Ask HN: What's the biggest red flag you've encountered during a hiring process? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's the biggest red flag you've encountered during a hiring process?

185 pointsctc24262 comments

I'll start.

A few years back, I was interviewing at a then "hot" startup. At the end of the process, the CTO calls and says they'd like to extend an offer. I was expecting him to walk me through the offer details, when he goes "well, are you going to take it?" I asked about getting some specifics (cash comp, equity, etc.) and he explains that they ask candidates to commit before sharing any details.

I told him that didn't seem like such a great idea, and he assured me that comp wouldn't be an issue, and that they do this to avoid hiring mercenaries. I passed and never looked back.

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I once was interviewing for an internship at a quant firm in Chicago (I was in my Sophomore year I think at UIUC) and my interview went pretty well up to the point of my second-last interview of the day.

Then, I sat down with the VP of engineering, and he opened the interview with "so, what do you think it is we do here?" And I naturally stuttered through a canned answer about how they use arbitrage opportunities in the market to profit off of mis-priced securities, etc. Then he asked me, "but what benefit do we provide? Why is working here good for society?"

I blanked, and didn't answer for about 15 seconds. Then, I tried to start piecing together an answer until he stopped me, told me he had found my Facebook, and wasn't appreciative of my politics (I was moderately lefty in high school, significantly more so now; maybe this conversation is part of why). He had _printouts_ of some posts I had made criticizing George W. Bush, talking about why I thought we should be raising taxes on higher earners, supporting Obamacare, etc. He told me that he didn't think I had the "cojones to stomach the job" (direct quote), and told the recruiter not to bother with the last interview and that I had failed.

I _sobbed_ on the train home; I think it was the worst I had ever felt about an interview in my entire life, and yet looking back at it, I think this was the best possible outcome. Imagine if I had worked for this asshole.

I've worked for companies I don't personally agree with in the past; it's part of living in a society(TM). I am able to hold my nose to a certain extent to make an income for my family (heck, I am currently having to cross picket lines to come to work, which makes me feel icky). But I can't fathom what hell I would have been living under had I gotten and taken that job.

Which firm was this?

I don't remember at this point to be honest, this was like...10 years ago? But this moment is seared in my mind.

I'm curious what the answer was. I've read plenty about how the boutique finance sector is basically a parasite that only benefits a small cohort of already wealthy individuals, would like to hear what the other side has to say.

Right? Like, I tried really hard to prepare a very neutral answer focusing on taking advantage of arbitrage and fixing over- or under-priced securities, which I think is the closest thing to a benefit you could come up with. And that apparently wasn't good enough for this guy.

He was checking if you understand what the actual benefits of trading firms are to the wider market participants. I've never worked in trading and even I know the answer to that: he was looking for a discussion of the value of liquidity and price discovery.

Sounds like you gave an answer that didn't mention that at all, and may have presented the firm as merely taking advantage of other people's mistakes to make profit. Clearly that's not how he saw it, and the VP correctly guessed from your social media that you may not actually have understood the part of the finance industry that you were applying to work for. The question was to check whether you'd actually be enthusiastic about the work you were doing and you did indeed fail it.

This would be like if you turned up at Google and an interviewer said, "What do we do here" and you said "exploit data to profit from people's ignorance" and when they gave you a second chance you couldn't answer.

Frankly you can't get a job at most firms if you can't explain why you think the company should exist.

The answer I get from people working at market makers I’ve talked to is that they provide liquidity (so you can buy or sell a security immediately rather than waiting minutes or hours?) and decrease volatility.

An example is onions futures; see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act and check the onions price history: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WPU01130216/ compared to a commodity where futures trading in common, like corn: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PMAIZMTUSDM where there are price swings but the volatility and frequency of the swings is lower.

I’m a layperson, not involved in finance, but this is the value add I most commonly hear about.

Likewise, this is the answer I generally hear from those folks. IME it's still begging the question - the increased liquidity is still overwhelmingly only meaningful to those already-ultra-rich, unless you subscribe to trickle-down Economics.

This does not sound as value for the society but advantage for the tradesman.

One set of markers of a "good" industry or organization is whether they pay for all the harm they create in society and whether their profits are equal to or below the value they create for society.

For instance, the oil/car industry pays for basically none of the large negative externalities they create. In this case, I hazard that futures industry captures more value than they create. And that value is extracted from other players in the vertical chain, particularly farmers.

futures contracts work somewhat well for farmers. There's a level of certainty provided and they are reducing their risk so that a low price at the end of the season doesn't ruin them (however they also don't profit from a higher price). As a farmer i would likely prefer to sell a certain percentage of my goods with a futures contract so that i can have less risk of financial ruin.

The relationship between futures traders and farmers is pretty much identical to that between any kind of insurance company and its customers - it's a risk arbitrage transaction where the client (farmers in this case) are sacrificing profit in expectation for a flatter outcome curve which in a properly priced market yields higher utility in expectation, since utility as a function of profit is concave for an individual farmer and much closer to linear for a well-capitalized market maker.

I understand the mathematics. The problem is that there is a practical asymmetry of information. Large future traders can invest a lot of resources into getting a much better prediction of future prices, while individual farmers cannot. In such scenarios, it is inevitable that farmers will be exploited by future traders into making bad deals.

You might try examining -- with an open mindset -- a few CFTC Commitments of Traders reports and then see if you feel the same way.

This reasoning seems suspicious. Why would farmers choose to use futures markets if it doesn't benefit them?

That's the benefit they give to their _customer_, which is not the same as a benefit to _society_.

In contrast to the parent post:

When I was an undergrad, I interviewed at a then-very small, now-very-prestigious quant firm. In the last interview or so, I asked the quant head something like, “but what value do you provide to society?”

He said, “we provide liquidity.”

I turned down the job they later offered and went to work at a software company that sells a thing people buy.

I took a look at the two graphs.

I would prefer the price of onions - seems like the price is a lot more stable other than a few points out of the year where it is very high. For those times, I could choose to have a small store of onions or go without.

For the price of corn, if the price is high, chances are it will be high for a while, so I'll have to go without for a while...

What do other people think?

I wonder too. Some things are really non-intuitive.

I really enjoyed "The Rational Optimist" where it explains things like trade, which tends to make everyone wealthy, while generally the people trading think they are both getting the better end of the deal.

I think the value add of the speculative markets is (in theory) that people make predictions of what will be valuable -- if they're right they earn and if not they lose out. In effect, it's market research expressed as bets. That information can have utility but my opinion is that our current setup probably over rewards this sort of work.

I have a friend in a similar business who was honest enough to admit that his impact on society was "likely negative, at best neutral," but it was a comfortable living.

Should have been honest and said "You contribute nothing to society"

I'm sure they already know that, indeed that they actually contribute negatively, which is why you need to be able to 'stomach the job'.

"You're just taking up space."

What a loser. I probably align more with him than you politically, but I don't go around berating internship candidates about it, it's no way for an adult to behave whatever your politics.

Whenever I have shitty experience like that I always think of the James Bond movie Quantum of Solace, there's some part where somebody doesn't deliver and the bad guy loses out, and upon being told he lost something valuable, he says "not as valuable as knowing who to trust". Like you say, it was a bad experience but actually the best possible information you could have gotten.

I asked this exact question ("what is the net benefit of currency arbitrage") and nobody has been able to articulate is.

Stock markets, I can see- they existed and exist to share risk and profit. But shorting and arbitrage, it's much harder for me to understand those.

(and yes, that VP was a sociopath)

Re: shorting. If people who believe a company is undervalued are allowed to trade based on that belief then people who believe a company is overvalued should be allowed to do the same.

Are shorting and longing symmetric? IE, do they influence the market in the same way? They seem much more complicated than straightforward stock purchase and fractional ownership.

Don't know enough to say but I would guess so.

In the generic case:

Longing == buying a share

Shorting == selling a share

I'd add to that and say shorting is typically selling a share that you don't own. Which means you need to borrow it from a broker for a fee. There's a securities lending market which revolves around borrowing and lending shares for these reasons.

Yes, they're symmetric. Shorting is logistically a bit more complex than going long, but that's not an argument against it. After all, buying stocks is itself more complicated than buying land, and buying land is more complicated than renting, etc.

1/ both shorting and arbitrage can and will happen as soon as you let people more or less freely buy and sell things

2/ people do it for their own (expected) personal profit

3/ at the market level, these transactions contribute to price discovery

You could imagine banning currency arbitrage, but then you’d have to at the same time enforce somehow consistent prices on all markets (I.e. literally do the same thing as arbitragers do)

In theory you're making the markets more efficient.

Someone outside of finance exchanging one forex for another could get a more fair rate if their exchange is more efficient due to increased liquidity.

But by the same token, the other side of that trade is getting a less favourable (but still more "fair") rate

Price discovery was brought up, but think about it this way - if Good A is plentiful in Market A and scarce in Market B - prices will be very high in B but cheap in A.

Robber Baron Capitalist comes in and says "hey wait a minute, there's money to be made!"

