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Interviewer: Welcome, Mr X. Thanks for dropping by. We like to keep our interviews informal. And even though I have all the power here, and you are nothing but a cretin, let’s pretend we are going to have fun here.
Mr X: Sure, man, whatever.
I: Let’s start with the technical stuff, shall we? Do you know what a linked list is?
X: (Tells what it is).
I: Great. Can you tell me where linked lists are used?
X:: Sure. In interview questions.
I: What?
X: The only time linked lists come up is in interview questions.
I:: That’s not true. They have lots of real world applications. Like, like…. (fumbles)
X:: Like to implement memory allocation in operating systems. But you don’t sell operating systems, do you?
I:: Well… moving on. Do you know what the Big O notation is?
X: Sure. It’s another thing used only in interviews.
I: What?! Not true at all. What if you want to sort a billion records a minute, like Google has to?
X: But you are not Google, are you? You are hiring me to work with 5 year old PHP code, and most of the tasks will be hacking HTML/CSS. Why don’t you ask me something I will actually be doing?
I: (Getting a bit frustrated) Fine. How would you do FooBar in version X of PHP?
X: I would, er, Google that.
I: And how do you call library ABC in PHP?
X: Google?
I: (shocked) OMG. You mean you don’t remember all the 97 million PHP functions, and have to actually Google stuff? What if the Internet goes down?
X: Does it? We’re in the 1st world, aren’t we?
I: Tut, tut. Kids these days. Anyway,looking at your resume, we need at least 7 years of ReactJS. You don’t have that.
X: That’s great, because React came out last year.
I: Excuses, excuses. Let’s ask some lateral thinking questions. How would you go about finding how many piano tuners there are in San Francisco?
X: 37.
I: What?!
X: 37. I googled before coming here. Also Googled other puzzle questions. You can fit 7,895,345 balls in a Boeing 747. Manholes covers are round because that is the shape that won’t fall in. You ask the guard what the other guard would say. You then take the fox across the bridge first, and eat the chicken. As for how to move Mount Fuji, you tell it a sad story.
I: Ooooooooookkkkkaaaayyyyyyy. Right, tell me a bit about yourself.
X: Everything is there in the resume.
I: I mean other than that. What sort of a person are you? What are your hobbies?
X: Japanese culture.
I: Interesting. What specifically?
X: Hentai.
I: What’s hentai?
X: It’s an televised art form.
I: Ok. Now, can you give me an example of a time when you were really challenged?
X: Well, just the other day, a few pennies from my pocket fell behind the sofa. Took me an hour to take them out. Boy was it challenging.
I: I meant technical challenge.
X: I once spent 10 hours installing Windows 10 on a Mac.
I: Why did you do that?
X: I had nothing better to do.
I: Why did you decide to apply to us?
X: The voices in my head told me.
I: What?
X: You advertised a job, so I applied.
I: And why do you want to change your job?
X: Money, baby!
I: (shocked)
X: I mean, I am looking for more lateral changes in a fast moving cloud connected social media agile web 2.0 company.
I: Great. That’s the answer we were looking for. What do you feel about constant overtime?
X: I don’t know. What do you feel about overtime pay?
I: What is your biggest weakness?
X: Kryptonite. Also, ice cream.
I: What are your salary expectations?
X: A million dollars a year, three months paid vacation on the beach, stock options, the lot. Failing that, whatever you have.
I: Great. Any questions for me?
X: No.
I: No? You are supposed to ask me a question, to impress me with your knowledge. I’ll ask you one. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
X: Doing your job, minus the stupid questions.
I: Get out. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.
All Credit to:
http://pythonforengineers.com/the-p...89 -
Was lead developer at a small startup, I was hiring and had a budget to add 3 new people to my team to develop a new product for the company.
Some context first and then the rant!
Candidate 1 - Amazing, a dev I worked with before who was under utilized at the previous company. Still a junior, but, she was a quick learner and eager to expand her knowledge, never an issue.
Candidate 2 - Kickass dev with back end skills and extras, he was always eager to work a bit more than what was expected. I use to send him home early to annoy him. haha!
Candidate 3 - Lets call him P.
In the interview he answers every question perfectly, he asks all the right questions and suggests some things I havent even thought of. CTO goes ahead and says we should skip the technical test and just hire the guy, his smart and knows what his talking about, I agree and we hire him. (We where a bit desperate at this stage as well.)
He comes in a week early to pick up his work laptop to get setup before he starts the next week, awesome! This guy is going to be an asset to the company, cant wait to have him join the team - The CTO at this stage is getting ready to leave the company and I will be taking over the division and need someone to take over lead position, he seems like the guys to do it.
The guys starts the next week, he comes in and the laptop we gave him is now a local server for testing and he will be working off his own laptop, no issue, we are small so needed a testing stack, but wasnt really needed since we had procedures in place for this already.
Here is where everything goes wrong!!! First day goes great... Next day he gets in early 6:30am (Nice! NO!), he absolutely smells, no stinks, of weed, not a light smell, the entire fucking office smells of weed! (I have no problem with weed, just dont make it my problem to deal with). I get called by boss and told to sort this out people are complaining! I drive to office and have a meeting with him, he says its all good he understands. (This was Friday).
Monday comes around - Get a call from Boss at 7:30am. Whole office smells like weed, please talk to P again, this cannot happen again. I drive to office again, and he again says it wont happen again, he has some issues with back pain and the weed helps.
Tuesday - Same fucking thing! And now he doesnt want to sign for the laptop("server") that was given to him, and has moved to code in the boardroom, WHERE OUR FUCKING CLIENTS WILL BE VIEWING A DEMO THAT DAY OF THE PRODUCT!! Now that whole room smells like weed, FML!
Wednesday - We send P a formal letter that he is under probation, P calls me to have a meeting. In the meeting he blames me for not understanding "new age" medicine, I ask for his doctors prescription and ask why he didnt tell me this in the interview so I could make arrangements, we dont care if you are stoned, just do good work and be considerate to your co-workers. P cant provide these and keeps ranting, I suggest he takes pain killers, he has none of it only "new age" medicine for him.
Thursday - I ask him to rather "work" from home till we can get this sorted, he comes in for code reviews for 2 weeks. I can clearly see he has no idea how the system works but is trying, I thought I will dive deeper and look at all of his code. Its a mess, nothing makes sense and 50% of it is hard coded (We are building a decentralized API for huge data sets so this makes no sense).
Friday - In code review I confront him about this, he has excuses for everything, I start asking him harder questions about the project and to explain what we are building - he goes quiet and quits on the spot with a shitty apology.
From what I could make out he was really smart when it came to theory but interpreting the theory to actual practice wasnt possible for him, probably would have been easier if he wasnt high all the time.
I hate interview code tests, but learned a valuable lesson that day! Always test for some code knowledge as well even if you hate doing it, ask the right questions and be careful who you hire! You can only bullshit for so long in coding before someone figures out that you are a fraud.16 -
I FINALLY DID IT!! I landed a job!! I'm going to be a firmware engineer!! Woohoo!! 😁
It only took half a year, but I finally got one, and purely off my own merit. It feels damn good when you get the job with no references or connections, just your own skills.
After a highly successful on-site technical/whiteboard interview, I was 90% confident I'd get it. The fact that my job search is finally over, is such a fucking relief. Good riddance to endless interview prep, applications & rejections.
I start on Monday. Goodbye freedom >.<19 -
Recently had an interview with a company. At some point an SELinux question came up and while I didn't provide the best answer ever (I'm hardly familiar with SELinux and mentioned that as well beforehand so they knew), it was technically correct and the reaction of the interviewers was funny.
TI (technical interviewer): say your php script isn't executed and after a while you find out that SELinux is blocking php script execution, how can you fix that?
Me: setenforce 0...? (essentially disabling SELinux at all)
TI: disabling it entirely for getting php execution to work?! That doesn't sound like a good solu...
HRI (HR (non technical) interviewer, also present): *turns to TI* - but, would it solve the problem?
TI: 😐 well, yes, but... That's a bad thing to do so I wouldn't count is corre..
HRI: *still aiming towards TI* but you simply asked him for a way to solve the php execution issue, would his answer work? Regardless of whether it's the best or worst solution, would it be a solution which works?
TI: well... yes...
HRI: then he answered correctly I'd say, next!
(yes, I'm aware that my answer wasn't good as for security at all but it would have solved that problem which is what was asked)18 -
An interview via Skype
HR: (ask some technical questions)
Me: (give some technical answers)
HR: Great! I will send your answers to technical team and let you know asap. Have a nice day!
Suddenly I lost all my interests on that company.3 -
>22 year old college student
>Apply for a QA internship
>Interview goes well,they see I have plenty of experience and doubt it's real
>Hard questions are thrown
>Answer them and they admit the position is for manual testing
I honestly don't care I need the money, plus manual testing doesn't usually strain me.
>A week goes by
>A month goes by
>Call them
>...Sorry we were looking for someone with less technical and dev experience.
My fucking face when I don't have a title, still overqualified, fighting with WordPress devs on freelancer.
14 -
So i've been a dev manager for a little while now. Thought i'd take some time to disambiguate some job titles to let everyone know what they might be in for when joining / moving around a big org.
Title: Senior Software Engineer
Background:
- Technical
- Clever
- Typically has years experience building what management are trying to build
Responsibilities:
- Building new features
- Writing code
- Code review
- Offering advice to product manag......OH NO YOU DON'T CODE MONKEY, BACK TO WORK!
Title: Dev Manager
Background:
- Technical
- Former/current programmer
- knows his/her way around a codebase.
Responsibilities:
- Recruiting / interviewing new staff
- Keeping the team focused and delivering tasks
- Architecture decisions
- Lying about complexity of architecture decisions to ensure team gets the actual time they need
- Lying about feature estimations to ensure team gets to work on critical technical improvements that were cancelled / de-prioritised
- Explaining to hire-ups why we can't "Just do it quicker"
- Explaining to senior engineers why the product manager declined their meeting request
Title: Product / Product Manager
Background:
- Nothing relevant to the industry or product line what so ever
- Found the correct building on the day of the interview
- Has once opened an Excel spreadsheet and successfully saved it to a desktop
Responsibilities:
- Making every key decision about every feature available in the app
- Learning to ignore that inner voice we like to call "Common sense"
- Making sure to not accidentally take some advice from technical staff
- Raising the blood pressure of everyone below them / working with them
Title: Program Lead / Product Owner
Background:
- Capable of speech
- Aware of what a computer is (optional)
Responsibilities:
- Sitting down
- Talking
- Clicking random buttons on Jira
- Making bullet point lists
Title: Director of Software Engineering
Background:
- Allegedly attended college/university to study computer science
- Similar to a technical product manager (technical optional)
Responsibilities:
- Reports directly to VP
- Fixes problems by creating a different problem somewhere else as a distraction
- Claiming to understand and green light technical decisions, while having already agreed with product that it will never happen9 -
Phone call...
Caller: we contact you to arrange an interview for Java developer position, what time is good with you?
Me: Sorry Sir, I am javascript developer not Java developer!
Caller: You mentioned in your CV that you are using Java and Ayax for building applications!
Me: Trust me Sir, I don't have any relationship with your Ayax...
Caller: No problem, we can discuss this small technical difference in the interview. When you are available for it?
Me: No Sir, I am not available.7 -
The last two frontend devs I interviewed.
First:
He had 15 some years of experience, but couldn't answer our most basic of technical questions, we stopped asking after the first couple.
Based on a technical test I got the impression that he couldn't distinguish between backend and frontend.
So, I posed a simple question "Have you interfaced with REST API'S using Javascript before?"
Which lead him to talk about arrays. I shit you not he droned on about arrays for five minutes.
"I have experience using big array, small arrays, breaking big arrays into littler arrays and putting arrays inside other arrays."
Never been in an interview situation where I've had to hold back laughter before. We refer to him as the array expert.
His technical knowledge was lacking, and he was nervous, so he just waffled. I managed to ease his nerves and the interview wasn't terrible after that, but he wasn't what we were looking for.
Second:
This was a phone interview.
It started off OK he was clearly walking somewhere and was half preoccupied. Turns out he was on his way back from the shop after buying rolling papers (we'd heard him in the shop asking for Rizla), and he was preoccupied with rolling a joint.
We started asking some basic technical questions at which point he faked that he'd seen a fight in the street.
We then called him back five minutes later you could hear him smoking "ah, that's better". After that the interview was OK, not what we were looking for, but not bad.
Top tip: If you require a joint to get through a phone interview, roll and smoke it before hand.17 -
Just got asked "How much experience do you have with the current JavaScript standards? I'm talking ES6 and ES7" in an interview with what I assumed were technical people.
I chuckled and said "I'm comfortable with ES8" as a joke but everyone just nodded and moved on..7 -
Weirdest technical interview:
I was applying all over during my last semester in college (before graduating). This place was hiring a PHP developer for their “web store”. My interviewer invited me into her office, pulled out a laptop, and asked if I could walk her through some of the existing code. After I successfully did, she responded with “oh wow, we had no idea it was doing all of that!”.
The main room consisted of 6 folding tables lined with people on desk phones (probably support/sales). When I asked her where I would be working (mostly concerned about not being able to focus over the constant phone calls), she said that I would just share her desk in her office.
Then she asked if I could start the next day, without giving my internship any kind of warning that I’d be quitting so abruptly. She also asked me to start missing class, so I could spend more time at work. Saying things like “if you already have the job, why focus on school?”. When I asked who wrote that code, she told me that it was an out of state contractor that they’re trying to get rid of, because his rates were too high.
I told her that I would need a few days to think about it, which gave me time to call the other places that I had interviewed, but were still waiting to hear back. Luckily, when one of the places heard that I had been offered a job, they decided to rush their hiring process and offered me a job over the phone!
It’s been 6 years, and I am so thankful that I didn’t have to take that sketchy job.1 -
Interviewer: (asks technical question)
Me: (answers correctly)
Interviewer: Oh thank God, most of the people we interview fail to answer that. So, on another note do you believe in rubber duck debugging?
Me: yes, ofc
Interviewer: but it's just a toy you know
[I was kinda taken aback]
Me: ...
Me: God is imaginary too you know
Interviewer: (he just laughed)
(So I laughed with him) 😅12 -
Perhaps not "best", but certainly most amusing, so what the heck!
Years ago as an intern, I applied to a large pharmaceutical company. On part of the application form, you had to enter the code of the department you were applying to.
What I *should have* put down was "IT", which is the department that houses all their devs. However, I didn't actually read any of what the codes meant, assumed that was the department for helping people with how to mail merge, and put down "COMPSCI" instead. This was computational sciences - loosely summarised as computational data analysis on various druggable molecules.
I do *not* have any sort of biology or chemistry background, so the interview was rather... interesting, and I muddled through on the basis of getting some more interview practice assuming it was a no go.
To my amazement, got a phone call saying that they'd been thinking they wanted someone more technical on the team, and despite my lack of scientific experience they thought I'd be a good fit. I was unsure as to whether I should accept for a while, but then decided to just go for it - and had a fantastic internship there, working on a great variety of stuff, and learning tons all under a supervisor who I'm still in touch with to this day.
tl;dr - Applied for the wrong job. Coincidentally got it anyway, and miraculously had a fantastic year working there.8 -
Fuck the memes.
Fuck the framework battles.
Fuck the language battles.
Fuck the titles.
Anybody who has been in this field long enough knows that it doesn't matter if your linus fucking torvalds, there is no human who has lived or ever will live that simultaneously understands, knows, and remembers how to implement, in multiple languages, the following:
- jest mocks for complex React components (partial mocks, full mocks, no mocks at all!)
- token cancellation for asynchronous Tasks in C#
- fullstack CRUD, REST, and websocket communication (throw in gRPC for bonus points)
- database query optimization, seeding, and design
- nginx routing, https redirection
- build automation with full test coverage and environment consideration
- docker container versioning, restoration, and cleanup
- internationalization on both the front AND backends
- secret storage, security audits
- package management, maintenence, and deprecation reviews
- integrating with dozens of APIs
- fucking how to center a div
and that's a _comically_ incomplete list; barely scratches the surface of the full range of what a dev can encounter in a given day of writing software
have many of us probably done one or even all of these at different times? surely.
but does that mean we are supposed to draw that up at a moment's notice some cookie-cutter solution like a fucking robot and spit out an answer on a fax sheet?
recruiters, if you read this site (perhaps only the good ones do anyway so its wasted oxygen), just know that whoever you hire its literally the luck of the draw of how well they perform during the interview. sure, perhaps some perform better, but you can never know how good someone is until they literally start working at your org, so... have fun with that.
Oh and I almost forgot, again for you recruiters, on top of that list which you probably won't ever understand for the entirety of your lives, you can also add writing documentation, backup scripts, and orchestrating / administrating fucking JIRA or actually any somewhat technical dashboard like a CMS or website, because once again, the devs are the only truly competent ones - and i don't even mean in a technical sense, i mean in a HUMAN sense of GETTING SHIT DONE IN GENERAL.
There's literally 2 types of people in the world: those who sit around drawing flow charts and talking on the phone all day, and those WHO LITERALLY FUCKING BUILD THE WORLD
why don't i just run the whole fucking company at this point? you guys are "celebrating" that you made literally $5 dollars from a single customer and i'm just sitting here coding 12 hours a day like all is fine and well
i'm so ANGRY its always the same no matter where i go, non-technical people have just no clue, even when you implore them how long things take, they just nod and smile and say "we'll do it the MVP way". sure, fine, you can do that like 2 or 3 times, but not for 6 fucking months until you have a stack of "MVPs" that come toppling down like the garbage they are.
How do expect to keep the "momentum" of your customers and sales (I hope you can hear the hatred of each of these market words as I type them) if the entire system is glued together with ducktape because YOU wanted to expedite the feature by doing it the EASY way instead of the RIGHT way. god, just forget it, nobody is going to listen anyway, its like the 5th time a row in my life
we NEED tests!
we NEED to know our code coverage!
we NEED to design our system to handle large amounts of traffic!
we NEED detailed logging!
we NEED to start building an exception database!
BILBO BAGGINS! I'm not trying to hurt you! I'm trying to help you!
Don't really know what this rant was, I'm just raging and all over the place at the universe. I'm going to bed.20 -
Tldr : In my country, there is always a middleman .It is so rare to work for end client directly and it is very common to be fuck over by them, because they want milk you out as much as possible
Job description : Salary range from X to Y
Me : I expect 90% of Y $
HR : if you pass technical examination we can agree on this amount.
*Technical interview*
All correct answers, perfect match with stack etc.
HR calling next day:
HR: Great job on interview, but you need to lower your financial expectation to X (around 50% of Y)
Me: Why? We have spoken the other day and you said there would be no problem with the money. I nailed the interview, I don't understand why I should agree to lower wage.
HR: I know I know, but right now we cannot give more. Maybe later
Me: I am sorry, but I feel kinda cheated. For me this is red flag since I don't know what I can expect later if you are not sincere from the beginning. I won't take your offer, goodbye.10 -
I'm 20, and I consider myself to be as junior as they come. I only started programming seriously in June 2016,and since then, I've been doing mainly Android Work, and making my own servers and backends(using AWS/Firebase nd stuff).
For the first time in life, I was approached by a recruiter for a company on linkedIn. They "stumbled upon" my Github profile and wanted to see if I was interested in an internship opportunity. This company is an early stage start up, by that I mean a dude with an idea calling himself the CEO and a guy who "runs a tech blog" and only knows college level C programming (explaination follows).
So they want me to make the app for their startup. and for that, I ws first asked to solve a couple problems to prove my competence and a "technical interview" followed.
They gave me 3 questions, all textbook, GCD of 2 numbers, binary search and Adding an element to the linked List, code to be written on a piece of paper. As the position was that of an Android Developer, I assumed that Java should be the language of choice. Assumed because when I asked, the 'tech blogger' said, yeah whatever.
But wait, that ain't all, as soon as I was done, Mr. Blogger threw a fit, saying I shouldn't assume and that I must write it in C. I kept my cool (I'm not the most patient person), and wrote the whole thing in C.
He read it, and asked me what I've written and then told me how wrong I was to write 2 extra lines instead of recursion for GCD. I explained that with numbers large enough, we run the risk of getting a stackoverflow and it's best to apply non recursive solution if possible. He just heard stackoverflow and accused me of cheating. I should have left right then, but I don't know why, I apologized and again, in detail explained what was happening to this fucktard. Once this was done, He asked me how, if I had to, I'd use this exact code in my Android App. I told him that Id rather write this in Java/Kotlin since those are the languages native to Android apps. I also said that I'd export these as a Library and use JNI for the task. (I don't actually know how, I figured I can study if I have to).
Here's his reply, "WTF! We don't want to make the app in Java, we will use C (Yeh, not C++, C). and Don't use these fancy TOOLS like JNI or Kotlin in front of me, make a proper application."
By this I was clear that this guy is not fit to be technical lead and that I should leave. I said, "Sir, I don't know how, if even possible, can we make an Android App purely in C. I am sorry, but this job is not for me".
I got up and was about to leave the room, when we said, "Yeah okay, I was just testing you".
Yeah right, the guy's face looked like a howling monkey when I said Library for C, and It has been easier for me to explain code to my 10 year old cousin that this dumbfuck.
He then proceeded to ask me about my availability, and I said that I can at max to 15-20 hours a week since my college schedule is pretty tight. I asked me to get him a prototype in 2 months and also offered me a full time job after I graduate. (That'd be 2 years from now). I said thank you for the offer, but I am still not sure of I am the right person for this job.
He then said, "Oh you will be when I tell you your monthly stipend."
I stopped for a second, because, money.
And then he proceeded to say 2 words which made me walk out without saying a single word.
"One Thousand".
I live in India, 1000 INR translates to roughly $15. I made 25 times that by doing nothing more than add a web view to an activity and render a company's responsive website in it so it looks like an app.
If this wasn't enough, the recruiter later had the audacity to blame me for it and tell me how lucky I am to even get an offer "so good".
Fuck inexperienced assholes trying shit they don't understand and thinking that the other guy is shitsworth.10 -
The following meeting occurred at a client between a recently added client PM and our team, we'll call her Shrilldesi, previously from one of the main consulting vendors.
*Meeting begins after 15 minutes of bullshitting, waiting for people to file in*
Shrilldesi: "Ok everyone, let's get started
TeamMember: "We're still waiting for Z and W, not sure why they're late."
SD: "We can start there. It was decided had to lay off Z and W, because we didn't have enough work."
Moi: "Wait, what. Who made that decision? Why weren't we consulted on this? We have another project starting next week that they were needed for. They just delivered the entire public facing rewrite, why would we let them go?!"
SD: "It was decided by myself, pajeet, and venkata looking at the backlog. Not enough work, week gap."
