Worst-ever job interviews: 'We had to crawl and moo' | Hacker News Reader

Worst-ever job interviews: 'We had to crawl and moo'

bbc.co.uk

50 pointsmmarian48 comments

>the "cancellation" had actually been a test, which she had failed.

So what was the "answer" here? Refuse to leave until she got an interview? Now she's just tresspassing. They really don't think these "tests" through, do they? A lot of the other exaamples are straight up illegal in the US, though (though not all examples are in the US). So I guess that answers the question then and there.

We were long overdue for a proper audit of a bunch of illegal and unethcical (e.g. ghost jobs) practices for a while, even before it became a "buyer's market"), too bad it looks like it'll get worse before it gets better.

The article really needs more reporting on what exactly they were told from the other side of the table, even if half of the time it would have been unexcusable bullshit.

For the lawyer job it's said she left upset, but we don't get anything more about the interaction, which seemed to be the crucial part if it was a test.

I'd see a point if the core of the job is to deal with conflictual situations, and it could be fair if the cabinet took the time to explain why they fail the test and how they could have been better (doesn't sound like they did, but it would at least balance the stress imposed on the candidates)

I can picture the linked in headline now. Why I made our prospects crawl and moo, and why you should, too.

This is depressingly accurate but nowhere near the worst thing I've seen on there.

The headline or the interview? I've heard my share of interview hells, but I don't think aything tops crawling and moo'ing.

Both.

I had one weird one. I once interviewed for a gay social network which was going under because they didn't have any engineers left. I am not gay. They tried to convert me. I politely said that while I have nothing but respect for the gay community, I am simply not gay. They said I wasn't the sort of person they were looking for then and said "shoo along then!".

I do not like this interview; I will not pander, crawl, or moo.

Do you like green bucks and care? Do you like them, Smaug-you-are?

I prefer the following to make the rhyme less tenuous:

> You want some wages, Smaug-you-are? Your attitude won't take you far.

Leetcode I rather crank. Even partake in a Month python prank;

Could you, would you, with a goat?

People got to eat.

The unproffessional interviews are usually for the lowest paid jobs. Some pleb gets into a psotion of power and abuses it.

However I had my own strange interviews with supposedly "proffessional" people - and it feels like stupid, incompetent or straight up abusive people are everywhere. Sometimes they get weeded out by market economy, but sometimes they dont.

Talent selection's not easy to do. Supply and demand must forever be one; The lowest-end jobs got demand by the ton, And something must cut the supply, so we moo!

"We need to know our hires are comfortable being part of a herd. We're low-ego, and we know that no one can do it alone. We're scrappy, and we'll crawl to get where we're going if we have to. No one is so important that they should stand up by themselves while everyone else is doing the hard work of moving forward."

I think I need to go take a shower now.

Memes aside, it sounds like this was a student job, which makes me think this was more "college kid screwing around" than "corporate toxicity".

Power abuse is still power abuse. :/

Yeah, absolutely. But the type matters to the kind of solution.

I think I’d crawl and moo in an interview if my future direct manager did it first. If it’s so important then they shouldn’t have a problem doing it. I would mostly do it for the story of telling someone I did.

Exactly. LinkedIn is such a performative place now.

“I proposed to my fiance, 10 things I learned about sales after closing the biggest deal of my life”

This kind of bs is everywhere.

The nice thing about stuff like that is it makes it pretty explicitly clear who you should avoid working with.

Exactly. Life is too short to work with such self absorbed people.

I find it somewhat sad. I've seen a bunch of former colleagues posting more and more of that bullshit as time passes by and they don't get a job.

Knowing them, you can see they are desperate, and that's why they follow the spiel to get "noticed" on LinkedIn.

Sounds like they were inspired by the "Boar on the Floor" episode of Succession, playing a kind of dominance ritual over the prospective employee in the guise of "a bit of fun".

Where I’m from we just call this hazing.

Hazing usually happens once you've joined a group - initiation rituals.

That is always the problem behind selections, gatekeeping, rules, control etc. in human contexts:

They definitely have merit and aim initially for a good cause, but their institution over time always attracts sick people, bullies, who like to abuse others and seek situations where they will not be punished for it.

Imagine being that person, who’s daily job and enjoyment is to reject other people, drag them through this disrespectful and demeaning process, witness the disappointment and sadness in the others eyes when they get to hear “No.” and when blame themselves for it.

Wow; all of these are straight up illegal in US employment law. I guess this is why we have to suffer through fair employment training every year!

a few "hiring for dummies" is an acceptable trade-off to avoid this, IMO.

a previous org sent us to a local community college that ran a 3-weekend "HR 101 for new managers" that was one of the best investments / training I've gotten.

I had one recently where the first stage, before you’d even spoken to a single person, was an assessment with an estimated duration of 76 minutes. Camera on was required and they’d be taking periodic snapshots of both my screen and my camera.

Immediately noped out of that and told the hiring team why.

That sounds insane. What was the position?

It was for a chief of staff position.

The company sells hiring assessments software so it makes sense that they used their own product, it was just at a completely wrong part of the hiring funnel and highlighted, to me, what seemed like an incredibly cynical view of what hiring should look like.

There’s a company in the monthly hiring thread this month that does the same, but it’s a constant live stream and you’re not allows to look away from the camera or move from your desk

I had that. No way I was gonna install such invasive software with no guarantee of a human even caring about my work. If you're hiring manager can spend 10 minutes sussing out if my solution was using AI or not without sitting there watching over my shoulder, then that says more about the company than me.

This, but hire anyone that declines.

...have you even met senior management? They're long past their usefulness and not only does everyone else around them know it, but they've caught on too. All they have left to maintain their status are power trips, since merit is no longer a metric they themselves can abide by.

> merit is no longer a metric

In most places it never was.

If someone did this to me I would tell them to fuck off rather loudly.

unfortunately telling a potential employer to fuck off is a privilege not everyone has

When I was applying to internship dev roles a long while ago it was very common to come across “record yourself” interviews and a situational test. Next stage was often some group interview where you had to put a presentation together or create a presentation yourself on why the company is so great. Almost none of it had anything to do with tech or development.

A company that does this should be sued out of existence.

Companies don't exist, individuals do. It's all coming from a few sociopaths that will happily go poisoning another company.

You are absolutely right. In a better society sociopaths would be pushed out of the market. Instead they are promoted or made billionaires.

Funnily enough, according to the article it was a (minimum wage) job at a university, not even a company.

Try to convince me we're not in a capitalist dystopia.

From experience, university staff appear to have never worked outside the student and university sector, so this does not surprise me.

Worst job interview I ever had was when I had to sit with three other candidates side by side as the employer interviewed us, and then played us off one another.

You interviewed on The Dating Game?

edit: Oh - they only had 3 candidates at a time!

Wow. Literally kowtowing ...

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