Sit down before you read this.

So I interviewed a guy for a "Support Engineer" internship position.

Me and the team lead sit down and are waiting for him to enter, but apparently he's actually making a coffee in the kitchen.

This isn't exactly a strike since the receptionist told him that he can go get a drink, and we did too. It's just always expected for him to get a glass of water, not waste 3 minutes brewing a coffee.

In any case he comes in, puts the coffee on the table, then his phone, then his wallet, then his keys and then sits on our side of the table.
I ask him to sit in front of us so we can see him. He takes a minute to pack and tranfer himself to the other side of the table. He again places all of the objects on the table.

We begin, team lead tells him about the company. Then I ask him whether he got any questions regarding the job, the team or the company . For the next 15 minutes he bombards us with mostly irrelevant and sometimes inappropriate questions, like:
0: Can I choose my own nickname when getting an email address?
1: Does the entire department get same salaries?
2: Are there yoga classes on Sundays only or every morning?
3: Will I get a car?
4: Does the firm support workspace equality? How many chicks are in the team?
5: I want the newest grey Mac.

And then.. Then the questions turn into demands:
6: I need a high salary (asks for 2.5 more than the job pays. Which is still a lot).
I ask him why would he get that at his first job in the industry (remind you, this is an internship and we are a relatively high paying company).
He says he's getting paid more at his current job.
His CV lists no current job and only indicates that he just finished studying.
He says that he's working at his parent's business...
Next he says that he is very talented and has to be promoted very quickly and that we need to teach him a lot and finance his courses.

At this point me and the team lead were barely holding our laughs.

The team lead asks him about his English (English is not our native language).
He replies "It's good, trust me".
Team lead invites him for an English conversation. Team lead acts like a customer with a broken internet and the guy is there to troubleshoot. (btw that's not job related, just a simple scenario)
TL: "Hello, my name is Andrew, I'm calli..."
Guy: *interrupts* "Yes, yes, hi! Hi! What do you want?"
TL: "Well, if you let me fi..."
Guy: "Ok! Talk!"
TL: "...inish... My internet is not working."
Guy: "Ok, *mimics tuning a V engine or cooking a soup* I fixed! *points at TL* now you say 'yes you fixed'".

Important to note that his English was horrible. Disregarding the accent he just genuinely does not know the language well.

Then he continiues with "See? Good English. Told you no need to check!".

After about half a minute of choking on out silent laughter I ask him how much Python experience he has (job lists a requirement of at least 1 year).
He replies "I'm very good at object oriented functional programming".
I ask again "But what is your experience? Did you ever take any courses? Do you have a git repository to show? Any side.."
*he interrupts again* "I only use Matlab!".

Team lead stands up and proceeds to shake his hand while saying "we will get back to you".

At last the guy says with a stupid smile on his face "You better hire me! Call me back tomorrow." Leaves TL hanging and walks away after packing his stuff into the pockets.

I was so shocked that I wasn't even angry.
We both laughed for the rest of the day though. It was probably the weirdest interview I took part at.

Got a phone interview for a backend dev job in an opsec company.

Interviewer:
This is a very serious and prestigious position, we take care of the most important bits of code.

*Proceeds to talk introductory nonsense*

Interviewer:
Do you know what a DNS is?

Me:
Yes, of course! DNS stands for Domain Name System.... Blah blah blah... I explain about the servers, about hosts file, about DNS spoofing and everything else possible on this topic.

Interviewer:
See, I was patient with you - letting you finish. I'm not sure what you're talking about and where you got it from, but a DNS is that line in the browser where you type the site's name.

He didn't ask any more questions, just told me that they'll get back to me. I asked not to do that.

Three weeks later I got an email claiming that I'm not qualified.

Worst dev I've interviewed?

"Archie" ran his own consulting business for almost 20 years. Prior to his interview, Archie sent HR (to send to us) his company's website, where he had samples of code for us to review (which was not bad, this guy did know his stuff).
What I found odd was Archie was the lone wolf at his company, but everything I found about him (the about page, his bio, etc), Archie was referred to as 'Mr. Archie Brown'.
Ex. 'Mr. Archie Brown began his humble career and 'Mr. Archie Brown is active in his church and volunteers his time in many charities ...'
Odd to refer to yourself in the third person on your own site, but OK, I like putting hot sauce on my mac & cheese (no judgement here).

Then the interview..standard stuff, then..
Me: "Given your experience, this is an entry level developer position. Do you feel the work would be challenging enough for you?"
Archie: "Yes, Mr. Archie Brown would have no problem starting at bottom. You see ..."

Almost any time he would reference himself, instead of 'me' or 'I', he would say 'Mr. Archie Brown'. As the interview continued, the ego and self-importance grew and grew.
My interview partner wanted to be done by using the escape clause, "PaperTrail, I'm good, do you have any questions?"

Yes, yes I do. I was having too much fun listening to this guy ramble on about himself. I made the interview go the full hour with the majority of time 'Archie' telling us how great he is.

The icing on the cake was my partner caught his gold cuff-links and tie-pin where his initials and how he kept raising his hands and playing with his tie to show us (which I totally missed, then was like "oh yea, that was weird")

After the interview, talking with HR:
HR-Jake: "How did it go?"
John: "Terrible. One of the worst. We would have been done in 10 minutes if PaperTrail didn't keep asking questions."
Me: "Are you kidding!? I had the best time ever. I wish I could have stayed longer."
HR-Jake: "Really? This guy was so full of himself I wasn't sure to even schedule with you guys. With his experience, I thought it deserved at least a round with you two. You think we should give him a chance?"
Me: "Hell no. Never in a million years, no. I never in my whole life met anyone with such a big ego. I mean, he kept referring to himself in the third person. Who does that?"
HR-Jake: "Whew!...yea, he did that in the phone interview too. It was a red flag for us as well."

Couple of weeks later I ran into HR-Jake in the break room.
HR-Jake: "Remember Mr. Archie Brown?"
Me: "To my dying day, I will never forget Mr. Archie Brown."
HR-Jake: "I called him later that day to tell him the good news and he accused me of being a racist. If we didn't give him the job, he was getting a lawyer and sue us for discrimination."
Me: "What the frack!"
HR-Jake: "Yep, and guess what? Got a letter from his lawyer today. I don't think a case will come in front of a judge, but if you have any notes from the interview, I'll need them."
Me: "What are we going to do?"
HR-Jake: "Play the waiting game between lawyers. We're pretty sure he'll run out of money before we do."

After about 6 months, and a theft conviction (that story made the local paper), Mr. Archie Brooks dropped his case (or his lawyers did).

I wasn't going to post this because I expected loads of hate but fuck it, I'd rather share it anyways. Also take into account that sometimes there's no choice because money is needed or other circumstances :)

This one guy told me to never let down my values and what I stand for if I can afford to do that, no matter what they are.

I'd quit my job over having to use tools like Google or Slack (luckily my company is highly against using Slack and most people have moved to ddg) and as for WhatsApp, I said at my interview that I'd either wanted a business phone for using WhatsApp or I wouldn't use it. Boss said 'thats cool!'

I quote from him(that person who said this to me):

"they force you to use something you're uncomfortable with? Fuck'em. They don't understand your reasons? Their problem.
Even if nobody in the entire world understands/accepts your reasons, doesn't mean they're not valid."

My previous job I got by winning an Xbox Kinect hackathon. Not because the game I made was really good or anything. But because I was the only one who actually built something. (Apart from a guy who’s application would cheer louder as you raised your arms.) So that evening I left the hackathon with an Xbox one and a job.

My job was to build advert games, games whose primary goal is to advertise a company or event. This is the job where I learned I DO NOT like game development. So after about half a year I quit.

Because I still needed money I did some freelance work as a game developer (I developed 3 advert games for 3 startups).

I was still looking around for dev jobs but because I was a student I had no luck, they were all looking for full timers.

At some point I called this one (Dutch) company and spoke to a very odd French person on the phone. He invited me to come over for an interview. I had very little information about the job so I started researching the company. They are a small company specialized in complex content migrations. I wasn’t that into migrations but hell, I’m always up for something new.

Upon arrival I was greeted by the familiar French voice and saw a collection 6 diverse developers sharing a space. We did the usual interview dance and practices and that’s where I figured out this is a java job. They developed tools for the professional services team to perform these complex migrations I mentioned earlier. With me never having touched java before I was quite sure I wouldn’t get the job. But I took the test anyway.

About halfway through the test I was stopped and they started to ask me some conceptual questions, I did okay there but nothing special. That same day the architect took me to their CEO and told him I had:

- very little experience
- no migration experience
- was still a student so could only work 20 hours a week
- he saw some potential they could work with

Quite unexpectedly, they still hired my 20 year old ass.

Now the company has grown to a good 20+ developers with a nicely sized professional services team and we are launching our first out-of-the-box product in a couple of weeks.

So that’s how I got my job. If you read to this very end, my hat is off to you!

Today's my lucky day for job rejections...

"Unfortunately we have decided not to proceed with you as a candidate because the salary range you expect lies outside our budget."

That's very interesting indeed because in the very first interview (phone call) you asked me about that range and I gave it, straight and simple.

Then I had to do a coding challenge, which I usually refuse, but did anyway. It took about 15 hours. Let's not forget that it had nothing to do with the job I was applying for, but OK.

After that, a second interview, which took 1.5 hours and a third, which gobbled up 2 hours of my time.

Then you tell me that you're not willing to fork over the dosh, after having wasted 18.5 hours of my time!

Thank you very much, you anus blossoms!

My most awkward recruiter interaction?

Just graduated college and got 'suckered' by an programming position ad that turned out to be a recruiting company. It was fine since they charge the company for their services and not me.
After a couple of weeks of waiting (they initially promised I would/could have at least 3 interviews a week, which hadn't happened.) I decided to start looking again on my own, found a position, and I was hired.

About two months later I get a phone call:

<skipping the pleasantries>
R: "I see you are working for D, congratulations. I've started the paperwork for our reimbursement."
Me: "Reimburse for what? I found that job on my own."
R: "D is one of the companies we work with and when we submitted your resume, they told us you were already hired."
Me: "And?"
R: "And you signed a contract and now its time to pay. The fees only start at $500"
Me: "Not me. I have the contract, it states, in the second paragraph, I am not responsible for any hiring fees."
<couple of seconds of silence>
R: "Yes, but that is only if we negotiated the contact. Since you went behind our back, we couldn't start the process"
Me: "And?"
R: "And its a breach of contract."
Me: "I'm not a lawyer, I don't understand what you're saying. It says right here on the contract I signed, I don't pay any fees. No where does it say I'm not allowed to look for a job on my own. Right?"
R: "Um..yea..right..right...but you were hired by one of our contracted companies."
Me: "No way I would have known that. Maybe you should have set up an interview long before now."
<R is getting pretty angry at this point>
R: "I'm sure we gave you list of companies we work with. Contacting those companies is a breach of contract. Unless you want our lawyers to get involved, the fee is only $500. Failing to honor your side of the agreement and we'll be forced to contact your employer and begin garnishing your wage until the fee is paid. You don't want that, do you?"
Me: "There was no list and I am allowed to find a job on my own. Again, I'm not responsible for you not setting up an interview so do whatever you think you can do. Have a good night"
<I hang up>

About a week later..

Boss: "Got a phone call from XYZ Recruiting requesting a wage garnishment. Do you know anything about that?"
<I explain the situation>
Boss: "Oh good grief. We've worked with them a couple of times and we contact them on an individual basis for new hires. You're fine"
Me: "You're not going to garnish my paycheck?"
Boss: "No no no, that's not how this works. He was probably trying to scare you into paying their crazy fees."
Me: "What if they get their lawyers involved? I don't want to cause any trouble"
Boss: "Ha ha...XYZ Recruiting is a couple of guys in an office and we have lawyers on the 3rd floor who eat and breath this shit. They know that and you won't hearing from them again."

HR: "We want to hire you, but we shouldn't until after we finish this migration and set up an onboarding process. That should take about two weeks; is this okay?"
Me: "Yes, of course."

... two and a half weeks later ...

Me: "Hey, it's been awhile since our last chat. How's the migration and onboarding process going?" etc.
HR:

------

Ugh.
This is the same company that had me sitting by the phone waiting for an interview an entire day, and let me know their schedule got booked for the day three minutes before they went home. gg.

I should tell them to get bent.

Phone call...
Caller: we contact you to arrange an interview for Java developer position, what time is good with you?
Me: Sorry Sir, I am javascript developer not Java developer!
Caller: You mentioned in your CV that you are using Java and Ayax for building applications!
Me: Trust me Sir, I don't have any relationship with your Ayax...
Caller: No problem, we can discuss this small technical difference in the interview. When you are available for it?
Me: No Sir, I am not available.

Just sharing my experience of my spontaneous interview with Facebook. I'm not good at writing these but here you go :)

- I was working as an Android dev and didn't have much knowledge in algorithms nor competitive programming, never ever interviewed with big companies.
- a random day on LinkedIn, a recruiter from Facebook contacted me
- I ignored it for few week because I thought it's so out of my league, then somehow, out of blue, I had a thought of giving it a try, so I did
- passed first round
- start studying algorithms a little for phone interview in 3 weeks
- recklessly took the phone interview
- passed
- start studying intensively (while working fulltime) for the on-site interview in 2 months
- almost got the job, they gave me one more chance by a followed up interview
- messed up the last chance real bad
- failed!!!
- Initially I just wanted to give it a try, but the fact that I failed at very very last chance, frankly, bothers me a bit. Maybe I will interview with FB or big companies if I have chance later, but I know for sure that the studying had made me a much better dev. All the code I write now is much more efficient (I think), I can and not anymore afraid of reading complicated code.
- Overall, it does takes a lot of time (~4 months studying while working fulltime), but also benefits myself a lot though I didn't get the job, so basically, good experience, but better if I got the job 😁

Oops, wanted to write a few lines and it's a long post already.. I should stop here :D

The last two frontend devs I interviewed.

First:

He had 15 some years of experience, but couldn't answer our most basic of technical questions, we stopped asking after the first couple.

Based on a technical test I got the impression that he couldn't distinguish between backend and frontend.

So, I posed a simple question "Have you interfaced with REST API'S using Javascript before?"

Which lead him to talk about arrays. I shit you not he droned on about arrays for five minutes.

"I have experience using big array, small arrays, breaking big arrays into littler arrays and putting arrays inside other arrays."

Never been in an interview situation where I've had to hold back laughter before. We refer to him as the array expert.

His technical knowledge was lacking, and he was nervous, so he just waffled. I managed to ease his nerves and the interview wasn't terrible after that, but he wasn't what we were looking for.

Second:

This was a phone interview.

It started off OK he was clearly walking somewhere and was half preoccupied. Turns out he was on his way back from the shop after buying rolling papers (we'd heard him in the shop asking for Rizla), and he was preoccupied with rolling a joint.

We started asking some basic technical questions at which point he faked that he'd seen a fight in the street.

We then called him back five minutes later you could hear him smoking "ah, that's better". After that the interview was OK, not what we were looking for, but not bad.

Top tip: If you require a joint to get through a phone interview, roll and smoke it before hand.

Weirdest technical interview:

I was applying all over during my last semester in college (before graduating). This place was hiring a PHP developer for their “web store”. My interviewer invited me into her office, pulled out a laptop, and asked if I could walk her through some of the existing code. After I successfully did, she responded with “oh wow, we had no idea it was doing all of that!”.

The main room consisted of 6 folding tables lined with people on desk phones (probably support/sales). When I asked her where I would be working (mostly concerned about not being able to focus over the constant phone calls), she said that I would just share her desk in her office.

