My worst interview: The recruiter forgot about me. Then joined 5 mins late, asking me if we had actually scheduled something.

I said yes, so assembled 3 people 20 mins to listen to my presentation on my PhD work. No questions at the end of the presentation, sent a mail 2 mins later telling me they are not moving forward.

I always wanted to tell the story of my weirdest interview. It's bad in a different way from OP's. This was for a "Machine Learning Engineer" contractor position.

- Hi, I'm gobdovan. How are you? says I.

The interviewer doesn't bite:

- How many prompting techniques do you know? (ok?..)

After a couple confused seconds, I respond with 2-3 techniques and ask if I should explain them, but the interview engine is already running at full speed:

- What is PEFT? How many PEFT techniques do you know?

I say I know LoRA and start to explain it, but the interview had no patience for answers longer than their acronyms. Before I knew it, I heard frantic clicking.

- He starts sharing his screen while I am still talking about LoRA in the background. Puts up an empty car from Google Images and commands: "Model the relationships between cars and people positioned inside the cars over time."

Uncertain of how to satisfy the inquiry, I start foolishly questioning what the task is supposed to be: vision? simulation? dataset labeling? self-driving cars?

But the interviewer doesn't budge. Doesn't give a specific task or context. Simply ignores the questions and stoically refuses to elaborate. The stars speak to me, and I guess he wants a relational mapping of some kind. Turns out I am right. This was supposed to test basic SQL table modeling.

At this point, I decide I'd sit through the interview just so I can collect all the questions. I am not disappointed:

- How many agentic frameworks do you know?

- What is the name of OpenAI's embedding model, and how many dimensions does it have?

- Then, the last ordeal lands: interviewer takes out a piece of cardboard that has "context engineering" written on it and asks: "What does this tell you?". His camera is unfocused, I ask if he could read what it says. Instead he repeats: "What does this tell you? What does this tell you? What does this tell you?".

I ask if he is the ML team lead. Turns out this absolute Chad is a mobile dev the client asked to interview candidates for the MLE role.

This… was a mistake on both you and the interviewer.

All interview questions - unless it’s impossible to twist your answer to fit this - is scoped to “… at work”. Nobody who asks “tell me about yourself” is asking you to talk about how you met your partner, how many cats you have, or that experience you had, that one time, at band camp. It would be redundant and awkward to literally say “… at work” at the end of every question. It’s totally 100% the intent of the interviewer.

This is interviewing 101 and unless this is your first ever interview I would find it odd, and stop you immediately and say “I meant, worst day at work”. They should’ve done that.

Unless they explicitly and unambiguously say “tell me about the day your mom and dog died in the same day when you found out you had cancer” they mean “tell me about your worst day _at work_.” And even if they ask about the time your dog died (they won’t), they are not asking you “tell me about the worst day you’ve had in your life”. They are asking “tell me about a time you experienced adversity and overcame it, exhibiting problem solving, resilience, and grit AT WORK. (Or - if you are operating in executive mode or you like to live dangerously - some non-work context that maps obviously and unambiguously to a work context).”

You failed the “knows how to interact with people in a professional setting” part of the interview. Or the “this person knows how to interview” part (which generally, but not always, correlates with experience and emotional maturity). Or the “read between the lines” part.

Yeah, inartfully asked questions - but also totally flubbed the answers.

Sorry, chalk it up to you had a bad interview or day or whatever, and never, ever forget the entire thing is scoped to “…. at work”.

Sorry OP you had to go through this - not knowing your circumstances, but golden rule, once the interview starts getting invasive, please cut it short and move on.

Recently I had an interview for a contract position. First off, it was a zoom interview where the interviewer did not have his camera on.

He promptly asks me to share my screen - which I found odd, since I had no content to share with him.

Next - he tells me to go the top right screen of my mac and asks me to disable bluetooth.

I said am not going to do it, since I had my airpods connected and within the next second I also told him am not interested in proceeding with this BS interview.

There are boundaries of human decency, which you should never let anyone cross.

I was excited, it was a game company, and I'd wanted to get back into games - or more specifically, game engines - for a few years. The tech of this particular company was interesting, an in-house engine developed by wunderkind, of course, and they'd invited me for an interview because I had done a fair bit of low-level work, which would be handy for their rough edges. Apparently.

Half way through the interview, I had an epiphany. I really didn't want to work there. It was cultural, it just wasn't going to fit.

I didn't waste any more time. Half-way through a white-board challenge, I put down the marker and said, plainly, "okay, I've seen enough, I don't want to work here - thanks and let me not waste any more of your time", picked up my coat and left.

It wasn't a bad interview. It wasn't a terrible one. Nor was it because of the whiteboard question, or anything like that.

I just didn't like the guys. That's all it was. And I couldn't stand the idea of working for them - just the way the interview proceeded. I don't need to give details.

It was really the only time I ever got up mid-interview and left.

I fail to recall the exact wording of the discussion topics, but they were, in fact, non-technical — covering such lovely topics as the hardest day of my life, my biggest life challenges, and other similar “trauma-baiting” questions.

Ha, I don't think anyone who asks these questions expects that you'll respond in a fully unfiltered way... These kinds of questions are part and parcel of non-tech interview processes.

You can redirect with some subtlety "Well, my hardest ever day at work was..." to avoid talking about dead babies or whatever. Your interviewer doesn't get to look over your whole life history and determine whether your /truthfully/ chose the actual hardest ever day. So really it's a chance for you to say "Here's a [big] challenge I once faced, and here's how I survived/overcame it."

I have had my fair share of terrible interview as well. The key thing I learnt is that the interview is an opportunity for me to understand the culture of the company and judge my fit there as well. I know that the phrase "dodge a bullet" is used to death in those kind of situation, but if the interviewer is behaving unprofessionally you can safely assume the people in the company will be unprofessional in a lot more other area.

As an instance, I had an interview with a CEO of a consulting firm. He took the interview while on the metro, so half the time on the call I couldn't hear what he said at all. When the call ended, I send a message to the HR person giving quite a critical feedback and stopping any further process with the company. A few months later I talked with one of my friend who worked there for 3 months. The CEO and the legal department overlooked some certain paperworks with regard to employment insurance, and when the taxman came and gave them a heavy fine, they hide the situation from everybody until the situation became unfixable. The company went bankrupt essentially overnight and most of the employees has a 1-year plus insurance gap with no practical way to sue for it back.

