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36 comments

  • One time as a teenager I was interviewing for a line cook position. Interview was going pretty good until chef mentioned "Can you handle pranks? We have fun around here", or something like that.

    Nowadays I would have been very cool and normal about it. Instead of... That... For some reason I adopted what I can only recall must have been a wicked sneer, and said "We all have our dark sides , heh hehhh".

    To a passive observer the interview continued for a few more minutes, but in reality it was over at that moment and I knew it instantly. The imp of the perverse had alighted on my shoulder for exactly three seconds and ruined the whole thing.

  • During the recession (no, not that one, the other one) I had to do a cattle call mass interview with other unemployed chefs at an assisted living facility. The one who one the interview became the new chef at the facility.

    that was the prize.

    It was horrible.

    I won.

    *I lasted 3 days into my first week, then was called for another position in a different town and never looked back.

    There are worse things in life than a bad interview.....you could get the job.

    • Oh lord mate. How did you win the interview?

      • at that point I had 22+ years experience, has The Ritz-Carlton, Park Hyatt, Wolfgang Puck, Private golf clubs etc. on my resume.

        The GM was a former hotel manager, who wanted to turn it into a high end hotel style facility....so inspoke to that and we connected.

        shudder I felt dirty

  • I had an interview just a couple months ago where I was expected to write code into what was essentially notepad. They barely asked any questions, just wanted me to rawdog code.

    I've been a developer for almost thirty years. You don't write code that way. Plus, my experience comes in understanding architecture, writing maintainable code, knowledge of how to create APIs, understanding the tradeoffs of different designs and configurations. I don't perform well on hacker rank tests because I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've had to write some kind of fancy algorithm. Most business software is just CRUD (create, read, update, delete data), user interface and orchestration of external service calls. So knowing something like users prefer to minimize the number of mouse clicks required to perform an action is more important to know than being able to code a radio button from memory.

    Yeah I'm a little defensive about this because I rock every part of a job interview except certain types of technical interviews, but I still code circles around most of my team mates once I understand the code (and often long before I actually understand how everything connects).

    So anyway that was pretty much the whole interview because I couldn't write Java code from memory to manipulate arrays, which might sound bad even to other kinds of developers, but I rarely have to do anything like that even in complex business software and on the occasions I do I just google that shit (or have AI help). Memorizing basic shit I never do has just never been my way. I'm focused on much bigger picture ideas.

    And I was so pissed I wrote a very nicely worded letter to HR explaining that I knew I'd blown the interview but in the interest of helping them find better candidates in the future, I offered a number of subject areas they might want senior developers to understand. And I 100% threw that interviewer under the bus, but I understood I was committing a faux pas and burning that bridge but fucking what a waste of time for me and other high level developers.

    Anyway, the wild part was that the HR person got back to me and said I had passed the interview and they were going to send me on to the next interview. What? Because no, however much I might rage against the way the interview was conducted, the only information they had to assess my suitability was that I couldn't demonstrate the most basic technical expectations.

    I turned them down because if that's their interview process I was 100% going to be working with a bunch of poorly written spaghetti code in dire need of a full rewrite but everyone would be too busy spending weeks trying to implement the most simple features because of the poor code quality and so there would never be time for actually fixing the code.

    On the other side of the table, I did a phone interview with a guy who was googling the answers to every question we asked. Things like explain the difference between an interface and a class. Or what the static and final keywords mean. Like if you don't know that well enough to even have a clumsy way of explaining it in your own words, how are you going to communicate with other developers? Can't you even guess what final might mean?

    Anyway, we knew ten minutes into that thirty minute interview that was a hard pass.

  • It might've been one approximately 25 years ago, around the time of the great poppings of the internet/i.t. bubble. I was in school working on a technology related degree at the time, but working in retail. A random customer at the store I worked for invited me to come interview with his business after he found out what I was studying in school.

    First step was basically me and two or three other guys my age, meeting / interviewing with the guy who was supposedly trying to hire help. I actually don't remember much about that part, other than I was a little irritated about the situation. Granted, I was still young, naive, and inexperienced so I thought maybe multi-person interviews were normal-ish in the industry.

    But then once the interview was completed, he told us we were all hired, and that we needed to watch some videos before we started the paperwork. Then he lead us to an auditorium FILLED with people, easily 100+ of us.

    It was a total scam. The videos literally described a pyramid scheme for some random Amway-style bullshit that was "Internet based". There were no computer related skills needed, they just wanted us out there directing all our friends and family to buy stuff from their website because these recruiters get paid a commission on each sale.

    I was so pissed. I let him know that he wasted my time. At which point, he accused ME of wasting HIS time. At least I was able to clue everybody at work in on what he was doing so he was not successful in future attempts to waste my coworkers' time.

  • The one that comes to mind was bad for a few reasons:

    1. I arrive and it was a group interview which they didn't mention in advance.
    2. Within 5 minutes I knew they weren't going to hire me and it felt like they literally only gave me the interview to waste my time.
    3. One of the other 3 interviewees who ended up sitting next to me, totally smelled like they had a load of shit in their pants. There's no way everyone else didn't smell it, but nobody said anything and it was uncomfortable as hell.

    It was for AFLAC.

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