Moi: "This is going to hurt our ability to deliver the next phase. When are we going to start interviewing new people, the project begins next week?"
SD: "We will interview new resources as needed."
Moi: "Who is we? And 'as needed' is yesterday, or realistically several weeks ago as the. project. starts. next. week. Also, we're obligated by federal law to bring back anyone we lay off before we hire anyone else for the same position."
SD: "Interviews will be done by myself, Mohd, and Pajeet."
Moi: "...can I point out that there's only one modestly technical person in that group, they're an admin, and none of them are from this team? How do you conduct an engineering interview without any engineers?"
SD: "That does not matter, I have watched enough to be able to ask your questions."
Moi: *anger intensifies* "I have to respectfully disagree. I don't feel it's appropriate to cut us out of the process of interviewing our own team members."
SD: "It is decided, we will take care of it, let us move on. Next, we need to find work for the Manasa, she doesn't have anything to do."
Moi: *sharpens baseball bat* "...shouldn't we just fire her then?"
SD: "Oh that is so mean, why would we fire her? We were thinking she might be able to do some of my project management work."
Moi: *sharpening intensifies* "You do realize it's a violation of H1-B statutes for someone to be employed in work other than what is stated on their contract, and Project Managers are specifically listed as not specialized skillsets per federal law."
SD: *ignores question* "We also need to find work for the offshore team, they don't have enough to do. Please find them work for the next period."
Moi: *checks how long the wait period is for ar-15s*
SD: "We also have a new person rolling onto our team, he comes from the xyz team, Dikshit *gestures to person we all figured was lost*. He will be handling our front end development."
Moi: *seething hatred* "WE JUST LET TWO EXCELLENT FRONT END DEVELOPERS GO. WE DO NOT NEED DIKSHIT."
SD: "Please calm down. We will be replacing the other two shortly, there is no problem."
Moi: "Have you heard nothing I've said? Did you even run this by legal and HR? Why did we let them go in the first place? Why do we even need Dikshit?!"
SD: "I said it before, please listen. There is not enough work for them. Dikshit will do front end. What is unclear?"
Note: There's not really any dramatization here. It's almost verbatim what happened. Eventually, the next project was cancelled, they incrementally rolled the rest of the local team off. They then had the cojones to express aghast anger when I notified them I would not be renewing my contract, and open hatred when I explained to them I was not a slave, and I refused to be a bag holder for the inevitable failure of a project without any chance of success. I don't really care what happened after that, they can all burn in their own little nepotistic shitshow of perpetual failure.4 -
I was recently hired as a lead devops to a giant shit show. The CTO said he needs someone to do things correctly instead of quickly. This is a conversation I just had this morning
HR: We want you to interview a potential new DevOps engineer
ME: okay, when?
HR: Tomorrow
ME: I won't be able to create interview tests and materials for tomorrow. How's next week
HR: This hire is urgent! It has to be tomorrow
ME: Then you'll have to do the interview without me
HR: We need you to interview them because we've had a few bad hires in the past that we don't want to repeat
ME: The best way to filter out bad hires is with technical tests, which will take time to develop. I can be ready by next week.
HR: We can't give you a weeks notice for each hire, we are in urgent need for more devops.
ME: ...14 -
Passed the online test.
Passed the technical interview.
Need to pass the final interview.
I'm applying to this company as a JS developer (backend). Their engineers are amazing and the fucking have 99.94% coverage on their test suiteeee; that gave me a code-boner.
If I get this job I'll finally say good bye to fucking PHPShit and Zend Framefuck and all this hacked bootstrap and 15k LoC "core.css/js"
I CAN DO IT10 -
The man who runs my IT department. The man who is in charge of all things and people that are technical: IT management software development, infrastructure, training, help desk, system administration, etc. A man with a staff of fifty plus. If you were to peel back the flesh on this man's head and crack open his skull you would find dung beetles feasting on the feces that power his thoughts and motor functions. Underneath this foul membrane, if you could push past the maggots; the meal worms; his undying love for hourly binges of Johnny Walker Black on any day of the week with a name that contains a vowel; his fascination with shiny objects and his endless internal monologue wondering when they would hatch rainbow ponies that fly; his desire whenever he enters a paint store to open all the cans of paint and taste the different colors; if you could push past all of the vile crap that exists where Thomas Aquinas once theorized there was a soul, you would find a colony of paramecia at the end of their short lives laughing hysterically at how much smarter they were than the host they lived in.
This man was in charge of hiring the Manager of Software Development. The manager I report to. After seven months of ignoring this chore; after interviewing the sum total of four candidates; after making a point to tell myself and a colleague that there was no one qualified to fill this position within our company (an opinion that is both untrue and, when spoken, runs afoul of internal hiring policies) this man hired a soulless cretin with no experience in software development or with running a software development group. A man who regularly confuses web servers and SQL servers. A man who asked me how my previous manager reviewed my work, was told by me that said previous manager read my code, and then replied in his capacity as the manager of software development that "looking at code is a compete waste of time for a manager." A man so without any humanity or reason for being that he will sit silently, creepily, in conference rooms with the lights off waiting for meetings to begin. Meetings he has scheduled. That have no reason for being in the first place. Just like himself.
Shortly before the man in charge offered the Dev Manager job to the simulacrum of human flesh that is my manager, he met with me and others who had been involved in the interview process. When I informed him that hiring someone with no technical knowledge for a very technical position would be a mistake that he would suffer through for years, he replied in reference to his future hire that "his managerial experience makes up for his lack of technical knowledge."
Best. Prank. Ever. Worst prank ever too. Fuck.6 -
The most disappointing (not so sure about upsetting) rejection was from none other than Google.
I was ecstatic when Google respond to my application by inviting me to an interview. If I recall rightly I had two pre-interview screenings, two technical interviews, and about four interviews with people. The people were great and the HR person I was dealing with was open that the feedback was all good.
And then the rejection came! I called the HR guy and asked what happened. He said there’s a central group somewhere who approve all hiring and they decided I hadn’t worked for a “big enough” company in the past.
Yet - my potential colleagues and manager thought I could do the job, I passed the Google-scale technical tests … and then some faceless person somewhere says “meh” and that’s that.
It’s not like they didn’t have my resume that whole time, or the opportunity to ask any questions they wanted !
So that sucked.10 -
I was expecting a 4th interview this afternoon for a position as a fullstack elixir developer.
Got a response from the CTO.
'Even if you pass all the tests with success, we could not go further because you're a junior and we're looking for a senior'
Well, dude, you've seen me 3 times and didn't understand that I was a junior ? My CV is not enough explicit ? It's written at the top of it...
So after a motivation interview, technical test, technical interview and Phoenix framework interview, they only realized yet the plot.
Good luck for your seniors to pass their knowledge to other seniors.17 -
I applied for the wrong job for my placement year. Put down COMPSCI on the form (which, it turns out, is computational biology, which I knew nothing about) rather than ITSEC, which was the software dev side of things.
I only found out in the interview, when the first question was asked:
"So Almond, I'm a bit confused as to why you've applied to this role specifically given you've no biology background at all - could you fill us in?"
...errr...
I spewed some kind of crap on the spot about wanting to work in a field where I saw a direct & differing application of computing than I'd seen before, and thought my focus on the technical, rather than the scientific side of things might be an asset to them. This awkward exchange went on for a while - but somehow it seemed to work, because I was offered the job, and decided to take it - had a fantastic year there.5 -
I applied to a backend position that requested one of the following technologies: PHP, Java or .NET ( I work on .net btw)
So far so good, the hr recruiter schedules a talk and ask a lot of standard questions like what is your greatest accomplishment, what is good code and so on.
After what seemed to be about an hour of questioning she then tells me that I am to take a technical test from backend javascript. I pause for a second and I specifically tell her, lady, the ad said .NET, Java or PHP, wtf? And she tells me, no worries, we will train you. You can imagine that I completely blew the technical interview to later get an email that my knowledge (in javascript) is not sufficient for the position. Gg guys, good company values :))1 -
Story time!
A little over a year ago I was in the hiring process with a new company and countered their initial offer. I was told by the CTO that it was no problem and they would get back to me soon.
A couple days go by and I'm then informed that they're hiring a new IT director and would like me to interview with him as well. It felt kinda lame since I'd already been offered the job but I rolled with it.
When I showed up to the office for an interview I tried to call and let them know I was there and couldn't get a hold of anyone. 30 minutes later I get a call from the CTO saying they couldn't find the new IT director and when they got him to answer the phone he said he had left early and would call me to do a phone interview.
Obviously the whole experience so far has been pretty lame but I stuck with it because I knew the CTO personally. I did the phone interview and quickly realized this dude was a prick, and would be a terrible boss, but I spoke with the CTO again who told me to stick with it and eventually I did get the job.
Fast forward about a month and it's clear the new director is trash. He literally bragged about firing a dude over an accidental outage (wtf!?).
He had the technical experience you'd expect of a junior help desk and his management skills were pretty clearly sub-par.
He was also, for whatever reason, completely unable to communicate with the only woman on our team. When assigning work he would always feel the need to ask if she could 'handle it' rather than just assigning it to her like it's done for everyone else. He was pretty clearly sexist.
The whole team hates this dude by this point but he's somehow managed to woo the executives into thinking he shits gold.
I was helping him set up a Python venv on his machine when I noticed another VPN client installed which certainly piqued my interest. After a bit of digging it was clear he was using company time and company equipment to continue working for his previous employer.
We turned over logs and he was fired the next day. He tried to add me on LinkedIn afterwards and I have never declined something quicker.
Moral of the story is don't be a dickhead.1 -
You can believe or not but it’s just one of those stories. It’s long and crazy and it probably happened.
A few years ago I was interviewed by this big insurance company. They asked me on linkedin and were interested. They didn’t specify who they were so I didn’t specify who I am either.
After they revealed who they are I was just curious how they fuck they want to spend those billions of dollars they claimed in their press notes about this fucking digital transformation everyone is talking about. The numbers were big.
I got into 3 or 4 phone/skype interviews without technical questions and I was invited to see them by person.
I know that it would be funny because they didn’t asked me for CV so they didn’t know anything about me and I was just more curious how far I can get without revealing myself.
They canceled interview at midnight and I was in the middle of Louis de Funès comedies marathon so I didn’t sleep whole night. I assumed they would just reschedule but then they phoned me at 8 am if I can come because they made mistake.
So at first talk I was just interviewed by some manager I knowed after 5 minutes he would be shitty as fuck and demand stupid things in no time because he is not technical. He was trying to explain me that they got so great people and they do everything so fast.
From my experience speed and programming are not the things that match. ( for reference of my thought see three virtues of a GREAT programmer )
So I just pissed them off by asking what they would do with me when I finish this transformation thingy next year. ( Probably get rid off and fire at some point were my thoughts )
Then I got this technical interview on newest gold color MacBook pro - pair programming ( they were showing off how much money they have all the time ).
The person asked me to transform json and get some data in javascript .
Really that was the thing and I was so bored and tired that I just asked in what ES standard I can code.
The problem was despite he told me I can do anything and they are using newest standards ( yeah right ) the “for of” loop didn’t worked and he even didn’t know that syntax existed. So I explained him it’s the newest syntax pointing mozilla page and that he need to adjust his configuration. Because we didn’t have time for that I just did it using var an function by writing bunch of code.
When he was asking me if I want to write some tests probably because my code looked ugly as fuck ( I didn’t sleep for more then 24 hours at that point and wanted to live the building as fast as I can) I told I finished and there is no time for tests because it’s so simple and dumb task. The code worked.
After showing me how awesome their office is ( yeah please I work from home so I don’t care ) I got into the talk with VP of engineering and he was the only person who asked me where is my CV because he didn’t know what to talk about. I just laughed at him and told him that I got here just by talking how awesome I am so we can talk about whatever he wants.
After quick talk about 4 different problems where I introduced 4 different languages and bunch of libraries just because I can and I worked with those he was mine.
He told me about this awesome stack they’re building with kubernetes and micro services and the shitty future where they want to put IOT into peoples ass to sell them insurance and suddenly I got awake and started to want that job but behind that all awesomeness there was just .NET bridge with stack of mainframes running COBOL that they want to get rid off and move company to the cloud.
They needed mostly people who would dump code to different technology stack and get rid of old stack ( and probably those old people ) and I was bored again because I work more in r&d field where you sometimes need to think about something that don’t exist and be creative.
I asked him why it would take so much time so he explained me how they would do the transformation by consolidating bunch of companies and how much money they would make by probably firing people that don’t know about it to this day.
I didn’t met any person working permanently there but only consultants from corporations and people hired in some 3rd party company created by this mother company.
They didn’t responded with any decision after me wasting so much time and they asked me for interview for another position year after.
I just explained HR person how they treat people and I don’t want to work there for any money.
If You reached this point it is the end and if it was entertaining thank YOU I did my best.
Have a nice day.5 -
Recruiter: are you interested in a client side java role?
Me: yes, here is my client side resume please submit me
Recruiter: sorry the hiring manager said they are looking for more of a back-end engineer
Me: you told me it was a client side role, please resubmit me with my back-end geared resume
Recruiter: yes that's correct, it's client side, we'll keep you in mind for the future but you should know there is a difference between mobile devs and web devs
Me: what you just said is not relevant to this conversation. I would be happy to discuss the diff between front-end and back-end, client vs server, etc.
Recruiter: I'm just relaying what the hiring manager is saying to me
Me: your [lack of] ability to relay technical information is quite apparent :/
*lesson learned*: interview recruiters before they start interviewing me
Unbelievable waste of time, how do these people even make a living? FML!16 -
Asked to do a technical interview task. It has expected input and output.
My code does what it needs to and produces the desired result.
Get rejected and no feedback given when asked.
Juniors won't get better if you don't communicate my dude 😒2 -
We've been trying to hire a greenhorn, fresh-faced intern from India for like a month now.
Plenty of applicants, most with very nice curriculums, a few even can think on their feet while grilled by my questions.
I've sent to talk to HR three almost college-graduating candidates, who convinced me they know the subject of data engineering enough to be working with me and that they are actually gonna do the tasks assigned.
The fucking tweep at HR, an old fart who I had to convince that HVAC maintenance is not the job of the IT department nor the data team, calls my approved candidates "too junior".
WTF, I ask. - "Not professional enough", says the human toad.
Yes, they are to be interns! - "But they do not show professionalism", answered the hag.
Yes they do! They were very professional on the interviews! - "That is for me to say!" barked the reptile.
A week pass by while I try to find more just as good candidates who are also "more professional" when the hag has the audacity to say "here, I found someone. He knows everything about computer things and is very professional".
I took like 20 seconds to find out that the kid she'd given my number to, and was now messaging me IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING NIGHT, was her niece's fiancee and wasn't even in uni! He was just a high school graduate!
Seriously, nepotism kids, delete your Instagrams, tiktoks and every single piece of social media.
I scaled the issue to my VP, who contacted the HR VP for India, who gave the worst possible excuse for her behaviour: "She knows nothing about computer things!" for what my own boss said "so why was she assigned to oversee the data team's new hires?!". The HR slug mumbled something and then doubled down with "well, the kids you sent her were all girls! she had never hired a girl to a technical position, she wouldn't know what to look for in an interview!"
What. The. Fuck.
My boss, my VP of a very strategic technical area, happens to be a woman who lives in a place where women's rights are for real. I had *never* heard she swear on a non-football-related context. She did. Loudly. On camera. As if the HR boss was a referee who just disallowed a goal for her team due to an very ambiguous forward pass.
Shit is still flowing, but it seems that the hiring process of the entire company is being restructured because of that.
I guess I've just sped up this process in about one hundred years?9 -
Dead 💀 developer.
My first interview,
Back then was technical graduated local CompSchool. Call for a job newspaper, by phone ☎️ the Supervisor assign a date for interview.
In the office the developer guy was amaze because he will hire any from CompSchool he also was student and all stuff made was on the premised of he learned and worked on the company.
About half and hour talks, he write my name on a post-it and put on HR desk.
“Come back tomorrow morning .. tell me you got the job !”
Do so, entering the office next day, was a sad people talking.. the Developer is 💀 dead (drugged on a party).
So this guy “my name in the post-it” is our salvation for all the database, passwords, accounting, etc. and spell my name.
What tha... got the job, the money 💴, was 18 years old, with excessive income (dead guy salarie).
Worked 3 1/2 years for the company.
Thank you 💀 for the opportunity.9 -
One of my top 10 worst meetings, was for an interview for a job I really wanted. The guy started off the technical interview by asking me about language features that had been replaced since before I started learning the language. Told him when I started learning and his reply was:
"Yeah I see that on your CV, but come on, you MUST know this stuff".
eh no asshole, because its been removed for 4 years, you MUST know its not relevant10 -
I met with the CTO of a local tech company today for a beer, at the recommendation of a friend who currently works at the company. They're looking for Software Engineers and wanted to see if I'd be a good fit.
I'm not actively looking to leave my current job, as I love it there. I was just curious to see what other opportunities were out there.
After the beer, he pretty much offered me the job on the spot for $30,000 to $40,000 more than my current salary, along with benefits. When I asked if there was any sort of technical interview, he said that this meeting was actually the technical interview, and that by the time he had finished his first beer, he could already tell that I would be a good fit. He wants me to meet with his Lead Architect and CEO soon just to see if we all click and then we'll go from there.
The only problem is that I really love my current company. I love the work, the atmosphere, the autonomy, and my coworkers. But an extra $30k to $40k per year is a lot of money.
If everything works out and they give me an official written offer, I'm going to see if my current job will counteroffer. I know my boss would happily counteroffer if he's given authorization from the higher-ups, it's just a matter of exactly how much they're able to counteroffer.19 -
As a full-stack dev who has been looking for a full-time role for over half a year now... How the fuck can it be so difficult to land a job as a dev? I'm a passionate, capable, and proven dev; it shouldn't be this hard.
And why the hell are coding/whiteboard interviews the de-facto standard for deciding if somebody is worthy of a role? Whiteboard interviews are as inadequate and unencompassing a means of determining the quality of a candidate as asking a dentist how well they know the organ structure of the human body.
I've applied to an endless number of positions, so far-reaching and desperate as to even apply to international positions and designer roles instead of developer roles (I've been a graphic designer for over 13+ years). Even with this, most don't get back to you, and the few who do most often just notify you of your rejection. On the rare occasion I land an interview, my chances get fucked up by the absurd questions they ask, as if the things they are asking about are at all an appropriate, all-encompassing measure of what I know.
Aren't employers aware that competent devs are able to learn new things and technical nuances nearly instantaneously given documentation or an internet connection? Obviously, I keep learning and getting better after every interview, though it barely helps, when each interviewer asks an entirely new, arbitrary set of questions or problems....
Honestly, fuck the current state of the system for coding job interviews. I'm just about ready to give up. Why the hell did I put myself through 5 years of NYU for a Computer Engineering degree and nearly $100K in student loan debt, if it doesn't help me land a job?13 -
Story time:
At a precious employer.
Hire shit-hot contractor.
No technical test at interview stage because he’s so shit-hot.
Is a uni lecturer.
PhD in mathematics.
Me: Shit, this guy must be good!
6 months later and a tragedy of errors and clearly misspent company funds later:
Manager: can you look at what x did and merge it into the product?
Me: Sure. *looks* *yells fuck very loudly*
*walks over to manager*
“Soooo... you know those 6 months and thousands and thousands you spent? It’s all for nought. There’s barely anything there, and none of it works.”
Manager: “Shit. What are we going to do? Can you fix it?”
Me: “To be honest, it would be quicker to just do it from scratch than try to work out what he’s done and failed to do.”
Manager: “Fuck. Ok. Go for it.”
I then had to build this entire new lot of systems, a workflow system, a user management and permissions system.
I got it done inside a month or so.
For context, we (the devs) knew something was afoot when the contractor couldn’t work out why his keyboard wasn’t working (it wasn’t plugged in), and he also *really* struggled to find his way around visual studio and git.
The moral of this tale? *always always* screen your candidates. Even if they seem amazing on paper.15 -
Had a job interview back where I want to move(2300 miles away), doing exactly what I wanted. Unfortunately it was for a senior developer, a bit over my pay grade.
First Interview: "It is above your skill level, but I like you. We will make it fit you."
Second Interview(technical): " You did super well! I will make sure to pass the good news onto the boss! I am excited to work with you soon!"
Response to my thank you email: "We decided to not persue you further for this position. We are going with someone who has more experience."
Why string me along?!?!4 -
Telephonic "technical" interview at 5 in the evening
Interviewer : Tell me about yourself
Me : Blah blah...
Interviewer : Thank you for your time
(Call time on phone... 7 minutes)
Absolutely uninterested... no single counter question... Guess she just wanted to go home early... 😑6 -
So this candidate came to an interview for a sys admin position. I didn't give my approval on the CV before, the HR department just sent him to the technical interview.
I began to ask him different questions related to Linux, bash commands etc. but he didn't know what to respond. Then i asked him about his past experience and he just replied me: "this would be my first job. I have some experience with administrating some Counter Strike servers and I was admin on a Metin server".
>.<2 -
For my very first job interview, I joined a rather well known company (somewhere in the mid-ranges) as an intern-frontend developer. Everything was going okay-ish. I was asked some technical questions and I answered them to the best of my knowledge, and it was all good until he came to the javascript questions.
Interviewer: So, have you worked with any frontend frameworks?
Me: Yeah, I usually work with vanilla JS, but I've gotten into frameworks like Backbone and Ember.
Interviewer: I've never heard of those. Do you know AngularJS?
Me: I've dabbled aroudn with it, although I haven't gotten into it much. If you want me to use AngularJS, I can pick it up and get the ropes of it pretty quick.
Interviewer: So tell me.. what is AngularJS?
Me: It's a Javascript framework released by Google (explains what it is and how it differs from most popular JS frameworks, explains the components of Angular.. etc)
Interviewer: Well, you're wrong. It's an enhanced html for web-apps. ( or some bullshit he quoted off the front-page of the then angularjs.org homepage )4 -
#LongRant
I AM SO FUCKING PISSED RIGHT NOW OF ALL YOU DICKHEADS WHO DON'T KNOW SHIT 'BOUT PROGRAMING AND STILL QUALIFY FOR THE NEXT ROUND!
Background: I am a final year student of Computer Science. This time of the year, companies come to the campus to recruit potential employees for their vacant positions. But during the COVID-19 times, the number of such companies and jobs have gone a little down. Two companies came to our university for recruitment — DXC Technology and Hanu Software. I cleared the aptitude/code test for DXC and appeared for the interview, which went fairly well. Waiting on the results. The rant is about the other company.
