe distance, far away from the blood and shit that's splattering against the walls.

And my phone -- keep your filthy infected bytes away from my sweet baby.

I'll stick with social distancing, regular hand washing, working from home and limited supermarket trips, thank you very much.

The following meeting occurred at a client between a recently added client PM and our team, we'll call her Shrilldesi, previously from one of the main consulting vendors.

*Meeting begins after 15 minutes of bullshitting, waiting for people to file in*
Shrilldesi: "Ok everyone, let's get started
TeamMember: "We're still waiting for Z and W, not sure why they're late."
SD: "We can start there. It was decided had to lay off Z and W, because we didn't have enough work."
Moi: "Wait, what. Who made that decision? Why weren't we consulted on this? We have another project starting next week that they were needed for. They just delivered the entire public facing rewrite, why would we let them go?!"
SD: "It was decided by myself, pajeet, and venkata looking at the backlog. Not enough work, week gap."
Moi: "This is going to hurt our ability to deliver the next phase. When are we going to start interviewing new people, the project begins next week?"
SD: "We will interview new resources as needed."
Moi: "Who is we? And 'as needed' is yesterday, or realistically several weeks ago as the. project. starts. next. week. Also, we're obligated by federal law to bring back anyone we lay off before we hire anyone else for the same position."
SD: "Interviews will be done by myself, Mohd, and Pajeet."
Moi: "...can I point out that there's only one modestly technical person in that group, they're an admin, and none of them are from this team? How do you conduct an engineering interview without any engineers?"
SD: "That does not matter, I have watched enough to be able to ask your questions."
Moi: *anger intensifies* "I have to respectfully disagree. I don't feel it's appropriate to cut us out of the process of interviewing our own team members."
SD: "It is decided, we will take care of it, let us move on. Next, we need to find work for the Manasa, she doesn't have anything to do."
Moi: *sharpens baseball bat* "...shouldn't we just fire her then?"
SD: "Oh that is so mean, why would we fire her? We were thinking she might be able to do some of my project management work."
Moi: *sharpening intensifies* "You do realize it's a violation of H1-B statutes for someone to be employed in work other than what is stated on their contract, and Project Managers are specifically listed as not specialized skillsets per federal law."
SD: *ignores question* "We also need to find work for the offshore team, they don't have enough to do. Please find them work for the next period."
Moi: *checks how long the wait period is for ar-15s*
SD: "We also have a new person rolling onto our team, he comes from the xyz team, Dikshit *gestures to person we all figured was lost*. He will be handling our front end development."
Moi: *seething hatred* "WE JUST LET TWO EXCELLENT FRONT END DEVELOPERS GO. WE DO NOT NEED DIKSHIT."
SD: "Please calm down. We will be replacing the other two shortly, there is no problem."
Moi: "Have you heard nothing I've said? Did you even run this by legal and HR? Why did we let them go in the first place? Why do we even need Dikshit?!"
SD: "I said it before, please listen. There is not enough work for them. Dikshit will do front end. What is unclear?"

Note: There's not really any dramatization here. It's almost verbatim what happened. Eventually, the next project was cancelled, they incrementally rolled the rest of the local team off. They then had the cojones to express aghast anger when I notified them I would not be renewing my contract, and open hatred when I explained to them I was not a slave, and I refused to be a bag holder for the inevitable failure of a project without any chance of success. I don't really care what happened after that, they can all burn in their own little nepotistic shitshow of perpetual failure.

I hired a new developer after careful screening and interviewing many candidates.

First thing he's asking first day on the job
- I have already booked august month for holiday, is that a problem?
- I need to come 2 hours before anyone else in the morning and leave 2 hours before, everyday because I have things to do at home.
- I've seen that espn.com sport news are blocked by the firewall, why is that?
- I've installed bitTorrent on my PC but it's very slow downloading movies

I hope he's good.

The man who runs my IT department. The man who is in charge of all things and people that are technical: IT management software development, infrastructure, training, help desk, system administration​, etc. A man with a staff of fifty plus. If you were to peel back the flesh on this man's head and crack open his skull you would find dung beetles feasting on the feces that power his thoughts and motor functions. Underneath this foul membrane, if you could push past the maggots; the meal worms; his undying love for hourly binges of Johnny Walker Black on any day of the week with a name that contains a vowel; his fascination with shiny objects and his endless internal monologue wondering when they would hatch rainbow ponies that fly; his desire whenever he enters a paint store to open all the cans of paint and taste the different colors; if you could push past all of the vile crap that exists where Thomas Aquinas once theorized there was a soul, you would find a colony of paramecia at the end of their short lives laughing hysterically at how much smarter they were than the host they lived in.

This man was in charge of hiring the Manager of Software Development. The manager I report to. After seven months of ignoring this chore; after interviewing the sum total of four candidates; after making a point to tell myself and a colleague that there was no one qualified to fill this position within our company (an opinion that is both untrue and, when spoken, runs afoul of internal hiring policies) this man hired a soulless cretin with no experience in software development or with running a software development group. A man who regularly confuses web servers and SQL servers. A man who asked me how my previous manager reviewed my work, was told by me that said previous manager read my code, and then replied in his capacity as the manager of software development that "looking at code is a compete waste of time for a manager." A man so without any humanity or reason for being that he will sit silently, creepily, in conference rooms with the lights off waiting for meetings to begin. Meetings he has scheduled. That have no reason for being in the first place. Just like himself.

Shortly before the man in charge offered the Dev Manager job to the simulacrum of human flesh that is my manager, he met with me and others who had been involved in the interview process. When I informed him that hiring someone with no technical knowledge for a very technical position would be a mistake that he would suffer through for years, he replied in reference to his future hire that "his managerial experience makes up for his lack of technical knowledge."

Best. Prank. Ever. Worst prank ever too. Fuck.

***Interviewing potential sys admins so us devs don't have to build everything and run everything***

Coworker: Do you know how to use cron and cron jobs?

Candidate: Yes I'm familiar with setting up users and permissions.

Me: 😳

Coworker: 😳

Boss: We will give you a call have a good day.

If you had just admitted you didn't know but we thought you could learn we might have been open to teaching you but brazenly acting like you know something when you don't is dangerous if you're running a multi thousand user production system.

One of my interview question for fresh graduates was to switch 2 variable values without adding a new variable.

I was expecting something like

a= readline()
b= readline()
a+= b
b= a - b
a-= b

And some kid answered:

a= readline()
b= readline()
print("a=" + b)
print("b=" + a)

I ain't even mad

Can y'all share some good programming questions for interviewing fresh graduates?

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

Interviewing front end developers with my boss.

Only skill I care about is knowing git.

HEY FRONT END DEVELOPERS!

LEARN GIT!

Fucking HR interviews. Fucking "tell me about yourself" and pretending to seem interested in what i have to say while you think about how you did it with a guy behind the dumpster.
For fucks sake, i am a developer, i have spent more time with coding language than human language. I speak more to a rubber duck than to my friends. That's what you want to know about me?
I am here to fix your fucking site that uses flash plugin in 2017 and you want me to tell good things about your company?
Do you want me to tell you the details about your site that i got from whois and that your subscribed domain registration will end in September this year?
You don't know what responsive design is and you dare interview me?
Thanks for wasting my time and telling me shit about your company and how you have offices in germany and china. Well guess what? I dont care. I am busy thinking about some girl... Actually i am thinking about my side project. I dont know why i pretend to be cool?

A co-worker/friend came in to work this morning and told me how amazing his interview went yesterday and how amazing the company is. He said he won't know if he got the position till Monday after they interview the other guy.

I didn't have the heart to tell him that the other person they are interviewing is me. I think it might get awkward when Monday comes and I'm not at work and he realizes why.

When you're interviewing a candidate, who works on Linux, for a senior position & he refers to the Terminal as "MD-DOS"!!

Wasted 45mins interviewing a "developer" who couldn't use git, the command line, CSS preprocessors or task runners. His sites were all template rubbish and he wanted £300($370) per day.

After interviewing 3 candidates for software today, I have officially decided its time to seriously pursue creating a YouTube channel with a complete set of series to learn programming MY WAY... not the short cut way... this will go all the way to beginning and start the person up with a solid foundation to build on... I’m going to pour my knowledge into these series.
The education system has failed too many in the real world... to many people I have interviewed they think they know have a degree but are clueless.. this is unacceptable and a waste... AND way too often I see online “learn programming in 30 days or learn programming in a day”... fuck off it’s all lies .. all wrong.. wrong methods wrong philosophy and I’m done with it...
I’m set on doing it this time, I’ve put it off too long, and longer I put it off the more I see shitty interviews! Time to fix it

So, my wife is in the hospital with two of the kids for an annual checkup. Should be nothing to worry about but still it's stressful and I want to be there.

I'd booked the day off (until the end of the week) and last week I got told, you've taken too many holidays, just the Friday is approved.

Ok, fine, I'll do some extra hours work from home and be there for the appointment. But fuck no, they schedule an "important" client meeting this morning and I'm required to attend.

TWO FUCKING HOURS and I contributed a sum total of 2 sentences which could have been filled in just as well by the other developer on the call

Just another reason I'm happy to be interviewing at other companies.

A few years ago I started a profile on a social media app to share programming endeavors and humor.

After a year or so I became somewhat close with the ~20 subscribers out of my ~1000 that would always comment on my posts. We started a programming group chat and all hung out there, sharing stories, posting random pics, etc.

When I was interviewing with my current company, I shared all the details with the group and kept them up to date while they cheered me on and wished me luck. Once I got my offer everyone was ecstatic.

One friend in the chat remembered my company has an office in NYC, where they live, and asked if I could arrange a tour. I asked around and it seemed like it wouldn't work out, but just a few weeks later I was sent to the NYC office to collaborate with another team for a few weeks.
I let my friend know I would be in town, and when the time came - we met up, toured the NYC office, ate really good tacos, and enjoyed the city.

10/10 would friend again.

I was interviewing a candidate for a senior UI dev position and I began to ask him stuff about closures, contexts, design patterns and others.

At some point, after failing to respond to most of the questions, the candidate looked at me and said something like: ‘I am amazed. You didn’t have a lot of toys when you were a kid. The PC was your only toy when you were a kid, right??’.

I looked at my junior colleague that was shadowing the interview and we couldn’t believe what the guy was asking. He was extremely serious and he was looking for a way to find an explanation for his failure.

"We reviewed your resume and we're impressed! We now want you to complete this 6 hour coding challenge before giving you an interview."

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!

Had a rough time. Dropped out of college twice. Got sent by a shrink to be tested for ADHD. Investigation dropped after phone interviewing my scientology parents. Depressed and admitted to the ward twice. Homeless for a month.

But come Monday I'll start my employment as a COBOL developer. My first qualified job! Code and all resources for learning online has really saved me.

