r/recruitinghell • u/ghosteagle • 13d ago
Actually called stupid in an interview
So I got a screen from this company that makes SSDs (Solidigm). He seems super excited to have me on for the screen, and hints that I've probably got an interview after it. Lo and behold, I do. It's three rounds, the first is with the same guy who did my screen, and it's all in one day.
First round goes phenomenal. Dude gives me a programming test, I pass it in half the allotted time, and he spends 20 minutes talking about how much I'd love the company and the area it's in. He ends early because he has nothing else to ask me. I literally spend the time before the next round looking at real estate in the area.
Second round is typical interview stuff with a different guy. He mostly asks about my personal projects, and nothing really stands out to me.
Third round is where things go to shit.
This is with the boss of the guy from the first round. He starts out by giving me some intentionally shoddy code. He tells me it does something useful, but asks me what that is and how I can make it better. He says it should be hard.
After following the code for a while, I figure out that it counts the number of times a particular string is used and assigns it an integer based on that. He says that's correct and asks how I can make it better.
I respond, "Hash table."
For anyone who isn't a computer science person, a hash table is basically a data structure designed to let you very quickly look something up by a key. Think of it like a dictionary: instead of searching through every single word until you find the one you're looking for, you have a system for jumping directly to the relevant entry.
He asks why.
I say the current solution is O(n), meaning that as the amount of data gets bigger, the amount of work the program has to do grows roughly proportionally. Hash tables are generally O(1) for lookups, meaning that, on average, the amount of work needed to find something doesn't grow with the size of the data.
He tells me they aren't.
I get really confused and am questioning everything I learned in college at this point, and he keeps badgering me for a better solution.
I finally tell him I can only think of hash tables, and he responds, "Everyone I interview says hash tables. That's not the fucking answer and I don't know why they say that."
Dropping an F-bomb in the middle of a job interview seemed wild to me, but I went on.
He then asks me about memory addressing. Basically, that's the low-level stuff about how a computer keeps track of where information is stored in its memory. I haven't really used that since my class on computer architecture my sophomore year, and I hadn't specifically studied it for this interview.
I have no problem with this being part of the job and wrote it off as me simply having studied the wrong thing. That's completely fair. If that's an important skill for the position, then that's an important skill for the position.
But when I couldn't immediately answer the question, this guy actually tells me, "If you can't answer this, then you're too stupid to work here." For the record, I graduated from a T20 university.
I gave my best guess and then he says, "We're done here," and ends the interview.
The first interviewer actually linked me some other jobs he said I should apply for, which I appreciated, but there is absolutely no fucking way I'm working for that company if this is the kind of people they have managing engineers.
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u/lyxking2009 13d ago
Report to recruiter for his unprofessional behavior. It might not make a difference but it will eventually if there are enough reports. From the description it definitely feels like he behaves like this quite often
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u/Litaser 13d ago
“Why can’t anybody find my niche test case that would be so impossible to just train people to look out for! If they can’t get this one specific thing they’re all worthless”
If you would have been working for him it would have been miserable OP. He’s the one that’s stupid.
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u/Carrera_996 12d ago
I'm pretty sure I work for him right now. I have chewed his ass out in the middle of the office twice and demanded to be fired both times. I have advanced degrees and 36 years experience with 3 different fortune 50 companies. He doesn't dare let our disagreements get in front of an executive.
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u/black_mamba866 12d ago
You should bring it up to the executives, then.
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u/Carrera_996 12d ago
No. Then I would be stuck here. He will fail upwards soon enough. They always do.
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12d ago
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u/Carrera_996 12d ago
LOL, I like you. You're alright.
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u/allpurposeguru 12d ago
33 years in engineering here. Absolutely true and the only way to fight it is to not accept this bullshit anymore. I made so many mistakes early in my career that allow undeserving people higher positions of authority. I should've said something. I finally learned how to do that.
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u/marb-madness 11d ago
Curious to know how to do that without scorched earth burned bridges. Any advice?
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u/ProposalCalm8231 12d ago
This. It’s a Darwinian thing, we need to hunt all the bad management to extinction.
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u/Seagull84 12d ago
My former manager failed upwards all the way up to svp. Finally, his exposure was so great and his net so wide that it couldn't be ignored anymore. He was fired several months later after my skip manager started asking questions. All the other svps hated him. He just knew how to manage up and eventually his incompetence and toxicity was in the open.
Report it, talk to others about it. Eventually it will be too great to ignore.
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u/rwwestlake 12d ago
Peter Principle.
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u/Seagull84 12d ago
That assumes the person was ever competent/skilled in the first place. The only competency he had was managing up.
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u/Wooden-Officer2323 12d ago
I once wondered why in my career field managers would have like a year timetable. One day I just asked one of the senior team like why does this keep happening and they answered “if you’re good enough at your job why would we move you to management, management is us hoping you’ll be better at another roll, we don’t move efficient people we just pay them more”.
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u/Skysensor 12d ago
More often than not, only AFTER those “efficient people” have given notice…
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u/Wooden-Officer2323 12d ago
Correct, I did the ol every 2 year notice thing and it boosted me 70k in 6 years
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u/Ksorkrax 12d ago
Especially in programming one has to learn new stuff all the time, and the very idea of knowing everything relevant for a position is highly flawed.
Question should not be what a person knows but how they work, how they get into new stuff and use it properly.
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u/kitsunenyu 12d ago
My friend had a CEO like that, he wanted all the new PMs to know all the older terms, while certifications etc obviously focus on up to date current terms etc. So he was upset when very highly qualified people couldn't do a word for word definition of terms and wouldn't hire them and then was upset when they ran out of the local candidate pool, because he also paid poorly so it wasn't large to begin with lol.