Then she asked if I could start the next day, without giving my internship any kind of warning that I’d be quitting so abruptly. She also asked me to start missing class, so I could spend more time at work. Saying things like “if you already have the job, why focus on school?”. When I asked who wrote that code, she told me that it was an out of state contractor that they’re trying to get rid of, because his rates were too high.

I told her that I would need a few days to think about it, which gave me time to call the other places that I had interviewed, but were still waiting to hear back. Luckily, when one of the places heard that I had been offered a job, they decided to rush their hiring process and offered me a job over the phone!

It’s been 6 years, and I am so thankful that I didn’t have to take that sketchy job.

After one job interview I ran across this one guy in an elevator.

"Are you an IT? I am looking for one".

I nodded, "Yes, I am". He was about to get off the elevator and told me to save his phone number.

By the time I was about to type the last 3 digits of his number on my mobile, I got a call from my brother and the elevator door closed. I immediately rejected the call.

Unfortunately, the dialer went empty and I lost his number.

I was trying to recall the number but I can only remember the last 3 digits.

I went back to the same floor, but there was around 30 offices and I couldn't find him. I gave up.

Fucking iPhone.

Perhaps not "best", but certainly most amusing, so what the heck!

Years ago as an intern, I applied to a large pharmaceutical company. On part of the application form, you had to enter the code of the department you were applying to.

What I *should have* put down was "IT", which is the department that houses all their devs. However, I didn't actually read any of what the codes meant, assumed that was the department for helping people with how to mail merge, and put down "COMPSCI" instead. This was computational sciences - loosely summarised as computational data analysis on various druggable molecules.

I do *not* have any sort of biology or chemistry background, so the interview was rather... interesting, and I muddled through on the basis of getting some more interview practice assuming it was a no go.

To my amazement, got a phone call saying that they'd been thinking they wanted someone more technical on the team, and despite my lack of scientific experience they thought I'd be a good fit. I was unsure as to whether I should accept for a while, but then decided to just go for it - and had a fantastic internship there, working on a great variety of stuff, and learning tons all under a supervisor who I'm still in touch with to this day.

tl;dr - Applied for the wrong job. Coincidentally got it anyway, and miraculously had a fantastic year working there.

A couple of months back I got an interview for a junior android devel position. I do not consider myself a junior devel, bt fuck it they paid 78k a year plus benefits and this is for south texas where it ain't thaaat expensive. So i kept my mouth shut and went with it.
The company was glorious, one of those hipsert marketing companies with cool couches and shit and people doing fuckign whatever all over the place and cool tools and desks.

So the initial interview with the hr dept went amazing, real cool guys and very down to earth. Next was the senior android dev.

This dude.

It was to be a phone interview, with a lil coding test. Fine whatevs. But the moment he called i knew shit was going down hill. Dude sounded dead af. Like he could not stand being himself that day. Asked asshole questions that every developer in Android should know that were frankly quite insulting ("what company develops the Android os" kind of deal) but kept my mouth shut and answered as needed.

Then the coding portion. Given a string, find the first position of the first repeated char, so if I had , fuck i dunno "tetas" then t was the first (and only) char repeated and it should have given out 2.
Legit finished it up in less than 6 mins and only because he was making me explain my entire thought process.

He got angry for some reason. Mind you I speak like a hippie, with a melow town and calm voice all the damned time, got that Texas swag going on as well as any good ol' boy from Texas should right?
Well this dude was not having none of that shit that day.

Dude was all like "ok now....why exactly did you do it this way?"

With a VERY condescending tone. And i explained that at first I normally think about solutions in pseudocode, so I wrote that as well...1 min or less. In python. This is after I still had the Java solution on screen with perfectly clean and working Java. I saif that since Python was as close to pseudocode as it gets that I figured i would just write the "pseudocode" in python and then map it to Java with all the required modifications.

"Welk i did not ask you to write it in java, so i dunno why you would even do that to begin with"

That is one of many asshole remarks. The first when I mentioned that I found React Native good for prototyping complex ideas for FUCKING FUN. Passion motherfucker. Shit so fly I do it for fun. "We don't deal with that here so I am not interested in what you can do with that or how would it help me"

Mofocka plz.

Well going back to the python shit. I explain (calmly) that it was just a way that I had to figure details, to think of different implementations. He continues by saying that it takes valuable company time.

Then he proceeds to tell me that he believes that i cheated since i fi ished the java "problem" too fast.
I told him that simple stuff like that should take even less for any senior java dev and that we could run another example if he wanted.
Bring it puto.
But no.

He then said that he still did not understand the need for Python in my solution. I lost it.

"Look man, getting real tired of your tone, i explained already, it is just a mental process, i do this when comming up with solutions, thinking in theory, not languages, helps me bridge the gap between problem and implementation, the solution works, it is efficient and fast and i can do it in 5 diff ways if you wanted, i offered and you said no. Don't really know what else you want"

"All i am saying, i am not going to hire you if you are going to be writing Python for Android, that is useless to me"

Lost it more.

I do sound different when pissed. So I basically told him that he asked for my reasoning behind and it was given, that not getting it was a you problem.

Sooooo did not get the job. Was relieved really. Can't imagine having a twat like that as a lead devel.

Fuck the memes.

Fuck the framework battles.

Fuck the language battles.

Fuck the titles.

Anybody who has been in this field long enough knows that it doesn't matter if your linus fucking torvalds, there is no human who has lived or ever will live that simultaneously understands, knows, and remembers how to implement, in multiple languages, the following:

- jest mocks for complex React components (partial mocks, full mocks, no mocks at all!)
- token cancellation for asynchronous Tasks in C#
- fullstack CRUD, REST, and websocket communication (throw in gRPC for bonus points)
- database query optimization, seeding, and design
- nginx routing, https redirection
- build automation with full test coverage and environment consideration
- docker container versioning, restoration, and cleanup
- internationalization on both the front AND backends
- secret storage, security audits
- package management, maintenence, and deprecation reviews
- integrating with dozens of APIs
- fucking how to center a div

and that's a _comically_ incomplete list; barely scratches the surface of the full range of what a dev can encounter in a given day of writing software

have many of us probably done one or even all of these at different times? surely.

but does that mean we are supposed to draw that up at a moment's notice some cookie-cutter solution like a fucking robot and spit out an answer on a fax sheet?

recruiters, if you read this site (perhaps only the good ones do anyway so its wasted oxygen), just know that whoever you hire its literally the luck of the draw of how well they perform during the interview. sure, perhaps some perform better, but you can never know how good someone is until they literally start working at your org, so... have fun with that.

Oh and I almost forgot, again for you recruiters, on top of that list which you probably won't ever understand for the entirety of your lives, you can also add writing documentation, backup scripts, and orchestrating / administrating fucking JIRA or actually any somewhat technical dashboard like a CMS or website, because once again, the devs are the only truly competent ones - and i don't even mean in a technical sense, i mean in a HUMAN sense of GETTING SHIT DONE IN GENERAL.

There's literally 2 types of people in the world: those who sit around drawing flow charts and talking on the phone all day, and those WHO LITERALLY FUCKING BUILD THE WORLD

why don't i just run the whole fucking company at this point? you guys are "celebrating" that you made literally $5 dollars from a single customer and i'm just sitting here coding 12 hours a day like all is fine and well

i'm so ANGRY its always the same no matter where i go, non-technical people have just no clue, even when you implore them how long things take, they just nod and smile and say "we'll do it the MVP way". sure, fine, you can do that like 2 or 3 times, but not for 6 fucking months until you have a stack of "MVPs" that come toppling down like the garbage they are.

How do expect to keep the "momentum" of your customers and sales (I hope you can hear the hatred of each of these market words as I type them) if the entire system is glued together with ducktape because YOU wanted to expedite the feature by doing it the EASY way instead of the RIGHT way. god, just forget it, nobody is going to listen anyway, its like the 5th time a row in my life

we NEED tests!
we NEED to know our code coverage!
we NEED to design our system to handle large amounts of traffic!
we NEED detailed logging!
we NEED to start building an exception database!

BILBO BAGGINS! I'm not trying to hurt you! I'm trying to help you!

Don't really know what this rant was, I'm just raging and all over the place at the universe. I'm going to bed.

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*.

I had a prospective employer be late to every single interview we had scheduled. I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt, but they simply didn’t value my time.

I was in the process of moving and a recruiter called me to tell me a job I had been submitted for wanted to do a phone interview that day. Even though I was driving across the country in a box truck, I agreed to the interview. We arranged for the employer to call me at 2 PM. I figured it would give me a break from driving in the middle of the day anyway.

I pulled over at 1:45 and waited. At 2:15 I called the recruiter to verify the time. He said he would get in contact with the employer and call me back. At 2:45 I called the recruiter and told him I needed to get back on the road and we’d have to reschedule.

We rescheduled the call for a few days later at 1 pm. This time I got the phone number of the employer, so at 1:15 I called him. He apologized and said he lost track of time. Whatever, let’s just get this interview going.

He liked me on the phone, so he wanted to meet in person the next day. I was a bit irritated by the situation, but I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I showed up for my in person interview 15 minutes early and checked in with the receptionist. 30 minutes later I asked the receptionist when they were going to be with me as my interview was supposed to start 15 minutes ago. I was finally seen 5 minutes after that.

The interview was supposed to be a several hour affair where they were going to have me sign an NDA and show me some of the issues they were having to see if I could solve them. I had cleared my scheduled meetings for the afternoon so I could attend this lengthy interview.

After about 45 minutes of interviewing, the manager suddenly said that they needed to cut the interview short because he had just realized they needed to get something done that afternoon. He asked me if I would come back the next day to finish the interview.

I shook his hand and left, shaking my head the entire time. When I called my recruiter after I had calmed down, I let him know that I would under no terms be interested in a job with them. If they refused to acknowledge my time was worth something as a candidate, they would never respect it as an employee.

They still offered me the job and couldn’t fathom why I was upset about the situation. I’m very glad I didn’t take that job.

Caller: My client looking for experienced developer in Technology X,Y and Z are you open for new position?
Me: But I don't know this X and Y, I only use Z!
Caller: Please add them to your CV and send it to me so I can pass it to the client...
Me: But I don't know it!
Caller: Neither me nor the client know it also, please update the CV...
Me: How many years of experience should I add then?
Caller: 3 years will be OK!
Me: §¢“°©™|-=]%

tl;dr: spent 12 hours creating an api for a job interview challenge. Got rejected after 4 weeks with no real feedback, and all I can do is rant!

So I was in the interview process with a company that was a great fit for my background.

Got through a couple of phone screens, and was given a coding challenge consisting of writing a web API with a couple of endpoints and a filter function.

I'm like, ok no problem, I happen to have created apis for some mobile apps in the past, and I pick Django rest framework to get the job done.

Implemented it on a Sunday, wrote a medium size Readme.md and some unit tests and submit. Took almost four weeks and a partial resubmission to get a rejection with no specific feedback.

Now I'm shamelessly butthurt and I have nothing else to do but rant! Worse part is I looked back at the code and in my opinion is solid AF, so I put it on my public GitHub cause fuck it!

My second job. I've been hired as a research specialist, not a developer, but they found out I could code during the interview.

Boss: hey, so we have our main product line that shares the control panel for all the models, right?
Me: unh, yeah
B: well, we need to know how it works.
M: sorry?
B: yeah, I mean, we should have a manual with all the tech documentation so we know how everything works
M: ...and didn't you handle the tech docs to the developers?
B: uh...no, actually we requests feature to the devs (note: external company) with a phone call, or email...now we need the specs.
Me: omg

...

The other company (which is part of the same group) handles me the source code.
It is a huge, 25k lines of spaghetti written by at least 7 people, one at a time, uncommented.
After a month I produce a 50page doc with how everything works, after actually compiling my resignation letter 3 times.

M: boss, here the docs
B: fine, I'll take a look
15 mins later
B: this is not what we need! You cannot describe those algorithm like this!
( I described the algorithms with their block flow, with a punctual verbal description)
M: umh.. So how do you need it?
B: we need an excel table, with all the entering conditions on the rows and all the exit conditions in columns, and the description of the condition of work in the crossing cells!
M: are you even serious?

(On a phone interview)

"So... in the entire span of your professional career, you've never had someone you could call a mentor?"

"Uh, nope, been mostly on my own."

"How did you learn new things?"

"I read a lot of Hacker News."

True story.

HR really are the scum of the earth. Especially Indian HR.

I tech interviewed this guy on Friday and rejected him. And I told HR to tell him so. Apparently he was "too busy" to type a darn message.

This poor sod who was apparently laid off and was pretty desperate and so he'd been calling every HR he'd interviewed with the past week and no one picked up, including my HR.

Now this lad had my work number because that's what I did my phone interview on. I don't attend work calls on the weekend, especially not interviewees but I had to tell this poor sod that he didn't make it (it was a bit obvious).

This is the exact same HR who rejected a candidate just because they were 2 minutes late to a video call.

Interview today! (Maybe?)
Sometime between 2pm and 10pm!
No idea if it's Skype or phone or what. Or with who. Or really when.

Sounds like I should turn them down. 😕

Story time!

A little over a year ago I was in the hiring process with a new company and countered their initial offer. I was told by the CTO that it was no problem and they would get back to me soon.

A couple days go by and I'm then informed that they're hiring a new IT director and would like me to interview with him as well. It felt kinda lame since I'd already been offered the job but I rolled with it.

When I showed up to the office for an interview I tried to call and let them know I was there and couldn't get a hold of anyone. 30 minutes later I get a call from the CTO saying they couldn't find the new IT director and when they got him to answer the phone he said he had left early and would call me to do a phone interview.

Obviously the whole experience so far has been pretty lame but I stuck with it because I knew the CTO personally. I did the phone interview and quickly realized this dude was a prick, and would be a terrible boss, but I spoke with the CTO again who told me to stick with it and eventually I did get the job.

Fast forward about a month and it's clear the new director is trash. He literally bragged about firing a dude over an accidental outage (wtf!?).

He had the technical experience you'd expect of a junior help desk and his management skills were pretty clearly sub-par.

He was also, for whatever reason, completely unable to communicate with the only woman on our team. When assigning work he would always feel the need to ask if she could 'handle it' rather than just assigning it to her like it's done for everyone else. He was pretty clearly sexist.

The whole team hates this dude by this point but he's somehow managed to woo the executives into thinking he shits gold.

I was helping him set up a Python venv on his machine when I noticed another VPN client installed which certainly piqued my interest. After a bit of digging it was clear he was using company time and company equipment to continue working for his previous employer.

We turned over logs and he was fired the next day. He tried to add me on LinkedIn afterwards and I have never declined something quicker.

Moral of the story is don't be a dickhead.

Man, I think we've all gotten way too many of these.

Normally most interactions that I have are through email. Eventually some would try to contact me via phone. These are some:

"Hey! We are calling you from <whatever company name> solutions! (most of them always seem to end on solutions or some shit like that) concerning the Ruby on Rails senior dev opportunity we were talking about via email"
<niceties, how are you doing, similar shit goes here...eventually>

So tell us! how good/comfortable would you say you are with C++?"

Me: I have never done anything serious with c++ and did just use it at school, but because I am not a professional in it I did not list it in my CV, what does it have to do with Rails?

Them: "Oh the applications of this position must be ready to take in additional duties which sometimes happen to be C or C++"

Me: Well that was not anywhere in the offer you sent, it specifically requested a full stack Rails developer that could work with 3 different frontend stacks already and like 4 different databases plus bla bla bla, I did not see c++ anywhere in it. Matter of fact I find it funny, one of the things that I was curious about was the salary, for what you are asking and specifically in the city in which you are asking it for 75k is way too low, you are seriously expecting a senior level rails dev to do all that AND take additional duties with c++? cpp could mean a billion different things"

Them: "well this is a big opportunity that will increase your level to senior position"

Me: the add ALREADY asks for a senior position, why are you making it sound that I will get build towards that level if you are already off the bat asking for seniors only to begin with?

