* If they are a small company who outsources any step of their interview process to another company. If you're only interviewing for a couple positions—people you will work with every single day—take the time to do it yourself.
* If they are a startup that says they are looking for people who are interested in solving exciting problems. For some people, this is going to be an enticement, but based on my experience, what I hear is "we're going to work you like a dog and pay you in equity, and at the end neither your work nor your equity will matter because we're definitely going to go out of business". I recognize this is a bias, but it's happened to me a couple times, and I'm in my 40s now and just not having it anymore. Plus, the problems are never that exciting, they're usually "how to sell a SaaS product that is basically a CRUD app, in a crowded marketplace with lots of competitors".
* If the interview is composed of like 10 rounds of 30 minute interviews, each with different groups in the company, that to me is an indicator that Conway's Law is at the helm of that organization: lots of groups that want input into everything, nobody empowered to make a decision on their own. Plus, it's just not a very good format. Give me a smaller number of hour long sessions where we can actually get into it, rather than racing through pro forma questions.
Yeah, and when theyee willing to sell it that way with deception, they're willing to do that with other things. To me that sounds like a political yes-man environment.
Outsourcing any part of the interview process for a small company is definitely one for me. Any hire is going to be absolutely critical and you’re going to let someone else make this decision?
My experience this is common for specialty knowledge the founders might not possess. They know enough to know they cannot assess, say, AI/ML or infrastructure, and seek interview support from an advisor.
> If they are a small company who outsources any step of their interview process to another company.
I'm torn on this. Having dedicated recruiting staff isn't cheap, and I'm not sure a small company could justify this unless they're constantly hiring. But I've gotten soooo much low-effort, generic recruiting spam from third-party recruiters that, were I running a company, I'd only resort to those sorts of recruiters if I had no choice.
Oh, I wasn't even thinking about recruiting staff, I was specifically thinking about outsourcing technical screening to a third-party company.
I'm specifically thinking of the time I was asked to do a karat technical screen when applying for a position with a small company, and it was a big red flag for me. This is a service that does a remote, screen-share-based technical screening. My view is, you're only going to get a worse outcome with this approach compared to doing the screening yourself: either you're spending a lot of time going through the recording afterward, in which case you might as well have just done it yourself in the first place, or else you are just looking at the feedback by the third party company and deciding based on what they tell you. Since the third-party screener doesn't know you business, product, culture, or tech stack, that seems like a terrible idea.
People will often acknowledge that hiring (or not hiring) is the riskiest thing a company can do, and yet take stupid shortcuts to save a little time on it. That's the mentality of companies I want to avoid.
While it's not fair, what I've settled on is this: if they can't spend for in-house recruiting, they probably can't afford me. This is based on ~20 years of this consistently happening. Again, not fair, but I have limited time to do job searching and empirically 3rd party recruiters have always hit a dead end.
I honestly think 30 minutes is a pretty good length as an average. Get much longer than that and it's really easy to get into filling in conversation holes. I've even interviewed people where 10 minutes in it's pretty obviously not going to work out and now where are you?
Maybe it's modern attention spans but I generally push back on analyst briefings/presentations/etc. that get much beyond the 30 minute mark.
I recently interviewed people for a couple positions where I work. We had to ask questions that got at a bunch of different skills, and at the end we were supposed to score their responses in a spreadsheet.
It quickly became obvious to me that there was a flaw in the method: If the candidate didn't get a chance to answer all the questions, their score would be really low. This is through no fault of their own: they don't know they're on question 4 of 12, and there's only 15 minutes left in the interview. They think they're just answering the question thoroughly and thoughtfully. So, it left me in the position of having to do a "lightning round" style assault at the end of the interview, to make sure they at least got a chance to answer everything, and not be torpedoed by the scoring system.
The solution to this is likely one of:
* ask everyone different questions, or different numbers of questions
* ask fewer questions to everyone, and potentially not cover some areas.
* timebox each response, and cut them off to say "time's up, let's move on".
* ignore questions they didn't answer, which means deciding on a candidate you know less about.
* increase the length of the interview.
I think I'd be happy asking everyone a different set of questions, but companies are apparently scared about the bias that could introduce (at any rate, we were instructed not to do that). Of the remaining options, the best one seems to be to increase the length of the meeting.
