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This is a thread to share the worst (and best) coding interview experiences, from either side of the table. Here are some memorable candidates I've had to get us started: quote:Given an IDE with unit tests already written and asked to implement a class, states "Oh, I don't really like to use those, I prefer whiteboarding". Proceeds to get super confused about how to write "if" statements in an IDE. quote:Simple behavioral question of "Tell me about a time when you had to resolve an interpersonal conflict" leads to half hour rant about their former boss and co-workers culminating in a racist tirade blaming "sand-niggers" for problems with the software industry quote:10 years experience on resume, spent 5 minutes trying to figure out why initializing a variable inside a for loop isn't accessible outside the loop. Spent another 10 minutes figuring out why the JUnit assertTrue() function wasn't defined in the class. quote:"I don't really want to code, I want to manage people, but I think it would be valuable experience for me to be a software engineer" quote:Dozens of people who turn directly to regex when given simple algorithm questions involving Strings (e.g. anagrams or bracket matching) quote:Team leads who totally get the "big picture" and can understand complex interactions between distributed software components, but can't code FizzBuzz even after being reminded about the modulo operator
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Mar 15, 2016 02:10
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quote:10+ years doing QA automation, specifically cites writing Selenium cases in Java, is shown the following C# test method and requires 30+ minutes of discussion to understand 'what it does': quote:Phone interview. 5+ years C# experience. Starts giving some very weird answers to things. Begin lobbing softballs, they all remain unanswered, or answered with the sound of frantic typing. Examples: quote:Asked about experience. References how she used to work with local Microsoft MVP. Asked about anything. References how she used to work with local Microsoft MVP. Entire interview, learned nothing about her, learned lots about Microsoft MVP.
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Mar 15, 2016 04:57
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quote:Is from academia that wants to leave for industry. quote:Is interviewing for position as documentation writer.
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Mar 15, 2016 06:56
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Coding Interview Horrors: I'd previously seen this man's penis on the internet
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Mar 15, 2016 08:06
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As an IP attorney at a midsized (250 employee) software development company that has both to: A) write software documentation and establish practices and procedures for programming and data security & management, about which I have no legitimate firsthand experience; and B) fire software developers that know less about software development than I do as a loving lawyer who learned all of his programming skills on a Commodore 64, I approve of this thread. Also, I got a write-up from HR because I said "ten little indians." FYI please he;lp me
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Mar 15, 2016 08:14
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KaiserSchnitzel posted:Also, I got a write-up from HR because I said "ten little indians." While that is a bit harsh, it does have some p unsavoury associations you know - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Little_Indians 'It is generally thought that this song was adapted, possibly by Frank J. Green in 1869, as "Ten Little Niggers", though it is possible that the influence was the other way round, with "Ten Little Niggers" being a close reflection of the text that became "Ten Little Indians". Either way, "Ten Little Niggers" became a standard of the blackface minstrel shows.[2] It was sung by Christy's Minstrels and became widely known in Europe, where it was used by Agatha Christie in her novel of the same name. ' The Agatha Christie thing is what first came to my mind.
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Mar 15, 2016 12:36
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- I'd estimate our FizzBuzz success rate is somewhere around 20%. I initially opposed asking about this because I thought any self-respecting developer would get this right easily. I am now no longer that naive. - We ask some stupid "ropes question" ("you have two ropes that burn end to end in 60 minutes; measure 45 minutes" - one of those stupid logic questions that accomplishes nothing besides letting the interviewer feel superior because they read the answer on the internet). This has a 0% success rate, though some people get close. We don't really count it against anyone regardless of how well or poorly someone does, except: - When one woman gave up on the ropes question and we gave her the answer, she proceeded to argue with us for a half an hour. My manager later came by and showed us the thank you letter she sent afterwards, which had a paragraph starting with "I still think your answer to the ropes question is wrong..." - One very awkward candidate sent us thank you cards with handwritten notes. One developer's had a full paragraph, another's just said "This card conveys how I feel about you". Mine just said, "Thanks MisterZimbu". - One candidate included his company's website in his resume Being a web development shop, we pulled it up. It was more or less an "under construction" page that looked like it belonged on Geocities, with a javascript countdown timer. His company was an actual service on the web, so it wasn't supposed to be some brochureware site. Viewing source, we found all his javascript files had ".php" extensions and css files had ".mysql" extensions. We asked why he would do something like that during the interview, he said "to see if it would work since I don't know too much about websites". Since then, his site