Them: You are not getting it, it is an opportunity to grow into a senior, applicants right now are junior to mid-level

ME: You are all not making any sense, please don't contact me again.

=======

Them: We are looking for someone with 15 years experience with Swift development for mobile and web

Me: What is up with your people not making these requirements in paper? if I knew from the beginning that you people think that Swift is 15 years old I would have never agreed to this "interview"

Them: If you are not interested in that then might we offer this one for someone with 10 years experience as a full stack TypeScript developer.

Me: No, again, check your dates, this is insulting.

===

* For another Rails position

Them: How good are you with Ruby on Rails in terms of Python?

Me: excuse me? Python has nothing to do with Ruby on Rails.

Her (recruiter was a woman) * with a tone of superiority: I have it here that Python is the primary technology that accompanies Rails development.

Me (thinking this was a joke) : What do you think the RUBY part of Ruby on Rails is for? and what does "accompanies Rails development" even means?

Her: Well if you are not interested in using Rails with Python then maybe you can tell us about your experience in using Javascript as the main scripting platform for Rails.

Me: This is a joke, goodbye.

====

To be fair this was years ago when I still didn't know better and test the recruiters during the email part of being contacted. Now a days I feel sorry for everyone since I just say no without even bothering. This is a meme all on itself which no one has ever bothered to review and correct in years for now. I don't know why recruiters don't google themselves to see what people think of their "profession" in order to become better.

I've even had the Java/Javascript stupidity thrown at me by a local company. For that one it was someone from their very same HR department doing the rectuiter, their shop foreman was a friend of the family, did him the service of calling him to let him know that his HR was never going to land the kind of developer they were looking for with the retarded questions they had and sent him a detailed email concerning the correct information they needed for their JAVAscript job which they kept confusing with Java (for some reason in the context of Spring, they literally wanted nothing with Spring, they wanted some junior to do animations and shit like that on their company's website, which was in php, Java was nowhere in this equation)

I think people in web development get the short end of the stick when it comes to retarded recruiters more than anywhere else.

To those that think they can't make it.
To those that are put down by those that don't understand you.
And to those that have never had a dream come true.

Not a rant, but the story of how I got into programming

I've always been into tech/electronics. I remember being told once that when I was 3, I used to take plug sockets to pieces. When I was 7, I built a computer with my dad.
There isn't a thing in my room that hasn't been dismantled and put back together again. Except for the things that weren't put back together again ;)

When I was 15, I got a phone for Christmas. It was a pretty crappy phone, the LG P350 (optimus ME). But I loved it all the same.
However I knew it could do a lot more. It ran a bloated, slow version of Android 2.2.
So I went searching, how can I make it faster, how to make it do more. And I found a huge community around Android ROMs. Obviously the first thing I did was flashed this ROM. Sure, there were bugs, but I was instantly in love with it. My phone was freed.

From there I went on to exploring what else can be done.
I wanted to learn how to script, so over the weekend I wrote a 1000 line batch (Windows cmd) script that would root the phone and flash a recovery environment onto it. Pretty basic. Lots of switch statements, but I was proud of it. I'd achieved something. It wasn't new to the world, but it was my first experience at programming.

But it wasn't enough, I needed more.
So I set out to actually building the roms. I installed Linux. I wanted to learn how to utilise Linux better, so I rewrote my script in bash.
By this time, I'd joined a team for developing on similar spec'd phones. Without the funds to by new devices, we began working on more radical projects.
Between us, we ported newer kernels to our devices. We rebased much of the chipset drivers onto newer equivalents to add new features.

And then..

Well, it was exam season. I was suffering from personal issues (which I will not detail), and that, with the work on Android, I ended up failing the exams.
I still passed, but not to the level I expected.

So I gave up on school, and went head first into a new kind of development. "continue doing what you love. You'll make it" is what I told myself.

I found python by contributing to an IRC bot. I learnt it by reading the codebase. Anything I didn't understand, I researched. Anything I wanted to do, google was there to help me through it.

Then it was exam season again. Even though I'd given up on school, I was still going. It was easier to stay in than do anything about it.
A few weeks before the exams, I had a panic attack. I was behind on coursework, and I knew I would do poorly on exams.
So I dropped out.
I was disappointed, my family was disappointed.
So I did the only thing I felt I could do. I set out to get a job as a developer.

At this stage, I'd not done anything special. So I started aiming bigger. Contributing to projects maintained by Sony and Google, learning from them. Building my own projects to assist with my old Android friends.
I managed to land a contract, however due to the stresses at home, I had to drop it after a month.
Everything was going well, I felt ready to get a full time job as a developer, after 2 years of experience in the community.

Then I had to wake up.
Unfortunately, my advisors (I was a job seeker at the time) didn't understand the potential of learning to be a developer. With them, it's "university for a skilled job".
They see the word "computer" on a CV, they instantly say "tech support".
I played ball, I did what I could for them. But they'd always put me down, saying I wasn't good enough, that I'd never get a job.
I hated them. I'd row with them every other day.

By God, I would prove them wrong.

And then I found them. Or, to be more precise, they found me. A startup in London got in contact with me. They seemed like decent people. I spoke with their developers, and they knew their stuff, these were people that I can learn from.
I travelled 4 hours to go for an interview, then 4 hours back.
When I got the email saying they'd move me to London, I was over the moon.
I did exactly what everyone was telling me I couldn't do.

1.5 years later, I'm still working with them. We all respect each other, and we all learn from each other.

I'm ever grateful to them for taking a shot with me. I had no professional experience, and I was by no means the most skilled individual they interviewed.

Many people have a dream. I won't lie, I once dreamed of working at Google. But after the journey I've been through, I wouldn't have where I am now any other way. Though, in time, I wish to share this dream with another.
I hope that all of you reach your dreams too.

Sorry for the long post. The details are brief, but there are only 5k characters ;)

You can believe or not but it’s just one of those stories. It’s long and crazy and it probably happened.

A few years ago I was interviewed by this big insurance company. They asked me on linkedin and were interested. They didn’t specify who they were so I didn’t specify who I am either.

After they revealed who they are I was just curious how they fuck they want to spend those billions of dollars they claimed in their press notes about this fucking digital transformation everyone is talking about. The numbers were big.

I got into 3 or 4 phone/skype interviews without technical questions and I was invited to see them by person.
I know that it would be funny because they didn’t asked me for CV so they didn’t know anything about me and I was just more curious how far I can get without revealing myself.

They canceled interview at midnight and I was in the middle of Louis de Funès comedies marathon so I didn’t sleep whole night. I assumed they would just reschedule but then they phoned me at 8 am if I can come because they made mistake.

So at first talk I was just interviewed by some manager I knowed after 5 minutes he would be shitty as fuck and demand stupid things in no time because he is not technical. He was trying to explain me that they got so great people and they do everything so fast.

From my experience speed and programming are not the things that match. ( for reference of my thought see three virtues of a GREAT programmer )

So I just pissed them off by asking what they would do with me when I finish this transformation thingy next year. ( Probably get rid off and fire at some point were my thoughts )

Then I got this technical interview on newest gold color MacBook pro - pair programming ( they were showing off how much money they have all the time ).
The person asked me to transform json and get some data in javascript .

Really that was the thing and I was so bored and tired that I just asked in what ES standard I can code.
The problem was despite he told me I can do anything and they are using newest standards ( yeah right ) the “for of” loop didn’t worked and he even didn’t know that syntax existed. So I explained him it’s the newest syntax pointing mozilla page and that he need to adjust his configuration. Because we didn’t have time for that I just did it using var an function by writing bunch of code.
When he was asking me if I want to write some tests probably because my code looked ugly as fuck ( I didn’t sleep for more then 24 hours at that point and wanted to live the building as fast as I can) I told I finished and there is no time for tests because it’s so simple and dumb task. The code worked.

After showing me how awesome their office is ( yeah please I work from home so I don’t care ) I got into the talk with VP of engineering and he was the only person who asked me where is my CV because he didn’t know what to talk about. I just laughed at him and told him that I got here just by talking how awesome I am so we can talk about whatever he wants.
After quick talk about 4 different problems where I introduced 4 different languages and bunch of libraries just because I can and I worked with those he was mine.

He told me about this awesome stack they’re building with kubernetes and micro services and the shitty future where they want to put IOT into peoples ass to sell them insurance and suddenly I got awake and started to want that job but behind that all awesomeness there was just .NET bridge with stack of mainframes running COBOL that they want to get rid off and move company to the cloud.

They needed mostly people who would dump code to different technology stack and get rid of old stack ( and probably those old people ) and I was bored again because I work more in r&d field where you sometimes need to think about something that don’t exist and be creative.

I asked him why it would take so much time so he explained me how they would do the transformation by consolidating bunch of companies and how much money they would make by probably firing people that don’t know about it to this day.

I didn’t met any person working permanently there but only consultants from corporations and people hired in some 3rd party company created by this mother company.

They didn’t responded with any decision after me wasting so much time and they asked me for interview for another position year after.
I just explained HR person how they treat people and I don’t want to work there for any money.

If You reached this point it is the end and if it was entertaining thank YOU I did my best.

Have a nice day.

Freaking tech support.
Freaking sparkhire.

Their 'one-way interview' bs only supports flash. Flash. in production. in 2019. Flash died years ago, and its support ends next year. What the crap?

Anyway, I finally decided I should do the interview since they already have all of my information anyway. Thanks, "privacy-conscious" third party. Totally appreciate it.

I spent half an hour and couldn't get flash working on their site (but all other sites were fine), so I contacted their support. I gave them all the relevant specs (inc. ofc browser), the steps to reproduce, and all of my attempts at fixing the issue.

To their credit, I recieved a response within a few minutes. To their discredit: their response was: "What browser are you using?" This question was followed by my report (including, ofc, my browser and all the other overlooked details), immediately followed by a "debugging info" section appended by their support service that also included my browser, os, and other specs.

Learn to fucking read.

Their suggestion? Use google chrome. Barring that: record your 20-30 minute video by holding your phone in front of your face the entire time. I am so not kidding.

They also asked what page i was having difficulty on. You guessed it: the page url was also included within that "debugging info" section.

It wasn't a form letter, either. I'd understand if it was all automated, but it was a real person who was really typing up the emails, and really didn't bother reading a damned thing.

I did end up getting flash working, but their "tech support" (script-reader) was entirely useless.

Had a skype interview yesterday...

> prepared for interview, checked internet and all
> home internet died literally 1 minute before call
> started interview using phone hotspot
> phone hotspot died in 1/3 interview duration
> used mom's phone's hotspot
> died in 2/3 interview duration
> oh shit
> went out to phone company's office to get more data
> half way to the office, mom calls: home internet is working!
> yaay! goes back home
> nop, internet isn't working (glitch in mom's phone which showed it to be working (wifi symbol))
> goes back to the office
> gets phone recharged (office people were SO slow 😑)
> gets back home
> continues and finishes the interview...

10/10 will do again 😂😂😂😂

The interviewer was quite patient, and waited for me to get back home (he called me 2-3 times to get a heads up)

Lol this was honestly THE most exciting and fun interview experience for me yet!
The interview questions were pretty easy btw (programming)
Waiting for result now...

I hate how some recruiters treat you.

I get it - I'm not your client, the person hiring me is. I get it - at the end of the day I'm just a big bag of money in your eyes.

But at least treat me like a person. I may have a family I need to take care of and the carrot you're dangling in front of me may mean the difference between me living comfortably and me being homeless. So after an interview even if it didn't go well let me know. DON'T avoid my phone calls or emails because you don't want to deal with breaking the news to me and instead hope you just never hear from me again.

Dead 💀 developer.

My first interview,
Back then was technical graduated local CompSchool. Call for a job newspaper, by phone ☎️ the Supervisor assign a date for interview.

In the office the developer guy was amaze because he will hire any from CompSchool he also was student and all stuff made was on the premised of he learned and worked on the company.

About half and hour talks, he write my name on a post-it and put on HR desk.
“Come back tomorrow morning .. tell me you got the job !”

Do so, entering the office next day, was a sad people talking.. the Developer is 💀 dead (drugged on a party).

So this guy “my name in the post-it” is our salvation for all the database, passwords, accounting, etc. and spell my name.

What tha... got the job, the money 💴, was 18 years old, with excessive income (dead guy salarie).

Worked 3 1/2 years for the company.

Thank you 💀 for the opportunity.

A couple of goodies here:

1 - The guy that said 'I prefer to work remote so noone can bother me. I will never answer my phone if you try to call me, and emails will only be read the second I arrive at work and never again. Do not disturb me at all. I decided not to bother him again with another interview request.

2- I personally interviewed at a gaming company in Dundee, Scotland and they wanted me to create a JS application, on video call to them, on Google Docs, and that they had set aside 3 hours for this whilst they watched me and ate lunch. I apologised, said that was the most absurd thing I've ever heard of, and cancelled the interview and hung up without saying bye.

How the fuck can any sort of developer think that's okay to try to make people do?

Well I've been at a new company for the last 6 months now, and I've just discovered that job is still being advertised.

Telephonic "technical" interview at 5 in the evening

Interviewer : Tell me about yourself

Me : Blah blah...

Interviewer : Thank you for your time

(Call time on phone... 7 minutes)

Absolutely uninterested... no single counter question... Guess she just wanted to go home early... 😑

Phone-interview with a recuiter from a big consultning company.
Her: So, what programming languages are your strongest?
Me: That would be Java, as it's been used through university courses and privatley I've been making some C# projects
Her: Allright cool. What about object oriented languages?
Me:... Erhm.. That would again be Java and C#...

The day I got my first interview, my dad kept fighting over the phone with me. He thought I was out with my girlfriend having fun. He told me no way anyone would waste their time interviewing me, let alone hire me.. Boy did I prove him wrong!

My worst interview ever was my first interview fresh out of college. After the initial phone screen, they asked me to drive 2 hours to their office to give me a "code challenge."

The challenge was to spend 4 hours writing a simple rest API for a blog type thing, but the catch was to not use any existing libraries for data access and instead write an entirely database agnostic DAL. Then after I finished they sat me in a conference room with 3 of their engineers and the CEO to just tear apart my code.
For a JUNIOR position to someone fresh out of college.

I guess I defended it well, because they asked to continue the process l, but after that I found a different position.

My first ever interview for a developer position involved waking up around 9am to a call from an unrecognized number.

I answered and realized it was someone from a startup I applied to just a day before.

Instant phone interview with tech questions on React and Angular, and I BS'd my way through it, knowing almost nothing about either. Got the job, somehow.

* Recruiter says he has a nice proposition

* I say that I'm not comfortable switching jobs yet, but I'd be up for a short phone interview to hear him out, out of pure interest

* Recruiter explains a lot about the company, and then asks if I am up for "a short Teams introduction with the team lead to hear more"

* I say yes, though still stating that I do not intend on switching, but want to know more in case of a future possibility

* Recruiter says I need to send my full CV / Resumé plus grades from every school I ever intended (including the early ones that doesn't even matter)

* I say no since 1) I'd have to dig them out from the basement, 2) I am not looking for a job right now, and 3) This request is absurd to me, and NOT a norm in my part of the world when I am not applying.

* He says I HAVE to, since I could be lying
(I am mostly self-taught and have very little actual education, so this logic made NO sense to me)

* I continue to say no, stating that it's simply not worth the time finding the old grades in the basement for a job I will not be taking, and that I am mostly self-taught so grades wouldn't matter

* He starts getting angry, accusing me of "purposefully wasting his time", and says he'll warn the company about me.

Fair point. I'll warn my contacts about you then. Have a nice day, you f*cking prick :)

Awkward recruiting process? Sit the fuck back!