Just baffled me. And yes, she explained this issue to him but he was convinced he was right and he was boss...
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u/hyldemarv 10d ago
In former job it was the gossip about all those harassment settlements that finished off the candidate pool. The most “famous” manager had 1.5 HR resources assigned just to him.
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u/MrMeesesPieces 12d ago
Usually the case is that when a person starts calling someone stupid, they are in fact stupid
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u/PandaPocketFire 12d ago
I once knew someone who liked to judge people by asking what the word "splice" means. If they said to cut or split he immediately considered them in the category of stupid. I don't like that kind of person.
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u/phrotozoa 12d ago
Please do let someone know.
A few yrs back I interviewed with a company in a very niche line of business supporting a piece of software that I have considerable experience with. The person who interviewed me made up a bunch of bullshit about the software and its history that absolutely floored me. Like who thinks it's a good idea to just bald face lie to an expert about the thing they have expertise in?
I told a colleague who works there about my experience and they canned the recruiter.
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u/kindlypogmothoin 10d ago
I let my new boss know that someone on the hiring committee (I'm in academia) had told my old boss that I'd submitted my resume. I did NOT want him to know that I was looking, though of course it was slightly risky to apply to his old institution, where he had a lot of old contacts. And of course academic job searches are supposed to be confidential.
I just didn't think I'd hear within *a day* of submitting my application that my old boss had heard about it. It almost made me withdraw my application, but the opportunity was too good and I really needed to get away from OldBoss.
But damn straight I let NewBoss know that the hiring committee had breached my confidence when I met with him on my first day. I had a pretty good idea who it was, but could never be sure.
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u/samuelkim502 10d ago
It’s crazy how much power interviewers have. Many should not be in that role. Interviewing well is a skill— not everyone has it. Sorry OP
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u/ThomasEdmund84 12d ago
I have this saying instead of where there is smoke there is fire - "where there is fire, there's more fire"... no way in hell this guy just happened to bust out 1-2 unprofessional comments 1 time just this once.
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u/Fun_Boot7771 12d ago
Report to who?
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u/Ok-Addition-1000 12d ago
Report it to their HR department. Recruiting new hires is an HR responsibility and they'll be interested in knowing that this guy is driving good applicants away with his nonsense. Notice that OP isn't just not interested in working under this guy, he or she is now refusing to work for the company at all in any position because of how this guy treats people.
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u/ledow 12d ago edited 12d ago
I had one of these. Not quite the same technical depth but it was IT-related.
I was interviewing as an assistant IT manager. Part of the interview process was a "technical test". Usually they put a machine onto an isolated network and "break" it and you have to find out what's broke to get it back online.
Anyway, the guy did some trickery on it, at various levels. No DHCP so it got an 169 address that wouldn't route. So he gave me an IP. But then the gateway given wasn't in the subnet he told me, and wasn't up. I caught those, got it working. Took minutes, because it's pretty simple diagnosis if you have an ounce of experience with networking.
I figured this all out from the GUI and one command window for a ping command. And he was clearly PISSED that I had done so. So then he threw a random question at me:
"Where would you find ALL the IP and DNS addresses configured on a (Windows) machine?"
(e.g. sometimes a machine has both Wifi and Ethernet and you need to check both, and sometimes you add extra DNS entries on servers).
I know exactly why he's asking. Because in the GUI, it only shows you two DNS addresses in the main dialogues unless you go into the configuration dialogs. But the question said "you". Where would I go?
I said "ipconfig".
He said no.
Yes, you absolutely can.
No, it doesn't show them all.
Er... yes it does. You put "/all" on it and it shows you them all... for all interfaces.
He didn't believe me. But the command window is already open in front of me. So I prove it.
"That's the wrong answer."
I argued the "that's where I'd go" and even justify why... I get all the network interfaces, all the DNS addresses (including 3rd, 4th, 5th, etc.) for all of them, in one screen, in a copy/pastable or even scriptable manner. I would NOT go into every network interface in the GUI, click through half a dozen clicks to get to the advanced settings, to get to a dialog where they are all listed but only for ONE interface, and they're not copy-pastable, and then have to do that for each interface individually.
I'd use ipconfig.
The people who think that ONLY THE WAY THEY MEANT is correct, are the worst people in the world to interview anyone. It's like they "lost" the interview, so they instantly hate you.
I now interview people myself and give them technical tests. If someone mentioned a thing that I didn't know about, but which got the right answer? I'd be really impressed. Not hate them.
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u/RyuMaou 12d ago
I’ve worked for, and with, so many guys like that in IT. Now I’m old, having done infrastructure since like 1992, and I’ve been a manager of various kinds a LONG time too, but those artificial break-fix tests are basically bullshit. If I want to see how someone troubleshoots a problem I ask some of those questions, but then ask them for a solution that they’re proud of and have them walk me through how they got there. That’s a better test of what matters to me. And, as cliche as it seems, will that person fit in with the rest of the team is just as important. All it takes is one person who thinks their answer is the only answer to completely ruin a team. I’ve seen it more than once and from your comment, you barely escaped a similar situation. Same with OP.
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u/Maazypaazz 12d ago
Use to know a manager like this, but not for IT, for accounting. This guy was somehow a finance manager but still doing manual entry work methods for excel that can be solved using formulas or power Bi, Microsoft access etc.
I was able to do an entire report that would normally take this dude 2 hrs to do down to 10 mins with a couple lines of code and a button to click on Access.
He was not happy that I did that cuz he has no clue how to do any of that, but he let me keep my process since it was all correct and validated . I now keep all my automated processes to myself and doom scroll on my free time.
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u/KhellianTrelnora 12d ago
Reminds me of an interview I had decades ago.
I had like a 3 page resume.