The Story: I am learning and working on Cloud (AWS specifically) for the past 1 year. I have a cloud Certification in Oracle and working my way to get Azure Certified. Hanu Software, which is a core cloud company (works on Azure) came to our campus for the recruitment (Cloud Engineer). Their test had these sections —
1. Personality (54 Questions; 15 minutes)
2. Verbal (20 Questions; 20 minutes)
3. Reasoning (15 Questions; 15 minutes)
4. Technical (25 Questions; 25 minutes)
5. Quantitative (15 Questions; 15 minutes)
As soon as I finished my Interview with DXC, I had my Hanu test within 30 minutes. I have a Mac so the test by default started on Safari. After completing 4 sections, I receive a mail in Junk from Hanu which stated that only Chrome or Firefox can be used to give the test. AHH! And on Safari.. the platform on which the test was being conducted didn't ask me for any camera permission (the test is monitored, can't even change windows/switch tabs). I then changed the browser to Mozilla Firefox and somehow finish the test. After finishing, I call up my classmates to find out how their test go. Know what? FUCKING TWATS USED GOOGLE LENS TO FIND OUT THE ANSWERS!
Last night, the list of qualifying students arrived and obviously I didn't make it to the list, but those dumbfucks did who don't even know what Cloud technology is or how it works. Neither they could do any average level program, nor have the communication skills. HOW?! HOW THEM AND NOT ME? Life is very unfair sometimes. I couldn't sleep at night.
PS: If you made this far, thank you for reading this rant (and sorry for it being so long). Makes it better to be able to share with someone. If you could, then please guide me (online resources/recommendations) to be better at competitive programming, or help me enhance my resume/linkedin or if you could refer me for an entry level position at your organisation, I would eternally be grateful. Thank you once again. And sorry for the long rant.17 -
!(short rant) && (long story)
So these last 2 months of my life have been quite topsy turvy. Everything was pretty much unexpected and now I am on my way to Banglore, which is referred to as the Silicon Valley of India.
All this started in mid Feb when one day my ceo dropped a mail to all of us saying he wants to covey something important. A little background story about my company before I go on. We were a bunch of 6-7 tech guys working on a location based analytics product and had a decent client base. I had joined them in November 2017 and I was very hopeful that I would get to learn a lot owing to the good seniors from reputed universities and their experience. Coming back to the day, the ceo called us and dropped a bomb on us that the funding is depleted and we only have enough money to pay you salaries for this month. "We didn't anticipate that this day will come but currently we are in talks with some companies that are looking to acquire us. I am very much hopeful that we will figure something out by the end of this month(Feb). Until then, I can't stop you from applying to other companies but don't reveal that we are in this situation." So, keeping my fingers crossed I was waiting for the acquisition and wasn't looking for any other opportunities.
The company work was under hold and during this time one of my friends approached me with his idea. Since I had nothing else to do, I agreed to work with him. I was living in Mumbai, the city with one of the highest living standards in India, and I was paying exorbitant rent without any income. There was no news until mid March when the ceo called and dropped bomb#2 that an Indonesian company is looking to acquire us and he had scheduled an interview for the entire team. This isn't what I had signed up for. Indonesia wasn't a country I had even considered, let alone leave the country. Still I appeared for the interview and it went very well.
No news from the company or the ceo after that. One of my friends advised me to start applying to other companies and not rely on this acquisition. Now the problem was I couldn't reveal about the acquisition in my interview, so I used to give some bullshit about me not liking the work here. The company didn't buy it because how can someone judge a company in just 4 months. So obviously I didn't clear the interviews, also partially because I didn't meet their technical requirements.
March end, I moved to my hometown in Gujarat because obviously I had started to get broke in this expensive-ass city. The friend with whom I was working with also didn't have any issue since it was just tech and coding and I could do it remotely. Comes mid-April when the ceo called and said the acquisition is done and gave me some details about it. For confidentiality sake I can't reveal the details but I figured enough red flags for me to go with it.
*Eye of the tiger playing in the background*
Now started my quest of finding a decent job. The edge I had now was that I could reveal about the acquisition to the other company. I started applying left right and center to any company I could find. Amazon, saavn and some good-ass Indian companies. The thing that now came in my way was my experience. I am 23 year old(soon to be 24) with around 20 months of experience. Everyone wanted a 3-5 year experience guy/girl. Soon, my entire optimism was draining and I even considered going back to my first company.
During this time, I got a call from this company in Banglore who were looking for a candidate which best suited my profile. I went all guns blazing and appeared for the interview. I had 6 rounds of technical interview plus 1 logical reasoning. And since I was giving the interview remotely, I had one round on each alternate working day. Everyday was a challenge and I spent the nights in anxiousness and anticipation. Meanwhile I was appearing for other interviews too, since I wasn't too hopeful about my chances in this one.
Cut to April 27, I got an offer from this company and without negotiating they offered me the package I was hoping for.
After this entire ordeal, I realised one thing. Whatever happens, happens for good. Looking forward to this new city, new company, new people and new environment.11 -
In Italy (Milan)🇮🇹, job hunting is a fucking hell for misfits like me:
• Young(26)
• 1 year(working) experience + continuous learning/improvement at home
• Skillful and adaptable full-stack
• Willing to do greater things with software without being payed like a monkey
This is the last week working at my current company (from which I rejected the renewal of the contract for 26K€/13 months) and almost every time at a new interview everyone tries to down sell me by default or because of the fucking little time that I've been inside companies without even looking at my skills/capabilities.
Also many little companies made by the CEO and a technical manager that are looking for someone from which being provided food 😒(metaphorically).
(On another side, in one month, me and my gf need to move to a new apartment, the renting process sucks, and she has issues to find a non-slavering job because she is a foreigner(with good knowledge of English and Chinese) with very basic understanding of Italian and I see her crying often in my arms because it's hard and stressful for her to become economically independent as she would like to be)45 -
About 18 months ago my non-technical Manager of Applications Development asked me to do the technical interviews for a .NET web developer position that needed to be filled. Because I don't believe in white board interviewing (that's another rant), but I do need to see if the prospective dev can actually code, for the initial interview I prepare a couple of coding problems on paper and ask that they solve them using any language or pseudo code they want. I tell them that after they're done we'll discuss their thought process. While they work the other interviewing dev and I silently do our own stuff.
About half way through the first round of technical interviews the aforementioned manager insisted we interview a dev from his previous company. This guy was top notch. Excellent. Will fit right in.
The manager's applicant comes in to interview and after some initial questions about his resume and experience I give him the first programming problem: a straightforward fizzbuzz (http://wiki.c2.com/?FizzBuzzTest). He looked as if the gamesters of Triskelion had dropped him into the arena. He demurs. Comments on the unexpectedness of the request. Explains that he has a little book he usually refers to to help him with such problems (can't make this stuff up). I again offer that he could use any language or pseudo code. We just want to see how he thinks. He decides he will do the fizzbuzz problem in SQL. My co-interviewer and I are surprised at this choice, but recover quickly and tell him to go ahead. Twenty minutes later he hands me a blank piece of paper. Of the 18 or so candidates we interview, he is the only one who cannot write a single line of code or pseudo code.
I receive an email from this applicant a couple of weeks after his interview. He has given the fizzbuzz problem some more thought. He writes that it occurs to him that the code could be placed into a function. That is the culmination of his cogitation over two weeks. We shake our heads and shortly thereafter attend the scheduled meeting to discuss the applicants.
At the meeting the manager asks about his former co-worker. I inartfully, though accurately, tell him that his candidate does not know how to code. He calls me irrational. After the requisite shocked silence of five people not knowing how to respond to this outburst we all sing Kumbaya and elect to hire someone else.
Interviews are fraught for both sides of the table. I use Fizzbuzz because if the applicant knows how to code it's an early win in the process and we all need that. And if the applicant can't solve it, cut bait and go home.
Fizzbuzz. Best. Interview. Question. Ever.6 -
I interviewed to this small company. It was a position requiring a lot of experience they said. They did Microsoft SQL server and their technical interview questions were so easy it took me a lot of time to answer them because I was looking for traps, like for real. Think I might've answered too complex for them as well.
In the non-technical interview they joked about how they'd need to reserve two saunas in team events (Finnish thing) as they were all male and I would've been the first female.
Then they asked questions about my *children*. "Who takes care of them when they're sick?" Ummm, yeah, illegal much.
In the end they didn't hire me but they took two interns from the vocational school (or applied sciences). Yeah, so hard a job a Master of Science in Software Engineering with (at that point) three years of full-stack experience couldn't handle but some not even graduate interns could do?
Oh, and fun thing was. A couple months later a recruiter called me about the same company. I told *her* the story and she said she's gonna drop that company from her list and said no wonder they complain about not getting people for them. xD
I also send a tip to my unions discrimination department. They used my case as an example in presentations so suppose this experience served a purpose. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯3 -
I think I nailed it.
I had an interview on Friday. Never had I ever such a good one. Everything went so smoothly I'm amazed to this moment.
It started pretty much normally. Few questions about me and my CV. Next some soft skills check and few minutes talking in English to make sure I know how to speak.
Next, two funny trick questions. I hope I'll translate them good enough.
1) You've got 6 cups in a row. Three of them, next to each other, are empty. Remaining 3 are full. You've got one movement to make them stand alternately, ie. Full, empty, etc. or Empty, full etc.
2) You've got yourself a cake. Normal, birthday cake in a shape of a cylinder. On three cuts, you have to cut it in 8 equal pieces.
Next was technical interview. The only thing I couldn't answer to was a formula to get angle between camera and two objects on the scene. Something about cos x.
They told me that I was the only recruitee to make project using Hololens SDK. Other people made the images gallery in 2D only.
Also they were VERY impressed that I managed to send them fix that changed a lot of the gallery in an hour. No one was expecting it so fast since the feature wasn't all that simple. Or so they said. Code was written so it wasn't hard to implement this change.
Now I've got to wait at least a week for their response. As you could imagine, I'm nervously checking my email each time I get any spam.
I'd like to thank @fire-phoenix and @Root that were responding to my last posts about this new work tasks and current hardships. I know it's a bit too early to celebrate but I'm just so hyped for how well everything went 😀10 -
My co-workers hate it when I ask this question on a technical interview, but my common one is "what is the difference between a varchar(max) and varchar(8000) when they are both storing 8000 characters"
Answer, you cannot index a varchar(max). A varchar(max) and varchar(8000) both store the data in the table but a max will go to blob storage if it is greater than 8000.
No one ever knows the answer but I like to ask it to see how people think. Then I tell them that no one ever gets that right and it isn't a big deal that they don't know it, as I give them the answer.8 -
I'm so close to giving up. Yesterday, I travelled 4 hours in one direction for a job interview for a graduate position as a web developer. As I arrived at the interview, I was welcomed by a senior dev and one of the HR people.
I sit down and they start explaining how everything will commence(standard procedure stuff) and afterwards hand me the technical test. At this time I am super calm cause I did my homework, checked out their products, their websites and knew right away what I was going to work on. As I turn the page, I see at the top with huge fucking capital letters "JAVA OOP test".
I take a minute and look back at them, like wtf is happening. Turns out that they are looking for a java dev. They picked me for the role because I had literally 1 fucking sentence in my CV and where I have said that I studied java in one semester of uni. FYI my entire portfolio, cv and cover letter are focused on JS, html, css both for client and server side.
As the fucking HR guy stood there and asked me "is there something wrong", I felt broken inside. For the first time in my fucking life I felt like I was done and couldn't continue anymore. I felt like this is some bitch-slap from karma about something but I still can't figure out what. I just walked out of there being unable to realize what happened.
I just feel like I should end my developer career before it has even started, just go do business analysis or something. Why the fuck would someone put a job description entirely talking about Angular, Less/SASS, bootstrap and jQuery and then say that is a Java dev OOP role. Who the fuck allows those people to take good salaries yet still deliver the up most shittiest quality service.
Before the interview, I checked out their websites which are simply horrendous with the comparability of a fucking baked potato. Idk really what to do, I don't mean to sound as a whiny little b.... but as I walked out of their office, I felt broken inside. Sorry for the long rant.8 -
Going to system engineer interview expecting technical questions. Very nervous.
First 'technical' question "what does DDoS stand for?"
Second "what does LTE mean?"
😐😐😐🙄🙄😏🤣😄😅😃 Gonna nail this interview.2 -
this is how I destroyed my career in IT and how I'm headed to a bleak future.
I've spent the last 10 years working at a small company developing a web platform. I was the first developer, I covered many roles.
I worked like crazy, often overtime. I hired junior dev, people left and came. We were a small team.
I was able to keep the boat afloat for many years, solving all the technical problems we had. I was adding value to the company, sure, but not to mine professional career.
There was a lot of pressure from young developers, from CEO, from investors. Latent disagreement between the COO and the CEO. I was in between.
Somehow, the trust I built in 10 years, helping people and working hard, was lost.
There was a merge, development was outsourced, the small team I hired was kept for maintenance and I was fired, without obvious explanations.Well, I was the oldest and the most expensive.
Now I'm 53, almost one year unemployed.
I'm a developer at heart, but obsolete. The thing we were doing,
were very naif. I tried to introduce many modern and more sophisticated software concepts. But basically it was still pure java with some jquery. No framework. No persistency layer, no api, no frontend framework. It just worked.
I moved everything to AWS in attempt to use more modern stack, and improving our deployment workflow.
Yes, but I'm no devop. While I know about CD/CI, I didn't set up one.
I know a lot of architectural concepts, but I'm not a solution architect.
I tried to explain to the team agile. But I'm not a scrum master.
I introduced backlog management, story mapping, etc. But I'm not a product manager.
And before that? I led a team once, for one year, part of a bigger project. I can create roadmap, presentations, planning, reports.
But I'm not a project manager.
I worked a lot freelancing.
Now I'll be useless at freelancing. Yes I understand Angular, react, Spring etc, I'm studying a lot. But 0 years of experience.
As a developer, I'm basically a junior developer.
I can't easily "downgrade" my career. I wish. I'll take a smaller salary. I'll be happy as junior dev, I've a lot to learn.
But they'll think I'm overqualified, that I'll leave, so they won't hire me even for senior dev. Or that I won't fit in a 25 y.o. team.
My leadership is more by "example", servant leader or something like that. I build trust when I work with somebody, not during a job interview.
On top of that, due to having worked in many foreign countries, and freelancing, my "pension plan" I won't be able to collect anything. I've just some money saved for one year or so.
I'm 53, unemployed. In few years time, if I don't find anything, it will be even harder to be employed.
I think I'm fucked25 -
!rant
Interviewed a guy for a senior technical job. I worked hard on making my own questions that hopefully make the interviewee think instead of useless gotchas.
He told me at the end that they were fun questions and this interview was loads better than the rest who just ask questions off of Google.
Having had my share of shitty interviews, this makes me feel so good 😊11 -
I did an interview with an international company for an "Expert Fullstack Dev." position...
After being praised by the technical team, it turned out that the position was offering a junior salary...
I swear to god...
HR is the cancer of this industry
I lose faith in humanity day by day.6 -
Awkward recruiting process? Sit the fuck back!
So about a year ago I got laid off. I got some help setting up LinkedIn and realising I'm not trash and offers to talk started flowing in.
So this consultancy firm asks me to come in for a talk and having nothing better to do I oblige - they're working on big, exciting Greenfield stuff and I'm amazed they want me.
Fast forward the most nervous week in my life and the HR assistant brings me into the meeting room, I get some water and a nice first impression - also my last. I wait in the room for five minutes.
In walks madam HR, madam Team lead and miss assistant from before, all carrying big ass laptops. We shake hands and they sit down and all open up their laptops between me and them - I just sit there feeling naked with my block of paper and pencil I brought.
So we wait for their machines to start up and madam HR just starts throwing questions at me and seemingly noting my answers into a sheet. Meanwhile madam Teamlead is busy on her phone most of the time and my most human interaction remains smalltalk and questions between me and miss assistant.
I did manage to get madam Teamlead to look up from her phone when I asked how they felt about the fact that I have no formal training and would need to pick up a lot of skills as we go, to which she said something along 'well this ain't a candy shop, we expect you to work' and looked back down at her phone.
A bit shaken, I agreed to stay for the technical test (apparently I passed the interview...)
Now this test was designed by their CTO since he didn't feel like any of the available tests on the market could properly judge applicants' skilllevels. Yes, alarms went off already at that point.
What I'm presented with is a word document with questions, and another for answers and... It's just string gymnastics and reference/value difference knowledge - shit it takes you a split second to look up or test if you ever get into these insane cases where you need to know. And then there was a likewise one with sql statements that was also just convoluted query gymnastics and trying to hide changes in the seemingly same statement through various questions. No questions on design, no problem solving, just... Attention span testing with a dash of coding?
Anyway, it turned out they had evening and weekend shifts and round the clock support tournus which on top of the ridiculous recruitment process and way lower than average salary offer had me turn them down.
Don't enable bullshit people, run away!4 -
- Get invited to apply to job
- Technical interview, guy shows up late starts small talk wasting time and gives me the exercise
- Start implementing the first algorithm, finish it passing min test cases then realize there's a solution that would make both algorithms a breeze
- I pitch my solution realizing there's no much time left, cuz we lost almost 20 min of my test hour talking about BS plus the almost 10 min he arrived late, and reassure the interviewer it can be developed faster
- Interviewer says it doesn't matter, we should finish edge cases
- Kay no problem, finish the first algorithm successfully and explain pitfalls on the second part with the current implementation
- I tell him there's a better solution but he doesn't seem to care, he says time's up
Now here's the funny part.
I get called by the recruiter today (2 weeks later) and she says "They are happy with your soft skills but feel there are some gaps with your coding, they would like to repeat the technical interview because they didn't feel there was much time to assess the 'gaps' ".
Interviewers, either I'm competent enough to work for you or not, your tests must be designed to assess that, if you see you can't fit the problem you want in the time you have left change the problem, reschedule or here's an idea...LEAVE THE BS CHITCHAT TILL THE END AND START THE INTERVIEW ON TIME. When I do interviews I always try to have one complete free hour and a one algorithm exercise because I expect the candidate to solve it, analyze it and offer alternatives or explain it, I've never had someone finishing more than 2 an hour.
You can keep your job I'll keep my time. I'll write a similar problem on the comments to pass on the knowledge for people who enjoy solving these kinds of problems, can't give you the exact same thing, also tip guys don't do NDA's for interviewing it makes no fucking sense trust me no one cares about your fizz buzz intellectual property.
13 -
Had a job interview for a front end dev (Involving a technical test). After couple of days, recruiter says - Unfortunately they say that you are too focused on best practices so they want to pass.3
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Had an interview with a potential customer last week, and he started questioning my technical capability in the middle of the discussion on the basis that I’m taking notes with pen and paper...
Yes, I can type. At 90+ WPM, I can darn near produce a transcript of everything we say. But I won’t remember any of it afterward, because it passes straight from the ears to the hands without any processing.
“You see, that’s what we have something called ’search’ for...”
...Yeah. Except that doesn’t help with picking out the most important points from a wall of text, organizing it in a way that allows visualizing relationships between concepts, and other non-linear things that are hard to do on the fly in a word processor.
“Well, how about we get you a tablet with a pen and you can just write on that, then?”
How about no.
Ended up turning him down because of other concerns that were raised that were, suffice to say, about as ornerous as you might expect from that exchange.7 -
It was my first time in Berlin. I came as a tourist but started looking for a workplace, with hopes of getting a blue card and continuing work.
I searched online, going through some hiring platforms, and sent out a few messages around. I felt a special connection (I thought I was exactly who they needed), and wrote them a carefully crafted letter of intention alongside my lavish CV.
They got back to me, and I was given this task, to do while at home. I completed it, had a phone interview, and was invited on-site for a face to face interview. Everybody felt warm, I felt a connection. We already talked salary expectations, and all was going great.
They told me they'd get back to me for the next stage. ...
and they actually DID. Yes, they did!
They invited me for a second interview, but this time to prepare a technical topic to present. So I did. I picked one of the 3 topics they offered, which was about performance optimization. I had recently read materials about that, so I felt really empowered.
So far nobody told me what I was supposed to be doing at the new job, I only knew the technologies required, and what the company did for money.
I prepared a thorough presentation, with practical demos of why some things are bad for performance. While I was showing it, many people in the room were learning about this for the first time, which means I did good. The team lead had some extra questions that I wasn't able to answer in full (needed some research), but otherwise it was great.
The CTO then asked me out to lunch, to talk over some more stuff, and we had a general discussion about what drives us, our life story, etc. He said that he'd really like me to be part of the team, and that he's looking forward to working with me.
So I've been at it for almost a month. I've met everyone, got acquainted with the team, knew the biography of some of them, proven my worth, etc. I was ensured with body language, and verbal language that everything was going great. As careful as I was with this kind of stuff, I was positive that I'd get the job. I even started planning my trips, to get the documents ready.
And then I got a message stating the usual stuff "Thank you bla bla bla we don't think we'll need your services". I was shocked, but in good faith I wanted to reply something along the lines "I'm sorry it didn't work out, all the best in finding what you're looking for", but I found out that I was blocked from contacting them.
That's right. Rejected + blocked. After a month of fucking foreplay. I get rejection, even though it hurts. But being blocked?! That's just insane!8 -
Story of my life when I am really interested in a company:
Company: let's have a call to get to know each other.
Me: okay.
Company during the call: takes a technical interview
Company *a few days later*: now let's have a technical call!
Me: okay
Company during call: asks to design GOOGLE in GOOGLE DOC (??!!?!)
Company *a few days later*: now let's have a Development Test!
Me: okay
Company *sends an email* asking to complete a task which should take a week to develop in a few hours
Me: okay...
Company *a few weeks later*: Sends a generic email saying they got another person who is a better fit.
Me: ffs..16 -
A couple of weeks ago, I got to the second stage of a recruitment process with a relatively big fintech in the crypto space (I know) - all went well and although I did not think much of it at first, with all the information I had gathered I came to realize this might as well be the best opportunity I've had in my pursuit of finding a new job (i.e looking for high technical challenges, unsure of where I see myself in 5 years, wanting to give full-remote work a try, etc.).
Cue to the end of the interview;
"That's great! I really enjoyed speaking with you, your technical background seems excellent so we would like to move to the next stage which is a take-home test to do in your free time.", said the interviewer.
"Wow! Much amaze, well of course! What's it gonna be?", said the naive interviewee.
"I'm sending you the details via email, please send it back in 48 hours, buhbye now", she hangs up.
...
"48 hours?? Right, this should be easy then, probably some online leetcoding platform, as usual.", thought the naive interviewee, who evidently went through this sh*t numerous times already.