So about a year ago I got laid off. I got some help setting up LinkedIn and realising I'm not trash and offers to talk started flowing in.

So this consultancy firm asks me to come in for a talk and having nothing better to do I oblige - they're working on big, exciting Greenfield stuff and I'm amazed they want me.
Fast forward the most nervous week in my life and the HR assistant brings me into the meeting room, I get some water and a nice first impression - also my last. I wait in the room for five minutes.

In walks madam HR, madam Team lead and miss assistant from before, all carrying big ass laptops. We shake hands and they sit down and all open up their laptops between me and them - I just sit there feeling naked with my block of paper and pencil I brought.

So we wait for their machines to start up and madam HR just starts throwing questions at me and seemingly noting my answers into a sheet. Meanwhile madam Teamlead is busy on her phone most of the time and my most human interaction remains smalltalk and questions between me and miss assistant.

I did manage to get madam Teamlead to look up from her phone when I asked how they felt about the fact that I have no formal training and would need to pick up a lot of skills as we go, to which she said something along 'well this ain't a candy shop, we expect you to work' and looked back down at her phone.

A bit shaken, I agreed to stay for the technical test (apparently I passed the interview...)
Now this test was designed by their CTO since he didn't feel like any of the available tests on the market could properly judge applicants' skilllevels. Yes, alarms went off already at that point.

What I'm presented with is a word document with questions, and another for answers and... It's just string gymnastics and reference/value difference knowledge - shit it takes you a split second to look up or test if you ever get into these insane cases where you need to know. And then there was a likewise one with sql statements that was also just convoluted query gymnastics and trying to hide changes in the seemingly same statement through various questions. No questions on design, no problem solving, just... Attention span testing with a dash of coding?

Anyway, it turned out they had evening and weekend shifts and round the clock support tournus which on top of the ridiculous recruitment process and way lower than average salary offer had me turn them down.

Don't enable bullshit people, run away!

Couple of weeks ago I posted that I failed my first interview by phone. Today I got the news that I'm hired at a different company for my first development job. Python here I come baby

First technical phone interview with Google done. Wasn't as bad as I thought it might be.

I've recently received another invitation to Google's Foobar challenges.

A while ago someone here on devRant (which I believe works at Google, and whose support I deeply appreciate) sent me a couple of links to it too. Unfortunately back then I didn't take the time to learn the programming languages (Python or Java) that Google requires for these challenges. This time I'm putting everything on Python, as it's the easiest language to learn when coming from Bash.

But at the end of the day.. I am a sysadmin, not a developer. I don't know a single thing about either of these languages. Yet I can't take these challenges as the sysadmin I am. Instead, I have to learn a new language which chances are I'll never need again outside of some HR dickhead's interview with lateral thinking questions and whiteboard programming, probably prohibited from using Google search like every sane programmer and/or sysadmin would for practical challenges that actually occur in real life.

I don't want to do that. Google is a once in a lifetime opportunity, I get that. Many people would probably even steal that foobar link from me if they could. But I don't think that for me it's the right thing to do. Google has made a serious difference by actually challenging developers with practical scenarios, and that's vastly superior to whatever a HR person at any other company could cobble together for an interview. But there's one thing that they don't seem to realize. A company like Google consists of more than just developers. Not only that, it probably consists - even within their developer circles - of more than just Python and Java developers. If any company would know about languages that are more optimized such as C, it would be Google that has to leverage this performance in order to be able to deliver their services.

I'll be frank here. Foobar has its own issues that I don't like. But if Google were a nice company, I'd go for it all the way nonetheless - after all, they are arguably the single biggest tech company in the world, and the tech industry itself is one of the biggest ones in the world nowadays. It's safe to say that there's likely no opportunity like working at Google. But I don't think it's the right thing. Even if I did know Python or Java... Even if I did. I don't like Google's business decisions.

I've recently flashed my OnePlus 6T with LineageOS. It's now completely Google-free, except for a stock Yalp account (that I'm too afraid to replace with my actual Google account because oh dear, third-party app stores, oh dear that could damage our business and has to be made highly illegal!1!). My contacts on that phone are are all gone. They're all stored on a Google server somewhere (except for some like @linuxxx' that I consciously stored on device storage and thus lost a while back), waiting for me to log back in and sync them back. I've never asked for this. If Google explicitly told me that they'd sync all my contacts to my Google account and offer feasible alternatives, I'd probably given more priority to building a CalDAV and CardDAV server of my own. Because I do have the skills and desire to maintain that myself. I don't want Google to do this for me.

Move fast and break things. I've even got a special Termux script on my home screen, aptly named Unfuck-Google-Play. Every other day I have to use it. Google Search. When I open it on my Nexus 6P, which was Google's foray into hardware and in which they failed quite spectacularly - I've even almost bent and killed it tonight, after cursing at that piece of shit every goddamn day - the Google app opens, I type some text into it.. and then it just jumps back to the beginning of whatever I was typing. A preloader of sorts. The app is a fucking web page parser, or heck probably even just an API parser. How does that in any way justify such shitty preloaders? How does that in any way justify such crappy performance on anything but the most recent flagships? I could go on about this all day... I used to run modern Linux on a 15 year old laptop, smoothly. So don't you Google tell me that a - probably trillion dollar - company can't do that shit right. When there's (commercialized) community projects like DuckDuckGo that do things a million times better than you do - yet they can't compete with you due to your shit being preloaded on every phone and tablet and impossible to remove without rooting - that you Google can't do that and a lot more. You've got fucking Google Assistant for fucks sake! Yet you can't make a decent search app - the goddamn thing that your company started with in the first place!?

I'm sorry. I'd love to work at Google and taste the diversity that this company has to offer. But there's *a lot* wrong with it at the business end too. That is something that - in that state - I don't think I want to contribute to, despite it being pretty much a lottery ticket that I've been fortunate enough to draw twice.

Maybe I should just start my own company.

Two months ago, I went to an interview that I thought I aced... Time passed and I heard nothing. Got bummed cause it's one of the rare positions that doesn't require industry experience, plus a friend works there so that would be fun.
Yesterday tho, i received a phone call from said friend saying that he finally got an update on a situation (since the whole thing was kinda in the dark even inside the company).
Apparently, the boss who directly interviewed me fought to the nail to hire me cause I was most qualified (even tho I'm very modest and generally nervous as fuck on interviews), but was denied funds for the new department at the moment.

Still bummed about the whole situation, but god damn it feels great to know that I'm still the first choice if/when they get funds

It was my first time in Berlin. I came as a tourist but started looking for a workplace, with hopes of getting a blue card and continuing work.

I searched online, going through some hiring platforms, and sent out a few messages around. I felt a special connection (I thought I was exactly who they needed), and wrote them a carefully crafted letter of intention alongside my lavish CV.
They got back to me, and I was given this task, to do while at home. I completed it, had a phone interview, and was invited on-site for a face to face interview. Everybody felt warm, I felt a connection. We already talked salary expectations, and all was going great.

They told me they'd get back to me for the next stage. ...
and they actually DID. Yes, they did!
They invited me for a second interview, but this time to prepare a technical topic to present. So I did. I picked one of the 3 topics they offered, which was about performance optimization. I had recently read materials about that, so I felt really empowered.
So far nobody told me what I was supposed to be doing at the new job, I only knew the technologies required, and what the company did for money.
I prepared a thorough presentation, with practical demos of why some things are bad for performance. While I was showing it, many people in the room were learning about this for the first time, which means I did good. The team lead had some extra questions that I wasn't able to answer in full (needed some research), but otherwise it was great.

The CTO then asked me out to lunch, to talk over some more stuff, and we had a general discussion about what drives us, our life story, etc. He said that he'd really like me to be part of the team, and that he's looking forward to working with me.

So I've been at it for almost a month. I've met everyone, got acquainted with the team, knew the biography of some of them, proven my worth, etc. I was ensured with body language, and verbal language that everything was going great. As careful as I was with this kind of stuff, I was positive that I'd get the job. I even started planning my trips, to get the documents ready.

And then I got a message stating the usual stuff "Thank you bla bla bla we don't think we'll need your services". I was shocked, but in good faith I wanted to reply something along the lines "I'm sorry it didn't work out, all the best in finding what you're looking for", but I found out that I was blocked from contacting them.

That's right. Rejected + blocked. After a month of fucking foreplay. I get rejection, even though it hurts. But being blocked?! That's just insane!

I was impressed with my latest job interview in the government (got the job).

Applied online, and they extended the application deadline because the lack of quality of applications.

I got invited for an interview. Present there were HR manager, Department manager and an employee from the regional office (opening a new dev department in the region).
Most of the interview consisted of them telling me about the company, and asking a bit about me. Nothing technical.

1.5 month later I got a 2nd interview. Present were two developers from the main office in Oslo. Again, very little questions about my technical capabilities. Mostly just repeating the stuff said in the first interview. Though I did have to send some code in for review by them.

A month later I get a phone call from the department head saying they’d like to offer me a job, but they don’t have a concrete job offer yet, as it has to be approved by a committee (gov stuff). That takes two weeks, and I finally got job offer. 42% pay rise from the current job in the private sector.

I later went and re-read the ad for the job. “Bachelor/ master required. For particularly qualified applicants, this requirement can be ignored.”

Fascinating that they didn’t give me more tests.

A couple days ago, I went through the most embarrassing interview ever. It was a startup into both hardware and software merged over image processing. I really wanted it. Really really did. It was telephonic, and involved a little bit coding over docs. In the one hour we talked over the phone, he asked me about 30 questions. I hadn't even heard of the words he said! Ive never delved into compilers, lower level things, and memory management. I could answer about 5 questions- including the tell me about yourself question.

So thats about 25 ways I came up with of saying "I don't know" in a span of 60 minutes.

My recruitment story is a bit funny,
i had two interview, first one was to evaluate working style, behavior and ethics, where the interviewer and i spent almost 20 minutes discussing video games 😀.
second was technical, was interviewed by a lady dev manager and the team's technical lead "which i didn't know their roles at that time" went really good and at the end they asked:
Do you wanna ask us any questions?
Me: *leans back, with one arm on the chair arm and with a curious look and pointing one finger at both of them😕*
So what are you two?
them: *both had a shocked face and looked at each other for few seconds, manager chuckles😓😓* Well i am the team's dev manager and this guy is the team's technical lead, and in case you were wondering, we are not a couple.
technical lead: 😂😂😂
Me: 😨😨 no no that's not what i meant i swear.
Interview was over, i left the building thinking 😢😢 oh god, i totally blew it.
2 weeks later i get a phone call asking me to come and discuss contract terms 😂😂😂
sorry for the long story

Why the fuck are Indian software companies under the impression that interns are just junior developers that you are legally allowed to fuck over with shit/no pay. Internships are supposed to be about learning and growth. Every fucking company I apply for has some bullshit bi polar disorder because their requirements state one thing and they ask you other bullshit on the phone or at the interview.

How the fuck do you expect a college student to know React, Django, AWS, Angular, D3, Scala, iOS and whatever buzzword you assholes noticed were trending on quora?

And for fucks sake don't waste my time to call me and ask if I'd be available full time if I mentioned I can only intern part time.

WTF is wrong with these people.

Got an email in response to an internship application asking "if you can just complete a coding challenge within next 24 hours thanks". They also wanted to me to setup a phone interview today or tomorrow. As if they expected everyone to drop everything with no explanation.

Told them I'm busy but can get started on Sunday, and was told they have assessment centres next week so it can't wait. No real apology.

I didn't set the date for the assessment centre, this is your fuckup. You have to at least feign respect when you ask for a day of my time with less than a week's notice. Been through too many bad interviews to waste my time on a company that doesn't have its shit together and/or doesn't respect interns.

Idk, maybe I overreacted. Thoughts?

I applied for a developer position and got the email response about candidates available that were a better fit. No big deal.

Three days later, contacted by a recruiter for an exciting opportunity in my field (aren't they all?) Said, "What the hell?" and played along.

Made it past a screening phone call and a screening Skype session. Made a date to interview in person.

It's the same goddamned position, only now a recruiter gets to feed off my offer (if I get one).

This one ticked me off because of the sheer rudeness of a demand they made of me. I had been building a personal freelance brand around myself and my skills for many years. I had in the prior 3 years developed it from a freelance to a lean agency model. That was running in parallel with full time work and the FT employer was happy to allow it. Eventually that employer downsized me and almost everyone else on staff. But they liked me and gave me mini-projects to do on a contract basis. I began interviewing for FT work with other companies.

One agency I applied at gave me a phone screen interview. The main hiring person was also an investor in the agency. He noted my lean agency and said that a second interview would be contingent on my dropping my clients that I was working for on my own time, disposing completely of my personal brand, and even giving up my domain name.

I told him I’d think about it. But the more I thought about it the more angry I got about such a stupid request. Why does this new company I don’t even know I will like working for get to tell me to abandon my “Plan B” option for if I quit or they decide to lay me off?

They never called back but I wished they had so I could have had the satisfaction of telling them no.

Sort of a meeting, sort of an informal interview, I've dialled in from the home office and my audio setup includes a standalone mic and some noise cancelling headphones. It's going really really well when all of a sudden I see something in the preview window of my webcam feed.
Behind me, looking very concerned and confused is my 73 year old Nanna who'd decided to pop in and see me as she was passing by.
It's common for me to keep the front door locked, but my Nanna has an emergency key and knows I don't always hear a knock at the door, so let herself in.
So she's now in the house, calling out to me and she can hear me talking, so follows the sound of my voice thinking maybe I'm on the phone. Walks right into the office, where the door is behind me, eventually puts two and two together to work out that I can't hear her and finally sees herself on my monitor. She panics and goes to hide in the corner of my office, almost underneath my workbench because she's old and doesn't know where she would or wouldn't be visible from.
The rest of the meeting went really well, but overran by at least half an hour. Meanwhile I can see my poor Nanna hiding away in my peripheral vision.

What kind of questions should I expect with a phone interview for a student tech support position?

Got an interview Tuesday afternoon!

Had an online programming interview for a start-up, writing code into a shared Google doc while on the phone with the interviewer.
Specifically told that I could just use pseudocode, so I did, without worrying about access modifiers, full variable declarations and use of "new" for making objects, or specific type declarations, etc.
Got told at the end that I "lack experience, and really should have defined access modifiers, declared types, and so on, and that they needed someone proficient in Java. That was the first time I knew about their Java requirement.

Too broke to get to the job interview. 😕
Well, that was an akward phone call to make.

Fml... you keep getting the weekly discussions right on point.

I started with the last guys right out of university... just out of Hospital.

With a brand new degree and a Crohn’s diagnosis I stepped into the first place I found hiring. They were good guys, after a junior dev... to get stuck in their muck.

I did! I nailed project after project, tricky development after tricky development. I spent 5 years with them and over those years things changed.

They had a mass cull... the original idea was to get rid of the useless middle managers, the ones managing other managers being managed by another manager for no real reason.... the ones that do fuck all with their day.

But the fucking idiots upstairs put the job of working out the cull in the shitty middle managers hands.

So, instead, they cut the titles senior, junior and everything in between. Everyone was just a thing, no senior things, no junior things. Just things.

Once they’d done that they said “we’ll we have this many things, they’re all the same, let’s get rid of the things with the highest pay checks because the other things can do it just as well for less money”...

And that’s how they cut 50% of their senior techs.

I was one of the ones left behind but the damage became obvious quick. The middle managers barked out orders at people who couldn’t complete them, and everything went to shit.

My team was rebranded twice in as many years... an obvious ploy for funding, but the cost of the team fluctuated like hell because contractors had to fill the senior positions at 3 times the cost.

Then the managers started barking out Self contradictory orders. Do this, but this way...

