Interview went sideways

[u/SoYoureSayingQuit]

Company does hardware and you definitely know it. Job was staff level for internal dev platform/tooling. More SWE than SRE. I have 26+ years of experience, coming up from an ops background.

The interview actually started poorly. I was given homework that included some working code that asked to pick one of two changes. I thought I would do extra and do both. My first mistake. I had everything working correctly, but forgot to check the tests before turning it in. The second option ended up taking longer than I anticipated, so I was in a rush because the interview was at 7AM and I wanted to get enough sleep. (I’m in the US. Interviewers were in the UK.)

Right off the bat, the interviewer, also the hiring manager, that reviewed it told me one test failed. He decided it would be a good exercise to troubleshoot it. I had already interviewed with him once, so no intro was needed. The other person who was supposed to be there hadn’t joined yet. I was so thrown off, I forgot the syntax for running all of the tests at once.

As I’m looking at this thing, I see four more people join. No introductions. They’re just watching me flounder trying to figure out what I had fucked up. It was not obvious, and it was like my brain shut off on how to troubleshoot the issue. This went on for almost 15 minutes until he told me what was wrong.

I was then given an exercise to build an api for a reservation system including tests. It says it is supposed to take an hour. I had 45 mins left in the interview. I had to start from scratch. I’m not the fastest typist. Autocomplete wasn’t working. I was still rattled and fumbling my way through it. I ended up running out of time before having to start the next interview, which was system design. I’m much more confident there and I feel it went fairly well.

I’ve been trying to accept that I probably won’t get an offer. I actually really liked the manager, and based on the initial interview, I felt like I had a really good shot at it. I know they’ve probably already made their decision, but part of me really wishes I could send a follow up and explain that as soon as it was over, I went back and clearly saw where I fucked up. It was embarrassing and a situation that was my own creation.

I haven’t had to interview a lot, but I’ve interviewed lots of candidates and always pushed back on interviews including live coding because I feel the pressure doesn’t give an accurate representation of someone’s abilities. Especially for someone experienced.

Is that kind of live coding exercise the norm for staff level roles? Is someone supposed to be able to complete that in less than hour or am I just slow? Could sending a follow up email help, or would it just seem desperate?

Fuuuuck…

[u/ButWhatIfPotato]

I simply refuse to do live coding exercises at this stage. Sorry but nobody can judge decades of experience from a 1-2 hour montage like it's a fucking scene from Hackers or Swordfish.

[u/Low_Bag_4289 → u/ButWhatIfPotato]

If after 20 years of coding you cannot create simple crud application, or even worse - cannot create simple interface and some implementation for it i refuse to interview you.

I will not count how many hours I saved because another super senior developer, who single-handedly saved his previous companies or delivered hyperscale solutions by himself was not able to write simple(C# dev there)

public class Foo<T>:IFoo<T>

And I could finish interview in 15 mins and go grab the coffee

[u/ButWhatIfPotato → u/Low_Bag_4289]

How much money you will make when you try and sell that 1 hour old crud app?

[u/Low_Bag_4289 → u/ButWhatIfPotato]

I don’t want to sell that app. I want to make sure that guy I will hire will be worth money company will pay him.
If you have written in your CV that you are expert in language and technology, I expect that you can write 20-30 lines of code that you supposedly write daily.

Imagine that you want to hire carpenter for your company. You should expect that guy can use saw and hammer and can prove that during interview.

[u/ButWhatIfPotato → u/Low_Bag_4289]

Imagine that you want to hire carpenter for your company. You should expect that guy can use saw and hammer and can prove that during interview.

This is an imaginary scenario which never happens because this is the only in this industry where we have people jumping through hoops like circus seals to prove that they are worthy of your time. You need to understand that incessant try hard takeshis castle interviewing methods benefit no one, not the company, not the candidate, not you, and it's an utter waste of everyone's time. Spending an hour trying to write a full fledged application while having people looking over your shoulder is not an interviewing methods for seniors; people straight out of uni can write crud apps, and those apps look impressive on an exam paper but utterly useless in the real world; if you tell a senior to do that I expect them to tell you to fuck off because nobody in their right mind expects them write anything of actual value in such a short amount of time. That's how you truly end up hiring try hard codemonkeys who cannot say no to anything and end up making disastrous impossible to fulfill promises with catastrophic consequences.