Got a CV Today and the guy literally listed one of his skills as 'Googling'

We're interviewing him

Not laughing.

Not cursing.

Both for interviewing and being interviewed.

Some interviews could have been taken straight from a mexican telenovela.......

"Yeah, I worked for a year in the Walmart IT administration."

"Ok, what did you do?"

"Oh I had the high responsibility of taking care of swapping printer cartridges, programming the registers, stuff like that..."

"You apply for a senior database management role, you're aware of that?"

"Yeah. I took a bootcamp for 3 months in the evening after work. I'm up for the job and expect a payment of <lol, even having a stroke while writing a payment check that number will never happen>".

I made that up - but we had these cases... The story is just rewritten and mixed up for obvious reasons.

When I'm being interviewed, the same thing can happen by the way, too.

IMHO a interview is made not only for the company, but for me as an employee, too. I don't sugar coat it. I want to know what type of shit I'm getting into and how much I'm drowning in it.

Some "types" of interviewers react kinda funny when I start roasting them with questions...

For example, the authoritarian type usually reacts with disrespect. How dare u piss on my front lawn.... Kind of reaction. Which makes it hard not too laugh, because who wants to work for someone who throws a tamper tantrum during a interview? Even harder when the same guy promised you heaveb before (the flowery kind of bullshit, like everything's peaceful and fine and teams great and they have such a great leadership...)

Even worse is the patsy.

When you're sitting in an interview and the only answers you get are:

- Sorry, I don't know.
- I'm not allowed to ....
- Not in my area of expertise....

All just nice ways of saying: I will say nothing cause then I'd need to take some responsibility.

:)

The most Mexican telenovela stuff though in being interviewed is when I managed to divide a team of interviewers and it starts to become a "Judge Judy" or similar freaked out justice show...

A: "No, our team doesn't work that way".
B: "But you will in the short future, WE committed to it".
C: "Not that I'm aware of".

And me, an obvious sinner and person who enjoys entertainment and schadenfreude, just keeps adding kerosene to the fire.

"So, it seems like the team of A has its own rules which do not apply to B and C, do they also have greater funding?".

Oh it makes just fun to spur a good blood bath.

I had the nerve to ask “Do you have any reservations about hiring me?” during an interview today. No regrets. Recommend.

Interviewer: Do you have any questions?
Me: When can I expect to hear back?

Interviewer: The HR will inform you
The HR never contacted me

4 years back I interviewed with a big bank
Neither the interviewer nor HR got back to me

Initially I had hope so I mailed them
Even then I didn’t get any revert

It is understandable that
I might not be deserving of that job

But I felt I deserved a feedback why?
The experience was really disappointing

Recently, a colleague & I were interviewing
“You don’t match our current requirement”

“We will send a written feedback
in a couple of days”, I told the candidate

Later my colleague: “Isn’t it unprofessional
to directly reject the candidate?”

Me: “I feel that an honest no is much better
than false hope from a delayed feedback”

“The candidate can move on
& focus on other interviews better”

Thoughts? Did I do the right thing?

Have you ever got a delayed feedback
or no feedback at all after an interview?

Manager: That last dev you hired is working out well. Where did you get him from?

Dev: *Looking at new hire’s resume which only contains a single bootcamp and nothing else*

Dev: He’s a rescue.

At least visit the company's website before interviewing

Probably the most awkward feeling call happened to me just recently.

I was to interview a guy that's like 10 years older from me with 10y more experience in mostly unrelated tech. I was prepared to have some respect for the guy, and was a bit anxious, but that changed quickly.

The first fucking thing he says, on the fucking job Interview is essentially "I've worked in tech for 20 or so years, and I don't appreciate being tested" great start .. needless to say, I tried to reformulate all my prepared Interview questions so they sound as casual as I could while still trying to get him to tell me *anything*. Most of the time I just felt like "why are we even here dude, you clearly don't care about any of this"...

About 12 or so questions later It was finally clear that none of his experience is useful, and even the exp he has sounds like past companies kept him around as a number...

I want to try a few more edge cases, hoping to find anything we could work with, when he calls me out on it and says "Well now you're testing me, I don't like being tested" at which point I pretty much gave up on the dude and let my HR colleague talk.

Then out of nowhere the guy brings up his mortgage, and how he needs money, and how no one wants to give him a job, and that if we don't want him, we should just tell him now.

Then he starts asking how many people we're interviewing, which is obviously stuff we can't answer, I just said "normal amount" to dodge the question at first, but that just made him more closed off and he just silently remarked "so you can be picky..."

That was one of the most painful interviews I had so far. Me and ny colleague pretty much instantly agreed that he's not a good culture fit for us. Probably not a fit for any company really, not with that attitude.

PS: it was a video call, though he had his camera turned off at first, so it was only me with a camera for half the call. He turned it on just about as I had enough of him.

I’ve been job hunting for a month with very few calls when I realised my resume didn’t have my phone number or my email.

I’ve been interviewing for half a decade.

Why yes, I am indeed retarded thanks for asking.

I hate interviewing..

The first sentence of the candidate was, that he wanted to speak in english instead of german. Great start if you stated something else in the application.

And his english was even worse than mine.

And as expected from his tags in the application, he had a broad knowledge base. From IoT, LTE, node.js TCP, Java, Ruby, Python, to VLAN and firewalls.

Guess what, he had no in depth knowledge for the required job. Suprise!

“Arya” and I were classmates in college. We were in the same year and did the same major. We’ve known each other for 16 years and have worked together twice; one time she was my manager and the other time I was hers. We often attend the same work-related conferences and exchange thoughts on articles that appear in industry publications. Our relationship is a professional one, although I did attend her wedding because her husband was in the same fraternity as me, and she did introduce me to my future husband at a networking charity event. Besides her wedding, we have never talked outside of work or a networking event.

I was hiring for a position and one of the promising candidates was working for Arya and had put her down as a reference. Arya sung her praises and told me she was the best employee in the department. The position I was hiring for would be a promotion for the candidate, and Arya said there was no room for promotion in her department at the moment. Based on Arya’s glowing review and the same from another manager there (and her strong resume), I hired her.

It was a catastrophe. Her work was sloppy and disorganized. She struggled to do basic tasks, missed deadlines, and was sometimes cold to her coworkers and clients. She was asked to take point on a project because her resume listed a similar project, and it went so far off the rails we had to bring in outside help to get it back on track. I know a promotion and new company can be an adjustment, but she was incompetent beyond having to adjust to a new place. Her mistakes cost us so much money she had to be fired.

When I spoke to Arya the first time, she played dumb. The second time, she admitted to lying about how good the candidate was because she was tired of dealing with her mistakes and wanted her gone. She told the candidate she wouldn’t fire her if she quickly left on her own and promised a good reference in exchange. The other manager agreed to do the same thing when Arya asked him to. Arya also told the candidate to lie about how long she worked there to make it seem like she was there longer and to put the project on her resume even though she wasn’t point on it. Arya said it was business and nothing personal.

After she was fired, my boss told me the bad candidate is being investigated by federal authorities for regulatory violations from her time at Arya’s company. The investigation started just when we were interviewing her, and Arya knew about it and didn’t tell me. The other manager is also being investigated for the same violations, which is how Arya got him to lie about the candidate. If the candidate had not left her job there, she would have been fired when word of the investigation got out. We had another candidate who worked for Arya, and Arya told me he was a mediocre employee who does the bare minimum. He just won two different prestigious industry awards. Arya also admitted to lying about him because she didn’t want him to leave. He still works at the same company as her.

I’m angry. She knowingly lied to me. I put stock in her opinion because of our relationship. I feel stupid and duped. I’m afraid making such a bad hire and passing up a good candidate will make me look bad and affect my career. My boss and her boss are upset about this debacle, and everyone knows something is up because the regulators came in when they found out the candidate worked here. They haven’t found anything yet but everyone is still nervous. The other manager who lied about the bad candidate has already been arrested and, based on what the bad candidate is accused of, she will likely be arrested soon also. (Arya cooperated with authorities, isn’t being investigated, and isn’t accused of doing anything against regulations.)

I don’t plan on talking to Arya again beyond being arms-length and professionally cool if I run into her at a conference and others are present. I’m not even sure if I can go to her boss because I don’t have any proof beyond her telling me verbally. Whether I knew her or not, the lie was egregious. Do I tell her boss? Do I confront her or leave it alone? She didn’t show any guilt or apologize to me.

"we use machine learning to ..."
Ffs you're interviewing a developer, not pitching to a investor. We know how much machine learning you use.

When interviewing for a .NET position, ask which language they work in! Don't assume it to be C#. Even when you do and pass your technical test in C#. This is how I found out a few days into my current job I'd now be working in Visual Basic. Part of me thinks they hid the truth on purpose :(

I was engaged as a contractor to help a major bank convert its servers from physical to virtual. It was 2010, when virtual was starting to eclipse physical. The consulting firm the bank hired to oversee the project had already decided that the conversions would be performed by a piece of software made by another company with whom the consulting firm was in bed.

I was brought in as a Linux expert, and told to, "make it work." The selected software, I found out without a lot of effort or exposure, eats shit. With whip cream. Part of the plan was to, "right-size" filesystems down to new desired sizes, and we found out that was one of the many things it could not do. Also, it required root SSH access to the server being converted. Just garbage.

I was very frustrated by the imposition of this terrible software, and started to butt heads with the consulting firm's project manager assigned to our team. Finally, during project planning meetings, I put together a P2V solution made with a customized Linux Rescue CD, perl, rsync, and LVM.

The selected software took about 45 minutes to do an initial conversion to the VM, and about 25 minutes to do a subsequent sync, which was part of the plan, for the final sync before cutover.

The tool I built took about 5 minutes to do the initial conversion, and about 30-45 seconds to do the final sync, and was able to satisfy every business requirement the selected software was unable to meet, and about which the consultants just shrugged.

The project manager got wind of this, and tried to get them to release my contract. He told management what I had built, against his instructions. They did not release my contract. They hired more people and assigned them to me to help build this tool.

They traveled to me and we refined it down to a simple portable ISO that remained in use as the default method for Linux for years after I left.

Fast forward to 2015. I'm interviewing for the position I have now, and one of the guys on the tech screen call says he worked for the same bank later and used that tool I wrote, and loved it. I think it was his endorsement that pushed me over and got me an offer for $15K more than I asked for.

So I have been working at the same company for five years, doing pretty much all the IT stuff. Sys admin, help desk, you name it. I've also developed a fair amount of in-house software for the company.

Today, I learned from a trusted source that they are actively interviewing people to replace me. I probably have a week, maybe two until I'm fired. To my knowledge I've done nothing to warrant this.

