Funny/Terrible Interview Experiences?

We just finished a round of interviews to hire for various development positions (Ruby, PHP, DevOps) and I was tasked with screening for the DevOps position. I was stunned to see some of the candidates. The job description called for system administration, AWS, and Docker experience. I had more than 1 person apply with NONE of these.

Clearly, they just apply to anything, but the screenings were terribly awkward. It’s hard to be nice when someone is wasting your time.

Regardless, I am wondering what your best (or worst) interviewing experiences are for a development position. I am hoping there are some amusing doozies out there.

The only one I feel I can share, as I don’t work for that company anymore and I have no idea where the interviewee is at anymore…

We were a .NET “shop” (I’m looking at you @mawburn lol!). We used quite a few JavaScript frameworks and such, so our requirements were .NET experience, primarily with C#, and knowledge of popular JavaScript frameworks.

Simple right? I mean we were looking for a Junior developer, so we didn’t need a lot of experience, we just wanted you to know what it was. We’d supply training once you were hired.

The first person confused JavaScript with Java. Every time he’d talk about the JavaScript portions he’d be referring to Java. The worst part? I decided, well, you know what, I’ll quiz him on his knowledge of Java (I have some experience there). He didn’t even know Java!! He just generally had no idea about either and was interchanging words he has seen on the Internet or in Books, or who knows where.

Unfortunately, the bigger WTF is the company hired him, and he only lasted 3-6 months. He was placed on my team and after 3 months of fixing his crap, I told my boss, “he goes, or I go. I’m tired of doing his work and mine.”

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I don’t really have any stories, but @cpradio’s reminded me of this I saw the other day.


Confusing Java, JavaScript, Flash, and Shockwave in 3 sentences.

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Maybe my interviewee/prior employee has moved into the Flash gaming world (8 years too late)… lol

I don’t have any personally experiences with bad interviews. I understand there are a lot of people who apply for positions they shouldn’t be, but what gets under my skin is the companies that hire these numbskulls in the first place. I’ve seen people post here and on other forums (not very many - Thank God) asking to fix their script(s) and a person can tell they are doing it for their job. I can understand if the code is neat and it’s not to far off in getting it to function, but some of these people you can tell by just looking at the script that he/she has no idea in what they are doing. Some of them also get up in arms if you criticize their script and go ballistic if you say they haven’t a clue in what they are doing.

I’m guessing that this is a pretty direct result of so many recruiters simply throwing a dictionary of programming into every single job description - candidates really have no idea what is really needed until they walk through the door…

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My current job I walked into the interview thinking it was a C#/ASP.NET position and it turned out to be IBM/Java/DB2. The recruiter had no idea what the difference was. He also listed my Math minor as a double major…

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Yeah. The company is almost always who I blame. They hired an idiot which happens ridiculously often, or, just as common, they refuse to hire what they need. They have a project that needs a ten person team, and they hire two. Or they’re a smaller business and they hire one “full stack” developer and believe that will solve all of their web-and-technology-related problems.

I didn’t really had much awkward interview. At one interview, they’ve asked me with a real issue they are having and how I’ll tackle it. At the end of interview, they were literally printing the offer on the spot.

Wait… maybe I do have one. My first job after college, I interviewed with HR and just talked about weather and school in general. She didn’t ask a single technical question and I somehow ended up as R&D developer :smile:

Now why can’t I get interviews like that? ^^

Or interviews full-stop?

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