launched, the site looks just as dated (and uses frames!), and the .php and .mysql files are still there years later. - A co-op/intern who was completely incapable of answering any questions whatsoever- technical or nontechnical- including "so why do you like programming"? We deal with a terrible outsourcing firm (and one I hope we're done with), some highlights of our interviews from them are: - Our first interview was a skype video call with 4 candidates, one at a time. The first one did okay. The second one faltered on pretty much every question. Until the first candidate started audibly feeding him answers off-screen. I have no idea why we continued doing business with them after we saw that. - When we got to the point where we were pretty much firing any candidate that we did hire from them after 2 weeks after finding they were grossly incompetent, our contact at the firm gave us two final candidates, A and B. He said that A was hands-down their best all-star developer, and that they didn't think we would like B, but give him a shot anyway. - Candidate A was clearly Googling the answers to even simple questions while on the phone. Like, he would stutter for a good two or three minutes and repeat random words out of the question, followed by a perfectly eloquent answer clearly pulled straight from the internet: quote:What's the difference between a left, right, and inner join? quote:Well you see... umm... tables... left... and when, umm, you put them together... join... uh... a left join is will give you everything out of the first table that matches the join condition and NULLs from the latter table,whereas the right join will give you everything from the second table and an inner join will give you only the rows from both tables that match the join condition. - Candidate B passed with flying colors, we hired him, and he was awesome. The email we got from our contact said, "I knew you would like him and that he would work out, he's one of our best guys". He got a very stern call from us after that calling him out on his bullshit. MisterZimbu fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Mar 15, 2016 |
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Mar 15, 2016 20:14
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Don't you just burn the first rope for 30 minutes, then wait until half of the other rope is burned for another 15 minutes?
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Mar 15, 2016 20:25
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piratepilates posted:Don't you just burn the first rope for 30 minutes, then wait until half of the other rope is burned for another 15 minutes? I mistyped that; it's 60 minutes for a rope, not 30. The full question is: You are given two ropes and a lighter. This is the only equipment you can use. You are told that each of the two ropes has the following property: if you light one end of the rope, it will take exactly one hour to burn all the way to the other end. But it doesn't have to burn at a uniform rate. In other words, half the rope may burn in the first five minutes, and then the other half would take 55 minutes. The rate at which the two ropes burn is not necessarily the same, so the second rope will also take an hour to burn from one end to the other, but may do it at some varying rate, which is not necessarily the same as the one for the first rope. Now you are asked to measure a period of 45 minutes. How will you do it? Answer: Take rope 1 and burn one end, and take rope 2 and burn both ends. When rope 2 is done burning, burn the other end of rope 1. 45 minutes have passed when rope 1 is done burning. We had one guy say- completely seriously- that he'd use a stopwatch. It took a couple minutes to explain to him why that wasn't an acceptable answer. We screen our candidates better now.
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Mar 15, 2016 20:29
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You're wrongly assuming the ropes burn at the same rate in each direction. 
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Mar 16, 2016 02:51
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I've found that there is a counterpart of the nightmare candidate who won't say anything. It's the nightmare interviewer who keeps asking the same question, literally without modification, because you gave an answer that he didn't like and he's too inarticulate to drill down.
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Mar 16, 2016 04:20
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sarehu posted:You're wrongly assuming the ropes burn at the same rate in each direction. This does pretty much undermine the logic. Since it's explicitly said that the rope burns unevenly you can't reasonably burn from the other end. Because otherwise wouldn't the answer just be to fold the first rope in half, intersect either half-of-half point on it with the half point of the second rope, then light either end of the second rope?
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Mar 16, 2016 14:16
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Cuntpunch posted:This does pretty much undermine the logic. Since it's explicitly said that the rope burns unevenly you can't reasonably burn from the other end. Because otherwise wouldn't the answer just be to fold the first rope in half, intersect either half-of-half point on it with the half point of the second rope, then light either end of the second rope? If each rope burns at the same rate forwards as it does backwards at every point along its length, the solution works just fine. The flame starting at one end of the first rope will burn through the first half-hours worth (however much rope that may be), while the flame starting at the other end will also burn through a half-hours worth of rope before they meet. The second rope is then the same situation in miniature - it doesn't matter how much length is remaining, you have a one-hour rope out of which a half-hour has been consumed, i.e. you have a half-hour rope. Folding over doesn't work because you have no way to figure out where the half-hour point is just by comparing length.