I’ve found standardized questions to be useless. I’ve found the best people by reading their cvs carefully. Then reading whatever published work they have. Then asking them to talk about that. If that goes well then I describe the work the team is doing and ask them their thoughts. If I really need validation I have a data problem I send them and ask them to send it back. (I don’t ask people to code in front of me - that’s ridiculous and tells me nothing) The standard problem Id ask was to figure out how to calculate something I describe only conceptually, and then give them a data set to do it on. Most mediocre so called data scientists will throw a bunch of Python libraries at the data and not even think about what was asked. This, sadly, is the state of my profession after 10 years of “boot camps “ and incursions from other disciplines.
* Open office bonus points for adding "because we like collaboration"
* No remote or hybrid
* Unlimited PTO can potentially be a red flag depending on other aspects
* Dinners at the office
* Business model that is not generating any revenue
* Needing 5 references for a junior position and they had to be people I worked with(my team was 3 devs). So, I listed other people I knew. One of them a VP of a tech company, who worked for large tech companies. They called him and grilled him. He told me he did his best but not to take the job and maybe just come work for him.
* Another time, I was told my code was wrong and wouldn't compile during the interview, I said "I am certain it will", but the dev said unless I change the answer is wrong. I changed it, he was wrong. I got the offer, and did not take the job.
> Unlimited PTO can potentially be a red flag depending on other aspects
The key on this one is to then ask your interviewers how much PTO they usually take per year. If the answers are below what would make you happy, then that's a problem.
At my last company with unlimited PTO, at my height I was taking ~8 weeks per year. I was highly productive and my boss knew that even losing me for two months out of the year, I was getting much more useful work done than most people who were taking 2-3 weeks. (At least I hope that was his thought process, and not just that he wasn't paying attention.)
> Business model that is not generating any revenue
Do you mean profit? Not generating any revenue either means they're very young and don't have a product yet (fair to not want to work on something like that, but every company has to go through that phase), or that they have a product but are somehow not charging for it at all, and don't have any other monetization strategies like ads (gross) or selling user data (even grosser).
But if you limit yourself to only companies that are turning a profit, you're essentially saying that you'll mostly only work for older, established companies, and for the most part nothing that's VC-backed. (Which, again: fair, but also pretty limiting.)
Wanting to work for a company that doesn’t lose money is “pretty limiting”?
I also disagree with asking interviewers how much vacation they take in an unlimited PTO situation. Instead just ask, “What’s the limit?” Any company that offers an unlimited PTO policy should be able to answer this easily. The only objectively incorrect answer is “There is no limit.”
- The interviewer asks "you've worked with [person who now works at our company] before, what do you think about them?". Bonus points if they insist after I give a diplomatic answer.
- "Why are you using microservices?" "Because everyone is doing it"
- Not following up. For weeks.
- "Can you send us your high school diploma?"
- Take home assignment with a time limit.
- No feedback on take home assignment except "we didn't like your approach".
- Developers use separate laptops for coding and for internet access.
What's your concern there? (Honest question!) I feel terrible about asking for home assignments but I feel like it's good for people like myself who are terrible about coding live. (I usually have a choice of live or homework.) I put a "limit" as a guideline about what kind of quality to expect, usually with language about things not to worry about. I don't expect/want folks to burn a bunch of time on things.
Not OP, but in my experience, it always takes more time than the time limit, either because they've just generally misjudged or because I spent the allotted time, did the case, and then through doing all the work came to some realizations about ways I could have done it better. Then I'm left with the option to either submit something that I know has flaws or spend more time updating it. I don't know about you, but I just hate submitting something that I feel is worse than my abilities, so I end up redoing it and spending much more time.
"Soft" limits as guidelines are fine (although in my experience they are often completely unrealistic - e.g. set up a spring boot app with tests, CI config and kubernetes deployment, that implements API XY - all in 4h).
