alt Hacker NewsThe worst job interview I ever had
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The problem seems to be that you treated a professional job interview like a therapy session and showed yourself to be a person who brings up situationally inappropriate subjects without a filter.
> I’m a little ashamed remembering myself talking about failed relationships, family struggles
It sucks what happened, but, yeah, you need to establish filters for yourself. No matter what they ask you, it's an absolutely terrible idea to bring up your failed relationships in an interview. Something tells me they did not ask for that private information specifically and you just decided it would be a good idea to volunteer it, otherwise the story would have said so.
It does not matter what you think they asked. You are the one in control of the words that come out of your mouth. This was poor judgement all around.
I am sorry to hear this. If you were perceiving the space as safe and then you felt abused, I think this is something you should report. Maybe people working in mental health startup are experts in mental health, but there are very strict rules and guidelines that forbid abusing this "power" with other people, especially when unwanted, uncertain etc. During my therapy I've learned that the therapeutist is having monthly update on their actions with their supervisor, so they wouldn't do things that are for example unethical, or direct me in the wrong direction for some reason.
As other people mention in comment, this surely have been error of the interviewer, and in my opinion the feedback should be left.
Cultural fit is the number one predictor for a successful fit, however a big wall here is with certain personality types (especially surrounding IT).
In general we don't open up easily to strangers and hate personal questions. We consider many social questions to be just fluff and will either brush them off or pick something with far too much personal information.
These issues especially surface when being interviewed by a non-IT worker.
They showed you their true colours early and saved you the hustle of joining an organisation like that. I will rename the article "my narrowest escape!!"
two stories.
fun one first.
I once did a coding interview entirely in bash. and the poor software engineer giving the interview did not have that as a skillset. so he was deeply confused when I spent like 70% of the time building a massive sed awk xargs one liner. then proceeded to answer every question in order with it.
I thought he was so confused by it that's why I never heard back. Turns out it was much stranger. The recruiter died. Took them months to figure out his backlog.
2nd story.
I am the responsible party for some poor persons worst interview. And I still feel awful about it. Like they were panicking cause they really wanted the role, and honestly the interview questions were unnecessarily hard and designed to induce stress ( not my call just company decision. personally I can see some of the logic for it but I question the efficacy ). result is this poor kid was spiraling. So I tried to throw them some confidence builder questions... but they were so far into the spiral they bombed those too. And like... I KNEW they knew the answers from previous parts of the interview. But like, they just lost it mentally.
I was told later they spent like 10 minutes in the bathroom recovering before doing the next stage of the interview.
I fucking hated that interview. I still think about it. Wish I coulda just sat down with em after and just apologized and told em they didn't do anything wrong. They just had a bad day and that's fine. It happens. They can try again. Like... I hate someone took it that badly. I hate I was unable to get em that confidence boost they needed to show off their skill.
Experience sometimes just plain leaves scars for everyone.
Trauma baiting was a new term for me. Must’ve felt awful. Your story made me think of this old Far Side comic, where the psychotherapist just writes “he’s nuts” in his notebook[1].
I had an eerily similar situation in a behavioral interview I had with a company where I had a very strong internal referral from a very senior person. I didn't have any time at all to prepare for the interview and was super stressed out that week because of a cascade of work and personal problems all hitting me at once. In hindsight I probably should have asked for the interview to be postponed by a couple of weeks.
In short, I hadn't prepared at all for the interview loop, so I didn't have any of the standard responses "ready to go" for the behavioral interview. We ended up meandering into a bunch of stuff from my personal life, and I didn't have the presence of mind to course-correct it myself. It didn't help that the interviewer actively encouraged me to keep talking about the personal non-work experiences. I got the impression that the interviewer was self-deluded into thinking that they could do some kind of psychological evaluation of me, even though they clearly (in hindsight) had no formal education or training in doing that sort of thing.
Anyway, same story. After a few days, generic rejection letter, and no more communications. I can only imagine my interview loop feedback must have been horrific to overcome what I am certain was a strong internal referral by a very senior and well-respected employee at said company who I had worked with closely for several years (and he'd sung my praises at our previous company many a time when giving perf feedback). I keep replaying the behavioral interview in my mind and realize I must have come across really awkwardly to the hiring manager. In the end I felt much like the author of this blog post did, personally rather than professionally rejected.
I'm resolved no longer suffering pseudo-psychological behavioral interviews. If I get any questions that I feel cross the line between professional and personal, I'll firmly respond that I do not feel comfortable discussing non-work-related issues in a job interview.
It’s kinda ironic that after interviewing with a mental health startup, you ended up so emotionally disturbed that you might now need some actual mental health support to tackle the thoughts it brought up. I’m sorry you had to go through that.
I had one job, where at the very end of the process there was a multi-hour evaluation by a psychologist / consultant they used. Went over my full life history, school, jobs, etc.
