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.

1. Bullshit coding challenges that you wouldn't be any good at unless you were doing the same stuff like yesterday. For an entry level job.

2. Stupid tech leads, who can't see people smarter than them so they bring you down in an interview to feel better about themselves. They'll ask you stuff they know is outside of your scope. Mine often ends up being about networking.

3. Stupid HR questions, that basically ask you to ass-kiss the company.

4. When you're actually better than the interviewer at just about anything, including maths, so you have to tiptoe around their ego and not call them out on being slow.

5. When they don't even give you a chance. You enter the interview and by question 3 you know they're gonna reject you and you never had a chance to begin with, so internally you start screaming for the money you spent on the new coat to impress these fuckers.

6. Salary negotiation when you're broke and you'll work for anything that covers your bills and food, basically.

7. Explaining the gaps in resume or radical changes. Like why I was a barista for six months after six months of being out of work.

Keeping my face straight as I ask them why are they asking me DS&A questions for a backend development job in which damn near everything will be taken care of by a package or a special config inside of something like spring boot or netcore and where damn near most of my requests will be of the form "can thou make tis button LARGER?"

Then watching their sad faces as I terminate the interview because I don't play those fucking games for web development jobs.

All is well until one of the interviewers starts dropping questions like:
- Where do you see yourself in x years
- What gets you out of bed every day
etc.

that give you some nice mid interview existential dread.

As an interviewer, the toughest part is actually before the interviews, trying to convince recruiting teams that you are not looking for "anyone who works with computers".

Seriously, I've once heard a recruiter ask me "you want someone who knows the program language, right?", to what I answered "a couple, yes". The mouth breather looked at me astonished, askng "is there another?!?"
I'm not surprised that they shower me in piss-poor curriculums from anyone who had a Nintendo DS growing up.
Someone needs to come up with a way to hire more selective recruiters. But I guess we're back to square one when approaching this problem.

About being interviewed, the toughest part is when people do not know the salary that will be offered (usually those recruiter types) and evade the question as billionaires evade taxes.
I don't fucking care if your compensation "is so competitive it could have been an Olympian", I want to compare numbers. And if you do not have a number, I will assume the money is crap, period.

"What are your strengths/weaknesses?" and similar questions.

The cultural fit round. The very first round. Got rejected multiple interviews because of failing this round

online coding exams.

Ask me how to do a rest api, ask me how to do a certain visual in the website, ask me how to setup a docker service running grafana, please just ask me something about the actual job.

Dont ask me to create some mind game that was ambiguously phrased in a timed hackerrank question that expects me to write runnable solutions that pass all test cases.

I have way too much work to play around with hackerrank for weeks so i prepare for your useless test

Running them, and having to ask dumb HR related questions that no-one gives a crap about.

I don't want someone that's sold their soul to XCorp and can rave about how it's the best place in the world to everyone they meet. I want a down to earth, decent dev.

Convincing them I'm a fully functional human person and not an autistic introvert with imposter syndrome crammed into a vaguely human shaped meat bag.

I once got something weird during interview. I had to do an assignment on site taking the whole work day of time. In the end, I got bashed on how much I delivered and had to defend it. Defending was easy: the project was decent while not being much. A Mercedes without electric windows. I just told them it's what I prefer.

Later got a phone call and got hired.

The social test was the hardest

Toughest part of dev interviews? There are multiple I can think of.

Getting an interview altogether in this dumpster fire of an economy.

Negotiating salary (i.e. prevent getting a low-ball offer)

When the interviewer is a dev themselves and they get on a power trip and ask you the toughest/trickiest questions.

Convincing the interviewer that something you don't know now can be learned later just by googling and tinkering around.

Trying not to burst out in anger when you get asked stupid questions like "Why aren't you married?"

When you are asked a complicated linked list problem in frontend developer interview.

Trying not to roll my eyes when they say they are like family(or adjacent things like we go to lunch togther etc) to convince me or they imply money shouldn’t be my highest priority…

People skills. Knowing when I should shut up when talking about me and my experience.

i think this is about getting interviewed, but when we were looking for interns it was really hard to gauge how much each of them knew, cause they lied like hell on their resume.

we ended up picking a boy that knew virtually nothing and a girl that was pretty good on her feet.

it didn't matter too much, cause we always had planned to teach them everything, but the boy kept lying so we didn't get any results from him for a while.

we also had an attitude problem from him for a while. it looked like he wasn't that interested in doing anything. that's also something that's hard to pick up in an interview, and we had to beat that shit out of him (figuratively).

I started out self-taught and had little support or guidance in early positions, so I'd say being able to correctly understand what was being asked of me, or getting across my answers in a way that was easily understood.
I wouldn't know the right terminology, or wouldn't know the industry best practices.