alt Hacker NewsThe worst job interview I ever had
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I fail to recall the exact wording of the discussion topics, but they were, in fact, non-technical — covering such lovely topics as the hardest day of my life, my biggest life challenges, and other similar “trauma-baiting” questions.
Ha, I don't think anyone who asks these questions expects that you'll respond in a fully unfiltered way... These kinds of questions are part and parcel of non-tech interview processes.
You can redirect with some subtlety "Well, my hardest ever day at work was..." to avoid talking about dead babies or whatever. Your interviewer doesn't get to look over your whole life history and determine whether your /truthfully/ chose the actual hardest ever day. So really it's a chance for you to say "Here's a [big] challenge I once faced, and here's how I survived/overcame it."
I was excited, it was a game company, and I'd wanted to get back into games - or more specifically, game engines - for a few years. The tech of this particular company was interesting, an in-house engine developed by wunderkind, of course, and they'd invited me for an interview because I had done a fair bit of low-level work, which would be handy for their rough edges. Apparently.
Half way through the interview, I had an epiphany. I really didn't want to work there. It was cultural, it just wasn't going to fit.
I didn't waste any more time. Half-way through a white-board challenge, I put down the marker and said, plainly, "okay, I've seen enough, I don't want to work here - thanks and let me not waste any more of your time", picked up my coat and left.
It wasn't a bad interview. It wasn't a terrible one. Nor was it because of the whiteboard question, or anything like that.
I just didn't like the guys. That's all it was. And I couldn't stand the idea of working for them - just the way the interview proceeded. I don't need to give details.
It was really the only time I ever got up mid-interview and left.
I've been working as a dev for over twenty years now and have had my fair share of interviews. The very worst I ever had was about six months ago.
I'd had a fantastic initial interview, it seemed like a perfect fit and interesting tech. Overlapped a lot with some work I'd been doing recently. They made it sound like my experience was a great match and they were exited for me to move forward. I was the most excited I've ever been after a job interview.
The second interview a couple days later was a one-on-one with the CTO. After about five minutes of pretty friendly get-to-know-you chitchat he asks if I have any questions about the position. I ask about what my day to day would look like and he replies "I don't know, and that's the problem. I don't like to lead people on, I'll be honest I don't see a position for you here."
It was such a sudden slap in the face that my brain just completely shut off. I kind of just stammered out an "Oh... Um... Thank you for your time"
I didn't get to talk about my experience ... at all. Not a single mention of my twenty years of across multiple tech stacks my resume doesn't even begin to scratch. I've never been judged so quickly or so blindly.
Later that day, out of sheer frustration I email him back trying to explain that I'd felt like I didn't get a chance to talk about myself and all the ways I'd felt like I was a great fit based on the previous interview and how my experience applied.
I never heard anything back.
Would be funny if the interviewer wrote the exact same blog post; "I had the worst candidate interview today, I asked him a simple ice-breaker question before getting into more technical stuff, and he just went off about his family and relationships for an hour; weirdest interview I ever gave."
Let me preface this by saying, I know this might be a privileged take. However, I've had some bad interview experiences but one thing I have never had happen and I never will do is cross the "just business"/"personal" line with anyone I may or am working with.
> hardest day of my life, my biggest life challenges, and other similar “trauma-baiting” questions.
I would take these types of questions as "from a professional standpoint". If the interviewer corrected and wanted personal answers, the interview would be over.
My worst interview was at Uber (their security team).
The screening and technical interviews on site were all fine and dandy. At the end of the onsite interviews I spoke with the director in charge of the team. I asked some general questions like, "What's the team's work-life balance like?"
He chuckled and said something like they work 60+ hour works. I looked at him and said flatly, "Yeah, I'm not doing that."
The HR person called me after the onsites and was completely puzzled. She said she never seen a candidate pass technicals and not get an offer. She suggested sending me to another team (I declined).
I have a lot of interaction with mental health professionals, due to an organization in which I participate. Have, for the last 45 years.
Many, many of them are "Doctor, heal thyself" type folks. Definitely non-boring people. I am quite sure of this, for reasons that I won't go into, here.
Sorry it didn't work out, but you dodged a bullet. Take it from me.
There is, and should be, a red flag for these situations. No make that RED flag. If you go into an interview that leaves you feeling the least bit helpless or at someone's mercy then run screaming. Not politely, not quietly. Just say to calmly to the person that you find the situation abusive. It is. As you go out, if you see anyone or have a chance to talk to anyone, just tell them you found that your interviewer to be personally abusive. That you will not be willing to take the position if it is offered, that you will share you perception with others around you and expect an apology.