He starts buying goods in A, then selling them in B.

This is a very, very stupid idea, your 5 year old could have it. So that means as soon as Business A figures it out, B , D, E, and F aren't far behind.

The net for people in Market B is that now they don't pay the previous scarce price, but something closer to Market As, and more people can afford the good. This means that someone does all the work of building out all that logistics for us, simply to exploit the price differential.

I feel like this question fundamentally demonstrates a lack of understanding of what arbitrage actually is. The obvious answer is: Because water seeks its own level.

If there is an imbalance in the market, someone will balance it. That's how it works. Let's say you have two different securities, that both represent the same underlying aspect of the economy. This happens all the time; there are multiple ETFs that represent the same basket of stocks, there are options and futures on those ETFs, including different types of futures that represent the same ETF but at different levels of leverage, there are options on those futures, and so on. All of this exists because there is no reason for them not to—people believe they can make money, reduce risk, or whatever by using these derivative instruments, and maybe they can.

But all of these stocks, funds, and derivatives are valued by one thing, and one thing only: their price on the open market. So, what happens when one of these funds get out of whack with the value of its derivatives, or even the underlying stocks themselves? Remember how we had multiple securities representing the same underlying aspect of the economy? Well, one is now worth more than the other, despite the fact that they represent the same thing. There's an imbalance, and if it gets too far out of balance, people are going to realize, wait, I can just buy 500 shares of SPY and short one ES contract, and that's free money! And that's entirely correct, you can. But the result of doing so is a minor market correction; the price of SPY goes up and the price of ES goes down, and boom, we're back in equilibrium.

So, arbitrage is a necessary and unavoidable aspect of the stock market. You can't have a stock market without arbitrage, because the stock market reflects so many different facets and ways to trade ownership and value of companies. Arbitrage is, in essence, the means by which information flows between various aspects of the market, and it connects them together so they effectively move in lockstep. It is nothing less than the market leveling itself, just as water poured into one side of a swimming pool fills every part of the pool.

> what is the net benefit of currency arbitrage

It means you can actually ask the question "how many dollars is a pound worth" and get a meaningful answer.

If arbitrage wasn't possible for some reason, and it's a natural phenomenon so that would have to involve pretty horrific levels of state-backed control, then the answer would be:

"It's $X in London and heading down, was $Y in New York yesterday and heading up, and $Z in Chicago but you probably can't get an account there because it takes ages and requires special paperwork, and <thousands of additional prices>"

You would then spend the rest of the afternoon attempting to figure out how the hell to do a basic international trade or FX transaction and by the time you'd finished reviewing the prices they'd have all changed again.

Arbitrageurs seek out and correct fixable price disparities, thus enabling you to talk about one global price for a particular type of trade. This has tremendous value for everyone.

Wow, that's a clear abuse of power and position against someone interviewing.

I’d genuinely ask why the fuck he waited for all these rounds to complete if political cojones scan was mandatory for the job. These last Big Men in Power never fail to deliver the most irrational nonsense you’ve never even thought about.

As long as you're not some violent extremist/racist who the hell cares which way do you lean politically? o.O I never once asked a workmate who they vote for. Nor will I.

That's like the devil telling you he won't buy your soul because there's too much light in it.

This comment has a lot of support (and indeed was a shitty interview experience) but the one mentioning the interviewer asking if they voted for Trump due being born in a red state it's crickets. It's ok to be shitty, as long as you do it in a politically correct context.

I should have spotted it but didn't: They took me out skiing one day between interviews (they were courting me pretty hard, and good snow was a selling point for the region) and I met the CEO for the first time on the slopes.

He wore a full motorcycle-style helmet with a mirrored face visor which he refused to open; it was like talking to a member of Daft Punk. It had fake hologram bullet-holes on it.

More importantly, he skied like an asshole: cutting people off, sudden stops or changes in direction without checking if anyone else was coming, cutting ahead in the lift line, stopping to readjust his gloves or whatever directly in the lift exit ramp, shouting at people who he felt were in his way -- just totally self-absorbed and borderline dangerous.

It turned out to match his management style 1000%.

My last CEO (healthcare startup) told me during my interview with them "but you don't look autistic!" and that should have been the end of the conversation there. When people show you who they are, believe them and all that.

....what was the lead up to that statement?

"I'm autistic"

"Oh, you don't seem autistic"

"Hi autistic, I'm dad. "

I've had that answer before... That was a fun but volatile place to work for a summer internship.

"Neither do you brother, could've fooled me"

So the story here is that the CEO's brother is Autistic, and was one of the major inspirations for the company. Being "out" about my disability, I thought it was really cool at the time and mentioned that I'm Autistic, and seeing her embrace her brother as part of the core mission of the company was inspiring.

Like in your other story, the response you got is actually pretty reasonable and you seem to be slightly out of step with what other people are thinking here.

The fashion for high functioning, highly articulate individuals calling themselves "autistic" is relatively new. To the vast majority of people the word autistic means severe disability that requires constant care, involves repetitive stimming motions and often is directly visible via an abnormal facial structure.

In this conventional usage of the term autistic people don't turn up to job interviews and say "Oh your brother is autistic, cool that it inspired you, I'm autistic too!" because they don't turn up to job interviews at all. Depending on how severe her brother's condition is she may well have been quietly offended that you were trying to pass yourself off as having a similar problem.

> The fashion for high functioning, highly articulate individuals calling themselves "autistic" is relatively new

It’s a spectrum, and you don’t know the struggles of the person you’re replying to. Just because someone can mask or play off as high functioning doesn’t mean it’s not a struggle, especially with people making flippant remarks like this - in fact one of the struggles that keep people from being continually employed is that accommodations aren’t taken seriously because people assume that a working mask means they’re trying to make up excuses. Your statement that the “vast majority of people” only equate it with only the most severe disability is based on… what? Almost everyone I know especially in tech have worked with someone on the spectrum.

So the specific framing, since it seems like this matters to you, was that she asked why I was interested in the healthcare space, and I said that I am autistic and have to interact with the American healthcare system, which is doubly hard for me specifically because I'm autistic: the myriad confusing systems you have to interact with just to get your basic healthcare needs in the US are difficult for me because of the number of interpersonal interactions required, and because I am "high functioning" (which, to your point, is a "relatively new label" [it's actually not, but that's not an argument I feel like having right now]) I'm very often not taken seriously when, for example, I have a sensory need during an MRI.

I said that I was appreciative that she wanted to make healthcare better for her brother, because it would help people like me too. And her response, after hearing my story about struggling to navigate the system she claims to want to improve on account of my very real, and sometimes very debilitating, disability, was "but you don't seem disabled." I don't think I'm in the wrong for being offended here. In my mind, It'd be very similar to if I had said that I struggled with the healthcare system due to losing a leg in an accident, and her response was "oh, but I can't see that your leg is missing because this is a zoom call."

The fact that I wasn't, at _that moment_, having a visible need, doesn't negate the existence of a disability that occasionally renders me mute, or makes me so overwhelmed I lash out at the people around me, or causes me actual physical pain. And mind you, I _was_ stimming; out of necessity many autistic folks who work in professional environments find stims that are relatively invisible on camera or in person in order to help us get through social interactions without losing our minds. It wasn't visible to her, but that doesn't change the reality of my story and my situation.

why aren't their positive traits that you see 99% of the time “who they really are”

just a question about the phrase, not this particular person

how does this give any predictive insight aside from you thinking they're hiding the rest of the time

In my experience, people who are dicks once in an environment where it was totally uncalled for are often hiding much more under the surface. It's like the old adage - one cockroach on the floor equals a hundred in the wall.

More people should do this! One time I advised people to out themselves in interviews--there are literal empirical reasons to do this--and I cannot describe how chewed out I got. Normalize neurodivergence!

THANK YOU. I make it a priority to introduce myself, and my disability, during my first 1:1 with every manager I have; it makes a huge difference. The conversation usually goes like:

- I am autistic

- I don't need any particular accommodations

- I will attempt to overcommunicate what I'm doing so that I can get your help if I rabbit hole on something (one of my common tendencies)

- I tend to need mental health days slightly more often than usual

- I will tell people I work with when I'm comfortable doing so, but this isn't a secret and don't feel bad if you accidentally out me.

I've never had a manager be anything but extremely appreciative to receive this context. Normalize talking about your needs, even if you don't have a diagnosed neurodivergence!

hilarious.

> mirrored face visor which he refused to open

> he skied like an asshole: cutting people off, sudden stops or changes

It sounds like Mr. Bean was mistaken as a CEO and was just rolling with it.

That's almost worth naming names, just to prevent anyone else from suffering a similar fate. Plus, I'm really curious who it was.

Ha! Sorry. This was decades ago, anyway. Right after the sort-of-botched IPO he drove off in his shiny new Ferrari never to be seen again (like, seriously, that exit is the last mention I can find of him online. He made out much better than the employees, I’ll tell you that much)

> He made out much better than the employees, I’ll tell you that much

They always do.