Moral of the story: if the interview feels wrong, email them and decline going forward right away. Give yourself the satisfaction of consciously dodging a bullet.

My worst interview was at Uber (their security team).

The screening and technical interviews on site were all fine and dandy. At the end of the onsite interviews I spoke with the director in charge of the team. I asked some general questions like, "What's the team's work-life balance like?"

He chuckled and said something like they work 60+ hour works. I looked at him and said flatly, "Yeah, I'm not doing that."

The HR person called me after the onsites and was completely puzzled. She said she never seen a candidate pass technicals and not get an offer. She suggested sending me to another team (I declined).

Would be funny if the interviewer wrote the exact same blog post; "I had the worst candidate interview today, I asked him a simple ice-breaker question before getting into more technical stuff, and he just went off about his family and relationships for an hour; weirdest interview I ever gave."

I've been working as a dev for over twenty years now and have had my fair share of interviews. The very worst I ever had was about six months ago.

I'd had a fantastic initial interview, it seemed like a perfect fit and interesting tech. Overlapped a lot with some work I'd been doing recently. They made it sound like my experience was a great match and they were exited for me to move forward. I was the most excited I've ever been after a job interview.

The second interview a couple days later was a one-on-one with the CTO. After about five minutes of pretty friendly get-to-know-you chitchat he asks if I have any questions about the position. I ask about what my day to day would look like and he replies "I don't know, and that's the problem. I don't like to lead people on, I'll be honest I don't see a position for you here."

It was such a sudden slap in the face that my brain just completely shut off. I kind of just stammered out an "Oh... Um... Thank you for your time"

I didn't get to talk about my experience ... at all. Not a single mention of my twenty years of across multiple tech stacks my resume doesn't even begin to scratch. I've never been judged so quickly or so blindly.

Later that day, out of sheer frustration I email him back trying to explain that I'd felt like I didn't get a chance to talk about myself and all the ways I'd felt like I was a great fit based on the previous interview and how my experience applied.

I never heard anything back.

I've had quite a few too:

* The most recent one: I was doing an "AI assisted coding interview". The problem itself was simple. I gathered clear specs, I explained what I planned to do. I was supposed to use AI so I wrote down the main function signatures I expected (the API boundary) and wrote in the prompt what I wanted Claude to do. I wrote no code myself other than editing the output. When I got rejected, I was told it was because "I wrote too much code myself".

* Once I was asked a brain teaser. I solved the initial problem, but one of the follow-ups made it significantly more challenging. I wrestled with the problem for a few minutes, and realizing I was going around in circles I stated so and told the interviewer I wasn't sure how to proceed. I was expecting a tip or at least an acknowledgement, but I heard nothing. Blank silence with the interviewer staring at the screen. Since it was a zoom call, I thought my internet was down, but when I asked "hey, can you hear me?", he replied yes, and went back to radio silence. This was a pattern of the interviewer throughout the interview. Later on, after this question I implemented an algorithm and was asked for its time complexity. I mistakenly said O(n) (I forgot the initial sort), and the interviewer literally just stared at the screen and said nothing until after 10 seconds or so when I realized my mistake and corrected it - at which point he acknowledged and moved to the next question.

* Another one that happened two times (at different companies) is getting asked a very vague question, like "how do you fix a bug in production" (to which I reply with 'I try to replicate it locally, I go through logs, etc') and then being told by the recruiter the interviewer didn't like that my responses were "too generic".

As we're all sharing some bizarre experiences we've had, I feel I have to chip in.

I had 2 very weird interviews with the same FAANG company, before actually joining the company in 2021.

Anyway, we're in 2011 and my career in tech has just started. I hear back from a recruiter regarding a role I've applied for, and to be considered for this position it is mandatory to be fluent in French. Which shouldn't be a problem as I happen to be French.

The recruiter tells me that the person that was initially supposed to interview me first (a native French speaker) is currently off sick, and that his manager will be interviewing me instead.

I'm in a room in the lovely old offices of this company, by the Bord Gais theatre for those who live in Dublin. The manager I'm about to spend the next 30 minutes with is American, and majored in French. At least according to the recruiter.

She greets me with a "bon matin !" which doesn't sound right in French, but that I immediately realise is the literal translation of "good morning!". She mumbles a few things which I now can't remember, but something along the lines of "la entretien il est aujourd'hui dans le Facebook, pourquoi ?". I just smile at her while trying to process what she just asked me. But I can't, so I ask her to repeat what she just said. V2 of her question is even worse, and we spend the next 5 to 6 minutes trying to understand each other. Eventually she switches to English and goes on to tell me how she moved to Dublin from the US a couple of years ago.

A few hours later, the recruiter emails me and tells me that unfortunately, being fluent in French is mandatory for this role and that I obviously am not.

Funny thing, I've been in Ireland for 16 years now, and I know a ton of people who also had some very weird interviews with this same company, all roughly between 2010 - 2017: like for instance a hiring manager who had brought her dog to the office (and therefore to the interview room). The dog kept barking / jumping on her, and she very clearly didn't pay any attention to the answers my friend was giving her (he didn't get the role). I could go on with stories like these ones for hours. All at the same FAANG company, all in Dublin, all between 2010 and 2017.

Like I said earlier, when I eventually joined in 2021 the interviewing process felt a lot more professional.

My worst interview was bringing my interviewer to a state of shock and hyperventilation from pointing out an error in their math formula they confidently showcased after telling me my prior answer was wrong. 10 minutes of intense breathing with a shocked expression on their face appeared, I was worried the person would collapse in front of me and didn't know what to do. In the end the interviewer collected themselves and told me they knew from the start I was right and were just testing me. And I instantly knew I failed that interview loop.

Let me preface this by saying, I know this might be a privileged take. However, I've had some bad interview experiences but one thing I have never had happen and I never will do is cross the "just business"/"personal" line with anyone I may or am working with.

> hardest day of my life, my biggest life challenges, and other similar “trauma-baiting” questions.

I would take these types of questions as "from a professional standpoint". If the interviewer corrected and wanted personal answers, the interview would be over.

Wth, are you people crazy? Never, under any circumstances, don’t share personal details during job interviews.

Instead have a list prepared with the BS question list like: what is your greatest achievement, what is your biggest failure, how did you deal with some difficult relationship in the team, how did you unblock some item etc etc. Use chatgpt for preparation, what you say there has to be very vague and not pointing to any of your previous employers or colleagues.

