Hacker News Reader

Comment by ericbarrett | Hacker News Reader

I still recall an interview I did at a recently public company in New York, for a DevOps position. 4/5 of the interviews went sailingly, with heavy emphasis on networking, scripting, and AWS knowledge. Then the lead engineer sailed in, five minutes late. He gave me an algorithm question straight from the Google playbook (I don't remember the question, sadly), then after I asked for a few minutes to ponder, proceeded to smirk and interrupt me every 30 seconds to ask if I needed help. In between he was chatting on his phone with the audible keybord ticks enabled.

View on HN

This happened to me at a recent Google interview. It was the last interview of 5 and the guy gave me a gnarly graph problem. I was trying to wrap my head around it, but he kept interrupting me and giving me unwanted help. I ended up getting writer's block and just mentally shutdown because he wouldn't let me have time to think. He ended the interview early because of poor performance.

It made me feel like I didn't know anything and was very embarassing. It also changed my outlook on Google, and I'll never interview with them again.

That’s rough. But sounds like an unpleasant work environment so at least you short-circuited that!

What an ass. I wish there was a way to report bad interviewers.

Maybe some tech media company will do hidden camera interviews and publish a scathing rebuke of the practice.

> I wish there was a way to report bad interviewers.

You can always tell the recruiter/coordinator. It's just tricky because you don't want to burn bridges, doing it before you hear back could be read as you asking for a do-over, doing it after could come across as bitter.

We are hiring at my company. We ALWAYS value feedback. Last week we heard someone had a bad experience and the feedback was taken seriously, and without resentment.

If you have a good or bad experience, PLEASE consider telling the recruiter know.

Recruiters don’t care. I’ve had some of the rudest interviews recently and complained to the recruiter and they completely ignored me.

Depends on the recruiter and their relationship to the company.

Some companies will ask for feedback after the interview and there's sites like Glassdoor.

The last place I did interviews at, we'd bring all interviewers into a quick debrief meeting and talk about whether to give the candidate an offer (going off the notes we took during the sessions). It was pretty obvious if someone had a particularly bad session and could be weighted against other peoples' input

Unfortunately it can be really hit and miss

there’s a site in Russian, ebanoe.it (translated: f*cked IT) which does exactly that!

You can (and should) report to glassdoor. At least forewarn other poor souls.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com