Then fall down and appreciate that you did not end up in that situation. And tell everyone you know not to apply or work there.
Yikes. Good thing you didn't wind up there.
The furthest I've gone in these jazz style culture interviews is asking people what they do outside of work for fun. This was for fully remote async positions. And it was important to know you had other stuff going on because the mental/personal health risk in failing at remote work is massive and life altering.
If, through wherever that discussion went, I wasn't 100% sure that you could stand on your own feet and wouldn't sink into the abyss, it was impossible to move forward. It was a tough line to walk sometimes because you don't want to pry personally. But that doesn't appear to be a universal opinion, it turns out.
Earlier this year I was told I failed an interview because when asked why I wanted to join a company, my answer "could apply to other companies in the same stage of life." They apparently required me to be _uniquely_ interested in their company. There were other oddities about their interview process.
Some interviewers just want to feel special.
I had an interview many years ago, that wasn't nearly as traumatic, but the interviewer asked me about my failures like 4 different ways.
- Tell me about a time you made a professional mistake. - Tell me about your biggest failure. - Tell me when you last shipped a bug. - Tell me when you took down production.
Never asked me about my accomplishments, or the positives. I'm prepared for being asked about making mistakes, and have a few examples ready to give depending on the job I'm interviewing for, but to get asked so many times in a row was just deflating.
I'm glad I didn't get that job.
I would've ended the interview. "I don't want to waste any more of your time. It's clear to me I won't be a good fit here. Thank you for the consideration." <end call>
Truth is, most people who interview people have no idea how to do it. I know because I've done hundreds and nobody ever trained me or explained to me how to do it properly. Over the years I've seen so many people on both sides of the table that I developed a method and I got semi-functional at it but so many people doing interviews shouldn't that bad experiences should be almost expected by now.
I can share mine. It was a job interview with one of the fastest growing companies. They were expanding sales positions in APEC region, specifically Korea. I am not really into sales, but I thought okay because it was such a big opportunity to work for this company.
I got three rounds of interviews including technical ones, then I had an interview with my potential team lead. The first thing he asked was about my MBTI personality test, which I hate and didn't pay much attention to learn mine. It seemed every encounter in Korea began with this MBTI test, but common in a job interview? I honestly answered him that I don't know my MBTI and just described my personalities in general. Then he started describing his MBTI and told me that I may not be the best fit with him because this and that.
A few days after, I got an email "... sorry". I don't want to believe that his MBTI question attributed a lot to this decision.
> Even if you hire a cracked engineer, it’s probably not gonna be a good experience all-around if you can’t make a human connection.
"Cracked engineer" is throwing me, but maybe I've just never seen the word cracked used this way before. Should it be "crack", like "crack team"?
Beats my worst interview. For some reason I mentioned that I like reading. The guy then demanded to list the last ten books I read. I just named ten random books that I had read at some point in my life, even in childhood. Pretty bizarre. Glad I didn’t get that job.
> covering such lovely topics as the hardest day of my life, my biggest life challenges, and other similar “trauma-baiting” questions.
> talking about failed relationships, family struggles, and interpersonal challenges in previous work environments.
I think that's an interpretation that wasn't necessary (though I agree they're terrible and risky interview questions). I'd stick to hard challenges is my professional life, hard problems I had to solve, etc. My personal life is none of their business.
And I think there's the possibility you may have been rejected for sharing too much. But I agree that kind of question does invite sharing too much.
A hiring manager asked me a question like those. I said: "sorry I'm not prepared, I don't remember from the top of my head." Right before that interview I was a solo founder. He said something like: "ok, so you just focus on the work?" "Yes." I got the job.
I think the author was reading too much into these questions. I bet these people came up with random questions they thought were deep, especially coming from a mental health lens, but struck a nerve in the author. They essentially weren't prepared for the raw human experience that was shared here.
I think regardless of whatever you face during an interview, true mastery is to let your humanity at the door and pull up a facade. If you cannot do it in that context, you dodged a bullet imho.. you wouldn't be able to recognize yourself a few years down the line working there with them daily.
I've met the same type interview recently, but not on the phone, it's a online web forms. I just write those not that important and positive memories, because I don't trust them from the start. Also, on the next step of the form, there's a statement shows they will use AI to analyze my personality. I feel uncomfortable and told them I don't like their way of interview and just end it.