No way this part of the interview process should be something where you, excuse my French, display your underwear, but instead you should be able to prove that you are capable to deal with some difficult inter human situations.

Two years ago I applied for a position in the Swiss Federal Gov's IT departement. The interview rounds went well, I liked the team and the atmosphere was good. They told me that I was the best fit from the people who have applied for the position. Before the last interview, which was with the HR and the "boss" of the departement, i got an email which described how the onboarding happens. So I went there on the next day and they started grilling me. I didn't put my pre University education in the CV and they thought that I'm hiding something from them. They also thought that i'm like 20 years younger than I am, although I told them multiple times how old I am and my age was as well in the CV. It ended without a contract signed. I had to send them all that stuff, like old school certificates (20 years old!) that weren't relevant for that position at all. After a month or so they told me that they do not want to proceed with my application since they found someone who better fits the position. The dude from the team called me and told me that the HR had vetoed me out. Crazy shit. You better don't throw your elementary school grades away!

I had a weird experience interviewing for a company recently. I'm in cyber security and I'm no way a SWE (my CV clearly shows that) and apart from the odd python/shell/powershell script I'm not a developer.

Job description matched 95% of my skills, and I thought it'd be a great opportunity to move to a more lean company, in a challenging industry. First interview with HR went awesome. For the second one I had a whiteboard to code a random problem. I never had a whiteboard before as I was never a SWE before. I tried my best but yeah not exacly what I've been doing for the last 15 years. There was a couple of system design questions which I think went well.

But anyway, received a rejection email a couple days after. What shocked me most was that I wasn't asked a single security question. Literally nothing about authZ, authN, threat modelling, vulnerabilities, frameworks, intelligence. Nada. All these things were listed in the role description, though.

I was upset but yeah, maybe they didn't know what they really wanted.

I have a lot of interaction with mental health professionals, due to an organization in which I participate. Have, for the last 45 years.

Many, many of them are "Doctor, heal thyself" type folks. Definitely non-boring people. I am quite sure of this, for reasons that I won't go into, here.

Sorry it didn't work out, but you dodged a bullet. Take it from me.

I also had a remote interview for an Australian agency company. I went to their website and it was all Australian folks, name, photos, etc. Their website also has a video of them working inside the office, having a meeting.

When I joined the call it was just a couple of Indian persons, with the video resolution of one fella so low, it was hard to make up his face. The other one was a female which did not turned on her camera for reasons she mentioned something she was sick and don't like turning it on.

I had lots of remote interview, but this one is just borderline creepy.

There is, and should be, a red flag for these situations. No make that RED flag. If you go into an interview that leaves you feeling the least bit helpless or at someone's mercy then run screaming. Not politely, not quietly. Just say to calmly to the person that you find the situation abusive. It is. As you go out, if you see anyone or have a chance to talk to anyone, just tell them you found that your interviewer to be personally abusive. That you will not be willing to take the position if it is offered, that you will share you perception with others around you and expect an apology.

Then fall down and appreciate that you did not end up in that situation. And tell everyone you know not to apply or work there.

Heh, I once interviewed at a place that asked me to sit the Oxford Capacity Analysis test as part of the process. (The Scientology personality test, for those unaware.)

I politely declined, which seemed to confuse the interviewer, but he moved right along. I still got the job lol

Something I've learned over the years is how much it matters to feel good about the people you work with, and how much intuition matters in interviews and hiring generally (for both sides!).

It doesn't matter how much you enjoy your tasks or how good your comp is (unless it's enough to retire early) if you dread your colleagues and/or work environment.

I've declined customers or offers.

I think it's important for two reasons:

-For career growth and learning new skills (which eventually translate to more money), it's important to be in an environment where you want to crack tricky problems and exchange ideas with colleagues. Not to talk about the fact that good working relationships pay dividends later on for networking and such.

-We spend so much of our limited time on Earth working that we should enjoy it as much as possible, which, at least for me, is a function of liking who I work with and how I work.

Yikes. Good thing you didn't wind up there.

The furthest I've gone in these jazz style culture interviews is asking people what they do outside of work for fun. This was for fully remote async positions. And it was important to know you had other stuff going on because the mental/personal health risk in failing at remote work is massive and life altering.

If, through wherever that discussion went, I wasn't 100% sure that you could stand on your own feet and wouldn't sink into the abyss, it was impossible to move forward. It was a tough line to walk sometimes because you don't want to pry personally. But that doesn't appear to be a universal opinion, it turns out.

I don't think this was a job interview. I think they needed research for their own project, and they used you as a test subject under the cover of a interview for a job position. They probably tested what type of questions work best to get information from the subject in their project.

I had an interview many years ago, that wasn't nearly as traumatic, but the interviewer asked me about my failures like 4 different ways.

- Tell me about a time you made a professional mistake. - Tell me about your biggest failure. - Tell me when you last shipped a bug. - Tell me when you took down production.

Never asked me about my accomplishments, or the positives. I'm prepared for being asked about making mistakes, and have a few examples ready to give depending on the job I'm interviewing for, but to get asked so many times in a row was just deflating.

I'm glad I didn't get that job.

Truth is, most people who interview people have no idea how to do it. I know because I've done hundreds and nobody ever trained me or explained to me how to do it properly. Over the years I've seen so many people on both sides of the table that I developed a method and I got semi-functional at it but so many people doing interviews shouldn't that bad experiences should be almost expected by now.

15 years ago a FAANG flew me from England to the US for a grad interview. The HR recruiter met me for a coffee before the tech interviews started and said she'd ask me some gentle questions to ease me into the day.

She opened with "do you believe in god?" Not knowing laws or workers' rights in a foreign country then I had to give a very stunted, mumbled response. I complained after I got back home and was told she should not have asked that question.

Earlier this year I was told I failed an interview because when asked why I wanted to join a company, my answer "could apply to other companies in the same stage of life." They apparently required me to be _uniquely_ interested in their company. There were other oddities about their interview process.

Some interviewers just want to feel special.

I would've ended the interview. "I don't want to waste any more of your time. It's clear to me I won't be a good fit here. Thank you for the consideration." <end call>

Genuinely opening up is a mistake. The incentives for these clearly mean that they actually select for candidates who are capable of glibly blagging their way through an extended conversation without saying anything inconsistent, weird, compromising or of substance.