Before you started talking about how he skied like an asshole. I was thinking, you where being interviewed by The Stig lmao

Years ago I was interviewing for a software engineering role. At the end of one of the interviews I asked how they liked working there. And the interviewer caught me off-guard with "it kind of sucks". She went on to explain that the company recently promoted a bunch of youngsters into VP roles through a combination of nepotism and early start dates, and they didn't know what they were doing. I thanked her and politely bowed out of the process when the hiring manager reached out to me with the next steps.

This was Nvidia in 2006 and their stock is up about 200x since then.

Nvidia, like many other tech companies, has many people/teams/departments/division. Is very hard to get a clear view of the world from a single point.

Who knows, maybe if you joined you would have hated it too, or loved it ! The story you shared is likely shared by many other companies that went through hyper-growth

TLDR: Stuff is hard!

NVidia was truly a spectacular opportunity. So was Microsoft, Databricks, etc. I picked a dud, and didn't realize it until it was too late (just now). Question is .. what are the obvious winners today, and for the next 10 years?

Some opportunities I missed but they didn't go anywhere: Docker, Qualcomm.

Consumer Devices is a general dud I think. Software and data is where it is at. I dunno?

Robotics

Any company to recommend in the domain? You are right that robotics has a good future. Just really capital intensive and hard to make money in the short term. I have a friend who is a founder in the space and man .. what a long slog.

BioTech :P

Really? Tell me more, please.

We will tell you in 15 days...

COVID-23?

On your masks, Ready, GO!

I remember losing a candidate to databricks around 2012/2013. I thought he was making a bad decision. Hoo-boy was I wrong.

Right, now he’s got really valuable Paper money that they offer to buy back at a very steep discount. Anyhow wouldn’t feel bad about missing that one!

Thats really funny because nobody says this when the interviewer is giving red flags that arent blunt like that

Even in other posts here, people are like “whew I wouldnt want to work for a company where an unrelated recruiter and hiring manager did something nonstandard” as if it was a predictor of their team

If "promotes people to upper management who don't deserve it" was a disqualifier then you would be left with exactly zero companies to work for. Ultimately you have to be able to tell whether it's a systemic problem or just one disgruntled employee.

You're right of course. However, interviewing is a game of limited information and I consider all signal I get from the company (after all, they're doing the same with me). I think a few things had to be broken in order for an employee to feel strongly this way, end up in the interviewing panel, and feel comfortable to share their views.

Nowadays it may be easier somewhat to get some insight into inner workings, but in 2006 there was no Blind, Glassdoor, etc. Sometimes the positive signals outweigh the negative. In my case they did not.

I too have seen a lot of people in upper management who shouldn’t be there. I wonder if this means that nobody really deserves the respect and power we show to upper management.

They’re just people like everyone else, subject to the same psychological failings as anyone.

Giving people a lot of power over other people might just be a recipe for disaster.

Of course I’ve met some compelling leaders and I’ve seen them replaced with total fools so maybe there are people who are better at it than others. (Eric Schmidt springs to mind as an example of the former and Sundar whatever his name is an example of the latter) Maybe it’s just hard to tell the difference. Or maybe our selection process is flawed.

That's really odd, because I remember asking someone who had interviewed a lot and she said that kind of question is almost worthless. Everyone is where they want to be, so of course they like working there. They have also achieved their position, so they think it is a great place to work.

The question comes from a self-selecting population.

I prefer to ask something like, “What’s one thing you love, and what’s one thing you’d change tomorrow if you could?”

Everybody would improve something, and it can give you insight into actual day-to-day challenges.

If they say, “Nothing,” either it’s the one rare perfect workplace or they are too afraid or checked out to give a real answer.

Either way it’s informative.

cafeteria is a safe answer there.

(sort of like: "my one weakness is I work TOO hard!")

Especially when WFH

Yeah, this is definitely a much better formulation and one I've used in more recent interviews.

> Everyone is where they want to be, so of course they like working there.

This reminds me of the joke where the economist sees the $100 bill on the ground and says if it were real, someone would have grabbed it already. It assumes that the market is perfectly efficient when it is not. There are tons of reasons why someone would work at one job when they would prefer another job:

Maybe the local job market is poor, but the worker can't move.

Maybe their spouse has a medical condition that requires really good health insurance, and moving to another job would lose that coverage.

Maybe the worker has been job-hopping too much and has to stay at this job for another year or whatever.

etc., etc.

When I was 19 and naive, I was interviewed for a desperately-needed summer job selling dictionaries door-to-door. The head interviewer wore a three-piece suit, gold watch, and an expensive haircut. He told me that as a demonstration of my independence and maturity, he wanted a commitment from me right then and there that I would accept the job and sign all the paperwork if he made an offer. If I wanted to go home and think about it or discuss it with my parents, that meant I was "immature" and didn't have the right stuff for the job.

Fortunately I had the presense of mind to see through that and walked out. When I got back to school, I found out that a friend of mine had worked for the same company selling Bibles in rural Tennessee; he hated it so much that he quit after a couple of weeks. He didn't make any money because the contract he had signed required that he stay for the entire summer before seeing a penny.

Made me think of this sketch: https://archive.org/details/w-bob-david-the-salesman

That contract sounds illegal, but I suppose that's another reason to recruit teenagers who don't know about labor rights (tbf IANAL and I could be wrong).

Yeah, I seem to recall the US having some big dust up about people working and not getting paid for it?

Back in 2014, I was an intern at a major tech company doing software testing for $13.25/hr. I was about to finish my CS degree and my internship was ending, so I was applying for software engineering jobs.

During a phone screen at one company, they asked my salary expectations, and I said $60K. They asked what I was currently making, and I (naively) answered the $13.25/hr. They said they could do $16/hr, and that I should consider that generous, as I shouldn't expect to get more than 15% more when getting a new job. Also, they would expect 50-55 hrs/week of work.

I noped out. Yeah, I needed work, but I wasn't desperate.

After looking at Glassdoor, I got the impression that this company was preying on desperate new college grads, underpaying the shit out of them while expecting the world so they don't have time to apply for better jobs. One guy, in his review, said that when asked about work-life balance, the manager said "We believe in work-life integration." He noped out just as quick.

Never tell them what you're currently on, just what you want.

I wonder what would happen if you countered the question with, "what were you paying the last guy?"

Yeah, though I consider lying a moral issue, it’s like no one should expect an honest answer to a deceptive question.

I always have an answer that is locked and loaded 20-40% more than what I’m actually making and generally ask for about 20% more than that. I’ve bumped my pay over $100k in 5 years doing that. Keep in mind I also refuse to work for FAANG-y companies.

I tell them how much money it would cost to get me to leave my current job as my salary. Then they beat that by 5-15% on their own recognizance and everyone is happy.

I've thought about doing this when random recruiters e-mail me.

"I'm pretty happy where I am, but if you can offer me at least $X/year, I'm interested."

I imagine most recruiters would say they can't match that. Some would scold me for just looking for a paycheck, as if that's not what literally everybody is doing.

When I was younger and during interview people asked how much I earn right now I learned to answer this : "my contract prohibits be from sharing this information", it was always working.

I went through the full deal with an algorithmic trading firm. I blazed through the interviews and given the history I have in finance was able to finish a large on-site assignment with an hour to spare. I was told that I was the first to ever finish it. Second to last step was submitting an official college transcript as part of their background check process. Last step was talking to the CEO.

Now, I flunked out of college, but I spent 7 years on Wall St., and 12 years with MAGMA firms. College was over 20 years ago. I made this clear up front and the recruiter told me it wasn't a problem.

The call with the CEO was two hours of "why did you get a C in Martian and Lunar Geology?" and "Why did you get an F in Intro to Viticulture and Enology?" After that I get the offer (it was all cash and about $150k more than my current role even with equity factored in). I refused and told the recruiter that it was because I was drug through the coals like that. The recruiter's response was "yeah, I know, we keep asking him not to do that."

They called every couple years asking me to reconsider. Always a new recruiter. And every time I told them exactly why I refused and asked if that policy had changed. Every time I was told it hadn't and the call ended.

The policy of asking why you flunked college?

Should a company not ask you that? Why are you hung up on flunking martian geology?

I don't understand

Not the OP, but it's extremely rude and unprofessional. Nitpicking a guy's college transcripts from 20 years ago? Come the fuck on. His experience and skills should have been enough, asking those dumbass questions is an insult, one that he didn't have to take.

you're right, I totally missed that detail, i didn't realise it was from 20 years ago.

That is totally bizarre.

And to be fair, yes, asking why I flunked out is a perfectly valid question, even after 20 years.

The reason I give is that I had some family issues that required me take a break. During that time I started working in tech, and after a few years I never saw the need to go back. The real reason was the grades, which was caused by an undiagnosed neural-divergent issue.