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Mar 16, 2016 15:11
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You can measure fifteen minutes by lighting a rope at both ends and the middle, and then each time one side burns out light the middle of the other side. You only need to do this countably many times before the rope is extinguished.
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Mar 16, 2016 15:43
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A guy comes in with a very impressive resume and I start asking him about the technologies used and why they were chosen. "I used cloud technologies" What ones? "There are many cloud technologies being used, I made sure to evaluate each and came to use the best ones for the job" OK, but what specifically? "Well, cloud technologies are highly available and distributed software that are really exciting." So did you use AWS, Azure, what? "AWS, Azure, yes" What are some AWS technologies you used? "I used EC2" OK, that's great, what did you use it for? "I used it for the ability to leverage the cloud technologies" 
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Mar 16, 2016 19:44
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At the previous employer, the senior engineer on my team was a freemason and research physicist who looked like Nathan Myhrvold. Very professional and knowledgeable guy who I respected. One day I overheard him doing a phone screen: "Do you have any experience with C++?" "Well, if you've used C++ the answer would be yes. If you have not used C++, the answer would be no." That company's strategy for phone screens was possibly the only thing I saw them do well. The basic principle was, ask questions that anyone with the required skills could answer from memory. Nothing clever. Nothing that can be waved away with "I didn't deal with that aspect." You have years of J2EE experience and want to bring it here? Tell me what a servlet is. You just got a CS degree and want your first job? Tell me the differences between an array and a list. Anyone who fumbles these questions doesn't come on-site.
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Mar 16, 2016 22:23
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Last year, I got a candidate claiming to have 10+ years experience developing iPhone apps. I asked him how he was making iPhone apps before the iPhone came out (let alone the SDK). He didn't have an answer.
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Mar 16, 2016 22:26
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Interviewed probably close to eight people for a lead developer position who couldn't write a fizz-buzz. The most memorable: quote:Me: Write a function which- Poor guy had a serious panic attack less than twenty minutes into the interview.  We sat back down and talked about the weather and his hobbies while he settled down.
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Mar 20, 2016 04:01
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One time my company had this awful idea to bring in like a hundred intern candidates all in the same day. I have no idea why we did this. We had pairs of developers interview someone in like 30 minutes and each pair got like 6 interviewees. Initially I thought this was going to be sort of fun since I generally like interviewing folks. My job doesn't interact with a ton of folks and it's fun talking to strangers. I was really wrong. A distressing number of candidates were from weird certificate programs or online schools or something. This felt awful because I could tell they were so excited to be there but they knew nothing. I knew we had only half an hour so I was going to go with stupid softball things like "reverse this string". No one came close to reversing a string. Just, whatever language you want, pseudocode even, as easy as possible, and no one was close. Most were like: quote:void Reverse (char * string, unsigned length) { They wrote that because I'd say "imagine I pass in abc in as an example". Like the first time this happened it was sort of funny but then I realized there's all sorts of schools out there essentially scamming over-eager kids. We also had one person who could barely speak English. His resume looked decent I guess, with the exception that he listed a bunch of poo poo about being able to speak English and couldn't hold a conversation with us. I felt sort of bad because maybe he was a programming genius and I had no way of finding out. But really if he couldn't communicate during an interview he probably wouldn't fit in very well. We had one person who said literally nothing the entire half hour. We offered them a drink, asked if they needed something, just nothing. I have no idea what they were doing there or what they thought was going to happen. Maybe they were having a panic attack but probably no one here had any idea of what to do about that. On a separate occasion we asked someone a few simple math questions and from that point forward they kept clicking a whiteboard marker cap on and off out of nervousness. I'm not sure if they knew they were doing it but it was really noisy and distracting. I was worried if I pointed it out it would make them more nervous too. One time someone explained in a written test that they were self taught and hadn't gone to a traditional school. They refused to answer a question because they said they would just google it in a work situation. They wrote like third of a page about how stupid we were for including such a dumb question. We're pretty forgiving people, they could have written a few lines proving they knew what we were asking and maybe a blurb about how it wasn't an important hole in their knowledge. It's not like anyone reading it had written the questions in the first place. Sex Bumbo fucked around with this message at 06:16 on Mar 20, 2016 |
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Mar 20, 2016 06:05
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A few little stupid things I have to complain about because I'm trying to find a job. PHP is not on my resume. I don't know PHP. I've never used PHP. I know my way around HTML and CSS sure but my JavaScript is weak and I don't know PHP. I tell calls that. Aaaaaand then proceed to be given a web programming test that asked for PHP. I was just like "welp!" handed it in blank and said "I never indicated that I knew PHP." The job it asked for considered PHP a "nice to have" rather than "this is mandatory." I got to a last round of an interview with a CEO. The first question he asked me was "so what do you program in your spare time?" I said "games, mostly." He responded with "we're done, I'm not hiring you."