A day later I receive the email: this was the whole deal. The take-home test supreme with bacon and cheese. A full-blown project, with tests, a project structure, a docker image, testing and bullet points for bonus points! The assessment was poorly written with lots of typos and overall ambiguity, a few datasets were also provided but bloated with inconsistent comments and trailing whitespace.
What the actual fck??? Am I supposed to sleep deprive myself to death while also working my day job? What are you trying to assess? How much of my life I'm willing to sacrifice for your stupid useless coding challenge? You are not all Google, have some respect, jeez.
I did not get the job.2 -
My interview,
Introduction round.
Basic information round.
General Aptitude test.
Technical round 1
Technical round 2
Telephonic round
Telephonic technical round
And now i asked them for the results of my interview.
They told me to arrange another FUCKING TECHNICAL ROUND.
WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON.
IT'S BEEN FUCKING 2 MONTHS SINCE I'M GIVING INTERVIEWS..
I'm literally exhausted. And it looks like they are completing their project for free.1 -
Had a LinkedIn recruiter contact me a few months ago, I usually get one of these a week at minimum and usually more frequent the moment a start a new position. I hate that!
Anyway, story and rant:
The recruiter sent me a position that was pretty good, lots of benefits, not too far to drive, some remote days. With the usual list of responsibilities that they themselves dont know what half of them are but put them on anyway, I would automate those anyway if I wanted to work there.
All looks great, I ask if they can send me more details and the budget they company has for the position.
This was for a Senior position so I thought they would know what industry standard is.
The recruiter replies with a budget: $2000
I actually couldn't believe that they thought that was acceptable amount of money for the amount of responsibilities they wanted this new senior guy to do, no wonder the previous guy left.
I respond and told her that the amount is extremely low for what they want and I dont think they will find someone with the skills they need at that amount. I would be willing to talk for a minimum of $4000 and thats not guaranteed until I can go for a formal interview to find out exactly what the company needs.
The recruiters replay was probably the rudest anyone has ever been to me online, lol! She insists its industry standards and any Senior would be lucky to get such a great paycheck, the company has been in business for years and their developers have always been happy and paid industry standards.
I respond again and tell her that im getting $3800 at this small company where I currently am and if the "international company with clients all over the world" wants to have my skill set why is it that they cant pay premium salaries!? As well as the graphs for my Country on what the current industry standards are for salaries in my industry.
She never replied, but I kept tabs on the company she was recruiting for. They are still looking for a senior dev, its been 8 months now and no one has applied.
I am so happy more developers are standing up for themselves and not taking agencies bullshit with low salaries, crazy overtime and bad technical specs.
Note: Amounts are made up, was just to show comparison.4 -
Ha ha ha ha. Fucking morons!
You brag about being a highly skilled company.
You tell me I don’t have enough experience despite three years of uninterrupted activity where I currently work
You’re willing to give me a chance (I just don’t know how to express my gratitude)
BUT among your super talented team members you can’t find anybody capable of conducting a technical interview?? And you’ve been looking for over a month for someone who could do it?
Thanks for wasting my time with three useless HR interviews you worthless DIPSHITS!2 -
Gonna go to uni in a few months. So I applied to 2 companies for a side job. (10hrs/week - some kind of scholarship)
First interview:
Of all the applicants I seemed to be the only one with enough technical knowledge to be considered. :)
They rejected me still, because I don't have enough time to have a proper onboarding process. They offered that I could start off in the holidays in the second year of uni.
Second Interview:
Had a test with logic and a little bit of maths. Nearly completed that and then had a technical talk with their team lead. He said that I sound like I know my stuff. They are gonna contact me next week...
I think I aced the interviews, and being complimented on my knowledge feels validating.
Let's see where this is going...4 -
I was impressed with my latest job interview in the government (got the job).
Applied online, and they extended the application deadline because the lack of quality of applications.
I got invited for an interview. Present there were HR manager, Department manager and an employee from the regional office (opening a new dev department in the region).
Most of the interview consisted of them telling me about the company, and asking a bit about me. Nothing technical.
1.5 month later I got a 2nd interview. Present were two developers from the main office in Oslo. Again, very little questions about my technical capabilities. Mostly just repeating the stuff said in the first interview. Though I did have to send some code in for review by them.
A month later I get a phone call from the department head saying they’d like to offer me a job, but they don’t have a concrete job offer yet, as it has to be approved by a committee (gov stuff). That takes two weeks, and I finally got job offer. 42% pay rise from the current job in the private sector.
I later went and re-read the ad for the job. “Bachelor/ master required. For particularly qualified applicants, this requirement can be ignored.”
Fascinating that they didn’t give me more tests.2 -
My recruitment story is a bit funny,
i had two interview, first one was to evaluate working style, behavior and ethics, where the interviewer and i spent almost 20 minutes discussing video games 😀.
second was technical, was interviewed by a lady dev manager and the team's technical lead "which i didn't know their roles at that time" went really good and at the end they asked:
Do you wanna ask us any questions?
Me: *leans back, with one arm on the chair arm and with a curious look and pointing one finger at both of them😕*
So what are you two?
them: *both had a shocked face and looked at each other for few seconds, manager chuckles😓😓* Well i am the team's dev manager and this guy is the team's technical lead, and in case you were wondering, we are not a couple.
technical lead: 😂😂😂
Me: 😨😨 no no that's not what i meant i swear.
Interview was over, i left the building thinking 😢😢 oh god, i totally blew it.
2 weeks later i get a phone call asking me to come and discuss contract terms 😂😂😂
sorry for the long story
5 -
Been lurking for a while, figured I would give a rant a go now that I have graduated college!
So here we go, this was the only technical question asked on my second co-op interview. Ended up getting it.
Interviewer: "Do you know any loops?"
Me: "Yes....?"
Interviewer: "Which ones, can you name them?"3 -
So I am going to talk about interviews from a different perspective, the being on the question side of the technical interview.
We have had four interviews for a single Senior Dev position. I threw some very hard questions at the people and some very easy ones. The thing that amazed me was that people actually went for an interview when they where woefully under qualified.
The latest in this list was someone who didn't understand how inheritance works for object orientated programming, and when I asked him something very specific he needed to look at his notes...
The person that I felt did the best on the interview was the person that didn't have every answer but said clearly that he didn't know and talked about his ability and desire to learn. The people that failed the worst were the ones that were certain, arrogant, and wrong.
Technical interviews are fun 😏4 -
I'm a bit tired of dev and applying for a customer support job for half my current income. During interview I already got promoted to technical support. Even dev job was possible, but I'm done. I've seen the wheel reinvented too much. Also, the looks of software became more important than ever and that's not something I do.
But I'm very positive now. I know the company already, they're great! Super culture! Always hired the right people and me once before as a py dev6 -
TLDR why do I need to be like a competitive coder just to get a good job?
Why does being very good at technical interview questions beat having a portfolio of actual apps built using technology, tools, and skills that are much more relevant to the needs of doing the actual jobs?16 -
Declined a job offer with a startup, partly because of imposter syndrome. Applied for position as programmer, showed up for interview and got cold feet when it turned out they actually wanted/needed a senior programmer/chief technology officer and offered me the position after having asked me no technical questions, seen none of my code or previous projects.
Still, it was a job that paid money... And I'm still jobless two months later :(7 -
I had an interview with a company that works offshore (works for a big silicon valley company) for an internship program. I liked their bosses vision and how he treats his coworkers. After 1 hour technical interview I asked how much they pay for internship and they told me they are not paying anything. And they said hey we are teaching you how things works. Wait... What? Atleast you can pay my transport and food fees. Fuck you and fuck your company. If you don't pay me a single fucking penny, I am not working with you. There is local laws to pay me some money. If you don't care about laws, I wont care about your fucking company. Burn in hell.5
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Fml... you keep getting the weekly discussions right on point.
I started with the last guys right out of university... just out of Hospital.
With a brand new degree and a Crohn’s diagnosis I stepped into the first place I found hiring. They were good guys, after a junior dev... to get stuck in their muck.
I did! I nailed project after project, tricky development after tricky development. I spent 5 years with them and over those years things changed.
They had a mass cull... the original idea was to get rid of the useless middle managers, the ones managing other managers being managed by another manager for no real reason.... the ones that do fuck all with their day.
But the fucking idiots upstairs put the job of working out the cull in the shitty middle managers hands.
So, instead, they cut the titles senior, junior and everything in between. Everyone was just a thing, no senior things, no junior things. Just things.
Once they’d done that they said “we’ll we have this many things, they’re all the same, let’s get rid of the things with the highest pay checks because the other things can do it just as well for less money”...
And that’s how they cut 50% of their senior techs.
I was one of the ones left behind but the damage became obvious quick. The middle managers barked out orders at people who couldn’t complete them, and everything went to shit.
My team was rebranded twice in as many years... an obvious ploy for funding, but the cost of the team fluctuated like hell because contractors had to fill the senior positions at 3 times the cost.
Then the managers started barking out Self contradictory orders. Do this, but this way...
This would work, but not that way... try explaining that to a group of non-technical, useless as fuck middle managers. It took months, and shit flows downstream so we got the bulk of the hassle for it.
Then my boy Morpheus, got a warning... they threatened his contract for saying “this will work, but not that way”.
He kept the contract, and the manager giving him the warning said he didn’t think he should... but he, and all the middle fuckwits don’t have the balls to stand up against nonsense.
That was the breaking point for me, I handed in my notice and told them a month was what they could have.
I didn’t have a position or an idea of where to go, a few long-standing offers as back up in a pinch but not the perfect job.
On the Thursday I decided I was done, I let my manager know. Then I boshed the fuck out of my CV and updated my profiles.
My phone started ringing off the hook, a senior NG2/MEAN/Ionic dev on the market is like candy to recruiters. They’re lovely too.
I went to a few interviews that were okay but not great. Then a company got in touch... one that I immediately recognised as an IT book publisher. They said they were looking for NG/NG2 devs, senior. winner! Set up the interview.
So I’d spent the weekend with the missus, about an hour away from mine and 2 from the interview. I hadn’t planned on staying there but at 6ish she looked over at me and said “do you have to go” <- imagine that with puppy dog eyes from a gorgeous Slovenian lass.
I folded quicker than a shitty pancake toss.
We spent the night together but that meant I had to be up at 6, to go back to mine, iron my interview clothes and make it to the train to manage the interview. Fuck. I did it, but I was at the interview wired on caffeine and struggling to be awake and coherent. I still managed, that’s what I do, I make do and try to do well regardless of the situation.
That comes from being ill btw, when you’re dealt a shitty hand you learn to play it well.
They were good guys, the heads all knew what they were on about, not the middle management bs I was used to.
They demoed me live with an ng1 test, which was awesome as hell to play with.
We chatted, friendly and cool guys! I loved the place.
The end of the week they got me in for second round. Ng2 and competence test, again I went for it!
Positive feedback and a “we’ll get back to you ASAP, should be by Tuesday”...
Tuesday was the Tuesday before the Friday I was due to leave the old company... I was cutting it close.
On the Monday the offers started rolling in, a few C# ASP MVC positions, cool but I was holding out for the guys I’d interviewed with.
Then Tuesday comes around, I’m nervous as fuck but it’s okay because I knew regardless I can pay the rent in December with one of the offers.
Then said yes!
The thing that seemed most important in the process was my ability to talk to any fucker. If you’re coming up to interview, talk to everyone, the grocer, your barista, the binmen, anyone. Practice that skill above all others.
I start tomorrow morning! I can’t wait.
Final thought: middle managers are taints.7 -
Dad: why are you doing IT after I put you through business school
Me: because you're the one that nagged me not to do it instead CS.... So now I'm stuck in IT... Because I can't seem to understand Big O and algorithms needed to pass a technical interview...6 -
Just got my first callback for a technical interview in JS tomorrow morning.
WOOOOO
*Brain*
"That's cool fam, but you just lost any ability to write anything in it."
...8 -
This was interview in so called startup.
BTW I don't get point in company calling themselves as startup when they are 5-6 years old, just call your self small sized company.
1 - online interview with HR, Normal.
2 - online technical interview - 1 hour of discussion with Lead.
3. On-fucking-site technical interview - ~1 hour of detailed technical discussions.
4. Coding task- submitted successfully
5. Zoom meeting to discuss on coding task - just told it was good and started discussion on their dead project which was unrelated to job position but I've worked with that kind of thing so it was fine.
6. Trial Day Onsite - Gave me to draw a fucking BPMN chart - fuck you motherfuckers - I knew it was waste of time.
Fuck this kind of Hiring process which takes >1.5 month.9 -
Happened to me - an experienced dev with most of the experience on the web.
I apply to this company that I had no idea what they do (big mistake on my part). I ace the technical interview, and they follow up with a request for a presentation on a topic, to see how well I can prove a point or understand a technology. So I do that. Everybody is listening carefully. Most people at the office didn't know the basics of what I was talking about, but there was a guy who knew more and asked the tough questions, but I didn't let down.
So we talk again, and again, and all is going well, we're out for a coffee, talk about the future of my career and the company, in a more casual setting. Got to know the CTO, etc. Everything was going stellar.
I was waiting for the offer, but instead I got a generic "We can't continue with your application" together with a notification that I was being blocked by the contact person.
Weirdest interview ever. And this thing really put me down and struck at my self-esteem. I mean was it really hard to mention whether you didn't like my expectations, or my skills, or my "fit for the team"? Or at least not block me like that, it's not like I'm gonna stalk you or anything. I still get birthday notifications on Skype from people I've interviewed with before, and I haven't written them since because they have other stuff to take care about, as do I.
Anyway. I got up and started again. New company. High expectations. High salary expectations. Rejection. Fuck.
Ok, start again. 2 companies this time. Both at the same time. Both make me an offer. Have to turn one down. Harder than I had imagined. The choice that I made literally changed my life for the better. I'm glad I didn't end up at any of the other 2 companies that rejected me.
Even experienced people get bad bitter rejections. Don't have high expectations, and that will help you keep your emotions in check, and fight on.2 -
The story of how I got my dream job.
I was working for a company with a job I got just after graduating university. It was ok, not very exciting tech but I learned a lot by just surrounding myself with professional code monkeys. I was there for about a year when my company bought parts of another company and there was talk about people getting fired. This made me worried since I was the last one to get hired, so I started looking around for other jobs. I received this e-mail from a company saying they were looking for interns, what a coincidence! I adjusted my CV and sent it in.
--A few weeks pass--
It's Friday and I'm at a dinner party, it's 10pm and someone is calling me. I pick up and it's a recruiter from this company. I get very nervous but the alcohol helps me keep my cool, I pass the initial idiot test and they invite me for an interview. Yay!
I go to work on Monday and in a 1-on-1 and I tell my boss about the upcoming interview, he gives me a high-five :)
The interview is approaching and I'm feeling that I'm about to get sick, I refuse to believe this so I start taking a lot of medicine (painkillers, cough medicine etc.). I feel a bit better and thank the gods for medication.
--D-day--
I wake up, put on my nicest clothes and get on the train. I had one hour to spare just in case, which was well needed because the fucking train is late by 30 minutes. I'm still heavily medicated because of my ongoing fever. When I arrive I basically have to run there and somehow I manage to pick up a coffee on the way there which I devour in two seconds. I'm ready for the interview!
Some guy meets me in reception and the first thing he says is "My colleague doesn't speak our language so we'll have to speak english". This is fine, I speak good english but I was not prepared for this so it caught me off-guard and made me even more nervous. We get in and start talking. Things are going OK despite my numbed brain. I try to make eye-contact to make a good impression with the foreign engineer but he keeps staring somewhere which is making me nervous.
We get to the technical part on a whiteboard and this is where my brain decides to stop communicating. I'm presented a simple task which I'm struggling with finishing, and I feel the embarrassment coming over me. "NOOOOO THIS IS MY DREAM JOB, THIS CANNOT BE HAPPENING!" I'm thinking to myself. After making myself look like a complete arsehole for some time we wrap it up and just before I step out the door I say to the engineer "You should checkout my Github page, I have lots of interesting stuff there" and he says "I'll be sure to do that" but I don't believe him.
I leave the office in fury (of myself) and make my way to the train station and even though it's the middle of the day I quickly devour two beers to calm my nerves and make me feel a bit better. I was so damn disappointed in myself, I wasted the opportunity of a lifetime! I go back home to my regular (now shitty) job.
--Two days later--
I get a call from an unknown number. I pick up the phone and it's the same recruiter guy. "So how did you think it went?" he says. "To be honest, I think it went really bad", I replied. "What? Really? Because they loved you, you got the job". (this was an obvious recruiter lie) "... wat, are you sure you called the correct person?" I said and he just laughed. The day after I quit my old job the whole department gets fired - such impeccable timing.
--A few months later--
I finish my internship and they want to keep me. I'm so happy. The engineer that was in the interview works on my team. I ask him "Why did you hire me? You know as well as I do that my interview was horrible". It turns out he _did_ look at my Github profile and that's how he knew I could write code. I also heard later that for my position there was about 2000 applicants and somehow I made the interviews.
I still work there today and I couldn't be happier (Sorry for the long text).3 -
A month ago, a company called my friend for an interview. They had a good talk but at the end they couldn't agree on the salary.
A week later they called him for a technical interview and they're ready to renegotiate with him the salary he's asking for. The Interview went successful and everything seems fine. They told that they'll send him a mail about the offer they're proposing.
2 days later he got the mail and the offer was kinda good, so he confirmed the agreement and they planned to sign the contract today.
After he went to the office and the manager came 1 hour late and he told him and i quote '' I'm sorry your application has been rejected, there's a women that refused to hire you ''.
I mean come on how can someone be an asshole more then this.
Just to add this company still uses eclipse for android development.3 -
It really irks me when I see 'web developers' and 'front-end developers' write CSS like a bunch of first-timers. Not considering hierarchy, specificity or even following a proper naming convention (who the fuck mixes camel case AND lowercase for class names?!) It's worse when you already have Sass or SCSS and they still write their style rules WITHOUT PROPER NESTING or keep using !important like it was a goddamn semicolon.
This is fucking basic shit for a web or front-end developer, and God help you if I ever conduct your technical interview and decide to ask you on a whim to write an Angular app WITHOUT USING BULLSHIT SYSTEMS LIKE CLARITY, ANGULAR MATERIAL OR BOOTSTRAP for your UI. But if you can explain to me the pros and cons between using CSS grid and flex, I'll be fucking impressed.
I wish these 'UI experts' I keep encountering would learn to build an optimal static site without a fucking framework or build manager before doing advanced shit, for the love of Jeebus.15 -
Just finished a technical interview for a company that asked me to submit a small app.
I guess when they had written the requirements they had anticipated it to be written as a Webform not as a full MVC application 😂. They had expected me to complete and build this single page app in 2-3 hours not in 14... 🫥 Oops
So here we are reviewing it and asking questions about my setup and what I was trying to do. They were impressed enough with it that one guy even admitted that I might be a better programmer than him. 😳 A very kind compliment, but concerning because he's supposed to be my manager...
All in all got through everything and they want me over to meet the team and see what this shop is all about.
I'm excited, they company is seeing immense growth and I might be able to bring in my expertise to expedite some of it.
Did I mention they use SVN for version control? 😳
They want to get into Git soon but they don't know how to. I guess I'll be leading that cause.2 -
Anyone else had an interviewer just blatantly waste your time and lie to you?
I was recently interviewing for a job, the first couple of rounds went really well, and they gave out a fairly standard tech test. It was a basic tic-tac-toe game, with a few extra twists and a 120 minute time limit. They then wanted me to host what I had be able to code somewhere so they could test it out before the second technical interview.
The interview interview date came round, the interviewer never actually showed up, but 20 minutes late he sent me an email saying they wouldn't be going ahead because the code wasn't good enough, and cited a bunch of things that were well outside of the brief they gave for the test. and when I checked the access logs for the hosted 'live' version, it showed they hadn't bothered to actually look at it; they hadn't even checked out the code from the repo.
I've had similar things happen in the past occasionally, but is it just my bad luck, or is stuff like this becoming more common recently?6 -
Today I had what might have been my worst job interview to date. It had many different technical, cultural, and business red flags. One that really stuck out to me was when I asked my interviewer why he loves his job, he went on about how great the benefits and events are. Not a single word about the work he does or his teammates. A younger me would have seen this as an opportunity to put in some hard work and contribute to something great. Older me knows to avoid this dumpster fire like the goddamn plague.6
-
I interviewed for a big named company who I really admired to work on some video stuff .. My technical interview lasted 10 minutes swiftly followed by a #fail email ... Two years later I had the opportunity to interview again and got a position ! Never stop learning1
-
probably the one who sent me 3 mails within 10 minutes regarding 3 different positions, and all were addressed to someone else (Hello, Mr. Completely Different Name), so i replied telling him that's not me, and gave him the info to fix it in their db. he apologized profusely and said he fixed the error.
Next day I got two mails for another two positions, with the same incorrect name.
Or the one with whom I had half an hour phone "interview" for a specific position, they couldn't answer even the most basic technical question about the project, but invited me to an in-person interview and said my questions will be answered there, the phone interview was just to make sure they don't send completely offtopic people to the interview with the client (so far acceptable).
On the in-person interview, it was partially a repetition of the phone one, but okay, lady from the company is talking to me first time in her life. We get to the part where I can ask my questions, so I ask those basics about the project again, and her answer is:
"Oh, i don't know, i'm not a technical person, you'd have to ask that to the technical person from the company, I'm an hr person from the recruiting company."
"Wait... so... not only was this whole meeting a waste of my time, but you also lied about what it is, when you scheduled it with me on the end of the phone interview?"
"Well... it wasn't a waste of time, we like to meet the candidates in person before we forward them to actual interviews in the company, to make sure that they're not completely offtopic."
"... and how exactly do you think you'd be able to evaluate that, since you're not at all a technical person and know nothing about the project??"
" Well, i talk to programmers a lot, so i've picked up quite a bit of the terms."
...7 -
Sent my cv through a local job finder website, 2 days later got an interview, 2 days later got a technical interview, 2 days later I was already sitting on my new desk
-
Spent all morning trying to write a JSON parser in Python just to get a bit of practice (technical interview next week).
After an hour or more... Didn't get far and finally gave up...
Then I remember Python has a built-in json module... (yea no need to write in myself).
Since libraries are just py files, I open the source code... And wow!
All the public methods are nicely documented with informative comments and descriptions.
But then I look at the method calls and .... I don't understand what it's doing....
.............................. ☹️🙁😖😢😭😧😰😱3 -
So here's my problem. I've been employed at my current company for the last 12 months (next week is my 1 year anniversary) and I've never been as miserable in a development job as this.
I feel so upset and depressed about working in this company that getting out of bed and into the car to come here is soul draining. I used to spend hours in the evenings studying ways to improve my code, and was insanely passionate about the product, but all of this has been exterminated due to the following reasons.
