What are your worst interviews you’ve done? I’m currently going through them myself and want to hear what others are like. Dijkstras algorithm on the whiteboard? Binary Search? My personal favorite “I don’t see anything wrong with your architecture, but I’m not a fan of X language/framework so I have to call that out”

Let me hear them!

(Non programmers too please jump in with your horrid interviews, I’m just very fed up with tech screens)

  • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.gg
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    9 months ago

    I think the interview I least enjoyed was with an unnamed big tech company.

    It was the first interview of the day and the guy came in with “so me and my buddy have been trying to solve this algorithm problem for years. I’d like you to try and solve it for me.”

    Like… Dude, that’s not a reasonable interview question! You should not use algorithm questions that you don’t know of any answer to in an interview. You’re effectively asking someone to give you a solution to something way too complicated of a problem without even a few hours to think about the problem or sit down with it on their own.

    • Caveman@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Sometimes you don’t have to solve it but instead ask them about what approaches they tried so far and suggest a new one. Just showing interest

    • Fester@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      Sorry, but the answer we were looking for is “I’ll need to work on this over the weekend.” That’ll be all for today. We’ll call you.

    • daq@lemmy.sdf.org
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      9 months ago

      Aren’t most questions like this are simply looking at what approach you try and not a solution? They’ve been at it for years so they can easily tell if you’re trying something that makes sense or something trivial even if they don’t have a solution or even if there isn’t one.

      • tiredofsametab@fedia.io
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        9 months ago

        When I give interviews, I’m more concerned with the process than the results for some questions. I don’t really do it any more, but I’d sometimes ask one question not related to programming or anything on their CV just to see how someone works through a situation given a little bit of a curveball.

      • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.gg
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        9 months ago

        The problem is you’re effectively leaving “can I program and work through the kinds of tasks this job entails” and entering “how do you work through a complex theoretical research topic” land.

        White board questions should be relative softballs related to the work you’re actually doing to see how you think… Now that’s often forgon for “welcome to a game of algorithm and data structure trivia!” but this is just a much more extreme version of that.

        Also if you don’t actually know the answer, how can you judge the direction? Even if you do know the answer for a problem that complicated, can you say the interviewee isn’t solving the problem in a novel and possibly better way?

        I presume he was looking for specific terms like DAWG (directed acyclic word graph) and things like that as well… Which I know because he would teach me the names of things as I slowly rediscovered them in conversation. Personally, I don’t put much stock in grading someone on their knowledge of obscure data structures and algorithms either.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techOP
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      9 months ago

      Oh god I’ve had an open ended one like that only once, and you’re right it’s terrible. Those questions would be great things to tackle as a team of peers where you’re all working together without the pressure, but dude you hold our careers in your hands. Pull it together

  • treadful@lemmy.zip
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    9 months ago

    I’m a little ashamed of this one. I really wanted it, and it was early in my career.

    1. HR Interview
    2. 16-hour take home test
    3. CTO interview
    4. 4-hour panel interview where the engineers grilled me on random things
    5. CEO Interview

    Didn’t get it.

    • acchariya@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Ridiculous take home tests are probably the number one reason I decline to continue interview processes. If you think that building a client, an API, wiring it up to some other third party API, then deploying is a reasonable scope for an unpaid interview challenge then you are very bad at scoping software projects and the most important thing I can do for you is tell you as much.

      I told one start up if I built what they asked for in the interview, I would pursue funding from their investors and launch it as a competitor- it was that similar to what their actual app did.

    • pastermil@sh.itjust.works
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      9 months ago

      Fuck. This. Shit.

      Been in an interview where the CTO asked me a bunch of questions and seemed interested, only to ghost me in the end. No reply even to my follow-up. Thankfully I found a better job.

      • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techOP
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        9 months ago

        I had one that was similar to this guys, got to the CEO interview and until that moment I was still excited to be there. They flat-out asked me “Here at ___ we know we’re making the world a better place - and because of that we’re willing to make ___ our number one priority in our lives. This is a hard question, are you willing to do the same?”

        I was taken aback for a second. I then answered in the only way I could. “I see what you are doing and fully appreciate it. If I’m hired here ___ will be one of the most important things in my life. Whenever I’m working I will be 100% dedicated to the work, I’ve never shy’ed away from it. I’ll work nights and weekends when needed, sometimes those are needed. However you’re asking if it will be the most important thing in my life? My answer is no. It will be one of the most important things in my life, but my family and spouse is the my most important thing in my life.”

        No shit, they ended the interview there, and I got a canned rejection email within 30 minutes. I’ve never been so angry at the audacity of an interview question like that. Who the fuck do you think you are demanding that you make yourself more important than my spouse?

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techOP
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    9 months ago

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

      • eskimofry@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        No you just start by marking all nodes as unvisited and perform a search from a random starting node. you store the current bfs set of vertices in a sorted datastructure. Repeat until there are no more unvisited nodes.

        • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techOP
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          9 months ago

          Bingo. For each node if it’s 0 continue if it’s 1 then bfs to get everything. Store that group temporarily and mark which nodes you’ve seen. For the remaining nodes check if they are 1 and you have not seen it and continue. O(n log n) I believe, since you still iterate over everything and check

    • GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml
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      9 months ago

      I think this is basically testing:

      1. If you have been practicing your leetcoding recently, and
      2. If you’re decent at leetcoding under pressure
  • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    Just a metric of ð insanity of it all, I went þrough someþing like 100 interviews over ð course of ð 2 years between graduating and landing ð job I have now.

    Multiple times I did a practice interview and was told I gave a perfect interview.

    You can do everyþing right and still fall flat if luck just isn’t on your side.

  • mumblerfish@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Not the interview itself, but… I had a personality test before the interview and it felt so fucked up. There were always two completely different statements of, at least to me, questionable morals. Like “I enjoy people’s envy of me having better things” and “In social situations, the conversation should only be about me”. Stuff like that, but not only egoistic statements. Then you had a single scale under the two statements which went from “describes me” to “describes me very well”, for both statements, no neutral option. Stated time was like 10 minutes, I took it like in an hour. An hour of having to think through if I should say that “not having sympathy for an abandoned dog describes me” because the other option was more horrible. Felt fucking traumatized after that.

    It got me the interview, but not the job.

    • Waldowal@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Imagine if you just had to scroll down to get to the other options like “Does not describe me”, and they are still talking about "The biggest psychopath we’ve ever interviewed - just out of morbid curiosity. "

    • Tower@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      I fucking hate these “personality assessments”. This is from one I just took the other day. One of around 50 questions.

      • tehbilly@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        9 months ago

        Holy shit, I kind of love that actually. I wouldn’t love to see it on an interview I’m doing, but that it exists and someone somewhere believes that the answer you provide for that will give them some kind of insight into your value as an employee?

    • 1984@lemmy.today
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      9 months ago

      Guess they were looking for sociopaths for that position.

      Please share the company name.

      • mumblerfish@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        It was the Swedish social insurance agency with these parts of the recruitment process probably outsourced to the lowest bidder.

    • qantravon@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?

      • A_A@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago
        source of this moovie scene

        (thanks to GPT 4-o ; i could not fully recal the scene)
        This story is a well-known scene from the film “Blade Runner,” directed by Ridley Scott and released in 1982. The character Tyrell poses this question to the replicant Leon as a test to explore his empathy and moral reasoning. The tortoise metaphorically represents vulnerability and the moral obligation to help those in need.

      • JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        Why did I flip it on its back in the first place? If I was the sort of person to do that, it would be consistent with the behaviour of not turning it back over, but I don’t think I am.

        • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          That is a very logical way of replying to someone telling you you’re the sort of person to flip a turtle. In other words, found the replicant.

  • afk_strats@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

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

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

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

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

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techOP
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      9 months ago

      It’s funny, the idea to make a thread here was because I was on another thread talking about using ChatGPT for cheating, and I had a student say “Why would I go through the hassle of writing the assignment when ChatGPT could just write it out for me”, and I just literally laughed out loud, because they have no idea how fucked they’ll be in a real interview environment

    • Mercuri@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Dude, so much of your experience resonates with me! I was applying to a small start-up and they were like “oh, our new CEO is former Amazon so you’ll be doing a half-dozen hour-long interviews over the course of a couple days.” Wut? Other times the company would claim they don’t care that most of my experience is in Java and then after final interviews they’ll turn me down because most of my experience is in Java and they think it’s not possible for someone to use a different programming language or something. And people who reach out to ME then ghost me.

      Sadly I’m still trying to find a new role.

  • mesamunefire@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

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

  • Toes♀@ani.social
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    9 months ago

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

    • Mirshe@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      I legit had a recruiter for Procter & Gamble tell me that “I’m not the right type of autistic” after applying and taking literally an hours-long personality/IQ test “designed” to screen for autistic candidates as part of a diversity push.

  • LedgeDrop@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

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

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

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

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

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

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techOP
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      9 months ago

      I’ve had some really great third party recruiters. I’ve also had some real white ones like this one. Salary expectations are step one, if they had no idea then they failed at their job and wasted everyone’s time.

  • fart_pickle@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

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

    • bobalot@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      I don’t come from a developer background but that honestly sounds ridiculous.

      If this type of thing is standard in software development, I feel bad for anybody in the industry.

      • fart_pickle@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        I can only talk about my experience, not sure how it reflects the whole industry. But all the big companies I applied for had a multistep recruitment process. On the other hand, the company I work for at the moment, was more than chill during the interview process. I had two interviews, one with the HR 3rd party and one with the CTO and the founder. I didn’t do any homework and most of the time we talked was a casual small talk with some tech questions. The more I think about that conversation, the more I think that I didn’t read between the lines. I guess the people who I talked to were really good t judging the character.

