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Search - "why are you interviewing me?"
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Me talking to a recruiter (even though I am not looking for a job)
Me: If I walk into an interview, and they ask me to reverse a binary tree for a frontend Reac or Vue position or something along those lines, I will end the call and/or walk away from it.
Him: I get similar feelings from other programmers, I don't quite understand why the notion is as common
Me: Because it is fucking useless, it servers no purpose to a dev to know about that when building frontends with react, I link my github profile, for which they can find advanced backend-frontend related projects, compiler and interpreter projects, plus the title I currently have at my workplace and a bunch of other shit, I am not interviewing for a teaching position at an institute, but an actual place of work, for which if they want to know about DS and A they can review my profile which has a repo of DS and A in about 5 different languages including plain C++. I do not need to be offended by such notions since they server no purpose on the frontend, and neither do other devs. If anything it should be a casual conversation during the interview, not a basis for employment.
Recruiter: .........thank you for explaining this to me, I am sure I can bring it up to the agencies doing the reviews and interviews. Are you still interested?
Me: Are they going to give me a coding assignment for a project or a bs question like what I mentioned?
Him: I don't know
Me: then I am not interested12 -
Fucking HR interviews. Fucking "tell me about yourself" and pretending to seem interested in what i have to say while you think about how you did it with a guy behind the dumpster.
For fucks sake, i am a developer, i have spent more time with coding language than human language. I speak more to a rubber duck than to my friends. That's what you want to know about me?
I am here to fix your fucking site that uses flash plugin in 2017 and you want me to tell good things about your company?
Do you want me to tell you the details about your site that i got from whois and that your subscribed domain registration will end in September this year?
You don't know what responsive design is and you dare interview me?
Thanks for wasting my time and telling me shit about your company and how you have offices in germany and china. Well guess what? I dont care. I am busy thinking about some girl... Actually i am thinking about my side project. I dont know why i pretend to be cool?7 -
Probably the most awkward feeling call happened to me just recently.
I was to interview a guy that's like 10 years older from me with 10y more experience in mostly unrelated tech. I was prepared to have some respect for the guy, and was a bit anxious, but that changed quickly.
The first fucking thing he says, on the fucking job Interview is essentially "I've worked in tech for 20 or so years, and I don't appreciate being tested" great start .. needless to say, I tried to reformulate all my prepared Interview questions so they sound as casual as I could while still trying to get him to tell me *anything*. Most of the time I just felt like "why are we even here dude, you clearly don't care about any of this"...
About 12 or so questions later It was finally clear that none of his experience is useful, and even the exp he has sounds like past companies kept him around as a number...
I want to try a few more edge cases, hoping to find anything we could work with, when he calls me out on it and says "Well now you're testing me, I don't like being tested" at which point I pretty much gave up on the dude and let my HR colleague talk.
Then out of nowhere the guy brings up his mortgage, and how he needs money, and how no one wants to give him a job, and that if we don't want him, we should just tell him now.
Then he starts asking how many people we're interviewing, which is obviously stuff we can't answer, I just said "normal amount" to dodge the question at first, but that just made him more closed off and he just silently remarked "so you can be picky..."
That was one of the most painful interviews I had so far. Me and ny colleague pretty much instantly agreed that he's not a good culture fit for us. Probably not a fit for any company really, not with that attitude.
PS: it was a video call, though he had his camera turned off at first, so it was only me with a camera for half the call. He turned it on just about as I had enough of him.12 -
So I have been working at the same company for five years, doing pretty much all the IT stuff. Sys admin, help desk, you name it. I've also developed a fair amount of in-house software for the company.
Today, I learned from a trusted source that they are actively interviewing people to replace me. I probably have a week, maybe two until I'm fired. To my knowledge I've done nothing to warrant this.
I've been looking around lately for a new job anyway, but without any sense of urgency. I have put in several applications with very few responses though.
I have 5 years experience doing this professionally and 15 total years of dev experience, but only a GED.
I'm not sure why I'm not getting any responses from my applications, but I'm pretty scared right now. I have a 5 month old baby, a wife and a teenager that all depend on me.
