I treat interviews as a two way street hence the word "inter" and it definitely behooves both sides to be on best behaviour.
You'd think that an industry full of analysts and theorists would have understood the game theory of interviews by now?
Earlier this year, I had an interview with a fairly serious company which shall not be named. They'd sent a mass email on LinkedIn a couple of weeks earlier, so that was my contact with them. After a chat with their in-house recruiter, they asked me to do a couple of tests, one a simple server application, one an intermediate-complexity SQL query. I'm willing to say that my SQL is competent, but it's not a focus for me, so while I got the idea, my query didn't actually work. The recruiter told me that it would be a good idea to be ready to explain why, and how I would fix it, for the technical interview. I rustled up a couple of acquaintances with better SQL than I, we worked through it, I knew what I'd done wrong and was ready to discuss it.
Technical interview came, on Zoom, and it was a car crash. There were two interviewers, one was on time, one was late - the late one was also only on audio, and it turns out mixing one audio-only interviewer with one on video was a bad idea. They mostly asked me about my background and experience for about half an hour, then ended the interview - never asked about my tests, didn't go into anything technical at all.
I didn't hear anything back, so I pinged the recruiter a week later, only for him to tell me he wasn't working there anymore, but he'd pass on a message for me. I then pinged the one other person I'd had any actual contact with at the company, the HR/admin who'd setup the Zoom call, to be told "we will not go for further process as rejected by hiring team."
I was pretty unimpressed.
What irks me is that the real ones like the people on this forum are losing to the fake ones like the bozos on that call
I have some interview horror stories bro but seriously it really boils down to basic game theory how do we get it so wrong?
But I mean wow exactly the same scenario -- hit it off with the recruiter, their engineering team is a shitshow, recruiter leaves, HR tells you suck it
Definitely not you, it's them but the injury of being rejected is added to the insult that it's a band of fools doing it.. think of it as dodging a bullet
You know in some hiphop tunes where they say they love their haters?
Think about how many bullets you've dodged on account of your haters and be grateful to them.. It's twisted but it's true
I'm trying court controversy as you might be able to tell
I've toyed with the idea of starting a blog but I suffer in that I can't write unless it's to someone.. Whenever I try writing for writing's sake it simply dries up I can't explain it
Do you feel like having a virtual cup of coffee or tea one of these days? I'd be very interested to learn your story and compare battle scars so to speak
I'm actually trying to write a book that captures the entire human condition with respect to corporacy and software professionalism but so far all I really have is a cover page
To be completely honest, I've been brought on interviews myself for this reason... in a sea of fucking business guys, I ended up being the person from engineering they wanted on the interviews.
There are are deep sociological undercurrents to all this behaviour but people who ought to know better are too busy denying the evidence