What are your worst interviews you’ve done? I’m currently going through them myself and want to hear what others are like. Dijkstras algorithm on the whiteboard? Binary Search? My personal favorite “I don’t see anything wrong with your architecture, but I’m not a fan of X language/framework so I have to call that out”
Let me hear them!
(Non programmers too please jump in with your horrid interviews, I’m just very fed up with tech screens)
I had an interview where they asked me to set up 3 micro services (with full functionality), a Kafka broker, a frontend and to configure everything to run on Kubernetes.
According to them this would take “more or less 4 hours” and those hours would obviously not be paid.
I’m still not sure whether they were just trying to get free work out of people or if their expectations for what a software engineer is supposed to do in half a day are completely absurd.
Oh my god I hate that, just set up an entire infrastructure before you even get to the question. The very least they could do is set up the cluster for you so you wouldn’t have to spend the time
The biggest red flag is how all over the place the task is. They were trying to test every single thing they could come up with at the same time.
If they are familiar with these task a solution can get outlined with words easily.
The author summarized it perfectly.
I had an interview like this, it was supposed to be Pair Programming which i had been doing very well for 5 years in RoR.
I get to the interview and they haven’t actually done any pair programming, they WANT to.
And the interview was ‘write a tic tac toe game in ruby on rails in one hour’
And they literally had nothing, we were in the zoom call the guy was like ‘okay go’ but every time i asked him any questions he told me to just do whatever i thought was right and he didn’t want to influnce me.
I got RoR and dependencies and apache installed and either finished or almost finished mariadb in that hour but i was doing it all over my own home internet so didn’t really get very far and they seemed really annoyed!?!
Then the best part was the senior programmer told me that they don’t have time to do code reviews and all the engineers just merged whatever they wanted into master, but it was fine that way. I think he didn’t like having anyone review his code.
LOL
That last part is a nightmare
it’s definitely free labor for them, they’re incompetent and likely checking notes on how other more competent people would approach deploying in whatever fashion they want to