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Mar 20, 2016 14:13
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ToxicSlurpee posted:
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Mar 20, 2016 17:26
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MALE SHOEGAZE posted:That's stupid but you should really consider coming up with a better answer, even if it's a lie. What exactly is wrong with saying that, if it's true? Put another way what would a "better answer" look like, and why would it be better? Would it be better to say "I don't program at all in my spare time; it's something I only do if I'm being paid"? I would have thought it indicated a significant problem with a company's hiring processes if they allowed a candidate to make it all the way through to a final interview, but to then have the interviewer arbitrarily and capriciously dismiss the candidate based on an answer to one question (without so much as probing any further into that answer). We can presume that if the company had arrived at the decision that it didn't want to hire people who just program games in their spare time, then they would screen for that at an earlier stage in the process, and given that they seemingly didn't do this it follows that this was an arbitrary decision based on the whim of the interviewer.
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Mar 20, 2016 18:34
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MALE SHOEGAZE posted:That's stupid but you should really consider coming up with a better answer, even if it's a lie. Programming games can be significantly more challenging than yet another run of the mill web/mobile application. It's a good answer, and it sounds like it helped dodge a bullet of working for a poo poo shop?
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Mar 20, 2016 18:39
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That's already a very good answer. Anyway, another story. I went interviewing and they asked me to write up my solution to finding the biggest palindromic substring on a computer, one with (lol) a CRT display. Okay, it was 2008. Anyway, I mention it shouldn't be a problem, as long as I can change the keyboard layout to Dvorak. Then while doing the task, a few cubicles over I hear the interviewer whispering, making fun of me to a coworker for using Dvorak. I mean, if Dvorak were missing a 'C' key, I'd understand! I then got a job at a place that didn't have all its systems written in Perl.
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Mar 20, 2016 18:39
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Hammerite posted:What exactly is wrong with saying that, if it's true? Put another way what would a "better answer" look like, and why would it be better? Would it be better to say "I don't program at all in my spare time; it's something I only do if I'm being paid"? Yeah the guy that interviewed me before that was the CTO and I told him the same thing, just more in depth. I was like "yeah I like games, they bring together all of my interests. I can apply anything I learn to games programming." I mean, really...programming, math, art, logic, artificial intelligence...it's all there! I've also been a big fan of computer games so why wouldn't I make them in my free time? My time is my time so I'm going to focus heavily on the things that interest me. return0 posted:Programming games can be significantly more challenging than yet another run of the mill web/mobile application. It's a good answer, and it sounds like it helped dodge a bullet of working for a poo poo shop? This is the other side of it; I have a bit over a half dozen functional games I've programmed. Some of them were pretty simple but they function. Programming even simple games is freaking hard. Thanks to games programming I can talk the talk when it comes to discrete math, data structures, software engineer, OOP concepts, etc. I've learned a ton and they teach me more. But yeah...it seemed like "you do not have a burning, religious desire to dedicate your life to what we do. Go away." I mean the CTO was pretty impressed when I described a few of the things I did so Mr. CEO doing that was pretty blindsiding.
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Mar 20, 2016 19:11
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sorry, i didn't realize it was 'what do you program' in your spare time. My bad.
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Mar 20, 2016 19:24
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ToxicSlurpee posted:But yeah...it seemed like "you do not have a burning, religious desire to dedicate your life to what we do. Go away." I mean the CTO was pretty impressed when I described a few of the things I did so Mr. CEO doing that was pretty blindsiding. You got hosed over in a weird way, but I do want to note enthusiasm in the subject matter is absolutely a key indicator of success. Candidates that are on the fence can become hires by projecting excitement. This can be bullshit if the job is yet another CRUD application, but in areas that are actually exciting to some people, being lukewarm to the subject matter can hurt a candidate.