I've been looking around lately for a new job anyway, but without any sense of urgency. I have put in several applications with very few responses though.

I have 5 years experience doing this professionally and 15 total years of dev experience, but only a GED.

I'm not sure why I'm not getting any responses from my applications, but I'm pretty scared right now. I have a 5 month old baby, a wife and a teenager that all depend on me.

I don't know what to do...

I'm cracking up...

"chatGPT will ruin the software interviewing industry!!!"

uh.... what does it tell you about our industry if a fucking ROBOT can "ruin" the interview

well, you're right. it tells you that only algorithmic robots do well and subsequently earn the top spots at software companies after interviewing.

creativity, grit, perspective, wisdom? that stuff is absolute bullshit!!! (and as a feeble human I can't figure that out in an interview anyway!!! better just have you solve leetcode problems ad naseum!!! that'll get us the best employee!!!)

god i hate the dumb fuck rat race. good thing i'm not in it anymore! peace out, girl scout✌️

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.

All those developers complaining about how at their new job there is no source control process, no ci, no CD, no code reviews, no coding standards, no effective project management, next time maybe try asking some questions during the interview stage 🤔

Remember you are interviewing the company as much as they are interviewing you.

Recruiter: Hi practiseSafeHex, you were speaking to one of my colleagues recently and I know at the time you said you weren't interested in interviewing with us. I just wanted to check is that still the case?

Me: Yes I haven't changed my mind since last week. You still have awful things on your glassdoor page for my country, and its still a role / area i'm not interested in. Please read my responses and please fuck off

Resumes don't mean jack shit!!

I just got off an interview call with a candidate for a hardware role. On paper this guy is absolute gold, having worked for some of the best robotics companies and research groups(in India at least) It took me an hour to realize that the was just spitting out buzz words. So I started asking him some very fundamental questions, like ohms law and such.. high school stuff. But, phrased in real world terms. And it took me another half an hour to realize that the guy is dumber than a sack of peanuts!

I can't believe how easy it is for people to coast by on paths paved by seniors and teammates. By any objective assessment this guy would be lucky to get a job as an electrician and instead I'm wasting my time interviewing him for a six figure salary (well, the Indian equivalent). Gaaah!!

Just tech screened a kid for a senior Network automation role, in a specific niche.

He's never automated anything before. Didn't know networking basics, didn't know about the niche...

This guy hasn't heard of unit testing or UDP... good luck out there kid. You've got balls anyway.

The day I got my first interview, my dad kept fighting over the phone with me. He thought I was out with my girlfriend having fun. He told me no way anyone would waste their time interviewing me, let alone hire me.. Boy did I prove him wrong!

That feel when you’re asked to share work you’re proud of and you’re not proud of anything.

Or rather, you are... but they’re programs written in C/C++ and you’re interviewing for a mostly frontend gig in React.

I got an interview tomorrow!!! It's the second one for this company and hopefully I'll be out my shitty job soon!

Coding challenges are not a waste of time when interviewing someone

Was asked to pop down to my bosses office for 5 minutes, turns out I was interviewing someone. Not one word of warning was given to me prior the phone call asking me to come down.

I know I am late to this but I have a happy story for this one.

My first dev job was awesome. Except for the pay. I had interviewed and taken the job based on the fact that I was done with my master's degree, but because of a paperwork snafu I wouldn't be receiving my degree until the spring. I was assured that if I provided proof of my degree when it was awarded I would get a pay rise in relation to my education. Well that was not to be. So this professionally and socially inept bitch I was working with was going to be ahead of me in her career because the people I worked for gave pay raises based on time served rather than ability and education.
So I started interviewing for other positions. Especially after government furloughs cut my pay by 20% for 11 weeks, causing me to max out my credit cards. All of my coworkers had my back. They went to the upper management and the higher ranking military people we worked for and explained the situation. They were my job references for my interviews. They got me a job that paid double what I was making. I still get the warm fuzzies thinking about it.
They were some of the sweetest people I had ever worked with. One of them gave my mom and brother a ride to the airport when I crashed my car. They bought me lunch when I was in dire straights. I really would have loved to stay but I couldn't afford it. That and winter in Utah fucking blows.

Bit of an essay. TLDR: come Monday I'm either getting fired or promoted. And the CTO is a dickhead. If you think you work with me or know who I am, no you don't, shut the hell up.

Was having a discussion with my team, went on for a bit, at one point my manager mentioned that the CTO wanted me to go into the office occasionally, same thing I've had since I joined when they literally wanted me to move hundreds of miles to be close to the office mid covid when the office was closed. I give a nondescript answer. He's a bit more persistent, I snap a little but the conversation moves on. Discussion of company and team dynamics, at one point he makes a comment about people at another company being told if they don't go into the office they won't be eligible for promotion.

I ask everyone else on the call to leave.

I point out that 2 years ago me and him were interviewing candidates. He on a few occasions introduces me to candidates as a _senior_ engineer. My job title does not contain the word senior. I let it slide the first time, not worth it for a slip of the toung. Happens a couple more times, I take him aside and privately point out my job title does not contain the word senior. He says he didn't realise and thought I was.

My take away then: I'm expected to do the work of a senior without being paid for it and without being given the acknowledgement of the appropriate job title. I remind him of this. My job title hasn't changed. Fuck, I took a low ball offer when I joined and have had a minimal pay rise in like, 3 years. My tone is "not happy".

His response? He discussed promoting me with CTO however budged constraints. I somewhat understand, however.

We have promoted several people in the last few years. We have grown by hiring new people in the last few years (5 in a company of 30). There are ways to compensate someone in ways that do not impact day to day budget (shares, TC, total compensation, is normal terminology in the tech field for this). I ask why the hell should I travel a few hundred miles to the office to get get to know people, put effort in to a company that demonstrably doesn't value me? Particularly as all levels of management have completely failed at developing a social atmosphere during covid? My first month, I had 3 5 minute meetings with my manager a week. That was all of the communication I had with people. I literally complained and laid out what they should do instead, they adopted most of it.

I also ask him if he genuinely thinks being here is in my professional interest? My tone has well passed pissed off.

I will say, I actually quite like my manager, we have a good working relationship and I've learned a lot from him.

He makes some mediocre points, tries to give advice about value of shares. To me, the value of shares is zero until they are money. The value to the company, however, is that it's a sizeable chunk on their balance sheet and shares sheet that they have to be willing to justify. If I wanted money, I'd go work at a high frequency trading bank and make 5x what I'm on now. No joke, that's what they pay, I could get a job, came close in the past but went to amazon. He understands.

He says will discuss with CTO. They were on a call for like an hour. His tone has changed to "you will be promoted ASAP, comp may be structured as discussed". Point made.

I'm in this job because it's convenient, is easy for me. Was originally lower challenge than previous, has a range of chances to learn and _that's_ the value to me. He's suitably nervous.

Point made I think.

So given I swore a few times, at least once about the CTO. Interesting to see how it goes.

Message from him to the effect that he spoke to CTO, has been told to write a proposal for promotion (kinda standard), will discuss with HR on Monday as they're on holiday.

So, maybe not getting fired today?

Blood pressure still very high.

Did not expect this from Google. Seems like you're hiring real linguistic pros.

Now this is not the only thing I didn't like, they're very disorganized & the interviewer got sick & two of three interviewers were so cocky.. bad bad vibes

On the other side, a small local company is giving warm & good vibes, seems more accommodating even with lower pay.. their website sucks & the tech director was honest & smiling.

So yeah, Fuck You Google
..|.

I am interviewing people for a job position with python knowledge.

My first question is how to reverse string and second one what’s the difference between set and list.
So far no one knows.

Fairly speaking I am asking only basic questions about what is decorator, generator, lambda. Also some basic data structure questions.

Is it to hard ?

I lost my faith in humanity.

So I was interviewing at company X, through recruiter A. It all went well - one of the best feedbacks I have ever received actually, but then they went quiet for a bit... only to have the recruiter A call me about 3 days later and tell me that apparently the project they had planned to get me on, was a no go for a while and that they would contact me again within a month or so.

Meanwhile, recruiter B called me up and sent me to company Y and asked me what my situation was at other interviews. I said that I was interviewing at company X and that they came back to me and said the project is delayed and they'll contact me within a month or so.

Recruiter B starts a rant about how he hates when companies do that and that he, as a recruiter, would loose trust in that company if something like that happened.

And now company Y goes quiet for 2 days. Recruiter B calls me and says exactly the same thing.

So naturally, I say - "ah that's a shame, you must be loosing trust in company Y now."

He pauses and says - "Well umm"... another big pause. "I see what you mean, but umm..." another pause and this awkward silence.

"thanks", I said and I hung up. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

- 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.

Hiring Manager: Thanks for interviewing for the position. But the things we listed as "nice to haves" are actually required for the job so we aren't going to hire you.

I have gotten some ridiculous rejections to my job applications recently - some of them were quite nit-picking gatekeeper sort of answers to the assignments like "oh you haven't used aria-label in a proper way" or "oh your error messages were not clear enough".

Then I see the same positions being open still after 5 months. This happened 4 times in a row. What is going on? Why do companies place job ads and waste time interviewing people, if they don't want to hire anybody? Am I missing something here? 🤔

That wonderful moment when after months of applying and interviewing you finally get to hand in your resignation..! 🎉

Interviewer: *looking at my GitHub* do you use devrant?
Me: ...yes
Interviewer: ok, cool

I had an interview once where the dev interviewing me recognised that I had devrant avatar as my github profile picture.
Maybe that was one of the reasons they didn't get back to me after that interview? 🤔

Once interviewing a developer I asked her what was the most challenging work from her experience. She said it was writing a game of tic tac toe, I paused for a bit, and asked her if she can describe in more details which part of it was challenging.

She said, "I am not too familiar with the rules of the game so it was hard".

The whole room went brain-freeze for 10 seconds before anyone could find a way to continue the conversation.

I'm coming off a lengthy staff augmentation assignment awful enough that I feel like I need to be rehabilitated to convince myself that I even want to be a software developer.

They needed someone who does .NET. It turns out what they meant was someone to copy and paste massive amounts of code that their EA calls a "framework." Just copy and paste this entire repo, make a whole ton of tweaks that for whatever reason never make their way back into the "template," and then make a few edits for some specific functionality. And then repeat. And repeat. Over a dozen times.

The code is unbelievable. Everything is stacked into giant classes that inherit from each other. There's no dependency inversion. The classes have default constructors with a comment "for unit testing" and then the "real" code uses a different one.

It's full of projects, classes, and methods with weird names that don't do anything. The class and method names sound like they mean something but don't. So after a dozen times I tried to refactor, and the EA threw a hissy fit. Deleting dead code, reducing three levels of inheritance to a simple class, and renaming stuff to indicate what it does are all violations of "standards." I had to go back to the template and start over.