I don't know what to do...13 -
Bit of an essay. TLDR: come Monday I'm either getting fired or promoted. And the CTO is a dickhead. If you think you work with me or know who I am, no you don't, shut the hell up.
Was having a discussion with my team, went on for a bit, at one point my manager mentioned that the CTO wanted me to go into the office occasionally, same thing I've had since I joined when they literally wanted me to move hundreds of miles to be close to the office mid covid when the office was closed. I give a nondescript answer. He's a bit more persistent, I snap a little but the conversation moves on. Discussion of company and team dynamics, at one point he makes a comment about people at another company being told if they don't go into the office they won't be eligible for promotion.
I ask everyone else on the call to leave.
I point out that 2 years ago me and him were interviewing candidates. He on a few occasions introduces me to candidates as a _senior_ engineer. My job title does not contain the word senior. I let it slide the first time, not worth it for a slip of the toung. Happens a couple more times, I take him aside and privately point out my job title does not contain the word senior. He says he didn't realise and thought I was.
My take away then: I'm expected to do the work of a senior without being paid for it and without being given the acknowledgement of the appropriate job title. I remind him of this. My job title hasn't changed. Fuck, I took a low ball offer when I joined and have had a minimal pay rise in like, 3 years. My tone is "not happy".
His response? He discussed promoting me with CTO however budged constraints. I somewhat understand, however.
We have promoted several people in the last few years. We have grown by hiring new people in the last few years (5 in a company of 30). There are ways to compensate someone in ways that do not impact day to day budget (shares, TC, total compensation, is normal terminology in the tech field for this). I ask why the hell should I travel a few hundred miles to the office to get get to know people, put effort in to a company that demonstrably doesn't value me? Particularly as all levels of management have completely failed at developing a social atmosphere during covid? My first month, I had 3 5 minute meetings with my manager a week. That was all of the communication I had with people. I literally complained and laid out what they should do instead, they adopted most of it.
I also ask him if he genuinely thinks being here is in my professional interest? My tone has well passed pissed off.
I will say, I actually quite like my manager, we have a good working relationship and I've learned a lot from him.
He makes some mediocre points, tries to give advice about value of shares. To me, the value of shares is zero until they are money. The value to the company, however, is that it's a sizeable chunk on their balance sheet and shares sheet that they have to be willing to justify. If I wanted money, I'd go work at a high frequency trading bank and make 5x what I'm on now. No joke, that's what they pay, I could get a job, came close in the past but went to amazon. He understands.
He says will discuss with CTO. They were on a call for like an hour. His tone has changed to "you will be promoted ASAP, comp may be structured as discussed". Point made.
I'm in this job because it's convenient, is easy for me. Was originally lower challenge than previous, has a range of chances to learn and _that's_ the value to me. He's suitably nervous.
Point made I think.
So given I swore a few times, at least once about the CTO. Interesting to see how it goes.
Message from him to the effect that he spoke to CTO, has been told to write a proposal for promotion (kinda standard), will discuss with HR on Monday as they're on holiday.
So, maybe not getting fired today?
Blood pressure still very high.10 -
I'm coming off a lengthy staff augmentation assignment awful enough that I feel like I need to be rehabilitated to convince myself that I even want to be a software developer.
They needed someone who does .NET. It turns out what they meant was someone to copy and paste massive amounts of code that their EA calls a "framework." Just copy and paste this entire repo, make a whole ton of tweaks that for whatever reason never make their way back into the "template," and then make a few edits for some specific functionality. And then repeat. And repeat. Over a dozen times.
The code is unbelievable. Everything is stacked into giant classes that inherit from each other. There's no dependency inversion. The classes have default constructors with a comment "for unit testing" and then the "real" code uses a different one.
It's full of projects, classes, and methods with weird names that don't do anything. The class and method names sound like they mean something but don't. So after a dozen times I tried to refactor, and the EA threw a hissy fit. Deleting dead code, reducing three levels of inheritance to a simple class, and renaming stuff to indicate what it does are all violations of "standards." I had to go back to the template and start over.
This guy actually recorded a video of himself giving developers instructions on how to copy and paste his awful code.
