The interviewer couldn’t describe the position.

The first interview I ever had was for a community center as a teen. They needed someone to remake thier website and I applied. I went after school in jeans and a tshirt.

Ended up in a room with 3 department heads in suits across from me at a table. It was a round robin of them asking questions with no pauses. I had made a site for another community center pro bono as my resume.

The interview was stressful as hell with non stop questions without time to breathe. One question after another.

Apparently I did well because they hired me. Fun gig for 3 months. I finished the site in a month and played games for the other two to finish my contract off.

Good experience since every interview after that “can’t be as bad as my first one”

I interviewed for a position as a PA at a film production company when I was about 19. The producer who interviewed me used to work for an uncle of mine, the whole interview was the producer telling me about how my uncle used to dip out of shoots because he was seeing hookers. It made me deeply uncomfortable.

It might’ve been one approximately 25 years ago, around the time of the great poppings of the internet/i.t. bubble. I was in school working on a technology related degree at the time, but working in retail. A random customer at the store I worked for invited me to come interview with his business after he found out what I was studying in school.

First step was basically me and two or three other guys my age, meeting / interviewing with the guy who was supposedly trying to hire help. I actually don’t remember much about that part, other than I was a little irritated about the situation. Granted, I was still young, naive, and inexperienced so I thought maybe multi-person interviews were normal-ish in the industry.

But then once the interview was completed, he told us we were all hired, and that we needed to watch some videos before we started the paperwork. Then he lead us to an auditorium FILLED with people, easily 100+ of us.

It was a total scam. The videos literally described a pyramid scheme for some random Amway-style bullshit that was “Internet based”. There were no computer related skills needed, they just wanted us out there directing all our friends and family to buy stuff from their website because these recruiters get paid a commission on each sale.

I was so pissed. I let him know that he wasted my time. At which point, he accused ME of wasting HIS time. At least I was able to clue everybody at work in on what he was doing so he was not successful in future attempts to waste my coworkers’ time.

As an interviewee the worst interview I ever had was the one that landed me the job (that I mentioned elsethread) I quit by noon of the first day.

The interview itself was nothing special: a boss so full of himself that 99.44% of the interview was him talking himself up and the remaining 0.56% was asking questions of me. These are a dime a dozen in the tech world. The reason I hate the interview so much is it’s the one that got me that job and made me waste a half a day of my life.

The one that stands out in my memory is the time that I interviewed with the owner of a small, retail business, who was an out, gay man. (It’s relevant.) When I got there, I noticed that all of the employees were 6’+, blond boys. I’m neither of those things. Immediately, he did The Look, and I knew it was over, but I still had to go through the motions of the interview.

(The Look consists of looking you up and down, and then peering into the empty space over your head, as if imagining the tall man that they want to see instead.)

I had an interview just a couple months ago where I was expected to write code into what was essentially notepad. They barely asked any questions, just wanted me to rawdog code.

I’ve been a developer for almost thirty years. You don’t write code that way. Plus, my experience comes in understanding architecture, writing maintainable code, knowledge of how to create APIs, understanding the tradeoffs of different designs and configurations. I don’t perform well on hacker rank tests because I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve had to write some kind of fancy algorithm. Most business software is just CRUD (create, read, update, delete data), user interface and orchestration of external service calls. So knowing something like users prefer to minimize the number of mouse clicks required to perform an action is more important to know than being able to code a radio button from memory.

Yeah I’m a little defensive about this because I rock every part of a job interview except certain types of technical interviews, but I still code circles around most of my team mates once I understand the code (and often long before I actually understand how everything connects).

So anyway that was pretty much the whole interview because I couldn’t write Java code from memory to manipulate arrays, which might sound bad even to other kinds of developers, but I rarely have to do anything like that even in complex business software and on the occasions I do I just google that shit (or have AI help). Memorizing basic shit I never do has just never been my way. I’m focused on much bigger picture ideas.

