The shortest, strangest engineering interview I've ever done
bluepnume.medium.com
bluepnume.medium.com
You didn't do anything wrong. Odds are that "Adam" was a scammer. Perhaps he doesn't know how to code at all and was looking for a job that would hire based on his resume, let him cruise for 2 weeks while "onboarding," let him flail around for 4 weeks, be put on a PIP for 2 more, then fired with severance after getting 8 free weeks of bay-area pay.
Or perhaps he does know how to code but was looking for a second job (to do the exact same thing I mentioned above).
You didn't do anything wrong. You just dodged a bullet.
Usually the schmoozers don't take such an aggressive route right from the start, but I can see it working on a certain type of company.
In the rare chance that "Adam" was, in fact, as good as he said he was, you still dodged a bullet because nobody wants to work with a brilliant, arrogant jerk, no matter how good he is. Someone could have the demonstrated programming skills of Linus Torvalds and John Carmack put together, but if he acts and talks like "Adam" I'm not going to hire him.
They dodged a bullet alright, because "Adam" isn't a scammer. He is just incredibly and utterly toxic, and would be extremely damaging to everybody he would be working with and/or for.
Luckily I didn't work with him very much. He was a technical consultant for a customer of ours. He was brought in to hold us to account so he wasn't going to be fun to work with even without the ego...
People who say arrogant things, even in a light-hearted joking tone, often truly are arrogant. Whatever people show you early in an interview process is often true. If they show you good things, believe it. If they show you bad things, believe it. If they either get off-track or hyper-focus on the wrong things... believe it.
I do a fair amount of hiring. In the past 5 yrs-ish, I've seen a new level of arrogance in interviews. People can (and do) think very highly of themselves. That's ok. But the outright person-to-person rudeness and breakdown of simple courtesy is new. My suspicion is the prevalence of social media as a primary comms method for many, and its tendency to stoke open conflict, has lowered the bar on what is considered "acceptable" in interpersonal contact.
I'm a pretty kind and forgiving soul. But folks like that go on a special list. I don't want to make the mistake of letting that particular person pass through in future hiring rounds. That kind of naked toxicity can kill a team, or at the very least, create a giant management and HR headache.
"Adam" will eventually figure out that everybody you pass on the way up, you meet on the way down. Experience is what you get just after you need it.
Normal people don’t act like this. They need help. But until they get help it’s best to avoid feeding the monster.
It doesn’t have to be read as an assertion of power - paranoia and related states will get you similar responses. (“The corpo is out to get you.”)
It might make me look more closely, and a little curious, but other than that it would feel like a likely red flag.
While reading the article, I was very curious to see where that claim was going to go, since it was being set up as an interesting story.
Sadly, the claim appears to be just what we probably would've guessed was the most likely explanation.
Generally you filter out toxic personalities as an absolute priority so this interview was a success.
I also think your process is appropriate for a smaller company. The key difference in my experience is that at the big high paying companies you filter on red flags and the green flags are just checkboxes that must all be passed. At the startups which simply can’t match on salary you have to instead hire on green flags instead and allow some red flags to pass. It’s harder to manage but it’s the only choice you have. So your interview which looks for green flags and is ok with some potential red flags was a sensible process.
Adam seems too naive to understand that different companies by necessity have different processes. Smaller companies are more informal and are looking for green flags not red flags. He couldn’t pass even at a smaller company willing to allow some red flags to pass.
BTW, I recommend disclosing this and getting consent before the call.
By the time they've joined the call, whatever service you're using has already captured the person's identity, face, and voice.
And we all know how our field is currently respecting privacy, rights, and even existing regulations, especially in the current AI goldrush.
That implies that on the way to success there will be a lot of communication, push-back, changing requirements, slipped deadlines, disagreements, compromise, shortcuts, refactoring, team meetings, celebration, interviews, promotions, and growth. The best companies have people who work well with other people. The best companies don't need prima donnas.
OP handled it well, but two things I would do differently in responding.
1. "Sorry you feel that way". I never apologize for other people's feelings, only my own actions, when am am sincerely sorry. "Not-really-apologies" are, IMO, always in bad taste.
2. Not sign emails using "best". Best what? Obviously this is up for interpretation but a dangling best is (IMO) corny and exudes "I am writing unnaturally and I think this is how professional people write"
I expect that guy is playing a different game - looking for overemployment or obligated to apply for a certain number of jobs per week. He might also just be in a really bad mental place right now and unable to see not everyone is stupid and against him. Absolutely doesn't excuse the bullying and rudeness but might be part of an explanation.
If Adam reads HN maybe these comments will push him to reflect or get some help.
This is part of why we still need to do interviews!
Came to the part of the interview where we do about five minutes of sample work - very basic, no tricks.
Candidate opened up screen sharing, stared at the screen for a few seconds, and then unleashed a tirade about about how much they hated the role we were hiring for and that they had quit their previous job doing this because they passionately hated this job, etc.
It was shocking to have them go from excited about X to ranting about X. Still don't know what was going on.
Hiring is a hard problem of computer science, maybe even harder than naming things!
Recently was one of the biggest feedbacks from me.
I got an outreach from a third-party recruiter I hadn't talked with before, for head of engineering at an early startup.
Not even screening call yet, I asked a quick question, they answered it and gave the name of the company, and I spent a few hours of due diligence...
The actual business model they were telling business journalists sounded very predatory. Especially considering they seemed to be making very different claims to consumers (and, apparently, to recruiters) about what they do.
So I messaged the recruiter, thanking them for reaching out, unfortunately not a match, and quick bulleted feedback on why, for their eyes only: (1) I wouldn't be able to build a good team to work on that predatory and deceptive stuff; (2) some other thing, about how the company was incubated, and why that would be unattractive to a lot of early startup eng/tech leadership; and (3) a suggestion to get the actual business model from the company, and be upfront to candidates about it (or have people keep dropping off late in the process, or leaving soon after they join, whenever they realize).
I figured the recruiter would either round-file or respect that. But now I have this "Adam" stereotype to try even harder not to sound like. :)
Not only did the personality thing derail other topics in this particular conversation, but the Adam character is tainting some valid points by association.
This reminds me of candidates who put "Expert in C++" on their resume. To me it's a good indicator that someone is on "Mount Stupid" of the Dunning Kruger curve[1].
On my phone it was really uncomfortable to read the messages back and forth
Fun red flag things candidates have said to me in interviewing:
1) Me: I see you have a PhD in computer science, what was your thesis topic? (Because I hadn't managed to find their thesis)
Candidate: Object orientation
2) Candidate (for a unix sysadmin role): I don't see how these questions are relevant to the role.
Me: I do the role currently and these questions are a selection of some of the more interesting shell-scripting things I've had to do in the last couple of weeks.
Candidate (yelling over the phone): I WROTE THE LINUX KERNEL (they didn't have any linux kernel code contributions and weren't even active on lkml)
3) Me: Here's an interesting challenge we're facing right now. See it's right in the hot path of some code that gets called a lot and basically we need (as fast as possible) to count the number of bits that are set in millions of flag variables. How would you approach that?
Candidate (with a smile, leaning back, arms crossed): You're never going to interest a pure computer scientist in optimizing a O(1) problem.