This would work, but not that way... try explaining that to a group of non-technical, useless as fuck middle managers. It took months, and shit flows downstream so we got the bulk of the hassle for it.

Then my boy Morpheus, got a warning... they threatened his contract for saying “this will work, but not that way”.

He kept the contract, and the manager giving him the warning said he didn’t think he should... but he, and all the middle fuckwits don’t have the balls to stand up against nonsense.

That was the breaking point for me, I handed in my notice and told them a month was what they could have.

I didn’t have a position or an idea of where to go, a few long-standing offers as back up in a pinch but not the perfect job.

On the Thursday I decided I was done, I let my manager know. Then I boshed the fuck out of my CV and updated my profiles.

My phone started ringing off the hook, a senior NG2/MEAN/Ionic dev on the market is like candy to recruiters. They’re lovely too.

I went to a few interviews that were okay but not great. Then a company got in touch... one that I immediately recognised as an IT book publisher. They said they were looking for NG/NG2 devs, senior. winner! Set up the interview.

So I’d spent the weekend with the missus, about an hour away from mine and 2 from the interview. I hadn’t planned on staying there but at 6ish she looked over at me and said “do you have to go” <- imagine that with puppy dog eyes from a gorgeous Slovenian lass.

I folded quicker than a shitty pancake toss.

We spent the night together but that meant I had to be up at 6, to go back to mine, iron my interview clothes and make it to the train to manage the interview. Fuck. I did it, but I was at the interview wired on caffeine and struggling to be awake and coherent. I still managed, that’s what I do, I make do and try to do well regardless of the situation.

That comes from being ill btw, when you’re dealt a shitty hand you learn to play it well.

They were good guys, the heads all knew what they were on about, not the middle management bs I was used to.

They demoed me live with an ng1 test, which was awesome as hell to play with.

We chatted, friendly and cool guys! I loved the place.

The end of the week they got me in for second round. Ng2 and competence test, again I went for it!

Positive feedback and a “we’ll get back to you ASAP, should be by Tuesday”...

Tuesday was the Tuesday before the Friday I was due to leave the old company... I was cutting it close.

On the Monday the offers started rolling in, a few C# ASP MVC positions, cool but I was holding out for the guys I’d interviewed with.

Then Tuesday comes around, I’m nervous as fuck but it’s okay because I knew regardless I can pay the rent in December with one of the offers.

Then said yes!

The thing that seemed most important in the process was my ability to talk to any fucker. If you’re coming up to interview, talk to everyone, the grocer, your barista, the binmen, anyone. Practice that skill above all others.

I start tomorrow morning! I can’t wait.

Final thought: middle managers are taints.

Well i was between jobs at the time, looking for something, anything to fill in the black hole being created in my wallet.

I applied online though this company’s website and within 20 minutes was on a phone interview setting up a face to face, this was Monday afternoon.

I went in on the Wednesday morning with the manager, no cv, no resume, no examples of work, we talked, did a couple of brain teaser questions and Friday morning I had the job 😂

I have never put so little effort into getting a job before but it was all a sham, the workload and requirements this job constantly sets out to kill me with are godly.

3 years later I’m still alive ( somehow ), and no blood has been shed.... yet.

The story of how I got my dream job.

I was working for a company with a job I got just after graduating university. It was ok, not very exciting tech but I learned a lot by just surrounding myself with professional code monkeys. I was there for about a year when my company bought parts of another company and there was talk about people getting fired. This made me worried since I was the last one to get hired, so I started looking around for other jobs. I received this e-mail from a company saying they were looking for interns, what a coincidence! I adjusted my CV and sent it in.

--A few weeks pass--

It's Friday and I'm at a dinner party, it's 10pm and someone is calling me. I pick up and it's a recruiter from this company. I get very nervous but the alcohol helps me keep my cool, I pass the initial idiot test and they invite me for an interview. Yay!

I go to work on Monday and in a 1-on-1 and I tell my boss about the upcoming interview, he gives me a high-five :)

The interview is approaching and I'm feeling that I'm about to get sick, I refuse to believe this so I start taking a lot of medicine (painkillers, cough medicine etc.). I feel a bit better and thank the gods for medication.

--D-day--

I wake up, put on my nicest clothes and get on the train. I had one hour to spare just in case, which was well needed because the fucking train is late by 30 minutes. I'm still heavily medicated because of my ongoing fever. When I arrive I basically have to run there and somehow I manage to pick up a coffee on the way there which I devour in two seconds. I'm ready for the interview!

Some guy meets me in reception and the first thing he says is "My colleague doesn't speak our language so we'll have to speak english". This is fine, I speak good english but I was not prepared for this so it caught me off-guard and made me even more nervous. We get in and start talking. Things are going OK despite my numbed brain. I try to make eye-contact to make a good impression with the foreign engineer but he keeps staring somewhere which is making me nervous.

We get to the technical part on a whiteboard and this is where my brain decides to stop communicating. I'm presented a simple task which I'm struggling with finishing, and I feel the embarrassment coming over me. "NOOOOO THIS IS MY DREAM JOB, THIS CANNOT BE HAPPENING!" I'm thinking to myself. After making myself look like a complete arsehole for some time we wrap it up and just before I step out the door I say to the engineer "You should checkout my Github page, I have lots of interesting stuff there" and he says "I'll be sure to do that" but I don't believe him.

I leave the office in fury (of myself) and make my way to the train station and even though it's the middle of the day I quickly devour two beers to calm my nerves and make me feel a bit better. I was so damn disappointed in myself, I wasted the opportunity of a lifetime! I go back home to my regular (now shitty) job.

--Two days later--

I get a call from an unknown number. I pick up the phone and it's the same recruiter guy. "So how did you think it went?" he says. "To be honest, I think it went really bad", I replied. "What? Really? Because they loved you, you got the job". (this was an obvious recruiter lie) "... wat, are you sure you called the correct person?" I said and he just laughed. The day after I quit my old job the whole department gets fired - such impeccable timing.

--A few months later--

I finish my internship and they want to keep me. I'm so happy. The engineer that was in the interview works on my team. I ask him "Why did you hire me? You know as well as I do that my interview was horrible". It turns out he _did_ look at my Github profile and that's how he knew I could write code. I also heard later that for my position there was about 2000 applicants and somehow I made the interviews.

I still work there today and I couldn't be happier (Sorry for the long text).

recruiter calls me up about a node position. I agree to a phone interview the next day at 3pm. wait around until 3:30pm...no call. I talk to him and he apologized a bunch and forgot to tell (or confirm the time) with the hiring company. he rescheduled for 2 days later (Fri) at 4pm. I wait around until 4:30pm...no call. this time he tells me I didn't answer my phone and I'm unprofessional. 5 min later I get an email from LinkedIn. (from the ceo of the hiring company) asking if I ever got back to the recruiter because they have been anxious to speak with me after seeing my resume.

He never once actually scheduled anything with them and led us both on.

Recruiter:
I have an excellent opportunity for you! You're experience is exactly what my client is looking for.

Me: (Just got laid off a week's go) Awesome! Send me the details.

Recruiter: here they are
10+ years experience with Java, Spring frameworks...

My thoughts: Hmm I only worked with java for two years 3 years ago. Since it's been full-stack JavaScript. Total of 5 years in industry...

Me: Nah, doesn't look like my type of position... Thanks though

Recruiter: Just go interview and try it out.
<Proceeds to blow up my phone several times a day for a few days>

To Recruiters: Know when to stop. Also, read my LinkedIn profile. Where it says, looking for full-stack JavaScript opportunities.

The worst interview . . . .

So I wasn't looking for a job, but I wasn't happy in mine, and I would listen to pitches. Recruiter calls me about a Java job. I tell him I know JS and it's probably not a good fit. He insists my resume looks good and that they are happy to train. I know just enough Java to relent. Eventually we set up an phone interview for a day I happen to have off anyway because I'm going out of town. Morning of, I'm waiting around for the call. An hour after the scheduled time, the recruiter calls and tells me they had an "emergency" and wouldn't be able to speak today. One whole hour of my day, making me late to leave town: no one anywhere in the whole company could give me a call, no explanation, no apologies, for a job I had told them I wouldn't be a good fit for anyway.

I left them hanging the rest of the weekend and then take my name out of the running on Monday. Respect people's time and lives!

probably the one who sent me 3 mails within 10 minutes regarding 3 different positions, and all were addressed to someone else (Hello, Mr. Completely Different Name), so i replied telling him that's not me, and gave him the info to fix it in their db. he apologized profusely and said he fixed the error.

Next day I got two mails for another two positions, with the same incorrect name.

Or the one with whom I had half an hour phone "interview" for a specific position, they couldn't answer even the most basic technical question about the project, but invited me to an in-person interview and said my questions will be answered there, the phone interview was just to make sure they don't send completely offtopic people to the interview with the client (so far acceptable).

On the in-person interview, it was partially a repetition of the phone one, but okay, lady from the company is talking to me first time in her life. We get to the part where I can ask my questions, so I ask those basics about the project again, and her answer is:
"Oh, i don't know, i'm not a technical person, you'd have to ask that to the technical person from the company, I'm an hr person from the recruiting company."

"Wait... so... not only was this whole meeting a waste of my time, but you also lied about what it is, when you scheduled it with me on the end of the phone interview?"

"Well... it wasn't a waste of time, we like to meet the candidates in person before we forward them to actual interviews in the company, to make sure that they're not completely offtopic."

"... and how exactly do you think you'd be able to evaluate that, since you're not at all a technical person and know nothing about the project??"

" Well, i talk to programmers a lot, so i've picked up quite a bit of the terms."

...

Got a phone interview for a web dev internship while in school. I only took a very intro web design/dev course, and wasn't sure if I wanted to pursue that career. It went well in the beginning though I was getting more and more nervous. Then they asked what I learned in that class. I suddenly remembered something and rambled how the teacher talked about how outdated and not mobile-friendly tables are, and we should never use it in layout. There was a few seconds of silence and someone spoke out "well table is still very useful and we use it a lot in our website".
I didn't get the internship :-)

Do not wave you phone around during a video interview. Don't turn it upside down. Don't put keep your hand near it -- I am not interested in your finger nails. Don't pace around. Don't look like a YouTuber that has no idea what they are doing on a video conference.

That is all.

CoolFuckingStoryBob

So I found a job that fit my stack perfectly
I phoned the CEO and we had a mini phone interview, it was easy
And the next day I had an offline interview
It was fast as fuck. I answered all of the questions, showed my projects and we were done in 30 mins, pretty good huh
So the CEO tells me to wait a week
It's strange but ok

The week passes, and you guess what
"We can't hire you, you psychological portrait does not fit in our team..."
I'm like bitch, what the fuck

I had declined other offer cuz I though there was no reason not to hire me

Also this is a small company tho, I should've saw it coming 😐

Most embarrassing interview rejection was not even in person, it was over the phone.

The company that I was going to work for (quite a big one mind you), scheduled to phone me at 2PM, I was preparing mentally for 2PM, so I took my girlfriend to lunch at 1. Just to relax and calm myself before the phoned me.

It was 34 degrees (celcius - I think that's about 93 farenheit? somewhere close) outside and I was waiting for her to finish her smoke (she was in the smoking area).

They phoned me, and it caught me completely off-guard. My years of knowledge just seemed to flush down the toilet at that moment, and I utterly felt stupid talking to the guy over the phone. It was a first for me, and I hope that it never happens again - he basically stopped me, told me that I had better not apply before I know what I am talking about (as I was wasting his time), and then put down the phone on me..

Worst part was that my girlfriend came back right then and asked me if I am ready for the interview. I hung my head in shame because I was ashamed to tell her that I fucked it up, because you know, I kind of needed the job (the one I had at the stage was shitty).

Got an interview request for a new job. They mostly do WordPress. I don't want to touch WordPress.

Talked to the Project Manager woman on the phone about the job, seems decent.

Sounds like a nice place to work at, but I just can't do the WordPress thing, man.

I hadn't used devRant in a while since I'm preparing for an upcoming job interview and was trying to stay away from my phone.

However, I cracked today and I spent the whole afternoon staring at this beautiful dark-themed interface and reading rants.

Guys what I want to know is how do you secure your code so that they pay you after you deliver the code to them?
So recently I was in this internship that I secured with an over-the-phone interview and the guy who was contacting me was the CEO of the company (I'm going to refer to him as "the fucking cunt" from now on). He asked me to do some OCR and translations and I managed to write a few scripts that automate the entire process. The fucking cunt made me login remotely to his desktop which was connected to the server (who the fuck does that) and I had to operate on the server from his system. I helped him with the installation and taught him how to use the scripts by altering the parameters and stuff, and you know what the fucking cunt did from the next day onward? Dropped contact. Like completely. I kept bombing emails upon emails and tried calling him day after day, the fucking cunt either picked up and cut the call immediately on recognising its me or didn't pick up at all. And the reason he wasn't able to pay me was, and I quote, "I am in US right now, will pay you when I get back to India." I was like "The fuck was PayPal invented for?" Being the naive fool that I was, I believed him (it was my first time) and waited patiently till the date he mentioned and then lodged a complain in the portal itself where he had posted the job initially. They raised a concern with the employer and you know what the fucking cunt replied? "He has not been able to achieve enough accuracy on the translations". Doesn't even know good translation systems don't exist till date ( BTW I used a client for the google translate API). It has been weeks now and still the bitch has not yet resolved the issue.And the worst part of it was I got a signed contract and gave him a copy of my ID for verification purposes.
I'm thinking of making a mail bomb and nagging him every single day for the rest of his life. What do you guys think?

So here's my problem. I've been employed at my current company for the last 12 months (next week is my 1 year anniversary) and I've never been as miserable in a development job as this.

I feel so upset and depressed about working in this company that getting out of bed and into the car to come here is soul draining. I used to spend hours in the evenings studying ways to improve my code, and was insanely passionate about the product, but all of this has been exterminated due to the following reasons.

Here's my problems with this place:

1 - Come May 2019 I'm relocating to Edinburgh, Scotland and my current workplace would not allow remote working despite working here for the past year in an office on my own with little interaction with anyone else in the company.

2 - There is zero professionalism in terms of work here, with there being no testing, no planning, no market research of ideas for revenue generation – nothing. This makes life incredibly stressful. This has led to countless situations where product A was expected, but product B was delivered (which then failed to generate revenue) as well as a huge amount of development time being wasted.

3 - I can’t work in a business that lives paycheck to paycheck. I’ve never been somewhere where the salary payment had to be delayed due to someone not paying us on time. My last paycheck was 4 days late.

4 - The management style is far too aggressive and emotion driven for me to be able to express my opinions without some sort of backlash.

5 - My opinions are usually completely smashed down and ignored, and no apology is offered when it turns out that they’re 100% correct in the coming months.

6 - I am due a substantial pay rise due to the increase of my skills, increase of experience, and the time of being in the company, and I think if the business cannot afford to pay £8 per month for email signatures, then I know it cannot afford to give me a pay rise.

7 - Despite having continuously delivered successful web development projects/tasks which have increased revenue, I never receive any form of thanks or recognition. It makes me feel like I am not cared about in this business in the slightest.

8 - The business fails to see potential and growth of its employees, and instead criticises based on past behaviour. 'Josh' (fake name) is a fine example of this. He was always slated by 'Tom' and 'Jerry' as being worthless, and lazy. I trained him in 2 weeks to perform some basic web development tasks using HTML, CSS, Git and SCSS, and he immediately saw his value outside of this company and left achieving a 5k pay rise during. He now works in an environment where he is constantly challenged and has reviews with his line manager monthly to praise him on his excellent work and diverse set of skills. This is not rocket science. This is how you keep employees motivated and happy.