This guy actually recorded a video of himself giving developers instructions on how to copy and paste his awful code.

Then he randomly invents new "standards." A class that reads messages from a queue and processes them shouldn't process them anymore. It should read them and put them in another queue, and then we add more complication by reading from that queue. The reason? We might want to use the original queue for something else one day. I'm pretty sure rewriting working code to meet requirements no one has is as close as you can get to the opposite of Agile.

I fixed some major bugs during my refactor, and missed one the second time after I started over. So stuff actually broke in production because I took points off the board and "fixed" what worked to add back in dead code, variables that aren't used, etc.

In the process, I asked the EA how he wanted me to do this stuff, because I know that he makes up "standards" on the fly and whatever I do may or may not be what he was imagining. We had a tight deadline and I didn't really have time to guess, read his mind, get it wrong, and start over. So we scheduled an hour for him to show me what he wanted.

He said it would take fifteen minutes. He used the first fifteen insisting that he would not explain what he wanted, and besides he didn't remember how all of the code he wrote worked anyway so I would just have to spend more time studying his masterpiece and stepping through it in the debugger.

Being accountable to my team, I insisted that we needed to spend the scheduled hour on him actually explaining what he wanted. He started yelling and hung up. I had to explain to management that I could figure out how to make his "framework" work, but it would take longer and there was no guarantee that when it was done it would magically converge on whatever he was imagining. We totally blew that deadline.

When the .NET work was done, I got sucked into another part of the same project where they were writing massive 500 line SQL stored procedures that no one could understand. They would write a dozen before sending any to QA, then find out that there was a scenario or two not accounted for, and rewrite them all. And repeat. And repeat. Eventually it consisted of, one again, copying and pasting existing procedures into new ones.

At one point one dev asked me to help him test his procedure. I said sure, tell me the scenarios for which I needed to test. He didn't know. My question was the equivalent of asking, "Tell me what you think your code does," and he couldn't answer it. If the guy who wrote it doesn't know what it does right after he wrote it and you certainly can't tell by reading it, and there's dozens of these procedures, all the same but slightly different, how is anyone ever going to read them in a month or a year? What happens when someone needs to change them? What happens when someone finds another defect, and there are going to be a ton of them?

It's a nightmare. Why interview me with all sorts of questions about my dev skills if the plan is to have me copy and paste stuff and carefully avoid applying anything that I know?

The people are all nice except for their evil XEB (Xenophobe Expert Beginner) EA who has no business writing a line of code, ever, and certainly shouldn't be reviewing it.

I've tried to keep my sanity by answering stackoverflow questions once in a while and sometimes turning evil things I was forced to do into constructive blog posts to which I cannot link to preserve my anonymity. I feel like I've taken a six-month detour from software development to shovel crap. Never again. Lesson learned. Next time they're not interviewing me. I'm interviewing them. I'm a professional.

Got rejected after final-round interviews with Amazon again. Can’t say it doesn’t hurt, but I understand it.

So to make myself feel better, I started working on the idea I’ve had for a while that I realize is going to be a huge time sink and silly, but I love it.

Tomorrow will be the first time I'll be interviewing candidates for hiring. Any advice?
P.S.: This will be first time an interviewer will be more nervous than the candidates. 🤔🤔

Few years ago a girl from our HR was hitting on my co-worker. She was asking all kinds of personal and professional favours just so he would come by her place, etc. One time she asked him to send her few C/C++ questions that she could use to thin the crowd of potential candidates before inviting them for the formal interview that he'd conduct later on. Obviously she wouldn't know if the answer is good or not but hell with it, he was ready to storm that pink fortress! So he came up with some mind twisters. She left two days later before he even reached the drawbridge. Sad.

So about six months ago he got fed up with some bullshit and left the company. Yesterday we had dinner. He was interviewing for quite some time being picky about which offer to accept and, surprisingly, during his last interview he got asked very familiar set of questions. He answered each. Then he couldn't resist and asked if the girl works there. The guy confirmed and, without a warning, called her. As if it wasn't awkward enough this is how I was told the conversation went:

- "Joan! You won't guess who I've got here! Your very good friend, Peter! Nope. Yeah, that one - how did you kn... Uh-huh. Oh? Yeah. Are you sure? I mean, I wouldn't. Deal!"

Then he turned out to Peter and said:

- "You know what? I wasn't going to hire you for shit because in my opinion your knowledge on the subject matter, how to put that gently, sucks ass... But apparently Joan here says you're professional and can handle everything we'll be able to throw at you. So when can you start?"

Needless to say he took the job. The fortress fell soon after and he wanted to meet to ask if I'm coming for the bachelor party. I'm ordering t-shirts with "batch mode off" in monospace.

Getting a rejection letter six months after starting a job when you haven’t applied to jobs since you got said job is weird. Like, what’s the point in even sending a rejection 8 months after a person applied?

Either:
a) they’ve already assumed you weren’t interested and have moved on with their life or
b) they were really REALLY interested in the possibility of working for your company and have been eagerly awaiting reply… only to be given the terse rejection email 8 months later.

And in neither of those scenarios is that person going to have a higher opinion of the company because you took the time to respond eventually.

I just… I don’t get it, mates.

Big title games

Console to Mobile: redesign the game to make it easy to play

Console to PC: just port the game, keep the console keys but remap them... randomly so it makes no logical sense and is impossible to remember or easy to press when needed (at least to me)

I guess ditching games on PC years ago was the right move but now I have A way overpowered computer... (Gonna take a while to get around to that ML stuff I had planned... Prolly taking a React/Native die first and maybe do some also for interviewing)

I had a manager who scolded me in me in public on a non-IT floor because I used child classes and overloading of methods which "is too hard to read". Instead use "lots of ifs and else's". This is the guy that had a JSP so large (be cause he had so many ifs) that it couldn't be compiled even on a server.

The best karma happened a few months later. I was looking for a new job (wonder why?) and was very deep in the interview process - like round 5- of company A. I got talking to this jackass, who had no idea I was interviewing, said "yeah I applied to company A once. Couldn't get past the first round. Great benefits, though.". Me getting the job a week later was the best thing ever.

Wasn't so much a question but...

Before WFH got so popular, I was interviewing at a place 50km from home, loyalty and stuff came up and the guy said something along the lines of "The only potential problem I can see is the distance. Now I get the sense you're quite a loyal person blah blah blah"

Half way into my third month they decided not to keep me after probation, after giving no negative feedback at any point prior to that then "we just need someone mors senior"

So yea, tune me about loyalty and then do that....

Also, if they needed senior why were they advirtising junior?

Always been the one interviewed. I cant wait till i get to be the one interviewing devs. 💔

Story time on my job hunt: Currently interviewing with Google during my notice period.

I always had a love hate relationship with Google. Unlike my hate towards Meta or Amazon, where I had a reason to hate them for how ill intended they are, I never had a valid reason to dislike or hate Google apart from the fact that they steal my data.

That's it. That's my only reason why I hate Google. But I fell in love with their products during my trip to Istanbul and how throughout my journey, Google products were there for me to solve all my needs.

As y'all know, I was treated badly during my Meta interview, last October. With Google, the experience is on another level.

People are fucking smart and ingenious, but at the same time very polite, humble, and respectful.

During my 3 interviews so far (2 more remaining), each one of them made me so comfortable that I was more anxious before the interview than during or after.

They supported me during each question they asked. They made me felt heard and focused on my strength, instead of the weaknesses (or trying to break me down unnecessarily).

The interview syllabus is so fucking vast, and recruiters know so much that they helped me not only with preparation material, but also guided me personally. Haven't seen such knowledgeable recruiters.

The questions were dynamic in nature and thankfully because of my preparation, I was able to answer them most.

Overall, the culture at Google seems brilliant and an environment where one can flourish. No wonder companies are trying to copy every aspect of how Google operates and no surprise that Google is doing well at scale.

I feel so high on emotions (positively), after these interviews that I wonder how would it be to work at Google with such phenomenal people and exceptional environment.

Interviewing intern today:

"What text editor do you use?"
"Notepadd, Word, I'm okay with anything."
"Like, Notepad++?"
"Eh... Notepad, I don't know about the ++."

Do all companies ask candidates to solve some crazy puzzles before interviewing them? These puzzles have nothing to do with the job!

Interviewing a potential candidate...

Me: So, how would you rate your JavaScript knowledge?

Him: Pretty good, although I still don't really understand prototypal inheritance.

Me: Yeah, it's hard to understand something which doesn't exist.

...let the flaming begin 😈

Interviewing tip #2: If you're going to lie about what you do at your current job on your resume, remember what lies you put...

interview today

me: and can you tell me a little bit more about your development process? e.g. an example dev cycle from reqs to testing and review...?

senior dev interviewing me:
*gives frustrated/annoyed "why tf are you asking these?" look*
So, uh, we don't really use testing for these projects cuz it would make it harder to refactor later.
(and responded nothing else on the topic)

I left shortly after that.

This one ticked me off because of the sheer rudeness of a demand they made of me. I had been building a personal freelance brand around myself and my skills for many years. I had in the prior 3 years developed it from a freelance to a lean agency model. That was running in parallel with full time work and the FT employer was happy to allow it. Eventually that employer downsized me and almost everyone else on staff. But they liked me and gave me mini-projects to do on a contract basis. I began interviewing for FT work with other companies.

One agency I applied at gave me a phone screen interview. The main hiring person was also an investor in the agency. He noted my lean agency and said that a second interview would be contingent on my dropping my clients that I was working for on my own time, disposing completely of my personal brand, and even giving up my domain name.

I told him I’d think about it. But the more I thought about it the more angry I got about such a stupid request. Why does this new company I don’t even know I will like working for get to tell me to abandon my “Plan B” option for if I quit or they decide to lay me off?

They never called back but I wished they had so I could have had the satisfaction of telling them no.

Me: *Gives second round in an interview, didn’t go as expected, waits for the result (at this moment we can’t go further with your profile kinda result)*

HR: *calls after 2 weeks* Hi, hope you’re doing good, your last round was declared CNS (Candidate no show)

Me: was it this bad, that the guy interviewing me simply wiped off my existence?

HR: let me figure out something. *Calls back after 5 mins* since it was a no show, we’ve decided to not go with your profile further.

