OK, if there’s anybody on this forum who wanted to know more about me, well, you’ve just hit the jackpot. Here goes nothing!

Interview processes are broken beyond repair, people bring a ton of unjustified bias and unreasonable expectations towards candidates and it’s extremely rarely to “fail” an interview entirely through your fault only. 95% of the time both sides “failed”.

Here are some examples from the last several years of my rather colorful career:

• I’ve done miracles for some of my employers (their words, not mine) – like writing shell scripts to refactor big chunks of their code (without errors!) or make various financial reports spanning tens of millions of records in mere minutes – while I couldn’t bring myself to code a simple Phoenix controller with 5 actions while at other employers.

• I’ve made code that (almost) automatically generates tests that cover 90% of newly introduced modules by using other files (declarative programming, I suppose?) while I couldn’t bring myself to reverse-engineer a simple chat system spanning 10-15 files and then extend it.

• I’ve been passed on interviews because out of 12 expectations for a homework just 1 of them I’ve did very sightly worse than another candidate.

• I’ve been asked to answer the same questions in a questionnaire with 30+ questions twice just because an HR was stubborn and refused to read a reply to an email. I already passed their technical test and the VP of engineering wanted me but I told them to rely less on bureaucracy and not waste people’s time, so I passed them.

• I’ve had to code an entire homework live for 2 hours. Never doing that again, even though the guy was impressed and said I did fantastic.

• At the same time I’ve had a complete freeze during an interview when I couldn’t solve a relatively simple problem that required processing a lot of data that I couldn’t all load into memory. Can’t blame them for being unimpressed but I can and did blame them for not engaging in a discussion and focusing less on just one algorithmic task. (What was even more maddening is that the solution came done and baked in my head like 8 hours later…)

• I’ve had one of the most perfect work opportunities last year and I started and we parted ways only 4 months in because they wanted me to work on a crappy laptop (that they sent me) that had its deafening fans on at least 50% of the time and because the team was too busy to actually onboard me. I eventually muscled through everything (30+ projects) but it was too late by then. Still regret losing that one but in retrospect they were not a good team to have, and they treated people like they have to pass a rite of passage through hell so they deserve to keep the job. Still, the company and the problems were very interesting, and the pay was excellent.

• I also managed to fail a simple interview with a GenServer coding task. Why? Because I didn’t memorize how to code one. I was told I can Google stuff but it was visible that the interviewer decided against me after I solved the exercise after 2 minutes of reading the docs.

• On one of the most chill workplaces I’ve ever had I never managed to bring myself to be actually productive due to being in a very rough mental health spot back then. Ironically I and others were fired for completely different reasons: the company was a startup and the investments dried up.

• Another company switched from Elixir to F# overnight because the CEO had a lunch with a Microsoft Azure representative. Boom, fired.

• In my last job I’ve specifically told the technical director what I’m good at and what I don’t want to do. The team didn’t care, they gave me the stuff I hated regardless eventually. Couldn’t bring myself to even give a good explanation of a lack of progress on the standup meetings. Decided to leave after 3 months with them.

There are more (did I mention that I’ve had a colorful career?) but the point is: train yourself to let go of such accidents or occurrences. Both hiring and employer’s expectations can be severely detached from your reality and that’s very rarely your fault.

Just keep trying. It will be okay. Just don’t stop.

I took an interview at Mongo out of college. I took 2 hr car ride, then 1.5 hr train into Central NYC. 4 back to back interviews without leaving the room. Final interview with a VP and we’re talking about my favorite data structure: Fibonacci heap. “Can you write the fib function on the board?”

Complete blank slate. Panic. I wasn’t able to do it. Mentally was drained and just completely blanked. I didn’t get the role and I’d wager that was a big contributing factor.

That was a dream job, although looking back I’m very happy I didn’t get it. I ended up somewhere better that, most likely, had a better outcome for me.

IMHO this happens because some companies prefer to define seniority based on some specific technical knowledge they deem important (even if it’s completely unrelated to the work) instead of considering the candidate’s soft skills, career experience, and what that person can actually bring to the table. Of course, technical knowledge is important, however, jobs where you have to be super-specialized, are really rare and require a very specific skill-set.

This kinda behavior leads to some very weird biases like, for example:

• Once I got rejected on a job interview in an agency because I didn’t remember how to calculate a password complexity given some constraints… The question was framed along the lines of “how long a machine with a processing capacity of X would take to brute-force a password constructed with a given subset of chars”.

  The interesting part is that they were trying to hire someone to maintain some sort of integration they had with WordPress, and the fact that I had (at the time) 6+ years of experience with web development didn’t contribute at all to my case, go figure. The cherry on top was talking to the other candidate afterward and learning that he was actually studying that discipline at college (he was in the second semester or something like that) but he didn’t actually have any experience working in the field.

• Another time I got on the phone with a recruiter that was in deep **** needing a senior developer. I explained that I didn’t have the time to meet with them that day, but they insisted on their urgency. I moved an important appointment that I had and traveled to another city to meet with them for the interview. After an hour-long talk with the CEO, I went to talk to the CTO for another hour where he asked me a lot of technical questions. After that, even though the knew I was on a tight schedule, the CTO wanted me to do some sort of generic knowledge pop quiz he had prepared and after I explained I didn’t have enough time that day to do that, he explained that he couldn’t continue with my interview process because he needed a “holistic view” of my skills.

• On another situation I was called to do an interview where I was the only one that passed all the interview steps but got rejected in the end because I didn’t have any certificates (even with a lot of experience). They had this policy where senior developers had to have an X amount of certificates to be considered “seniors”.

The lesson I take from those experiences is that most of the people hiring are not qualified to hire people. They are not even (most of the time) qualified to deal with people in the first place. On the technical side though, beyond having unreasonable expectations, I’d say these companies don’t want to invest resources in hiring people that are good problem solvers, have decent people skills, or have at least some level of critical thinking… Unless of course, if you manage to prove in some sort of tribalistic rite of passage that you are in fact worthy.

PS.: People in our field need to learn how to be more like humans and less like computers.