Here's my problems with this place:
1 - Come May 2019 I'm relocating to Edinburgh, Scotland and my current workplace would not allow remote working despite working here for the past year in an office on my own with little interaction with anyone else in the company.
2 - There is zero professionalism in terms of work here, with there being no testing, no planning, no market research of ideas for revenue generation – nothing. This makes life incredibly stressful. This has led to countless situations where product A was expected, but product B was delivered (which then failed to generate revenue) as well as a huge amount of development time being wasted.
3 - I can’t work in a business that lives paycheck to paycheck. I’ve never been somewhere where the salary payment had to be delayed due to someone not paying us on time. My last paycheck was 4 days late.
4 - The management style is far too aggressive and emotion driven for me to be able to express my opinions without some sort of backlash.
5 - My opinions are usually completely smashed down and ignored, and no apology is offered when it turns out that they’re 100% correct in the coming months.
6 - I am due a substantial pay rise due to the increase of my skills, increase of experience, and the time of being in the company, and I think if the business cannot afford to pay £8 per month for email signatures, then I know it cannot afford to give me a pay rise.
7 - Despite having continuously delivered successful web development projects/tasks which have increased revenue, I never receive any form of thanks or recognition. It makes me feel like I am not cared about in this business in the slightest.
8 - The business fails to see potential and growth of its employees, and instead criticises based on past behaviour. 'Josh' (fake name) is a fine example of this. He was always slated by 'Tom' and 'Jerry' as being worthless, and lazy. I trained him in 2 weeks to perform some basic web development tasks using HTML, CSS, Git and SCSS, and he immediately saw his value outside of this company and left achieving a 5k pay rise during. He now works in an environment where he is constantly challenged and has reviews with his line manager monthly to praise him on his excellent work and diverse set of skills. This is not rocket science. This is how you keep employees motivated and happy.
9 - People in the business with the least or zero technical understanding or experience seem to be endlessly defining technical deadlines. This will always result in things going wrong. Before our mobile app development agency agreed on the user stories, they spent DAYS going through the specification with their developers to ensure they’re not going to over promise and under deliver.
10 - The fact that the concept of ‘stealing data’ from someone else’s website by scraping it daily for the information is not something this company is afraid to do, only further bolsters the fact that I do not want to work in such an unethical, pathetic organisation.
11 - I've been told that the MD of the company heard me on the phone to an agency (as a developer, I get calls almost every week), and that if I do it again, that the MD apparently said he would dock my pay for the time that I’m on the phone. Are you serious?! In what world is it okay for the MD of a company to threaten to punish their employees for thinking about leaving?! Why not make an attempt at nurturing them and trying to find out why they’re upset, and try to retain the talent.
Now... I REALLY want to leave immediately. Hand my notice in and fly off. I'll have 4 weeks notice to find a new role, and I'll be on garden leave effective immediately, but it's scary knowing that I may not find a role.
My situation is difficult as I can't start a new role unless it's remote or a local short term contract because my moving situation in May, and as a Junior to Mid Level developer, this isn't the easiest thing to do on the planet.
I've got a few interviews lined up (one of which was a final interview which I completed on Friday) but its still scary knowing that I may not find a new role within 4 weeks.
Advice? Thoughts? Criticisms?
Love you DevRant <33 -
/*
"Not wk135, but blah blah blah"
Please don't misuse wk135 (Sorry)
It's about coding tests
Thank you. */
=>
A company took their technical test on this really weird website. There was a Windows Narrator guy's voice giving instructions while a timer was running. I had to flash my ID to the webcam and then fit my head on an outline on the screen. It was for a web dev position. I had to speak into the microphone to answer the Narrator's questions and then send the video to them. The questions were weird and hypothetical, mostly. I just thought that their process was dumb and unnecessary.
=>
I don't like aptitude and algebraic tests. One company, I remember, had their test on Google Forms. For some multiple choice questions, they put check boxes instead of radio buttons. So, I could just blaze through it selecting all options. Some of the questions had their first option as "All of the above" 🤔. Fortunately, I didn't pass the test.
=>
The company I'm interning with, starting from next month, had a good interview process. They asked me questions on JavaScript, CSS, and a few on algorithms and data structures. I was also given a task where I had to make a css animation of trees. I'm glad they didn't have an algebra entry test.
😊 -
Alright. This is going to be long and incoherent, so buckle up. This is how I lost my motivation to program or to do anything really.
Japan is apparently experiencing a shortage of skilled IT workers. They are conducting standardized IT skill tests in 7 Asian countries including mine. Very few people apply and fewer actually pass the exam. There are exams of different levels that gives you better roles in the IT industry as you pass them. For example, the level 2 or IT Fundamental Engineering Exam makes you an IT worker, level 3 = capable of working on your own...so on.
I passed level 1 and came in 3rd in my country (there were only 78 examinees lol). Level 2 had 2 parts. The theoretical mcq type exam in the morning and the programming mcq in the afternoon. They questions describe a scenario/problem, gives you code that solves it with some parts blanked out.
I passed the morning exam and not the afternoon. As a programmer I thought I'd be good at the afternoon exam as it involves actual code. Anyway, they give you 2 more chances to pass the afternoon exam, failing that, you'll have to take both of them the next time. Someone who has passed 1 part is called a half-passer and I was one.
A local company funded by both JICA and my government does the selection and training for the Japanese companies. To get in you have to pass a written exam(write code/pseudocode on paper) and pass the final interview in which there are 2 parts - technical interview and general interview.
I went as far as the interview. Didn't do too good in the technical interview. They asked me how would I find the lightest ball from 8 identical balls using a balance only twice. You guys probably already know the solution. I don't have much theoritical knowledge. I know how to write code and solve problems but don't know formal name of the problem or the algorithm.
On to the next interview. I see 2 Japanese interviewers and immediately blurt out konichiwa! The find it funny. Asked me about my education. Say they are very impressed that self taught and working. The local HR guy is not impressed. Asks me why I left university and why never tried again. Goes on about how the dean is his friend and universites are cheap. foryou.jpg
The real part. So they tell me that Japanese companies pay 250000/month, I will have to pay 60% income tax, pay for my own accommodation, food, transportation cost etc. Hella sweet deal. Living in Japan! But I couldn't get in because the visa is only given to engineers. Btw I'm not looking to invade Japan spread my shitskin seed and white genocide the japs. Just wanted to live in another country for a while and learn stuff from them.
I'll admit I am a little salty and probably will remain salty forever. But this made me lose all interest in programming. It's like I don't belong. A dropout like me should be doing something lowly. Maybe I should sell drugs or be a pimp or something.
But sometimes I get this short lived urge to make something brilliant and show them that people like me are capable of doing good things. Fuck, do I have daddy issues?16 -
I wouldn't say it's upsetting but confusing.
I had an interview at a household name where I asked for feedback. They only told me I did well in the technical and every other area, and that I was the first person they interviewed in the last 2 months to make it passed the technical part.
Less than half a day later I got a rejection email.3 -
Hmm. So have you ever argued in a job interview? Like really standing your ground? In a technical interview?
Today I had a live coding session with a company I'm interested in. The developer was giving me tasks to evolve the feature on and on.
Everything was TDD. Splendid!
However at one point I had to test if the outcome of the method call is random. What I did is basically:
```
Provider<String> provider = new SomeProvider("aaa", "bbb", "ccc", "ddd", "eee", "fff")
for(int i=0; i<100; i++) {
String str = provider.get();
map.put(str, incrementCount(str));
}
Set<Integer> occurences = new HashSet(map.values());
occurences.removeIf(o -> o.equals(occurences.get(0)));
assertFalse(occurences.empty());
```
and I called it good enough, since I cannot verify true randomness.
But the dev argued that this is not enough and I must verify whether the output is truly random or not, and the output (considering the provider only has a finite set of values to return) occurences are almost equal (i.e. the deviation from median is the median itself).
I argued this is not possible and it beats the core principle of randomness -- non-determinism. Since if you can reliably test whether the sequence is truly random you must have an algorithm which determines what value can or cannot be next in the sequence. Which means determinism. And that the (P)RNG is then flawed. The best you can do is to test whether randomness is "good enough" for your use case.
We were arguing and he eventually said "alright, let's call it a good enough solution, since we're short on time".
I wonder whether this will have adverse effect my evaluation . So have you ever argued with your interviewer? Did it turn out to the better or to the worse?
But more importantly, was I right? :D21 -
I went for an interview yesterday and everything went fine, today I was asked to complete a technical test. I have done plenty of these in the past but never have I come across something as invasive as interviewzen.
It records every key stroke and plays it back to the interviewer, I assume they are watching on the webcam and recording audio too. I find the whole concept horrendous.
I closed that shit straight away and will tell them I'm no longer interested.
Anyone used that site before?5 -
When you realize you hated taking tests your entire life and then you find out that to get a job have to take tests while someone is literally staring at you
-
Recruiter reaches out to me, he says he saw my LinkedIn and thinks I'd be a great fit.
I say ok and send my resume.
He gets me a phone screen. I do it, I think I do a pretty good job. (I'm able to answer all the questions well, I think I'm onto the coding interview for sure.)
A couple days later I get a generic rejection email.
I'm not sure what happened. They had my resume, I know I did well on the technical questions (I do that kind of thing for my current job all the time.)
No idea why I'm rejected. If it was something about my experience, they could have seen that from my resume. If it was something from my phone screen, I have no idea what it could have been.
Just wanted to rant >:[8 -
/* Not a rant, more like a story with a good ending */
Le me finally got an interview for a big company, started preparing for technical questions, white board test, basically anything related ti a technical interview. The role was for a graduate software developer as i just finished my college and is my first ever interview with a company.
At the interview, he sat down and said " it will be a friendly and a very informal type of interview " and then carried on to ask me about my interests and past experiences and shared some details about the company and technology they work with. At one point i started ranting about some problems i was in due to javascript's nature of compiling even though syntax isn't right and we both had a good laugh as well about it. Idk but i felt like the interviewer made me feel really comfortable so that anything we were having a chat about was without stress, as i was nervous the whole time before the interview for being my first expereince ever.
After leaving the office i felt like this was too simple for the role i applied for and thought the company might not be interested, 4 days letter i got a mail that they are offering me the role as the feedback from interviewer was excellent.
Pretty wierd but fun experience frankly.2 -
I recently accepted my first "real" Dev position. This has been a huge hurdle for me.
So my degree is in graphic design and it's pretty much what I spent the first 2-3 years after university doing. In fact, when I started at the place I am now (I am still working my notice) I was hired as a creative artworker.
I had always had a website I put together with some basic frontend skills, but always assumed the backend stuff was "beyond me". But, given the option here, I asked to be sent on a PHP course. Holy shit I took to it like a duck to water. Over the next few months I got my feet wet building a new website for the company, building out a little intranet, all that good stuff. I went from procedural spaghetti monstrosities to nice, OOP, documented code. It was beautiful. And no one here really have a fuck.
About 6 months ago, I started trying to leave. This was hard. I actually had several interviews for design positions, but always got turned down for some variation of "you're very technical and we think you'd get bored here" and thank god really, because they're right. I could never get a look in for Dev jobs though, because on paper I had no experience, hell my job title was still "Digital Designer" despite over a year of developing here.
But it finally happened. Through someone I used to know I got my foot in the door for a developer position. In the interview they even told me if it was a junior position they'd hire me on the spot - but sadly it wasn't. I had a good time though, a good laugh, and had a lot of fun finally, for the first time in my life, "working" and talking with other developers.
Over the next couple of weeks the agent kept telling me I had done really well and they were just dragging their feet getting things sorted, but I gave up hope a little. So imagine my surprise when I found out they turned the role into a junior one for me!
And so now, I get to go to a job where my job title includes the word "Developer". To some of you that might not mean much, but to me it's a fucking medal I wish I could mount on a plaque on my wall.4 -
Received feedback on a task I made for a job interview (I didn't get a technical interview).
The task was easy with nothing special about it that made me think if that's what the job is like, I don't want to work there. It was a simple web page with search functionality. I did the task anyway.
The feedback I got was useless. It said that I made a complex and an over-engineered solution.
What I made, mind you, was a one endpoint API and a single Vue.js component instead of using jQuery to update the results. That's it. OVER-ENGINEERED!
Complete waste of time.5 -
So technical interview today but woke up (6am) and started thinking about it and it led to this rant about algorithms. This is probably going into a Medium post if I ever get around to finishing it but sort of just wanted to share the rant that literally just went off in my mind.
*The problem with Algorithms Technical Interviews Is They don't test Real skills*
Real world problems are complex and often cross domain combining experience in multiple areas. Often the best way is not obvious unless you're a polymath and familiar with different areas, paradigms, designs. And intuitively can understand, reason, and combine them.
I don't think this is something a specific algorithm problem is designed to show. And the problem is the optimal solution to some of these and to algorithm design itself is that unless you train for it or are an algorithm designer (practice and experience), you can only brute force it in the amount of time given.
And quite frankly the algorithms I think we rely on daily weren't thought of in 30 minutes. The designers did this stuff for a living, thought about these problems for days and several iterations… at least. A lot were mathematicians. The matrix algorithm that had a Big O of 7N required a flash of insight that only someone constantly looking and thinking about the equations could see.
TBA
-system design
-clean readable coding practices
...
TLDR: I could probably go on and on about this stuff for hours jumping from item/example/area to the next and back again... But I don't think you can test these (~20) years of experience in a 1 hr technical interview focused on algorithms...8 -
Just had an interview with our new potential product manager. I companioned our CEO, if technical questions arise...
First, he came to our office, to the interview, and never..never looked at our application. Neither he saw some screenshots, review's or anything related to the product. As a potential product manager...gasp
And he really tried to impress me, by mentioning what a great full stack developer he also is (LOL), with years of experience in frontend and backend.
But, since I am an android software developer, he mentioned he don't like java. But he loves java script...
Me: ehhh what? So you compare apples to oranges. Why do you don't like java? (And I could image a lot things ...)
Him: because unlike JavaScript, java is a mess when writing code.
Me: ok Iam done.9 -
Hey rejection, my old friend, I’ve come to grips with you again. Because a technical interview with a question that I thought I knew, required the use of a structure that I didn’t yet understand. And that I planned... to study... when I was done with hash maps....10
-
15 min till technical interview with IBM:
Trying to convince myself I’m not an imposter. 🙃
10 min after the interview:
I’m thinking how for the last 15 min of the interview they were pitching about how great the life at IBM is and why I should join.21 -
Not 100% of dev nature:
- Got an informal interview a few days ago: Got me super happy.
- Another 2 recruiters on LinkedIn showed interest: Made me happy.
- Psychometric & technical tests popped today: Feel like failed them completely.
- 2 more career days coming up: Not all hope is lost.
- Lack of portofolio and job experience: Brain is stuck and emotionally being meh. Maybe I wasn't meant to be a dev. :-/
I've just wanted to let it out of my system. Thanks for reading it. :-)2 -
It’s funny being on the other side of interviews. People say how complicated it is to get a job, and it is. But then they show up to a third round Senior Software Engineer technical interview and is unable to write a function on the white board in any language or even pseudo code to reverse a string. That isn’t complicated stuff...
Argh, very frustrating.2 -
Because of high gas price, the government decided to lower our tax.
For me it translates to additional EUR 11/month ☹.
This is after deductions of thousands of euros each months (tax and social contribution) from my hard-earned salary. How come nobody is complaining about this?
During my yearly review, I told my manager that I expect to see significant salary increase next year (the inflation is 9% duh!).
She told me that I can expect to get 20% increase after 3-4 years. ☹
Now I know why a lot of people are leaving. How can you expect your employer to stay put if you're constantly paying them under market rate?! I have to keep switching jobs every 4-5 years to get a decent pay, right? Yet society expect me to settle down and have a stable job.
And then, how come a PM earn significantly more than a regular dev? Even the job interview is much easier. But I like the technical part too much to switch to people management.
By no means, I am starving right now working as a dev. I am happy that I even have a job, but somehow I felt like what I do is pointless just being a wage slave, and felt demotivated in a lot of ways.
P.S.: I am writing this now in front of my work computer. I have to catch up some work to do otherwise I won't have time to do it during the weekdays 😔
Pray for me guys I can get better job within next year.8 -
Story Time!
Tittle: About Larry.
Fun Game: Tell me if / when in this story you know the plot twist.
Setting: Years ago, non coding job.
I work with Larry a lot, Larry works remote. In technical terms Larry is senior to me and I escalate some technical issues that get assigned to Larry. I've never met Larry in person.
Larry can be hard to work with, but he's plenty good at his job and I don't mind his prickly side. Sometimes it takes telling Larry something a few times before it sinks it, but that's not a big deal. Sometimes it seems like Larry doesn't remember his cases entirely, but he has a lot of cases. Also Larry has good reason for how he works considering the land of scubs who usually escalate to him without any thought / effort.
Larry's escalation team is short staffed and they're trying to hire folks, but that's been like that forever.
So one day I get an email that Larry is going to be out of the office for a few weeks. Nothing unusual there.
My current case that I share with Larry sort of floats in limbo for a while. The customer is kinda slow to respond anyhow and there's nothing that I need Larry for.
Finally I get automated notice that my case has had a new escalation engineer. Laura. Laura is much more positive and happy compared to Larry. Understandably Laura isn't up to date on the case so we go back and forth with some emails and notes in the case.
The case is moving along just fine, we're making progress, but it's slow because of the customer's testing procedures. Then we hit a point where this customer's management pushes on sales for a solution (this customer's management is known for doing this rando like for no reason).
Down the management chain it goes and everyone wants a big conference call to get everyone up to date / discuss next steps (no big deal).
Now I really don't want to do this with Laura and throw her into the deep end with this customer, she doesn't have the background and I'd rather do this call with Larry & Me & Laura. Also according to the original email Larry is due back soon.
I start writing an email to Laura about "Let's try to schedule this for when Larry gets back."
Then I stop ... I don't really know why I stop but when it is a "political case" I want some buy in on next steps from management so I go talk to my manager.
-Plot Twist Incoming-
Long story short, my manager says:
"Laura IS Larry..."
O
M
G
I had no idea. Nobody told me, nobody told ANYBODY, (except a couple managers).
Back up a few months Larry apparently went to his managers and told them he was going to transition, surgery and all, in a few months.
Managers wondering how to address this went to HR and some new hire very young to be a manager HR manager drone logiced out in her bonkers head that "Well it shouldn't matter so don't tell anyone."
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!??
Thank god I didn't send that email...
I did send an email to Laura explaining that I had no idea and hoped I didn't say anything stupid. She was very nice about it and said it was all good.
After that incident made the management rounds (management was already fuming about being told not to tell anyone) things came to another critical point.
Laura was going to visit the company HQ. Laura had been there before, as Larry, everyone knew her as Larry... nobody (outside some managers) knew Laura was Larry either. With nobody knowing shit Laura was going to walk in and meet everyone ...
One manager at HQ finally rebelled and held a meeting to tell his people. He didn't want Laura walking in and someone confused, thinking it was a joke or something horrible happening.
HR found out and went ballistic. They were on a rampage about this other manager, they wanted to interview me about how I found out. I told HR to schedule their meeting through my manager (I knew they didn't want my manager to know they were sniffing around).
Finally the VP in our department called up the HR head and asked WTF was going on / kind of idiots they had over there (word has it legal and the CEO were on the call too).
HR had a change in leadership and then a couple weeks later there were department wide meetings on how to handle such situations and etc.27 -
What a difference being in the right frame of mind makes.
On Monday I had an interview for a role that I was really keen on, I'd completed a codility test before which I had killed, everything seemed in place. Then I didn't sleep well, had an urgent fire fighting call with my current employer 15 minutes before the interview, I just couldn't focus, I stumbled on some very basic questions, the whole process was torturous.
Today I had an interview for a different, but equally attractive, role. What a difference, I was focused, my answers were clear and thought out, the technical questions were fine, I killed it I think. Pma definitely makes a big difference.1 -
it was not a technical interview.
just screening.
guy: tell me smth about redis.
me: key value, in memory storage.
guy: more
me: umm, the concept is similar to localStorage in browsers, key value storage, kinda in memory.
guy: so we use redis in browsers?
me: no, I mean the high level concept is similar.
guy: (internally: stupid, fail).3 -
My friend recently went through technical interview for a very specific position in very niche technology. Which I will call technology A.
He is an expert in technology A, but interview was in technology B. All questions were about technology B, which has very little to do with technology A.
After few days, my friend received written replay. In section about technical knowledge about technology A, interview wrote his opinion based on technology B. Even if he didn't ask any question related to technology A, because he has never heard of it. Of course my friend didn't get that job6 -
Do you get filled with anxiety and mental anguish when asked for your availability for a technical interview, knowing you’ve spent all your time recently programming and not working on algorithms/data structures and so you’re terribly unprepared but have no idea what the acceptable amount of time to schedule out without seeming like you’re incompetent is?
No?
....me neither. (She says, lying)8 -
Yesterday I had another job interview. This time from home via Skype. Today I was blown off. I was not technical enough according to the company.
This company was working with an ancient cms nobody ever heard of and made Sass sound difficult and new.
Good luck in the Stone Age fellow devs. Make sure you upgrade your pc to Windows 7.5 -
Worst recruiter experience wasn't mine, but it was one I overheard:
Buddy of mine who, like me, was older does a couple rounds of interviews at a nice place and gets a call back from the company recruiter. He puts the recruiter on speaker phone so I can hear too.
They are very nice and tell him they selected another candidate, bummer but no big deal.
Hey I the age of ghosting at least they called right?
He is still upbeat and asks if there was anything he could do better interview or technical stuff.
She tells him "We weren't sure you would fit into the culture."
This is a bit odd as this guy is outgoing and one of those folks that everyone loves being around and working with, just a naturally likeable guy.
He asks what she meant about culture fit and she responds "Well you're older..."
He thinks he misheard her and asks again "Your older and we don't think you will fit in that way."4 -
So I'm called down to the office the other day for a meeting, I get there and my boss says "hi this is John Doe he has applied for the developer role, can you give him the technical interview" had no time to prep, my boss didn't even give me a copy of his CV2
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Had a technical interview with AWS on Wednesday. Woke up Thursday with the flu. Thanks, body, good to know the long tradition of sickness following completion of highly anticipated task is alive and well. Had to reschedule interviews and hold off on scheduling other interviews. (Damn it!)
To protect my repos from my brain on brain fog, anything I’ve done the past few days have been on branches titled “fever” or some variant thereof (“fever1”, “fever2” when there were two approaches I was trying).2 -
# Retrospective as Backend engineer
Once upon a time, I was rejected by a startup who tries to snag me from another company that I was working with.
They are looking for Senior / Supervisor level backend engineer and my profile looks like a fit for them.