After reading your blog : I would say : interview depend totally on candidate on how he/she wants to drive, its never like an QnA, unless you are giving a HR round. its like : you say something : other person asks more about it : you explain more. and this is how an interview is driven.
The feeling you expressed is a true feeling of a candidate after the interview : but you are thinking that you did everything best : I would suggest to think from interviewer's shoes as well : how you gave interview : if you are someone taking interview : and candidate gave this responses : would you hire him or not
if not then what could he/she do better...
Reflect like this...
It’s kinda ironic that after interviewing with a mental health startup, you ended up so emotionally disturbed that you might now need some actual mental health support to tackle the thoughts it brought up. I’m sorry you had to go through that.
I had an eerily similar situation in a behavioral interview I had with a company where I had a very strong internal referral from a very senior person. I didn't have any time at all to prepare for the interview and was super stressed out that week because of a cascade of work and personal problems all hitting me at once. In hindsight I probably should have asked for the interview to be postponed by a couple of weeks.
In short, I hadn't prepared at all for the interview loop, so I didn't have any of the standard responses "ready to go" for the behavioral interview. We ended up meandering into a bunch of stuff from my personal life, and I didn't have the presence of mind to course-correct it myself. It didn't help that the interviewer actively encouraged me to keep talking about the personal non-work experiences. I got the impression that the interviewer was self-deluded into thinking that they could do some kind of psychological evaluation of me, even though they clearly (in hindsight) had no formal education or training in doing that sort of thing.
Anyway, same story. After a few days, generic rejection letter, and no more communications. I can only imagine my interview loop feedback must have been horrific to overcome what I am certain was a strong internal referral by a very senior and well-respected employee at said company who I had worked with closely for several years (and he'd sung my praises at our previous company many a time when giving perf feedback). I keep replaying the behavioral interview in my mind and realize I must have come across really awkwardly to the hiring manager. In the end I felt much like the author of this blog post did, personally rather than professionally rejected.
I'm resolved no longer suffering pseudo-psychological behavioral interviews. If I get any questions that I feel cross the line between professional and personal, I'll firmly respond that I do not feel comfortable discussing non-work-related issues in a job interview.
This is hazing, and OP is right to be upset. They were put into a Catch-22 by the interviewer and I see no reason to believe that was accidental.
I see a lot of replies that accuse OP of oversharing, and that's bullshit. In any job interview, the expectation is that you answer questions to the best of your ability. If "I'm not comfortable answering that" is an acceptable answer, that is an exception to the norm and it should be made clear ahead of time.
My worst job interview ever - in-house creative team at telecom company in downtown Chicago.
I walk into a darkened cubicle farm, down to the only lit corner office for a 'lunch interview'.
Interviewer is sitting at their desk eating a hot pocket on a paper plate.
Didn't even offer me any.
First interview I walked out of.
Not the last.
I had one job, where at the very end of the process there was a multi-hour evaluation by a psychologist / consultant they used. Went over my full life history, school, jobs, etc.
It was all disclosed up front, so no surprises. Not really that bad.
Sounds like a behavioral interview that silicon valley sometimes uses - the questions are designed to ascertain how you deal with difficulty, stress, and certain situations which they absolutely can't legally ask about directly - they are looking for you to discuss challenging times where you succeeded by working harder, doing more than peers, etc. It's not about shaming you, and understanding what they are looking for and why is key - they want people who stick with them through difficult times that they anticipate having.
For interview questions like these, they can only tease about what they are really after - finding employees who "go the extra mile" or "stay late" or "don't give up in the face of adversity". They are looking for you to find evidence of these patterns to corroborate your story. If they drove you to the answer they were after, it wouldn't be a passing score in their interview summary write-up.
Are you quite sure it was a real business and not just some weirdo pretending to be a business for fun?
I've had that kind of interview. I kept avoiding the questions because it's not their business. He kept asking. I didn't get the job but that's fine.
I've always worked with people I don't mesh with. We fight with each other. We even yell sometimes. But that's ok. We don't need to be a family and in fact I feel major ick at the thought (weird polyamory shit) - they're gross. But they are competent and consistently bring us more customers.
You dodged a bullet my fren.
Name and shame company: Canonical
They make us write essays and life stories and reject in 24hrs.
Felt the exact same frustration.
