I've been in a ton of interviews. Some I get rejected/ghosted, but I've also withdrawn my application during the process a lot too. These are my stories (dun dunn)

#1
Just had an interview with a company that the recruiter spent 10 minutes talking about how they did layoffs 2 months ago and what they did/are doing to get back on track financially. I'm guessing this was brought up by a previous interviewee or something, but probably not something you want to be that transparent on. Definitely a turn off and not sure if I will want to continue interviewing with them (just met with the recruiter 2 hours ago and she just responded saying the hiring manager really likes me and wants to expedite the interview process, so instead of having 2 separate rounds of interviews like she originally said, they now want to combine it into a long interview process on 1 day). Huge red flag for me.

#2
Interviewed with a company awhile back where the hiring manager was on PTO, so they scheduled me with a "senior" engineer. He had asked me a linux question and question regarding Terraform, where he didn't know the answer. So when I gave the correct answer, he said I was wrong. It was a pretty simple question so I even asked some of my friends the question to ensure I wasn't going insane, and yeah he was wrong.

#3
Had an interview with a leet code problem. I'm not a programmer by any means, so I basically just told them "yeah I have no idea". It was very awkward


Have plenty more stories, but curious to hear miscer stories.


CLIFFS:
#1 = company talked about layoffs and their financial situation for 10 mins on initial interview
#2 = senior engineer didn't know the answer to the questions he was asking
#3 = OP failed badly at leetcode question

one time at the end of an interview I mistakenly said "thanks dude"

cringe till this day

Only 1 comment on my thread. Is this the type of poster I've become? Sad!

Misc isn't interested in most topics outside of trash talk, women, money, and politics. Interview #1 and #2 sound like organizations that you would want to avoid altogether anyway. The first one would give me job security concerns with those finance comments.

The second one is kind of funny considering the senior guy didn't even know the right answer but would ask you. Could be an advantage if you end up being more knowledgeable than everyone else in the team.



All of these interviews took place last year (Feel free to skim or not read at all. It's kind of an essay)

#1 Medical company that had multiple clinics around the city. I go into the interview to meet the team, nice people but super awkward and I could already tell that the "culture fit" was a miss. She takes me into another room to meet the Network admin who pretty much acted like he'd rather be somewhere else. What put me off is that she aired out all of their issues on the interview and they essentially needed a team to fix their already abysmal IT structure with no mention of pay. They tried to call and extend and offer but I declined.

#2 Some Oil/Gas company. I went for two interviews Both times something seemed off about the vibes, especially on the second interview. There were four of us in the conference room...Me, the two guys I interviewed with the previous time and their manager making the fourth. Anyway the tension in the room on the second interview was thick enough to slice, srs. The manager commented that I was ambitious and asked that I give it at least 2 years there to see if I like it. He was the type that feels like you should ALWAYS be doing something during downtime. None of it was particularly bad, but when I my recruiter called me back to ask how it went I told her that I felt a lot of tension and it concerned me...here's the kicker

Turns out there were friends and family of the other two guys who interviewed me, and they also wanted the job. Ultimately didn't take that one because paying $150 for parking is asinine anyway.

#3 They were totally unprepared, talked over each other and were so honest that they told on themselves. I had interview questions, a good 15 prepped and they covered just about all of them while they spent their time talking my ear off. Lots of needless awkward silences and it felt like I had to direct the interview. I posted about that experience and misc tried to turn it back on me, but I interview well and I know when someone is on some bullchit.

Honestly good read. I’ve only done 1 interview in person and it went pretty bad (was my first real job out of college).

What kind of questions do you ask at the end? For me, I usually like to clarify their tech stack and code base, day to day life, is the role customer facing, etc.

I usually tried to avoid questions like work/life balance as I don’t they ever tell the truth. Same thing asking about frequency of Oncall alarms.

I usually ask what my average day would look like, what projects are currently in progress or planned, what growth opportunities could I expect if I'm there in 3-5 years. Mostly stuff along the lines you ask, but since our fields are different and you have more experience in yours then I imagine your questions go much deeper.

But yeah, I had to learn that the hard way about employers telling the truth, srs. My last 3 roles involved some type of deception that would've made me turn down the job otherwise. Employer dishonestly seems commonplace now.



I do hope you land the role you're looking for breh.

Once had a guy come in and talk about himself entirely in the third person

Did it for the whole interview

Three of us on the panel were looking at each other like WTF

Couldn’t remember a single thing dude said it was so offputting

Last interview i had absolutely smashed it, obviously got the job