Comment by simonebrunozzi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonebrunozzi | Hacker News Reader

In 2016 I was VP and CTO for the hybrid cloud team at VMware, and previously Senior Technology Evangelist at AWS.

I interviewed with Digital Ocean in NY. One of the founders set my first interview with a young woman. She had perhaps 2-3 years of experience as a writer, before joining DO.

Halfway through the interview, I started to understand that she was going to be my... boss, if I got the job. And I also understood that they were interviewing me for a position well below my then-current pay grade.

I was angry. Such a waste of time, and such idiocy. After politely completing the interview, I (also politely) wrote an email to such founder, expressing my concerns and my doubts. Never heard back.

At that point I thought: F*ck DO. They don't deserve me or my time.

No one would care about this, but I'm still happy to share this here. This is the type of damage you do when you as a company are careless about how you treat prospective hires.

I've been on the other side of that interview, 2-3 years out of univeristy and asked to interview someone with 10-15 years experience, it was pretty awful. Before that I just interviewed either students (interns) or graduates and asked them basic coding questions.

There's a pretty high chance that the young women was just as unhappy about the situation as you were.

Reading your comment, my first thought was "how entitled??", but I see that this meeting was set up by the DO founders? Aoutch.

It is not entitled in any case! Interview bait/switch can be frustrating and a waste of precious time.

Thanks for sharing. I don't have such good credentials, but I've had my time wasted as well. Now without a written position description and salary I don't agree to the meetings. Seems like a great filter as at least half of the recruiters don't answer

In fairness, all they were looking out for was themselves, as most companies do in most interviews. If it was someone with say 5 years of experience, rather than yourself, it'd be the same deal so don't take it personally. Waste of your time definitely, and they should be clear on what the role is up front, but it's typical of some recruitment process where the folks doing the actual leg-work to hire new staff don't have much of a clue what's required beyond maybe a half-page job spec.

Ah, the holy grail, the top of the pile, you’ve reached it. Not getting the respect you „deserved” must have been the most insulting experience of your life.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com