9 - People in the business with the least or zero technical understanding or experience seem to be endlessly defining technical deadlines. This will always result in things going wrong. Before our mobile app development agency agreed on the user stories, they spent DAYS going through the specification with their developers to ensure they’re not going to over promise and under deliver.

10 - The fact that the concept of ‘stealing data’ from someone else’s website by scraping it daily for the information is not something this company is afraid to do, only further bolsters the fact that I do not want to work in such an unethical, pathetic organisation.

11 - I've been told that the MD of the company heard me on the phone to an agency (as a developer, I get calls almost every week), and that if I do it again, that the MD apparently said he would dock my pay for the time that I’m on the phone. Are you serious?! In what world is it okay for the MD of a company to threaten to punish their employees for thinking about leaving?! Why not make an attempt at nurturing them and trying to find out why they’re upset, and try to retain the talent.

Now... I REALLY want to leave immediately. Hand my notice in and fly off. I'll have 4 weeks notice to find a new role, and I'll be on garden leave effective immediately, but it's scary knowing that I may not find a role.

My situation is difficult as I can't start a new role unless it's remote or a local short term contract because my moving situation in May, and as a Junior to Mid Level developer, this isn't the easiest thing to do on the planet.

I've got a few interviews lined up (one of which was a final interview which I completed on Friday) but its still scary knowing that I may not find a new role within 4 weeks.

Advice? Thoughts? Criticisms?

Love you DevRant <3

Me: Hmm... My Android phone has been acting strange lately, cell signal keeps dropping... Maybe I picked up a virus... let's flash the latest update.

Phone: Updating Done

Me: Hm... signal is still bad... maybe it's hardware... *Angry*

Phone: By the way you lost root

Me: @#$%$&&$%^#$!#$@$%$#%^ OK LETS SEE, SUPERSU, REINSTALL THE BINARIES... YES!!!

Phone: Reinstalling... Restarting...
......................................................
......................................................

Me: it's not loading.... why? NO! I bricked it..... NO NO NO NO.....

*1 hour of flailing...*

Hey Recovery still works! OK, let's try to reflashing the OS

Phone: Flashing... Restarting...

Me: Please, please... let this work.... it's not starting............. wait. IT LOADED!!!! WOOT!!!! AWESOME...

Phone: still no root...

Me: Eh...

And there went my most of my evening which I was supposed to spend preparing for an interview tomorrow....

Recruiter reaches out to me, he says he saw my LinkedIn and thinks I'd be a great fit.

I say ok and send my resume.

He gets me a phone screen. I do it, I think I do a pretty good job. (I'm able to answer all the questions well, I think I'm onto the coding interview for sure.)

A couple days later I get a generic rejection email.

I'm not sure what happened. They had my resume, I know I did well on the technical questions (I do that kind of thing for my current job all the time.)

No idea why I'm rejected. If it was something about my experience, they could have seen that from my resume. If it was something from my phone screen, I have no idea what it could have been.

Just wanted to rant >:[

When you are reading job requirements for a dev job and they put a shit ton emphasis on MS Office. I remember a phone interview where they asked skill level for Word, Excel and Outlook.

Phone interview sprung on me in 2 hours from now. It's in devops. Just got called out of the blue.

Wish me luck

Another year is ending,slowly, without much of a hassle.
Here's to all those performers who are still waiting for the phone to ring, to all those students who thought they would be earning by the year end. Here's to that father who couldn't get his dying child to have one meal with him. Here's to that daughter who could not inform her imprisoned father that she has made it to the final. Here's to that 70 year old man who is still waiting for his son to return from the dead, to that 12 year old child whose parents just split up, to that girl who thought winter would be unbearable. Here's to that silent lover who is yet to tell the girl that he exists, to that girl whose new year text to her crush failed to yield more than a blue tick. Here's to that couple who had their child, to that scientist whose data sets are turning out to be promising, to that scholar who made it to the last of the Interview rounds.
Here's to that cancer patient who went into remission.
Here's to that boy who got a Hi message from his crush, to that girl who is getting married.
Here's to all those promises and resolutions. Once again. The ones we couldn't keep,and the ones we kept. Here's to that promise that our GPA shall rise again,that all the incomplete MOOC courses will someday be done.
Here's to the beauty of fantastic beasts, Star Wars, sense8, Westworld and all the films and TV shows that made us happy.
Here's to life that goes on. Uninterrupted. Fearless. Still.
Happy New Year

1) Submitted my CV
2) Got an email to schedule a phone interview for the next week, I gave ~5 appiointments on the next week that were good for me
3) Next week passed, no answer to my E-mail, I asked in a mail, what happend
4) Got reply, that we should schedule the phone interview for the next week
5) We aggreed, in the appointment, they did not call me
6) I asked in a mail, what has happened
7) We aggreed in a new appointment
8) This time they called me, after a short conversation I was told, that I they send me task as homework right after the phone call and I will have to do it in one week
9) They did not send it
10) Next day I asked, whats going on
11) They sent me the task, and said that I can ask them, if have queations
12) For me it was not clear, if I was allowed to use frameworks for the task, so I asked it
13) I neveg got reply and did not ping for the 4th time

This was the most annoying and ridiculous recruiting process I had to deal with. It was just a waste of time.

Yesterday I had a phone screening with a hiring manager and was expected to talk about more of my expertise and just my experience overall. With four years of experience, I thought I could tell her everything she needed to know.

However, this interview was just kind of... weird. Literally every question she asked was defintiions. It was as if I was doing a short answer quiz.

"What is object-oriented programming?"
"What is a hashmap versus a list?"
"What is class inheritance?"

Like... What the fuck. These are questions that give no insight into who I am or how I work. This is shit you see on a second-year midterm exam. What a waste of time.

I covered it in a recent rant but it was for a marketing lead job (career switch for me) and they were very disorganized.

The HR guy just couldn’t shut up about completely irrelevant and personal topics. The CEO made fun of my cognitive disability, calling it “an excuse” (illegal in the U.S. under anti-discrimination laws). Then he walked out of the room to “go to the bathroom” and never returned. The HR guy grabbed the CEO’s notes and just read them to himself out loud like I wasn’t even in the room. He also asked me what my religion was (also illegal to ask in the U.S.) A third guy came in, asked me a bunch of questions, and then abruptly ended the interview. They only gave me a vague idea of the salary and benefits in all of that.

Two days later the HR guy asked me to come in immediately because I was needed to begin work right then. I said I hadn’t planned to start just that quickly (I already had plans that day that I couldn’t cancel) and especially not knowing how much I’d be paid. I asked for the customary time to talk it over with my family first. He asked me to get back to him before an hour was up. When I called back, he switched the story to say that their marketing lead just wanted to ask me questions before they made a final decision. But the fact that they had been interviewing me for that very marketing lead position was really confusing.

I said I was no longer interested and hung up the phone.

I once got something weird during interview. I had to do an assignment on site taking the whole work day of time. In the end, I got bashed on how much I delivered and had to defend it. Defending was easy: the project was decent while not being much. A Mercedes without electric windows. I just told them it's what I prefer.

Later got a phone call and got hired.

The social test was the hardest

Worst recruiter experience wasn't mine, but it was one I overheard:

Buddy of mine who, like me, was older does a couple rounds of interviews at a nice place and gets a call back from the company recruiter. He puts the recruiter on speaker phone so I can hear too.

They are very nice and tell him they selected another candidate, bummer but no big deal.

Hey I the age of ghosting at least they called right?

He is still upbeat and asks if there was anything he could do better interview or technical stuff.

She tells him "We weren't sure you would fit into the culture."

This is a bit odd as this guy is outgoing and one of those folks that everyone loves being around and working with, just a naturally likeable guy.

He asks what she meant about culture fit and she responds "Well you're older..."

He thinks he misheard her and asks again "Your older and we don't think you will fit in that way."

I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can get a ride to the airport on Friday and I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can get a ride to the airport on Friday and I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can get my car out the time to do it again and I look forward to hearing from you in awhile I have a few questions about the other I have a few questions about the same as the other day I will have a talk at you and I hope to see everyone again and again I apologise I didn't get a response to your advertisement for a while but it is a little chilly here is a copy to the store to buy the car is in a good way to start a little more time with the family for a while but it is a little chilly here is a copy to the time of the year for the first time in a long time and I don't want it for a couple days so I'm just trying for you guys I just want a ride with us to get a few things done and I will be there at the end if this works out well for you and your family a very happy and excited about this weekend so I'm just going to go to the store and get back with me and my family is going to be a little late today but I'm still in my car and I will be there at like midnight so much and have to be at work at the moment but I'll try again later in life I have been trying to get a hold of the guy that I have a meeting with you to discuss the details of the job and I have been working in my room so I can get a ride to the airport on Sunday so we are all on my own and I will be there at noon so I'll just be me my money back and I will get it done this weekend but I will be there at the same time and where would we have been in the hospital for a week or two to see you soon and have a great day today love it and it will not work for me to come in and get a new phone or in person and I am not sure how long it would have taken it off and on again and again I apologise I didn't know you were going to be a little late to the game and it will not work on it this morning I was wondering if you had a choice but I don't know if you have any questions please feel free to contact me at any rate is higher up for it and the other is a good time to come in for an appointment with the surgeon on my phone and I don't want to be a good friend to come in at all and the other is a good time to call and talk about what we can do to help you feel better I can come by to pick up the kids from school today so I'm not going anywhere for the next few days and I have a few more days before we get into my car to go out for lunch at home and I will be there at the same time as you can imagine how hard is it to late to get a new car is a lot more done with the interview and the kids will have a good day at school today so I'm not going anywhere for the next two days so we are all on my way home from the gym and then I will be able to make it today because I'm a very nice person who can do it for you if you want to come by and see you soon and have to go back in the office tomorrow morning at work today but I'm going back and I will be there at the same time and where would we have been trying all of us and the rest are you still interested I can send you a picture of the front and back of the house and the kids are going well with the family for a while but it is a little chilly here is a picture of the front and back of the house is in my prayers as a friend but it will have a great weekend and I will be there at the end if this works out well and that your mom and dad are going to be a bit of an emergency at least you have a good day at school today so I'm going to be in the office tomorrow and will be back to the hotel now I'm in bed with a friend and then I will be able to make it to the meeting tonight but I will be there at the same time I was in a hurry and come to the office and I will send the other side and a little about me and you will see that you sent it out and get a good deal and you have the address of where I can get a ride to work on it this week but will have a good day at school today so I'm not going anywhere for the next two days so we are going to be in the office tomorrow and I have been working in the morning and I will get it done this weekend but will be back in the office on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday are going well for you and your wife is not the case then you have the address of your day goes on and I have been working in the morning and I will be there at the same time I am in need and I'll see what the status is on the way to the airport and then we will have a great day at school today so I'm trying to get a hold of the guy who was the guy who was the guy who is going well and I am going to be out by then but if I can find a way to get the car out the door to go to the store and I have to be in a relationship with a friend and then I will be able to make it to the meeting and will get the info for the guy who was the guys are doing the meeting at the church

- Phone screen with HR - went well
*set up interview with CEO*
- Interview with CEO - went well
*set up tech interview with a dev*
- Tech Interview - interviewer doesn't show up
I sent followup email, asking if we needed rescheduling - no response

I don't understand why I was ghosted like that, at least they could've sent a message to reject me or something? Seemed like a waste of time.

Still looking for my first full-time dev role. After being endlessly rejected from every dev job I've applied for, it starts to eat away at your confidence. Makes me wonder if I'm not as competent as I believe I am. :/

Fortunately, I landed a coding interview with Google! It is my dream job to work at Google, so the fact that they even acknowledged me & my skillset makes me so happy and reaffirms my belief in my capabilities. :D

It's pretty odd, that after applying to 20+ open Google positions relevant to my skill level & location and often with references included, then having been rejected from all of them, that I finally got a chance with them when one of their recruiters found me on LinkedIn and liked what she saw. I cleared the screening call, and made it to the first coding interview.

Of course, even with all the interview prep I've done, it was all practically for naught since they caught me off guard with a crazy conceptual problem anyway. (Well, actually, was I 'caught off guard' if I was already expecting to be caught off guard? o.0) I struggled heavily in the first half of the interview, but found my footing towards the end. So I knew I screwed up and that it was highly unlikely for me to get the job.

Nonetheless, Google had the decency to reject me not via an automated email, but through an actual direct phone call with my recruiter. (The cruelty of the automated application rejection system in our society is a whole rant of its own, for another time.) My recruiter told me that they felt I wasn't ready but they liked what they saw, so they will be revisiting me in exactly a year to reconsider me.

To know that I wasn't fully rejected, and that my dream company Google sees real potential in me, is highly reassuring. It means I'm not a lost cause; I simply need to keep looking. Google will want me more strongly once I have the experience that comes from a fresh grad's first full-time job.

In-person interview follow up from my phone interview last week. I hope I nail it. Stressing though. Gotta eat, drink water, and calm the hell down.

(one day before the phone interview)

Them: Please call to us at (TIME) to (PHONENUMBER)

Me: Ok

(interview day)

--[[CHORUS START]]--
Me: (calls to the number at (TIME))

Phone: Your call has been forwarded to automatic voice message system. (PHONENUMBER) is not availible. After tone please leave message. When you are finish the recording you may hang up or press 1 for more option, please leave message now.

Me: (deep breath, patiently waits 5 mins.)

--[[CHORUS END]]--

--[[CHORUS]]--

WHY DO YOU MAKE ME CALL YOU WHEN YOU TURN OFF THE PHONE / TALK WITH SOMEONE ELSE????
IF YOU DON'T LIKE ME, JUST DON'T MAKE ME CALL YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

--> Could not reach them for 3 days, gave up

I had a phone interview with a small startup for a Web Development role. I was fairly confident that I would pull through most of the technical questions that would come my way.

They instead asked me a stupid optimization problem involving some buckets, pigs and poison. I answered it, told them to fuck off and ask me something relevant.

Except that I didn't. I fumbled to find a half decent answer to it and they were unimpressed. The worst part was that I could think of a dozen better answers after the call was over.

Doesn't seem particularly fair for people to judge you by such abstract questions rather than evaluating skills directly relevant to your job.

My first interview was the interview where I cheated and got the job, it was an on campus job interview. I did not have a good gpa, (to be honest it was really bad i was below the 25th percentile)

Anyway this was the only (developer) job interview I knew I could qualify for, I was pretty sure that if I couldn't nail this one then I could kiss my dream of programming professionally good bye.

We were about 25 kids sitting in a class room with a pencil and couple of sheets of paper and the the interview panel walked between the seats looking at what we wrote.

So, when I couldn't write an algorithm for the problem of square rooting a number n. I panicked (was literally shivering with tears rolling down my cheeks, thankfully nobody saw me as i was on the last bench) I gave up, wiped my tears and stared at the board, a panel member saw me and told me to leave after looking at my paper. This was the moment my mind decided (not me but someone else inside me) that I have to do whatever it took, so just when I was stepping out and grabbed my bag i quickly opened the browser of my phone inside the bag typed square root algorithm opened the first result and read the words arrive at the answer by binary search, ass soon as I read that my mind worked at a pace that it has never managed ever since that time, and i knew the solution in a matter of seconds, i dropped my bag when to one of the more sympathetic panel members and explained the whole thing to him on the spot, he was impressed, and he asked me how this algorithm can be extended for the nth root(which is really simple once you have the algorithm for square root) and i blurted it out instantly which impressed him even more and offered me the job on the spot and told me to attend the next 2 rounds as a formality.

Thus i saved myself for a world of hurt and now I am a developer who thinks back to that day every time I need a boost of morale

Got my first technical job with no interview. Well, let me explain.

A recruiting firm contacted about my resume that it was impressive. *I didn't have any corporate experience in there. Just school projects, personal projects and internship.