This isn’t usually a required engineering skill. I’m guessing the interview was designed for salespeople and/or middle management.

Beats my worst interview. For some reason I mentioned that I like reading. The guy then demanded to list the last ten books I read. I just named ten random books that I had read at some point in my life, even in childhood. Pretty bizarre. Glad I didn’t get that job.

Back when I was younger and interviewing candidates for a startup where I was one of the oldest engineers my favorite "fit" question used to be "tell me your favorite 4 letter word".

I never actually based my decision on that one, only the technical questions.

This is an example of where I (probably) contributed to making some people feel uncomfortable and I wouldn't do it now.

> Even if you hire a cracked engineer, it’s probably not gonna be a good experience all-around if you can’t make a human connection.

"Cracked engineer" is throwing me, but maybe I've just never seen the word cracked used this way before. Should it be "crack", like "crack team"?

Cultural fit is important. You don't want to work with people who are not morally aligned with you or the company. A rotten apple can ruin the entire basket, but the problem with these cultural fit interviews is that the people who run them often use the wrong framework for their questions.

Who cares if you had trauma when you were 16? Will a past trauma affect your future at the company? Does the interviewer have a psychology degree to conduct such an interview?

In any case, do people have the right to a second chance if they did something morally questionable in the past? I've conducted over 2,000 interviews in the past 20 years, and I've learned a lot. The best indicators of a good candidate are not questions like "Tell me your weaknesses" or "Tell me about a mistake you made."

The best indicators are whether the person spent time learning about your project, your company, the people who work there, the technologies, the product, the vision, the financial status, and the investors. That shows more interest than answering "Tell me about your hobbies."

My worst job interview ever - in-house creative team at telecom company in downtown Chicago.

I walk into a darkened cubicle farm, down to the only lit corner office for a 'lunch interview'.

Interviewer is sitting at their desk eating a hot pocket on a paper plate.

Didn't even offer me any.

First interview I walked out of.

Not the last.

I remember having this interview with an HR person several years ago (like in the early 2010s) where she asked me all these vague, difficult to answer questions. None of them were technical, and I can't remember a single one of them now, but they reminded me of the vague questions we get from various IT audits.

<< insert "dodged a bullet" comment here >>

Interview at Microsoft Serbia, around 2018-2019, for a general Junior Software Engineer position.

My expertise was in Machine Learning (this was way before LLMs and the current AI craze).

The first guy knew what ML was, but advised me to round up my knowledge with low level coding, cause ML is too abstract and isn't very useful.

2nd and 3rd guy gave me a mix of stupid brain teasers and high school math, coupled with questions about obscure C++ libraries (despite me clearly saying I've only done C++ back in high school and don't really ever use it).

The 4th guy, however, was the actual bizarre part. He was completely introverted or something, kept looking at the desk and eventually whispered to me:

HIM: Write an API for a book with chapters. It should be able to flip to the next chapter and flip to the next page.

ME: Sure, no problem, that's trivial. By the way, when the user is at the last page of a chapter and calls nextPage, should it give null or skip to the first page of the next chapter? What if it's the last chapter/page and the user is calling nextChapter/nextPage? Give null? Throw error?

HIM: Write an API to flip the pages and chapters of a book.

ME: Yes, I understand. But if I'm at the last page should it give null?

HIM: The book has pages and chapters. Your API should be able to navigate to the next page and next chapter.

ME: So you keep repeating the question over and over again, and not answering my question.

HIM: I don't know how I can say this any clearer, the book has chapters and pages and your API should navigate to the next chapter and page.

ME: You know, I'm just gonna write this with the null thing in it and we'll go over it line by line.

After a minute or so, I go through the lines and we get to the null part, I look at him while I'm explaining the line and his face shows no pattern recognition to my question. After I finish going through the code, he just picks up his stuff and says "Thank you for your time".

So was this a behavioral interview in disguise or what even happened there?

They showed you their true colours early and saved you the hustle of joining an organisation like that. I will rename the article "my narrowest escape!!"

I can share mine. It was a job interview with one of the fastest growing companies. They were expanding sales positions in APEC region, specifically Korea. I am not really into sales, but I thought okay because it was such a big opportunity to work for this company.

I got three rounds of interviews including technical ones, then I had an interview with my potential team lead. The first thing he asked was about my MBTI personality test, which I hate and didn't pay much attention to learn mine. It seemed every encounter in Korea began with this MBTI test, but common in a job interview? I honestly answered him that I don't know my MBTI and just described my personalities in general. Then he started describing his MBTI and told me that I may not be the best fit with him because this and that.

A few days after, I got an email "... sorry". I don't want to believe that his MBTI question attributed a lot to this decision.

A hiring manager asked me a question like those. I said: "sorry I'm not prepared, I don't remember from the top of my head." Right before that interview I was a solo founder. He said something like: "ok, so you just focus on the work?" "Yes." I got the job.

I've only had one terrible interview as the candidate, but there's one I conducted myself that weighs on my conscience. It was my first job in IT, and I was still a student back then with no real experience to speak of. A young guy came in to our company who was clearly very stressed, and I kept asking him hard questions - probably not to actually assess his competence, but to prove that I was the one who knew my stuff. That was 20 years ago and I don't remember the details anymore, I only remember that he was stressed and I just treated him cruelly with those questions. It wasn't anything offensive, I just keep recalling that moment and I regret it. Today, if I were conducting any interviews, I would make a real effort to make the person feel comfortable, even if they don't know everything or are a weak candidate.

Cultural fit is the number one predictor for a successful fit, however a big wall here is with certain personality types (especially surrounding IT).

In general we don't open up easily to strangers and hate personal questions. We consider many social questions to be just fluff and will either brush them off or pick something with far too much personal information.

These issues especially surface when being interviewed by a non-IT worker.

The problem seems to be that you treated a professional job interview like a therapy session and showed yourself to be a person who brings up situationally inappropriate subjects without a filter.

> I’m a little ashamed remembering myself talking about failed relationships, family struggles

It sucks what happened, but, yeah, you need to establish filters for yourself. No matter what they ask you, it's an absolutely terrible idea to bring up your failed relationships in an interview. Something tells me they did not ask for that private information specifically and you just decided it would be a good idea to volunteer it, otherwise the story would have said so.