One thing I've done in the past when interviewing candidates is to create a hypothetical situation where the candidate doesn't know how to proceed, like some difficult technical issue. I'd also tell the candidate that their manager and peers are all unavailable. Then, I'd ask how they'd go about trying to resolve the issue and proceed. Honestly, I was never looking for the correct resolution. Rather, I was just looking that the candidate had some basic process for troubleshooting and figuring stuff out on their own. If someone said, "I'd search Stack Overflow until I found the solution.", that was usually good enough. However, all too often, candidates just couldn't understand what was being asked, like they independent troubleshooting was an unrealistic skillset. I'd say, "Just walk me through how you'd approach solving this issue." Some candidates would fully melt down, saying, "I don't know. I can't proceed."
Boy oh boy, the shenanigans I saw when it comes to job interviews are enough to write a book, not even joking, it was easier to start a business than getting hired as an employee, because building a business you talk with mature, goal oriented adults, who only care about what value that business will add. In jobs, that’s the last they care about nowadays, from morons in the HR, to power hungry managers, to contracts that I would say borderline exploitation with minimum regulations to protect the employees.
One job they got offended to ask for a negotiation, despite it was them who changed the original job posting. Another job took 4 interviews (plus one redundant, as it seems they forgot they had that interview with me) over 4 months only to send a generic “thank you” email. Another job, the interviewer seems was hostile just to have the interview. Another one the questions in the first interview were stupid, supposedly technical but extremely shallow, like tabs or spaces.. yeah, I got asked that! Another one refused to change a word in the contract because it’s a “template”, it felt like applying to a service rather than a job. And many other stories, like a company sent me a ticket for an interview in another country, only to find the team is disconnected from what the recruiter wants, they paid for the trip tho.
European companies seem slightly better than North American ones, but for some reasons bringing up the money talk early is a taboo topic? Had few calls and noticed that, they got shocked asking such question, even though it’s great to know so we don’t waste our time.
I never negotiated money, funny how that sounds, but it isn’t my no1 priority, all I wanted is a mature workplace and working with goal oriented people where nothing else matters that much than delivering the results, it seems it was impossible.
had a similar unsolicited psych evaluation interview back in 2017 in twitter. There was a VP (or maybe director), who started with "go back in history and tell me what your boss at position X would say about you", and this kept happening for an hour.
I was asked what my hobbies are during an interview once and it made me believe they were just looking for a personality hire or a pretty face.
I came here expecting it was a yet another story about Canonical.
>covering such lovely topics as the hardest day of my life, my biggest life challenges, and other similar “trauma-baiting” questions.
And this was for a mental health startup!? Please name-and-shame them. Awful.
These are essentially sociopath screens where they expect you to memorize some STAR stories and regurgitate them on demand. And I don't mean screen out.
I have a two way tie for the worst interviews I've ever had, for very different reasons.
First, in 2023 I interviewed for a startup as a lead architect.
They had me do some virtual whiteboard stuff, and so I was drawing rectangles and cylinders and mentioning things like "database" and "message queues" as generically as I could.
They would interrupt me and say stuff like "Which message queue? Where do you download that?". The interview went on for a long time, with many bizarrely-specific questions for a whiteboard interview, but I figured that it was just their way to make sure that candidates didn't bullshit them by handwaving away important details.
They did make me an offer a few days later, but not for as much as I wanted. That's fine, no hard feelings over that.
But then a week later the CEO emails me asking for technical help on a question. I was on the train when I got it. I don't remember the exact question but it was something to do with RabbitMQ and Redis, and it was pretty easy, so I just typed out a quick answer to my phone and replied without even really thinking about it. Then another half-hour later he responds back to my reply asking for more detail on everything.
After his last reply I sent a response like "I am happy enough to continue this conversation but I'm afraid I will need to start billing the time it takes for me to reply. Give me a call and we can discuss the rate.
He didn't reply.
And then I realized something: this company was using interviews as unpaid consulting. That's why they were asking for bizarrely-specific stuff during the interview, and that's why the CEO was still trying to get free consulting out of me even afterward.
Really pissed me off, and I am very glad I didn't accept their offer. I am generally a person who is happy to help answer technical questions for free [1], but I felt like my trusting nature was kind of weaponized.
---------
Second was last year at a big bank.
I was really excited for this job, so I showed up to the interview in my best (and only) suit, made sure everything looked nice, and had studied for many of the technical questions I thought they were likely to ask the previous night.
Off to a bad start, it was one of the hottest days in NYC of the year, and I sweat a lot by nature, so in combination with the full suit, by the time I got to the building I was already kind of drenched in sweat.
Once I get in, they start giving me some conceptual algorithm questions on the whiteboard. I don't remember the exact question, but I remember they asked the runtime complexity of my solution and I said "Looks like O(n + log m) where n is the length of list A and m is the length of list B". One of the interviewers very confidently corrects me an says "You got your n and m backward".
