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 think the interview I least enjoyed was with an unnamed big tech company.
It was the first interview of the day and the guy came in with “so me and my buddy have been trying to solve this algorithm problem for years. I’d like you to try and solve it for me.”
Like… Dude, that’s not a reasonable interview question! You should not use algorithm questions that you don’t know of any answer to in an interview. You’re effectively asking someone to give you a solution to something way too complicated of a problem without even a few hours to think about the problem or sit down with it on their own.
That sounds suspiciously like doing actual work for them.
I had one interview where they literally got me to fix their Sendmail server while I was there.
I seriously hope you got the job.
I did.
I was there 5 months before heading back to grad school.
Aren’t most questions like this are simply looking at what approach you try and not a solution? They’ve been at it for years so they can easily tell if you’re trying something that makes sense or something trivial even if they don’t have a solution or even if there isn’t one.
When I give interviews, I’m more concerned with the process than the results for some questions. I don’t really do it any more, but I’d sometimes ask one question not related to programming or anything on their CV just to see how someone works through a situation given a little bit of a curveball.