But this was different. It was an hour and half of going course by course down the list, and asking exactly why I got that specific grade for that specific class if it was less than an A (including a few that were A-). I didn't flunk Martial Geology, but still was asked to explain that grade. Do you remember what grade you got in a freshman physics class 20 years ago, much less why it was that grade and not higher?

In the end I'm glad that I got an offer, glad it was higher than I was making, and glad I rejected it. It was proof to myself that I have morals that can't be bought. Not for that price at least.

if someone wanted to see my university grades after this time i'd confusedly ask: excuse me, i thought this was a senior position not a student internship.

just as frustrating as wanting code samples. none of my work of the past decade is public, and it's not mine to share. all i can show is ancient stuff

I remember i had an interesting project on a resume, and one guy really drilled down into the details of it. (I think this is an interviewing technique)

At some point, really deep down the rabbit hole, I remember saying, "I don't actually recall, it WAS over 15 years ago"

That CEO and Mark Shuttleworth must be trading notes.

It is okay to bring up something like flunking out of school 20 years ago but why drill someone on it?

It may be a way of filtering out older workers without having a policy as such.

That is totally possible, but I recognize this as an interrogation tactic.

Your resume is a showcase of your best accomplishments. Short of clearance-level interviews with your family and friends, people in C-level positions ask for transcripts from 20 years ago because it's the only intelligence concerning your failures they can get their hands on (your previous employers won't ever attest on-record that you sucked).

So with that in hand, think about how you're going to feel when the only things they want to talk about are topics you were struggling to understand while your brain was still underdeveloped. He's big-dicking you to ensure your submission in any ongoing business relationship, and probably lowball you on salary just because he likes taking things from people after humiliating them.

Asking about failures in past jobs is fair game-- you are free to disclose that much at your discretion. Asking for a transcript itself isn't even that weird either, just to verify you went to the school you said you did. But grilling you about failures from 20 years ago is someone engaging in emotional abuse; they're desperate to have something to hold over you.

I like to assume that people have the best (if sometimes misguided) intentions, and I have an alternate theory.

This firm clearly put a huge amount of stock in education. They were 4 blocks from a major CS university, and a significant number of staff were recent grads. I suspect the CEO had a masters which only adds credence to their belief in the education system.

On top of that, they knew how much I was making ($x), how much I was asking for ($x + $50,000), and ended up offering me more ($x + $150,000). That's not the kind of thing you do when you're trying to dissuade someone from taking a job with you. Especially when the offer is 100% cash (company was private and they offered no equity).

I strongly suspect that this person came from a bubble of education, and just didn't understand how you could be a poor student and then successful outside of academia.

I've had similar red flags when interviewed by management with masters or PhD's. They seem to think they would be tainting themselves by hiring someone obviously dumb, in their view.

I don't understand why the way you cared manifested in that way

My dad was overly sensitive about not having a degree too, I wonder if its a generational thing

From what I can tell, this nonstandard question would have no bearing on the work experience and never come up again, but you are acting like it would

Given that the info we have is that the CEO's interview involved a silly amount of questioning about college grades that were two decades old, I think that what anyone could tell is not that it's never going to come up again, but that it was way more important to that workplace than most others. You could reasonably be concerned that it would affect how you'd be viewed by the management, and affect your opportunities there.

Doubt. I looked at this post and all the other top level posts in this thread and cant reasonably assume any of these reindeer games would be predictive of anything on the job.

Oh here's another one - I was interviewing at Google and got an offer, and I decided to ask for a meeting with the HM because the other job I was considering at the time gave me an interview with the HM that was really enlightening and made me feel good about taking the other job over Google. I figured it would be a good way to directly compare the two jobs since the comp, etc. were similar.

The moment I met the HM I wanted to leave. He was brusque, felt like our entire meeting was a waste of time, and was, quote, surprised that they had finally filled his job req. I tried to brush this off as him having a bad day, and sat down for coffee with him. We started having a stilted conversation in which I mentioned that I had just adopted a dog, and his first response was, "oh god, I _hate_ dogs, please never bring it to work."

That was kind of the end of that. Sure, maybe it's petty, but I was getting bucketfuls of bad vibes from this guy.

That totally sucks. When I was at Google I was asked to do a few of these interviews, and from my perspective I loved them. They counted towards good citizenship, but you didn't have to do a write-up. Literally all you had to do was present a realistic view of the company, positives and negatives. And have a good vibe.

I was always honest with candidates and tried to give them advice to navigate the hiring process and the first few weeks of work. I told them what work would realistically be like. Some joined, some didn't, but I like to think I gave them a good perspective on the company in a non-judging, non-interview environment.

I was summoned to a nondescript industrial building, found my way upstairs and wound up in a grubby room posing as a lobby. I was seated on a low futon and had several discussions with my knees nearly level with my ears. The conversations were overly casual but with some oddly specific IT security questions. I seriously contemplated walking out of what was clearly an amateurish, shoestring operation.

Nope... I have worked there 20 years so far.

My first job was to evict the former sysadmin, and within the first 90 days I was relocating the whole company, building out the new IT infrastructure.

So in the spirit of the recent post about Charlie Munger killing a lot of pilots I would suggest not judging the company solely by its lobby. Make a list of real deal-breakers and consider overlooking the rest.

> So in the spirit of the recent post about Charlie Munger killing a lot of pilots

Mind linking this? The search box isn't giving me any recent results that look right.

Suppose I Wanted to Kill a Lot of Pilots https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37209309

If you ever contemplate a career change, even if never, please consider writing.

Thanks! I consider writing well to be a differentiating skill, especially in IT.

Too late I already trained the model on your writing style

Is the futon still there? If not, work it into the story somehow, near the end.

I worked at a place that had a futon, but they got rid of it because if people slept on it, the company would get a reputation for being a sweatshop.

Canonical. Their desktop experience had already lost its shine (and, effing snaps), but I made the mistake of believing that they might be cool anyway, without doing my research.

Intelligence test? Story about high school? Reflex test? The actual red flag for me was their final admission that they require an unpaid internship in the form of "community participation."

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/tkc348/my_interview_...

I had the same experience and lost respect for Canonical. Kind of makes me want to avoid using Ubuntu as well.

Knowing this stuff makes me feel weird about people who still ended up working there. Idealism? Very good pay?

Judging from data on levels.fyi, definitely not the latter.

Debian has already largely caught up with Canonical. Their peak desktop experience is imho 16.04. Unless you need to update every half year, Debian is almost same as LTS Ubuntu, but no snaps.

Switched from Ubuntu to Debian 12 last month and couldn't be happier. Barely noticed any downsides.

The CEO had pictures of his racing Porsches all over his office, but the bathrooms looked like they hadn't been painted in 20 years. Told me all I needed to know about where the priorities were, so I bailed.

Interviewed with a defense contractor. I had three “ins” at the company and was basically interviewing to check them out because I was about 90% sure I’d get an offer.

I was about to burn out at my current job at the time. Too much stress, too many hours, too much crazy. At this interview, every one I talked to talked about how “exciting” and “cutting edge” everything they were doing was. “We barely finish a prototype before they’ve changed the design and we have to start over without testing the last one.” “It’s very fast paced, stuff is changing all the time.” “We work over some. Last week, I put in 72 hours, but that’s not typical.” “A dozen companies have tried to solve this problem, but we think we’ve finally figured it out.” And so on. And it was a weapon technology, which I had ethical qualms about.

I called them back and withdrew my application. The HR guy said he was preparing my offer. I told him I didn’t want to see it. My biggest fear was that it would be enough money to tempt me to take the job and I would have been miserable.

Six months later, half of everyone there was laid off. They never got the big problem solved. They lost several contracts. Dodged that bullet (pun intended).

"So what might have caused this strange new syndrome in our trading platform?" "Perhaps one of the market participants was doing something different?" "Nope."

Then literally two hours of me stumbling through possible technical issues to do with the internals of a system I had never seen. Even though I had thought I was being considered for my maths rather than my computer skills.

"Well just so you know, it turned out that one of the guys trading on the platform was doing something different." Laughing politely, "but you told me...". "Oh well no that's not what I would consider a market participant."

I call my laughter polite but I suspect it had an edge to it. Anyway he immediately walked me out saying, "we'll send you feedback." The feedback was that I had asked for too much money. (I hadn't asked for anything.)

I was relocating from California to NY/NJ and packed in a bunch of interviews over one day. They were all startups, and the first two or three were great. Very professional companies and people.

The last one, the guy was twenty minutes late for an hour interview. I had a hard stop to get to JFK, so I was getting anxious and ready to walk. He finally comes gets me. The place is tiny and everyone is squeezed into two large tables, one being a large round dining room table. No one made a sound, and it seemed like a sweatshop.

Not kidding, we maybe spent about ten minutes talking about my experience, and he took the remaining 20-30 minutes talking about how he was likely going to leave soon to do a Masters in PolySci. Guy was smug as hell. He basically said I should expect an offer, which was great to hear, but seeing the place, and vetting me only after really ten minutes, I thought that was a huge red flag. I withdrew the next day when I got back home.