Then he randomly invents new "standards." A class that reads messages from a queue and processes them shouldn't process them anymore. It should read them and put them in another queue, and then we add more complication by reading from that queue. The reason? We might want to use the original queue for something else one day. I'm pretty sure rewriting working code to meet requirements no one has is as close as you can get to the opposite of Agile.
I fixed some major bugs during my refactor, and missed one the second time after I started over. So stuff actually broke in production because I took points off the board and "fixed" what worked to add back in dead code, variables that aren't used, etc.
In the process, I asked the EA how he wanted me to do this stuff, because I know that he makes up "standards" on the fly and whatever I do may or may not be what he was imagining. We had a tight deadline and I didn't really have time to guess, read his mind, get it wrong, and start over. So we scheduled an hour for him to show me what he wanted.
He said it would take fifteen minutes. He used the first fifteen insisting that he would not explain what he wanted, and besides he didn't remember how all of the code he wrote worked anyway so I would just have to spend more time studying his masterpiece and stepping through it in the debugger.
Being accountable to my team, I insisted that we needed to spend the scheduled hour on him actually explaining what he wanted. He started yelling and hung up. I had to explain to management that I could figure out how to make his "framework" work, but it would take longer and there was no guarantee that when it was done it would magically converge on whatever he was imagining. We totally blew that deadline.
When the .NET work was done, I got sucked into another part of the same project where they were writing massive 500 line SQL stored procedures that no one could understand. They would write a dozen before sending any to QA, then find out that there was a scenario or two not accounted for, and rewrite them all. And repeat. And repeat. Eventually it consisted of, one again, copying and pasting existing procedures into new ones.
At one point one dev asked me to help him test his procedure. I said sure, tell me the scenarios for which I needed to test. He didn't know. My question was the equivalent of asking, "Tell me what you think your code does," and he couldn't answer it. If the guy who wrote it doesn't know what it does right after he wrote it and you certainly can't tell by reading it, and there's dozens of these procedures, all the same but slightly different, how is anyone ever going to read them in a month or a year? What happens when someone needs to change them? What happens when someone finds another defect, and there are going to be a ton of them?
It's a nightmare. Why interview me with all sorts of questions about my dev skills if the plan is to have me copy and paste stuff and carefully avoid applying anything that I know?
The people are all nice except for their evil XEB (Xenophobe Expert Beginner) EA who has no business writing a line of code, ever, and certainly shouldn't be reviewing it.
I've tried to keep my sanity by answering stackoverflow questions once in a while and sometimes turning evil things I was forced to do into constructive blog posts to which I cannot link to preserve my anonymity. I feel like I've taken a six-month detour from software development to shovel crap. Never again. Lesson learned. Next time they're not interviewing me. I'm interviewing them. I'm a professional.9 -
interview today
me: and can you tell me a little bit more about your development process? e.g. an example dev cycle from reqs to testing and review...?
senior dev interviewing me:
*gives frustrated/annoyed "why tf are you asking these?" look*
So, uh, we don't really use testing for these projects cuz it would make it harder to refactor later.
(and responded nothing else on the topic)
I left shortly after that.9 -
So at this startup i was single iOS dude age 34, android had 1.5 dudes, one older, one you ger. That 0.5 younger was tech director, really good, so they churned for two guys. Millenial, nice guy, never making conflict, just being sleazebag.
Nobody explained to boss why iOS was always late with features, even when i complained. So i got help, 10 months later, project was unpolished but stable, codewise. Now i interview and hire a guy, age 27, who was all yeah dude no problem, and that being my first interview, i fell under his friendly appearance. I ignored a fact that he didn’t know 90% of stuff i was asking him, because he was so friendly and outgoing and we will do anything attitude.
The guy knew very little, was childish and irresponisble. He showed at work at noon. He started telling me what to do, his senior collegue who started the project. He argued about everything that i would tell him. So i spent three to four hours a day charting with him, because we were in different cities. He had two uears of experence, but he was below junior level. And he refused any of my advices for learning in free time. No, he said, thats my free time, you will not tell me what to do. Well, how do you plan on being better, i asked. He said, i learn by doing. But, since he was at his job only six hours a day, instead of eight, and since he was productive only for 2, i guess he was lazy.
He would deliver a UI he would make, without business logic, and tell it is done. Then clients would call me and ask why text fields are not saved..
