Interviewer: For this next code challenge you will not be allowed to use the internet, or an IDE.

Dev: …

Interviewer: OR a keyboard OR a mouse. I will be verbalizing the code to you and you need to memorize it and tell me where the bugs are.

Dev: …

Interviewer: We must do this exercise to know how you are as a dev without any performance enhancing “aid”. This way we can understand where you are truly at skill-wise, and what you are truly worth from a compensation perspective.

Dev: …

Dev: If I get a job with you will I be allowed to use the internet and an IDE and a keyboard/mouse?

Interview: Of course you would! Getting anything done without those is just about impossible. We just need to evaluate you without them to see how good you REALLY are.

Dev: …

Interviewer: Hello I’m calling for your phone interview now

Dev: You’re about an hour early calling but I can accommodate

Interviewer: Well it’s more convenient for me to do it now

Dev: …Alrighty then.

Interviewer: So I am from HR 😇*pause for effect*

Dev: …

Interviewer: Um, typically candidates start the interview by thanking me for consideration for this role.

Dev: Your job description was very vague so I don’t really know what I would be thanking you for.

Interviewer: 😡. It’s me that’ll be determining whether or not to pass you on to The Management.

Dev: …The Management?

Interviewer: Yes 🤗.

Dev: I’m no longer interested *click*.

Interviewer: Here is the interview challenge. Tell me what the expected output is. You have 5 minutes.

** 100 line class with 4 async methods that contain if/thens nested 4 layers deep that call each other and log things to the console

Dev: Ok wow this is a bit of a maze to work through but I’ll try my best.

** 1 minute later of reading through the code

Interviewer: One minute has elapsed. There is now 4 minutes remaining.

Dev: Actually could you please not interject with time updates like that while I’m reading code? It makes the challenge harder than necessary. Just letting me know when the time is up would be fine.

Interviewer: Ok.

** ~2 minutes later trying to comb through this spaghetti mess

Interviewer: What do you think are you getting close to figuring it out?

Dev: …

Interviewer: Time limit for this exercise was an hour and you took 2 hours so you fail. Best of luck next time

Dev: Look I really don’t think your assessment has a very fair time limit. The only way you could do this in an hour is by knowing what the problem was beforehand and having all these niche utilities written ahead of time.

Interview: Oh yeah we had one guy that did that, he did the entire thing in only 45 minutes! We hired him immediately!

Dev: …

During my first-ever technical interview, the interviewer asked me "Do you know the FizzBuzz problem?"
"Uhh, not really." (I was just thinking ok this problem has a name, must be some algorithm problem)
"So the problem is basically to give you the numbers 1 to 100, if the number is divisible by 3, print 'Fizz', if divisible by 5, print 'Buzz', if divisible by 3 and 5, print 'FizzBuzz'. For other numbers just print out the number itself."

After hearing the problem, I felt so many ideas popping out of my stressed brain.

I thought for a bit and said "ok, so if the digit sum of a number is a multiple of 3, then the number is divisible by 3, and if the last digit is either 0 or 5, it's divisible by 5."
Then I started to code out my solution until the interviewer said "there's an easier solution. Can you think of it?"

This stressed me out even more.

I thought for a bit and said "well, starting from 3, keep a counter that records how many iterations are done after 3. When the counter hits 3, that number would be divisible by 3 for sure. Should I try this solution?"
The interviewer said "Sure." So I started again.

However, I struggled for about another 3min until I realized this solution is a lot harder to implement. The interviewer probably saw my struggle too.

This was the point where he stepped in and asked me "Ummmm there's an easy way of solving this. Have you heard of the MODULO OPERATOR?"

In sheer embarrassment, I finished the code in 30s.

Of course, there was no further question after this, and I felt the need to seriously reevaluate my intelligence afterwards.

I rewrote my resume. It is getting shorter and shorter. Scary.

But I was thinking, that during interviews, I never get to ask the important questions. Like, I do need to ask a few things that are important for me. Those that are not written in their websites, and they will do their best to hide.