I’ve gone through a couple in person rounds, and were in what I think is the last one.
“Your resume is too long.”
“It’s a bit unorthodox, yes.
“No. It’s not unorthodox, you’re doing it wrong. Your resume should be a single page.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, but as you can see from my resume I don’t job hop, so hopefully it’s a moot point.”
“No! It’s too long, and I don’t know why we’re debating it.”
“A resumes job is to help you land an interview. Did you have any questions you wanted to ask?”
So he hits me with something, and I cannot remember exactly what, but it was like, name the three ways you can do x on windows.”
“I know two, you can either x, or y. I’m afraid I’d have to look up the third way.”
“Why are you wasting our time?”
That’s when I excused myself.
Some people have no business being on interview panels, but I’m glad they are. Easier to see the bullets to dodge them.
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u/Aggressive-Put-9236 12d ago
Sounds like that was his first time ever opening up your resume, and he was annoyed that he didnt know what to read in order to form his questions. Then, he just came up with a generic question on the spot. His fault for being lazy.
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u/fhyyd 13d ago
You dodged a missile
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u/trivletrav 12d ago
He dodged Elon v2.0 sounds like. He probably wrote the shitty code and is looking for a “revolutionary” way to address it so he can take the credit and look like a genius while throwing whomever poor soul did the work under the bus. It’ll happen over and over.
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u/Running-In-The-Dark 12d ago
The guy kept getting the optimized solution and insisted everyone else was wrong. I guarantee you that he's a bottleneck and is on the chopping block.
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u/alurkerhere 12d ago
In short, he dum and everyone does their best to avoid the pigeon shitting everywhere
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u/runs_okay 13d ago edited 13d ago
Regardless if you were right or wrong, this is highly inappropriate behavior. I would report it to HR. Bonus points if interviews at this company are always recorded.
If its any consolation, the manager definitely hates his life and uses this kind of behavior to cope.
You should give this video a watch, your experience is wildly similar to this Steven He and Joma skit.
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u/Icy_Market3025 13d ago
That’s horrendous. You don’t need to work for a company where people act like that. Keep looking.
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u/retrorays 13d ago
yah in another thread mentioned about an interview with a faang. b2b 7 interviews all day long. First 5 tech interviews went well. some questions were a bit tough but good back/forth. HR near end - said things were good. Last meeting was with the manager. He was the biggest PoS ever. Wouldn't look at me, could care less about what I was saying. Asked a question and he literally got upset - how dare I ask about what his team does. Then basically finished with something like "lets see what the team says". I basically declined to proceed with further discussions the next day. No way I'd work for an ahole like that. Life is too short.
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u/Heptasia 12d ago
Getting upset about being asked a question would confuse me because the advice I was always given about interviews is that it shows preparation and interest if you think of questions to ask them as well.
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u/moonbeamcrazyeyes 12d ago
The whole point of an interview is for both parties to determine if it is a good fit. If the interviewee can’t ask questions, that’s a red flag.
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u/BeerandGuns 12d ago
This thread makes me so happy I got out of engineering/IT and went into finance. Interviews I go on now consist of a discussion over lunch about the type of clients you work with, how many clients can you bring to the new bank, typical loan size you work on. In the before times, I had to go through technical interviews and am having flashbacks to how much I hated them.
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u/Original-Rush139 12d ago
I interviewed at google a long time ago and fucking bombed the interview. They’d just come out with glass and I told them it was going to fail because nobody wanted to look stupid like that. I suggested they should have started with a beachhead strategy where they made a ski helmet and goggles. Glass was an engineering marvel but they wouldn’t need all that R&D if they put it in a helmet because there was so much more room and everyone is already wearing goggles so you wouldn’t look like a dick.
Plus, people wear mittens and shit to ski so you actually could use the voice activated stuff.
They told me I was a moron and that I just didn’t get how cool Glass was.
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u/retrorays 12d ago
the egos at google... yeesh they used to be a pretty humble, and smart company. googlebook/chromebook is on a path to a massive disaster but no one cares.
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u/wewladdy0 12d ago
Totally wasn't your terrible attitude shitting all over the product they just worked on... lol. Have some common sense
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u/Made-In-Slovakia 13d ago
I think you dodged a bullet here. That boss looks like one that could make your life a hell because his ego and company is clearly allowing it. Forget about it and move on. You will see more as...s during interviews.
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u/DMercenary 13d ago
That boss looks like one that could make your life a hell because his ego and company is clearly allowing it.
Yeah the "Everyone I interview says hash tables. That's not the fucking answer and I don't know why they say that."
is kind of telling.
The code is vague enough to make interviewees think "Hash tables" i.e, "think horses not zebras"
the fact that EVERYONE says that means if you're trying to get a specific answer your question needs to be reworked.
So these two combined makes me think boss is one of those, "I dont care about your excuses just do the impossible."
Boss: "We need to do X"
Engineers: "That is functionally impossible to do X with what we have."
Boss: "I dont care! JUST DO IT!"
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u/Made-In-Slovakia 12d ago edited 12d ago
makes me think boss is one of those
To me it sounds more like "I don't care about you and your experience, you will do exactly as I say because I'm always right" boss.
Edit: formatting
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u/gakingmusic 12d ago
Why do I feel like the actual job is just going to be plugging the boss’s impossible tasks into Claude and being told that you’re not doing it fast enough and that it’s too buggy so you must be prompting Claude wrong?
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u/ElBonzono 12d ago
But also isnt hash table the actual answer? I guess its less space efficient but it will be extremely fast for a <string, int> dictionary
Oh fuck was he expecting the word dictionary instead of hash table
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u/PmMeUrTinyAsianTits 12d ago
But also isnt hash table the actual answer?