But a hard limit (you will get the assignment at X o'clock and you will have to turn it in within 3 hours) is just bonkers. It's totally unnecessary and artificial time pressure. Maybe I'm having a bad day and I make a silly mistake that takes time to fix - or the assignment is complicated and it takes me half an hour to even understand it and decide on an approach. Or I could implement the assignment in a maintainable way, but the time pressure requires me to do it in the most hacky way possible. Basically, I don't do my best work under time pressure, so I have no idea why you would impose it on me. In my professional experience, there's very rarely ever been any time pressure like that, so it's not like it measures something important.
Hard limits are idiotic, people have things to do, they're doing you a favor spending any time on your assignment. We have soft limits, and it's "this should take around an hour, if it takes much longer please tell us so we can tweak the assignment for the future".
The main issue is that you can give any guidelines you want but a ton of people will take "Don't spend more than 4 hours on this" with an implied nudge/nudge/wink/wink.
That said, as I wrote elsewhere, if you can't pull a reasonable version of a work product out of a folder, I may be asking you to create one. I'm not necessarily talking code but I absolutely am looking for some proof that you can do the work if it's not already in the wild.
I have had this problem and my assignments really stress that it doesn't even have to be done, we can look at in the meeting and possibly finish small parts together or talk about work that'd be done. But still people do sometimes do far too much and it's not the positive signal they think it is.
Yeah I mean.. I have nearly hired people before who turned out to be scammers, no coding skills at all. I need some kind of signal before turning off the recruiting pipeline, emailing a bunch of people "no thanks," and making a commitment. Sometimes strong referrals work but that might unfairly advantage some, can be gamed, and doesn't work at all for most junior devs without a work history. Shoot, even a strong history elsewhere doesn't mean they will be successful on a different product/platform/team/etc.
Both interviews (live and homework) have downsides, referrals don't work for all and hiring blindly isn't an option. I need some kind of signal, some way to choose one of hundreds. I have successfully used contract to hire before, and while that does lower the anxiety on the interview track, many can't consider that option. And that (again) unfairly advantages some.
I.. don't really know. Just over here trying my best. The market is broken in many ways.
I hear that. But I’ve been burnt by people who “coded live” real well and then couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything for months at work. IMO - any one who is going to be good will be good at coding. It’s not rocket science. Haha. Been around long enough to see language du jour change too. Python also isn’t the end all of languages (we’ve moved on to Julia where I work).
Can you think? Are you curious? Those are hard to distill in an interview and harder still in formulaic interviews.
For what it's worth, I'm near 40 and have never once seen anybody at any work place wear a suit (who wasn't giving a speech at a town hall).
There is nothing wrong with wearing a suit, and it may be common in some workplaces/cultures, but in others it can be corollary to a work culture you are not compatible with.
In 2024, at a tech company, I wouldn't find it common. But, especially for people who may have customer-facing roles, I probably also wouldn't find it worthy of comment or really a second thought if someone in the office was wearing one.
When I last interviewed 15 years or so ago, I wore a jacket and tie (though not a suit) when I interviewed in person. I certainly didn't think it was necessary but I'd have been shocked if anyone had considered it to be a ding.
My guess is it just doesn't fit their style. Some people want more formal clothes in the workplace and others would rather not have a dress code. Even then, just the interviewer wearing a suit doesn't necessarily mean it's a strict dress code culture, but probably a strong signal.
Related: asks questions about that McDonald's job you had in high school, even though you have a master's degree and years of experience in the actual posted job requirements.
> - There are three architects on a single project.
Related: there are more than three layers of management between you and the Big Boss. Two is better. One is best. Too many layers means that it's probably going to take months to get approval for anything, meanwhile management is giving you the stink-eye for "not producing".
* Referring to the company as a "family", or cliches like "work hard, play hard" or similar.
* They don't leave time for you to interview them.
* They're stuck on looking for particular, specific answers to their questions, even if other answers are valid and workable.
* The questions/problems given are one-sided and don't invite discussion. I really enjoy interviews where the interviewer will kick off a design or architecture question, and then instead of just sitting there, waiting for me to respond, taking notes and moving on, they engage with me on the problem and we discuss it mutually, like peers, with a lot of back and forth. This might not be a strong "nope" signal (some people just aren't very good at interviewing, and often that doesn't reflect all that poorly on the company), but it's definitely concerning.
