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)
Not the interview itself, but… I had a personality test before the interview and it felt so fucked up. There were always two completely different statements of, at least to me, questionable morals. Like “I enjoy people’s envy of me having better things” and “In social situations, the conversation should only be about me”. Stuff like that, but not only egoistic statements. Then you had a single scale under the two statements which went from “describes me” to “describes me very well”, for both statements, no neutral option. Stated time was like 10 minutes, I took it like in an hour. An hour of having to think through if I should say that “not having sympathy for an abandoned dog describes me” because the other option was more horrible. Felt fucking traumatized after that.
It got me the interview, but not the job.
You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
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Why did I flip it on its back in the first place? If I was the sort of person to do that, it would be consistent with the behaviour of not turning it back over, but I don’t think I am.
That is a very logical way of replying to someone telling you you’re the sort of person to flip a turtle. In other words, found the replicant.
Because there’s some tortoise torturing dickhead narrating a fake story about me
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A tortoise? What’s that?
You know what a turtle is? Same thing.
source of this moovie scene
(thanks to GPT 4-o ; i could not fully recal the scene)
This story is a well-known scene from the film “Blade Runner,” directed by Ridley Scott and released in 1982. The character Tyrell poses this question to the replicant Leon as a test to explore his empathy and moral reasoning. The tortoise metaphorically represents vulnerability and the moral obligation to help those in need.
a) you hate tortoises,
b) you don’t want to burn your fingers on the tortoise, and you also hate tortoises.
Guess they were looking for sociopaths for that position.
Please share the company name.
It was the Swedish social insurance agency with these parts of the recruitment process probably outsourced to the lowest bidder.
Imagine if you just had to scroll down to get to the other options like “Does not describe me”, and they are still talking about "The biggest psychopath we’ve ever interviewed - just out of morbid curiosity. "
I fucking hate these “personality assessments”. This is from one I just took the other day. One of around 50 questions.
Holy shit, I kind of love that actually. I wouldn’t love to see it on an interview I’m doing, but that it exists and someone somewhere believes that the answer you provide for that will give them some kind of insight into your value as an employee?