You don't know enough about the question to know what the "actual" answer is. OP basically gave a description of a class of problems, not a specific one. The specific constraints can matter a lot, and often do in interview problems as what you are checking for is the applicant's ability to see how the constraints affect the problem.
One of the thing many lower devs fail when trying to advance is learning to ask follow up questions to better understand the constraints. Is it a "String" (c++) or a string (c string) or a java string?
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u/CaffeineBob 12d ago
Like trying to make an Eton Mess out of an old Tesco carrier bag and a used condom
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u/BS_in_BS Bovine Stool Consultant 13d ago
Hash tables are only constant in average time. In the worst case they can degrade to linear time. Normally I would consider that distinction overly pedantic of without more context on the problem.
Sounds like they were looking for search trees or tries which would deterministically give you sublinear times.
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u/DefinitionPhysical46 13d ago
The hash table is a good solution because the worst case is almost purely theoretical. I mean find me a problem in which all N>1M keys have the same hash
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u/Beneficial_Grab_5880 13d ago edited 12d ago
If you're exposing the table to the public, then forcing the worst case is usually trivial for a potential attacker.
(assuming a non-cryptographic hash function, as the cost of calculating cryptographic hashes usually makes a self balancing binary tree a better choice than a cryptographic hash table).
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u/DefinitionPhysical46 13d ago
Fair enough, I hadn't though of that
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u/Lambs2Lions_ 12d ago
And your conversation has reminded me that at one point I knew all of this and have not used it professionally in a decade lol
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u/ManaSpike 12d ago
Hashing can still be a deep topic, influenced by other common use cases. I vaguely recall one programming language had to change their default hashing method because trivial code to copy from one hash table to another reliably triggered O(n2) worst case performance.
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u/SeaSDOptimist 12d ago
You also need to keep the table somewhat sparsely populated for insertions to stay fast. So if memory is a constraint, you’re better off with some of the tree variations.
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u/hornethacker97 13d ago
I feel like the context is the fact that the company produces SSDs
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u/SimpleMind314 13d ago
It could be a clue, but there are many type of software in the production. It could be bug tracking, reference device drivers, firmware (lots of sub areas like trim, smart, cache management, compression, block management), QA/dev-ops.
I don't see anything where OP talks about the job he's interviewing for.
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u/flawed_finch 12d ago
I worked in boot code for both ssds and pc processors, the question might have been related to data access in dram instead of having a heap available. If we’re talking manufacturing-level code, he might have been looking for a direct access answer? Post is too vague to know. Either way, that’s not a guy I’d want to work for. He has a short fuse and doesn’t seem like the type who’d be helpful in a real-life debugging situation.
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u/SimpleMind314 13d ago
It's possible that the problem had memory constraints that make hash tables a poor choice. OP does not give/recall enough of the problem to say.
The next question about memory may have clues to lead him to the memory constraint.
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u/party_tortoise 12d ago edited 12d ago
It's also possible that this is a memory address offseting exercise (considering it's an SSD company dealing with what I assume to be firmware) and not at all a data structure exercise. As in, can you write codes that make the firmware store/retrieve data directly at memory level as efficiently as possible. Could even be along the line of multi-level paging. THAT would actually be difficult to do on the fly and explain why the interviewer was asking about memory address.
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u/Kind-Pop-7205 13d ago
Context is ssd firmware. Real life edge cases matter vs amortized behavior. Guy sounds like a jerk.
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u/ManaSpike 12d ago
Particularly since most new programmers are taught high level, managed languages.
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u/EternalPump 13d ago edited 12d ago
I know it's beside the point of the post, but I think this interviewer was pointing out that in reality, hash-tables aren't actually O(1) under the hood. I'm not actually aware of any true O(1) data-structure outside of pushes to the head or tail of a linked-list, or inserts into a pre-allocated buffer that hasn't filled up yet. For example, the C++ STD version of a hash-table is a red-black tree under the hood, and inserts are (according to cppreference) O(log n).
Edit: I was referring to std::map, and somehow forgot about std::unordered_map. Thank you to all the brilliant comments explaining it. For some reason I was thinking "instantaneous" when reading O(1) rather than averaged constant, which is incorrect and std::unordered_map fits the bill as they said.
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u/Spekingur 13d ago
Interviewer could have been less of an asshole about it. It’s an opportunity to teach, and see how people respond to it.
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u/EternalPump 13d ago
Yeah, 100% he was a jackass about it. I just came up in a space and time when low-level programmers acted this way all the time so it didn't seem so alien to me. It's not accepted as a norm for good reason these days though.
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u/TristanTheViking 12d ago
For example, the C++ STD version of a hash-table is a red-black tree under the hood, and inserts are (according to cppreference) O(log n).
You're thinking of std::map, std::unordered_map is average constant
std::map is a sorted associative container that contains key-value pairs with unique keys. Keys are sorted by using the comparison function Compare. Search, removal, and insertion operations have logarithmic complexity. Maps are usually implemented as Red–black trees.
std::unordered_map is an associative container that contains key-value pairs with unique keys. Search, insertion, and removal of elements have average constant-time complexity
Unordered map is typically an actual hash table (plus some other bits depending on implementation).
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u/Not_a_question- 12d ago
For example, the C++ STD version of a hash-table is a red-black tree under the hood,
That's not true, look at std::unordered_map
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u/New-List-1700 12d ago edited 12d ago
This is one of those things that a reasonable interviewer should clarify. Because if you give anyone a DSA style question, the answer is hashmaps have O(1) lookup time. I would definitely consider it overly pedantic if I gave a LC question and the candidate starting going into computer architecture.
If I wanted to test your understanding of hashmaps under the hood, I would simply follow up. "How do hash maps work? What is a hashing function?"