    • CaptainBasculin@lemmy.ml
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      9 months ago

      Did you forgot how the sequence worked, and the interviewer not tell you/didnt let you look it up?

      Because its logic only requires a loop where you keep adding i and j, where j is the previous value of i.

      Needless to say, must be very unlucky.

  • 1984@lemmy.today
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    9 months ago

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

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

    • Damage@feddit.it
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      9 months ago

      Yeah, I’m an industrial automation tech, so my kind of programming is different from what is done in information technology, but I’ve never been asked to complete exercises during an interview.

      • Lazycog@sopuli.xyz
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        9 months ago

        I switched from controls engineering to information technology - not once was I asked to prove my knowledge about PLCs or anything like that, they trusted my education and experience.

        The interviews in information technology were like “make us a working app for free before we have a second round of interviews” even after few years of previous experience in their specific field and a repository to show off my free-time projects.

        I switched because I got tired of traveling, but holy shit I miss the job market of industrial automation. I still feel like I got more respect working in automation field than I have ever gotten working as a software developer.

        • Damage@feddit.it
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          9 months ago

          I think industry jobs are more… Grounded. If you look like you’re not an idiot and you’re not lazy, you’re hired; whatever you don’t know can be learned on the job.

          At least that’s how it is in my area.

  • Mercuri@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    As the interviewee?

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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      9 months ago

      Unprompted, they all commented that “yeah, this is a start-up so we’re expected to work 80 hour weeks. That’s just how it is.”

      lol I’m walking out the minute they say that.

        • Mercuri@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          At the time it was like watching a train wreck. This was much earlier in my career and I was like, “there’s just no way, right?”

          I did get lunch out of it.

        • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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          9 months ago

          I’m genuinely terrible at not falling for sunk costs and have a bad habit of just letting inertia take me.

          But unless you’re offering me 100k a week (in which case I’ll work for maybe a month before burning out), I’m not working a fucking 80 hour week.

    • fubarx@lemmy.ml
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      9 months ago

      “Given a list of strings, print the contents of the list to the screen.”

      print(stringlist)
      

      or if you want to get fancy:

      print(", ".join(stringlist))
      

      When do I start? I feel like I nailed it.

      /s

      • Mercuri@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        lol. I kid you not, someone did that. Then completely imploded when I pointed out that it’d just print the object reference and not the list contents.

        Can you start next Monday? :p

        • zaphod@sopuli.xyz
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          9 months ago

          Now I need more details, you said they can use whatever language they want, if you do print(stringlist) in python it will print something like ["first string", "second string"] and not an object reference.

          • Mercuri@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            The candidate said they were going to use Java. I asked them if perhaps they weren’t coding in Python instead? They insisted it was Java. I forget the details but they proceeded to “fix” their code by doing some stuff that made absolutely no sense no matter what language they were using.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techOP
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      9 months ago

      I resonate with so many of these. I hate the tech prescreen, but morons, cheaters, and liars make it necessary. The prescreen is purely there to weed out a good, like you said well over 50% of candidates right there.

      And I’ll throw a thorn at you, I do store numbers as strings… When I’m dealing with currency lol. I’m 100% sure that’s what he meant of course, because he was thinking about float precision and how you wouldn’t want to risk currency imprecision during serialization or anything! Should have given them the job! /s

  • 7dev7random7@suppo.fi
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    9 months ago
    1. Interview
    2. team meet-up
    3. coding tasks with my thought process

    According to the team I nailed it + above expectations. I was asked for my salary: Said at least between X and Y.

    I received an offer with X.

    1. negotiations
    2. negotiation feedback

    They raised it to the middle

    I declined. New offer arose: Y.

    I declined again since they were cheap and not transparent like me.

    Received a flame e-Mail afterwarsa about how I would dare to decline since it is the matching salary. I have wasted their time and effort. THE CEO WROTE THE LAST SENTENCE IN UPPERCASE.

    Oh, and I should have been responsible for one year to maintain enums about tax numbers, since everybody started there like this.

    Uff.

    • nilclass@discuss.tchncs.de
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      9 months ago

      Sounds like you dodged a bullet, if that’s how the CEO reacts to you declining the offer. Just imagine how they’d react to somone actually making a mistake at work

      • 7dev7random7@suppo.fi
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        9 months ago

        Düsseldorfer Scheißverein. Meine Zwei Pfennig. Schwer das Ganze im Englischen zu Rekapitulieren.

  • Schal330@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Got a couple.

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

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

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

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

    Thee casting couch....

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

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

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

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

    • luluu@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Could you share a description of your angel? I think everyone might need that guy.

      /s

      pls dont share his description