So I came up with a list of questions:

1. Do you pay for overtime work? what is the basis of pay? hours or work-module? how realistic are the work-modules?
2. Have you ever had issues with employees from minority groups?
3. How do you address employee's professional concerns? for example, about technological debt.
4. what's the policy for meeting and daily interruptions during brain-work? Are people ever forced to participate in meetings that could be summed up in emails? what's the company policy for initiating a meeting?
5. Who designs the software? Are the requirements always non-negotiable? do the direct developers have a say in design matters?
6. How close are job requirements (as advertised) to actual tasks I need to perform?
7. What's the company policy for motivating the employees?
8. How does the company deal with mental health issues? is it acceptable for people to take leaves due to mental health issues? Has anyone ever done it?
9. How does the company deal with individual needs for working methods and space? Specifically, how does that apply to meetings? Do you have company-wide meetings? How often are they? What's the impact on productivity? Can employees not participate? Do they have to have an excuse to not participate?
10. Do developers get to develop their skills during worktime often? Or is it a "do it in your own free time" kind of thing? Are there any resources available to those who want to develop their skills further? Is it included in the career planning and employee performance review?
11. Assume I work for your company for a year. What are the benefits I can potentially gain in a year from working here, aside from adding a line of work experience to my resume?
12. Does the company provide any form of free feminine hygiene products in the bathroom?

Any questions I should add?

- Get invited to apply to job
- Technical interview, guy shows up late starts small talk wasting time and gives me the exercise
- Start implementing the first algorithm, finish it passing min test cases then realize there's a solution that would make both algorithms a breeze
- I pitch my solution realizing there's no much time left, cuz we lost almost 20 min of my test hour talking about BS plus the almost 10 min he arrived late, and reassure the interviewer it can be developed faster
- Interviewer says it doesn't matter, we should finish edge cases
- Kay no problem, finish the first algorithm successfully and explain pitfalls on the second part with the current implementation
- I tell him there's a better solution but he doesn't seem to care, he says time's up

Now here's the funny part.

I get called by the recruiter today (2 weeks later) and she says "They are happy with your soft skills but feel there are some gaps with your coding, they would like to repeat the technical interview because they didn't feel there was much time to assess the 'gaps' ".
Interviewers, either I'm competent enough to work for you or not, your tests must be designed to assess that, if you see you can't fit the problem you want in the time you have left change the problem, reschedule or here's an idea...LEAVE THE BS CHITCHAT TILL THE END AND START THE INTERVIEW ON TIME. When I do interviews I always try to have one complete free hour and a one algorithm exercise because I expect the candidate to solve it, analyze it and offer alternatives or explain it, I've never had someone finishing more than 2 an hour.

You can keep your job I'll keep my time. I'll write a similar problem on the comments to pass on the knowledge for people who enjoy solving these kinds of problems, can't give you the exact same thing, also tip guys don't do NDA's for interviewing it makes no fucking sense trust me no one cares about your fizz buzz intellectual property.

Interviewer: *looking at my GitHub* do you use devrant?
Me: ...yes
Interviewer: ok, cool

I had an interview once where the dev interviewing me recognised that I had devrant avatar as my github profile picture.
Maybe that was one of the reasons they didn't get back to me after that interview? 🤔

A couple of weeks ago, I got to the second stage of a recruitment process with a relatively big fintech in the crypto space (I know) - all went well and although I did not think much of it at first, with all the information I had gathered I came to realize this might as well be the best opportunity I've had in my pursuit of finding a new job (i.e looking for high technical challenges, unsure of where I see myself in 5 years, wanting to give full-remote work a try, etc.).

Cue to the end of the interview;
"That's great! I really enjoyed speaking with you, your technical background seems excellent so we would like to move to the next stage which is a take-home test to do in your free time.", said the interviewer.

"Wow! Much amaze, well of course! What's it gonna be?", said the naive interviewee.
"I'm sending you the details via email, please send it back in 48 hours, buhbye now", she hangs up.