They sold to a major newspaper about 8 months later. Not sure what the terms were or if it would have been a quick payout for me, but my gut says that would have been a miserable 8 months. The job I took instead turned out to be four years at a great company. It ultimately failed, but I was managed by a sharp boss who I greatly respected, and colleagues who many ended up being great friends.

Interviewed with a company that implemented their own healthcare insurance. That is, if you have a medical issue, you tell them what it is, they OK a doctor visit, then you pay for it, bring the receipt and they will reimburse you as per their policies.

Also their compensation comprised a fixed salary and a "guaranteed" bonus of about 20%, which together added up to the market rate. However the bonus wasn't mentioned in the written contract.

It was a high-tech hardware company of several dozen people with their own clean-room manufacturing facilities. Interesting tech, good product, but the CFO felt like a grifter and the CEO looked like a retired gangster, with mannerisms to match, who spent all interview telling how much business prowess he had.

That was really bizarre.

I had a weird interview with a gambling company. The CEO looked like a bookie and gave off some very strange vibes. During the interview he told me how if I took the job I'd never be able to visit the US again (because the company had US customers, illegally). I didn't take the job, but later on one of their management team was on a flight to visit their server farm somewhere in the Caribbean. The flight got diverted to a US airport and the manager was arrested and spent some time in prison, so the CEO wasn't joking!

That's... surprisingly honest.

"You're not allowed to work on your own projects when you're not at work"

The biggest red flag ever

I can understand having this policy in place for projects that directly compete with a company. Working on a search engine at home when you're working on search at Google, or working on a banking product for farmers when you do the same thing at work could be a direct conflict of interest and incentivize unethical or possibly even criminal behavior. I think setting some guidelines in place for that kind of thing is reasonable.

But some companies take this to an extreme.

I was working on a niche clothing brand at home in my spare time for example when I wanted to work for a gaming startup. They were giving me such a repulsively hard time about my side project even though the clothing had literally nothing conceivably close to the company's business model.

It's so stupid because companies should try and hire people that have diverse experiences and are working hard to achieve something.

If it had nothing to do with their business, why did you even tell them about your side project? I would've just kept my mouth shut.

You can do this and I know of people who have done this. In virtually all cases, it's never going to come up.

But, for companies that are batshit anal about side-projects, they're going to make you sign some onerous contract and have management that are assholes about this kind of thing.

What happens in the event that you "hit the lottery" and some side-project becomes a big deal worth a lot of money? Somebody from your company is eventually going to find out about it: maybe from a public interview or from public records. If they put 2 + 2 together about when you built this and figure out that they can file some legal claim to it, you're in a mess of a legal situation that you don't need to be in.

Safer to put your cards on the table and make sure there's nothing in an employment agreement that puts something you really care about at risk.

The percentage of companies that are very anal about side-projects isn't substantial. They need you more than you need them and it's safer to be honest and look elsewhere for employment.

Electronic Arts!

Was told exactly the same, verbatim, followed by "besides you won't have time to work on them anyways".

Apple has this policy too

in some states, isn't this against the law?

like texas and california diametrically opposed (I think)

texas: we own you

california: you can start a startup in your garage while working for someone else

I had an interview for a large well-known bank software internship maybe 15 years ago. One interview was a role-play in which I was attending a meeting in lieu of my boss with someone from another division of the bank to discuss a behind-schedule project.

Role-play starts and this guy storms in, slams the door and starts shouting about how the software department are useless and how are we going to proceed. At one point he yelled that without his department we wouldn't have money to keep the lights on.

In retrospect, I'm sure this was a lot of fun for him and it might have been a good filter but I also am more than happy that I did not proceed to the next round if this is what they wanted to show me about their culture.

This makes me think of those interviews where the code the candidate figures out is integrated into the product.

Wonder if your responses helped them practice for real meetings. :)

Remember that every company, like every interviewer, is trying to put their best foot forward during the interview process.

You can never expect them to be on any better behavior, so expect this as your top bar for your relationship and you'll not have many surprises.

As a corollary, that means anything that looks like a red flag is probably an iceberg.

I interviewed many years ago at a web agency in Melbourne.

I was coming from contract work for the federal government, preceded by salary work for a state government - both of which allowed me to work flexible hours, eg start at 10, finish at 7 or what have you.

I asked the guy if they supported flexible working hours (this was a year or so before I started working fully remote) - their office was literally the other side of the city to my house so commuting during non peak hours would be a huge benefit for me.

His response: "well we have a standup meeting every day at 8am which you must attend, and we don't allow overtime so you need to finish by 5. But you can take your lunch break any time you want".

They offered me the position a couple of days later and I never bothered to respond.

If your working conditions make government employment look flexible, there's something very wrong with your company.

Sounds like the option to work earlier was there? e.g. start at 6 head home at 3

I don't remember every detail of the conversation but as I remember it, part of it was related to the office being open basically for the "expected" hours.

Very long take-home assignments, I was interviewing with a startup for a backend position. they gave me 5 days to build a Cinema Ticket Reservation API, this by itself was long since it required managing 5 to 6 tables with it corresponding crud and business logic of each one (and also tests) but apart from that they wanted to see complex data structures, design patterns, caches strategies, be able to "scale", a design diagram, and as a bonus if I wanted add a CI/CD pipeline.

I did only the core app, but none of the others stuffs beacase that looked like way to much unpaid work just to "prove" my ablities.

I should have known better becase they rejected me because the project was to simple, wasn't going to "scale", and did'n used any complex design patterns, a day an a half of work wasted.

This last search I had one like that. I wish I had done the bare minimum like you did. Instead I spent a weekish on this thing. They were suitably impressed and wanted to do an interview, after which I could expect on offer. A day before the interview I was told the pay for the position was about half what I was asking. Insanely for the skill set they were looking for. Mind you in the HR screen they had asked about expected compensation and I had been direct and upfront in my expectations, so it's not like they didn't know. Just decided to waste my time because they could.

Is this a "Coupon*" company based out of India ?

I got the opposite. They requested a Infra design with one page of explanations and one page for the diagram, it was actually two designs, an onprem version and a cloud version.

Physically not enough room to put in everything with explanations.

I got the impression I failed because I didn't put in an WAF but then the recruiter said they'd decided not to hire anybody so I suspect they were not all that serious.

I think that the take home assignment really helped. It showed you what they value in code, and how that’s not aligned with what you value

I once interviewed for a financial company. They were looking for an experienced developer who could easily onboard onto a project. During the second meeting with the HR representative, he asked me to meet with the guy I was going to work with, and proceeded to give me context on why they were hiring someone. It turns out the guy I was supposed to meet was the sole person working on a project which managers were piling on pressure to get done in spite of being astonishingly understaffed and overworked. Why were they looking to hire another guy? Well that developer rage-quit on the spot, and left the country without noticein protest because of being systematically overworked and underpaid.

It turned out the company actually couldn't afford to lose him, and started addressing his concerns. He reconsidered staying after they gave him a huge raise and promised to hire someone to help him.

If the soviet-parade-in-red-square number of red flags wasn't enough, the recruiter proceeded to say they were looking for someone who loved the job and wasn't seeking to work for money.

Circa 2000, I was invited for a lunch interview.

I walk into a completely dark and empty cubicle space, one lit office in the back.

Lunch meant the interviewer ate a Hot Pocket off a paper plate as we talked.

Didn’t even offer me any.

First interview I walked out of.

>Didn’t even offer me any.

I hope that middle bite was frozen.

Ha I've had more than one of these (nothing this bad, but still). Turns out for a lot of recruiters "lunch interview" means interview that is scheduled during lunch, not interview in which lunch is provided.

And here I was thinking a lunch interview would evaluate your masticative abilities...

I had a day of interviews once, and I remember the person who interviewed me during lunchtime. Wvery time I would get a fork near my mouth I would have to put it down and answer a question.

I remember dumping a full lunch in the trash can as we walked out towards a conference room for the next interviewer I would meet...

I also don't signs of bureaucracy, lack of flexibility or emotional manipulation generally.

If a company cannot negotiate salary because of some corporate rules, I'm not interested. If a company will not give me any flexibility in working hours I'm not interested. If a company tries to make me feel bad about not immediately accepting their offer I'm very likely to not accept their offer at all.

Rigid companies which have no regard for your emotional wellbeing are not pleasant places to work and I struggle to give my best when I feel I'm not respected.

This isn't quite what they asked about, but much of my work has been freelance contracts from the internet. One of the biggest red flags for a project description is when they mention that the project is "very simple" or "easy for someone who knows what they are doing". That just means they are dirt cheap and looking to rationalize the way they squeeze contractors.

Another red flag is that it's a freelancing site.

The glassdoor salaries were the red flag I ignored at least twice. They were about half of what I was asking. In both cases I gave my asking price, and they said something like 'well, it's not out of the question'.

Did all the coding tests and such for both, both claim I 'aced' them. One made me an offer about half of what I was asking, in line with the Glassdoor salaries. The other didn't provide an offer after basically trying to ask how little I'd take.