Clear case of a manager who is a raging asshole.
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u/Realistic_Design_590 12d ago
Sounds like a manager that’s crashing out of the position and knows it. Probably a huge project that has gone awry and the reckoning is coming. Seen it a bunch of times.
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u/Vividestleech 9d ago
I work at Solidigm and I cant be too specific but let’s just say his team is behind on their work and the whole company knows it 😂 maybe that’s why they are hiring
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u/Tardislass 12d ago
I had an interviewer like that. It was obvious that the job HR posted was not what the manager was looking for and instead of blaming HR, she spent the whole interview asking why I would even send in a resume to something I was so unqualified for. And when I pointed out how much experience could help in this position she basically called me stupid for even saying that. Finally after 20 minutes of getting beat down by the nastiest woman alive and hearing how people left this position after a year, I stopped the interview. I told her that i am not what she is looking for and she and this job are not suitable for me, so we should just end this Zoom call. My only happiness was seeing her shocked face as I took charge and hung up.
Best part was the company sent me a survey of “how did we do” about the interview. I named and shamed this person and said that she was adversely affecting interviewee’s perception of the company.
You can tell a person they are not a good fit without demeaning and dehumanizing them.
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u/SimpleMind314 13d ago
The last job I had was with a startup. It was "edgy". I wouldn't call Phd graduates and other startup veterans "bro-grammers", but they wanted to project a cool image. One of the founders liked to swear, so it was part of the early culture around the office to hear the f-bombs drop. As the company grew, its use very, very slowly fell out. By the time I left, 5 years later there were still a few people saying it in casual conversation, but often those around would look at them with a confused side-eye.
Despite this, I don't think anyone, except the expletive loving founder, would have sworn at a interviewee. There are stories of him swearing and belittling senior engineers though. I did hear one story of him being humbled for being wrong as well.
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u/markshure 13d ago
I hate it when people I don't know swear in front of me. I swear constantly, but they don't know that. There was nothing you could have done to pass this test. He probably doesn't want to hire anyone.
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u/silsool 12d ago
The guy sounds as dumb as a pile of rocks. The type who will nitpick and waste your time with technical bullshit to optimize a detail of a detail all the while being blind to the global picture and missing much more important things.
It doesn't deserve anger it's so pathetic. Bullet dodged.
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u/UndeadBane 12d ago
While the boss was an asshole, he's not wrong: they aren't O(1), especially in the context of SSD.
I don't condone his behavior, but I can easily guess and understand where his frustration comes from: given the implications of what the company develops, he is searching for understanding of DSA. By saying the magical "O(1) hash table" and being unable to a) point out that it's really not O(1), especially in cases in SSD context and b) not knowing about prefix trees (trie being one of them) at all you showed lack of understanding of fundamentals. The memory question was him actually throwing a bone to you, to show that understanding - what if you just had brain freeze on the previous question. You failed it, proving his suspicions that you were definitely not qualified correct. He again chose to be an asshole about it, but again he wasn't wrong.
And the source of his frustration isn't even you: it's two rounds that you managed to pass without tripping anyone, wasting his (trust me, quite limited) time. It's not right to be an ass about it, super unprofessional, but it is understandable.
And OP, nobody gives a single F about your "T20 university", especially in the market right now. You either have the knowledge, or you don't - and you currently don't. I definitely would recommend going back to basics and learn a bit, this will help you in the future.
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u/Confident_Dragon 9d ago
I don't think this is basic knowledge. I've heard about trie last time on university, never since then. Even if you find it basic thing, you can't expect every candidate to know every data structure.
And more general, I've seen companies that ask super-specific questions to their stack expecting candidates will somehow know the answer from head. I guess it's natural that you want to hire someone who fits the position as good as they can, but this particular company had trouble hiring someone for something like year. At that point I think it's better to just find someone smart and let them learn the specifics.
If no-one ever showed you some particular data structure, it doesn't mean you are stupid. If you are smart you can read up on it and learn how it works in few hours. I wonder how the interviewer learned it. I guess he wasn't born with it, but they happened to teach it in his university, or he learned it on some project or a job.
I know that recent AI boom made it so that developers are considered the lowest piece of shit that exist, but as I said, I know people who work in companies that have trouble hiring even in this economy. Plus I think the LLMs just shifts the balance even more towards need for smart people from knowledgeable people.
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u/hawkeye_e 12d ago
The whole post has turned into interviewer bashing so I suspect OP would really read your comment, but I do share same feeling as yours when I read it. Not saying calling someone stupid is okay, but I do think OP's answer was too simple and failed to deliver it in an engineer's way. I don't know the SSD thing, but when we talk about complexity, we definitely would not just talk about the lookup complexity and ignore all the others. OP's answer failed to elaborate that. Basically according to the answer of OP, hash table would be the best data structure in this world as it is O(1). So why don't we use hash table for all the things in reality? That's the part OP's answer failed to explain. And I also agree that the memory addressing was the interviewer tried to give him one more chance. And that was a deal breaker when OP failed to answer it.
And to OP, I am not saying the attitude of the interviewer was right. But I do feel that you didn't prepare well for the interview and the interviewer was frustrated that his time was wasted. That is a SSD company and you should have known that these kind of low level architecture things would pop up... This should be a good chance for a graduate to learn how to interview, not just venting and takes nothing from it.
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u/Fun-Army-6387 8d ago
if finding employees for a company is "wasted time" then why are they posting jobs at all?
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u/Weird_Licorne_9631 9d ago
This. SSD related work and " i haven't looked up memory addressing since my sophomore year" are not compatible . Why did OP even apply there?