This all took me month to understand. I lost time, i lost trust, and soon he was fired.
But, soon i was fired also, replaced by another two devs who i had interviewd and formed a team. I was discarded as trash, just like that. I have even worked overtime to catch up with android guys, unpaid.
Took me year to recover mentally from this.
Lessons learned: be objective when interviewing. Job is business, not friendship, trust no one, keep neutral on work. Leave honesty for someone else, honesty will be used against you. Never criticize two girls in office who disturb developers by talking about sex and dicks all the time, dressed sexy, they are girlfriends of people ranked above you. Leave code perfection for your projects.3 -
Project manager, who i've complained in the past is neglecting critical things that he doesn't want to do, decided today to cancel our weekly planning meeting, to have the below conversation with me 1:1. Its very long, but anyone who has the will to get through it ... please tell me it's not just me. I'm so bewildered and angry.
Side note: His solution to the planning meeting not taking place ... to just not have one and asked everyone to figure it out themselves offline, with no guidance on priorities.
Conversation:
PM: I need to talk to you about some of phrasing you use during collaboration. It's coming across slightly offensive, or angry or something like that.
Me: ok, can you give me an example?
PM: The ticket I opened yesterday, where you closed it with a comment something along the lines of "as discussed several times before, this is an issue with library X, can't be fixed until Y ...".
"As discussed several times" comes across aggressive.
Me: Ok, fair enough, I get quite frustrated when we are under a crunch, working long hours, and I have to keep debugging or responding to the same tickets over and over. I mean, like we do need to solve this problem, I don't think its fair that we just keep ignoring this.
PM: See this is the problem, you never told me.
Me: ... told you what?
PM: That this is a known issue and not to test it.
Me: ..... i'm sorry ..... I did, that was the comment, this is the 4th ticket i've closed about it.
PM: Right but when you sent me this app, you never said "don't test this".
Me: But I told you that, the last 3 times that it won't be in until feature X, which you know is next month.
PM: No, you need to tell me on each internal release what not to test.
Me: But we release multiple times per week internally. Do you really need me to write a big list of "still broken, still broken, still broken, still broken"?
PM: Yes, how else will I know?
Me: This is documented, the last QA contractor we had work for us, wrote a lot of this down. Its in other tickets that are still open, or notes on test cases etc. You were tagged in all of these too. Can you not read those? and not test them unless I say I've fixed them?
PM: No, i'm only filling for QA until we hire a full time. Thats QA's job to read those and maintain those documents.
Me: So you want me to document for you every single release, whats already documented in a different place?
PM: ok we'll come back to this. Speaking of hiring QA. You left a comment on the excel spreadsheet questioning my decision, publicly, thats not ok.
Me: When I asked why my top pick was rejected?
PM: Yes. Its great that you are involved in this, but I have to work closely with this person and I said no, is that not enough?
Me: Well you asked me to participate, reviewing resumes's and interviewing people. And I also have to work extremely close with this person.
PM: Are you doubting my ability to interview or filter people?
Me: ..... well a little bit yeah. You asked me to interview your top pick after you interviewed her and thought she was great. She was very under qualified. And the second resume you picked was missing 50% of the requirements we asked for ... given those two didn't go well, I do think its fair to ask why my top pick was rejected? ... even just to know the reason?
PM: Could you not have asked publicly? face to face?
Me: you tagged me on a google sheet, asking me to review a resume, and rather than tag you back on 2 rows below ... you want me to wait 4 days to ask you at our next face to face? (which you just cancelled for this meeting)
PM: That would have been more appropriate
Me: ..... i'm sorry, i don't want to be rude but thats ridiculous and very nit pick-y. You asked my opinion on one row, I asked yours on another. To say theres anything wrong with that is ridiculous
PM: Well we are going to call another team meeting and discuss all this face to face then, because this isn't working. We need to jump to this other call now, lets leave it here.5 -
Why is the interviewing process becoming worse over the years?
About 2 years ago I applied for a company and got into 2 interviews: one with the hr to see if I am bsing them and one with the tech people, to be sure I am not using buzzwords without context. Pretty straightforward, could be done in a single interview IMHO, but it's making me waste max 2 weeks.