It does not matter what you think they asked. You are the one in control of the words that come out of your mouth. This was poor judgement all around.

> covering such lovely topics as the hardest day of my life, my biggest life challenges, and other similar “trauma-baiting” questions.

> talking about failed relationships, family struggles, and interpersonal challenges in previous work environments.

I think that's an interpretation that wasn't necessary (though I agree they're terrible and risky interview questions). I'd stick to hard challenges is my professional life, hard problems I had to solve, etc. My personal life is none of their business.

And I think there's the possibility you may have been rejected for sharing too much. But I agree that kind of question does invite sharing too much.

I am sorry to hear this. If you were perceiving the space as safe and then you felt abused, I think this is something you should report. Maybe people working in mental health startup are experts in mental health, but there are very strict rules and guidelines that forbid abusing this "power" with other people, especially when unwanted, uncertain etc. During my therapy I've learned that the therapeutist is having monthly update on their actions with their supervisor, so they wouldn't do things that are for example unethical, or direct me in the wrong direction for some reason.

As other people mention in comment, this surely have been error of the interviewer, and in my opinion the feedback should be left.

I believe the authors reading of the situation: its likely the interviewer wasn’t intentionally being cruel; most likely its this startups “unique thing that makes them stand out”; quirky twists that every startup attempts to make them stand out from the rest.

Honestly though, I think it ultimately worked out best for all parties. Its clear that the startup didn’t value someone that could be so vulnerable, and hopefully the author ultimately found a place that did.

My personal perspective is that for super early/founding engineer type roles you absolutely have to bring a greater part of yourself to work; you will be working over the weekends, working late, celebrating together and such… generally that environment is closer to a college club or fraternity than a corporation.

Trauma baiting was a new term for me. Must’ve felt awful. Your story made me think of this old Far Side comic, where the psychotherapist just writes “he’s nuts” in his notebook[1].

[1] https://pin.it/7S4LVwrr6

I still remember an off-site team building event that I (luckily) skipped the first half of, where our tech lead tried to speed-run some intimacy building by going around and asking what everyone's biggest fear was.

I had just recently become a parent, and if you're a parent reading this, I'm pretty sure that we both have the exact same biggest fear in our lives - and it was absolutely not one I was willing to fucking share, even with those coworkers that I felt close to.

During university, I had an interview for a quant role. I was asked an option pricing question, and then the interviewer immediately picked up the phone, asked something, then spent the next 2 minutes yelling at the person on the other end. I had a question, so I looked at him during this, and he paused, said "Why are you looking at me, you have 3 minutes left?" and went back to his stream of expletives.

To this day, I still don't know if it was part of the interview or the interviewer's working style. I learned a few new curse words and insults from the exchange, but mostly the signal to tell me I didn't want to work there.

Psych eval without consent is unethical to say the least. And I disagree, the culture fit is not important at all - the way of working, the products, the attitude towards work all good, but the culture fit is a scam.

Usually I do my best to answer questions in a business context and prepare different STAR scenarios based off past experience.

I had something similar to OP. "What was the worst fight you've ever had in your life?"

I asked "you want me to answer that honestly?"

"Yes"

So I did. It was from when I was seven.

They didn't proceed forward with me. But quite frankly, I wouldn't have proceeded forward with them either.

Reading through these comments is pretty sad. I didn't know how bad it had gotten. Haven't had to look for few years.

It’s kinda ironic that after interviewing with a mental health startup, you ended up so emotionally disturbed that you might now need some actual mental health support to tackle the thoughts it brought up. I’m sorry you had to go through that.

I had one job, where at the very end of the process there was a multi-hour evaluation by a psychologist / consultant they used. Went over my full life history, school, jobs, etc.

It was all disclosed up front, so no surprises. Not really that bad.

I think the author was reading too much into these questions. I bet these people came up with random questions they thought were deep, especially coming from a mental health lens, but struck a nerve in the author. They essentially weren't prepared for the raw human experience that was shared here.

I think regardless of whatever you face during an interview, true mastery is to let your humanity at the door and pull up a facade. If you cannot do it in that context, you dodged a bullet imho.. you wouldn't be able to recognize yourself a few years down the line working there with them daily.

two stories.

fun one first.

I once did a coding interview entirely in bash. and the poor software engineer giving the interview did not have that as a skillset. so he was deeply confused when I spent like 70% of the time building a massive sed awk xargs one liner. then proceeded to answer every question in order with it.

I thought he was so confused by it that's why I never heard back. Turns out it was much stranger. The recruiter died. Took them months to figure out his backlog.

2nd story.

I am the responsible party for some poor persons worst interview. And I still feel awful about it. Like they were panicking cause they really wanted the role, and honestly the interview questions were unnecessarily hard and designed to induce stress ( not my call just company decision. personally I can see some of the logic for it but I question the efficacy ). result is this poor kid was spiraling. So I tried to throw them some confidence builder questions... but they were so far into the spiral they bombed those too. And like... I KNEW they knew the answers from previous parts of the interview. But like, they just lost it mentally.

I was told later they spent like 10 minutes in the bathroom recovering before doing the next stage of the interview.

I fucking hated that interview. I still think about it. Wish I coulda just sat down with em after and just apologized and told em they didn't do anything wrong. They just had a bad day and that's fine. It happens. They can try again. Like... I hate someone took it that badly. I hate I was unable to get em that confidence boost they needed to show off their skill.

Experience sometimes just plain leaves scars for everyone.

It is OK to be rejected. Showing vulnerability (in a professional manner) can be a sign of strength and trustworthiness, but one should also be resilient when it isn’t a match and not dwell on it too much. Ego is the enemy.

I had an eerily similar situation in a behavioral interview I had with a company where I had a very strong internal referral from a very senior person. I didn't have any time at all to prepare for the interview and was super stressed out that week because of a cascade of work and personal problems all hitting me at once. In hindsight I probably should have asked for the interview to be postponed by a couple of weeks.

In short, I hadn't prepared at all for the interview loop, so I didn't have any of the standard responses "ready to go" for the behavioral interview. We ended up meandering into a bunch of stuff from my personal life, and I didn't have the presence of mind to course-correct it myself. It didn't help that the interviewer actively encouraged me to keep talking about the personal non-work experiences. I got the impression that the interviewer was self-deluded into thinking that they could do some kind of psychological evaluation of me, even though they clearly (in hindsight) had no formal education or training in doing that sort of thing.