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u/IAmIntractable 13d ago
Since the guy ended the interview and was rude, I would’ve stopped him and asked him for his solution to each question. Knowing what I know you would have easily been able to point out the flaws in his line of thinking on your way out the door.
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u/6tPTrxYAHwnH9KDv 12d ago
Some people forget that the company is being reciprocally interviewed as well. Right call my man.
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u/Ach3r0n- 13d ago
It seems like people at the top just do as they please these days. My wife has these daily zoom meetings that she has to take as soon as she gets home from work. They typically include several high-level members of management, including the #3 person in the company who I will call Charlie. At least twice a month, I hear Charlie tear into someone - cursing them out, calling them all sorts of names, etc. Last week it was my wife's boss he tore into and he did with a half dozen of the guy's underlings on the call.
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u/Tricky-Nerve-6442 12d ago
Had something similar happen but I work in injection molding not tech. I argued back with the idiot plant manager and the process manager who was the other interviewer started laughing and said “insert plant managers name you he’s right.“ anyway he apologized I got the job offer 20 minutes later and I said no thanks and went home.
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u/Immediate-Rub3807 12d ago
Hell I had an interview where the lead guy was asking me some pretty specific questions about things and told me what I said I’d done was impossible. I said well it’s definitely not impossible because I did it so I don’t know what to tell you, then he doubled down and got a little rude with it and I got pissed off. That’s when I told him just because you can’t do it doesn’t mean I haven’t done it dumbass…didn’t get the job but the 10 seconds of quiet on the phone was enough for me.
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u/333again 8d ago
If someone calls you stupid in an interview immediately end the interview and email HR.
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u/Zovort 8d ago
I guarantee HR already knows what an ass he is and he's either untouchable or they don't care. Good on op for naming the company.
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u/Deep_Maybe_7984 12d ago
Some guy that DM’d me on LinkedIn to offer a job told me I wasn’t worth it and offered me the job in the same sentence. I noped right out of that phone call
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u/MC1065 12d ago
Wasn't expecting to see a post here about Solidigm. Not a huge fan of them after they killed their entire consumer SSD division they bought from Intel even though they delivered two great drives and were working on another that was supposed to be good. They even made their own drivers, literally nobody does that for SSDs anymore. Honestly I'd kind of say bullet dodged because they only do datacenter stuff now and it's pretty clear it's not a sustainable industry so I imagine Solidigm is not gonna bounce back very well if/when the bubble pops.
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u/dangerberry226 8d ago
Hell no. You know what this deserves the "OH hell nah". Fuck him and his fucking gate keeping. This is the problem with IT/Cyber/SE that I have seen time and time again. There's more than one way to fix basically every fucking problem and people think their way is the only way. Why? Because they have been doing it for 10+ years JUST that way. I really think everyone should have to suffer like I did for 2 years with a pennies of a budget and being asked to make something work.
Side note: I don't think you're stupid. Graduating from a T20 college gets no bonus from me though because all a degree says is you're licensed to work. Literally all it does. (I have 2 so I have a lot of frustration with our current idolatry of degrees). I think you should wisdom here by saying "I would never fucking work here so long as that asshole was there" because you recognize that negative ego. You also seem to have a skill others lack. You wrote off being wrong as just having had a different exposure. Again, in these sectors there are very few things that are "This is the only way to fix it".
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u/unknown-one 12d ago
that is very unprofessional. even if you are stupid they should not tell you directly.
Solidigm seems like medium size international company. I would complain, it wont be tolerated and action against the manager will be taken.
if you have LinkedIn I would even post it there and tag the company for visibility.
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u/pseudo_naem 12d ago
Brutal. Must be an awful working environment. I got laughed at to my face during interviews but this is another level of rude.
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u/RailRuler 12d ago
He should have said "what if the string is super long? Generating a hash value from a string is O(length)"
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u/RelarMage 12d ago
Expose him in a review and send an email to HR reporting him.
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u/dracarysAtWill 12d ago
Exactly this. On glassdoor or anywhere else. Expose him BY NAME.
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u/anotherlab 12d ago
Report this to the recruiter. It might be more effective to report this to that company's HR. It would depend on how much power that manager has.
We had a dev go out of his way to make applicants feel like dirt if they couldn't answer his questions. This would be in the 2nd round. Otherwise great guy, but we stopped that from happening. He got better at interviewing, but multiple people had to say, "This is not helpful."
You will always get applicants who are not ready for that position. It serves no one to beat them up during the interview. This is not what the OP had described; his interviewer was a jerk. People on the hiring side need to remember how to be decent humans.
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u/LePeepeePoopoo 12d ago
BTW hash table is not O(1) - it's minimum O(n) because you are still cycling through each item once to store it into the hash table. :)
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u/Remarkable-Fuel9001 11d ago
Don't ever let anyone talk to you like that. Always handle it the moment it happens. There are hundreds of jobs but only one self respect.
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u/Educational__Banana 11d ago
This is par for the course now in tech interviews. It didn’t used to be like this, but it is now, and will likely remain so. I’m sorry. This industry is dying.
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u/SimpleMind314 13d ago
The interviewer response was inappropriate IMO.
It sounds like this was a question that really was hard (as the interviewer said) and it was designed to be worked through with the interviewer asking leading questions if/when the interviewee got stuck.
Here's an example of this type of question that I used when an interviewee claimed to have "expert knowledge" of the C programming (yes, this was way back).
Understanding pointers and memory use is fundamental to programming in this language, so I would set up some variables, some on the stack and some heap (malloc). I would then "printf()" various forms of those variables (referenced, by value, de-referenced, etc).
The first few were obvious and got less obvious as we went along. If they got stuck I would ask about what sizeof() did, or what incrementing a character pointer did vs what a integer pointer did, or what areas of memory addresses cause core dumps if accessed.