* Being inflexible on compensation mix. If I think the salary is too low, I might ask for more equity. If they can't budge on the financial part of compensation, and have fixed/accrued PTO rather than unlimited, I might accept starting out with more vacation days instead. Answers like "sorry, this is the standard that everyone gets and it can't be changed" are big red flags.
* If we get to the offer stage and they want me to sign things that I'm uncomfortable signing, and their response is "oh, it's just standard boilerplate, we'd never enforce something like that". Well, I'm not comfortable with selective enforcement, either. "Never" really means "as long as we don't end up having an axe to grind with you later on".
Indeed. A workplace is not a family. It's a Team. If it's a family, then expect family-like drama. If it's a team, then you know there are actual leaders, coaches, and players, and if a team member isn't pulling their weight, they get "traded" to to speak. It's a much healthier analogy.
An interviewer looked at me with this vicious, incredulous look when I described my side project in ~2019, which was a weather network built on the sensors inside phones. Guy said, “a weather app, really?! You think that’s a good use of your time in 2019? What makes you think a weather app is useful to make today?”
MFer, it was a good idea in 2011 and it’s a good idea today and it’ll be a good idea in 10 years.
And it wasn’t just a weather app omg! But he didn’t care, just kept pressing me for like 5 mins why I would ever think making a weather network service was useful. No amount of explaining the complexity or novel recently-developed techniques that made it possible would convince him I wasn’t wasting my time.
Yeah, that's the thing. Being a dick to your interviewee -- being a dick to anyone -- is just a huge red flag.
And ignoring that, even if the project was just a toy that isn't particularly useful, that's not really the point. Developing and building a project/product from the ground up is useful experience, whatever it is. Demonstrating a valuable skill should never be a prompt for scorn.
Imagine how handy it would be to read temperatures at 1000 phones if you were an HVAC engineer trying to optimize AC in a 50 story building on a 100 degree day in San Francisco.
A heat map heat map, so to speak.
Forest fires? Outdoor events on hot days? This is a good idea.
I prefer reasonably scoped take home assignment to leetcode "prove me you're awesome in 30 minutes" kind of interviews.
Relying on these kind of signals as a main input is a sign that company didn't think through their hiring process and rather just cargo-culting.
But all that are still secondary concerns: good people can make bad process work, bad people tend to ruin the best of processes.
So for me the only important "flags" are specific people I contact — their attitudes, levels of professionalism, questions they ask, answers they give, their decision process etc.
I share the same feeling. Give me a reasonable take-home where I can flex my knowledge on some real-world stuff.
Some people I've worked with in the past scoff at this idea. When I ask them how they would prefer I evaluate technical ability they seem to all meander around the question basically saying you know a good hire when you see one.
It's tough to hire good people. I've been in the hiring process for Stanford graduates who could barely code in their take-home. I've also hired candidates who freshly changed their careers later in life and wowed us with their take-home. The 4 hour take-home for us has been wildly helpful in identifying the best hires, but I do get it can feel like a burden to some.
I just don't think I could really trust the outcome of leetcode. To me, I feel like anyone can grind leetcode for a couple months and ace a test on it. Does that mean they can create anything of value? Not really.
Sure thing, but if you don't compensate them for the work you're going to lose people, actually you're still going to lose people who don't feel like being tested at all.
I've been involved in hiring developers, and I get it, you want to make sure. But just because something can be measured that doesn't mean that it's a good idea.
I like to suggest a time limited evaluation period instead.
Reasonably scoped is probably the tough part. There are a lot of things where you know the other person who is really banking on this job is going to spend days on.
That said, when I was a tech industry analyst, a writing sample--maybe a presentation--on a topic (probably of your choice) wasn't really a negotiable requirement and if you couldn't just pull one out of a folder that you could share, you were probably going to have to spend a bunch of time creating.
I think a lot of companies forget that the interview is the applicant selling themselves to the interviewer and *the company selling itself to the applicant". That's a strong "reject" signal to me.
But also some of these examples could be from companies who understand the bidirectional dynamic. E.g. if you consider wearing a suit to be a bad sign the company might just as well be glad you don't want to work at a place like that. Win-win!
My contribution to the argument: people who use vapid business buzzwords/ like "win-win" except in the rare cases where it really is appropriate.