So they contacted me, arranged a technical test, system design test, and interview with their lead backend engineer who also happens to be co-founder of the startup.
## The Interview
As usual, they asked me what are my contribution to previous workplace.
I answered them with achievements that I think are the best for each company that I worked with, and how to technologically achieve them.
One of it includes designing and implementing a `CQRS+ES` system in the backend.
With complete capability of what I `brag` as `Time Machine` through replaying event.
## The Rejection
And of course I was rejected by the startup, maybe specifically by the co-founder. As I asked around on the reason of rejection from an insider.
They insisted I am a guy who overengineer thing that are not needed, by doing `CQRS+ES`, and only suitable for RND, non-production stuffs.
Nobody needs that kind of `Time Machine`.
## Ironically
After switching jobs (to another company), becoming fullstack developer, learning about react and redux.
I can reflect back on this past experience and say this:
The same company that says `CQRS+ES` is an over engineering, also uses `React+Redux`.
Never did they realize the concept behind `React+Redux` is very similar to `CQRS+ES`.
- Separation of concern
- CQRS: `Command` is separated from `Query`
- Redux: Side effect / `Action` in `Thunk` separated from the presentation
- Managing State of Application
- ES: Through sequence of `Event` produced by `Command`
- Redux: Through action data produced / dispatched by `Action`
- Replayability
- ES: Through replaying `Event` into the `Applier`
- Redux: Through replay `Action` which trigger dispatch to `Reducer`
---
The same company that says `CQRS` is an over engineering also uses `ElasticSearch+MySQL`.
Never did they realize they are separating `WRITE` database into `MySQL` as their `Single Source Of Truth`, and `READ` database into `ElasticSearch` is also inline with `CQRS` principle.
## Value as Backend Engineer
It's a sad days as Backend Engineer these days. At least in the country I live in.
Seems like being a backend engineer is often under-appreciated.
Company (or people) seems to think of backend engineer is the guy who ONLY makes `CRUD` API endpoint to database.
- I've heard from Fullstack engineer who comes from React background complains about Backend engineers have it easy by only doing CRUD without having to worry about application.
- The same guy fails when given task in Backend to make a simple round-robin ticketing system.
- I've seen company who only hires Fullstack engineer with strong Frontend experience, fails to have basic understanding of how SQL Transaction and Connection Pool works.
- I've seen company Fullstack engineer relies on ORM to do super complex query instead of writing proper SQL, and prefer to translate SQL into ORM query language.
- I've seen company Fullstack engineer with strong React background brags about Uncle Bob clean code but fail to know on how to do basic dependency injection.
- I've heard company who made webapp criticize my way of handling `session` through http secure cookie. Saying it's a bad practice and better to use local storage. Despite my argument of `secure` in the cookie and ability to control cookie via backend.18 -
As the saying goes "beggars can't be choosers" and I need to get a job.
I got approached by a recruiter in LinkedIn who had attached a PDF brochure.
It seems OKish, but the only part that worries me is "step 3" of recruitment process:
"Invitation to France and have a face-to-face technical interview and meet the team."
Will I be out of bounds if I ask the technical interview (if I ever make it that far) take place into Skype?
There are some savings, but going to France (somewhere between Cannes and Nice in summer period!!!) just for an interview that I might fail is a big gambit for me.8 -
Heard a job position opened through a friend. Passed him my CV since we don't know his email (lol how?)
Got called for an interview + technical test. Came and they were expecting my CV. They somehow misplaced my CV (lol again how?)
Told the interviewers that I made a couple of apps for fun and informative. Tested me by doing a value switch between 2 variables without introducing a third variable. Done and dusted.
A month later, the company that interviewed me disappeared.
That's my definition of the worst interview rejection. Company pulled a Houdini without telling all of their candidates that we're rejected.14 -
So I had an interview with Amazon, I had 2 technical rounds and 2 managerial rounds. Now I am waiting for the HR to call, this guy is not picking up the call or replying to my emails. Its almost 3 days now and I am FREAKING OUT!!
How difficult is it to tell the candidate that the application is in progress/accepted or you have been rejected!!!
HR PEOPLE :(10 -
I went for an interview as a MS SQL DBA. They gave me a technical knowledge test which I passed then started asking about me, All was going well until they started telling me what the company did.
They harvested people's data from websites online questionnaires and collated it into saleable data.
This was too much for me and I'm not certain that it isn't a grey area legally. They were told that they were scum of the earth and they could go fuck themselves.4 -
I conducted my first "technical" interview today. Let's just say the chap needs to brush up on his terminology...
Q: What's a class and an object? And what's the difference between each?
A: Ummm... Errr... The one holds static information and the other can change its values.
OK, in his defence, he was nervous and English isn't his first language either, but then brush up on your terminology at the very least so that you can speak the lingo when asked questions about programming.1 -
Just compleeeetteellyy messed up a technical interview.. stupid theory.. I can apply all that stuff but when I get asked to explain then . Well.. I messed up.
And the coding part, I had the right approach but had one big brainfart in it making the whole thing useless (pseudo code so couldnt test it). I realized just after the interview was finished..
I hate the feeling of failure.
Was a really nice position which is why I applied. Ah well, tonight is whiskey night I guess.8 -
So, after crashing and burning during my last interview I’ve applied for another job, this time as a Technical Support Engineer.
Bringing my aspirations down slightly to spend a bit more time building up my experience.
But, the job is for a good company, and I can work from home. -
had an interview at a place that went good at the technical part but I didn't do great at their 'abstract' questions. the guys interviewing were complete stone faced as well, no personality, pretty sure I wouldn't have liked working there anyways. a few years later and they are still looking for people. the recruiter rings up and I said I wouldn't want to re-interview unless the process had changed. he guaranteed me it had. so I went back in and it was exactly the same. exactly the same technical questions, followed by more abstract questions. different guys but same no-personalities. never going back
-
There's nothing wrong with asking algorithm and data structure questions in an interview if the employer calls for it.
If you're hiring a junior and/or you desperately need workers, then you can lower the bar, but if you want to be picky, then asking them leetcode-tier coding questions is fine.
THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH ASKING A SOFTWARE ENGINEER CANDIDATE DATA STRUCTURES AND ALGORITHM QUESTIONS
If they complain that asking ds&a questions is unfair for a position where all they're going to do is shit-tier frontend work, then blacklist them for 10 years.
If people argue that Doctors don't get asked chemistry and biology questions for interviews, tell them it's because medicine is much more regulated than software and that doctors are vetted technically even before they're allowed to go job hunting. Since software doesn't have the same regulations medicine does, employers have to do the technical vetting themselves.
If you think it's unfair to ask software engineering questions to a candidate applying for a software engineering job, then find a different career.9 -
Adobe labs released one new component, I played with it after two days. Went to an interview with huge company after two weeks for a developer position, the interviewers was from different departments, they asked about one technical challenge they have, then I suggest the new component as solution, they gave me small task to implement using the component, I delivered it next day... Then they hired me in R&D department. It was great days.
-
Got my first technical job with no interview. Well, let me explain.
A recruiting firm contacted about my resume that it was impressive. *I didn't have any corporate experience in there. Just school projects, personal projects and internship.
I had a quick phone interview with them and also asked me for an in person interview that same week on Wednesday. After that interview, the guy asked if I could come back for some paperwork because they have found a job for me to start the next Monday. This was exciting.
Monday at the new job, I dressed up in fitted suit and all thinking the company will also interview me. I walked in and the director was like, "welcome, you know you don't have to dress up for this job right? Feel free!" They took me to me workstation with an already clean set up.
I was confused and my stupidity asked: "what time is the interview?". The immediate supervisor I was going to be working with replied, "no need for that. We got you because of your skills. That's all we need so we both went water each other's time".
Long story short, I worked with them for almost a year but due to financial issues they couldn't extend my contract. However, the director got me a new permanent job at one of his friends office and says he will hire me back in a heartbeat if things go well at his place.
I kind of feel bad leaving the recruiter because he was one of those who actually cared and willing to help entry level.4 -
Such glorious Wednesday...
#1: Friend needs me to keep her cats, hasn't called yet to give me keys (and she's leaving tonight).
#2: Got an e-mail from a job I applied, rejected cause I flunked the impromptu technical interview (with the usual pretty wording).
#3: Helping a friend with his dissertation code in Java. Just a marvellous spaghetti code with minimal semblance of a structure and a hodgepodge of various solutions found on the Internet. 2H 40M and still nothing... At least I have my stress ball to save me from mental breakdown...1 -
Interviewer said that passing technical interview means that 90% of the time I will get the offer.
In the final interview with management, I can't answer some questions because I didn't study. Isn't final interview should just about getting to know each other like hobby, interest, talking about company products?
They gave me some puzzle to solve :(
After that, they wait another 1 week just to tell me I don't pass. Why the fuck they wait 1 week just to tell me that? They should just tell me 1 day after!
I still have other job openings right now, but the job searching has been very depressing.
I will give it like 1 more month. But if I can't get any leads, I will just give it up. Maybe tech is not the right job for me.
I will just go back to my old job in non-tech. It's not exactly my dream job, but at least they don't treat me like shit like this.9 -
Argh recruiters!! After 4 emails back and forth because he won’t tell me the company name I agree to a call. Basic role for a basic company. Acknowledges he’s asking for me to take a pay cut but doesn’t listen to the reasons why I would. I ask about the hardware - doesn’t know. Tells me that two competing frameworks are being used. Wants me to agree to an interview without listening 😡🤬😡then tells me I will need to do a technical test, jog the f**k on.2
-
I don't know if this was the worst interview I've ever had, but a technical director is looking at my resume, then asks, "So you like programming?"
me: "Uhm... yes, very much so. I typically have at least 4 or 5 side projects going at once on top of my full time job."
Interviewer: "tell me about one."
I tell him, and this process reported 4 more times, as if he wanted to be sure I had 4-5 side projects going... it was almost a little bit like meeting with Peter Gregory from silicon valley, but not quite as awkward.1 -
Fuck I am so screwed... Spent an hour + trying to implement a Trie except I didn't know it was called a Trie... and don't remember how to implement one...
I am so fcked for my technical interview/test i m planning to take this weekend...
It's like I know i've seen this problem before and the brute-force way probably won't work... but after an hour trying to implement the right way... i just go fck it...
and lo and behold... it doesnt work..
Google the solution and the code is like less than 100 lines... and probably took the guy 10 minutes to write...6 -
1. Applied to a company as a senior dev and sent them my prefered rate
2. Got rejected
3. Contacted recruiter and asked why. The rate seems to be not within their budget
4. Knocked down my rate by 15 percent, did their intro and technical interviews
5. Received an email with feedback that on some topics during technical interview I displayed senior knowledge and on others a very strong mid knowledge. Basically they are trying to gaslight me and presented me a final offer with a knocked down rate by another 30 percent this time. Bitch thinks if I reduced my rate I will do it that for second time.
And they are supposed to be US based company. Offering me a rate that I could get 10km away from my home lol.
Gonna ghost them for a couple days and respons them on Monday that I would like to proceed with the original rate that was quoted by them.
Fucking idiots expect a senior to know everything. If there was a person like that he would be charging at least double of what they are offering.3 -
confession time:
I am php laravel developer with little knowledge about nodejs.
I got selected by one startup as nodejs developer.
frankly I am not better nodejs developer than my competition who were rejected.
I completed oral interview with my nodejs theory knowledge at a time of technical round , they gave us task to create crud with fantastic front end and nodejs mongo as a back end.
I developed front end in bootstrap but at a time of backend, I just copy paste code from github.
and changed everything variable and other proof to hide reality. in mean time other candidates were actually coding everything then I took time to understand this code and I submitted after few candidates.
in last round they ask me to explain code which I explained properly and I get salary 40k/month INR.
I know it is cheating but I wanted this job badly.6 -
So it turns out I was interviewing for a senior role, when in fact I'm looking for a junior-mid role.
Two days ago I had a bad feeling creep up on me when the HR interviewer mentioned to me that they were looking to fill a senior role. I should have interjected. Instead, I stupidly asked the recruiter after passing the HR interview. He answered that the company would also take a mid-level developer and he thinks that I have a good chance. In retrospective, I'm not sure on what basis he made the judgement call.
I had the technical interview today and didn't get the job as I expected. But the same recruiter told me that the company said they'd take me for an intermediate role in the future, but I didn't make it for the senior role.
Can I take that as "you're not technically sound enough" put in a nicer way to soften the blow? But by the company or the recruiter? Or would they actually consider me for a mid-level role in the future? Who is lying or not lying?
Steam off my head now. Thanks for reading my rant.
Context: I'm still transitioning from another field and barely had one year of web development experience so far, half of which was from where I just learned to hack stuff together. I'm now going to focus on landing an internship or a junior role, without going through recruiters since I'd be waste of their time.15 -
Getting my first ever second dev interview for a Node.js fullstack role next week(First interview wasn't technical, they gave a coding assignment which I passed)!
What should I expect? Any tips?1 -
I think I fucked up today's interview. Opening with non-technical questions really threw me off kilter.
"What happened the last time you conflicted with another team member?"
IDK, ask me what "static" means in C# or just let me solve "FizzBuzz".4 -
Did technical interview yesterday, rejected today. As expected. Nothing new.
my 1000 job applications tiktok journey might continue
9 -
Is it normal to feel uneasy about how the technical part of an interview went. I mostly knew my stuff but there where some questions that came up that were nowhere near what was stated to be necessary before the interview or that I claimed to know.1
-
I think I need to go to a bootcamp, so I can go through everything I need to learn: how to pair program, how to explain your code to someone else, how to prepare for a technical interview, etc.11
-
Since I can't make many posts, I'll try squeeze them all in one:
1. Phone recruitment interview went "well", I even spoke french at some point! 😃
I have to brush up my knowledge again for the technical test (I hate them). Somehow I got excited, which I shouldn't, but only time will tell...
2. My brain is stuck with opening a Twitter account, mainly for following people/companies news. I don't know if it's worth it, so I would your feedback on this.
3. I've finally come down to listening to synthwave while coding and I was wondering if there's any good free service (I'm still poor, so I don't want neither Deezer nor Spotify), preferably with a UWP app on Windows 10 (that is not Soundcloud).4 -
! RANT
Yesterday I went to pool campus recruitment drive and there were 3 rounds
1. Written aptitude test
2. Group Discussion
3. F2F interview
Cleared first round and got selected for second round out of like 80 students. (15-18 got selected)
Went to group discussion first topic was "Donald Trump Administration is threat to IT for Indian or not" and the all were saying he stopped giving visa to Indians, there is no opportunity for us there because of him and I was like wtf... And they think because of Trump, Indian people from Infosys got kicked out hahahaha wtf is this.
Second was how AI and Digitalization can help in growth of nation.
And again those girls hahahah one girl said by using AI we can make new technology and can explore galaxies. What the fathafucking fuck!!
And YES THEY GOT SELECTED.
(Whole HR team was non technical)5 -
I had a technical test on Tuesday on Linux and SQL. I thought I failed. I get a call that I did pretty well and now they want me for an interview. Naturally, I get very excited.
I get a date for the interview and get ready to shine... until I accept the video call and find out that it is a technical interview! But this time instead I have to express myself in a foreign language.
(And also not with the people I was supposed to have the interview with)
No worse way to stress someone XYZ company! Totally uncool!!!
I think now I can go in a shadowy corner and whimper.9 -
So, I need to search for a new job again. The thing killed my project.
15 years of Java experience in my resume, I look a like a sterotypical 35 years old programmer, I’m applying for expert roles. But every remote technical interview starts with:
- what is the difference between ArrayList and LinkedList?
- what is a hash map?
The hardest part is to keep smiling to the camera, pretending I don’t have the answer memorized by repeating it for the last 15 years of interviewing, and not rolling my eyes.
And before you ask, I do know what garbage collector is.5 -
I was not happy with the way my team lead made those technical decisions. I couldn't do much about it. Hit with frustration, I switched job.
What a coincidence, my new employer is exactly his old employer. Although I liked the company with my impression from the interview, knowing this fact made me nervous. What if this is the place that bred him into what he is today?...
Turned out the reality is not cruel. I'm joining a team that is formed way after he left. And this new team is expected to bring changes to the old-fashioned existing product (or simply a revamp/remake if you call it).
And it's interesting for me to now come to understand the poor decisions he has made. I said I "understand". This does not mean I agree with him now. His approach makes sense when I look at the old-fashion product I am working on. But it still feels wrong in many ways for the product he is now in charge of.
There, I witness that someone with experience is not necessarily smart.
This is the same guy who said "That's why I don't like to catch exception."
FYI https://devrant.com/rants/2420797/...1 -
Does anyone have a true measure to recruit freshly graduated? yesterday I had a technical interview with a candidate, the problem is he didn't know even the basic of coding in Java, like String equality and hashcode, he also didn't have a solid understanding of basic design pattern. But what made me want to give him a chance is that he seemed highly motivated and eager to learn. So I don't know what to do guys?10
-
My Technical lead always asks one question to new interviewing candidates. "Write a SQL query to find the second highest salary from employee salary table". It's the same question which he faced in one interview and he didn't have answered it.
Sorry for my bad English..3 -
There is a big difference between IT and CS, the first has a lot of monkeys because most of the hiring managers don't ask technical interview questions that screen out monkeys... Probably because.... **Hmmmm thinking of a nice way to say it** They don't know any better...
-
Okaaay.....so after I got fucked at the technical interview i returned there the following day and wrote them code for a system that was actually on their pipeline
Left the thing 80% complete and they were like: Amaizing we will be in touch
And I left bouncing1 -
Me: Interview is in 3 hours, I'm prepared, it's non technical anyway, just be yourself.
Brain to me: What the fuck is big 'O' notation? Objects you mean chairs? Turing? That's some kind of robot right?
Also me: fuck....1 -
Last tuesday I was scheduled for a technical interview with company's mobile team lead. First thing he does is noticing my The Legend of Zelda messenger bag. He starts asking questions about the games I've played, my favorite ones, the ones I disliked and keeps on going for about 10 minutes. Then he starts asking about my experience and some technical stuff for 2-3 minutes. Then he walks away saying "our HR lady will contact you to let you know what's next". Nobody contacted me the rest of the week. I guess someone who prefers "Ocarina of Time" over "A Link to the Past" is not a fit for that company.4
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Doing a technical assessment. Slightly different stack than what I am used to!
- NGINX instead of Traefik
- Kubernetes instead of Docker Swarm
Just because the stack is different, anxiety / impostor syndrome is kicking in. I'm proud of myself for commanding my brain and body to execute:
While !done:
- google,
- find simplest straightforward tutorial
- implement
The chemicals inside my body are all over the place. I really want to move out of my current job!! -
Interviewed with a company, it was a direct hire SQL Dev/Analyst role(ETL,BI etc). Had three interviews in a row all of which went great. We laughed, I was able to answer every technical question with no problem. Each person clearly enjoyed the interview, I ended up going over the specified amount of time set aside for the interview... Still didn't get the job. They said "There is no doubt he can do the job, but we don't think he's passionate enough about the position." What?!?! So confused. It's also odd to me because every job before this If I had an in person interview I was offered the job... I don't get it.4
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End of my rant about 35 day recruitment process for anyone interested to hear the ending.
Just got rejected by a company (name Swenson He) for a remote Android Engineer SWE role after wasting 35 days for the recruitment process.
First intro interview went good, then I did an assignment that had 72 hours deadline (asked for couple days longer to do this task, did it in around 40 hours, it was purely an assignment not free work, I could have done it in a day but I choose to overeenginer it so I could use the project as a portfolio piece, no regrets there and I learned some new things). After that It took them 2 weeks just to organize the technical interview.
2 days after the technical interview I received an offer from a second company with 1 week to decide. I immediately informed the Swenson He about it and politely asked whether they could speed up their decision process.
Now I know that I could just sign with the second company and if the big Swenson He would decide to bless me with and offer I could jump ship. But out of principle I never did that for 7 years of my career. If Im in a situation with multiple offers I always inform all parties (it's kinda a test for them so I could see which one is more serious and wants me to work for them more). Swenson He didnt pass the test.
6 days of silence. I pinged the techlead I interviewed with on LinkedIn about my situation, he assured me that he'l ask his hiring team to get back to me with feedback that day.
2 days of silence. I had to decide to sign or not to sign with a second company. I pinged the techlead again regarding their decision and 10min after received a rejection letter. There was no feedback.
I guess they got pissed off or something. Idk what were they thinking, maybe something along the lines of "Candidate trying to force our 35day recruitment process to go faster? Pinging us so much? Has another offer? What an asshole! ".
Didnt even receive any feedback in the end. Pinged their techlead regarding that but no response. Anyways fuck them. I felt during entire process that they are disrespecting me, I just wanted do see how it ends. Techlead was cool and knowledgeable but recruitment team was incompetent and couldn't even stay in touch properly during entire process. Had I didn't force their hand I bet they would have just ghosted me like they did with others according to their Glassdoor reviews.
Glad I continued to interview for other places, tomorrow Im signing an offer. Fuck Swenson He.
P.S. From my experience as a remote B2B contractor if a company is serious the entire process shouldn't take longer than max 2 weeks. Anything outside of that is pure incompetence. Even more serious companies can organize the required 2-3 meetings in a week if they have to and if they are interested. Hiring process shouldnt take longer than MAX 3 weeks unless you are applying for some fancy slow picky corporate company or a FAANG, which is out of topic for this post. -
If there was a team architect role at your company per team that had no financial benefit tied to it and you were told it had no bearing on promotional chances and it came with a lot of extra responsibility and then you were asked to be interviewed (technical and behavioral) by two people outside your team in order for your manager to determine who on your team should have that role even though the last TA (who left the company) on your team was literally chosen by popular vote… would you do it? Would you feel insulted being asked?5
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!rant
For those who get nervous when it comes to the technical interview, you should check out https://interviewing.io it allows you to practice the tech interview anonymously with developers from some of the bigger companies.1 -
After going through the regular process of talking to HR/Recruitment and passing the casual interview with a team-mate for cultural compatibility, I got the task of grilling a candidate on some technical matters. This being a PHP job, we got to talking about PSRs (PHP Standards Recommendations).
As he seemed to take pride in his knowledge of PSRs, I decided to focus more closely on that.
So we got to a recomendation regarding dependency injection containers. Nothing special, and he seemed to know his stuff. At that point, he made a statement that parts of that recommendation were a bit stupid.
Now, I hate to put people in their place, but his statement did not match what that specific PSR stated. So I gently tried to correct him. The candidate, being on fire thus far, pointed out that I should trust him on this, as he clearly knew his stuff.
Again, I didn't like having to do this, but I also did not like him having a misconception about a topic he was, otherwise, really on top of...