I had a quick phone interview with them and also asked me for an in person interview that same week on Wednesday. After that interview, the guy asked if I could come back for some paperwork because they have found a job for me to start the next Monday. This was exciting.

Monday at the new job, I dressed up in fitted suit and all thinking the company will also interview me. I walked in and the director was like, "welcome, you know you don't have to dress up for this job right? Feel free!" They took me to me workstation with an already clean set up.

I was confused and my stupidity asked: "what time is the interview?". The immediate supervisor I was going to be working with replied, "no need for that. We got you because of your skills. That's all we need so we both went water each other's time".

Long story short, I worked with them for almost a year but due to financial issues they couldn't extend my contract. However, the director got me a new permanent job at one of his friends office and says he will hire me back in a heartbeat if things go well at his place.

I kind of feel bad leaving the recruiter because he was one of those who actually cared and willing to help entry level.

TLDR;
I remissness about Yahoo site builder and talk about finding the record of the Google search that changed my life a long time ago and I think it's fucking great.

Earlier I re-installed google chrome but unlike every other time, this time I forgot to turn off the auto-sync feature. I only realized this when I opened gmail and it pre-populated my login info with the info of my very first, long forgotten gmail account.

So naturally I went exploring... after going through the mails I decided to check out the actual Google account to see if there was anything of interest there and lo and behold I found around 7 years of browsing history that I had no idea Google stored at the time.

As scary as it was to see I'm kinda glad about it now because aside from finding out that I was going through an Asian porn phase in 2008 I also found the one Google search record that changed my life.

It was a search to download Yahoo site builder followed by a bunch more on how to use it.

I had stumbled across a random article about it and it caught my eye because I needed a website for the grocery store I was a manager of back then.

Thankfully it was a fucking horrible WYSIWYG editor. I recall it acting almost identical to Word at the time - I would save and back up my site constantly because moving something 1px would fuck the layout up and burn everything to the ground, cntrl+z would try and do something, reversing only my last action while leaving the rest of the site in tatters and I didn't have the skills to understand or fix it...

Ultimately my frustration led me learn a bit of html & css and a week or so later It became apparent it would be easier to scratch code the damn thing so I uninstalled Yahoo site builder and started all over again.

Learning & building that site in notepad ignited my passion for coding and less than a year later I left my shitty dead end job to join a brand new tech company created with the help of a like minded investor officially employed as a developer. Let help you understand just how big this achievement was for me - I had been trying to find a job, ANY job in I.T even at a call center level without success for 6 years because I dropped out of school.

In 6 years as an active job seeker I only received one phone call about a job opportunity which ended very quickly once they realised they had misread my CV. In all those years I never even got a single job interview.

After that I spent the next 3 years rolling out and improving the cloud based loyalty card system I had written for my store out on a national scale and the rest is history. Since then I have never been judged by a crappy piece of paper, hated my job or struggled to find a new one.

What a beautiful search result that was to find.

I dedicate this rant to Yahoo, with my sincere gratitude for making a shitty WYSIWYG editor that was so bad it pissed me off enough to make me actually learn something.

Spent 4 hours today, talking to 7 different people on the phone. All were interviews. There were even 2 where i called the hr and 20 minutes later the ceo/architect whatever called me to get the phone interview done fast. Im really fuckin exhausted.

I am so pissed. Someone i know asked me if we were hiring marketting people so I asked the COO and he said we are and asked me to refer them. I asked my friend for her CV and referred her.

I ask the COO a week later whether he contacted her and he says that they will hire a girl they had as an intern a few months ago instead.

I give no fuck to whether my friend ended up getting hired. But i at least expect to get her an interview. When u ask ur friend to refer you to their company, u expect the fact he works there will help u get a chance for an interview or even a god damn phone call at the very least. But now the COO made me look very useless infront of her, it wasnt any different than if she had applied online rather than me referring her personally.

i honestly feel disrespected having been indirectly told my position in this company doesnt even let me help people i know to get a small interview. nevermind the outcome of the interview, but me being in this company should give me the ability to get someone an interview AT LEAST. just for the sake i referred her personally as a current employee at the company... they shouldve interviewed her and forgot about her. just make it look like u cared about the fact that a current good employee referred someone and that my referral actually did something.

I feel very useless infront of my friend now and i hate that now its obvious to her my company doesnt give a shit about my referrals...

Just before my graduation a big consultancy firm reached me to offer me a job.

They told the salary was double compared to other jobs but they needed me to

go to a city 4 hours away from mine,

have an interview there,

if that went well I would have had to attend an intensive course in the same city (paying all expenses by myself)

and after that have another interview to see if I was good for the job

“Sounds nice 😊 can you call me next week after my graduation? Now I need to focus on that but then I would like to hear more…”

How did it go? Who knows, after my graduation I turned my phone off for a month and 👻 ghosted them…

I had a phone interview and he was shocked that I hadn't learned C, C++ or an assembly language in college. anyone else find that strange?

I applied for a dev job, ofc _without_ looking at their references before sending my candidature.
Turns out 80% of their references are porn sites...
Most of them are quite big as far as I can tell, but I don't really wanna work for a company like them. I'm still young, I don't really think it would make a good impression later on if I'd had a company who makes 80% porn sites in their portfolio in my CV when posting for more serious stuff.

And they asked me for a phone interview. Should I accept it?

A job that I wanted so bad, I had went to 3 interviews in one day, plus one phone interview before this. AFTER this, I went to yet another interview. 2 weeks later I get a phone call letting me know ow that they chose the other candidate because that person apparently had more passion for programming than me.

How the fuck do you measure passion?

Going for an interview with them asking me to open console on their laptop and type a 1 liner in JavaScript that will make an array with indices being numeric values 1-20. Their machine doesnt want to work and never wanted to log in... So i do the following:

1.Pull out my phone
2.Open Thermux
3.Ask for wifi password
4.Install node on my phone and write the below attached code

Needless to say. I actually feel good about myself, i got the job and a good offer and the network password...

Recruiter for a well known company somehow finds my personal email, no biggie - it's not the first time they've contacted me. I decide to give it a shot, phone interview is scheduled, they're a no show. Email them 10 after, they want to reschedule, I do a reschedule. Again, no show. Yeah, it's like that... I haven't even heard back now. Seriously, how do these people even hold jobs?

Anybody know any good .net web devs in Sydney? I'm sick of reading seek and LinkedIn resumes where 95% of the applicants have a phone number starting with +91 and are skilled in "user testing and SAP".

I mean, what are they expecting? "Absolutely sir, we will mail you a first class plane ticket right now for your interview! Oh .net was just a suggestion, you can code in COBOL if you prefer. And don't worry about that pesky working Visa, we can pay cash!"

Worst interview experience was a marathon. 3 interviews in a day.

I asked the recruiter to assemble them like that after I had to remind her I was still employed and could go about having interviews all week. I took a day off and departed.

The first interview was with a company that had moved fro their previous address. Since the recruiter obviously checked that, I got to the right place late and with little mojo left.

The second interview was with a company that explained to me how they actually did not need my expertise.

The third was with a company that had just won Apple's Best of the Year award:

Me: So how is it having received the award?

Him: Nah, it's just another one. You get used to it.

[A little more interview]
[We wrap things up and stand up to leave]

Him: Well, thanks for stopping by and talking to us. And sorry we had to do this at our ping pong table. You know, the CEO and I are always playing. He says he's the best, but I always beat him.

All of that sprinkled with a very energising bellyache I had to take to the toilet every now and then (no idea what I ate the night before).

After the marathon, I told the recruiter the third company seemed the most promising, although I couldn't see myself working with someone that pretentious, to which she replied "I thought you had very similar personalities and you have a lot in common".

WHAT?! I've never said anything like that my whole life and now you're telling me you know me from the three fucking phone calls we had?

From that moment on, I've moved away from recruiters and towards networking.

I think I bombed a phone interview big time. I'm fucking frustrated with myself.

Since I can't make many posts, I'll try squeeze them all in one:

1. Phone recruitment interview went "well", I even spoke french at some point! 😃
I have to brush up my knowledge again for the technical test (I hate them). Somehow I got excited, which I shouldn't, but only time will tell...

2. My brain is stuck with opening a Twitter account, mainly for following people/companies news. I don't know if it's worth it, so I would your feedback on this.

3. I've finally come down to listening to synthwave while coding and I was wondering if there's any good free service (I'm still poor, so I don't want neither Deezer nor Spotify), preferably with a UWP app on Windows 10 (that is not Soundcloud).

I guess I should relate what work experience I have: my internship.

A little backstory I suppose. It's required at my school to do an internship to graduate except under certain circumstances. They encourage work experience a lot where I study. It was around time for me to apply for internships. However, the closest I got was a phone call with Amazon that I biffed when they started asking about stuff like sorting algorithms and other Big O notation stuff. So I was pretty desperate. I found a small company that were looking for internships and got an interview with them. The pay was dirt (I made more as a crew trainer at McDonalds) but I needed that internship and they were only 10 minutes away.

Immediate red flags when I showed up to the address. At first I thought I was wrong, But I noticed the sign of the company pointing up some stairs that were installed on the side of the house I was in front of.

Interview was a bit weird. It was with the CEO and the marketing manager. Again red flags. I show up for work a week later.

Turns out, they have no full time developers. 1st day was getting my workstation ready and 2nd day I was running Ethernet cables to the basement where the phones were connected. Spent around a week doing that.

This was supposed to be a Software Engineering internship?? Excuse me?? I came here to learn how working on Software is supposed to be like! I was also their "tech support" both for their computers and their crappy software that was built 16 years ago that people still pay for that I had NO idea how it worked because I just started and NOBODY taught me anything! To make matters worse, even if I wanted to delve into the code to see how it works it was all made in ancient Perl which didn't make things any easier.

But I needed that internship to graduate. And thus begun my 9 months with them and boy howdy I have stories to tell. Stay tuned in the future.

I remember a recruiter reaching out to me after I applied to a company and we set up a phone interview. When the date arrived, she did not call. I emailed her a few days later and she did not reply. A few weeks later she contacted me again, and since I hadn't secured a job yet, I decided to give it another shot and we set up another phone interview. Guess what? She didn't call. Second strike was too much for me, so when she emailed about a couple of weeks later to know if I was still interested, I did not even bother to reply.

My craziest interview prep was for the role I just started last week. I applied to AWS and forgot about it, a month later I got invited to do a phone interview followed by a 5 hour on-site loop

I had just 4 days to prepare while already working full-time so I basically didn’t do anything after work for those few days other than cramming through over 50 hours of content on ds & algo, linux, networking and scalable system designs.

It helped that I’ve been working as a software engineer for many years so I just needed to review what I already knew

All you guys are here ranting about how your interview didn't go as planned and I'm just sitting here like "at least you got an interview; I don't even get a phone call back."

Interviewing with three companies. First one extended an offer. I'm expecting an offer from at least one, possibly both, of the others (On-site with Second was yesterday and expecting an offer tomorrow or Mon, phone tech interview (they also had a tech screen) with Three was today and I /rocked/ it, expecting an onsite invite for next week).

The problem with being a badass is that the choice paralysis is SO OVERWHELMING. All three have features that I like and how do I choose.

I think I'm being overly influenced by the weekly massage, onsite barista, free nice breakfast/lunch, and ideal location of Second (the domain is finance, they have $$$). Oh and fucking 25 vacation days and amazing 401k matching. I mean how would I say no to an offer? But what if the work is actually beyond me? But they have seriously cranked their benefits package up to 11.

First is an in house product with external clients. The domain I don't find super interesting, but it has amazing Glassdoor reviews, seems like a decent environment, and really seems like a place to progress and grow as a professional. It is also the lowest salary of the three (both others are through Hired, so I know what they are offering).

Third is a consultancy where I'd really get to keep my skills relevant. Seems mad fast paced, which is a bit intimidating, and I don't know how well I'd handle the context switching of being on multiple projects at a time.

I mean, all of this is counting my chickens before they hatch. But I have a really good feeling about my chsnces with Second, though I suppose I still have a chance to botch my onsite with Third.

Ahhhh. Dev Rant, how did you go about choosing between offers that can't be evaluated on a single axis?

I got a phone interview!!! Hope it goes better than my last one :') that one was for a web developer position and they asked me about stack vs queue and memory allocation. Idk why but I sure as shit didn't get the job.

Ok so I had a phone interview with a start-up for an internship and didn't get a call, for like a week(actually more) but today they called and wanna meet me tomorrow for work. Problem is, I fucked up my sleep cycle, big time. I hope me requesting to meet them at 7pm won't cause a problem!

DevRant users (and my wife) are the only people that know that I have applied for 2 new jobs! I’ve already had a phone interview with each. Tomorrow I have a 2 hour in-person technical interview, and last night I completed a technical assessment/sample application for the other position!

Things are moving fast, but I don’t want to let friends and family know yet, until things get a little more certain.

It’s such a weird feeling going to work everyday knowing that my current job may be coming to an end!

Just had my reasoning for not doing technical projects for interviews proven.

Pass the first 2 stages of interview (including showing some personal portfolio projects) then after a week of hearing nothing get sent a technical project to complete.

Spend every spare moment for a week polishing this thing, decent front end, quick and efficient back end, low traffic between fe, be, persistence etc.

Submit the code at midday ready for the interview the following day, only for the company to phone at 5pm and say all is fine and the code is great for the final interview (walkthrough) the next day, then phone 5:10pm phone and pull the position.

That company has just had free work done which should have cost 1 weeks worth of fees, using the premise of a job at the end of it, only to take the code that they are super happy with and run with no payout.

Phone interview tomorrow! Hopefully things go well 😅

Not a rejection per se, but a company I applied to just stopped emailing me after trying to arrange a day for me to come to the office and meet the team, following an informal phone interview. They dragged their heels while I was on leave and by the time they got back to me I was back at work and had limited time. They basically just ghosted me after that.

This has annoyed me.

I sent my CV off to a company, they came back quite quickly and wanted to give me a phone interview. It had some technical questions, which I did well on and they gave me a test.

I liked the look of the company so I did the test asap, and passed the test.

They then invited me in for interview and all went find and dandy.

They then wanted me to come back in to met the rest of the team, so I thought things were going well.

Buy nope, they've emailed to say I wouldn't be a good fit right now, and have limited feedback. All throughout the process they seemed very keen, now I'm confused af.

I had a coding interview with Amazon. I had to implement a depth-first search algorithm with no prior experience while 2 devs watched me code on a collaborative IDE. To make it worse, the connection was terrible on the conference call and one of the interviewers had a very thick accent. I barely understood what they wanted me to do until I typed out:

Breadth-first search || Depth-first search?
// Sorry, phone keeps cutting off and I can barely hear you

Yeah, I didn't make it to the next round. :(

A few months ago I applied for an IT Support role managing computer systems for a smaller manufacturing corporation. Now some back story, I'm a recent college grad looking for work and this hit my radar. I did well in the phone interview and really enjoyed the in person interview as well.

However, if I was offered the role I'd be the only person working on their infrastructure. The person who I interviewed with was leaving and thus his position was available. It was kinda strange to interview with the person you'd be replacing.

I started asking questions about their critical infrastructure and how they manage it. Short answer is they don't know.

I asked about off-site disaster recovery. "Oh we back everything up to a 2TB disk and I take it home every day."
I asked "What if that backup fails?"
Their response was "That would suck."

The company decided to go with a managed IT solution instead of me as I don't have the required experience in their eyes. The previous guy left because they we're stuck in their ways.
Yah, no thank you.

I got my last job from stack overflow jobs. They had me implement a code test that involved a decent amount of features and took several weeks of my freetime to complete, but in the end I had a short phone interview and I had gotten the job :D

I have a phone interview for a summer co op in a half hour!!! Aaah!!! I have so much anxiety but I’m also excited, I wanna finally start WORKING!