> think a lot of companies forget that the interview is the applicant selling themselves to the interviewer and the company selling itself to the applicant.
To be fair, I think that's a more recent phenomenon, at least when it comes to hiring low- to mid-career rank-and-file (in the past I think this was a consideration mainly only when trying to hire executives or people with specialized talents). And even then, that only works in a job market that is relatively at equilibrium, or one where applicants are in high demand. Beggars can't be choosers, as the saying goes.
A bit of short-term thinking, though. Even if companies _right now_ can treat applicants like crap, they probably shouldn't. I'd rather have an applicant accept an offer because they want to, not because they have to. They'll care more about the work and are less likely to flee.
haha. I'm pushing 50. If somebody asked me "Do you still have it in you" I'd say "What, to disconnect Zoom calls with smug 20 somethings? You bet." [End Call]
1 Interview time
- if the interviewer schedule the interview time out of office hour (like 8PM or 10PM), it's likely overtime is a common thing for them
2. Interviewer asking template questions and doesn't show any interest
- if interviewer asking those basic questions and don't understand even what the job means, it's a sign that they don't even bother, they are just there to filter you
3. Interviewer pushing for the interview ASAP
- it's very likely the position is needed as soon as possible, sometimes this could be something really serious and they are hiring someone to put out the fire, sometimes it's already a crisis and they expect someone to save the day
Outside of a couple of phrases I consider clear-cut red flags (such as "we're a family here", "we work hard and play hard", etc.), what I'm really looking for is a bit squishier and not tied to particular phrases and such.
Things that I think indicate a poor fit for me include places where it's expected that people work more than 40 hours per week (I have no problem doing that in unusual circumstances, but if it's part of routine practice, that's a problem); where it's expected that you'll take part in extra-curricular activities; where they take agile methodologies too seriously; where there's too much social stratification in the workplace; and such.
Concrete red flags include using leetcode tests, using personality tests, absurd interviewing hoops (too many interview rounds, too many days to complete the interviewing process, etc.).
Not being interviewed by (or at least meeting) the members of the team I'd be working with is a bad sign, as is the interviewer not knowing the position I'm being considered for. The interviewer not answering my questions (or being vague or evasive in their answer).
I pay attention to the other devs I see. If most of them look unhappy or stressed, that's an enormous red flag. If in-person, most of the desks in use being pretty bare (little in the way of knick-knacks, personal photos, funny or interesting things hung on the cube wall, etc.) is bad. A lack of enthusiasm about what the devs are working on is bad.
Immediate showstoppers are having an open office plan or hot-desking.
Having too fancy of an office is a bad sign, but more of a yellow flag than red.
I'm sure that I've omitted a bunch of things here. I don't have a literal list in my mind. What I tend to do complete the interview process and then put it out of my mind until the next day. Then I go through my notes and examine to totality of what I observed, both things that pleased me and things that didn't.
> Immediate showstoppers are having an open office plan or hot-desking.
Yes. Not just because it's an unpleasant environment (though it is), but it's a sign of major management cluelessness. "Wait: you're hiring me to think, and putting me in an environment that makes it harder for me to think? Um...okay."
The other side of the coin is that there needs to be somewhere to hang out when you do* want company. It doesn't have to be one of these places where every floor has its own executive chef. A comfortable break room with a selection of hot and cold beverages is fine. Snacks aren't necessary if there are food options nearby.
I had a recruiter trying to convince me to take an offer lower than my current salary, telling me it’s not all about the money. I told him I’d do it if he made up the difference by giving me some of his salary. He told me he’s not giving me his salary to which I replied “it’s not all about the money”
To be fair, sometimes it's not all about money. Better work life balance after making bigger money can be a nice transition as one gets older or starts a family. But yeah, those lower paying jobs have to play some kind of angle other than money. Some are garbage, but some might have perks.
This is true, but whether or not it's all about the money isn't something anyone outside of your own head can determine. A recruiter or other outside interested party saying it is that person straight-up trying to manipulate you. That would be the red-flag part to me even if I were fine with a reduced pay rate.
Honestly I just found it irksome that the recruiter was trying to tell me how to prioritize my needs in the job search when it was obvious he was just trying to make a placement.
