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by vmlinuz 2215 days ago
> I had an interview once with a team that was all remote and the person on the other end had literally just crawled out of bed a few minutes earlier

Earlier this year, I had an interview with a fairly serious company which shall not be named. They'd sent a mass email on LinkedIn a couple of weeks earlier, so that was my contact with them. After a chat with their in-house recruiter, they asked me to do a couple of tests, one a simple server application, one an intermediate-complexity SQL query. I'm willing to say that my SQL is competent, but it's not a focus for me, so while I got the idea, my query didn't actually work. The recruiter told me that it would be a good idea to be ready to explain why, and how I would fix it, for the technical interview. I rustled up a couple of acquaintances with better SQL than I, we worked through it, I knew what I'd done wrong and was ready to discuss it.

Technical interview came, on Zoom, and it was a car crash. There were two interviewers, one was on time, one was late - the late one was also only on audio, and it turns out mixing one audio-only interviewer with one on video was a bad idea. They mostly asked me about my background and experience for about half an hour, then ended the interview - never asked about my tests, didn't go into anything technical at all.

I didn't hear anything back, so I pinged the recruiter a week later, only for him to tell me he wasn't working there anymore, but he'd pass on a message for me. I then pinged the one other person I'd had any actual contact with at the company, the HR/admin who'd setup the Zoom call, to be told "we will not go for further process as rejected by hiring team."

I was pretty unimpressed.

1 comments

Exactly the same scenario! You'd think we could at least salvage some personal relationships out of it but nope too busy being false corporate

What irks me is that the real ones like the people on this forum are losing to the fake ones like the bozos on that call

I have some interview horror stories bro but seriously it really boils down to basic game theory how do we get it so wrong?

But I mean wow exactly the same scenario -- hit it off with the recruiter, their engineering team is a shitshow, recruiter leaves, HR tells you suck it

Definitely not you, it's them but the injury of being rejected is added to the insult that it's a band of fools doing it.. think of it as dodging a bullet

You know in some hiphop tunes where they say they love their haters?

Think about how many bullets you've dodged on account of your haters and be grateful to them.. It's twisted but it's true