Comment by vsc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vsc | Hacker News Reader

Some five years ago, I was having a phone interview for a company that were looking for people specializing in embedded programming with solid knowledge of OS internals and assembly. It seemed a great fit for me as that was what I have been doing since the start of my professional career.

As soon as the phone call started, the interviewer asked a puzzle question which had absolutely nothing to do with what I would eventually have to do if I got the offer. Bemused, I promptly solved the puzzle. He went on to ask three more puzzles after that. I solved each one of them. Now, it had already been 20 minutes into the interview and not one relevent question had been asked. I was getting a bit edgy.

He then went on to ask me textbook questions like difference between a process and a thread, types of memory management and so on.

It was one hour into the interview and he hadn't asked meaningful question that could justify the lofty requirements they had mentioned of their desirable candidate in the Job description.

When after around 1 hour, he asked me another puzzle, I politely asked him the relevence of that question with respect to the job. He told me that since he was the one interviewing me, he got to decide what was relevent and what was not.

I told him that I would like to end the interview right there. He protested. I hung up.

If I was really pissed of id have written to the CEO and HR director pointing out that there procedures needed "some improvement"

I almost did this after a disastrous interview at AKQA a while back.

Unless you were offered the position and declined it that would always be ascribed to sour grapes. Regardless of merit.

No Gross incompetence and interviewer wearing such a soiled and scruffy t-shirt I would not use to do the gardening.

I think this interviewer was not that bad actually. He checked your problem solving skills, and he ensured you knows some textbook basics. That's fine. Thats what we do too: In the first interview ensure the candidate satifies the minimum requirements, and is a problem solver.

You are getting downvoted, but I agree. A first phone _screening_ is meant to discard candidates that are clearly not a good fit for the role. Lots of small technical questions are a good way to go about it.

Once you bring the candidate onsite you can ask deeper and more open questions. A phone is simply not a good medium for this.

I think that the scope of the interview should have been more explicit in such a case - up front, ideally: "this is a first-level interview, I expect it to take an hour and a half; if you're successful, we will get to the specifics in the next one." Without an introduction, an hour of general quizzes would seem excessive to me.

OTOH, if the recruiter reacted to this expectations mismatch with an equivalent of "no explanations are given", I would have bailed, too: the interview is a two-way street, and both sides are interviewing - "do I want to work in such a company culture as evidenced by the recruiter"?

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