If they have the company values written on the wall, it probably means they don't actually live them.
Engineering leadership doesn't understand (or care about) the business side.
Trying to shoehorn you into a role obviously you're overqualified for.
A focus more on time spent and dedication rather than achievements and outcomes.
No clear business model. Maybe it isn't an issue today, but for 99% of businesses it will be an issue soon.
A pattern of getting interns or juniors to do an initial chunk of work, and then getting seniors to clean up after them, rather than letting seniors lay a foundation and the juniors/interns filling in the gaps.
Depending on the size and age of the company, most of those hint towards a product-focused organization that often cultures careful, reliable engineers. It might not be fun or flashy, but there's good odds that a place like that knowns how to build their product and does a consistent job of it. They're often a great place for senior engineers to settle down and focus on low-drama productivity and for junior engineers to witness durable best practices in action.
I like working at places small enough that we don't need badges because everyone just knows each other. I remember way back at an old company (that was quite large by the time I joined) learning that someone had quit rather than wear a badge as the company "grew up". I thought it was nuts back then, and I still would be willing to make that compromise myself, but I get it a lot more these days.
What's this "office space" you're talking about? :)
But seriously, we'd fail 1, 3 (we've never had anything like badges to wear), 4 (some of it is old, not too much us worn out though - chairs get replaced, desks are pushing 25 or more now), 5 (every one, including receptionist has multiple monitors but they're standard 300dpi), 6 (depends what you mean by old), probably 7 as well as most folk are remote now.
What is wrong with coding challenges? With a simple challenge you can get a hint of coding style (flashy vs pragmatic), accordance to current best practices, is TDD being used, clean code accordance and so on.
And then you have something you can talk about in your final interview which can be helpful. Does the applicant take criticism well, can he explain his code or specific decisions etc.
If they have an interview process that involves a take home project or something similarly time intensive. To me that screams, "I don't care about any family responsibilities you may have, I want a bunch of childless 20-twenty somethings I can burn and churn".
That's what all these are.. The 6 hour assignments, the 10pm happy hour team meet and greet - it's not about skill it's about proving you have no other responsibilities.
I failed one of those take-home projects (got about 1/3 of it in probably 3x the time) but felt it was a pretty good experience because it got me to try a kind of coding I'd always been interested in but never did.
I was asked a while back to do a 4–6 hour take-home project. I would have told them where to stick their 4–6 hour project, except it involved writing a Flask server, and I wanted to learn how to write a Flask server.
We have a take home assignment as a screening stage, but we ask candidates to time box it to 45min. Some folks refuse to do it and that's fine, but most are pretty open to it.
Given how much time an interview process usually takes, I don't think 45 minutes is a lot to ask; if I were the interviewer or were setting policy, I'd advocate for, "sorry you feel that way, but we won't be able to continue the interview in that case".
Then again, not completely sure what the GP means about "screening stage"; if a take-home assignment is given before any kind of substantive interaction between the company and me, that'd be a definite red flag. I'm not going to spend 45 minutes doing your resume screening for you.
We screen resumes and then based on resume we send this out as a technical screen. So the interaction is an invitation to do the screening exercise. It's the best way that we have found to eliminate candidates that don't meet the technical bar out of a huge pool of candidates.
I guess it was misleading when I said "that's fine". For certain roles it's required, so if a candidate refuses, we pass... It just signals that we're not a great fit for each other. We treat this as a technical screener. We get a lot of applicants for these roles and we need to quickly eliminate candidates that are not technical enough.
I'm torn on that. On one hand I agree with you that it's possibly a bit tone-deaf to ask people to spend a significant amount of their time outside their interview working on a take-home assignment. But:
* Live coding during an interview sucks. I'm not convinced interviewers actually learn all that much useful during those, and I know a lot of people who perform well on the job but choke up during interviews when there's a live coding component.
* It's not like there isn't precedent for this sort of thing outside tech. For example, marketing/sales positions will often require the interviewee to prep a mock presentation specifically for the interview. (That is, not something generic they can use for multiple interviews.)