Anyway, same story. After a few days, generic rejection letter, and no more communications. I can only imagine my interview loop feedback must have been horrific to overcome what I am certain was a strong internal referral by a very senior and well-respected employee at said company who I had worked with closely for several years (and he'd sung my praises at our previous company many a time when giving perf feedback). I keep replaying the behavioral interview in my mind and realize I must have come across really awkwardly to the hiring manager. In the end I felt much like the author of this blog post did, personally rather than professionally rejected.

I'm resolved no longer suffering pseudo-psychological behavioral interviews. If I get any questions that I feel cross the line between professional and personal, I'll firmly respond that I do not feel comfortable discussing non-work-related issues in a job interview.

I've met the same type interview recently, but not on the phone, it's a online web forms. I just write those not that important and positive memories, because I don't trust them from the start. Also, on the next step of the form, there's a statement shows they will use AI to analyze my personality. I feel uncomfortable and told them I don't like their way of interview and just end it.

This is hazing, and OP is right to be upset. They were put into a Catch-22 by the interviewer and I see no reason to believe that was accidental.

I see a lot of replies that accuse OP of oversharing, and that's bullshit. In any job interview, the expectation is that you answer questions to the best of your ability. If "I'm not comfortable answering that" is an acceptable answer, that is an exception to the norm and it should be made clear ahead of time.

The real question is... what they expect? What would be the perfect fit for this interview? Someone with irreversible trauma?

I had a pretty weird interview with this crazy french guy that after a couple of minutes, started acting like a telepreacher and demanding passion or something.

But the most frustrating one was with an attractive smiling girl that praised the founder as a genius, dismissed my experience and refused to talk money. She said the next step was a "group dynamics" with the team. I said no thanks. Cult.

In general, I get the job when I reach the technical guy. Except that time that, after being approved by the technical lead, I had a chat with the dept head, that asked some inane what are your hobbies questions and rejected me, really because of too high salary. Later the same company reached me, when he was replaced.

The interviewer certainly didn’t mean tell me about your failed romantic relationships

That’s a misread of note

I remember a moment in an early job interview. My resumé was all proper for this entry level junior position and everything was checking out. We turned to smalltalk to round up the interview.

"What sort of music do you like?"

(What sorta ques... you don't just throw this in without a warning. ahh I'm blanking out. What was it that I listened to last night??)

"Uhhh Mike Oldfield is one..."

"Ohh... (pause) ewww. But we won't let this hinder your application heh heh"

"hee..."

I got the position and rose to senior rather quickly. I didn't have any interactions with this guy since after this one interview. Maybe for the best. He didn't mean bad, he was just a bit out of his element 2nd-seat interviewing for devs.

AI makes it trivial to narrow down who this company might have been despite the anonymized details. Mostly a heads up for future posters who want to truly avoid it.

After reading your blog : I would say : interview depend totally on candidate on how he/she wants to drive, its never like an QnA, unless you are giving a HR round. its like : you say something : other person asks more about it : you explain more. and this is how an interview is driven.

The feeling you expressed is a true feeling of a candidate after the interview : but you are thinking that you did everything best : I would suggest to think from interviewer's shoes as well : how you gave interview : if you are someone taking interview : and candidate gave this responses : would you hire him or not

if not then what could he/she do better...

Reflect like this...

This sounds less like an interview and more like they’re gathering data to train their mental health model!

> And I think it’s worth sharing not because I want to shame the company or individuals (I’ve left them anonymous), but rather to suggest some reconsideration for founders and hiring managers in the same boat.

Now I want to know the name. Companies that use psycho-tactics should be known to us.

I'd say I've been fairly luck as far interviews go. The vast, vast majority have been about as straight forward and by the book as they come. Completely predictable ones.

But I've had some iffy ones.

One was for a small boutique investment firm, for a data scientist type role. I'm not sure if it was part of their "stress testing" routine, but I was given a bash terminal where I had to SSH into some server, find data, and write a program to manipulate said data, and write it to a database. The problem was very straight forward, BUT one of the interviewers was practically hanging over my should for 60 minutes straight, commenting every other minute "No, no, you should...", "This looks wrong", "Have you actually done this before?", "Why don't you know..."

I tried my best to just be professional, and walk him through my thought process. In the end my program ended up doing exactly what it was supposed to, with optimal performance - but I couldn't get out of there fast enough. I thought to myself that I'd rather go unemployed than work under that level of passive-aggressive micromanagement.

But in the big picture, that's nothing. I have friends that have experience explicit age, sex, and race discrimination. Ranging from "Why should we hire [the caste this person "belongs" to]?" to "You better not get pregnant if we decide to hire you"

An interview is a date between a company and a new employee. If either one of them acts inappropriately, or gives off strong "bad chemistry", the other party learns it is a red flag.

Sometimes these red flags are ignored because one side is desperate (lonely, horny and attracted, needs a job, needs the role filled soon). That's always a bad thing.

My worst was with Digital Ocean, a dozen years ago. Total shitshow, top to bottom.

Name and shame company: Canonical

They make us write essays and life stories and reject in 24hrs.

Felt the exact same frustration.

Are you quite sure it was a real business and not just some weirdo pretending to be a business for fun?

Years ago I interviewed at a company that later became infamous owing to a series of posts on TheDailyWTF (https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Virtudyne_0x3a__The_Foundin...).

It was... weird. I had a friend who was working there, and I needed a gig. At the time, in the city I was in, this constituted a pretty big advantage.

The role would've been customer facing but technical, which is where I've spent my career. I answered some reasonable panel questions, and then they had me give a preso on any technical topic I liked. I'm good at that, so I aced it.

Then we got to other questions: specifically, questions from me.

"Are you currently profitable?"

They were not. This, in and of itself, isn't a problem, but it leads to the next question.

"At your current burn rate, how many months of operating cash do you have on hand?"

(murmuring) "Two, but our founder funds us as we need it."

"Are there specific milestones that are tied to additional capital infusions, or any formal agreement, or is it all just at his discretion?"

"It's discretionary but he's very committed to the company."

Having already had negative experiences with one-rich-dude companies, I thanked them for their time and left. I was VERY surprised when they called me a couple weeks later to MAKE A SERIOUSLY LOWBALL OFFER, which I literally laughed at. At least the dude who made the call seemed to understand the company was insane.

