I interviewed for a part-time web developer role during the summer of my second year at university. The “employer” wanted the interview at their house. No problem, I guess it’s a small operation and I’d work remotely?

The interview was fine. It was a guy that worked with his wife, and they needed someone to pick up some work over a few weeks. Midway through the interview, the guy’s wife came downstairs - in what I can only describe as the kind of dressing gown you’d see in porn.

She walked over, asked if I was “the guy”. The man said, “oh yeah, he looks good don’t you think?”, to which she responded “yeah, he looks like he’ll do the job nicely”. She then came over and put her hand by the back of my neck, and asked if I wanted to help out with a problem they’d been having.

Being a socially awkward 20 year old CS student, I said something along the lines of “uhh no that’s okay thanks, I’d better get going soon”, and the man escorted me out. I had received an email minutes after to say the job was mine if I wanted it.

I turned the job down, saying that something else had come up. I’m 70% sure that the job was a threesome or some weird cuck thing, and if I didn’t have a girlfriend and wasn’t awkward as fuck I’d probably have gone back and plowed his wife/written some PHP. Either way, that’s my worst interview experience - and probably will be for the rest of my days.

On the other side, one guy I interviewed for a startup was really qualified and we wanted to offer him the role. I thankfully Googled him, and found a Twitter account against his name where he had pics of him balls deep in a blow up doll. We didn’t hire him.

My first ever software interview was with a small company that made a web app for traveling nurses. It was mainly a calendar with additional functionality to help nurses manage cases.

I was given a pre-interview programming task to complete. The task was relatively simple and would not take long to complete so I agreed.

When I logged in with the credentials they provided it looked like they had a very robust testing environment. There was a complete copy of the app running on the server with fake information in the database.

The code itself did not follow any style guides and was rarely documented. This caused me to spend much more time completing the task than I had estimated. Once I completed the task and verified functionality I notified the company. They checked my work and scheduled an in person interview with the lead developer, CTO, and CEO.

During the interview they attempted to access the test server with my code so we can discuss. My code could not be found on the test server and it was at this time we learned that the lead developer had given me complete access to the production servers including direct database access. The “fake” data that I used in my own testing on a production server was actual patient records. It was a huge HIPAA violation on their part and I withdrew my application for fear that this company will soon be in legal trouble.

I suspect they thought I was going to report them because they offered me $3000 for the “work completed.” It turns out their programming task was a feature that they wanted implemented into production anyways. I think if it were not for the lead developer’s mistake I would not have been paid anything. There was no offer of compensation for the completion of the task before the mistake was revealed.

I interviewed for a shop in Ottawa.

I was working at the time, but it was declining situation so I was Motivated.

So I show up a the appointed time, and I meet a guy who can best be described as ‘a little grizzled’ and ‘a little stressed’. We go over my resume, first off the bat.

“These are the things we need from you,” he said, tapping items on a list. “And these are places you suck,” he said, tapping the same list.

I basically checked out at that point; there was no way I was suitable for this post. I could learn it, but it was a lot. And while I had a lot of other skills that showed up on the job desc and my CV, missing so many important pieces was insurmountable. It wasn’t a super-fun experience no matter how interesting he was - he was a great lead hand - and I left without much fanfare. Great rambling talk about all kinds of things, but it’s the worst I’ve ever flamed out in an interview; and the fastest.

Imagine my surprise when he 'strong-hire’d me. I actually said to the recruiter, “Yeah, you’ve got it wrong. No no, and it’s totally okay, but you’re off by one or something. You mean to call the name above mine or the name below mine, and that guy is probably gonna love this job. But you don’t mean to call me. No stress, all good, but yeah, I’m not the guy you wanted to call.”

It was a great job and that guy was my lead. Brutal honestly is fabulous if you can take it.

As the interviewee?

I show up at their office for a round of interviews. IIRC it was 4 interviews of about an hour each. Every single interviewer comes in 5-10 minutes late. They all look completely exhausted. Unprompted, they all commented that “yeah, this is a start-up so we’re expected to work 80 hour weeks. That’s just how it is.” I did not take that job.