It was all disclosed up front, so no surprises. Not really that bad.
I think the author was reading too much into these questions. I bet these people came up with random questions they thought were deep, especially coming from a mental health lens, but struck a nerve in the author. They essentially weren't prepared for the raw human experience that was shared here.
I think regardless of whatever you face during an interview, true mastery is to let your humanity at the door and pull up a facade. If you cannot do it in that context, you dodged a bullet imho.. you wouldn't be able to recognize yourself a few years down the line working there with them daily.
Usually I do my best to answer questions in a business context and prepare different STAR scenarios based off past experience.
I'd say I've been fairly luck as far interviews go. The vast, vast majority have been about as straight forward and by the book as they come. Completely predictable ones.
But I've had some iffy ones.
One was for a small boutique investment firm, for a data scientist type role. I'm not sure if it was part of their "stress testing" routine, but I was given a bash terminal where I had to SSH into some server, find data, and write a program to manipulate said data, and write it to a database. The problem was very straight forward, BUT one of the interviewers was practically hanging over my should for 60 minutes straight, commenting every other minute "No, no, you should...", "This looks wrong", "Have you actually done this before?", "Why don't you know..."
I tried my best to just be professional, and walk him through my thought process. In the end my program ended up doing exactly what it was supposed to, with optimal performance - but I couldn't get out of there fast enough. I thought to myself that I'd rather go unemployed than work under that level of passive-aggressive micromanagement.
But in the big picture, that's nothing. I have friends that have experience explicit age, sex, and race discrimination. Ranging from "Why should we hire [the caste this person "belongs" to]?" to "You better not get pregnant if we decide to hire you"
I had something similar to OP. "What was the worst fight you've ever had in your life?"
I asked "you want me to answer that honestly?"
"Yes"
So I did. It was from when I was seven.
They didn't proceed forward with me. But quite frankly, I wouldn't have proceeded forward with them either.
It is OK to be rejected. Showing vulnerability (in a professional manner) can be a sign of strength and trustworthiness, but one should also be resilient when it isn’t a match and not dwell on it too much. Ego is the enemy.
I've met the same type interview recently, but not on the phone, it's a online web forms. I just write those not that important and positive memories, because I don't trust them from the start. Also, on the next step of the form, there's a statement shows they will use AI to analyze my personality. I feel uncomfortable and told them I don't like their way of interview and just end it.
During university, I had an interview for a quant role. I was asked an option pricing question, and then the interviewer immediately picked up the phone, asked something, then spent the next 2 minutes yelling at the person on the other end. I had a question, so I looked at him during this, and he paused, said "Why are you looking at me, you have 3 minutes left?" and went back to his stream of expletives.
To this day, I still don't know if it was part of the interview or the interviewer's working style. I learned a few new curse words and insults from the exchange, but mostly the signal to tell me I didn't want to work there.
This is hazing, and OP is right to be upset. They were put into a Catch-22 by the interviewer and I see no reason to believe that was accidental.
I see a lot of replies that accuse OP of oversharing, and that's bullshit. In any job interview, the expectation is that you answer questions to the best of your ability. If "I'm not comfortable answering that" is an acceptable answer, that is an exception to the norm and it should be made clear ahead of time.
I still remember an off-site team building event that I (luckily) skipped the first half of, where our tech lead tried to speed-run some intimacy building by going around and asking what everyone's biggest fear was.
I had just recently become a parent, and if you're a parent reading this, I'm pretty sure that we both have the exact same biggest fear in our lives - and it was absolutely not one I was willing to fucking share, even with those coworkers that I felt close to.
I had a pretty weird interview with this crazy french guy that after a couple of minutes, started acting like a telepreacher and demanding passion or something.
But the most frustrating one was with an attractive smiling girl that praised the founder as a genius, dismissed my experience and refused to talk money. She said the next step was a "group dynamics" with the team. I said no thanks. Cult.
In general, I get the job when I reach the technical guy. Except that time that, after being approved by the technical lead, I had a chat with the dept head, that asked some inane what are your hobbies questions and rejected me, really because of too high salary. Later the same company reached me, when he was replaced.
The interviewer certainly didn’t mean tell me about your failed romantic relationships
That’s a misread of note
After reading your blog : I would say : interview depend totally on candidate on how he/she wants to drive, its never like an QnA, unless you are giving a HR round. its like : you say something : other person asks more about it : you explain more. and this is how an interview is driven.
The feeling you expressed is a true feeling of a candidate after the interview : but you are thinking that you did everything best : I would suggest to think from interviewer's shoes as well : how you gave interview : if you are someone taking interview : and candidate gave this responses : would you hire him or not
if not then what could he/she do better...
Reflect like this...
The real question is... what they expect? What would be the perfect fit for this interview? Someone with irreversible trauma?