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Mar 20, 2016 21:19
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baquerd posted:You got hosed over in a weird way, but I do want to note enthusiasm in the subject matter is absolutely a key indicator of success. Candidates that are on the fence can become hires by projecting excitement. This can be bullshit if the job is yet another CRUD application, but in areas that are actually exciting to some people, being lukewarm to the subject matter can hurt a candidate. It creates vicious cycle though because then companies self select for people really good at bullshitting.
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Mar 20, 2016 22:32
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My least favorite thing as a candidate is applying to a job and then you talk to someone who wants you to apply to a bunch of totally different jobs and you never hear about the original one again. It would be nice if everywhere had clearly marked recruiter stuff so that I could just avoid them.
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Mar 21, 2016 20:54
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RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:My least favorite thing as a candidate is applying to a job and then you talk to someone who wants you to apply to a bunch of totally different jobs and you never hear about the original one again. It would be nice if everywhere had clearly marked recruiter stuff so that I could just avoid them. Ugh. I completely agree. Part of me understands why this happens: recruiters are actively incentivised to try and get as many people hired as possible (and are sometimes profoundly ignorant to the nuance of the technologies). Not a great excuse, but an explanation.
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Mar 21, 2016 21:29
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Jo posted:Ugh. I completely agree. Part of me understands why this happens: recruiters are actively incentivised to try and get as many people hired as possible (and are sometimes profoundly ignorant to the nuance of the technologies). Not a great excuse, but an explanation. I mean, the worst is when the original job they message you about pays pretty well and then you call them back and they try and casually slip in that the other job they're suggesting pays like half as much. Then it's just like, outright dishonest.
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Mar 21, 2016 23:15
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I flew out to interview somewhere so I could video conference with people like ten blocks from where I live in the I city I flew away from. I made it explicitly clear over email I have no intention of moving, but figured I'd work remotely or something.
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Mar 22, 2016 00:22
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Sex Bumbo posted:I flew out to interview somewhere so I could video conference with people like ten blocks from where I live in the I city I flew away from. I made it explicitly clear over email I have no intention of moving, but figured I'd work remotely or something. That may be difficult to beat.
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Mar 22, 2016 00:36
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ToxicSlurpee posted:But yeah...it seemed like "you do not have a burning, religious desire to dedicate your life to what we do. Go away." I mean the CTO was pretty impressed when I described a few of the things I did so Mr. CEO doing that was pretty blindsiding. You probably dodged something awful. Have a beer, and move on. Don't worry about it.
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Mar 22, 2016 04:15
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Pixelboy posted:You probably dodged something awful. Have a beer, and move on. Don't worry about it. I need a job because I'm too broke to afford beer. It'd have been better than the no job I have right now.
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Mar 22, 2016 13:58
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We wanted to try showing a candidate one of our pages and seeing what sort of design he or she came up with. One of the first people we did it with kept reading all the content on the page, instead of the structure, despite us suggesting several times that the content wasn't the important part. He kept prefacing his statements with, "Well, not knowing any other requirements..." while never actually seeing if we would tell him any. He then said, "I've done a lot of database design." and proceeded to say there'd be an individual table per category our content was posted in, instead of one "Category" table or whatever. I found out later that he called my boss and complained the interview was unfair. Edit: Another candidate listed "C, C++, Java" as his languages, then said, "I remember some of the high-level concepts of object-oriented programming." and listed a decade of jobs where he only used C. I do wish I had more opportunities to interview people, mostly because 1) we need more people, 2) interviewing people is a good skill to put on resumes, and 3) it's really funny when they go haywire. CPColin fucked around with this message at 22:03 on Mar 22, 2016 |
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Mar 22, 2016 21:59
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Oh, maybe an interviewer asking if I work a lot with IF statements was a legitimate screening question instead of someone talking out their rear end.
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Mar 23, 2016 03:05
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CPColin posted:2) interviewing people is a good skill to put on resumes, You know what, I never thought of that.
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Mar 23, 2016 04:32
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sarehu posted:You know what, I never thought of that. Some people are really lovely at interviewing. The first several times I was probably more nervous than the person I was interviewing.
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Mar 23, 2016 05:10
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I got over the nervousness pretty quickly, but I've had a bunch of interviews where I spend an hour or two talking to them and at the end all that I've concluded is that they aren't total idiots. Giving people oppontunities to convince me that I'd never want to work with them is easy, but actually assessing the people that don't shoot themselves in the foot is definitely an important skill that I have not yet acquired.
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Mar 23, 2016 05:59
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