Ask HN: What's your funniest hiring interview story?
Funny might be interpreted in both good and bad way.
During the interview I was asked something like, "Can you explain what the LAMP stack is and what each piece does?" I gave my answer but when I got to MySQL I prounced it "My-Sqwill." The interviewer kind of gave me a funny look, chuckled a bit, and said, "Do you mean, 'My-Sequel'?", I gave the excuse I didn't know what the word was because I never heard anyone say it.
I walked out of the interview pretty defeated, but a few days later I heard back and got the job.
A month or so in I was speaking with the interviewer and he said, "Do you know why I hired you? Because you mispronounced 'MySQL' and said you didn't hear anybody say it out loud, but you could still tell me how it worked, what it did, and how to use it. To me that says you were mostly self-taught."
He was right and huge props to the interviewer for recognizing that.
Each of them turned out great, because it was a signal that they "read a lot and learn from it".
This was three different companies over decades. I wish I ran into more people like this, but, as is attested in countless HN stories, as well as elsewhere, the "right schools" networking is really powerful. And this is despite the fact (and I am a graduate of one of the "right schools" myself) that a significant number of those grads aren't great developers either.
Weeks later I heard someone else call SQL "Sequel" and I had enough context there to know they were talking about an SQL database and put it together. I think the person from that first conversation just thought I was a complete fucking moron though.
My teammate was calling a candidate who had submitted their resume. Teammate got their voicemail where the candidate drops the N-Word. To top it off, Teammate was African. Non-plused. Candidate frantically called back apologizing saying it was a joke voice message. A big nope from our side.
A candidate comes in, brings their laptop for the shared screen coding section. Frantically clears all the Asian porn tabs while sharing. When we get to the questions for us part, he asks about the open travel policy and if that can be used to go to Thailand (no, open travel was to our other offices, all in the US). A bit cringy.
Bonus round. Early in my interview experience. Candidate comes in and two of us are going through coding questions with her. Simple stuff. She is woefully not qualified. We reach out to our in-house recruiter (much more experienced than either of us) for help on ending the interview early. Co-interviewer and I step out and go to the kitchen to commiserate on the negative experience. After letting the candidate go, In-House-Recruiter comes over. "Man, I've never seen someone cry so hard at being told it wasn't going to work out." Queue us interviewers feeling gut punched and like total jerks, totally gap faced. In-House-Recruiter laughs and says just kidding, Candidate knew she wasn't qualified and was just interested in trying a dev interview as she was normally a project manager and was perfectly fine and smiling as she left. Man, got us good.
I actually had to re-read it 5 times at the “non-plussed” part, I just assumed the candidate was of African descent before reading the teammate was too. In which case the voicemail recording wouldnt have been a “flag” just not prepped for professional settings. Many people’s voicemail arent whether its a competitive or not.
The combination would have resulted in smiles and nods for that almost distinctly American experience. But I guess it was just some suburban kid of non-African descent that really wanted to use the N-word.
I should be a lawyer what am I doing
So as we're finishing the transaction, he sees my engineering ring and asks about it. Yes, I do software. Hmm, he asks if I could help him out of a jam. He needed someone to add a print function to a Windows NT app. I say sure, I'll take a crack at it. He shows up that weekend with a laptop all set up with a dev env and source code. Figure out how to do GDI printing stuff and get it done. When he picks it up and sees what I did, asks me if I want a job. Worked as Director at that telco spin-off consulting place for years.
Another fun story is how when roommate of mine was interviewing for a company I interned at, I joined them for the interview because it was done over lunch due to scheduling issues. At the end of the day, I drop by their interview room to see who else is around to say hello to. The VP of R&D is there with a job offer in an envelope. I don't know how they expected to be seeing me that day. Good thing though, I was dragging my feet applying for grad job interviews.
In general, I haven't looked for jobs, they find me one way or another (pre LinkedIn). I did once submit an updated resume--after I was hired.
The candidate is a 40-something man with a pretty good resume for the slot.
I start off with small talk.. "Wow, can you believe this weather? I can't remember the last time it was this cold."
He replies, "Is nothing. In Russia is where cold grabs hold of you, deep in bones. Only one thing help."
He reaches into his bag and pulls out an half empty pint bottle of vodka, opens it, takes a pretty decent swig and offers it to me.
"Is that from today??? I ask.
"Yes, very cold this morning."
End of interview.
They take me into this small conference room off of the main floor. It really could only seat two people comfortably but had seats for four. We started to talk about a pairs trading project that I'd done in my spare time when I hear a yelp come off of the floor and then the ear-splitting noise of Bawitdaba by Kid Rock blaring from the desk immediately outside of the conference room.
I can't emphasize enough just how little of a reaction the interviewer had. I paused momentarily and he gave a look to encourage me to continue talking, only now I had to yell. I answered the rest of the question as though we were communicating at a construction site. He then asked a follow-up, only this time he yelled as well. This continued for the approximately four minutes that the song lasted from start to finish, and when it was over we went back to our normal speaking voices. Neither of us ever acknowledged the impromptu Kid Rock concert.
I got the internship and was later offered a full-time position but turned it down to do startup-esque things.
She was watching my eyes the entire time. I realized if I looked down to examine her uniquely proportioned features, I'd fail the interview. It took a lot of will-power to never even glance. She was probably there to test my will-power, since she didn't ask technical questions. (I didn't get the job for reasons not related to anatomy.)
We paused and looked at each other for a minute and then we burst out laughing.