This sounds less like an interview and more like they’re gathering data to train their mental health model!
I remember a moment in an early job interview. My resumé was all proper for this entry level junior position and everything was checking out. We turned to smalltalk to round up the interview.
"What sort of music do you like?"
(What sorta ques... you don't just throw this in without a warning. ahh I'm blanking out. What was it that I listened to last night??)
"Uhhh Mike Oldfield is one..."
"Ohh... (pause) ewww. But we won't let this hinder your application heh heh"
"hee..."
I got the position and rose to senior rather quickly. I didn't have any interactions with this guy since after this one interview. Maybe for the best. He didn't mean bad, he was just a bit out of his element 2nd-seat interviewing for devs.
AI makes it trivial to narrow down who this company might have been despite the anonymized details. Mostly a heads up for future posters who want to truly avoid it.
Reading through these comments is pretty sad. I didn't know how bad it had gotten. Haven't had to look for few years.
Years ago I interviewed at a company that later became infamous owing to a series of posts on TheDailyWTF (https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Virtudyne_0x3a__The_Foundin...).
It was... weird. I had a friend who was working there, and I needed a gig. At the time, in the city I was in, this constituted a pretty big advantage.
The role would've been customer facing but technical, which is where I've spent my career. I answered some reasonable panel questions, and then they had me give a preso on any technical topic I liked. I'm good at that, so I aced it.
Then we got to other questions: specifically, questions from me.
"Are you currently profitable?"
They were not. This, in and of itself, isn't a problem, but it leads to the next question.
"At your current burn rate, how many months of operating cash do you have on hand?"
(murmuring) "Two, but our founder funds us as we need it."
"Are there specific milestones that are tied to additional capital infusions, or any formal agreement, or is it all just at his discretion?"
"It's discretionary but he's very committed to the company."
Having already had negative experiences with one-rich-dude companies, I thanked them for their time and left. I was VERY surprised when they called me a couple weeks later to MAKE A SERIOUSLY LOWBALL OFFER, which I literally laughed at. At least the dude who made the call seemed to understand the company was insane.
My friend jumped ship shortly after. He had more tolerance for Weird Startup Shit because of family money, but it got too weird even for a guy who didn't need the income, if that tells you anything.
Name and shame company: Canonical
They make us write essays and life stories and reject in 24hrs.
Felt the exact same frustration.
> And I think it’s worth sharing not because I want to shame the company or individuals (I’ve left them anonymous), but rather to suggest some reconsideration for founders and hiring managers in the same boat.
Now I want to know the name. Companies that use psycho-tactics should be known to us.
Are you quite sure it was a real business and not just some weirdo pretending to be a business for fun?
An interview is a date between a company and a new employee. If either one of them acts inappropriately, or gives off strong "bad chemistry", the other party learns it is a red flag.
Sometimes these red flags are ignored because one side is desperate (lonely, horny and attracted, needs a job, needs the role filled soon). That's always a bad thing.
One thing I've done in the past when interviewing candidates is to create a hypothetical situation where the candidate doesn't know how to proceed, like some difficult technical issue. I'd also tell the candidate that their manager and peers are all unavailable. Then, I'd ask how they'd go about trying to resolve the issue and proceed. Honestly, I was never looking for the correct resolution. Rather, I was just looking that the candidate had some basic process for troubleshooting and figuring stuff out on their own. If someone said, "I'd search Stack Overflow until I found the solution.", that was usually good enough. However, all too often, candidates just couldn't understand what was being asked, like they independent troubleshooting was an unrealistic skillset. I'd say, "Just walk me through how you'd approach solving this issue." Some candidates would fully melt down, saying, "I don't know. I can't proceed."
My worst was with Digital Ocean, a dozen years ago. Total shitshow, top to bottom.
One fun trick I learn (or more like two tricks) is to start working with the person during the interview. If you do a lot of interviews you get to see a lot of different ways to do it. Their job is to do interviews but they never get to see how others do it. You can tell them what they are doing right, what interesting approaches others take, what you would do and how they can improve.
If I notice they cant talk about improving the way they do things I cant get out of there fast enough. It's one of those places where everything goes wrong but you have to actively pretend it's not.
I came here expecting it was a yet another story about Canonical.
worst interview you had: but can't name the company.
exact reason why software engineering interviews will never improve. candidates due maybe desperation, lack of assertiveness or masochism - keep getting abused but won't take action.
name & shame. you get ghosted - or get a rejection email one day later. maybe start cutting interviews short too - if you don't see why you would wanna work at a place.
My worst was right out of college. It was for a really small company that needed a web developer.
I showed up, and it was two guys that were around my age.
They seemed annoyed by the interview, it was completely unprofessional, and I was told I didn't get the job because I didn't like a specific sports team.
