What are your worst interviews you’ve done? I’m currently going through them myself and want to hear what others are like. Dijkstras algorithm on the whiteboard? Binary Search? My personal favorite “I don’t see anything wrong with your architecture, but I’m not a fan of X language/framework so I have to call that out”
Let me hear them!
(Non programmers too please jump in with your horrid interviews, I’m just very fed up with tech screens)
As an interviewee it’s nothing much, but when they asked me to sort a list, I find that question to be completely pointless, I will never implement a sort IRL, and most people who get it right are because they have it memorized.
As an interviewer, a person who sent their take home as a .doc file inside a zipped folder. I didn’t understood why they sent it that way, but got the code to compile, and found very serious issues. When confronting the person they claim there were no issues, which happens so I pointed out at a specific line, and still nothing, I asked them if they knew what an SQL injection was and his answer was “yes, and you’re wrong, there’s no SQL injection happening there”, so I sent him a link for him to click that would call that endpoint on his local instance, and dropped the entire database for the take-home assignment. No need to tell you he wasn’t hired.
TBH a take home assignment as a
.docfile would have been enough for me to pass. Even when going through resumes (for technical roles), i usually skip anything that’s not a PDF.In hindsight that should have been enough, but at the time I didn’t want to discard a possibly good candidate because of that (reasoning that maybe he had some reason for it). Being subject to SQL injections also is not the end of the world, everyone makes mistakes. Not realizing it even after me pointing the line could also be overlooked as “we need to train this person”. But insisting that there isn’t even after the interviewer tells you there is, means you don’t want to learn, and at that point I can’t help you.
My answer to “what’s the best sorting algorithm” is “the SORT BY clause in SQL”.