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Comment by smcl | Hacker News Reader

How do they react to being told that? I don’t imagine many companies are prepared to rework their interviews on the fly like that, so my naive guess would be that they continue with the interview and proceed to offer the original salary they planned to

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Few years ago I went to an interview at EA for some infrastructure engineering job. And the technical person/director conducting the interview asked me some FizzBuzz questions. I provoked him by saying: "let's take 30 minutes you and me and see who can write more FizzBuzz variants and more performant." He replied he doesn't have time for bullshit. I asked him why he assumed that I had time for bullshit? And that was the end of the interview.

The previous answer he disliked was to the question of what would I do if something happens and he is not available for me to ask him to take a decision. He expected that I'll fire him a mail. But instead the answer was that I will assume the responsibility and take the decision myself.

After the interview I was glad I did not work for them.

My reading of your story is that you decided during an interview that it wasn’t a good fit (totally fair!) and then responded to that situation by rudely provoking your interviewer. If you think that’s an appropriate response in a work setting I would suggest you work on your interpersonal skills.

Your coworkers have feelings and you want them to have positive feelings towards you since that makes it easier to work together. Deliberate rudeness kinda breaks that.

I am not rude to people. I want people to like me. I do respect people. One thing I don't tolerate, though, is being treated poorly.

By that point I was looking to terminate the interview. Looking retrospectively, I should just have stand up and thank them for their time. That person rubbed me in the wrong way and I couldn't support the belittling.

Nah, some of these manager types are a little too full of themselves and could use a reality check. He did them a favor. If enough people do this, maybe late one night this manager may start to wonder if there may be a point. If we all smile and nod things will never change.

It's been a while since I interviewed but that second one has always come up for me, and I find it exceedingly horrible.

Why can't the business just say "the policy is that you email a manager/call another manager/assume responsibility" and that's the end of it? Getting quizzed on the "correct" answer to their business policies is absurd.

It's perfectly reasonable for interviewers to ask FizzBuzz type questions. Many candidates can't answer them, so it's a good quick filter.

I'm not surprised he didn't have time for your bullshit.

I agree that other question is stupid. Clearly it depends on what the something is. He shouldn't expect an email for every decision so either he's a crazy micromanager or there's no valid answer.

I've just told numerous companies that I won't do it, and they don't care, because they're just trying to fill seats and the sellers market isn't what some people make it out to be.

I am not searching for work. The recruiters are reaching out to me. And many companies are not trying to whiteboard me.

I am searching for work, but these are largely asked by recruiters of me. It usually goes 0.5) Call with recruiter 1) coding test 2) call with 1 - 3 other people 3) Call with CTO or something 4) usually there's some other call

I've started saying no to these though

When I was searching for jobs I got the best offers from companies that didn't require code interviews nor they required too many meetings.

Well, that gives me all the more reason to try and continue to avoid these tasks. It is genuinely distressing though how many mediocre companies are adopting these horrific interview chains. More often than not starting with some multi-hour coding task before speaking with anyone worth speaking to. It's pretty bad.

I had someone hiring a web/app dev position and they had me make a 2D platformer game for a coding task... I still have no idea why.. It was some education startup trying to find someone to write socket code. They were really nice but by the end of it I wasn't super stoked on coding tasks.

>How do they react to being told that? They tell me that this is how things work for their company. Which means I do not have to waste my time with them.

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