I found my next job the next week at 3x the pay.
I've had that kind of interview. I kept avoiding the questions because it's not their business. He kept asking. I didn't get the job but that's fine.
I've always worked with people I don't mesh with. We fight with each other. We even yell sometimes. But that's ok. We don't need to be a family and in fact I feel major ick at the thought (weird polyamory shit) - they're gross. But they are competent and consistently bring us more customers.
You dodged a bullet my fren.
Ive had a few stinkers of interviews.
One when I was 19 was for a 3rd shift stocker at a "family business". Guy straight up asks "Are you married?". Sure, its illegal to ask. Not like a jobless 19 year old could do anything.
Ive had a few jobs claim "pay band was from x to y. And surprise it was x-20000 to y-50000.
One interview (an HN company) did the interviews. Got back round 2, seemed interesting. The "third round" was do like 20 hours of github work to prove me. Told them my going rate was $100/hr. Never heard back, surprise surprise. Cant remember the company.
Applied to Oxide. They want a whole litany of crap filled out. And what do you get? A form letter 2 months later. Should have slop'ed it. I guess this doent really count, since it wasnt EVEN an interview.
I had an interview with a CTO back like 2 years ago, I already passed the 3-4 interviews 2 of which were technical and I am on this cultural fit interview with the CTO. The guy enters the call everything seems normal and he begins with his questions which were absolutely insane. First he asked me how did I improve in my work, since I work in cyber I explained to him that I am following latest trends, and getting security certificates like OffSec and other hands on stuff, even CTFs. He is not satisfied he asked me about specifics and to dive deep, okay.. I've explained to him how OSCP, OSWE and OSEP worked and possibly even shared some of the exam ranges scenarios, again he wasn't satisfied and asked for specifics I am already baffled and I was thinking "Does he want me to share the CTF flags or what". Anyway after back and forth with me saying that I don't understand what he wants me to say, he moves forward with "Now what about outside working hours". I sighed and explained that this is taking at least 90% of my free time as well, but he kept asking that he does not care about work and wants to know what I do outside work. Okay I play table tennis quite often and I train it, HE IS NOT SATISFIED (mind you he asked for specifics as well) and in the end he sighed and just said "so you are not improving outside work". I am on the verge of clicking the end meeting button but I kept going. Next question was, have I done any proactive work during work hours, I explained what I did, what tools I've written for the developers and he again asked for SPECIFICS, I said that at this point I am starting to worry about my NDA, and explained that I won't be sharing what I did specifically. He was frustrated and started explaining me that he does not know my clients or whatever or anything about me so it won't matter, which is absolutely laughable but I refused to share anything. Next thing he said is that I am bombing the interview and he has 0 value from this conversation, and I was like okay sure I didn't know that I should bring value into your company/you without even starting. He was now really frustrated started to use words like "fucking" and so on, explained to me how the interns in the company were having a better answers and how his mom would do a better job at this. I was like "???? lmao". Now telling you this I am not sure why I did not quit the meeting but here we go the next question, which I do not remember exactly but I distinctly remember that he said "that's a perfect answer". And since this is becoming long enough I would spare the rest of questions which were absurd once again. Needless to say that I wasn't chosen nor I would have chose them even if this was somehow a pass.
Right, you should never, ever, make yourself emotionally available to a prospective employer. They might seem friendly but they are not.
Horizontal scroll on your site bruh that is why you did not get hired
had a similar unsolicited psych evaluation interview back in 2017 in twitter. There was a VP (or maybe director), who started with "go back in history and tell me what your boss at position X would say about you", and this kept happening for an hour.
Sounds like a behavioral interview that silicon valley sometimes uses - the questions are designed to ascertain how you deal with difficulty, stress, and certain situations which they absolutely can't legally ask about directly - they are looking for you to discuss challenging times where you succeeded by working harder, doing more than peers, etc. It's not about shaming you, and understanding what they are looking for and why is key - they want people who stick with them through difficult times that they anticipate having.
For interview questions like these, they can only tease about what they are really after - finding employees who "go the extra mile" or "stay late" or "don't give up in the face of adversity". They are looking for you to find evidence of these patterns to corroborate your story. If they drove you to the answer they were after, it wouldn't be a passing score in their interview summary write-up.
My first interview was the weirdest one, as i was so panicked that i started lying to the interviewer.
> covering such lovely topics as the hardest day of my life, my biggest life challenges, and other similar “trauma-baiting” questions.
> talking about failed relationships, family struggles, and interpersonal challenges in previous work environments.
I think that's an interpretation that wasn't necessary (though I agree they're terrible and risky interview questions). I'd stick to hard challenges is my professional life, hard problems I had to solve, etc. My personal life is none of their business.
And I think there's the possibility you may have been rejected for sharing too much. But I agree that kind of question does invite sharing too much.