So I asked him to trust *me*, as I was one of the writers who contributed to the standard.
The true test here, of course, wasn't if he knew all the minutia of every standard but how he would react to being corrected.
We, as developers, are wrong all the time. Its how we learn and evolve. So being able to accept that is vital.
Sadly, he did not respond too well and sunk into a bit of a sullen silence. At first I though maybe I'd scared him or that he was afraid of having made a gaff but it soon turned out he genuinly did not like being wrong.
Sadly, I had to advise against hiring him.2 -
Just had my reasoning for not doing technical projects for interviews proven.
Pass the first 2 stages of interview (including showing some personal portfolio projects) then after a week of hearing nothing get sent a technical project to complete.
Spend every spare moment for a week polishing this thing, decent front end, quick and efficient back end, low traffic between fe, be, persistence etc.
Submit the code at midday ready for the interview the following day, only for the company to phone at 5pm and say all is fine and the code is great for the final interview (walkthrough) the next day, then phone 5:10pm phone and pull the position.
That company has just had free work done which should have cost 1 weeks worth of fees, using the premise of a job at the end of it, only to take the code that they are super happy with and run with no payout.10 -
DevRant users (and my wife) are the only people that know that I have applied for 2 new jobs! I’ve already had a phone interview with each. Tomorrow I have a 2 hour in-person technical interview, and last night I completed a technical assessment/sample application for the other position!
Things are moving fast, but I don’t want to let friends and family know yet, until things get a little more certain.
It’s such a weird feeling going to work everyday knowing that my current job may be coming to an end!4 -
Just finished fourth interview with a company (fuck me) for a solutions engineer position (I am a self taught dev that is transitioning to technical roles from a pretty "soft" background with the hope of being in a software engineer role within three years). Anyone have any experience with the solutions engineer role and some advice about it? Note: this IS an invitation to rant about solutions engineers so I know what NOT to do.5
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Bad interview experience:
Went to HR interview: boring company's history class first. Asked what projects do they need me for. He didn't knew but he was able to underline some letters on my cv, based on what I was choosed to come: wpf.
After one week I went to technical interview. Still no answer about what/where should I work within their company. Apparently this developer's job was just to evaluate me. So I had few questions to answer. While I've talked about stuff, he was chatting on keyboard and smiling.
I'm sorry I didn't left at that moment and stayed until the end. After that nobody contacted me again with any refusal. -
I know we all hate FAANG companies here but I got invited to Amazon 5 hour interview(5 session here) after 2 technical i terviews and it feels good. It will also be in the domain I really want to work in.
But enough for good news, I want you to piss in my drink. Give me reasons to stay away from Amazon. Especially in European branch. What are they bad at? Why would people leave Amazon? Company gossips, I want to hear everything!12 -
**random rant**
So next week I have a technical interview with TripleByte and I'm supposed to spent the next 2 days sorta preparing. Just woke up and had this thought tho:
What's the point? Yes I think I could try to get a better job but been trying for years (banking tech area) but now it feels like I'm at a "local optimum" sort of a sweet spot. Team/company could be smarter/more efficient but...
I've got my own place in a city that's also near NYC. It takes me 20 minutes to get to my current office, fairly flexible with the 9-5 work day, I can work remotely. I get enough money.
And then finding a new job === technical interviews about stuff you will rarely use and usually with no feedback like a pass-fail test where they only tell you if you pass or fail (and for me it always feels skewed towards fail the moment i walk since I'm deaf).
But at this point, I feel more like "you need to convince me to work for you". In my head, the plan is mostly to just have a nice chat and wing the technical questions just to see how good i am without any prep (i.e. poring thru Cracking the Coding Interview or Big O concepts, sorting...).2 -
This has annoyed me.
I sent my CV off to a company, they came back quite quickly and wanted to give me a phone interview. It had some technical questions, which I did well on and they gave me a test.
I liked the look of the company so I did the test asap, and passed the test.
They then invited me in for interview and all went find and dandy.
They then wanted me to come back in to met the rest of the team, so I thought things were going well.
Buy nope, they've emailed to say I wouldn't be a good fit right now, and have limited feedback. All throughout the process they seemed very keen, now I'm confused af.4 -
There's something super broken about the interview process in our industry. I spent 30 minutes chatting with a hr recruiter. 2 hours on a coding screen. 1 hour for a technical interview. 1 hour talking with the head of engineering. But then they decided to pass on me. Well if things went well then, then I spend an entire fucking day on an onsite.
Wow. Since when did the industry get so bloated until we have to do so much to get a job? Is signal really that unclear so candidates have to jump through hoop after hoop?
BS.5 -
Job hunting is hard!
I have over 10 years experience in software engineering. I do mostly full stack, so I can say I'm a jack of all trades and a language agnostic. I'd say I'm a good software engineer and will be able to tackle any task I've been assigned to. Having said that, my confidence in finding a new role is at an all time low.
I've been job hunting for 3-4 months now and so far I've only had 1 interview and it was unsuccessful. Now have been invited to a first round interview for another company (first of many rounds). It's going to involve many technical challenges like coding, algorithms and data structure and system designs.
In general I've had hardly any interviews (about 6-7 in total in my whole career). Due to my lack of interview experience, I've been getting anxiety especially now that the job market is tougher than it has ever been.
Firstly, how do you guys prepare, if at all? I feel like many of these interviews require you to be good at interviews, almost like an exam. If these questions were presented to me when I first came out of college, I would've had a better chance.
Secondly, how do you take rejections? I didn't know how painful it was to get rejected, regardless of how much I wanted the role.
I've been fortunate enough to still have my current job, but because of that I don't really have much time, nor the mental energy to study for interviews.
Apologies I'm advanced for poor grammar, I'm writing this on the train.5 -
Recruiter reached out on a certain other social network where people seem to be humbled a lot.
First interview (a day later) goes well
Second interview (a week later) also goes well. They tell me there's one more technical interview, but that shouldn't be a problem.
A week later, that interview is a breeze too. Interviewer said they'll prepare the paperwork.
Another week goes by without communication, so I ping them.
A week after that they send me an email saying that they need references they can talk to. A co-worker and a direct manager.
Uncommon in my part of the world in general. But coming up with that idea this late in the process? Really? But ok, I provide those in like an hour.
They take their time, but eventually call the co-worker. Another week after that, they still haven't called the manager, so I ping them again.
Silence for another couple of days, then a very sad email about how the general situation has changed and they've now stopped hiring indefinitely1 -
I went to a job interview about 3 weeks ago. I got an email that I didn't pass, so I asked for a feedback. Their response was that I have required technical skills, but the reason I was not accepted was "your personality is incompatible with our team". I mean, WTF. How can you get my personality after one hour of me talking about code?18
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Definitely landing the first real gig.
I've been writing software since I was 12 (full disclosure: early code consisted of C=64 BASIC). I learned C in high school. Contributed to a MUD in my 20's. But I never got a CS degree and didn't really understand how hiring works, so I limped along doing technical support for years. Years turned into decades.
About 2 years ago, I became an embedded support person inside a development team. I got to show off my skills, and the year effectively became a live interview. Last October I finally got the title.
On the positive side, by taking the long way around I missed out on some of the insanity of the software world in the 90s/00s.2 -
A few months back, I was having the last few days of my college / university. Already had a job offer, wasn't fond of attending classes, so I had not much to do. I had been a student placement coordinator, and a few of other student coordinators along with the University Placement Cell decided to overhaul the current placement structure with a new, more efficient one. So, they asked whether I could take interviews (along with a few others) for new placement coordinators, who'd take over the following year, making the existing posts null and void.
So, I was interviewing a 2nd year girl for the technical team. In her form, she had mentioned that she'd been an executive member of the programming club of our University, founded the previous year, was peaking in terms of popularity among other clubs.
I found it strange, and during the interview, I kept pushing it until she accepted that she was just a member and not an executive member.
Then, I asked, do you know Bugs Buggy (name changed)... She said, yes, he is the founder of that club. I said, I am, Bugs Buggy.
Felt thug life B)1 -
So I went for a "special" interview to a company whose slogan is "experience certainty" (fresher, was hoping to get a role in cyber security/Linux sysadmin). Got shown what the "real" hiring process of an indian consultancy company is...
We were called because we cleared a rank of the coding competition which the company holds on a yearly basis, so its understood that we know how to code.
3 rounds; technical, managerial and HR...
Technical is where I knew that I was signing up for complete bullshit. The interviewer asks me to write and algo to generate a "number pyramid". Finished it in 7 minutes, 6-ish lines of (pseudo) code (which resembled python). As I explained the logic to the guy, he kept giving me this bewildered look, so I asked him what happened. He asks me about the simplest part of the logic, and proceeds to ask even dumber questions...
Ultimately I managed to get through his thick skull and answer some other nontechnical questions. He then asks if I have anything to ask him...
I ask him about what he does.
Him - " I am currently working on a project wherein the client is a big American bank as the technical lead "
Me (interest is cybersec) - "oh, then you must be knowing about the data protection and other security mechanisms (encryption, SSL, etc.)"
Him (bewildered look on face) - "no, I mostly handle the connectivity between the portal and data and the interface."
Me (disappointed) - "so, mostly DB, stuff?"
Him (smug and proud) - "yeup"
Gave him a link to my Github repo. Left the cabin. Proceeded to managerial interview (the stereotypical PM asshats)
Never did I think I'd be happy to not get a job offer...1 -
Last week I had an initial interview for a mid-senior C# position, and I got asked to do a technical test to check on my actual skills.
The problem is that the skills required to meet all the criteria in said test are far beyond my actual knowledge, so I'm 100% sure I'm going to fail the test.
Now, the question is, should I be honest with the person that's going to review whatever I manage to do, and tell them upfront that I've never done this or that? Should I even try to do it on the test, even if it's the first time I try to do some of the points mentioned on the criteria?
It's the first time this happens to me, and I'm tempted to just tell them I don't feel capable of completing it, and leave it there.10 -
I’m always tired all the time. Depression and what not but today I am TIRED
Had an interview that requires vanilla javascript but I suck at algos even tho I was getting it done till time ran out. We gelled tho so I hope they see potential and move to next round.
But the good news is. I had a follow up interview based on a challenge. It’s the second I’ve ever had and I did well this time.
So much so that they’re booking another interview for tomorrow.
So I’m done with the technical portions of the process.
This is the first time I’ve gotten this far and I’m so happy. I’m hoping really that this is the one cause I doubt I have the energy and will power to keep going though the processes.
I’m so excited. It’s as if all my work is slowly showing and I’m getting closer and closer
Wish me luck guys. Hopefully I ace it as I come across well In General Chats.
This is my last application. If it doesn’t work I think I’m done with dev life and job hunt.
Fingers crossed I’ve found the one1 -
well, i just screwed what might have been a great opportunity at a great company with a recent capital injection by Uber.
I don't know what the hell my brain was thinking when answering at the technical interview, like wtf? they asked for an use of design patterns, and i started thinking for uses in my daily life (???), like, outside of work?? to which of course i answered "no, I can't think of a time I have used them" 🤡🤦🏻♂️
They asked what motivated me to work at that company, and I basically answered "money and free education perks" 🤡
The worst part is that they contacted me! So for some reason I was pretty sure that I would ace that interview with flying colors. Yeah well no, fuck those expectations.4 -
!rant
I had a second stage technical interview for a job today. I met three devs who prodded my experience and gave me a task to do (design a complete system architecture for registering sheep, I got ten minutes). I think it went well because after the interview they invited me out for dinner!
Feels good! I might become a consultant soon. -
Am I the only one to think companies asking questions such as those for technical interviews don’t understand what software engineering/development is about ?
- How many layers does a webservice have?
- What framework do you use for unit testing ?
- How do you do dependency injection ?
Essentially questions that they deem black and white but really aren’t. Besides isn’t the core of the work to just adapt and learn while being smart about what things you implement ? I don’t get these questions for me it’s a sign that a company doesn’t understand the work I’ll be doing.
I think for a technical interview I’d much rather spend my time on a difficult algo question in the language of my choice for 30mins - 1h than 20mins answering close minded questions that don’t have to be.
This rant is mostly due to the fact I’ve done a few interviews with two companies and both behaved like that, I’m 100% certain I had the skills to do the jobs they were offering me (they both contacted me first) but both ended up denying me because my knowledge on their specific questions wasn’t detailed enough. I could have learnt their stack in about a week so I don’t know why that mentality exists.
I might be wrong about the core of the work though… what do you think?3 -
I have an onsite technical interview test tomorrow. I have no clue what to expect as I have always done it online.
Should I expect it to be the same system but me just doing the online test in their offices 🙄?
NB: After the test I have an interview with the hiring manager.3 -
When you're at an interview and they give you 5 mins to answer a technical problem and you panic, give an uncertain, semicorrect solution and the minute you walk out you know the best answer. FML.2
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Hey everyone, I'm ecstatic and nervous! I got my first technical phone interview from a company I'd actually really want to work with for a full stack (mostly frontend) react node web app developer job. Any tips or stories of your first technical phone interview with a company you cared about?! I think it will really help me. Thanks! 😅4
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this.post != rant
Just had my first job interview for backend dev position. Hopefully, it went well. Not that much technical questions but the interviewer sure did verified all the things I wrote on my cv. Good thing I included my side projects, that way we have a topic to talk about. Hope ill get the offer. Yaaaaas!!! -
Technical interview to solve a fairly simple problem. I proved that I am an idiot.
Really don't want to work for a company that doesn't test new hires well and hires idiots. Ironic :D10 -
I just had my first "technical" interview with a CDO of a digital marketing startup currently employing ~50 people. The quotes come from the fact that he basically didn't ask me a single question - he basically spent 30 minutes talking about their tools, how everything works etc. I asked a metric shitton of questions, but I don't know how this whole situation could give any assessment of my position as a junior frontend web dev. I'm confused as balls.7
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Heard nothing back from an interview I attended 3 weeks ago. I'm sure this sort of thing is common, but it's never happened to me before.
It's so shitty and unprofessional.
The interview was a joke anyway, bouncing between business questions (strictly non-technical, as I learned that one of the interviewers thought Bootstrap and JS were the same), a written test for a Junior (testing to see if you knew arrays started at 0), then random technical questions which didn't allow me to prove what I could actually do.
So what the fuck are you recruiting for here, a business person, Junior, Mid or Senior developer?!
Total fucking bullshit.
Surely the best way to test a candidate is to let them try to fix a recent bug from your app?
Annoying because I know I can do the job.
Fuck you and your shitty fucking questions. -
Got another phone interview tomorrow. This time with the manager of the department id be in. Tonight I finalize my more technical questions about the position and general ones about the environment of his department
Hopefully it goes well and I'm out of my current job in a couple of weeks -
I did another interview yesterday. I knew within the first few minutes I wasn't going to get hired based on the questions they asked (all technical questions that I did not know the answer for).
I had to sit through the rest of the interview, trying my best to answer, knowing already I wouldn't be hired.
I hate the feeling of putting in all that effort, knowing I was already out of the running.
And before anyone says "you never know", how many of you have gone to an interview, not been able to answer any questions for the first 10 minutes, and ended up getting hired?3 -
I've actually already discussed this one on here I believe
I see this job looking for an android developer for Kotlin with UI experience with XD & Figma and experience with Firebase. I have all of these qualifications so I throw my resume into the fray within an 2 hours the recruiters contact me. they have an offer of 76,000 and I'm looking for junior so I'm like, eh whatever, I give them a copy of my resume and we hold discussion for a few days and then radio silence. I then see a job posting EXTREMELY similar but with a "different company" so I throw my resume in and again within 2 hours I get a call only THIS TIME ITS THE INTERNAL HR. She sounds interested we have a good conversation and sets me up for 96,000 and they schedule me for my first interview within the week. Interview goes great, next I meet with the CTO and we have a pretty good conversation, I'm expecting a technical exam but it doesn't happen instead they give me a case study. they send me requirements for an app API to use, architecture, and a week time span to do it. I finish the app with extra features within 6 days, in my understanding of MVVM and I was excited and happy about this app because its JUST NICE. a week goes by and I meet with the tech team. They grill me on my application, scalability, use cases, how would I advertise or place advertisement and I'm answering everything they love the UI (I included mockups I made on XD), they say everything sounds good everyone leaves with smiles they say they have to find out on what team to place me because they have multiple apps and that HR will be in contact with me in the next few days... A WEEK GOES BY and I randomly get the declination email that next Friday. When I asked for feedback they said it wasn't true MVVM. I was devastated until the next week when I was accepted for a higher paying job that didn't require me to move. After I accepted this job guess who calls? THE FIRST RECRUITER and for this long I was wondering if this was the same job due to the very similar job description so I ask "is your client XXXXXXX?" it was I just told him "I'm good" and hung up4 -
Full stack interview tomorrow. 1 hour of technical backend questions. 1 hour of front end questions. Where to start preparing!3
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RANT!
Had to do one of those at-home tasks instead of a technical interview as part of applying for a (junior) positon with this startup that is using a blockchain for medical records. The task is build the api to interface with the records. Both for searching and crud operations, (Using a json array of records in local file for mock db) in 2 hours.
Ok fine, doesnt sound totally unreasonable, so I did what I could (which is all but tests, it worked at least)
But thats like 2/3 of what their actual production system is, built in 2 hours, for free. Theres 6 hr + in a work day, and the position is a 24mos contract....
Maybe its just me cause this is the first one of these Ive ever done, but it seems unreasonable that in order to qualify I need to do in 2 hrs what an entire team did in weeks.
I get they want to see if an applicant wasn't lieing on their cv, but damn...
Thats like saying In order to show your good enough for an entry level poistion on the Facebook team, you need to build Facebook; before lunchtime, its 7am. GOGOGO! lol1 -
So I have a technical live interview tuesday and thursday, they last around 1 hour each. What should I expect?2
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I’ve been working at my company for about 3 years now and under 2 managers. In my time I’ve grown to be a technical anchor and SME in multiple facets of our architecture. First manager was cool and I could really see my development under him. Then he gets promoted and I get a new manager. New manager just rides me and bleeds me dry, all while telling me “you’re just a couple months away from Senior” for like 2 years. Every time I meet with him he still says I’m not ready even though I step up and do more and more and more. He’s never satisfied. Then we recently had a shift in the roles in the company where there’s a new intermediate role in between my role and Senior which I was gunning for. After a few more months he says to me “Congratulations, we finally opened up a position to promote you… to this other role that you didn’t want”.
Naturally, I’m pissed. So I start looking at open reqs for the Senior role I’m looking for. I applied for a job and interviewed for it. I “aced” the Senior interview. The new team wants to bring me on. They tell HR that they want to hire me. Now HR is pushing back saying “hey now, you can’t just SKIP roles like that” even though it was an open requisition that I applied to, not even an in-line promotion and also they just opened this intermediate position I’m skipping like 3 months ago and again I’ve been here for 3 years. So even after crushing the interview and the other team loving me I still won’t get the job because of stupid corporate bureaucratic bullshit.2 -
Update on job hunting in the first world:
1- Tens of rejections
2- Had one HR interview last week, seemed to have went well and claimed to check with techlead for a technical interview so fingers crossed
3-interview tomorrow with another company
Also January weather sux balls1 -
Is it normal for US based companies to lowball EU based remote senior hires that much?
Just had this weird experience:
Applied to a US based company as a remote senior android dev.
Told them my rate was 55usd/hour.
Their internal recruiter who is based in Poland told me that their budget is max 45 usd/hour max for a senior role.
I was like ok maybe its worth a shot.
Passed the initial interview, did the technical interview, seemed like I did really great.
Today I receive an offer from that recruiter of 30 usd/hour. Feedback was that Im senior in some areas but in most of them Im a "really strong mid level" so they cant offer senior rate for me. Right now Im thinking of how to respond to that.
What is this? Seniors are expected to know everything 100 percent? Every senior I worked with usually specializes in 2-3 areas and looks up others as he goes. I guess shes trying to lowball me or something.
To be honest this is hilarious for me. If I wanted I could land a contracting gig with same 30usd/hour in my city 5 miles away from my home (Im based in Latvia, capital city Riga). But this is US based company so what the heck? Am I being gaslighted? Or is this rate the new normal?
Maybe Im being delusional here, should I manage my expectations or something?
Can you share your experiences with negotiating hourly rates as a senior dev and what rates you guys charge for EU/US B2B contracts?22 -
What’s up with HR calling to do technical interview and asking questions she doesn’t even know the answers to? Bruh, all that time I thought I was speaking with the Hiring Manager only to find out she’s HR when I asked her ONE technical question then she goes..”Oh, I won’t be able to answer that. I’m not technical in this role, I’m just the HR but I can schedule an onsite interview with the hiring manager.”
Me: I believe it’ll be beneficial to have a phone conversation or interview with the hiring manager before deciding if it’s worth coming onsite for an in-person interview.
HR: Ok, I’ll see his availability.
I’m not even concerned if she calls back or not. Plus the rate she’s talking about is really disrespectful.2 -
February will be the first full year at this company as full time employee.
I've updated so many legacy projects, optimized a lot of workflows as well as built new tools to improve efficiency and remove unnecessarily duplicate projects (sometimes literally only 3 variables were different between multiple projects)
My one co-worker taught himself enough code to do the job but doesn't think like a programmer though he is asking me for help and advice to improve what he does since ive proven i know a little. my other direct co-worker I'm practically teaching a Programming 100 course to them
My direct manager at one point said he was so happy he took a chance on me even though I didn't interview well
I like my job, I find it so much better than my last job which was horribly toxic, and more fun than my first 'real' job as a night shift help desk for basically a warehouse environment.
But I feel under paid sometimes for how much i do and all ive improved in my first year, I have my first yearly review coming up. I'm hoping to get a decent raise for all ive done and I want to somehow go over everything with the HR person to justify it. But I have no idea how to talk about my dev work to them in a way a non technical person could understand. I'm also not sure how the review process will work. Like will my manager be there. Or is it just me and HR, is there a paper I'll be sent to fill before hand,1 -
That moment when you fcked up in a technical interview and realize oh I need to sharpen my skills, I need to improve my skills! I am not a worthy programmer now 💔
Then you go to work next day and have a busy day working as a project manager!
Now I know why my skills got rusty, and am not able to code as I used to be 😭😭😢2 -
Join a coding boot camp and cramming myself for technical interview instead of this almost useless master degree.1
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What an ultimate experience it was! # interview for internship. Now i have last interview(might be technical+HR) with Japanese panel for R&D internship in tokyo. Any suggestions ? ^_^ how can i impress Japanese executives?3
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Coding has pretty much been the center of my life?
