[laszlo_kovacs]

I interviewed with Wasmer a few weeks ago. It wasn't enough time to get a real inner view into the company but I saw enough to give me pause. They set up an interview for 3 hours, which stretched into 4 hours. During this interview both interviewers had to leave at points to attend other meetings.

After this, they wanted another interview. Sure, I guess one 3 hour interview isn't enough. They first scheduled it in the middle of the night my time, but meh time zones are hard. Most egregiously, the interview was to work on the wasmer runtime and fix a bug. Put politely, wasmer is an evolving codebase at a startup. Basically, it's not in the most clean state.

This was a bug involving a virtual file system using WASI. I was fortunate enough to be somewhat equipped to handle this bug. I've sat in on WASI meetings; I remember my file systems; and I've touched a lot of raw WebAssembly. It was still freaking hard as hell. Not to mention, the bug turned out to actually be two bugs sitting next to each other, and partially caused by an unused variable which Rust should warn you about, except for some reason they turned that warning off. Oh yeah and the CEO tried to argue with me about whether Rust warns you for unused variables. Yeah dude, anybody with half a second of experience in Rust can tell you that.

That interview took 2 hours stretching into 3.

After that fun experience, they asked me for yet another interview. I'm sorry but if you're a seed startup hiring anybody with qualifications, you do not get to give me two, 2+ hour long grueling interviews, then ask about a third. You do not get to give me a question that you only solved in the middle of the interview. Your job is to convince me to work for you as much as it is my job to convince you to hire me. Don't waste my time. If you think I'm stupid or lazy or whatever, just reject me.

Maybe it was because I was tired and irritable, but the spirit of the interview did not feel like a collaborative "let's solve this together", but more a "let's see if you're as smart as me". Which just sucks man. I want interviews to be encouraging and emotionally healthy, not just grueling beat downs.

One last petty tidbit, I find it really disingenuous how the CEO markets himself as a "mathematician". I asked about it in the interview and the dude had an undergrad degree in math. Maybe this is my elitism showing but an undergraduate degree is not enough to call yourself a mathematician. There's so much damn work that you need to do to get a PhD. I got pretty damn far in undergraduate math and I still only know a fraction of a fraction of what a PhD knows.

[dkarl]

Since half the purpose of an interview is to see whether you want to work for them, I'd call that interview a success.

[sushisource]

What an awful story, I'm sorry you had to endure that. My undergrad is in applied math and I would never even dream of calling myself a "mathematician", so, yeah, tells you a lot about the guy.

[mmmpop]

That's a funny standard, and not that I disagree--quite the contrary--but once you get an undergrad in engineering you're an engineer right? Sure, there is an expectation to pass the FE exam but is being employed as an engineer a requirement to "be an engineer"?

I hear a lot of people with a BS in Comp Science that call themselves computer scientists which seems mostly inaccurate too.

It's just odd, these titles and what qualifies you to call yourself a thing.

[sushisource]

It's just about how it's colloquially used. Even in industry we mostly call ourselves software engineers / developers, but if people say "Computer Scientist", especially in the context, it's generally understood you didn't mean PhD level research.

Mathematician, OTOH, does kinda usually imply that, or at least implies you do something that likely requires beyond undergrad level education.

[ska]

Sometimes people differentiate by, for example, saying "research mathematician" but I think the meaningful distinction is: do you spend (an appreciable fraction of) your time creating new mathematics...

[jnsie]

> the bug turned out to actually be two bugs sitting next to each other

I have to ask...did you check github after the fact to see if these were real bugs that they used your interview time to solve? Would be funny if there was a commit shortly therafter...

[PragmaticPulp]

Interesting perspective. Was the author of this blog post still involved at the time? Or was this after his departure?

Having the CEO try to dunk on applicants during interviews is not a great sign for any company.

[_jal]

> Having the CEO try to dunk on applicants during interviews

Wasn't the CEO, but the CTO at a startup I was applying with years ago swooped into an interview at a place I was pretty sure I wasn't going to accept an offer from, while I was at the whiteboard solving some stupid thing.

He immediately started arguing with me about some code on the side that was from a previous question, kept interrupting me when I tried to correct him, and then told me I should be cleaner about my work when he finally figured out his mistake.

I thanked the person actually interviewing me (not Mr. CTO) for his time, picked up my stuff and walked out without another word.

[gavinray]

Thanks for posting this, genuinely. Sorry you had to go through that.

[iammisc]

That sounds grueling (and stupid) , but I don't think you need a PhD in math to be a mathematician. Presumably, if you make your income doing mathematics, then you are a mathematician. Many professionals with bachelor's degrees sometimes publish in academic journals.

For example, many amateur haskellers have published in academic journals (oftentime in mathematics). I myself have been cited in academic publications despite not having ever gotten a PhD (again related to functional programming). Presumably, someone (And his peer reviewers) thought a blog post I had written about various things in pure FP land was academic enough to qualify for inclusion in a journal.

However, based on my reading of the CEO's profile, blog, etc, it doesn't seem like he fits that definition. In fact, he claims to be a mathematician without as much as one serious blog post or any published content remotely related to mathematics of any kind. I'm not an elitist by any stretch. But to claim to be a mathematician without publishing or speaking on anything related to mathematics, despite being seemingly outspoken on several publishing platforms is incredibly disingenuous