[eterm]

It wasn't google, but last year I had the worst interview experience of my life when I was berated for not being able to remember if a System.Tick was 10nanoseconds or 100nanoseconds.

I remarked that in the circumstances I'd need to know, that I'd google it and check the documentation to make sure I got it right.

The interviewer (who I later found out was the founder/CEO) absolutely laid into me for that answer, saying if he wanted people to google that a "thousand Indians graduating in computer science every day" could google it.

I tried to argue that I was looking to be employed for my problem solving skills and experience rather than rote knowledge, but he was really angry. He literally said to be verbatim, "Let me give you some interview advice, NEVER tell an interviewer you'd google something". He also made a mildly off-colour remark that if he "wanted someone just to google, [he] could hire one of thousands of fresh graduates coming out of India".

It was an experience so bad that it inspired me to create a glassdoor account just to leave negative feedback, something I've never done before or since. The recruiter was absolutely pissed, and still doesn't provide me leads, which is kind of annoying since he's the most active C#/.Net recruiter in my area.

But my point is that some people have absoultely atrocious interview manners. Interviews are a two-way street and I discovered that there was absoultely no way I'd want to work with them. (Even when I just thought they were a team lead rather than the CEO it was enough to put me off.)

[JohnFen]

Damn, if the founder/CEO was this obnoxious in the interview, can you imagine what it would be like to actually work there?

The minute that he showed aggression or anger, I 100% would have just walked out. Life is too short for that nonsense.

[rasjani]

> I was berated for not being able to remember if a System.Tick was 10nanoseconds or 100nanoseconds.

Had somewhat similar scenario. Company's internal headhunters had reached out to me once already before and I did few interview rounds with them and said no. Year later they reached out to me again and had to go thru tech interview again.. during that I did help(sleep) on python repl and mentioned why; since I haven't used sleeps on my own code I wanted I make sure that if sleep will yield cpu time or not. Mood of the interview changed at that point and got rejected by not having enough skills in Python.

Another case; One of the interviewers was late to the meeting and started to shout profanities cuz my Audio Quality was poor. And it was - thanks Sony XM's but the way he acted on the call really gave lasting impression on their "company culture"

[em-bee]

i recently failed a timed test because while it was asking a simple question about manipulating CSV data. i was unfamiliar with the CSV library because i simply never had to use CSV data before. so i had to look it up and that cost me to much time. on the other hand, another question in the same test was about variables in a function in a metaclass that were giving the wrong values because of a scope issue. i had enough experience to understand scope issues and was able to solve the problem easily.

the CSV question was easy to look up, and with time anyone could have solved it. failing it because it took to long was frustrating. the scope question would have been difficult to answer without experience, and even looking it up would not have been easy without knowing what to search for.

[derefr]

> which is kind of annoying since he's the most active C#/.Net recruiter in my area

Tangent: I like .NET as a platform, but I get the impression that a lot of .NET shops tend to be toxic in this particular way.

.NET attracts bigcorps — and I don't really that they're toxic. Working in a big enterprise environment is actually fine most of the time.

But because .NET attracts bigcorps, .NET also attracts development agencies that mostly want to work with bigcorps — i.e. agencies whose sales process is designed around attracting and retaining solely enterprise customers. These agencies market to middle-managers' needs to check checkboxes and satisfy scrum tasks; and then they skate indefinitely in their contracts on a basis of "shoddy work in bounded time" and infinite make-work extensions.

These "enterprise agencies" exist to deliver internal political value for the people hiring them, rather than delivering any business value for the company as a whole. (As such, they mostly get hired by bigcorps that are themselves dysfunctional in some way. But there's enough of those to keep quite a lot of these agencies in business.)

In agencies like this, I find that the only people who stay working there, are either burn-outs trying to keep their heads down and take home a paycheck, or some flavor of awful people.

If you want to avoid this kind of experience in the future, I'd highly suggest either focusing your search for enterprise-y language shops on actual enterprises rather than agencies — or marketing yourself for your talents in less enterprise-y languages, to shift your appeal more toward SMB employers.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

There are a few things worth remembering. 1) "Interviews" as a process to select employees is probably so broken as to to be completely useless to employers, 2) they are not aware that it's completely useless and believe in their own supernatural ability to use interviews to select ideal candidates, and 3) each and every one of them thinks that it works completely different and that all other hiring managers agree with them on every detail.

If we start with the assumption that (for the most part) interviews are a useful HR tool to hire people with, supposing we have a skilled manager to give the interviews (haha!), they will ask a series of questions, and otherwise engage in conversation which will elucidate whether or not the candidate should be hired. Presumably they are relying on the answers given, but they might also be relying on non-verbal clues... body language, facial expressions, who knows maybe even pheromones. Whatever the correct "answers" are, what if we train a candidate to give those answers without actually understanding them? What if he rehearses it? What if he can even do the body language and facial expressions?

We've just cheated the process. Candidates are incentivized to cheat the process, and you can vilify them all you like, but if they can manage the trick they can (at least temporarily) receive a paycheck which all of us seem to need. No matter how difficult it is to do this, it's likely some have managed to perfect that trick.

Furthermore, no one gets a bachelor's in "assessing interview performances". There are no degree programs for it. No training bootcamps for it. I've never worked anywhere that they send the hiring managers away to some seminar specifically about this. So even if it were possible to assess the performance, the people doing the assessing likely aren't very good at it.

If magically someone developed some brain scanner that gave perfect, empirically verifiable answers in a "hire/don't hire" format, what are the chances that a hiring manager could do even 60% of what the machine says? Flipping a coin should get 50%, if we limited the candidates to a matched set of hires-don't-hires, right? Would the hiring managers even do as well as random chance? Or are there some personality defects that have some of them do worse even than that?

Interviews are more in the realm of superstition than sound practice. They're polygraphs without the polygraph machines.

[nine_zeros]

You have just described in plain words why tech interview processes are beyond f-ed up.

Not every programmer is skilled to be an interviewer. Not every manager is skilled to be a hiring manager.

[gorbachev]

You dodged a fairly sizeable bullet. What a turd that founder is.

[Juliate]

Starck reminder that some founders/CEO are little more than immature people with too much power in their hands.

[financltravsty]

Name and shame -- they don't need any investment from the community.