I was in the final stage for a YC company and met the CEO at the final interview. I had already kind of messed up the technical interview so I wasn’t feeling too great about talking to him to begin with. He opened with an introduction of himself and told me the history of the company which was fine, and asked if I had any questions. I asked him what were some challenges that he faced during the growth of the company. his answer was that “people challenges” were among the hardest of problems that he had. Fair enough, but he gave only one example: having to let go of an engineer that was underperforming.

I didn’t get the offer, but I didn’t want to work for somebody who would say that to an engineer applying for a job. (plus they had the weirdest stack i’ve ever seen)

In the interview I asked the technical lead, "So, what sort of version control do you use?"

Answer: "Well, we just open the file on the server and Vim will tell you if someone else has it open too."

Nope, nope, nopity, NOPE.

Perforce in a nutshell

You reminded me of Linus git talk at Google: https://youtu.be/4XpnKHJAok8

was the first time I heard about Perforce :-P

That's crazy, what year was this? Even Perforce sounds better

Once I applied to a slightly sketchy indeed posting. The company was named something incredibly generic like WorldProgrammers or GlobalDevs. Within 60 seconds of posting my application, I got a phone call from a very pushy guy with a thick Indian accent, requesting that I fill out a separate application over email. When I didn't immediately respond (because I was at work), I got a series of calls from the 'manager' over and over until I blocked the number.

The listing was on the edge of too good to be true, and the immediate and desperate attempts to reel me in were a huge red flag.

I withdrew my application, did everything I could to block them, and reported the listing to indeed.

I have no idea what the scam was, but I'm absolutely convinced it was a scam. It was honestly pretty scary, and I'm sure that a slightly less vigilant person would get pulled in.

The scam is that these bottom-of-the-barrel recruiters’ contracts pay out based on providing a certain number of “qualified resumes”, not for actually filling the position. They’re basically doing lead generation, not real recruiting.

After a while you can tell which positions these are by how they are worded and how the recruiters associated with them talk and behave during the call.

Not a specific story here but as you read these....

I have NEVER ever ever ever seen a red flag (in an employer or employee or any other relationship) that was not real.

Not every red flag needs to be a deal killer, but it never is just your imagination or just goes away.

"You need to send us a handwritten page that we'll send to a graphologer in Switzerland. Nobody is hired without a graphological report."

I did that, got hired, and wouldn't comply again. First job after university.

Nothing bad happened. Years later I could read the report, and it was nothing remarkable.

I had never heard of a"graphological report" so I looked it up. It's so much worse than I would have guessed! Any of those personality tests are such a major red flag.

"Graphology is the analysis of handwriting with attempt to determine someone's personality traits."

To me the aptitude tests are red flags. Once had a successfull technical round plus agreement on work conditions and compensation when the last step was completing an aptitude test. Two parts (had a chance for a single practice round). One was finance related calculations (this was a developer job for a CAD application) mixed with logic and pattern completion tests, with less than adequate time to complete - yet both progress and accuracy was judged without specifics how. The second part was 'which one do you find more important' kind of personality test with all important answers of independent matters (all three are important in their own place), all without a context that would require different choices, expecting universal answers, and again, not enough time but rushing through without deliberation or contemplation of the right answer. I was asking how will they use the results and they said something like 'to determine abilities, suitability for advancements and future roles in the company'. All after position related technical interviews succeeded. I chose not to be judged this way now and in the future, in case they take it dead seriously. If not, then opt out because of that, being unnecessary. Since they told it is mandatory and everyone (10k+ employee) have to be judged the very same way and repeatedly throughout the course of employment with bleeding heart (interesting task, same wavelength with technical manager, remote work in 2019, good enogh salary, being without income for 3 months already) I said no (after rounds of emails with HR trying to negotiate this away). I am afraid of an organization with this level of robotic stubbornness about vaguely relevant attempt of measuring a persons whole personality and future at the company in 30 minute automated tests with unveryfiable methodology.

They may has well have done a tarot reading. OTSH, it could just be a mostly harmless eccentricity of the CEO.

Used to work with a guy who moved from Israel and he mentioned that the handwriting analysis is a routine part of the hiring process there.

So apart from that Canonical isn't actually that bad?

I interviewed at a very small company in Santa Monica in the late 80s, and they also had all of their applicants submit a handwriting sample for analysis. They claimed that it was a very reliable indication of something-or-other.

I went ahead and filled it out while I was there, but I'd already decided not to move forward by the time the interview was over.

Once, I had an interview where the hiring manager seemed uninterested in my questions about team dynamics and growth opportunities. It made me wonder if they valued open communication.

I believe interviews are a two-way street, and if a company isn't willing to engage in meaningful dialogue, it might signal potential issues down the road.

For those interested, we have open positions! https://www.ratherlabs.com/open-positions

Why are you linking job postings, for your current employer/company(?), in this thread? Seems like a very strange thing to do.

Many jobseekers will be in this thread, looking for tips. Seems like a smart place to pick up candidates.

raise hand

You might even call it... a red flag.

Some years ago I was looking for a change, I was burnt out/tired of my job at that moment and I started looking for new opportunities. At some point, a HR agency contacted me for a role with a startup and it seemed a match for my skills/what they were looking for. It was a 10-20 people company. I passed all the technical challenged and I got to talk with the CEO.

I remember he asked me if I was married and/or if I had kids. According to him, they needed people who are "committed" with the company and people without responsibilities are more likely to leave the company if they don't like it there.

This question caught me off guard and I just answered. By that time I was young and single, but I somehow managed to defend that I was committed and so on... Later, when the interview finished I noticed I should have stopped the process immediately, I wasn't desperate or anything like that I don't know why I continued. I guess they needed people who have no choice but to keep working due to the shit show the company was and I decided to ignore the offer. They tried to call me twice but I didn't answered. I bet I dodged a bullet.

A former boss (and friend) wanted me to join him on his team at a new company. I met HR in January, next interview in March with some of my (future) colleagues, then with the CFO as the CIO position was in flux at the time. Finally meet the CIO in April and get an offer in May. A few red flags:

The length of the recruiting process, no comms back and didn't want to bother my friend if it was a dud. Communication is important. Speaking with the other managers and CFO: "We're agile, we're not against procedures and process but we need to move fast" Met the CIO for 10 minutes who did a 'Machine Gun Style' interview: Rattled off questions one after the other for 10 mins and I guess I did ok since I got the job.

Suffice it to say, my buddy was laid off 1 month after I joined, the CIO another 4 months after that. So many good people to work with (thank goodness) but the culture was so messed up because of the impression that moving fast meant to cut corners no matter the cost to the company and employees. I lasted 2 years and learned so much about what to look out for now.

Nine years ago, during the interview with the manager of a textile company, he asked what my religion was. I said i didn't had any, and then he said "You know what happens with people who don't follow any religion, right?" and pointed down, indicating that i was 'going to hell'. That made me want to quit right there, but i was so much in need of a job.

I wasn't hired in the end, despite doing well on the tests. But it was for the best as everything worked out in the end.

sounds like a case for a discrimination lawsuit

Isn't that ILLEGAL pretty much everywhere?

It is. But wasn't worth the trouble to fight over it.

One of the biggest red flags I've encountered during a hiring process was a complete lack of interest in my thoughts, ideas, or experiences. During the interview, it felt like they were just going through the motions, asking generic questions without really listening to my answers. There was no engagement or curiosity about what I could bring to the team.

When I asked about the company culture and the team I'd be working with, the answers were vague and dismissive. It gave me the impression that they were more interested in filling a seat than finding the right fit.

That experience taught me the importance of mutual respect and genuine interest in a hiring process. If a company doesn't take the time to get to know you during the interview, it's a strong indication of how they'll treat you as an employee.

Nothing crazy but I interviewed at a startup a few years ago — I use the term startup loosely as the company was around for 10 years already but still calling themselves a startup (eye roll). Anyway the VP said every morning the entire company attends stand up. Mind you that was almost 50 people in the meeting discussing their updates. Yup I bolted. They tried to follow up with me after for additional interviews but I ignored it and moved on with my life.

I was once asked “why do you want to work here?” while interviewing at a Hardee’s as a teenager.

I figure that at the level of fast food, the "why do you want to work here" and similar questions are really just to filter out someone that cares so little they can't even make up an answer. It doesn't have to be a good answer, even a "I like cooking food" is usually fine enough. But a decent amount of people will just shrug.

That's a legit question for a throw-away fast food job. Since most of these jobs are fungible, it can be useful to know why someone picked your greasy burger joint over the one down the road.

"It's close to where I live / I can walk here" = You probably don't have to worry about their "car breaking down" or general issues getting to work.

"My friends work here" = You're going to have a bunch of teenagers dicking off if you're not running a tight ship.

And there are a whole bunch of neutral responses too. "I need a job and you all are hiring" is a perfectly acceptable, accurate answer to this question that literally every applicant can provide.