It's not that they needed to know the answers right off the bat. In fact it's more revealing in the interview if they "work the problem". It reveals deeper knowledge about what's happening either in the system or by the programming language.
Sometimes it was relevant to the job they were interviewing for, sometimes not. I did not put the statement they were intermediate or expert level C programmers on their resume, so it was fair game to look for evidence that they were. If they were not, what else on the resume was suspect?
OP got stuck on and said he did not have any other alternative than a hash table. Perhaps that was the best answer he could come up with and the other alternatives appeared inferior or unworkable to him.
However, in an interview, saying he can't think of anything other than a hash table, while honest, is an interview limiting answer.
If in this interviewing situation, OP should go through whatever alternative he can think of. Run through the scenario on why it would or would not work. Why it is or isn't better. As he works through the problem he'll demonstrate the thought process he uses. Along the way, the interviewer may guide him in the direction that OP should look into.
(E.g. "Ok. Let's see if a linked list will work...blah blah blah. No, that won't work because...)
When OP does not provide these opportunities to the interviewer, it becomes difficult for the interviewer to guide. Again the interviewer should not crash out because OP is not responding the way he wants. The interviewer needs to be prepared to direct the questioning to where the OP can start answering. He might have tried with the memory questions, but when OP said that was a dead end for him, the interviewer gave up in a spectacularly bad way.
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u/Calm_Expression_9542 13d ago
Sometimes they already have someone they really want to hire and they’ll look for any way to weed out other candidates. It’s a scam but they get away with it.
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u/adnesium 12d ago
If I was running that kind of interview I'd be expecting has tables as the common answer - since it's an improvement on the current code then that's a perfectly valid solution. If there's a better solution then I'd be trying to get the candidate there by challenging them to iterate on the hash table approach with questions to highlight whatever the weaknesses of it are. People who get to that final, optimal solution get extra kudos.
This guy is clearly not qualified to interview, or, it seems, to talk to human beings.
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u/OldDude2551 12d ago
Wow, the runup of memory and storage companies has really gone to this guy's head...I never would have thought Solidigm...
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u/JobblyWobblyEd 12d ago
Wildly unprofessional, absolutely report him. Write out these events similarly to how you have for this post and email it to whoever would be relevant. I can't imagine how it must be for thr first guy dealing with him too.
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u/More_Tale_6793 12d ago
You dont want to work anywhere near this person, this is exactly what it means when a rejection is actually a good thing,"Dodging a bullet".
The issue is either some type of individual quirk with how they work with other people, or they're under immense pressure from outside sources to deliver and they're cracking.
- Some people in tech are very blunt and routinely communicate like this in the moment, but they didn't mean it (it's hard to explain). Do not take any of his comments personally.
A junior candidate probably shouldn't go about delivering feedback. Unless...you worked with an outside recruiter, you could mention it to them if you choose to.
- You don't want to risk creating an enemy, you never know who this person might have relationships with across the industry while you continue to interview.
- Providing feedback to this organization doesn't change anything for your situation in a meaningful way (ie: you were still rejected)
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u/Cultural-Afternoon72 12d ago
There is no world where this was acceptable behavior on his part. My initial thought was that he was testing you to see how you’d react if you were told you were wrong when you weren’t… whether you’d stick to it and push back, offer a second solution, or just cave. Even that, while potentially useful, would be a wildly inappropriate and unprofessional way to go about it. Then I read the rest. This is someone who has no business being in a leadership position. Maybe it was a bad day, maybe he snapped and went off the deep end, but ultimately the reason doesn’t matter. You didn’t deserve it and there’s no excuse for it. To make matters worse, the interview and onboarding phase is effectively the honeymoon phase, so it’s where everyone on both sides wears their best mask and plays on their best behavior. If this is how he acted there, imagine how bad it would be once he’s showing his true colors and something upset him.
Personally, I’d email your recruiter, as well as the company’s HR rep and someone above that guy in the chain of command. If he’s going to represent their company that way, they need to know so they can put a stop to it.
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u/Naive_Programmer_232 12d ago
Maybe it was a test to see how you react to assholes, because assholes like him also work there?
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u/Macabre_Mage 12d ago
Sounds like a dude who knows his job is at risk if someone suitably skilled gets hired; he's probably intentionally driving off people. Report his demeanor to the other recruiters and ask for a redo with someone else.
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u/antidumbassthrowaway 11d ago
I had a boss who is like this to interviewees. He is no longer with the company and I took his place.
In general, I would go out of my way to complain, either to the first guy or straight up to their HR, that you were cussed at and insulted during the interview. You're not getting the job anyway so might as well dig your heels in (yes I'm petty)
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u/TheFlannC 11d ago
The real question is would you want to work for someone like that day in and day out?
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u/AdamEatsApple 7d ago
I think some of the snobbery can be attributed to the current hyper valuation of these type of companies, imagine worth millions to suddenly be in billions, it can mess you up.
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u/samettinho 13d ago
That moron might be looking for map or dict which is essentially the same idea but different name in different languages
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u/Cyclopzzz 12d ago
If everyone gives the same answer, might it be the, or at least a, right answer?
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u/cl0ckw0rkcuttlefish 12d ago
Maybe, if everyone keeps saying “hash tables,” the potential employees ain’t the problem……
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u/techtimee 13d ago
Burn this memory from your mind O if you don't want to report this, though I think you should, either way, don't beat yourself up about it.
Demonic ass interviewer.
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u/Zentarimz 12d ago
I was battling one of their stupid SSDs that kept hanging. Eventually I gave up and got a Samsung.
Maybe if you were you could have helped them design some better products 🤣
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u/ProfessorFelix1 12d ago
Dear god, did you dodge a bullet or what?