Another place wanted to do a coding “pre-screening” thing. You know, where you go to a website and there’s a coding question and you code it and submit your answer. THIS place wanted you to install an extension that took full control of your browser, your webcam, your mic, etc. So it could record you doing the coding challenge. No, thank you.

As the interviewer? omg, the stories I can tell.

We had a guy come in for an hour interview. We start asking him the normal interview questions. Literally everything he says is straight up wrong or he says, “I don’t know” and then just gives up and doesn’t try to work out a solution or anything. But we have a whole hour with this guy and as interviewers we’ve been instructed to use the full hour otherwise candidates complain that they weren’t given a fair chance even when it’s TOTALLY obvious it’s going to be a “no-hire.” So we start asking this guy easier and easier questions… just giving him basic softball questions… and HE STILL GETS THEM ALL WRONG. We ask him what type of variable would you use to store a number? He says, “String.” WHAT?! I’m totally flabbergasted at this point. So finally I get a brilliant idea: I’ll ask him an OPINION question! There’s no way he can get that wrong, right? Looking at his resume, it has something like “Java Expert” on there. So I say to him, “It says on your resume you’re a Java Expert. What’s your favorite thing about Java?” His response? “Oh, I actually don’t know anything about Java. I just put that on my resume because I know they used that at a previous company.” So now on top of this guy getting every question wrong, we’ve established he has also lied on his resume, so basically just red flags EVERYWHERE. Finally, after a grueling 45 minutes we decide to give up asking questions and just end with the whole, “So we like to reserve the last bit of time so you can ask us questions. Do you have anything you’d like to ask?” Without missing a beat, this guy goes, “When do I start? I feel like I NAILED that interview!”

At another company I worked at, we would do online interviews that took only an hour. The coding portion of the interview had a single question: “Given a list of strings, print the contents of the list to the screen.” That was it. Sure, we could make the coding question harder if they totally aced it, but the basic question was nothing more complicated than that. The candidate could even choose which programming language they wanted to use for the task. That single question eliminated half the candidates who applied for the job. Some straight up said they couldn’t do it. One person hung up on me and then when I tried to call back they said the fire alarm went off at their place and they would reschedule. They never did. Many people forgot that I could see their screens reflected in their glasses and I could see them frantically Googling. There was one candidate that did so insanely poorly during the interview that we believe it must have been a completely different person that had gone through the initial phone screen, so basically they were trying to bait-and-switch.

I have a bunch of other stories but this post is already getting quite long.

How about the other way around, I had this guy come in, he had been out of the business for a while and decided to go and be a mechanic for a few years. One winter in particular he decided that he was kind of tired of doing the mechanic stuff and wanted to come back.

I interviewed him on a phone screen. His knowledge was appropriately dated but he was not bad. I figure he’d be able to come in and get up to speed pretty quickly.

My company does kind of a nightmare scenario where they interview you all day long and you literally meet with everyone in groups.

First thing in the morning first group came through said he was great.

Second group came through asked him some questions and he was a little bit more cagey but still not bad.

The third group was the lunch group, They took him out to lunch and he threw out a bunch of racist stories and while people watching, made fun of people as they came into the restaurant for their ethnicity or their weight, or what car they drive or whatever else they could find.

The lunch crew came back and did a hand off but no one raised the flags right away so we went into the first after lunch crew. A couple of people from the lunch crew pulled me aside while he was in his next set of meetings and said they were extremely uncomfortable being around him and recounted the stories.

I had to bust up the interview and send him on his way. The person that was uncomfortable with what he said is one of the most IDGAF people I’ve ever met.

Years earlier we had a developer come in with a fantastic resume. They brought him in first thing he was rude, and we’re not talking autistic doesn’t know what he’s doing rude he was clearly making a lot of generalizations about people and being nasty about the questions. Skill wise he was absolutely fantastic and he would have been fabulous to be a lead in front of a complicated project, But he was impossible to be around. Toward the end of the Early interview they told him that they had all they needed. He asked him if it was because of his attitude and they said that it was a team job and they needed somebody that was capable of working with a team. He said they could just put him in a one-man team and have him architect things or do other work by himself. There was simply no chance they were going to hire him. You don’t willingly bring that much toxicity in the workplace if you can help it.