...

"48 hours?? Right, this should be easy then, probably some online leetcoding platform, as usual.", thought the naive interviewee, who evidently went through this sh*t numerous times already.

A day later I receive the email: this was the whole deal. The take-home test supreme with bacon and cheese. A full-blown project, with tests, a project structure, a docker image, testing and bullet points for bonus points! The assessment was poorly written with lots of typos and overall ambiguity, a few datasets were also provided but bloated with inconsistent comments and trailing whitespace.

What the actual fck??? Am I supposed to sleep deprive myself to death while also working my day job? What are you trying to assess? How much of my life I'm willing to sacrifice for your stupid useless coding challenge? You are not all Google, have some respect, jeez.

I did not get the job.

Recruiter story.. hilarious stuff..

I have an interview in next fifteen minutes and was setting up for it.

Recruiter calls me to remind me of the same.

I ask her to tell me who the interviewer would be, because she did not mention in the invite and also did not respond when I asked her over the email.

Her response: sure, wait a minute... Actually we are not allowed to disclose interviewer.

LMAO WTF!!

I recently got into an interview where the interviewer made a huge mistake:

R: “what’s your resignation period?”
Me: “well, long story short I’m working on a contract so it’s actually short, just 1 month”
R: “mhhh could you make it 2 weeks somehow? We may really need to start sooner”

This is a sentence you shouldn’t say as a recruiter as now I know:
- You are desperate to find someone
- You have a time urgency
- You failed to find someone before
- You basically confirmed you want me in

INTERVIEWER: Let’s say client wants a gif in the EDM design but older outlooks don’t support it. How do you solve it?
ME: Maybe we can try using iframes if outlook supports them and host gif somewhere and use iframes to show it.
INTERVIEWER: Any other solution?
ME: We can probably also detect the email client and just show gif for all other email clients but a picture for outlook.
INTERVIEWER: No but the client wants the gif to show on all email clients
ME: But outlook doesn’t support gifs!!!
INTERVIEWER: yeah
ME: …..
INTERVIEWER: …..

I thought maybe I missed something having been a junior dev and never developing edms. So jumped on the internet after the interview and my second answer is literally how everyone does it. What even was the point of that question? At no point she said yeah that’s a good solution and that’s how we do it in the industry. If outlook doesn’t fucking support gifs then what the fuck kind of solution am I supposed to bring to the fucking table in 5 fucking minutes.

i have been applying for jobs recently, and after getting some HR interviews that evolved to tech interviews, i just cancelled them all...

Every company seems to have hacker rank, and online coding sessions as tech interview stages which really stress me out. Its like everyone thinks they are google and its ok to make people go theough this pressure to join them.

I dont mind being given 10 days to implement a complex project, after which im either in or not. But 20 mins to solve something online while either the interviewer is watching me or the automated test is waiting to filter my application out... i get anxiety just thinking about that..

so im gonna stick with my current job for now, and focus on building my own business slowly on the side. I really felt anxious because of those tech interviews these past weeks and i feel so much better after cancelling all of them.

if a decent company comes along with the project approach, id love to apply, but otherwise ill just stick to where I am for now. dont know if im being immature or irresponsible career wise or if this decision will blow up in my face

stay tune to find out !

what is the point of having massive HR departments if something as expected and frequent as university hiring can't go smoothly?

i managed to reach the interview round for a big 4 firm only for the interviewer to not show up for 4 hours from my time slot (i waited the entire time - took periodic screenshots for proof), HR to say "we'll reschedule your interview, this happened because of internal miscommunication" more than THREE months ago, and dip. until december they'd repeat the same. now they've ghosted. thanks, virtual hiring.

how is it the candidate's fault? found out this isn't rare by speaking to a few others from my network who i knew were interviewing for the same firm. for students whose lives can change completely based on the outcome of an opportunity that they came across due to sheer luck and could definitely make use of because of their hard work - this is so heartbreaking and demotivating.