I get that people have commitments outside of work, and that the ideal situation is that you're interviewing for a job while you already have one (so interviewing work is going to be on top of all your existing responsibilities). But at the same time, take-home assignments in tech are becoming more common, and refusing to do them is going to limit your options. And I don't think the usual "well I probably wouldn't enjoy working at a company that does $THING during their interviews" really applies here.
1. Interview questions where it's clear the interviewer wants a specific answer even if it's not the only correct answer. Especially true if that interviewer would be your boss.
2. I once had a technical interview where I was given a Jupyter notebook that set up a problem and then asked me several questions about it. The interviewer was on the other side of the desk watching me on a separate monitor. The interview itself was 1 hour long but he wouldn't stop talking for more than a minute or so. I didn't have time to read and understand the problem, nevermind design and execute a solution. Instead, he kept asking me questions, breaking my concentration... just a total nightmare.
3. Keeping me locked in a room all day. I've interviewed at several places over the years where I'd go, sit in a meeting room, and have a day's worth of interviews. Sure, I got a brief tour of the office, but even my lunch I'd eat in that meeting room. If I can't talk with employees in their natural habitat then how am I supposed to get a real feel for the office culture?
4. Interviewers who don't seem to know why they're interviewing you. I've had this happen many times. They don't know what the position is for, they never work with the person in that position, why bother?
5. Your potential boss can't give you a reasonable description of the work you'll do. Huge red flag.
6. Too many detailed questions about work I do at my current job that I obviously cannot get in to. If they can't respect my inability to tell them company secrets then there's a problem.
When one or more people on the interview panel behaves extremely unprofessionally. ie, ridicules the interviewee, or makes inappropriately offensive comments.
When the interviewer decides to give an interviewee they particularly like a tour of the premise and introduce them to other staff before they've even offered the person a job.
When there are heaps of relatives, or best/close friends within the management structure of the company.
When asked if they want a faster result or a higher quality one, they say both.
This was for an open ended coding test. I just wanted to know if they wanted to see if I could work fast, or produce a better structured solution.
I should have left right then. The interview did not get any better. At the end they asked repeatedly how I would deal with problem employees. I had just about figured they were problem employers by then.
Recently interviewed with a startup, and during the process via email, I was constantly communicating with different people. After the 3rd interview with the CTO, I thought they ghosted me and emailed the last interviewer and got no response. Over a week later the director of engineering emailed me to schedule the 3rd interview with the CTO. I immediately knew that they had internal communication issues and decided I wasn't going to pursue the role further.
My current role has a somewhat misleading title, but to offset that I make sure I really highlight my experience and the projects I've worked on. If an interviewer starts asking me about my title and why I'm applying for something more 'generic' I immediately know they didn't read my resume or pay attention and I'm out.
Years ago I walked out of an all day interview, maybe 2 hours in, because one of the engineers was on his phone the entire time, seemingly just scrolling and not paying attention.
I just got a generic message on YC's job board that ended by asking me if I'd be interested in doing their case study with a link to the case. No, head of product, I am not interested in doing a case study before I spend, y'know, fifteen whole minutes talking to you about the company and role.
Lots of people without degrees in data science (or statistics, or even computer science) in supervisory positions. Silly interview questions like “define multivariate” or “write python code to find factors” or “write SQL code to join tables”
These are all signs of an immature data science function- which predicts working on ill posed problems and a problematic business justification. If the people already there are mediocre it’s not a great place to join. A strong sign of that is if the interviewers don’t know enough to construct thoughtful questions about real, non trivial, issues from their work. There are too many people in data science who, sadly, are at this level.
For any early-career people reading this thread– take the responses with a pinch of salt. As they may be very true for more senior folk but not always true if you're trying to get your foot in the door and/or find a place you can grow quickly.
- Dinner at the office
- No remote or by hybrid options
- Team is fresh out of college. If no one has more than 2 years of professional experience except for the founder/s, they are looking for followers.
- Multiple case studies / take home exercises (difficultly making decisions / moving quickly)
- If you have an interview scheduled with multiple ppl and one of them is a no show more than once.
- If you’re interviewing for team lead / head of position and the team/part of it isn’t part of the interview process.