Although I was persuaded to take a dumb expensive, useless detour into Finance... and probably cost me a nice job at a big tech company... at least until maybe I get around to really really trying really hard to possibly get an interview after reading through a few Algo books and prepping for technical interviews and doing foobar enough to request being recruited...
Anyway I still like coding for my own use a lot (check my github.io page), getting paid for it is more of a ++ though I would prefer to be solving more interesting and useful problems at work....
Oh yes and it makes me an Android/tech power user, always thinking about how to use tech to solve my problems, get what I want...
and now if you'd please, dfox when can I have my unicorn? 😀
1 -
Can somebody give me examples of questions I might get asked in a final technical interview where I'm NOT doing any coding...
The guy said they want to get a sense of how I would approach a technical problem and that they can teach me how to code but I need to show I can problem solve - just not sure how prepare for this...4 -
I got an interview with the first company that has ever taken me seriously in 8 days (Oct 5). It's not the technical interview yet, but I'm still really fucking nervous. I really don't want to screw this up and i would love to finally be a professional...ish software/web developer; not to mention I kinda need a new job since being put on call at my current workplace (tourism's slow season). I got a lot of future plans hanging on the outcome of this at this point, and I can't shake the negative feeling that things aren't going to work out how I want them to, but at the same I feel confident enough to say within myself that I got this--what the hell is wrong eith me? 😥😥😥4
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Studying trees prior to a technical interview tomorrow.
It's so daunting as I'm only recently delving into fundamentals of computer science - I studied something quite unrelated. I wish I could just sit down and build an Angular project...2 -
Is it only me who mostly failed on technical interview. Because most of the time from my previous employer they always try to keep me stay whenever i submit resignation letter and they said that I one of the good performer...1
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!rant
[Update on previous rant at the bottom]
So I had the technical test last friday. I did not try to implement any automated test as it is not my forte.
I had three hours to showcase my knowledge of data structures and OOP so I did that.
The test was somewhat long actually, so I left out one part that I did not have time to implement: validation of input files.
Today I got feedback, everything went well, they liked my code and I only got two negatives: Error handling and automated tests xD
Now I'm going to the second phase: phone interviews and they are gonna asks the whys of my implementation.
I'll have to explain why I did not implement automated tests and the girl on the phone told me "they didn't like it much that you had no tests because tests are very important for us".
I guess I'll have to come clean and say that I'm not very strong on that but willing to learn, so I didn't want to risk it doing something I'm not really good at.
I hope it ends up well.
prev rant:
https://devrant.com/rants/1607302/...4 -
Fair / Not Fair
I hate when an interviewer would ask me to code something for them for technical interview.( happy to show non propitiatory previous work) So now that I am the one doing the interviewing, I am doing what I would have wanted, and I have to say it is working out. I thought I would share my experience so far and find out if the community at large sees this practice as fair or not fair.
People reply to the job post then I call and do quick phone interview ask a few key questions. After I find somone I think should go the next level I direct them to freelancer site and give them a paid project.
most recent project: Build simple(i mean really simple) ASP.net Core MVC web application (code first) that remotely connects to SQL server and can be published in linux ubuntu.
bla bla user accounts/ subscription bla bla. But it must me completed in 10 days. reward $1000.00 us dollars.
I build the SQL server for them and put blank database in and provide connection details.
To be fair
I have already built this app my self it and it took me 5 days.
So, Fair / not Fair11 -
Job Interview Help!
Hi Devs! Applying for a junior front end developer job here and have been called by a recruiter. He's explained he will:
"be asking some technical questions, so it might be worth a quick bit of revision on your JavaScript knowledge and terms!"
Has anyone come across these before and what level of knowledge would I be expected to know for a junior role?
I'm going to do the test either way as it'll be great experience but a bit of prep is always good! -
Let's assume I have a technical interview in Python. What are the question that you are going to ask me?
P.S. Asking this question for everyone. I have seen a lot of websites but still don't know what to read first so I am asking you.9 -
Just applied for my first internship, the manager said they just hired a girl fresh out of college so there might not be any payment opportunities (which I wasn't expecting anyway)
Might get a technical interview next Monday or Tuesday, wish me luck!2 -
I've an interview with Microsoft in 2 days for Summer Internship in Software Engineering in North America. Anyone has any tips how to prepare for it? This is my first technical interview.
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I have an interview later this week. Hit me with some unusual non-technical interview questions, so that I've seen them and can prepare. ;)
"What is your greatest weakness" need not apply.12 -
Hey! Just curious, is it normal that a technical test/challenge takes me more than a day to do?
I have been interviewed for a front-end role, and was given a react challenge. They said that it shouldn't take more than 2 hours ('hopefully' is what they added at the end). But i've been doing this challenge for a day now and it's only 60-70% done.
It's not complicated, and I do know how to do it, and, even, do it properly, it just takes a lot of time for me to code, i.e. develop components, change webpack when needed, read react materialize-ui (css framework) docs, then destructure json response from the api they provided and put this information on a page, then try to compile to the right format (they want single .html element with inline js and css as a deliverable).
So my question is, am I shit or is it unreasonable for a company to ask do so much coding or a little bit of both?
What's your experience usually when looking for a job in 'hip' and 'cool' startups?4 -
Technical Interview Ranters:
C++ is not my strong language. Maybe I can hack the 98 version but I know little of the 2011, 2014, and 2017 versions. With my nine years of experience would you recommend a hit to a junior for C++ and Java or just keep looking for a senior for C#/SQL?2 -
How many of you have formalized knowledge in computer science theory? Do you find yourself using that knowledge in your daily engineering life? For example, knowing random search algorithms, or obscure data structures. I ask this because of the modern "technical interview" trending towards discrete math instead of actual programming ability. Instead of coding projects I care about or reading research papers, I'm just doing discrete math problems to prep for recruiting. While it's not the worst thing to do I just wish there was a more direct way of interviewing a person's engineering abilities.1
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Application process:
Interview with internal recruiter
Coding test that doesn't even remotely resemble real world problems
Technical phone screen
Phone call with vp of engineering
More "formal" technical screen
In person interview
FFS, either you want me or you don't. Stop wasting my time. -
Landed my first technical interview ever with a local dev house. Before the interview I decided I could never work there. Took the interview anyway so I could note down their questions 😎3
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We have a notorious question in one of our coding interviews, designed to weed out people who've slapped 'Postgres' on their CV (because that's what we're looking for) when what they really mean is "I've used MySQL a lot, and it's basically the same, right?". People get choked on that about 70% of the time.
If you put something technical on your CV, be prepared to be tested on it in a coding interview!1 -
So technical interview time but whenever I look at algorithm, data structure questions now I feel demotivated... it sort of feels like boring pointless work.
But if i remove the context of preparing for an interview and say I have as much time as i need, it feels like a logical puzzle, challenge, something interesting I could use to kill some time, learn something new...
It feels like there's a divide like how I can go on and on about my personal projects but if you ask about work projects, I give you the boilerplate or have to really think about what to say...
And so now I'm feeling fucked for the phone screens and algo interviews that I'm supposed to be having soon... and let's just say one of them may be with a really really big tech company... -
Any tips for doing well on the technical interview?
It's my first time doing a technical interview so any tips are welcome. It is for a (paid) field application engineering internship. They said it would mostly be regarding electronics10 -
So... I have a technical test today (in 7 hours) as part of a job interview. I have a lot of experience in Java but none in TDD or test automation.
I'm pretty sure they use TDD, so they'll probably value it in my review.
Should I try to learn some TDD in the next two hours and apply it in my technical test?
or Should I not, avoiding messing all up and go with my tools and skills totally honest?5 -
Hi fellow devRanters,
I'm just finishing my Bachelors Degree in Media Information Technology and already talked with a company over the phone about an entry level position as a developer. They send me an requitement task that I did and send them over a week ago. It's been silent since then.
Should I call/write them, or just wait and sit tight? In an email they wrote they'll write when they review the code to schedule an technical interview. Don't know what to do here 😶
Any experienced advive?9 -
After two interviews with the people I might end up working with I'm called out for a third interview, this time with the recruiter (external) I've only talked to over the phone... Weird.
He said the interview will include tests, but not technical. Hmm. What can I expect?1 -
Some had teased me a bit on my previous meme so let me tell my anecdote...
I have to tell you a rather funny anecdote that happened to me during a job interview..
To put you in context, I am a front/back developer and the language where I perform best is JS. I started learning JS at an early age during an open source project to make animations on websites then I also quickly moved to the backend using NodeJS. I gained a lot of experience by going to small start-ups and this time if I wanted to try my luck on big companies in the field of video games.
So I wanted to present some projects to my interlocutor who seemed to be someone with an important position in the company, about 26 years old and we talked about the JS language. I showed him all my projects including those where I was doing free/open source and also in the field of video games such as volunteering like the back off https://mylolmmr.com And suddenly he called out to me and said "JS is not a real language".
I must confess that I was quite disturbed by his assertion and did not understand his condescension or his belittlement. This mind...
Especially since I find it extremely misleading to say that the JS language is not a real language when you know its advantages and disadvantages, but I did not dare to express myself on this subject and we continued the interviews, even though he saw that it bothered me.
The funny thing is that once the interview is over and I decide to go home and I receive a call from the company in question who wanted me to take a technical test telling me that the oral interview was successful...
I reassure you right away, I refused.. For a question of salary which was extremely low and obviously the bad experience with this famous director.
3 -
It started when life caught me off guard. It was one of those transition moment when you realized you are no longer a college student and you need to get a job.
I was clueless that time (still clueless - smh) that I didn't prepare my CV nor interviews. I got into panic mode and ask help from career service in my college (I rarely ask for help, and when I did that, I am really desperate).
Long story short, I got a job from the career service's connection. I don't think I did well in both the interview and technical test (of course, no prep or whatsoever, what do you expect?) but seems like we both in need of each other (maybe because my grades when I was in college is good... and maybe because my starting salary is low enough... and maybe because there was no better candidate at that moment) that I get picked.3 -
Just got my first technical interview for a summer internship! Now it's time to brush up on data structures and I'll be set :D1
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So I applied for this company that was a perfect fit for me, I cleared the take home assignment and did the round with CEO and CTO.
When it came to CTO round, he handn't even gone through the take home assignment task that I submitted, instead he asked me about hackathon experiences . Now I have 6 years of experience and during the technical round, he was out not even on the call for most of the interview.
It makes me more angry than sad . Hopefully I can channel this anger into motivation for a better company
Today I got the rejection email and it makes me so angry , how can you go through multiple rounds until the end and reject without giving any reason ?
Their whole tech team consist of people during internships and just out of college.4 -
In the year 2015 I graduated from a reputated university. Though I had a couple of offers from my campus Placements, I did not willing accepted those offer and tried updating my CV in job portals.
On the day June 25th 2015, I still remember I recieved a invitation to attend the interview with one of the reputated company and I was like very much excited to attend this interview.
Interview process,
1) I had coding round which lasted for an hour and half and the best part is I scored max marks 😉
2) next round was problem solving or algorithm round it was quite difficult, but somehow I managed to clear that too.
3) final round was managerial round which was very much tougher than these two, My manager was real technical guy who knew most difficult industrial problems. In fact I should thanks him because he thought me how to organise code while development and also he thought me corporate ethics as I was a fresher when I joined there.
4) so I cleared all the rounds and joined the company around 10 days after 25th.
5) my journey in this organisation was very good. I had learnt the tech stack and there I started working as a microservices developer.
Thanks to my previous organisation. -
Had my first ever technical interview! I usually interview well in like normal non dev interviews but I was so fucking nervous I couldn’t think when they asked me technical questions. I did a lot better on the written portion but damn I fucked that up. It’s for a co op position so I don’t think their expectations are super high but still fuck I feel dumb
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Working on a test assignment for an interview with a company. There's a time limit of 3 days and I absolutely hate how quickly I have to do everything (I don't have much free time because of some family obligations). I'm just copying stuff from a tutorial because I find it very difficult to start projects from scratch. Analysis paralysis gets in the way. I'll be hired as a senior so people will expect me to make technical decisions all the time and this scares me but I'm greedy and I like the extra money. Part of me wishes I could find a junior job and just work on very basic stuff.
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I have a technical job interview Wednesday for a remote software developer position
Does anyone have any advice on how to be successful?
I'm a little nervous about it, because I have been looking for a job for a while now and have been rejected over and over again...1 -
Is HackerRank a good site to prepare for technical interviews? And I guess the general question is how to best prepare?
The problems are interesting but it seems most of the Medium+ ones require knowledge of a specific approach or the large test cases will terminate with timeouts or out of memory.
Been sitting on this for a week. Just implemented the recursive versionwhich is better but now times out.
https://hackerrank.com/challenges/...6 -
I have a technical job interview via phone call later today and would like some advice on what to prepare for.
The role is Junior Web Developer and here is what's expected of me:
- Good knowledge of HTML and CSS
- Some knowledge of Javascript
- Some experience with a PHP framework such as Laravel
- Some experience developing themes for content management systems such as WordPress
- Basic familiarity with Git or other VCS
Those are fairly low requirements and I meet or exceed them individually but just want to ensure I prepare properly.
What can I expect?3 -
Just received code review from interview technical task. 50 percent of it was because of encapsulation (that 5-8 variables could have been private instead of public). 20 percent was about shit that was expected but missing (error validation, dependency injection). It was missing because it was not specified in app requirements and also noone said that I have to build a production level application for a simple interview here. 10 percent was nitpicking about formatting(I used default intellij formatter) and one ide error that appeared because of project importing. And only 20 percent of feedback was actually constructive and useful. Cool. Also developer said that he was shocked that I made loading animation but didnt call it in my app. However I made it, but if you have fast internet connection it doesnt show up. I mean if you run my app on a phone with gprs connection u will see that damn animation. What Im supposed to do slow down the app so u could see it? But we are building production level app here no? Shit. It feels like he applied double standards to me or something. Half of review nitpicking about useless details and another half about shit that is expected to be in the app but was not even communicated. Also I did not get developers contact so I could ask him what the fck he wanted from me.1
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https://devrant.com/rants/3039690/...
Going for second interview on Friday. Don't really know what to expect. We pretty much covered everything in the first interview. They didn't say it would be a technical interview or anything so idk1 -
I want to share one of my recent interview experience..
so first round was telephonic and technical guy seems cool as he did not emphasis on syntax, function name etc.. but just took the info of my tech on which I am working on and discuss some approaches to find a solution towards the problem.. ( I guess thats pretty well for experienced dev)
Second round was assignment and its a hell of assignment :( atleast for me.. Like I work in CI 3 and I did assignment on CI 4. almost everything is changes in CI 4 ( I mean its structure writing the way of routes,models and controllers).. But I took the challenge personally and finished 95% of assignment ..
Overall this interview experience was pleasant one.. :) -
So I've been helping with recruitment at work for a lead developer. Our first stage is pretty standard for all levels and it essentially a technical interview because CVs are useless really. We're a C# house so we have questions on framework internals such as how the dictionary class is implemented, locking and thread synchronization techniques. Then some pen and paper coding excercises, like reverse array.
I'm not a big fan of these and I think they are too constrained to detail implementations and not about concepts.
So I ask what stuff do you do at your company to get an idea of some ones competency?1 -
What should I expect out of a technical interview for a software engineering internship, one likely focused in front end web application development? I am prepping for this interview but wouldn't mind some seasoned feedback!2
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Had a 2nd phone interview just now with the manager of the department I'm applying too, rather than an HR person like last time.
I think it went really well, The guy was kinda awkward for what I know of managers thus far in my career, but he seemed chill and friendly and a lot more interested to talk about technology than the 'business' side of stuff lol.
He liked my experience and we talked a bit about what tech stuff I do outside of my current work since that's closer to what I'm applying for if not exactly comparable.
I asked at one point how employee reviews are done and dude said HR is mad at him cause he's 3 reviews behind where they say he should have done and he says he doesn't find them useful unless an employee is obviously doing bad un-quality work, so he ignores them.
Lol, I like him a lot more than my current manager from 1 call, and I had a more technical conversation in half an hour than these past 6 months combined.
I hope I get an offer, or at least another interview with that guy.1 -
I think for this one i had higher expectations which let to me being disappointed. Was a fun experience nonetheless.
So i am junior dev in a bigish company and i am pretty comfortable where i am, its challenging enough and fun enough. Pay is fine nothing out of ordinary but perks are nice.
But this job is the one i got out of college and it did feel that i got really lucky as i was preparing for leetcode and what not but the interviewer was pretty linient and asked me technical questions out of my cv. The questions were mostly about what i used and all felt quite easy and i was offered a role with a decent salary. Since then i have been working and learning and thing been pretty stable.
Recently i was hinted at a promotion by my manager so i have been working towards that. I have in the past got a lot of messages on LinkedIn from different recruiters but never tried because i was satisfied with my job and my visa condition made it a little tricky to hope jobs ( i work in eu as a non eu citizen). But i did fantasize that if i could just get an interview with a decent company and clear the technical round without much preparing and get offered a decent package just to inflate my ego and maybe use that to increase my current package.
So i got another message on LinkedIn and a startup was looking for a developer and i gave it a go. I asked the recruiter what is the expected compensation and he instead asked me. I said i want a big enough increase tk even consider leaving my comfortable spot, so i am looking for more than 35-40% increase If they can then i am willing to try. The recruiter said that their range is between 25-35 but can try 40 if the interviews goes well.
I went ahead with it and gave the interview, the first one was simple and the next one was supposed to be technical and was told its not leetcode but i will have to implement a feature into a project live on the video call. Which i did with some success, i was quite clumsy but i was able to do it with tests passing sl i guess that was fine.
I was really happy that i didnt prepare much and still passed a tech interview. I was recently told about the offer, its around 40% more than my current but there are no yearly bonus or even health insurance. If i consider the bonus and health insurance then the offer becomes like 20% increase. Considering i am already expecting a promotion and some salary increase this offer seems really lack luster.
Just wanted to talk about all this, can you get a really big jump generally or is it only 15-25 ?1 -
!rant
so, I somehow got an interview with NASDAQ for the summer internship this year. somehow it was the only company that had cleared my resume for the interview process, other companies didn't even scheduled one.
and I messed up the first technical interview.
the interviewer asked me to find the largest element in a nested list in python.
for ex [[3,4],[5,2,9],[1,7]] would return [4,9,7]
it was a verbal interview on call and he asked what would I use? Lambda function or list comprehension.
I said lambda function. (I knew it was list comprehension, if I had to code I wouldn't have got confused between the two)
later he asked a couple of questions about linux and boot processes, I could answer some of the basic ones but not after 3rd or 4th question.
now I don't think I have anything to do for summer, as it's a little too late for finding the internships.
any advice?10 -
The following piece of advice will be for those aspiring for an IT service desk position:
When companies are looking to hire service desk agents, they're primarily looking for socially skilled people with strong communicative skills, rather than primarily technically skilled people. When I first joined the IT world, I went on different interviews for that position and across all of them there was one truth: all the interviewers were eyeballs-focused on my social and communication skills and a mere thin layer of technical skills was required (depending on how technical the service desk). In fact, I immediately got aggressively dismissed twice for two of those when I filled in a Myers-Briggs personality test according to my Sheldon-type personality (selfish, condescending etc). Conversely, when I applied for a new position and I faked that test into answering everything focused positively on the social aspect, I was an immediate top candidate.
Here's a definition from the ITIL Foundation course, chapter Service Management: Because of how lateral the function of the service desk has become today (not only used to solve technical issues, but also company-wide issues), the most important and valued skills when hiring a service desk agent are fully focused on empathy and soft skills and none of those are technical skills. This is because the service desk has people that are the front window of your company and thus you can't make social mistakes as to protect your company's reputation. That risk has to be minimized and you need the ideal people. The people who in fact solve the technical problems are behind a back-office and they are contacted by the service desk agents.
In the beginning, when I did my first service desk job, I also thought: "Oh, I'm going to have to convince them I'm this technical wizard". In the end I got hired for being able to explain technology in human language and because in the interview I successfully communicated and explained ideas to both the team manager and the CEO, not because I knew what goes on inside a computer. This is a very important distinction.
My friends have also been in service desk positions and ironically they were the most successful when they were empathetic slimeballs (saying: "of course, anything for you" while not meaning it, constantly making jokes), rather than people with integrity (those got fired for telling the customer they were wrong while being unfriendly).
I hope this helps.8 -
Is it wrong of me to want to learn technologies like GraphQL, databases, Nest.js, and other backend related technologies without having solid HTML, CSS, and JavaScript knowledge? I've been working with Node.js and Express.js for a couple years now but really want to dive into more of whats possible on the backend but I never felt interested to learn the frontend. I do have some very basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but I feel I couldn't pass a technical interview related to them. I just find the backend so much more interesting and fun to work with over the frontend.3
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Botched the technical interview with the CTO he got me with fucking left joins x,) I'm forever stuck at my dead end job, I'm destined to wither in that wilderness of spaghetti and poor practices2
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Was solving algo problems for the last few hours again. It's for technical interview prep but what I realized was...
If I just see them as puzzles rather than a pointless barrier to me getting a better job... they actually become fun...
That and maybe I'm bored at work, need something intellectually challenging/requires thinking, and out of ideas for personal projects I want to build. -
I'm facing a technical phone interview for a full-stack engineer position. Any tips or helpful advice? What stuff should I focus on?1
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I’ve got a technical interview for a front-end development internship coming up and I want to start preparing. Anybody got any good resources?
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Had an internship interview earlier this morning, it's a newer company just getting started says they don't have any technical aspects or employees yet so any programming interns would build the tech side up from scratch. They pay would start at $15 an hour with a guaranteed job at the end. Location is easier to get to than school.
I got an offer 20 minutes ago, I like the opportunity but I'm worried about them having college interns build the initial tech setup and work flow without supervision of a more experienced IT person2 -
Any good tips on how to prepare for a system design technical interview?
(So for questions like "how would you go about designing and implementing an app like LinkedIn?" for example). -
Last week I got a call I thought it was a screen interview, but turned to be a technical interview for a job I probably applied for back in 2015.
Today, I got a call for face to face HR interview next week which is going to be in the middle of the day and the company is about 1 hour away from my home/work.
Right now, I am feeling good at my current company. Nice salary, only me and manager but we are hiring, and its close from home.
The other company, is a bigger company, salary is unknown, and working hours are less but if you count driving hours it will be much longer! And work will be related with SharePoint “0 Experience” and Web Developments.
PS: Both companies aren’t tech companies!
Even tho I am happy here, I have this thing inside me that asks me to change jobs and challenge myself learning about new technologies “Or technologies I have never worked with”!
However, If keep doing this I won’t settle and If I find myself stuck at a job I hate and try to move to other companies, they won’t hire me because I keep moving!
I hate overthinking these stuff,
and just need to get it off my shoulders!1
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