seeing questions like "finding the Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters" and being unable to find answer for hours make me question myself as a developer and wanna leave the tech world entirely.
And i am the dev who reduced an app size from 64mb to 27mb and rewrote the entire payment stack for a 10million user base company :|

DSA and competitive programming is seriously a bullshit. The world runs on fancy buttons and screens, and grabbing user's attention should be the ultimate goal to get profits. nobody should be learning this aweful stuff anymore. We are storing the open source and stack overflow content below the oceans and glaciars for a fucking reason!, so that our future gen could use those stupid knowlege without recreating the wheel

Why do we have this inferiority complex component in our life? do foot doctors also feel low for not able to understand heart or the working of eyeballs? they all are doctors to us, and all are equally appreciated by peons, HRs, receptionists the owner and even his freaking colleague doctors and seniors!!
But here we will be judged by a stupid "coding interview" for the role of a dev . the interviewer will be laughing at me for not solving a trivial problem with strings, as if I am seeing those bloody strings for the first time. I will be like some peasent to him, asking for more wages while portraying myself as some unqualified filth

FUCK this SHIT

just came out of an interview , totally fucked myself.

it's my first interview in last 6 months, i didn't prepare shit, 30 mins before the interview i was trying to get Hello world in java to work , and this was totally what i expected.

however the interviewer went deep into my domain and only asked Android questions. i wasn't even able to answer them 😅 . fuck am fucking rusted.

i would not hire myself if i were to interview a guy like me XD . but it was fun.
i wanted to get an idea of where i stand and what i should be working upon. i guess i know now, will try to get better

I gave a technical interview today and here is summary how it went . interviewer asked me to login to leetcode account then .

Interviewer :- "Open this problem( he gave link) and open submission section".

Me :- "Yes sir" I opened it and I have solved that in past .

Interviewer :- "okay so you have solved this one so let's move to next question(2nd)".

I opened it and again I have already solved that in past. Then he gave 3rd and it was also solved by me already .

Then he said " Okay now I will share with you this problem which you have not solved and I am sure ".

He gave me a hard problem which I actually haven't solved . I would have solved the first 3 , the 4th one was actually hard and I was not able to optimise my code on time .

sometimes life is really tough 😪. he could have asked anyone of them 😕.

Worst interview?
Last 7 or 8....
I took 3 years of formation to get a job in a specialized area... To be offered only minimum wages.
On one I felt so offended that I was rude to the interviewer... Stupid lady saying that small people only get minimum wages...
And I was rude to her again last week... I'm trying to change jobs and replied to a job offer from the same company (dissimulated, I only knew because of the email) my reply: no thank you... If I wanted to work for minimum wage I would go cleaning...

During my first-ever technical interview, the interviewer asked me "Do you know the FizzBuzz problem?"
"Uhh, not really." (I was just thinking ok this problem has a name, must be some algorithm problem)
"So the problem is basically to give you the numbers 1 to 100, if the number is divisible by 3, print 'Fizz', if divisible by 5, print 'Buzz', if divisible by 3 and 5, print 'FizzBuzz'. For other numbers just print out the number itself."

After hearing the problem, I felt so many ideas popping out of my stressed brain.

I thought for a bit and said "ok, so if the digit sum of a number is a multiple of 3, then the number is divisible by 3, and if the last digit is either 0 or 5, it's divisible by 5."
Then I started to code out my solution until the interviewer said "there's an easier solution. Can you think of it?"

This stressed me out even more.

I thought for a bit and said "well, starting from 3, keep a counter that records how many iterations are done after 3. When the counter hits 3, that number would be divisible by 3 for sure. Should I try this solution?"
The interviewer said "Sure." So I started again.

However, I struggled for about another 3min until I realized this solution is a lot harder to implement. The interviewer probably saw my struggle too.

This was the point where he stepped in and asked me "Ummmm there's an easy way of solving this. Have you heard of the MODULO OPERATOR?"

In sheer embarrassment, I finished the code in 30s.

