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Comment by ozim | Hacker News Reader

I don't hate selective interview process.

I hate it when interviewer is an asshole. Somehow in my experience companies that have 'Leetcode' or that kind of thing in process have interviewer that is an asshole.

If someone thinks he is better than me just because he is in a position to ask questions, well that leaves me frustrated for the rest of the day after interview.

It is specially frustrating when you already have the experience, I am now almost 10 years and a senior dev and I cannot really put up with it.

When I was a junior trying to find any job I was not offended at all, but I still remember all bad interviews.

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Yes, completely agree with this. There's so many bad interviewers out there, and sadly many are really arrogant too.

However, in my experience, most interviewers are not like that. But even one bad interviewer leaves a really foul taste.

Everybody hates to be in front of an asshole no matter the context. Care to elaborate specific things you wish interviewers didn't do?

Context: I do conduct a fair amount of technical interviews and it can be quite awkward to be in front of an engineer with arguably more experience but that struggles to write a correct solution to a relatively simple problem.

Worst was being actively aggressive in their tone shooting questions and approach "well you have an engineering degree, we will see about that". Then there were quite some dismissive with sighing when not getting answers they like to hear.

They could keep it to themselves and go back to their colleagues and nag about "what a waste of time, that guy was".

I am also interviewing people from time to time, but I see it as part of my job not some kind of punishment. So maybe don't push technical colleagues, who are not happy about it, to do it.

> "well you have an engineering degree, we will see about that".

Well this means you dodged a bullet early :) It's better they wasted your time for the interview (couple hours or days of preparing?) than months or years of your time working there.

Yes, bullet possibly dodged but that still makes it frustrating and a time waster. And these types of interviews don’t expose or test on knowledge needed on the actual codebase. I see it as a cockyness contest which I don’t want to be part of.

I am quite happy with that dodged bullet, after that I found job I am working now couple years with satisfaction.

For quick comparison, Wwat's your opinion on fizzbuzz?

I don't mind solving fizzbuzz, I don't mind take home assignments.

They don't know me and besides my CV they have to see that I can write code or see that I can use a computer. I can invest up to 2h into some task if I am switching jobs and offer/company is interesting for me.

For some specialistic roles I don't mind questions about specific technologies, just keep in mind that for example "Web Development" spans so many topics that we might have vastly different experience and questions that you ask or the way you ask them might not connect to my experience.

That is why it should be more of a discussion to try to find out common understanding than grill:quizz, shooting question and 0.5s answer.

Fizzbuzz is laughable, I don't like Leetcode and now that I'm in charge of hiring, I don't do Leetcode.

But fizzbuzz is truly the lowest of the low bars you can pass. You could even do it in a language you have never ever written before.

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