The hiring manager of a small software company gave me a quick brief before handing me off to his technical heavy. "He's hard to get along with, but he's really smart. Oh, and he has two PhDs. He'll tell you that."

I was ushered in. The Guy with Two PhDs (he showed me his business card first, and there were indeed two PhDs on it) asked me:

"What is the simplest way to synchronize two threads?"

I rattled off some synchronization primitives. Semaphore. Critical section. I was ready to do an implementation if he wanted.

"No, the simplest."

I dug around. Interlocked operations? A mutex? A spinlock? I mentioned Dekker's algorithm (it sucks, but it's simple). I dredged up a few more.

"No, I want the SIMPLEST possible way to synchronize two threads. What is it?"

I'd run out. He gave a disgusted snort. The next question wasn't much better: "What's the BEST way to share data between programs?"

"Not sure what you mean by best. How many programs? Is it over the network? Hmm, shared memory and a maybe a signal of some kind?"

"No, the best way!"

This interview did not go well. At the end, Dr. DoublePhd scolded me for dropping out of college and told me to go back to school to finish my degree.

That evening I wrote the hiring manager that Dr. DoublePhd appeared to want the answer "raise interrupt priority" for the thread synchronization question -- which doesn't work on a multiprocessor -- and that I had no idea what the heck he was asking for on the other questions.

I didn't add that even the awful questions I was being asked could have been productive interview fodder in the hands of a good interviewer, but that in the hands of a terrible person they were destroying that company's ability to hire.

Turns out that I didn't need to add that last bit. A few months later the hiring manager emailed me, saying that they had fired Dr. DoublePhd and would I consider interviewing again? I politely declined.

I never found out the BEST way to share data between programs. In fact, I'm still looking. I think we all are.