Me: 🥲 it didn’t have to be this brutal of a rejection

I was unemployed and had to sent out 10 or so job applications per month to e eligible to receive the money substitution for unemployment...
Anyways, not many jobs fit my experience, so I was sending out to those with higher/different requirements aswel.. That day I was meeting my sister and she was already waiting for me, so I quickly sent out a totally unpersonalised application for a job I wasn't qualified for. Next day I got back response email with a self grading questionaire I didn't really understood, all about MS technologies I never worked with..which means I didn't know how to grade myself..I decided to ask around people to try to help me grade myself, but then I totally forgot about that in the next days and never replied to that email.
Anyways, week later I got email for job interview from a sister company (found that out later, snooping through linkedin). I was surprised someone requested a meeting with me, especially without the agenda (at that time I was not aware it was a job interview).. Anyways I went there, found out the guy interviewing me thought they lost my questionaire. I explined the situation and he just decided to ask me around to see what I know. So we talked about my past experience and the guy who was doing the interview explained what is what & and explained what I did before and together we figured out what I know and what my experiences are... After we were done, he said that everything else, the payment and other stuff about the job position I should discuss with the director. Not to ask questions, but negotiate.. O.o And just like that I got the job, because they liked my CV & attitude (I like to learn new stuff) and they thought I'd fit in perfectly.
I'm still working there, it's been 4 years now, I think.. loved it since the day one.. Got 'promoted' to another project, crappy old code noone wants/dares to touch but I love it! The guys think I am weird cuz I like to solve/fix things and make them better, and previous employees who worked on that project have all lost their shit and quit. They are all wondering how I can handle this, but little do they know about devrant & my love for the crazy!!

I shaved half my beard off. I just had a meeting with a recruiter and he told me I might get problems with upper management (CEOs for example) in Switzerland because they are still very conservative and they'll be interviewing me. Why would that matter!? Either I get the job done or I don't, why the hell does it make a difference if I like to stick out in a crowd with a unique cool beard!?

While interviewing someone for a DevOps position, he admits having only started on this subject a year ago. This is no big deal.
When asked how he keeps up-to-date, he answered "I haven't for the last ten months".
Well, that was not the answer that I expected...

Was interviewing someone for a role, asked them a basic question in Python (before anyone gets on my case about interview coding questions, it's removing duplicates and the answer is to just cast to set, I'm just checking that they actually know Python). Perusing Stack Overflow while I wait for their answer (it's a remote call and I give them a bit of time to calmly deliberate). The exact prompt I gave them pops up as a question, the asker is registered to their profile.

Not only did they not get the job, but I downvoted the question and marked it as duplicate. Rejection and unemployment can be temporary, but StackOverflow reputation is FOREVER.

I was recently interviewing a fresh college graduate. According to his resume, he had practically invented machine learning. He eats kaggle datasets for breakfast and was all set to invent a cure for cancer with deep learning. And then, I ask him a simple question. What is 's' in 'https' and he says... "simple".

Really fed up with my colleague and possibly my job. Am starting to doubt am cut out to be a developer

Am a junior java dev , been working working for this company for about 2 years now. Although they hired me to be a java dev, they pretty much exclusively had me working on JavaScript crap because none of the other more senior devs wanted to do even so much as poke JS with a long stick....

Oh and the salary was crap but i figured since i had barely 3 years of exp i thought i would stick with it for a while

But a few months ago after seeing other opportunities I got fed up and threatened to quit , already started interviewing etc
Got an offer, not exactly what i wanted but better than where i was. Went to quit but they freaked out and started throwing money at me. They matched and exceed the other salary and promised to addressed the issues that made me want to leave. Ie get me to work more on the java side of the project and have me work with someone more senior who could sort of mentor me, i had been working semi solo on the js shit till then...

The problem is that my supposed mentor is selfish prick... he is the sort of guy who comes in real early, basically he goes to early morning prayer then come in at some ungodly hour and fuckoff home around 3pm

He does all his work early morning then spends the rest of the day with his headphones on stealthily watching youtube, amazon, watching cricket, reading about Palestine , how oppressed muslims are or building a website for some mosque.

I asked him to let me sit with him so that I could just learn how this or that part of the sys worked , he agreed then the very next day comes in and does all the work before i get in at 9 , i asked him how he did it and he tells me oh just read the code.

Its not as simple as that, out codebase is an old pile of non standard legacy dog shit. Nothing works as it should, i tried to go through documentation online for the various stuff we use , but invariably get stuck when i try the usual approach because it turns out the original devs had essentially done a lot of custom hacks and cowboy coding to get stuff working, they screwed around with some of the framework jars & edited libraries to get stuff to work, resulting in some really weird OSGI errors.

My point is that i cant really just "read the code" or google ...
I gotta know a bit more what was actually modified and a lot of this knowledge isn't fucking documented, theres a lot of " ohhh that weird bug yeah yeah that happens cuz x did this hack some years ago to fix this issue and we kinda built on it, yeah we weren't supposed to do that but heyyy what u gonna do, just do this or that instead"

I was asked to set up a web service to export something, since thats his area of expertise and he is suppose to be teaching me the ropes, i asked him to explain where i should start and what would the general workflow be, his response is to tell me to just copy the IMPORT service and rename it to export then "just do it um change it or something" very helpful indeed (building enterprise application here nothing complex at all!!)

He sits right next to me so i can see how much works he actually does, i know when he just idly sitting there so thats when i ask him questions, he always has his earphones on so each time i gotta find a way to get his attention with a poke or a wave, he will give a heavy sigh and a weary look as he removes his headphones, listen to my question then give me the shortest answer possible before IMMEDIATELY turning away and putting his headphones on as fast as possible regardless of whether I actually understood or even heard what he said. If i ask another question ( am talking like an immediate follow up question for a clarification or something) he will
Do the whole sigh + tired look routing to make me know yeah you are disturbing me. ( god was so happy the day he accidentally sat on and broke them)

Yesterday i caught a glance at his screen as i was sitting down and i think he and another dev were talking about me
That am slow with my work and take forever to get into gear.

Starting to have doubts about my own ability n wether am really cut out to be a developer. I know i can work hard but its impossible to do so when you have no clue where to start and unable to look it up since all the custom hacks doesn't really allow any frame of reference.
Feels like am being handicapped and mocked, yesterday i just picked up my gear n left the office.

I never talk ill about my colleagues, whenever i have a 121 with my mgr i always all is fine, x n y are really helpful etc
I tried to indirectly tell my other colleague about this guy, he told me that guy had kinda mentally checked out of this job and was just going through on auto pilot and just laughed it off (they have been working together for almost a decade and a buddies) my other colleague is pretty nice but he usually swamped with work so i feel bad to trouble him.

Am really Fed up with it all

Technical phone screens be like, "we see you have years of OOP experience, but can you tell us about the differences between an interface and an abstract class?"

Yes. Yes I can. Can you tell me why you're asking such basic questions? Is this something people actually don't know this late in the game?

Fuck this day!
Like really fuck it!
I have one of the most terrible crunch-time i ever experienced.
I’v been working 12+ hours every day with an ever-changing project timeline.
It started simple, we made a timeline, it was risky even then but it was realistic, we started working immideatly, everything looked good then a few days in BOOM! Actually our project management completely forgot client B’s projects soo we need to do that too with the same fucking deadline!!! (About 10x more work in waay less time)
Then this morning i got an email from the graphics team that we need to document our design process RIGHT FUCKING NOW! Because management wants documentations, in the middle of a fucking crunch-time.
Today it almost got physical with my project manager, i told him that he is not a programmer, i dont fucking care about his shit, just fuck off and let me work because we won’t be ready based on his unrealistic bs.
I feel like completely fucked over, like we were told 2 days before deadline that the whole company and people’s jobs depends on us now because if we wont finish this clients won’t pay.
WE ARE TWO PROGRAMMERS for studio of 10-12 people!!!
Soo i’w been thinking about getting the fuck out of here ASAP, i got an offer from a pretty big international gamedev company just what i needed, i already did their test before all of this, i passed A+.
We scheduled a skype interview for today. I had completely no time to prepare or chill off, just got out of the office, got into a starbucks and i’m interviewing. No time to even check my mic or internet, the call was so shit i could not hear anything, they neither because the plaza was loud af. Meanwhile im nervous about work, about the interview, about can they hear me at all because of the noise. I fucked it up. BIG time! I was so done i could not reverse a fucking string in c++ or explain what is a signed int!!!
Needless to say they said no.
Need time to think about it or realize what happened? Nice dreams. Back to the office and continue working.
I can’t do this anymore. My girlfriend came for me and took me home at 10pm but all i could do was stare at the floor on the subway. I don’t want people to lose their jobs but i just phisically can’t do this anymore.
Meanwhile any time i talk to my project manager about being tired he says like “hshshsbsb i have 60 hours in the last 4 days i got the worst part, i would be grateful in your place..” like fuck off dude, i dont give fuck about how you feel about this. This is not okay for me, you did this to the project, your fucking job is to manage it! I have one day off before going back to this, i have completely no idea what to do now...

[ps: this is not Nemesys. They did not let me work on my own stuff because i would be a competitor, so i left.]

Six or seven years ago, I worked for a large financial organization as part of a very large effort to convert server assets from physical to virtual. The consultants on site were in bed with the vendor of a terrible piece of software designed for that purpose. After a couple weeks on the job I'd had it, and sat down in between sessions of "validating" the conversion procedure, and started writing my own software for converting Linux servers. After a couple days it was working great, and they wound up adopting my software as the default method for Linux conversions.

Years later, I'm interviewing for my current job and one of the interviewers tells me he used my converter some time later and loved it. Pretty sure it's what swung the interview for me.

7 page resume
13 jobs, some only lasting 3 months
TONS of grammatical and spelling errors.
Descriptions of each job has several lines just saying he "created functions; interfaces; abstract classes; classes".... For a jr/senior level developer job? Why are we interviewing him?

So at this startup i was single iOS dude age 34, android had 1.5 dudes, one older, one you ger. That 0.5 younger was tech director, really good, so they churned for two guys. Millenial, nice guy, never making conflict, just being sleazebag.

Nobody explained to boss why iOS was always late with features, even when i complained. So i got help, 10 months later, project was unpolished but stable, codewise. Now i interview and hire a guy, age 27, who was all yeah dude no problem, and that being my first interview, i fell under his friendly appearance. I ignored a fact that he didn’t know 90% of stuff i was asking him, because he was so friendly and outgoing and we will do anything attitude.

The guy knew very little, was childish and irresponisble. He showed at work at noon. He started telling me what to do, his senior collegue who started the project. He argued about everything that i would tell him. So i spent three to four hours a day charting with him, because we were in different cities. He had two uears of experence, but he was below junior level. And he refused any of my advices for learning in free time. No, he said, thats my free time, you will not tell me what to do. Well, how do you plan on being better, i asked. He said, i learn by doing. But, since he was at his job only six hours a day, instead of eight, and since he was productive only for 2, i guess he was lazy.
He would deliver a UI he would make, without business logic, and tell it is done. Then clients would call me and ask why text fields are not saved..

This all took me month to understand. I lost time, i lost trust, and soon he was fired.