And I was so pissed I wrote a very nicely worded letter to HR explaining that I knew I’d blown the interview but in the interest of helping them find better candidates in the future, I offered a number of subject areas they might want senior developers to understand. And I 100% threw that interviewer under the bus, but I understood I was committing a faux pas and burning that bridge but fucking what a waste of time for me and other high level developers.

Anyway, the wild part was that the HR person got back to me and said I had passed the interview and they were going to send me on to the next interview. What? Because no, however much I might rage against the way the interview was conducted, the only information they had to assess my suitability was that I couldn’t demonstrate the most basic technical expectations.

I turned them down because if that’s their interview process I was 100% going to be working with a bunch of poorly written spaghetti code in dire need of a full rewrite but everyone would be too busy spending weeks trying to implement the most simple features because of the poor code quality and so there would never be time for actually fixing the code.

On the other side of the table, I did a phone interview with a guy who was googling the answers to every question we asked. Things like explain the difference between an interface and a class. Or what the static and final keywords mean. Like if you don’t know that well enough to even have a clumsy way of explaining it in your own words, how are you going to communicate with other developers? Can’t you even guess what final might mean?

Anyway, we knew ten minutes into that thirty minute interview that was a hard pass.

The one that comes to mind was bad for a few reasons:

1. I arrive and it was a group interview which they didn’t mention in advance.

2. Within 5 minutes I knew they weren’t going to hire me and it felt like they literally only gave me the interview to waste my time.

3. One of the other 3 interviewees who ended up sitting next to me, totally smelled like they had a load of shit in their pants. There’s no way everyone else didn’t smell it, but nobody said anything and it was uncomfortable as hell.

It was for AFLAC.

One time as a teenager I was interviewing for a line cook position. Interview was going pretty good until chef mentioned “Can you handle pranks? We have fun around here”, or something like that.

Nowadays I would have been very cool and normal about it. Instead of… That… For some reason I adopted what I can only recall must have been a wicked sneer, and said “We all have our dark sides , heh hehhh”.

To a passive observer the interview continued for a few more minutes, but in reality it was over at that moment and I knew it instantly. The imp of the perverse had alighted on my shoulder for exactly three seconds and ruined the whole thing.

My first real job interview, I was woefully under qualified and everyone on the call knew it. That’s fine, that’s normal. What threw me off was that I could hear my voice echoing back to me with a 1/2 second delay, so everytime I would answer a question I had to willfully ignore my own voice being parroted back to me, and let me tell you, it’s hard to even form a coherent sentence under such circumstances.

I should have spoken up early and mentioned the issue, but it was my first interview and I didn’t want to cause a fuss. I must have sounded like I was having an aneurism, because they ended the interview early.

During the recession (no, not that one, the other one) I had to do a cattle call mass interview with other unemployed chefs at an assisted living facility. The one who one the interview became the new chef at the facility.

that was the prize.

It was horrible.

I won.

*I lasted 3 days into my first week, then was called for another position in a different town and never looked back.

There are worse things in life than a bad interview…you could get the job.

From the perspective of the interviewer or the one being interviewed?

As an interviewer the company I worked for got one of “those” CVs. You know the kind. The kind that will cite a job at 7-11 as a job involving inventory management, customer service, basic mechanical maintenance, etc. etc. etc. Puffing up everything, no matter how trivial, into something truly meaningful and significant. And then you add the cover letter that looks like the kind of thing that ChatGPT would churn out if you told it to go max purple … only this predates ChatGPT by a good 30 years, so an actual person wrote this!

The boss left the hiring pre-process to department heads and I suggested to them that we bring this specific guy in on a slow day so that one person after another could sit down in the interview with him and tighten the thumbscrews.

And the marketing manager went for it!

So when he came in, we spent the better part of a day (we supplied a good lunch, though) torturing this poor guy, making it clear one interview after another that he was not suited for the position.

And still he called back 48 hours later to see if we had a position for him.

I think that’s the worst I ever acted as an interviewer. It was delightful!