> general issues getting to work

When I was applying for jobs like this as a teen, applications specifically asked about my transportation situation.

> You're going to have a bunch of teenagers dicking off if you're not running a tight ship

Just run a tight ship, then. People who didn't know each other beforehand will also dick around. I've made plenty of friends out of work colleagues.

> "I need a job and you all are hiring" is a perfectly acceptable, accurate answer to this question that literally every applicant can provide

Then I'd argue it's the opposite of legit: it's completely superfluous.

The question would successfully filter you.

I love the idea that fast food managers are using gotcha questions to select for the very best teenagers and not just reading off questions from some PDF they downloaded online.

For sure. I worked at dozens of restaurants between the ages of 15 and 23, and was never asked anything like that. From the lowest common denominator chains, to ma and pa diners that turned into nightclubs on the weekend, to haute cuisine. They care about results and whether you know what you’re doing. I aced every interview I walked into because I know food –the one exception was an interview for a bartending position where each candidate was asked to demo a drink they invented, and, well, I didn’t know what I was doing there! Total bomb, mega embarrassing, but a good experience looking back.

GP must never have worked in that industry, or they only worked that one job at Outback Steakhouse for a manager thinking they were changing the world. It’s a familiar mindset to those in tech…

Standard question.

If that's a red flag, the whole world is red.

Yes. After establishing work history, skills, availability and references one would be derelict in their duties to not establish the Philosophical Why before handing a kid the Sacred Mop.

Is there any way to "correctly" answer that question that isn't just made up bullshit, especially for a fast food restaurant?

I think it's hilarious being asked this question when I'm in early discussions with a company that reached out to me.

The team, the environment, the flexible hours, the pay.

Even for fast-food service jobs, there is always some differentiator.

People who can't answer this question are more likely to turn over. That's why it is asked.

Honestly. If your first reaction to a question like that is how to trick them, what subterfuge to use - you're the red flag! Not everything is a trick. You shouldn't try to fake aligned interests if they're not aligned.

"You are offering currency in exchange for labor. I can provide labor, and desire currency."

Ha! I remember having to "draw my thoughts" when applying for Whole Foods circa ~2004.

When I quit working at McDonald's, the manager said "well, some people don't have what it takes to work this job". i told him I had to quit because I was leaving to go to college.

"I am truly ecstatic about the unparalleled opportunity to become a part of the Hardee's family, a prospect that aligns seamlessly with my life's passion and professional aspirations.

From the moment I first savored the delectable aroma of your signature charbroiled burgers, I knew that my destiny was intertwined with your esteemed establishment. The synergistic blend of your brand's values and my personal ethos is a match made in culinary heaven, a union that promises to revolutionize the gastronomic landscape.

The prospect of contributing to Hardee's renowned legacy of taste innovation and unparalleled customer satisfaction resonates deeply with my quest for self-actualization in the fast-food industry.

Each meal served, every customer smile elicited—these are the very keystones that embolden my commitment to fulfilling my dream of championing a new era of succulent satisfaction. With utmost fervor, I implore you to consider my application, for it is not just a role I seek, but a calling I am destined to embrace with zest and zeal."

as a CS undergrad i interviewed at PwC or a similar firm one day. The lady hands me one of their 2 page publications on IT and asks me to write a summary. She gets back and I explain that the publication makes no sense and is full of inaccurate bullshit. Needless to say I didn’t go work there.

Admitting the company is involved in drug trafficking.

EDIT: illegal drug trafficking

You can’t lead with that and not tell the full story!

Just a vibe I got from the small company owner. His way of speaking at the final stage: his demeanour, over seriousness and stuffiness etc. All other stages with devs were great.

Ignore my gut and took the job. That was a big regret :-(. Most dysfunctional org I have worked at. As one of many examples I got made a team lead then someone was put on my team to help a tough deadline.

Turns out (hidden from me) this person was someone on their last legs they wanted to test out for a final go before firing. And I was being tested too: blamed for not spotting he was struggling within a couple of weeks of him joining the team.

$_Insert another 10-20 dysfunctional war stories here

I ended up resigning with no onward job. Only time I have done that.

Gut instinct can be good.

At a tier-1 hedgefund. I got an offer for its branch in Asia, and I was in the US at the time. It said it would like to make an offer, but it said it can show me the employee contract only in person. I asked I need to see the contract before I fly and move to a different country. I did not take the offer. Also, the compensation happened to be 80% lower than then-current compensation.

That's not a red flag, that's a scam.

They said they liked to start their engineers on the assembly line for a few months so they "know what's going on". Um, no, not for me. Found out later that "no" was definitely the right call. What they really liked was having engineers working on their assembly line.

I'd do it if they were gonna pay me the engineer salary while on the assembly line.

I doubt this was the case, though.

I was invited into an in-person interview in downtown San Francisco for a role on a digital marketing team at Adobe. I was interviewed one by one, by three potential colleagues (all women).

One of them condescendingly asked me if I voted for Trump, simply because I am originally from a non-blue state.

It was very strange, anti-toxic/toxic, and came out of nowhere. It made me consider secretly filming & voice recording interviews, especially in the SF Bay Area where people are a bit more influenced by political trends.

Well, did you? lol.

oops, typo--

"anti-toxic/toxic" --> meant to say "anti-social/toxic"

I went to a university where the NSA was heavily recruiting. I had a bad feeling about it and not only stayed clear but also asked some fellow students about the ethics of going to work for the spooks. At least one told me, something like "someone else takes care of ethics, I will just get to work on amazing stuff!"

Never looked back, never got a security clearance. Now I'm a dual citizen, so basically neither of my countries probably trusts me. :)

I applied for a company that gave me a "take home test." They wanted me to use my evening free time to create a boilerplate Java backend. I was actually willing to do it (one never should) until I found out they were contracting for ICE. Very quick nope.

It was one of a French startup - it did pretty well in the market, and I liked what they've been doing.

It was something like a fifth or sixth interview, and CTO told me they decided to offer me a position requiring more solid technical skills. I was happy to hear it, and I didn't think my boss should be also a different person and didn't ask about it.

Later I realized my boss was awful at management and speaking with people, so I understood why no one wanted him to interview me. If I had an interview with him - I wouldn't take the offer.

I left the company in a couple of days, and it was the worst scam in interviewing I have ever had.

Sorry you went through this but loved how you wrote it, building up to a punchline. I cannot imagine how bad it must have been, I've always assumed there is a baseline for managers in tech...

After a 1-hour presentation, "come back tomorrow and we'll tell you the details of the job."

Nope.

I interviewed with a company that kept telling me repeatedoh how “people-focused” they were and how people were the most important thing to them.

Over the course of 3 interviews, I was ghosted by the CEO (had to email to see where they were 10 minutes into the scheduled interview), left with no contact for weeks between interviews and then when I emailed to check in was told, “Sorry for keeping you waiting, we were going to email you today…”, and then they wouldn’t let me read the company handbook before signing the offer letter.

It was a real stark example of telling vs. showing.

The one where I was put in a room with like 25 other candidates, we were given an hour to solve a puzzle involving clues written on little bits of cardboard and half way through one of the girls started to cry whilst the interviewers looked on impassively.

This was a long time ago and for a large scale internship programme for teenagers (18-20) at a once-big tech firm that shall remain nameless. The goal appeared to be seeing how we worked together under pressure or something that, so after a while I guessed that the puzzle might not have a solution at all, as if it did some groups would finish a lot faster than others and then they wouldn't be able to watch us for the same length of time in each group. But none of the other kids had seemed to realize that. When the girl started to cry she was really sobbing and saying stuff like "we're not making any progress", so I said something like "yes that's true but bear in mind there might not be an answer" and she stopped crying immediately. I had to spend the next five minutes explaining this idea to the group and then the five after that convincing them that we had to keep working on the puzzle anyway, because even if the guess was right it didn't make any difference to the correct course of action.

The whole exercise struck me as needlessly cruel for teenagers who were probably in their first job interview ever. Like, if you're recruiting for a serious job where you need to make fast decisions under pressure then fine, but putting kids through that? Later I became an interviewer for big tech myself and never saw anything similar. I must have been right though because I got an offer, but turned it down in favor of a more interesting company that had used a more individualized interview process.

When I was in my last semester of college and looking for jobs, I just needed to find something but it was so hard to get someone to an interview phase. I always had good luck once I at least got an interview but it was an odd job market at the time. I was desperate to find _something_ so that I could start paying my loans and then looking for something better if need be afterwards.

I ended up interviewing with a company that did contract work for software in government agencies, like DMVs. It sounded so depressing. Their technical screening was checking if a number is prime. I was familiar with checking all number up to the square root of the target number to see if they divided evenly from when I was a kid. Always knew it from some math or computer book.

After implementing that, I began to be investigated if I had done interview prep where I found this. I honestly told them that I hadn't but this back and forth went on for a few minutes of disbelief over something that shouldn't have been a big deal in the first place (considering how esoteric the problem they gave me was anyway).