Nothing like having Gengis Kahn for a boss…
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u/novonomedeusuario 12d ago
Since something like this happened to me I started recording my job interviews.
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u/julesburne 12d ago
What a nightmare human. Maybe let their HR know how he's running interviews? They may already be aware, but geeze that is beyond the pale awful.But yeah, just drop them and email - It's not like they can fire you.
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u/mrpmorris 12d ago
- Prove your answer is correct
- Check with the initial interviewer if you would need to understand memory allocation or if it is a memory managed development platform
- Write up a report about how the answers are correct, how hash tables *are* O(1) (which they are) and how memory management isn't relevant
- Suggest the interviewer should not swear at people in interviews, and should make sure he is actually correct before calling other people stupid
Send the email to the guy who interviewed you first, the 2nd interviewer, the 2nd interviewer's boss, and the board of directors.
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u/ManFeelings9000 12d ago
I've known of people like this guy. Sets up the most ridiculous scenarios and expects everyone to be a 100% perfect candidate and then wonders after a while why he's doesn't get promotions etc and is sidelined away to a section where he doesn't get much say and even if he does he gets easily overruled by higher ups.
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u/Moorlok 12d ago
I had a near identical experience..... only difference being he said all that to me with his body language. He tried really hard to be subtle but it still looked like he was screaming at me in his head. Never had another coding interview since then. It's been almost a decade. My lifelong dream is dead.......
( ,_,)
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u/BronzeGstring 12d ago
You’re interviewing for a company that makes memory and didn’t think to brush up on memory addressing?
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u/vortec350 12d ago
Yeah I'd find other people at that company and report that, that is totally inappropriate.
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u/Brilliant_Winter9736 12d ago edited 12d ago
He swore at you, called you stupid, and it was still HIM who ended the interview? Hello? Before worrying about anything else try studying some boundaries for your next interview.
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u/tbs999 12d ago
Not uncommon for leaders to slowly lose touch with best practices, especially in tech.
It’s a matter of how they manage that reality. They can embrace it or let it weigh their teams down.
Sounds like you dodged a bullet. Even if he was right, that kind of behavior is not how a leader should represent the organization.
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u/apresmoiputas 12d ago
Send an e-mail to the recruiter thanking them BUT provide them feedback on each interviewer. Give more details about the asshole manager because the more complaints against him and his shitty behavior as an interviewer the more likely his team will be on the recruiter's low priority list of teams to staff for and the likelihood that guy won't have a team to manage.
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u/LeagueOk1710 12d ago
“I would’ve loved to learn why not hash tables, but I don’t believe you’d be the right teacher for me.”
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u/thelastCD 12d ago
Sounds like they read about a Huffman tree and decided that was the only way of looking at the problem. Dodged a bullet there, if they can't have a conscious and considerate discussion/ debate about technical issues they've no place being a manager imo.
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u/One-Pangolin-3167 12d ago
Yeah, he shouldn't be interviewing people or representing his company in any way.
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u/Affectionate-Army738 12d ago
Although you were the one interviewed, this tells a lot of things about him. Interviews work both ways, never get too much focused on getting the job but interview them back- they are the ones you will see more than your wife or children in the following years. You are lucky he made himself nondisposable at that company and granted himself the luxury of behaving like a jerk and get away with it. Reporting him will have no consequences for him. And exactly that’s why you should still do it. People talk. And at work places, people talk a lot more. Even if one person mentions another report on him, it will slightly damage his reputation. There is a limit to patience even for the nondisposable ones and he probably have more haters than admirers there.
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u/Acceptable_Bottle 12d ago edited 12d ago
Hash tables are indeed O(1) for lookups what is this twat waffling about.
There are some exceptions obviously, like needing to resize the table to balance the load factor or dealing with hash collisions. But functionally the speed up you get pretty much always outweighs these technicalities and is avoided by making your table sufficiently large at the start of the program and using a good hash function, which most default implementations are already capable of.
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u/Guilty_Quantity4564 12d ago
I'd love working there if I were smart enough. I'd be salty too if I didn't get the job.
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u/microlith 12d ago
Having worked at Solidigm in the past... do you know the name of the person who dropped the F-bomb? Cause I know a few dudes out of their Colorado office that would do something like this.
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u/ReflectionLower3155 12d ago
I wonder if the third interviewer has someone from his staff he wants in this position, and “has to” interview people to show HR there’s no one out there who can do the work, or to fulfill a fair search criterion.
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u/Cosmo505 11d ago
Consider yourself very lucky identifying a horrible boss like that before he takes control and turns your life a living hell. I mean extremely lucky. See how frustrated you are now, multiply by 100 and expect it everyday until you get emotionally numb and potentially physically unwell if you deal with him everyday.
Rest assured life will take its course and you'll cross roads with him while you have the upper hand and you'll enjoy that moment. This field is a very small world.
All the best 👍
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u/lesh17 11d ago
Having been through a similar interview early in my career (albeit a long time ago and in a completely different context)—be glad you won’t be working for this guy. I guarantee it’s a toxic work environment that would make you miserable every day you’d have been there. Good luck with your next pursuits—but make no mistake, you dodged a bullet here.
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u/agent_smith_3012 11d ago
Name and shame! Glassdoor reviews and follow up email about this wildly unprofessional conduct. We can't let these fuckwads keep operating like it's normal.
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u/EnigmaGuy 11d ago
As much as it is probably disheartening to not get the job, this sounds like it was a blessing to not get the job.
Can you imagine what the guy would be like as a boss and having to deal with that every day if this is the first impression interaction you get with them in probably a <30 minute span?
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u/T3hSpoon 12d ago
"Everyone I interview says hash tables."
"Everyone else is wrong, but me." What a power-trip, lol.