But, soon i was fired also, replaced by another two devs who i had interviewd and formed a team. I was discarded as trash, just like that. I have even worked overtime to catch up with android guys, unpaid.

Took me year to recover mentally from this.

Lessons learned: be objective when interviewing. Job is business, not friendship, trust no one, keep neutral on work. Leave honesty for someone else, honesty will be used against you. Never criticize two girls in office who disturb developers by talking about sex and dicks all the time, dressed sexy, they are girlfriends of people ranked above you. Leave code perfection for your projects.

Company: We want to attract lots of new talent.
Employee: First, try to retain your existing talent. Please treat them with respect and give them every now and then challenges they deserve.

Please ask the attrition rate of every company you interview with.

Anyone else had an interviewer just blatantly waste your time and lie to you?

I was recently interviewing for a job, the first couple of rounds went really well, and they gave out a fairly standard tech test. It was a basic tic-tac-toe game, with a few extra twists and a 120 minute time limit. They then wanted me to host what I had be able to code somewhere so they could test it out before the second technical interview.
The interview interview date came round, the interviewer never actually showed up, but 20 minutes late he sent me an email saying they wouldn't be going ahead because the code wasn't good enough, and cited a bunch of things that were well outside of the brief they gave for the test. and when I checked the access logs for the hosted 'live' version, it showed they hadn't bothered to actually look at it; they hadn't even checked out the code from the repo.
I've had similar things happen in the past occasionally, but is it just my bad luck, or is stuff like this becoming more common recently?

interviewing a guy earlier on... apparently jQuery is better because it can do things javascript can't

I’ve been interviewing with a startup for a Frontend Engineer role. In the interview they said they didn’t have a designer, that their founder and other devs do the design work. I thought “ok so they are still putting something together and don’t care much if the UI is crappy”, and still proceeded with it. I do the take-home test, it took a lot more than the 1-2 hours they said it should take (these estimates never seem realistic), I thought I did a pretty good job and send it back to them. I then got an email back from one of the founders, they really liked the code and my approach, but the UX was not good enough. He asked if I would be willing to iterate on it if given some direction? The direction: design your own version of our product. I refused. I thought this was a developer position, not a designer position.

Just received a test for a job I'm interviewing for. I was interviewing for a C++ position. Practice test: Create an REST API using SpringBoot, Spring Data, document with Swagger and implement continuous integration testing.

To be fair, I also mentioned I'm fluent in Java. But I've never touched SpringBoot or done any backend webdev, since my intention was to never get near it.

Deadline: Sunday. Game on...

I fucking got scammed.

Scenario 1: Had literally no experience in B2C, no experience in experimentation, 0% fitment.

Verdict: got hired in just one round in a top domestic brand which is a profit making startup.

Scenario 2: A friend from ex-org got referred in a global brand for an international location. Hadn't interviewed for 4+ years. Created his resume in 15 minutes, got shortlisted, screened, interviewed, and hired in less than 2 weeks.
(This guy is a good friend I am incredibly happy for him and that he scored the gig and in now way I wish bad for his outcome).

Scenario 3: I also got a strong refferal for the same brand and location. I have been interviewing for past 6 months, resume is super polished where companies like FAANG spoke to me.
Got rejected in shortlisting. The referral guy got me in the pool because it was his team
In screening round, I was a good fit, answered everything well. Yes, I wasn't concise as much (and that's the feedback I kept getting and I was working on it).
Verdict: rejected. They didn't ask me relevant questions and rejected me on the basis of not having the required experience.

Seems like the hiring manager didn't want me to clear so came up with reasons.

And now it feels that, if the HM wants you, they'll hire you irrespective of anything and if they don't they'll kick you out for lamest of the reason.

My life is split in two part, the first three decades were surely shit and this was my last chance of making sure the next three are worth remembering on the death bed.

I failed. Miserably. For the factors outside of my control. Not that I haven't failed in past. Not that I didn't try again.

But man, I am doing persisting. The game is rigged. One cannot win without extreme luck.

Millions of dreams shattered. A shitty day, is now a shitty life.

Being born in third nation is a fucking curse.

Project manager, who i've complained in the past is neglecting critical things that he doesn't want to do, decided today to cancel our weekly planning meeting, to have the below conversation with me 1:1. Its very long, but anyone who has the will to get through it ... please tell me it's not just me. I'm so bewildered and angry.

Side note: His solution to the planning meeting not taking place ... to just not have one and asked everyone to figure it out themselves offline, with no guidance on priorities.

Conversation:

PM: I need to talk to you about some of phrasing you use during collaboration. It's coming across slightly offensive, or angry or something like that.

Me: ok, can you give me an example?

PM: The ticket I opened yesterday, where you closed it with a comment something along the lines of "as discussed several times before, this is an issue with library X, can't be fixed until Y ...".

"As discussed several times" comes across aggressive.

Me: Ok, fair enough, I get quite frustrated when we are under a crunch, working long hours, and I have to keep debugging or responding to the same tickets over and over. I mean, like we do need to solve this problem, I don't think its fair that we just keep ignoring this.

PM: See this is the problem, you never told me.

Me: ... told you what?

PM: That this is a known issue and not to test it.

Me: ..... i'm sorry ..... I did, that was the comment, this is the 4th ticket i've closed about it.

PM: Right but when you sent me this app, you never said "don't test this".

Me: But I told you that, the last 3 times that it won't be in until feature X, which you know is next month.

PM: No, you need to tell me on each internal release what not to test.

Me: But we release multiple times per week internally. Do you really need me to write a big list of "still broken, still broken, still broken, still broken"?

PM: Yes, how else will I know?

Me: This is documented, the last QA contractor we had work for us, wrote a lot of this down. Its in other tickets that are still open, or notes on test cases etc. You were tagged in all of these too. Can you not read those? and not test them unless I say I've fixed them?

PM: No, i'm only filling for QA until we hire a full time. Thats QA's job to read those and maintain those documents.

Me: So you want me to document for you every single release, whats already documented in a different place?

PM: ok we'll come back to this. Speaking of hiring QA. You left a comment on the excel spreadsheet questioning my decision, publicly, thats not ok.

Me: When I asked why my top pick was rejected?

PM: Yes. Its great that you are involved in this, but I have to work closely with this person and I said no, is that not enough?

Me: Well you asked me to participate, reviewing resumes's and interviewing people. And I also have to work extremely close with this person.

PM: Are you doubting my ability to interview or filter people?

Me: ..... well a little bit yeah. You asked me to interview your top pick after you interviewed her and thought she was great. She was very under qualified. And the second resume you picked was missing 50% of the requirements we asked for ... given those two didn't go well, I do think its fair to ask why my top pick was rejected? ... even just to know the reason?

PM: Could you not have asked publicly? face to face?

Me: you tagged me on a google sheet, asking me to review a resume, and rather than tag you back on 2 rows below ... you want me to wait 4 days to ask you at our next face to face? (which you just cancelled for this meeting)

PM: That would have been more appropriate

Me: ..... i'm sorry, i don't want to be rude but thats ridiculous and very nit pick-y. You asked my opinion on one row, I asked yours on another. To say theres anything wrong with that is ridiculous

PM: Well we are going to call another team meeting and discuss all this face to face then, because this isn't working. We need to jump to this other call now, lets leave it here.

Managed to land 2 interviews:

The first one was for a startup that was looking for a react programmer (I've never used react before).

The later was a php job at a big company. They told me they used cakephp which is a framework I had not used before either.

Still, I'm more familiar with php than react so I felt more confident with the second interview. However, I felt there was a lot of good chemistry going on in the first interview.

The interviewer was incredibly nice (he was the lead dev, not an HR person as opposed to the second interviewer)

He gave me a small react test to be completed within a week. I barely managed to do it in time but I felt good about the solution.

Just as I was sending it, I get a call from the second interviewer saying I landed the php job.

I wasn't sure if my novice react skills would be impressive enough to secure me the react job (and I really needed a job) so I accepted.

After explaining everything to the guy who was interviewing me for the react job, he understood and was kind enough to schedule a code review where he walked through my novice code explaining what could be improved, helping me learn more in the process.

I regret not accepting the react position. The PHP they got me working with is fucking PHP5 with Cake2 :/

Don't get me wrong, I like the salary and the people are nice but the tech stack they're using (lacking source control by the way!), as well as all the lengthy meetings are soul-draining.

Can we please eliminate React?
I was interviewing lately and the lady asked if I knew react, I said no and I don't want to. She then asked what the hell I use for front end... As if react is the only thing you can use... Ehm hello we still have vanilla JS and jQuery in the house. Which are better, faster and easier to use for like +90% of all Web projects out there...

Interviewing at companies that have exactly the same kind of problems/people/politics makes me sad and a little desperate.

Probably best to stick with the devil I know (for now). After all, why trade in crap for a turd: it's shit either way.

Me and the unofficial CTO (3rd party's CTO) are interviewing an ios dev. (I'm an android dev, btw)

CTO: In your view, would you find developing an ios app would be faster or at the same speed as an android dev?

Me: *shock*

Canidate: I've never developed on Android before, but I'd think it would be the same speed. We both need to make screens, views, and type code.

What the fuck is up with interviewing these days. Now I have to invent a video game and work for free for ten hours just to find out I have no idea what the fuck video programming has to do with frontend. You kids need to figure this shit out. It’s really fucking annnoying.

What the hell is with startup CTOs thinking dev applicants are willing to do an "8 to 10 hour" take home coding test before even a first in person interview?! Seriously?

Interviewing is much harder than it was even a few years ago. I go into it knowing I probably won't get the job. It may sound negative but it relieves the pressure. I also make note of what I didn't do well on so I can work on it. Last year I wanted to leave my job so I would go to interviews at lunch and do phone interviews in the parking lot. I was turned down for soo many jobs. Just a couple of years ago I could get a job in one or two interviews. Things have gotten more complicated. It used to be if you knew even a little about a backend language and a little sql you could easily get a job. It has all changed. I think the javascript framework of the month thing has only made it worse.

Interviewing for a front end JavaScript position. Interviewer asks me to converge a linked list in c#. wtf?

Last job search experience?

I just had an interview today.
15 minutes in, the interviewer isn't done with the dumb questions and is consistent in using incorrect C++ terms. I was close to texting mates about this awful interview but I had camera on, so didn't. (Side rant: hate those entitled interviewing fucks who ask you to turn on your cam while never turning on theirs, and when you ask them, they'll say their connection is weak).

Twice he suggested something wrong or just bad. Corrected his wrong, but he didn't seem to be convinced. Allowed the bad.

Then he asked why am I looking for a change and his reactions to my answers made me realize he hadn't read my resume that was attached with the meeting invite. I assumed he was asking why I'm leaving my current shithole so soon but he was just generally asking why I'm looking for a change. And then he seemed not to believe me when I said I quit because of the stress. Kept asking about other offers and such.

