[rjkennedy98]

I don't think this is as rare as you might imagine. When I started doing engineering interviews at our last company I was startled about how obsessive they were about doing video interviews because I hadn't ever remember doing them in previous jobs. If video resolution was bad they would simply cut the interview and ask to reschedule.

When I asked why they did this, to my surprise they said they had been scammed by people who did phone interviews well, and in the on site interviews were completely incapable of answering the same questions at all. They we sure they had been catfished by multiple recruits.

[binarytox1n]

This has happened to us many times and we now do the same for remote interviews. No video? No interview. And even then, if you do great in the video we fly you in for an in person interview just to be sure. There's clearly a market for stand-in phone interviewers. I can't imagine that jobs acquired this way ever last, but that doesn't stop people from trying.

[vsareto]

>I can't imagine that jobs acquired this way ever last, but that doesn't stop people from trying.

Probably because there's a real slice of the job market that gets paid six figures to do nothing much more than browse the internet all day.

2 of the 5 tech jobs I've had have had this. I kid you not, I spent 6 months opening my PC, watching email, and doing whatever I wanted from home. My current job is like this as well but I actually get to help others, so it's not as bad. Believe me, I don't want it -- it gets very boring, very quickly, but legal agreements mean you can't really work on anything else.

And it's not hard to imagine someone trying to cover up a blunder of making a bad hire by giving them no work or busy work because the company is just awash in so much cash that it doesn't actually affect much to just let them leech compared to the reputation damage of admitting that mistake.

Every time someone cannot believe this is possible, I have no empathy for them. It has happened over and over and over and over again. If you don't believe this happens, you are being willfully ignorant! Don't be ignorant!

Sadly there just isn't a good solution for it. A more complex interview doesn't fix it.

[OJFord]

I don't know about 'ever', I can believe there are people that interview terribly (because of nerves or whatever) but would be fine in the job.

You'd need to be really sure about the nature of the role though, or else find a stand-in who is similarly skilled (and not).

[mjevans]

Or maybe some people just don't do well in an interview setting that is inherently completely unlike a real day at any office?

Some step before on site interviews, to save everyone effort and money overall, might help.

I think unpaid small utility projects are also unfair to prospective employees.

A better approach might be for the company to identify something they'd like done, which might be part of an employee's normal role. This could be work towards a bug in something (open source) they use, a small utility project, or even just a 'toy' project of somekind (E.G. fizz buzz but with some constraints, maybe language or being a module something else can use, etc).

There'd be a fixed size payment for either using up a maximum number of hours or completing the task (with documented work on what was done in both cases).

[jonathlee]

I have personal experience with this type of situation. Twice we had excellent phone interviews for an onsite contractor position. Then, when the supposed person we interviewed showed up, they turned out not to be able to do the work (not an onsite interview, the actual work). One was so bad that they had no idea what a variable was.

[grawprog]

>One was so bad that they had no idea what a variable was.

I'm curious as to how someone like that could even pass a phone interview. Even if they were cheating, they would have had to have been reading stuff verbatim to answer the interviewer's questions. How was this not at least picked up a little bit during the interview? How could someone with such a small amount of knowledge in the domain trick the interviewer enough that they raised no flags at all during the interview?

[kubanczyk]

By not actually making the call but assigning it to their sibling or their friend, duh. "Phone interviews", so no video.

[coke12]

I think they're implying that someone else took the phone interview for them.

[celticmusic]

> Or maybe some people just don't do well in an interview setting that is inherently completely unlike a real day at any office?

I once had an interview where I sent in a solution to a small program they asked me to write (had to do with golfing).

During the interview they sat me down in front of a computer and asked me to re-implement a part of it, which I did so gladly.

I realized later that my re-implementation wasn't the same as my original implementation, but they both worked. It was more 6 of one, half dozen of the other, sort of thing.

But the thing is, during the rest of the interview I seriously got the impression they thought I was lying to them. I've often wondered if that difference in implementation was why.

But I'm of the opinion that technical people shouldn't really be too involved in the yes/no decision of the interview process. I've seen too many instances of people coming to conclusions that just didn't make sense. I once had feedback that they felt I would be anti-social because when asked about an open floor plan I told them as long as I had headphones it wouldn't be too much of an issue.

I remember one guy was convinced I was devops because I described a system I built and implemented that got deployed across datacenters around the world, and I explained how we did it. When it was done, he started asking me about unit tests, and I remember going to the whiteboard, pointing at a few of the circles and telling him "we had unit tests around this, and this, and this".

At the end I reiterated that I had a degree in CS & Math and had worked as a software developer for coming on 20 years. I did this because he kept making comments about devops. And yet, when it was done, the feedback is that they weren't looking for devops.

The worst part to me is that what I described was the system architecture and how we were able to do this successfully. I'm not even sure I spoke about deployment much at all.

I've had several wtf moments like this in my career, and it's caused me to be a lot more bullish on interviewers. Everyone who interviews seems to think they have some secret sauce that allows them some mythical insight into a person over an hour interview. And they're all wrong.

Business people are actually easier to deal with in my experience because they're willing to accept when there's a misunderstanding and you attempt to explain yourself more fully. Most technical people seem to judge you for it and ignore any attempt to follow up.

Anyway, this is long winded, but my point is that I agree with you 100%. I don't think most people who interview quite realize just how bad they are at it, nor how overly judgemental they are. I'm glad it worked out for the author of this article, but the indications he claimed to see (the lack of a linked in profile, for example) are not actually indications of anything. They got lucky, but they're going to take their sample of 1 and be overly judgemental with everyone in the future.

[Darkphibre]

Craziest interview was for a job that I wrote the description for, yet was apparently unqualified to fill. -.-

I like my job, and I'm visible enough to have had several poaching attempts (one or two I regret turning down, my would-be peers have all retired after a few years and 8-digits happier). Anyways, one studio tried to lure me away by having me interview for 'whatever my dream job was.'

This intrigued me. I wrote up a 2-page job description. Was quite clear I'd moved into Data Science and my Solution Architect days were a few years behind me. Passed the 10-person panel interview with flying colors. And the Data Science / Management tiers. Lunch interview no problem. Then... came the low-level C++ interviews. I did OK, but clearly was rusty.

And then the architecture interview. They laid out an identical topology to one I've given talks on having architected, and asked me where might be problems. I highlighted the number one concern (ensuring the data was logged with accurate ingress/egress timings so we could be measuring real funnel progress), and went down several esoteric paths that telemetry could be corrupted / unreliable / provide faulty analysis. At the end I could tell they weren't convinced. I circled back, and... "Well, this is based on a real thing we rolled out, and we were measuring the time-to-receipt on the first layer, not the delays in payload aggregation before relaying the buffer through the rest of the system, so latencies seemed low but throughput was unacceptable. We'd hoped you would have picked up on that."

It was the very first thing I pointed out. But they didn't hear me when I stated the obvious up front. I'll own that feedback: Make sure I'm heard and understood.

At any rate, someone else was hired for the job I defined. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[awesome_dude]

Single Job Syndrome:

Engineers/Managers have only ever worked for the same people for the last 5 or 10 years, and have no idea what engineers look like in the wild.