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I came into this thread to comment about a similar experience. Had a call set up with the company founder for a consulting role, for me generally this means an informal chat where they share the pains they're experiencing, I share my background and thoughts related to fixing those kind of pains and, if we both determine we can see it working, I put together a proposal.

However, instead of the founder, an engineer ambushes me in the zoom call and starts a full on technical interview. In retrospect I should have ended the call there and then but I had already committed the time and it was only 30 minutes so I did my worst technical interview ever.

I'm still annoyed at their behavior, the company ended up folding so that's the silver lining.

[poulsbohemian]

I had a small consulting firm for a few years, and spent a few years as a solo consultant as well... what you describe is probably above all else what drove me away from that business model. Often I would walk in as "the sales guy" and they would want to turn it into a full blown technical interview. Disrespectful and a waste of everyone's time.

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Isn't it just great? In my experience it's often the in-house technical team that ends up being overprotective about their turf.

And I kinda get it, I've been in-house tech leadership for companies where consultants have been pushed on me because they're someone's cousin or because they're a big company and therefore immediately trusted. But it can be frustrating...

[emehex]

I’m sorry that happened to you. Do you think that the engineer that ambushed you felt threatened by your candidacy? I’ve been around a bunch of engineers who hate hiring to “raise the bar”…

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It's possible, I have also seen that, especially in small companies where everyone is very protective of their turf. I also had a terrible interview experience years after that where I was being interviewed for a CTO position by the company COO and the CTO that was leaving.

The CTO was really harsh in the interview, he gave me a bunch of brain teaser questions, followed by some algorithms questions where he was expecting one correct answer and would interrupt me if I was going a different way. We barely had any of what I would expect would be proper questions for a CTO interview (eg stakeholder management, people management, technical architecture)

It was so bad that the COO sent me a personal note apologising after the interview, but said that they had to go with the CTOs judgement on who was better qualified to succeed him. That was a pretty surreal experience and I think it was because the CTO already had someone in mind to replace him.