In the end he asked if I'm cool with relocating, and I said not right now, maybe later. All in all, it's not the kind of place that's vibing with me even on short term.

So I'll be back on this week's topic next week too. Perhaps.

!rant

Just had an interview for a position similar to mine in another company.

It was a breath of fresh air that the team lead was open and honest...

It’s not the best position but it’s stable Work that I’m good at, he was up front that it’s not the shiniest thing to work on but that there’s huge opportunity to grow.

His behaviour alone is why I’ll give the position strong consideration.

When you’re interviewing: don’t sweep anything under the rug, be up front about the job and at the least you’ll gain the respect of your candidate.

I can't wait until I hand in my resignation to become a pen tester, I'm interviewing next week! I'm done with development. Don't really have any message here, but felt like sharing it regardless.

After two interviews at same company,.. I'll just cut to the email and my response to them..

Company X: "...blah blah blaaah, sorry but unfortunately, we decided to move forward with a candidate that we see fit for this role. Thank you for your interest and interviewing at X company."

My reply: "....don't be sorry. Fortunately, I have already accepted an offer where I see my skills fit at an even higher level at a company."

I was lying. I didn't have an offer yet. Just had to let them feel a little regret. 😂😁

!rant

I’ll be interviewing for a software developer position at a bank today.

What do they like to hear?

I recently quit a job which I excelled at technically, but professionally I struggled. The best way to put it is that I was incompatible with my newly appointed manager. My frustration with that manager led to many inappropriate comments that I made in front of him and a couple of other senior leaders. To be clear, I never cursed at them or called them names or raised my voice, but I did make (multiple) comments about their ignorance of projects or lack of experience in this speciality. I’m sure you can tell that didn’t go over well.

Ultimately, my behavior got me put on a PIP by my manager. He explained that I was excellent at the job, but not mature enough to do well. This obviously greatly upset me, and I quit on the spot. I know what a PIP means and I wasn’t about to get fired. I had been at the company for about three years and have dozens of excellent professional references (at this company and others) from as high up as the C-suite to as low as individual contributing peers who I worked closely with. They can all honestly and passionately speak to my technical and soft skills very highly. However, this doesn’t seem to matter in my situation.

Overall, I excel at interviews. Within days after quitting I had over eight different interviews lined up. I made it to final rounds of five and got two offers already (still waiting to hear back from the other three). The offers were both contingent on passing employment and background checks. Well, I gave my references, have no criminal history and never lied on any part of my background or history (though I did not admit to my emotional issues with my previous management team). Needless to say, I was shocked when both offers got rescinded.

One company claimed it was due to a change in the role, and the other told me frankly that the “manager did some digging on my history and unfortunately doesn’t feel like I would be a culture fit.” I looked up the manager on LinkedIn and lo and behold, they are connected with my former manager. This has me worried as back-channel references are super common in my industry, and my industry is not very big overall. My manager appears to be very well connected with many of the companies I am interviewing with or hope to in the future.

I will admit that my behavior previously was very disrespectful and probably deserved the reprimand, but now I feel that I am not able to move past it and learn from this experience as my reputation in the industry seems to be damaged. I’m still fairly early in my career overall and am learning how to handle office politics. It’s been a big struggle for me, but I do get better with each passing year.

Anyway, I’ve decided to wait for the other three final stage companies that I’m in talks with before I officially decide that this manager is my blocker, but assuming he is, what do you recommend I do to get past this? Should I talk to him? As this is all fresh, I’m not sure I can do that now, but maybe in a few months? Either way, I need a job now and can’t afford to go more than two months without a paycheck (and I don’t qualify for unemployment as I quit). What do you recommend I do?

I was interviewing for a new position that would be primarily Android development with a chance that I would help out on iOS when necessary. When I got their coding challenge, it had to be done for iOS in Swift. Made no sense, but now I can say I finally wrote a project in Swift.

I worked for a streaming company where I was interviewing a candidate for a device position. I tried digging into his passions and hobbies and he told me he was using rasp pi:s to automatically download torrents and stream to Kodi.

He really wasn't reading up on which company he applied for.

I really despise solving competitive programming problems.

I truly believe it's okay to struggle with them and that people have different abilities. But these kind of problems are an easy way to make you hate yourself and think of yourself less.

I can't solve this problem --> I'm not a good programmer --> I'm not smart enough --> I'm not good enough like my peers who work at FA*G companies, ...

I know these interview problems are a filter and that recruiting is hard and the demand is always high and that they are nothing like the real work but, the reality is, you need to prepare if you want to get into one of the big companies with better perks and maybe better projects.

Times I have run into event loop / closure related issues in my 10+ years of JavaScript app development: 0

Times I have run into event loop / closure related issues in my 10+ years of interviewing: Uncaught RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded

SHEESH

Interviewing candidates for a middle/senior dev position:

Me: Imagine you have this button, but whatever it's doing when you click it, it's taking too long to load. How would you improve the speed performance?

Candidate: Redis!

Me: Okay... but how would you find where the bottleneck is?

C: Redis!

Me: How abo-

C: REDIS!

Just when I was getting used to working from home, my stupid friend made my life even more hell.

I live in a 1 bhk apartment. It's just enough for 3 guys to live comfortably. Now this stupid friend has brought in 3 of his friends since lockdown started and it looks like they are here to stay unless offices start functioning again.

I'm not a smoker and I don't like drinking every other day. Ever since his friend's moved in, it smells like I'm living in a chimney and they drink evey other day.

I don't like their lifestyle or work ethics. I try to blend in but it's a hell here for me trying to focus on my work and goals.

I'm just lucky they haven't brought in any corona yet.

I'm currently interviewing for a new job and I hope it will help me get out of this shit hole as soon as possible.

I have declined their offer for me to drink because I really want this new job. Now, I'm that odd guy in the group who doesn't drink or smoke.

Smh

Why is the interviewing process becoming worse over the years?

About 2 years ago I applied for a company and got into 2 interviews: one with the hr to see if I am bsing them and one with the tech people, to be sure I am not using buzzwords without context. Pretty straightforward, could be done in a single interview IMHO, but it's making me waste max 2 weeks.

Fast forward to one year ago: 1 interview with the hr, 1 interview with the tech people, 1 interview with CEO (why? Just.. why?)

Fast forward to today: 1 interview with hr, 1 interview with tech people, 1 interview with the CEO (again... why?), 1 coding assignment which "it's only going to take a couple of hours" and punctually has either poorly documented APIs to rely on or has trick questions/points. So "it takes a couple of hours", but if you want to pass it you need to spend a day on it... (and let's add that they may be using old docker versions so if it doesn't work cause they are using docker 1.0 and it fails too bad, you lost time for nothing, we are not trying to solve it, you just don't pass!).

Not kidding the last assignment I took and dropped required: external API, testing, don't use CSS libraries and make your own CSS, you must use TS and it was supposed to take "3 hours max".

My question is: why? Why is the interviewing process slowly becoming less of a: "I understand that your code may not be perfect for us but that you are a human being able to reason and adapt your code to our standards" and more of a: "You must do everything PERFECTLY and we don't give a sh*t about your time, start giving us your free time and then we see if we want you."

I just keep giving up after I analyze the assignments, cause a part of my brain thinks that if this is the way a professional relationship starts it's too easy to foresee weekend shifts and lots of overtime cause some manager thinks that "come on, it just takes a couple of hours!"

Received feedback on a task I made for a job interview (I didn't get a technical interview).

The task was easy with nothing special about it that made me think if that's what the job is like, I don't want to work there. It was a simple web page with search functionality. I did the task anyway.

The feedback I got was useless. It said that I made a complex and an over-engineered solution.
What I made, mind you, was a one endpoint API and a single Vue.js component instead of using jQuery to update the results. That's it. OVER-ENGINEERED!

Complete waste of time.

I can't pass a whiteboard interview to save my life. I did pretty well on a fizzbuzz whiteboard a few years ago but in reality in is fairly straightforward. I am interviewing right now and the more I practice and study I realize my teacher in college was right 25 years ago. I should never have become a programmer. I am a likable and fairly competent coder but I am completely overwhelmed and stressed.

A connection was looking for a developer in the city my brother-in-law recently moved to (for my sister's career), so I connected them. They exchanged a couple of emails, and he has an on-site interview tomorrow!

He and I are both .Net developers, and I'm older/more experienced, so I offered to rearrange my schedule to help him with some interview prep tonight.

He said no, that he's pretty confident about things, that he'll do some studying and research on his own.

Good for him and his confidence, but I'm kinda salty that he didn't take me up on my offer. I'm pretty damn clever. How dare someone reject my offer for assistance?? I hope the interview goes well of course but if it doesn't I'm very much going to feel some silent "I told you so!"

Is it normal to feel exhausted after an all-day on-site?

Interviewing for an internship with Microsoft In a couple weeks. Sh****** my pants every day or so, been reading Cracking the Code Interview but still scared... Any recommendations?

I covered it in a recent rant but it was for a marketing lead job (career switch for me) and they were very disorganized.

The HR guy just couldn’t shut up about completely irrelevant and personal topics. The CEO made fun of my cognitive disability, calling it “an excuse” (illegal in the U.S. under anti-discrimination laws). Then he walked out of the room to “go to the bathroom” and never returned. The HR guy grabbed the CEO’s notes and just read them to himself out loud like I wasn’t even in the room. He also asked me what my religion was (also illegal to ask in the U.S.) A third guy came in, asked me a bunch of questions, and then abruptly ended the interview. They only gave me a vague idea of the salary and benefits in all of that.

Two days later the HR guy asked me to come in immediately because I was needed to begin work right then. I said I hadn’t planned to start just that quickly (I already had plans that day that I couldn’t cancel) and especially not knowing how much I’d be paid. I asked for the customary time to talk it over with my family first. He asked me to get back to him before an hour was up. When I called back, he switched the story to say that their marketing lead just wanted to ask me questions before they made a final decision. But the fact that they had been interviewing me for that very marketing lead position was really confusing.

I said I was no longer interested and hung up the phone.

I'm going to start searching for a new job next month. I was let go from my current one because my co-workers were putting in 60~80 hours per week and I was only putting in 40 (plus one 13 hour weekend, which we were paid for. I refused to work the next Sunday and was let go two days later. We were salary exempt; no overtime).

When interviewing this fall, I do intend to list a 40 hour work week as something I'm looking for, but what do I say about my current employment status?

This has only happened once in the past; years ago. I simply said "My contract ended" at the time, and I got a job really quickly so it wasn't an issue.

