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Comment by mountainboot | Hacker News Reader

I interviewed with one of the companies on that list a few years back (noredink). They gave a timed hackerrank style coding question as round one (so I guess technically not a whiteboard). I passed that, then I had an interview with an actual person.

He asked me vague question, like what is architecture, I started to reply with what design tradeoffs I made on the app I was working on. He literally laughed at me, and said that is not architecture. I was shocked that someone would laugh at a candidate but said ok, what does architecture mean to you? He responded, I ask the questions here not you. I immediately ended the interview. Worst interview I have ever had. Every time I see that company brought up, I think back to that experience.

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I've had one such interview go really bad. I am normally a very trusting and confident person, but that interview destroyed me for days. This was for an internship on my first year of uni when I just started learning to code C and C++. The position was for a Junior programmer (which I was).

At some point the interviewer asks which I would choose in a project, C or C++ and reasons why. Basically answered that it depends on the project, but that both languages had their pros and cons, and it all depends. I told him I did not that many projects under my belt at the time.

Interviewer got somewhat pissed off and kept asking me about specific languages constructs which I was not yet familiar with. In a way felt like he was trying to ambush me and make me feel incompetent. I mentioned to him that I was not yet experienced enough to answer these questions, but was eager to learn. Well he did NOT like that either and ended the interview promptly.

It seems like the guy really did not like me (which is fine), but also wanted to turn this interview into some type of power trip ....

Had this been today, I would have politely declined and left. But I was a young and eager cub. Live and learn!

I rarely see it talked about just how much ego plays a part in interviewing. In fact, I'd wager it plays one of the biggest parts of the interview process. If you get even one interviewer that is bitter, unhappy, on a power trip, or otherwise a sociopath, you're not getting hired. Many folks hate interviewing candidates; it can put them in a bad mood. They're going to take it out on you because it's safe.

Ego issues sometimes apply to the interviewee as well. I once had to interview someone that clearly thought the interview process was beneath them. This person answered every question as if it was a stupid endeavor and we should just hire them since it was just obvious how great they were.

What would have been a way to find out s/he had that mindset, before having the interview?

A crystal ball?

All jokes aside he was not foaming at the mouth or unpleasant when we first started the meeting, and I'm not the quickest one to pick up on subtle body language cues. So your guess is as good as mine.

interesting that weren't any "signs" before

What type of signs do you have in mind? Maybe some examples of your own experience will help me understand missed clues.

> Basically answered that it depends on the project ... it all depends

Sounds like a good judgement thing to reply :)

Thank you so much for actually naming the company.

Too many times we read someone's experience, which even if only half true, would be horrifying, yet no indication of who the company was.

Worst interview you ever had, but ending it was one of your best moves. Imagine having to work with someone like that!

Yeah, some interviewers enjoy the interviewee/interviewer power imbalance and like to play with it, as in this case in a sadistic way. I think that he wanted you to guess what he had in mind but when you put him on the spot to give you his definition of architecture he didn't have a solid answer or was afraid you could easily scrutinize him.

It is still a whiteboard question according to the definition on the above mentioned github page - which is correct.

I had the same experience on some vague Postgres question for a Rails job when I was junior. I asked a similar question along the lines of: how often do you use this day to day here?

Similar response.

For many engineering candidates, we ask them to design the data schema for a calendar. I’m sure my employer and the question are not a secret. We have various follow-ons, like handling the wild number of ways meetings can be periodic, exceptions, and so on.

Nobody has ever asked me how often we need to build calendaring software, because I explain right up front that while this is a “toy” question, our core product functionality schedules people, and nearly every feature from a calendar app has some analogue to things we either do, or are asked to do but haven’t prioritized yet.

I think it’s ok to ask “toy” questions, but I also think that there should be a ready answer to the question “Does this have anything at all to do with the job?”

p.s. We don’t ask a question directly about scheduling, for a simple reason: Almost everybody understands the basic idea of a calendar, so it’s a more “level playing field” for candidates to think about calendars than schedules.

Schema is something you work with everyday so that is fair. Even if the particular schema is for a made up problem it's fairly close to reality.

Name and shame the company. It's the best way to get them to change their behaviour.

They did name the company (NoRedInk)

Didn't see that initially.

What does architecture mean to you? He responded, I ask the questions here not you. I immediately ended the interview.

Again, thanks so much for naming the guilty party (NoRedInk) in this case. So that we can firmly add them to our list of companies not to bother engaging with, if this is the kind of behavior we can expect from their interviewing team.

The above anecdotes speaks volumes about the mentality that drives companies like these -- and the "culture fit" they're apparently looking for.

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