I look at the board, go through my solution, and, no, I actually hadn't gotten the variables backward.
I have no idea what you're supposed to do in a situation where you're right and the interviewer is wrong [2], so I just do a trace through my solution and explain that, no, my variables were appropriately assigned. He still confidently "corrected" me again.
At this point I really don't know what I'm supposed to do, because I'm not going to just lie and say "oh you're right", but if I'm wrong, then I do want to know why so I don't repeat the mistake in the future. So I ask him "Ok, let's trace through this again because I really don't think my understanding is wrong here".
It was this bizarre gaslighting experience, because he would agree with every premise of why I thought the answer was O(n + log m), and every reasoning step along the way, but then still insisted I got the answer wrong. I do really know my Big O complexity, I have been doing this for a very long time, so eventually I just said something like "I guess we need to agree to disagree" because my time for that interview was almost up.
Then there was another interview immediately afterward. The interviewer started asking me very specific questions about Java Spring MVC (like about which annotations to use and whatnot)
Now, I don't have Java Spring on my resume, I haven't touched Java Spring in more than a decade, and Java Spring was not in the job listing. I didn't even consider studying Spring MVC because the listing didn't even mention that this would be web-based.
So I tell the guy something like "umm, I don't really know Spring. I know how a web request works so I'm happy to answer conceptual questions on the whiteboard, but I'm afraid I would have to learn the specific syntax".
And he responded "Well this is not a junior role. You shouldn't have to learn."
So of course I get the specific Spring questions wrong, and fine, if they wanted a person who knew Spring, that's ok, even if they should have put that in the job posting.
But then he asked me to, on the whiteboard, design a basic web request where there was a global counter [3]. I use an AtomicLong, which to my understanding is what pretty much every human who writes Java uses for counters.
He asked me why I used an AtomicLong, and I said "because it's what everyone uses, and because it doesn't block and because compare and swap for a small surface area like that is pretty cheap".
The guy then, corrected me, and told me to use a mutex. I said "I don't think a mutex is necessary here, if it's just a counter I think an atomic is fine."
He was very insistent, and told me to rewrite it with a mutex, and at this point I am starting to question my own competence, so I yield and just rewrite it with a ReentrantLock, which he again "corrected" me saying that I should use `synchronized`, and at that I push back and say "no, ReentrantLock is fine".
I left the interview feeling like a moron; I was so sure about this stuff before, but maybe I didn't have the understanding I thought I did.
I'm friends with a few graybeard C and C++ programmers on Discord, so when I got home I told them the questions and asked them how they'd solve them, and they solved the problems in the same way I would have.
Then I realized that this interviewer, who was principal level, didn't know what an atomic was, and I think he also had no idea how to use ReentrantLock, and so when I used them he just assumed I was wrong. Moron.
[1] And that's still true; feel free to email me if you want to geek out about software :)
[2] And it seems like the answer I get for that varies between each person. I'm not sure anyone knows.
[3] With, to be clear, no further arithmetic or anything being applied to it, before someone asks.
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This… was a mistake on both you and the interviewer.
All interview questions - unless it’s impossible to twist your answer to fit this - is scoped to “… at work”. Nobody who asks “tell me about yourself” is asking you to talk about how you met your partner, how many cats you have, or that experience you had, that one time, at band camp. It would be redundant and awkward to literally say “… at work” at the end of every question. It’s totally 100% the intent of the interviewer.
This is interviewing 101 and unless this is your first ever interview I would find it odd, and stop you immediately and say “I meant, worst day at work”. They should’ve done that.
Unless they explicitly and unambiguously say “tell me about the day your mom and dog died in the same day when you found out you had cancer” they mean “tell me about your worst day _at work_.” And even if they ask about the time your dog died (they won’t), they are not asking you “tell me about the worst day you’ve had in your life”. They are asking “tell me about a time you experienced adversity and overcame it, exhibiting problem solving, resilience, and grit AT WORK. (Or - if you are operating in executive mode or you like to live dangerously - some non-work context that maps obviously and unambiguously to a work context).”
You failed the “knows how to interact with people in a professional setting” part of the interview. Or the “this person knows how to interview” part (which generally, but not always, correlates with experience and emotional maturity). Or the “read between the lines” part.
Yeah, inartfully asked questions - but also totally flubbed the answers.
Sorry, chalk it up to you had a bad interview or day or whatever, and never, ever forget the entire thing is scoped to “…. at work”.