Fast forward to one year ago: 1 interview with the hr, 1 interview with the tech people, 1 interview with CEO (why? Just.. why?)
Fast forward to today: 1 interview with hr, 1 interview with tech people, 1 interview with the CEO (again... why?), 1 coding assignment which "it's only going to take a couple of hours" and punctually has either poorly documented APIs to rely on or has trick questions/points. So "it takes a couple of hours", but if you want to pass it you need to spend a day on it... (and let's add that they may be using old docker versions so if it doesn't work cause they are using docker 1.0 and it fails too bad, you lost time for nothing, we are not trying to solve it, you just don't pass!).
Not kidding the last assignment I took and dropped required: external API, testing, don't use CSS libraries and make your own CSS, you must use TS and it was supposed to take "3 hours max".
My question is: why? Why is the interviewing process slowly becoming less of a: "I understand that your code may not be perfect for us but that you are a human being able to reason and adapt your code to our standards" and more of a: "You must do everything PERFECTLY and we don't give a sh*t about your time, start giving us your free time and then we see if we want you."
I just keep giving up after I analyze the assignments, cause a part of my brain thinks that if this is the way a professional relationship starts it's too easy to foresee weekend shifts and lots of overtime cause some manager thinks that "come on, it just takes a couple of hours!"10 -
Stuxnet's job quest part 3:
(P1: https://devrant.com/rants/1573298/)
(P2: https://devrant.com/rants/1583743/)
(TLDR for the two parts: I'm interviewing for a job at the tech support center at my uni. Had a phone interview last week, questions like they asked below.)
So they called the me Wednesday and asked to set up a face to face interview. I go in on Wednesday for the interview.
What kind of questions should I expect? Similar to the same ones asked during a phone interview, such as:
• If you could be anyone, who and why?
• What do you know about us?
• Steps you'd take to troubleshoot issues?
• Explain a virus to a technologically illiterate person.
Or are the face to face questions more in depth and I should prepare a bit more?2 -
My dumbass fucked up a good interview by looking down on the company I was interviewing for unintentionally (:
They outsourced the "core" finance code to a 3rd party B2B provider and I was like "oooooooooh so y'all are only a wrapper? That explains why you didnt do super-crazy background check on me hahaha"
I ended up sounding suspicious af :'v8 -
Hey, you, my new colleague, you are annoying. I have reviewed your PR and left about 50 comments on your mess. I even explained to you why half of your code is shit in a very polite way. I have explained why you have to rewrite that and even how to do that in the best way possible. Result? Half of the code is gone, it works as before but without the overhead.
Now you're annoying cuz I have to go again on conventions and best practices. I totally understand that you've been doing it differently and throwing buzz words at me won't help. Just stop and do it as it's needed in this project, don't reinvent the wheel only because you can.
You know what? Fuck it! I'll approve all your PRs, anyway I am leaving soon. There is no benefit for me to teach you stuff. You're one of those guys that I voted against in interviewing process. But guess what? My manager decided to hire you anyway! Ha! I rarely vote NO and you were a one of those...
Your confidence doesn't impress me. That works on people that have no clue on what you are doing. Your just average at best, not a superstar.
Fuck it, you're on your own now!1 -
Years ago, I would go on forever with my personal projects. I got so much stuff done I almost couldn't believe it. Today, I just can't. My mental health the last 2 or so years has made me lose interest in everything and i can't even describe how much I hate it. What are you supposed to do when a recruiter asks you why you haven't done much the past 2 years? Say you had mental health problems? Sure they're not allowed to discriminate because of mental health concerns, but they do. I feel like I have to lie on the US disability form, no matter how minor the problem is for the company and little it affects my work ethic. But then, when I'm late more than most because I barely slept or couldn't will myself to get up in the morning, now i can't explain myself.
If anyone here does recruiting or interviewing, please realize that happy face we show at an interview is sometimes a mask for deeper problems we feel we can't admit because we won't be hired. I hate that terrible events made my already inbalanced neurotransmitters worse, but that doesn't mean I will be a worse employee. Please look at me for my skills and enthusiasm for software engineering. That one detail shouldn't be what makes you say no.1