My friend jumped ship shortly after. He had more tolerance for Weird Startup Shit because of family money, but it got too weird even for a guy who didn't need the income, if that tells you anything.

One thing I've done in the past when interviewing candidates is to create a hypothetical situation where the candidate doesn't know how to proceed, like some difficult technical issue. I'd also tell the candidate that their manager and peers are all unavailable. Then, I'd ask how they'd go about trying to resolve the issue and proceed. Honestly, I was never looking for the correct resolution. Rather, I was just looking that the candidate had some basic process for troubleshooting and figuring stuff out on their own. If someone said, "I'd search Stack Overflow until I found the solution.", that was usually good enough. However, all too often, candidates just couldn't understand what was being asked, like they independent troubleshooting was an unrealistic skillset. I'd say, "Just walk me through how you'd approach solving this issue." Some candidates would fully melt down, saying, "I don't know. I can't proceed."

One fun trick I learn (or more like two tricks) is to start working with the person during the interview. If you do a lot of interviews you get to see a lot of different ways to do it. Their job is to do interviews but they never get to see how others do it. You can tell them what they are doing right, what interesting approaches others take, what you would do and how they can improve.

If I notice they cant talk about improving the way they do things I cant get out of there fast enough. It's one of those places where everything goes wrong but you have to actively pretend it's not.

worst interview you had: but can't name the company.

exact reason why software engineering interviews will never improve. candidates due maybe desperation, lack of assertiveness or masochism - keep getting abused but won't take action.

name & shame. you get ghosted - or get a rejection email one day later. maybe start cutting interviews short too - if you don't see why you would wanna work at a place.

I came here expecting it was a yet another story about Canonical.

My worst was right out of college. It was for a really small company that needed a web developer.

I showed up, and it was two guys that were around my age.

They seemed annoyed by the interview, it was completely unprofessional, and I was told I didn't get the job because I didn't like a specific sports team.

I found my next job the next week at 3x the pay.

I've had that kind of interview. I kept avoiding the questions because it's not their business. He kept asking. I didn't get the job but that's fine.

I've always worked with people I don't mesh with. We fight with each other. We even yell sometimes. But that's ok. We don't need to be a family and in fact I feel major ick at the thought (weird polyamory shit) - they're gross. But they are competent and consistently bring us more customers.

Horizontal scroll on your site bruh that is why you did not get hired

You dodged a bullet my fren.

I had an interview with a CTO back like 2 years ago, I already passed the 3-4 interviews 2 of which were technical and I am on this cultural fit interview with the CTO. The guy enters the call everything seems normal and he begins with his questions which were absolutely insane. First he asked me how did I improve in my work, since I work in cyber I explained to him that I am following latest trends, and getting security certificates like OffSec and other hands on stuff, even CTFs. He is not satisfied he asked me about specifics and to dive deep, okay.. I've explained to him how OSCP, OSWE and OSEP worked and possibly even shared some of the exam ranges scenarios, again he wasn't satisfied and asked for specifics I am already baffled and I was thinking "Does he want me to share the CTF flags or what". Anyway after back and forth with me saying that I don't understand what he wants me to say, he moves forward with "Now what about outside working hours". I sighed and explained that this is taking at least 90% of my free time as well, but he kept asking that he does not care about work and wants to know what I do outside work. Okay I play table tennis quite often and I train it, HE IS NOT SATISFIED (mind you he asked for specifics as well) and in the end he sighed and just said "so you are not improving outside work". I am on the verge of clicking the end meeting button but I kept going. Next question was, have I done any proactive work during work hours, I explained what I did, what tools I've written for the developers and he again asked for SPECIFICS, I said that at this point I am starting to worry about my NDA, and explained that I won't be sharing what I did specifically. He was frustrated and started explaining me that he does not know my clients or whatever or anything about me so it won't matter, which is absolutely laughable but I refused to share anything. Next thing he said is that I am bombing the interview and he has 0 value from this conversation, and I was like okay sure I didn't know that I should bring value into your company/you without even starting. He was now really frustrated started to use words like "fucking" and so on, explained to me how the interns in the company were having a better answers and how his mom would do a better job at this. I was like "???? lmao". Now telling you this I am not sure why I did not quit the meeting but here we go the next question, which I do not remember exactly but I distinctly remember that he said "that's a perfect answer". And since this is becoming long enough I would spare the rest of questions which were absurd once again. Needless to say that I wasn't chosen nor I would have chose them even if this was somehow a pass.

Right, you should never, ever, make yourself emotionally available to a prospective employer. They might seem friendly but they are not.

had a similar unsolicited psych evaluation interview back in 2017 in twitter. There was a VP (or maybe director), who started with "go back in history and tell me what your boss at position X would say about you", and this kept happening for an hour.

Sounds like a behavioral interview that silicon valley sometimes uses - the questions are designed to ascertain how you deal with difficulty, stress, and certain situations which they absolutely can't legally ask about directly - they are looking for you to discuss challenging times where you succeeded by working harder, doing more than peers, etc. It's not about shaming you, and understanding what they are looking for and why is key - they want people who stick with them through difficult times that they anticipate having.

For interview questions like these, they can only tease about what they are really after - finding employees who "go the extra mile" or "stay late" or "don't give up in the face of adversity". They are looking for you to find evidence of these patterns to corroborate your story. If they drove you to the answer they were after, it wouldn't be a passing score in their interview summary write-up.

My first interview was the weirdest one, as i was so panicked that i started lying to the interviewer.

I hate to victim-blame because it's wrong, uncalled for, and also everyone has these kinds of lapses of reason and trip up. It happens to all of us.

That said, these job interviews aren't therapy sessions; they are roleplaying games where everyone must understand the rules and just pretend, so when they ask you "what's your biggest flaw" the only valid answer is "I'm too much of a perfectionist".

Boy oh boy, the shenanigans I saw when it comes to job interviews are enough to write a book, not even joking, it was easier to start a business than getting hired as an employee, because building a business you talk with mature, goal oriented adults, who only care about what value that business will add. In jobs, that’s the last they care about nowadays, from morons in the HR, to power hungry managers, to contracts that I would say borderline exploitation with minimum regulations to protect the employees.