Of course, there was no further question after this, and I felt the need to seriously reevaluate my intelligence afterwards.

Recruiter reached out on a certain other social network where people seem to be humbled a lot.

First interview (a day later) goes well

Second interview (a week later) also goes well. They tell me there's one more technical interview, but that shouldn't be a problem.

A week later, that interview is a breeze too. Interviewer said they'll prepare the paperwork.

Another week goes by without communication, so I ping them.

A week after that they send me an email saying that they need references they can talk to. A co-worker and a direct manager.
Uncommon in my part of the world in general. But coming up with that idea this late in the process? Really? But ok, I provide those in like an hour.

They take their time, but eventually call the co-worker. Another week after that, they still haven't called the manager, so I ping them again.

Silence for another couple of days, then a very sad email about how the general situation has changed and they've now stopped hiring indefinitely

The worst dev experience was having to interview people for job openings. I already dislike having to be the interviewee. I don’t like being the interviewer because I haven’t had a great experience with it. I’ve had a lot of people tell me what they think I want to hear instead of just answering my questions.

Surprisingly, the best was working with a recruiter for our open roles. The candidates from the recruiter were really great. Personally, I don’t have great experience with recruiters when I’m the one looking for a job. But for this case of my employer using one, it worked out. IDK if those candidates would have applied without the recruiter.

This happened during the early months of WFH in the covid pandemic. I had a paired programming video interview and my interviewer had some strange behavior. IDK if he had a weird tick, but his head kept dropping to the side like he was falling asleep and he’d jerk back up again. His eyes weren’t drooping though. It kept happening throughout the interview and I was afraid he’d fall out of his chair. I wondered if he was crashing from an all nighter or his body was shutting down in some way. It was jarring enough that I wondered if I should ask the recruiter to check on my interviewer.

!rant

So Today the interviewer dont know how to interview me, I feel like interviewing myself.

Since the 3rd day, I have been telling y'all but none of you listened to me.

I kept repeating that I am the dumbest person I know. Why didn't you believe me when I said it?

Remember, Booking feedback? They sent me another official rejection with additional feedback. Mind blown.

That feedback really helped me understand what was going wrong. And now today in an interview, I was asked a question and the interviewer said, "I am looking for a specific details like xyz for why you should be a Sr PM".

That's when it clicked me, that I have done stuff and I know things. It's just that I didn't understand the question and wasn't able to articulate and communicate well.

My dumbass just needs constant feedback to learn. How much I love feedback more than ever.

The feedback cycle is interesting too. When I was new, I hated it. Then started to realise the value of it.

Then it did felt bad in the very instance whenever I got one, but quickly I used to incorporate the changes.

And now, I am crave and desperately seek feedback. It only helps me improve.

Funnily, everyone gave inputs when I didn't want it. And now when I am hunting for it, no one is giving inputs. This is how life is.

Nonetheless, I am pretty impressed with Booking. Good people, nice vibes, and kickass culture for sure.

!dev I knew this was true but I'll say it again because I recently was met with this situation again:

Rule: If the interviewer says at the end of your first interview: "We'll see", you didn't get the job.

I'm starting to think that getting a job these days is a rarity..

In my latest interview. It's the first in a overly morose process that includes many.

Me: So, about the scope of responsibilities...
Interviewer: <translated from fart noises> "we're a dynamic company"
<translated again> do any shit some big headed brass asks of you

Me: it involves many meetings?
Interviewer: <dismissive fart noises>

Me: Is it for an open field project or an ongoing structure?
Interviewer: We have many ongoing projects, and you allocation may be changed dynamically <so, fart noises>

Me: about the salary...
Interviewer: <Extra-stinky-fart noises>

...
It went on for an hour, never an straight answer. Not even for the name of the company.
...

Me: Have you noticed that, even that you are interviewing me, I'm the one asking all the questions?
Interviewer: <actual fart> yes, you really seem to have the knack for it!
Me: ...
Interviewer: so, any more questions?
Me: Yes. Are you flammable? <actual quote>