When a potential employer asks, do I say I was let go because I couldn't keep up with the two months of 60~80 hour work weeks, or do I simply say, "My contract ended." (A little bet of a stretch since I was an FTE, but a work agreement is technically a contract and it technically did end).

Interviewing for Senior Web Developer role, candidate: I have 16 years experience in JavaScript...
Don't know anything about addEventListener... FACEPALM

So I went through the first round Google interview process and was declined for not "finishing fast enough" even though I did in fact solve the problem in the allotted time.

Either it's a BS excuse and they were just interviewing me to interview me for a quota or there is some invisible time limit that I am not aware of.

Really annoys me when I just don't know exactly what I'm doing wrong and instead get what feels like cop out answers.

I interviewed for a Lead role at a popular energy producing company last week. The fucking retard that was interviewing me was multi tasking and only asked me a few questions. It was as if he was forced to do it. He came late and couldnt even introduce himself. He just started asking questions.

After about 2-3 questions, he asked me to tell him my current salary and my salary expectations. I told him to go fuck himself for the former and said i was open to negotiations for the latter. We said our goodbyes afterwards and the interview was terminated. The easiest I have done in a long time.

Fast forward to last friday, I received a call from someone in HR. She offered £60k. I couldn't believe what I heard, so I asked her to repeat the offer. She replied in the affirmative, £60k! I refused and told her I was hoping for £100k because that's like the average for the position I applied for. I could literally hear her gasp with shock when I said that. She replied by saying that's the kind of salary we pay people 2 levels above the one you have applied for! What the fuck I said to myself. Is your company that poor was all I could think of??? I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I told her to go and see if they can come back with an improved offer.

She sent me a mail this morning saying the best they can do is £75k. Oh no, for your troubles and mine, can you talk to HR and let them raise it £95k was my reply to her. She replied moments later, No. £75k is the final offer. C'mon, I presently earn more than that. I only want to leave my current company for new challenges.

Moral of the story: Politely ask for the salary range for the role you are applying for at the early stages. It saves both the employer and applicants having to go through an interview process only to be disappointed at the end.

The place I'm interviewing for apparently has a "no music" policy. Is this common? Music is a huge part of programming for me. It helps me get into a rhythm and ignore all the little distractions like people tapping their feet, etc. that drive me absolutely crazy. Am I expecting too much here???

!rant
So my boss told me they will be interviewing applicants and he wants me to come with.

Reading posts here on devRant has enlightened me on what NOT to ask on interviews.

But what questions should i ask then?? Any tips for me? First time sitting on the other end of the table.

Interviewing a 7yr experienced c++ guy, started with an ice breaker.
Me: when would you use std::list and when would you prefer to use std::vector
Candidate: vector for sequential elements and list for sequential but sorted elements
Me: why list for sorted elements? I didn’t say anything about sorting
Candidate: you’re rude

Real telephonic interview

They are not interviewing me , I am interviewing them.

I feel very anxious when developers interviewing me asks
1. is nodejs single threaded or multithreaded ?
2. How does node handle requests
3. How do u manage concurrency
4. What is event emitter and callback.

Dude i have given you my resume, without knowing these things i could never do that ?

I feel the discussion must be based on concepts and general problem solving rather than focusing on one technology. Tech can always be learnt.

Do you get filled with anxiety and mental anguish when asked for your availability for a technical interview, knowing you’ve spent all your time recently programming and not working on algorithms/data structures and so you’re terribly unprepared but have no idea what the acceptable amount of time to schedule out without seeming like you’re incompetent is?

No?

....me neither. (She says, lying)

Had a technical interview with AWS on Wednesday. Woke up Thursday with the flu. Thanks, body, good to know the long tradition of sickness following completion of highly anticipated task is alive and well. Had to reschedule interviews and hold off on scheduling other interviews. (Damn it!)

To protect my repos from my brain on brain fog, anything I’ve done the past few days have been on branches titled “fever” or some variant thereof (“fever1”, “fever2” when there were two approaches I was trying).

Another day, another company that doesn’t live up to its own hype.

This time interviewing for a company that only want people who are willing to start with the language they currently know but learn other programming languages and not shy away from new things.

Brilliant, I’m up for that. I love learning and want to be at a place that values learning. I’ve got 20+ years of experience and I’ve learnt all sorts in that time to stay relevant. Currently I’m a c# dev, but I’ve worked on projects using JavaScript & Typescript, Angular, React etc. Done front end and back end, taught myself mongo and architecture. Point is that I have a proven track record of learning.

To cut a long story short, they give me a .net test. Nothing special about it. I have a 4 hour chat. And a week later I’m rejected because I don’t do Python. WTF?!

I thought this place was all about allowing people to learn if they were willing, not about what they know right now. I’m calling bullshit.

Well I'm in the process of interviewing for a new job and everything about it sounds like a big upgrade but I'm already starting to feel sad because I'm going to miss my fellow captives 😭 nothing bonds people like a toxic workplace.

I'm interviewing with the data architect in two weeks' time, a self-proclaimed ninja. The chap has done PL/SQL development on SQL Server 2008 according to his LinkedIn profile. Yeah, okaaay...

I would have to say the first start-up I worked with had the worst recruiters. Albeit they were seniors of mine, and not full fledged professionals, but this was pretty ridiculous.

So at the interview(which I won by winning a hackathon in college), they asked me the standard questions about my current knowledge and what I hope to achieve in the company. When they asked me my tech questions, one program that they thought was tough, I solved in 2 minutes. I was interviewing with 3 other people whom hadn't gotten the answer. Naturally I doubt myself due to the lack of answers being produced. The recruiters themselves didnt understand my answer initially. So much so that they were convinced I was wrong(at this time the others were coming up with, and submitting their answers, which the recruiters naturally expected from us). So to give me the benefit of the doubt, they whip out a laptop to run my code, and guess what? It worked, and had NOTICABLY lesser computation speed.

Needless to say I got the job, but the look on my recruiters' faces after exclaiming I was wrong, then they themselves being proven wrong? Priceless. xD

Well I asked what Wednesday could bring in my last rant.

Potential redundancy apparently. Company I work for has just been bought and no one knows if any jobs are safe.

The question is do I still have a interviewing suit? (One that fits)

Applying for web dev jobs in a state I'm about to move to...yeah you thought tech interviews were hard! Try impressing someone over the phone and that's your only chance :/

Just had a customer into my shop. A regular chap but we've never really spoken before. Turns out he's a system architect for British Aerospace Engineering, a huge company up here in the north of England. So we were chatting about what I study and what he does and I said, if I come out with a first or solid/high 2:1 in my software engineering degree, would that qualify me for an entry level at your place, and he said no. Hrs part of the interviewing panel, and he wouldn't even consider people my age (23 at time of qualification) without at least having another job in the field, and said most places would be the same. So let's say I decided to not go in for anything Web development and focused on C++, is there any sort of way you guys know of gaining experience in the field without first having another job? As mentioned I do freelance Web development, but do you think having a large Github portfolio and such would help me stand a chance? I know I'll need to take a lower tier job straight out of uni in the field, but as something to help speed the process along...

That #facepalm moment when the person you are interviewing has 2 years of experience, rates himself 8/10 in JAVA and doesn't know the difference between abstract class and interface!

[at the end of a coding interview]

Me: Do you have any questions for me or the company that I can help to answer?

Candidate: Normally I have many questions to the future teammates, but you're not from the team I'm interviewing for so no I have no questions.

🤯

Worst interview, had to travel half a day, tired already and got grilled on how to debug a overloaded complex network schematic and no additional information, just told that traffic was being dropped. I'm not a network engineer and had no clue where to even start. Manager had mixed papers and thought I was interviewing for a senior position. I was fresh from uni.

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

Something I wrote in my "how not to run a company" notebook:

Getting told you've now replaced the CTO as the person people ask for support (literally, he was recieving no questions), but you're not experienced enough to be promoted to senior.

I replied by telling them I was interviewing elsewhere.

Made me laugh. Is it really that hard for management to get that they should invest in talent?

C++ template errors.

Probably enough said... But a couple years ago I was interviewing and each interview included, do know about templates. I always answered, "enough to determine what is wrong when there is a compiler error." I always got some form of a chuckle or "wow" and NEVER a follow up question about templates. I received job offers from each interview, they all apparently needed someone who could help get their template code compiling?

Interviewing at Amazon and Microsoft at the same time.

it's driving me nuts!

During one of the interviews that I had I was trying to be myself, a bit easy, fun and Normal and the dude interviewing me had a death stare face on the whole time.
The whole interview was weird, awkward and stupid. A few days later they made me offer that i had to reject because they wanted to pay me a trainee salary when had 3+ years of experience at the time.

A post today made me think about this interview I had about a year ago... I shall tell you all about it.

Went to a hiring event for this company everyone was cool but this one guy (who would have been my boss) was a total arrogant, douchey, know it all.

So anyways cue interviewing with him a week later. He says if I give you task A, B, C and they need to be done by the end of the week in which order do you do them. (Note: he literally said abc not actual tasks)

Me: I don't really know how to answer that question without more information.

Him: Well I like to see how people answer it... So think about it for a second.

Me: Ok I guess if doing one task would help me do the next task faster I would do it in that order. Like I can use code or concepts from C to do B faster.

Him: What if A would take 2 days and B and C would take 1 day.

Me: I don't see how that would influence the order I do them in.

Him: Would you complete one task after another or switch between them or do see simultaneously.

Me: It would depend on my previous answer and what would be the fastest way to get them done but without more info I literally cannot give you an answer of like I would do B, C, A.

Him: Would you do the longest task first or the shorter tasks.

Me: I don't know I guess it depends on if it would help you or somebody else move forward with something if I got a particular task or the shorter tasks done first.

So cue more of this kind of back and forth about arbitrary details about undefined theoretical tasks for like 10 minutes.

Suffice is to say I didn't get the job and I'm glad.

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.

I hate applying for a job online. For some reason it just doesn't work out for me. I have a lot of humor but today my interviewer asked me if i was insecure doing that. I'm like "No, my whole family is like this".

But that's beside the point. Every company thinks they're so special. Well, some do have special benefits. But after a few times turned down my ego starts to break.

I'm so done with this new type of interviewing

Skills required for the job I'm interviewing for:
C++, sql, cuda
Skills I have:
C++

I think it's going fairly well so far.

Okay I'm doing the whole leetcode bs, interviewing with a faang like company.

I'm genuinely curious to see if their engineers are actually any good. It seems backwards to me to hire someone based on something they most likely know by heart.

It's like trying to stress test an API by calling a cached endpoint. It will look fast AF, and it will be, but it won't compute shit.

Anyway, if I get the job and the engineers aren't crappy, then I'll forever stfu about how lame this is. But if I get the job and the devs are crappy, oh boy you'll hear me for a long time.