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.

I’m a little ashamed of this one. I really wanted it, and I was a little desperate.

1. HR Interview
2. CTO interview
3. 16-hour take home test
4. 4-hour panel interview where the engineers grilled me on random things
5. CEO Interview

Didn’t get it.

i got an interview as an embedded software engineer for a company that makes wireless camera flashes. high-precision real-time programming. i wanted to dive further into that area.

the first task was… reading comprehension, basic arithmetic, and pattern matching. i was flabbergasted. i wrote a really negative passage in their feedback form about how they apparently don’t trust their engineering candidates to be able to read, and how those pattern matching iq tests are bullshit since you can up your score by like 20% if you practice.

they called me back and explained that the reason they have everyone from cleaning staff to C-level take the standardized test is to create a workplace of “objective equality”. also they were really confused about my stance on the test because apparently i had scored in the top 5%. that’s the fastest i’ve ever noped out of an interview process.

I interviewed at Cisco once, with two managers. They started arguing with each other during said interview.

I didn’t get the job, and I didn’t want it, either.

When I was in Uni, we had the opportunity to apply for co-op at Black Berry when they still made phones with their own OS.

I was getting into mobile dev at this time and applied and got an interview.

I didn’t know what I was expecting but what I got was a 10-20min sales pitch for their phone and I wasn’t asked a question… I don’t think. From what I gathered afterwards they just wanted to hire/rehire one guy and had to interview others to be in the co-op program.

Believe it or not I wasn’t sold on black berry after that.

As an interviewee it’s nothing much, but when they asked me to sort a list, I find that question to be completely pointless, I will never implement a sort IRL, and most people who get it right are because they have it memorized.

As an interviewer, a person who sent their take home as a .doc file inside a zipped folder. I didn’t understood why they sent it that way, but got the code to compile, and found very serious issues. When confronting the person they claim there were no issues, which happens so I pointed out at a specific line, and still nothing, I asked them if they knew what an SQL injection was and his answer was “yes, and you’re wrong, there’s no SQL injection happening there”, so I sent him a link for him to click that would call that endpoint on his local instance, and dropped the entire database for the take-home assignment. No need to tell you he wasn’t hired.

I’m not a swe but I work in technology doing solutions, so semi technical I guess. I recently did 6 rounds with a company with positive feedback after each round. They told me they needed to get through a few more candidates and would have an answer on if an offer was being made the following week.

1 week turned into 2 into 3. At the end of the third week I lied and said I had an offer and told them that I needed an offer from them or to remove me from candidacy. The opted to remove me.

I was working at a job, so I wasn’t stressing it but the process was just gross

At university, a prof for theoretical CS (the kind of professor who thought CS students don’t need computers) was looking for someone to program something for him. The requirements really showed that he had no clue about programming. His assistent, sitting beside him, obviously knew that, too.

I basically told that prof that he had no idea what he was talking about, and suggested that he should attend a basic programming course before I left.

Interviewed at two big, well-known tech companies. Had done a lot of mobile dev work at the time, but really wanted to switch to connected hardware and told the recruiters.

Showed up for the first on-site interview. Guy walks in. Explains the actual first interviewer couldn’t make it so he was a last-minute stand-in. Goes: “So, it says here you are intererested in mobile. That’s good. My team is looking for someone like that.”

I explained it was actually the other way round. What proceeded was an awkward hour of bullshit questions about train schedulers and sorting algorithms. Repeat five times that day. Every. Single. One.

Second company a few weeks later. Same thing. Except this time, 2/3 of the way through, a manager in HW group walks in. Grouses why he was asked to talk to someone, checks notes, about mobile. We had the greatest conversation after I set him straight. He wanted me to come back and do another loop just with his group. Except a week later, they announced a hiring freeze and I never heard back.

In retrospect, it was a good thing. I would not have been a good fit.

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.