A couple of years ago, I was invited for an interview after applying for a part time job as a C/C++/Assembly developer with customer contact to earn a bit of money while studying at university.
Throughout the whole interview they didn't ask me a single question related to the work I was expecting to do. Just a couple of questions about my team skills, how I would react in certain difficult situations and how my studies were going. Nevertheless they seemed pretty pleased with me and asked when I could start.
I was somewhat irritated by that, especially because I was still a beginner in some areas and made that quite explicit in my application. I asked what kind of projects I would be working on and what skill level was expected of me.
"It's pretty straightforward. Just pick up the phone and go through the checklists we'll provide. You'll pick it up quickly."

Wait what?!

Turns out they didn't have an opening for a programmer. They were looking for somebody for a first level phone support minimum wage job and simply used an old ad for a programmer's position "to attract more technically minded people".

I rejected respectfully...

What the actual fuck? Who even does something like that?

Ranting...
So they called me for a phone interview, I made a good impression, the job desc. states that it's a full stack Java/J2EE Developer, after all they hired me.
Now I found myself doing validation (Implementing a VTP for functional testing) using UFT and VBS for an eclipse RCP application made in 2007, in my previous job I was a TL for a Spring/angular application with five other developers building a LIMS from scratch, I feel a bit disappointed, although the salary is pretty good and there is no stress at all.
Any comment is welcomed.

Big fucking rant....

3 employers, 3 sets of phone and in person interviews.

Guess how many provided even a scrap of feedback why they passed and did not hire me. I always ask at the end of the interview if I can address anything left out, if they have any concerns, etc.... Everything is fine, no concerns, we'll be in touch...
Except just to say no, but not why

What the fuck? Is this this just another form of ghosting? I don't get it - they spend hours interviewing. Mother fuckers can't even give 2 minutes to write a fucking reply email with a reason?

Fml...

Got another phone interview tomorrow. This time with the manager of the department id be in. Tonight I finalize my more technical questions about the position and general ones about the environment of his department

Hopefully it goes well and I'm out of my current job in a couple of weeks

PSA: surpise-sending play-by-play instructions via chat on how to answer questions in a phone interview happening IN REAL TIME is not helpful and makes me look like a blubbering idiot

thanks but no thanks

I have passed 3 interview levels including the coding test for a big telecoms company. After 2 weeks i get a 15 minute phone-interview in which I answered all the tech questions correctly and yesterday I received an email saying my application was unsuccessful. WTF...literally.

P.S.
I even said I was Bi-sexual in case they wanted diversity :D

I'm not real big on asking for help but I'm kinda nervous about applying for my first real programming gig. And I was hoping someone here would be willing to conduct a mock interview with me because I think it would help to get over my jitters and iron out where I might need to practice.

I'm applying for junior python and SQL based positions and I'd really appreciate if anyone would help me practice for an interview.

I'm available most hours Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and if you're willing you can contact me here or at email to setup a phone, screen share, or web interview.

My email is wisecrackdoesathing@protonmail.com

Well my last job was nothing but a call center with AT&T, but I will tell the story of how I got my current job which is also my first job as a developer.

I was living in Texas. I just moved out of a house I was renting and my girlfriend at the time moved back to Missouri and she was about 5 months pregnant.

She wanted us to all be in Missouri because that's where her family is. No big deal for me, but we didn't have a place to stay yet in Missouri and it was difficult to find a job in a city that has very little to offer in what I do, and of course, wants experienced people despite what said they were looking for.

For 5 months I kept looking for a job while I stayed with my parents and worked at the call center and she with her mom and stepdad so I could save up to not only make the trip to Missouri but to be able to make a payment on a place which we were also having trouble finding.

Even if I didn't have a job or if we didn't find a place, I was not going to miss the birth of my child. So, within about 3 weeks of her due date, it was time for me to make the trip to Missouri. I still haven't found a job but at least we were going to have a place ready for my child within the week. With all the money I saved, we could get through a couple of months of rent, bills and necessities, but still needed to find work.

After only a week after we got the place, I almost gave up so I started to apply at restaurants as a backup after I found a couple more places. The restaurants were quick to respond and I had interviews scheduled for the week that I applied. I knew I was going to be miserable working at a restaurant, but I needed a job, any job. As a last attempt, the day before my first interview with one restaurant, I found a new posting for an entry level position early in the morning. I quickly sent in my resume but didn't expect anything until weeks later. It only took a few hours for a reply and he wondered if we could do a phone interview. I said yes, of course. After the interview, he said that he had one more person to interview but he would let me know. I thought, great, there goes my chance. After only an hour of waiting, while I was looking for more places to apply, he calls me back saying that he wants to hire me. Immediately after I got the job I cancel my other interviews and I started the next day.

It was great I got the job, but it was a far drive. However, they did offer telecommuting, but I had to come in every day until they felt I understood their work flow. I did inform my boss that my son would be born really soon but he was okay with letting me take off when it was time.

I started on a Wednesday in May of 2014 and made the 1.5 hour drive every day. After only working 10 days, my girlfriend calls me at work saying that it's time for the baby to come but it would be a while so I could finish my shift and then come straight to the hospital.

I get there but still no baby. It was a long labor which ended up in C-section at 4 in the morning the next day. My son was finally born on a Wednesday and it was the greatest thing in my life.

But now, I am a single dad(about a year now and it was mutual) and I am the only developer as of a couple of weeks ago. Despite how they handle things and my annoying coworker that sits next to me which I have ranted about in a previous posts, I do enjoy working there trying to improve and move the company forward. After all, I work from home 3 days out of the week now. The rants will still come lol.

Sorry for the mood kill at the end but that's my story. 😁

Had a phone interview sat in my car.

Don’t think it went well, could be wrong, but felt like i waffles too much

Oh well, nothing ventured nothing gained.

Hey everyone, I'm ecstatic and nervous! I got my first technical phone interview from a company I'd actually really want to work with for a full stack (mostly frontend) react node web app developer job. Any tips or stories of your first technical phone interview with a company you cared about?! I think it will really help me. Thanks! 😅

So, I recently applied for a graduate position at a company. They will wanted me to complete an online test for them and successful completed it.

I then had the option of choosing a time and date for a phone interview, so I did so.

The day of the phone interview came and went, and no one called. I emailed asking what happened? But the only reply I had back was the same template email I had before. It seems like they're asking me to book another time again, however, there aren't any free slots for now 2 weeks.

I am now quite annoyed with how the process has gone, and now unsure if I should even bother with them. Will they just forget to call again?

HALP!

So, I have a phone interview for a job that is basically the same job I have now, but they use c# instead of Java.

I'm only a year into my first programming job, and I'm not really sure what kind of questions they're going to be asking during this interview.

Anyone have any good examples?

My worst interview was almost a year ago. I was very excited to interview with this company since it looked liked they were very focused and new what they wanted. I had two phone interviews before they brought me in. My final interview was with the ceo who had no productive knowledge of technology whatsoever. When I found out they were redeveloping systems for deployment on deface rent servers, which would also require their sales people to learn yet another password, I asked why they didn't consolidate their systems and re-use what they have. The Eco simply responded with, servers go down. I wanted to reply with, damn somebody should tell Netflix or google this rid but of information. I was basically done at that point.

I interviewed at my current workplace a few short hours later.

Anyone gave Amazon interview? They scheduled second phone round for me. Apparently I am not that good. Any tips?

Company is hiring a new PM (the first one, to allow me, the only dev, to concentrate on developing and not dealing with client crap) and I'm being allowed in on the vetting process.

Background: we maintain quite a few WordPress ecommerce sites, so part of the job spec was to be familiar with WordPress environments and the codebase, and that they have a least 3 years of PM experience.

1st phone interview: I'm an experienced WordPress developer, been doing it for 5 years.

Me: oh cool, can you show us examples of themes, plugins, and extensions you've created?

Guy: oh, no, I just install pre-made stuff.

Me: ...

*click*

Recruiter bailed on my phone interview twice today! Wtf! Getting my first job in tech is tough

Why it's so difficult to get a junior php developer job in NYC? Should I bullshit on my resume because staying honest I couldn't even get phone interview! Feel like I'm a loser. Bad bad.

!rant

Well, today I wake up, zombie like and I was searching throw all the new notifications on the phone...

To my surprise, a company that had interviewed me in December want to call me tp see my actual profesional status (which is a fucked up one tbh xD) because the got a great feedback at the interview and wanted to check on me again.

I will tell you how this end, I hope well (I need a job :_( )

Now I am nervous ><

When I was finishing my telecommunications engineering degree, my aunt told me that a friend of her had a work offer for me and we arranged a casual interview.
After some small talk, the first thing this dude told me was: "as you have studied telecommunications, you must be interested on selling telecommunication devices right?". It happened to be a pyramidal phone reselling "work" offer.
I have never felt so attacked. My family thinks I studied 6 years to fucking sell phones.

You know what annoys me...compnies dropping of the face of the earth. Like I take to the recruiter over the email. We set up a phone screen with HR and then with the Dev team, we talk about on site interview, WE DISCUSS THE TIME AND THEN NOTHING. Weeks go by and no emails or replies. Like what am I doing wrong here. This happened for the third time!

Fair / Not Fair
I hate when an interviewer would ask me to code something for them for technical interview.( happy to show non propitiatory previous work) So now that I am the one doing the interviewing, I am doing what I would have wanted, and I have to say it is working out. I thought I would share my experience so far and find out if the community at large sees this practice as fair or not fair.

People reply to the job post then I call and do quick phone interview ask a few key questions. After I find somone I think should go the next level I direct them to freelancer site and give them a paid project.

most recent project: Build simple(i mean really simple) ASP.net Core MVC web application (code first) that remotely connects to SQL server and can be published in linux ubuntu.
bla bla user accounts/ subscription bla bla. But it must me completed in 10 days. reward $1000.00 us dollars.

I build the SQL server for them and put blank database in and provide connection details.

To be fair
I have already built this app my self it and it took me 5 days.

So, Fair / not Fair

The moment when the company you applied to as Junior Java Developer emails back asking for a date for a phone interview and it's been 3 days passed the day you picked with them and still no call.. 🤔😥

when you slept through your fucking unpaid on call alerts (i remember when pre-interview i was told i wouldn't have to do on call, thanks for the incorrect information HR) and your manager happens to be your second and took care of it

fml

fuck phone UIs and settings, silence just everything besides pagerduty and slack, why the fuck there's multiple sliders for notification volume i don't fucking know

PM: I can't see the Facebook page, can you check what's wrong with it?
Me: *click click tab tab* There's not much I can do... I don't have the admin access
PM: Who is the admin?
Me: ABC (who is on holiday)

PM then decided to bombard ABC with emails & phone calls (& to ABC's family)

PM: When ABC comes back, ask for the login details
Me: But that's linked to the personal account.....
PM: It doesn't matter

Where the f is privacy?

p.s PM is an arrogant bastard who logged in to ex-colleague computer, read her personal emails, found out she went to a job interview, told the boss and asked her to come back then fired her on the spot

Got called on company phone while being in home office. Somehow through VPN + RDP session it got routed to my laptop, but connection was really bad and we could hardly understand each other, i.e. I had to guess that it even was a recruiter.

Guy however was really nice, but I failed the interview to a job I did not really want.

A degree from an accredited university and thousands of dollars spent on continuing education so some nitwit can ask me if I know a bunch of obscure syntactical features of programming language during a phone interview.

What’s up with HR calling to do technical interview and asking questions she doesn’t even know the answers to? Bruh, all that time I thought I was speaking with the Hiring Manager only to find out she’s HR when I asked her ONE technical question then she goes..”Oh, I won’t be able to answer that. I’m not technical in this role, I’m just the HR but I can schedule an onsite interview with the hiring manager.”

Me: I believe it’ll be beneficial to have a phone conversation or interview with the hiring manager before deciding if it’s worth coming onsite for an in-person interview.

HR: Ok, I’ll see his availability.

I’m not even concerned if she calls back or not. Plus the rate she’s talking about is really disrespectful.

Got an invite from an recruitment agency, went for the exam. Was hoping I get rejected 😐😑😕 ( I never passed an exam). After exams went home.
.
.
Got a message on my phone " You are selected for interview".
.
.
Went there for the interview.
They asked very simple questions.
.
.
2 hours after.
.
.
The agency people calls my name.
.
You are selected for the job.
🙌
Now it has been 3 Years...

What's the idea of people contacting you to offer a position, you make an appointment for a phone interview and the person don't call you at the right time and then hours later come with a random excuse. It happened twice with me already. If the idea is to spoil the company reputation, good job. '-'

Hi fellow devRanters,

I'm just finishing my Bachelors Degree in Media Information Technology and already talked with a company over the phone about an entry level position as a developer. They send me an requitement task that I did and send them over a week ago. It's been silent since then.

Should I call/write them, or just wait and sit tight? In an email they wrote they'll write when they review the code to schedule an technical interview. Don't know what to do here 😶

Any experienced advive?

Hey everyone,

So I recently had a phone interview which I think I fucked up by being super scared and this not being able to answer some questions properly. They said that they'll be sending a programming test but I haven't heard back from them since about a week. I'm having this bad feeling that my application has been rejected.

What would be a good way to email them back asking how the interview went and whether they will be moving forward with my application or not?

Recruiter contacts on linkedIn, and I have to drag some written information out of him, while he asks again and again and again for a phone interview.
I oblige and we schedule a time where I have an open slot in my ridiculously filled meeting calendar.

Then this fucking prick doesn't call, nor respond to messages. At least give a fucking heads up if you're unable to attend. I fucking hate when people are late, and it pisses me off to no end when people do not fucking show.
God fucking damnit.

I didn't even care for the position at all, but now I'm pissed because if it!

Fuck.

So technical interview time but whenever I look at algorithm, data structure questions now I feel demotivated... it sort of feels like boring pointless work.

But if i remove the context of preparing for an interview and say I have as much time as i need, it feels like a logical puzzle, challenge, something interesting I could use to kill some time, learn something new...

It feels like there's a divide like how I can go on and on about my personal projects but if you ask about work projects, I give you the boilerplate or have to really think about what to say...

And so now I'm feeling fucked for the phone screens and algo interviews that I'm supposed to be having soon... and let's just say one of them may be with a really really big tech company...

I went to an interview and they say they will call me within 2 week if I pass the first round of interview.

They don't call me so I assume I fail the interview and life went on.

I received the call today said I pass the first interview and if I wanted to come for second interview. My first thought is Fuck Off.

My acquaintance work for that company and we have a frank conversation. What is going on is that they are overwork and the other department complain that they don't have output from IT department.

When they ask IT department why don't produce output, head of IT department said they don't have enough people. HR department reluctantly allow them to hire more people and they phone me. My acquaintance apologize for the move that their company make. My acquaintance also said that he/she will also pass my decision to their department head.

I have meet everyone is that IT department whom I am going to work with and I like them. They are not only knowledgeable but also a nice person. More importantly they value the quality of work. They are the kind of person I like working with.

What I don't like is their HR department and they only call me when their departments work stale.

Here is my problem, I like the people I am going to work with but I don't like the company that they think I am kind of "backup". The company is the reputable company and it will be easier for me to find other job if I decided to quit and apply for other job.

I know the price range that they are willing to hire me due to first interview and the probing question I asked.

I was thinking of asking for salary outside their price range and think how it goes. If they are willing to hire me despite the ridiculous salary I asked , I may tolerant to work with them.

How do you think I should handle the situation?

So a company sent me a "few days/hours" homework assignment (that conveniently uses their exact software stack) before even doing a phone interview. That's not cool, right?