Fast forward to the end of the interview, they ask me what my GPA was. I told them it was 2.98. They said that they couldn't accept anything below a 3. My GPA was going to get a massive bump at the end of the semester but they didn't care. A company that will flat refuse a candidate over two hundredths of a number (low because I didn't care of philosophy or other non CS classes) means they will be just as irrational during your employment.

I ended up finding a much better job with a much better culture the next week which lead me down what's been an excellent career so far. I'm terrified what would have happened if I ended up working there.

> low because I didn't care of philosophy or other non CS classes

For all people saying that philosophy is not important for engineering/cs grads - here's the proof it is!

That gave me a laugh, but in all seriousness it was an interesting class looking back. In reality I should've put more effort into it, but c'est la vie.

I was unemployed and had an interview at a small startup. I was anxious so I was playing games in the morning to keep things calm, and I decided to stream what I was playing for a few friends.

When I got to the interview they asked me about the game I was playing. It really threw me off. I've always tried to be really careful about linking my real name to my online presence and I always search myself to see if I can find myself when I'm interviewing to make sure there's nothing I need to scrub.

They found me anyway. I'm still not sure how exactly. I'm not a genius about online opsec but I like to think I'm more careful than most.

I wound up programming an interview exam program for them (which they paid me for, super nice) and they did offer me the job, but I was still weirded out that they dug into me so much online. I decided I didn't want an employer that monitors my non-work Internet activity so I declined.

I'm not stupid. I know that most employers probably try and monitor their workers social media for questionable stuff, but my hope is that most aren't trying too hard to track down all of my pseudonyms. Or they don't care what I do as long as I don't post with my real name or the company name.

Biggest red flag for me was one I pretty much was aware of before I went in.

I can't remember if it was through a third-party recruiter or direct to the company, but I was fairly desperate for a sysadmin job, and I might have been out on the streets already at that point. I strolled on down to see this place, which was nestled behind a Motel 6 and a future mental health clinic; charming neighborhood.

I met the HM and I swear to god that he was a dead ringer for an old boss I'd had years ago. Once I got over that shock, we had a little chat, and along the way of course, he said "you know that we're the biggest service provider to the pornography industry?" and I said "yeah" and he said "you don't have a problem with that?" "nah... [I NEED THIS JOB NOW]"

I didn't get the job of course, but I really dodged a bullet, and definitely did not need something like that in my past or on my résumé.

This is not one incident but it happens to many times — when the hiring manager or sometimes other interviewers as well start explaining how:

- team/company works like a family

- we even party together on weekends

- then things like: we “love and own” our work we only leave once it’s done

Or a place that’s not clear and don’t want to be specific about availability/timing requirements i.e clarity about hours (which is by the way like 100% of job posts here on the HN!!!)

This is indeed a red flag. I usually (truthfully) tell applicants the opposite. That despite $company being a startup, founders and senior leadership are all grownups with families and as such we value a healthy work/life balance, don't have any pizza-coding in the evening going on and don't expect overtime.

Maybe there should be a “jwlb” board - Jobs With Work Life Balance :-)

I will take that any day over those trillion remote work only job boards.

Mercenaries are willing to give their lives on their job, you’d be crazy if you thought I’d cross a red traffic light for your company

A certain engineering firm recruits college graduates mostly to brainwash them “we are #1 in employee happiness!” (Made up bs for mid tier form smaller than Benesch).

Eventually fired because I’m handicapped and wouldn’t join their softball team and pretend the baby faced bully was cool.

Glad it finally broke me. Social security disability time.

Got an offer where they refused to put job description, work hours, or the promised remote work in the contract.

They own all IP I create outside work hours, unrelated to the company. I need permission to work on my side business, which basically got me the job. That business has a community I've built over 5 years.

HR called me early morning, and three times without warning during office hours of my current job. Their first offer was about the same as my public sector position, where the salary is public.

I tried hard to resolve these problems with HR but most of the time I was just gaslit, as if the problems didn't exist. The hiring team and work seemed really great.

In the case above you agree and let them share details than say thanks I'll let you know.

Last year I received a LinkedIn message from a recruiter. After the first online call, I was invited into the office, where her manager was also sitting at the table. After a few minutes I realized that everything she had promised me in the first meeting had been denied by her manager. I just said what I don't see myself doing in this position, which she didn't understand because I met all the requirements.

The company requested pay slips for the previous three jobs. Also full names and identity card numbers of all relatives, t-shirt size, shoe size, pregnancy status.

This was before the first, codility level interview.

sounds like Indonesian p2p lending? XD

That's a nice euphemism for loan sharks (:

During an interview with a startup they asked me about my hobbies and then shut me down with mid-answer with "you're going to need to give them up" because they expect you to give so much of yourself that you wouldn't have time/energy for anything else.

Also the interview was super early, not to accommodate me interviewing off-hours, but because they (interviewers) "weren't allowed" to impinge on work hours to conduct the interviews!

She cited herself as a reference and her last three employers were all clearly made up. Another coworker hired her anyways, because of her appearance. It didn't end well.

I had interviewed and accepted an offer at some time, call it t0. I was meant to start some time in the near future, tn. The boss-to-be called my personal cell phone both during work hours, early morning, and late evening at t0 <= t <= tn asking if I could start sooner (I was still at my previous job...)

I've worked there now, for ~2 years, and the prodding hasn't gotten much better. Work's fun, though. :^)

Online coding tests (I refuse to do them now, though I'll happily provide samples of my source code):

- You never know how it's going to be judged (style, efficiency, error handling, abstraction, thread-safety, type-safety, commenting, etc).

- You're given a very short time-limit, but well-designed, maintainable software is almost never written like that.

- etc., etc.

For a hiring manager: if they are either divorced or have no kids AND have zero discernible hobbies when you ask them what they do outside of work. Every time I’ve worked for someone like this it has been a beating with slack messages and emails nonstop outside of normal working hours and on the weekends along with expectations of me working nonstop.

Why didn't you just agree to see the offer? It's not like you couldn't just ghost them or whatever.

After hearing some mildly homophobic comments at one place I worked, now in interviews when asked about hobbies I often drop in to a chat that my partner is a man, this means two things, if the company is anti-lgbt in anyway they can just not give me a job for any reason and also I don't have to come out at work if they do give me a job. Anyway, I did that in one interview and one person on a panel of three gave a horrifed face and shut down, and two other people in the interview were for lack of a better word, looked delighted. I did get the job offer, but the person who pulled the face would have been my boss so I turned it down.

Your instincts were accurate.

Everyone's a "mercenary" and you can't compel loyalty by being a control-freak dick. They want compliant slaves who will work for nothing and will never leave the unending crash schedule. The end isn't gonna be either pretty or successful.

One place was ok on the interview but dealing with the HR after that was strange.

Similar to OP, I had to verbally accept the offer before they would give me an offer letter. And then the offer expired in 12 hours.

It felt like a high pressure sell that really turned me off the place.

I was interviewed once, so I came to their office and they had part of interview by remote key team members, they have never showed up. The local team said not to worry, this happens, come again tomorrow. Thank you but no thank you.

Salary: "Competitive"

In retrospect: hiring managers having Ayn Rand books at work.

could you elaborate please? any interesting experience you made because of that?

I worked for a guy who had Atlas Shrugged on his bookshelf. I chuckled and thought okay.

I later went on a business trip with him and found out that 1) he was left of center and 2) a prior CEO was very much a Randist and sent the book to every SVP and up in the company.

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

What is a "mercenary?" Someone who wants to make money?

Someone who has money as the primary criterion for where they work.

The implication being that they're likely to jump ship as soon as anyone else makes them a better offer (and that they'll be at least semi-actively looking for that better offer while working for you), and that the quality of their work output suffers because they're not sufficiently passionate about the problem to be solved.

They're the opposite of "missionaries", in this particular vernacular.

> Someone who has money as the primary criterion for where they work.

So, a plain old business.

  We can't pay anything at start

Treating candidates inconsiderately in any form

coding interviews

For coding jobs?

Probably read about it somewhere.

Funny enough, my curent position did not give me a coding interview. Rather they asked difficult technical questions about the technologies I used, and asked me to justify my use of them. I found this was a far better test, because coding out an algorithm is something you can just memorise.

Example: "You've used k8s, how and in what context?" "Ok, great, so you've AWS EC2 instances, how did you manage cost and performance there?" "You're listing Clojure here, what were your thoughts on X feature/limitation"? It was a rather fluid discussion about the ins and outs of technologies, stacks by engineers.

Sometimes actually interrogating someone's knowledge of a system works just as well. I code a lot of things slowly, and need to think through my designs with a pad of paper. I really can't do it when someone is hovering over my shoulder.

same here '__') last 2 was easy 1 time interview

"given this architecture diagram, what you would do if you have to debug/explain to junior how to debug a problem with this sympthom" or "how you would design an architecture with this kind of requirement"

oh but there's 1 coding challenge, just simple date addition/subtraction tho

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