"There are only two hard problems in Computer Science: cache invalidation, and naming things." -- Phil Karlton
I think this version is better, sadly no idea who to attribute it to ... ?
The interviewer asked what I expected as salary. I replied, "I'll accept peanuts to get started in web". A voice then rang out from a random cubicle: "Well that's exactly what they pay here!"
Another time an interviewer asked, "can you work well with difficult people?" Of course that set off a yellow alert in the back of my mind. Unfortunately, it was just after the dot-com crash and I couldn't be picky, so took the job. There was indeed a very good reason they asked that question.
The other two people liked library-style quiet and rarely talked unless necessary for work, and were not sociable. I had a habit of talking to myself, such as grumbling about Microsoft. But, I had to quickly quel that habit. The least annoying guy liked classical music, which was something we had in common and the only non-IT chit-chat I did there. A toast to classical music! (clink clink)
The mail with the link arrived while I was at work. They told me that it is time-limited so I wanted to wait until I got home to be be free of distractions, but I was getting curious.
I though I can log in with another email and take a look at what kind of questions would I get, so being still in the office I logged in using a very old email address I had: 'crazybastard@hotmail.com'. I went through the questions without thinking too much, and finished very quickly.
10 minutes after that I got a call from the recruiter:
- Hey, have you finished the test?
- (What a pain! I though.) No, I'm waiting until I get home after work to do it.
- OK! (hang up)
5 minutes after he called me again:
- Are you lying to me?
- Why would I do that?
- The client told me that some guy called 'crazy bastard' has finished it already, but it wasn't you. Did you give the test to someone else to solve it for you?
- Actually I tested the website, logging in with a different email just to get familiar with it, but I expected to do 'the right one' later when I get home.
- That was a single use link, you only had one chance to do the test!
- Ups! I didn't know that.
- Now the client believes that you were trying to cheat. Sorry I think you fucked up!
- Why would I give it to someone else to do it on my behalf but pretending to be someone called 'crazy bastard' instead of myself? That is the opposite of cheating. Please tell them that I'm sorry for the confusion, tell them the story and that my intention was to prepare as best as I could for the task. Pleeeeease!
- I'll see what I can do...
Later in the day he called me again to tell me that the client though the story was to stupid to consider it cheating, and since I got 90% of the questions correct in half of the time, they wanted to proceed to the next interview round.
We felt bad for her (we were never disrespectful, we just asked questions to the best of our ability. It didn't help that we were just fresh college grads with no real world experience). It is kinda funny if I think about it now.
Edit: Another one, not personal, but happened in a place I worked
The sysadmin team was hiring. The candidate walks in, lists the names of all the servers we had and a whole bunch of other details that only our sysadmins were supposed to know. The candidate had hacked into our network and had leisurely browsed around and made detailed notes. He was hired on the spot and his first task was to plug all the holes that he had used to get into our network.
I swore the shit out of this bastard. He was looking at me like the devil...
15 minutes later, I was outside the reception of the company I was about to get interviewed.
The lady told me to go to the conference room.
Guess who came for the interview? The ASSHOLE!
"oh, you! Hi, bye!"
In the nitty gritty of the interview I found they asked me a lot of javascript questions (okay I thought, maybe they were testing my limits - they were confident in my 'advertised' back end skillset from just reading my CV?).
Turns out the recruiter had put me up for the wrong position, it was front-end and to my credit they were willing to hire me as front-end but I had other interviews for positions I'd prefer.
15 minutes into the interview I hung up. 15 minutes later he tried to call me back on my phone (apparently he took him 30 minutes total to remember I was interviewing). Got an email from the recruiter mentioning a "connection problem during the interview". Then the day after I got another email from that recruiter saying "I wasn't a great fit for the role:.
I think startups really win the #1 spot when it comes to horrible candidate experiences.
In the car we talked, I said I worked remote in CA but would like to try a local job. He said they'd been looking for a Project Lead at their startup, I'd be a shoo-in. I went over, they talked a bit and made an offer.
Turns out it was Mark's biggest customer, they'd been designing their products for 25 years, and its become a multi-year contract for us for a year now and several years to come.
Glad Mark still had my phone number!
BTW I've been using whiteboard interviews for years. I know a lot of people hate them but if you don't use trick questions, let the candidate use whatever language they like, and treat them more as a collaborative effort you can get a good feel for a candidate (i.e. see through nervousness) and give them a chance to see if we are a-holes or not. Think of the whiteboard more like scratch paper. If somebody gets wrapped around the axle on some part you can gently guide them out of the problem and then usually they can find their balance.
A candidate actually replied: "One bit is 0.12 byte"
Still a failure because the ratio is actually 0.125, but I kept going for a few questions, I stopped when they could not explain the difference between a thread and a process...
I had been already waiting about 20 minutes in a boardroom when two guys came. We all introduced and sat down. One guy looked at my resume and after a while said
> "Well, if I had time before this meeting and looked at your resume I'd prepare myself because you're clearly not a junior level developer."
It's worth noting that they had my resume about a week in advance.
"When is it?"
"Now."
Anyway, 10 minutes later, his cell phone rings, presumably a family member, as he looks concerned and very politely asks if he can step out to take it, in case its an emergency. I say, "of course" and I'm just sitting there with nothing to do but stare at the wall.
I didn't want to take out my phone, so I grab the cube and start solving it.
He steps back into the office thanking me just as I'm putting his solved cube back on his desk.
Not the main reason, but I did get offered the job.
- We've got all the answers from you, thank you. Maybe you have some questions for us? Is there anything you'd like to know?
- Yes. How can I get to railway station...