One job they got offended to ask for a negotiation, despite it was them who changed the original job posting. Another job took 4 interviews (plus one redundant, as it seems they forgot they had that interview with me) over 4 months only to send a generic “thank you” email. Another job, the interviewer seems was hostile just to have the interview. Another one the questions in the first interview were stupid, supposedly technical but extremely shallow, like tabs or spaces.. yeah, I got asked that! Another one refused to change a word in the contract because it’s a “template”, it felt like applying to a service rather than a job. And many other stories, like a company sent me a ticket for an interview in another country, only to find the team is disconnected from what the recruiter wants, they paid for the trip tho.

European companies seem slightly better than North American ones, but for some reasons bringing up the money talk early is a taboo topic? Had few calls and noticed that, they got shocked asking such question, even though it’s great to know so we don’t waste our time.

I never negotiated money, funny how that sounds, but it isn’t my no1 priority, all I wanted is a mature workplace and working with goal oriented people where nothing else matters that much than delivering the results, it seems it was impossible.

I was asked what my hobbies are during an interview once and it made me believe they were just looking for a personality hire or a pretty face.

These are essentially sociopath screens where they expect you to memorize some STAR stories and regurgitate them on demand. And I don't mean screen out.

I have a two way tie for the worst interviews I've ever had, for very different reasons.

First, in 2023 I interviewed for a startup as a lead architect.

They had me do some virtual whiteboard stuff, and so I was drawing rectangles and cylinders and mentioning things like "database" and "message queues" as generically as I could.

They would interrupt me and say stuff like "Which message queue? Where do you download that?". The interview went on for a long time, with many bizarrely-specific questions for a whiteboard interview, but I figured that it was just their way to make sure that candidates didn't bullshit them by handwaving away important details.

They did make me an offer a few days later, but not for as much as I wanted. That's fine, no hard feelings over that.

But then a week later the CEO emails me asking for technical help on a question. I was on the train when I got it. I don't remember the exact question but it was something to do with RabbitMQ and Redis, and it was pretty easy, so I just typed out a quick answer to my phone and replied without even really thinking about it. Then another half-hour later he responds back to my reply asking for more detail on everything.

After his last reply I sent a response like "I am happy enough to continue this conversation but I'm afraid I will need to start billing the time it takes for me to reply. Give me a call and we can discuss the rate.

He didn't reply.

And then I realized something: this company was using interviews as unpaid consulting. That's why they were asking for bizarrely-specific stuff during the interview, and that's why the CEO was still trying to get free consulting out of me even afterward.

Really pissed me off, and I am very glad I didn't accept their offer. I am generally a person who is happy to help answer technical questions for free [1], but I felt like my trusting nature was kind of weaponized.

---------

Second was last year at a big bank.

I was really excited for this job, so I showed up to the interview in my best (and only) suit, made sure everything looked nice, and had studied for many of the technical questions I thought they were likely to ask the previous night.

Off to a bad start, it was one of the hottest days in NYC of the year, and I sweat a lot by nature, so in combination with the full suit, by the time I got to the building I was already kind of drenched in sweat.

Once I get in, they start giving me some conceptual algorithm questions on the whiteboard. I don't remember the exact question, but I remember they asked the runtime complexity of my solution and I said "Looks like O(n + log m) where n is the length of list A and m is the length of list B". One of the interviewers very confidently corrects me an says "You got your n and m backward".

I look at the board, go through my solution, and, no, I actually hadn't gotten the variables backward.

I have no idea what you're supposed to do in a situation where you're right and the interviewer is wrong [2], so I just do a trace through my solution and explain that, no, my variables were appropriately assigned. He still confidently "corrected" me again.

At this point I really don't know what I'm supposed to do, because I'm not going to just lie and say "oh you're right", but if I'm wrong, then I do want to know why so I don't repeat the mistake in the future. So I ask him "Ok, let's trace through this again because I really don't think my understanding is wrong here".

It was this bizarre gaslighting experience, because he would agree with every premise of why I thought the answer was O(n + log m), and every reasoning step along the way, but then still insisted I got the answer wrong. I do really know my Big O complexity, I have been doing this for a very long time, so eventually I just said something like "I guess we need to agree to disagree" because my time for that interview was almost up.

Then there was another interview immediately afterward. The interviewer started asking me very specific questions about Java Spring MVC (like about which annotations to use and whatnot)

Now, I don't have Java Spring on my resume, I haven't touched Java Spring in more than a decade, and Java Spring was not in the job listing. I didn't even consider studying Spring MVC because the listing didn't even mention that this would be web-based.

So I tell the guy something like "umm, I don't really know Spring. I know how a web request works so I'm happy to answer conceptual questions on the whiteboard, but I'm afraid I would have to learn the specific syntax".

And he responded "Well this is not a junior role. You shouldn't have to learn."

So of course I get the specific Spring questions wrong, and fine, if they wanted a person who knew Spring, that's ok, even if they should have put that in the job posting.

But then he asked me to, on the whiteboard, design a basic web request where there was a global counter [3]. I use an AtomicLong, which to my understanding is what pretty much every human who writes Java uses for counters.

He asked me why I used an AtomicLong, and I said "because it's what everyone uses, and because it doesn't block and because compare and swap for a small surface area like that is pretty cheap".

The guy then, corrected me, and told me to use a mutex. I said "I don't think a mutex is necessary here, if it's just a counter I think an atomic is fine."

He was very insistent, and told me to rewrite it with a mutex, and at this point I am starting to question my own competence, so I yield and just rewrite it with a ReentrantLock, which he again "corrected" me saying that I should use `synchronized`, and at that I push back and say "no, ReentrantLock is fine".

I left the interview feeling like a moron; I was so sure about this stuff before, but maybe I didn't have the understanding I thought I did.

I'm friends with a few graybeard C and C++ programmers on Discord, so when I got home I told them the questions and asked them how they'd solve them, and they solved the problems in the same way I would have.

Then I realized that this interviewer, who was principal level, didn't know what an atomic was, and I think he also had no idea how to use ReentrantLock, and so when I used them he just assumed I was wrong. Moron.

[1] And that's still true; feel free to email me if you want to geek out about software :)

[2] And it seems like the answer I get for that varies between each person. I'm not sure anyone knows.

[3] With, to be clear, no further arithmetic or anything being applied to it, before someone asks.

>covering such lovely topics as the hardest day of my life, my biggest life challenges, and other similar “trauma-baiting” questions.

And this was for a mental health startup!? Please name-and-shame them. Awful.