- If there are co CEOs that disagree on the vision or mission
This is almost too a high a bar, but I would prefer to take a job at a place where the interview isn’t about the interviewer demonstrating how smart they are. But… that would rule out most places.
I'm adding to my list "using ancient tech". Not because I think that orgs should always be on the new shiny, but to me using old tech is a yard stick for uninteresting and low-growth culture WRT software engineering; is there an interest in technology? Do the people there like to code for fun? Are they open to improvements in the way things are done? If I know that you're happy still using TFS, jQuery, ASP.NET Razor, etc, I can probably guess the answers to a lot of those kinds of questions.
Usually the response is “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” but the change process for fixing anything that actually is broken is so onerous that no one bothers.
I interviewed with Dell during their acceleration rise around 1999. The big red flag for me was all the interviewing people were late and in a ultra hurry to get the interview over. I had a would be peer that said he "Was tired of people being hired & then leaving within 30 days because of the chaotic work load!"
This was a management/executive position.
I get linked to threads like these in a newsletter, and I’m just curious. Are these threads only for coders or do coders just happen to be the majority of respondents?
Or will interviewers actually be sending me homework for an interview where I have to code something when the job is a SOC analyst or incident response?
I've walked out of an interview when the employee doing it took a phone call in the middle of it. It was so rude and disrespectful.
I once got a whiteboarding problem and proposed a solution, and the interviewer gave me a flat out "that's not the one I had in mind". I'd already asked clarifying questions and thought my proposal was reasonable in light of the constraints as I understood them. After a few minutes of trying to play mind reader, I asked, "Is there some constraint or requirement I'm missing?" and they said no. I retrospect, I should have walked out on that one, too. I still have no idea what they wanted from me. Communication goes both ways.
Did a round of interviews for staff engineer at Catawiki that felt more like trying to guess the right words than actual problem solving.
But I get it. People get dragged into the process, usually without compensation. And it's much easier and safer to reject than to accept.
The tragedy is that everyone knows that the approach isn't working, I haven't met a single person who thinks SWE hiring is working; but we still seem unable do fix it.
> I once got a whiteboarding problem and proposed a solution, and the interviewer gave me a flat out "that's not the one I had in mind"
Oh jeez. The impatient, combative side of me would want to respond, "so you're not open to other people's ideas, or open to the possibility that your approaches may not be the only good possibilities?"
A more diplomatic response might be, "can you tell me what you think about my approach is unworkable or at least suboptimal?" I think your question about a possible missing constraint/requirement was a good one. Actually, I think after asking that question and getting no reasonable responses, my original combative response seems a bit more appropriate...
For remote interviews, when the interviewer(s) have their cameras turned off. Or the camera is on but they look completely disinterested or disengaged. Once I had a guy's phone go off and he checked the messages while he was asking me a question...
When they start describing the dysfunction in their team or the org as a whole. One interviewer talks about a "legacy team" that needs help "modernizing" and "migrating to the cloud", and then you talk to the "legacy team" and they don't think they need any help. Or they're just a collection of acquisitions with no standardization. Or they try to avoid talking to corporate IT about anything. Or they regularly get woken up at 3am on-call. Or they deploy less than once a week, or need someone to manually validate it and schedule it and have all-hands-on-deck. Or you ask about test coverage and they laugh. Or they have one database for 100 services. I don't find a ton of huge deal breakers, but a lot of "ehhhhhh......." things. The biggest deal breakers are attitude and culture, whether the business creates abusive demands on employees, signs of poor leadership, disorganization. And pay. The business shows you what they really think of you in their offers.
I had one where the TL was on their laptop the whole time. They were prompted by their manager to ask me a question. They asked and immediately went back to typing while I was responding they didn't even acknowledge my response. I was offered the role but turned it down. The manager was furious. Why would I want to work with/for someone who doesn't have enough time or desire to show basic respect?
Another time went for a code screen that said we could use any language on our own machine. When I go there the hiring manager handed me a Mac and told me I'd be using Angular to code a given problem. That's great. I had no experience with Macs, no experience with WebStorm, no experience with Angular. What a waste of time. I asked why he even brought me in if I didn't have any of this listed on my resume and the recruiter told me it'd my choice of machine and language? His response was that maybe I had the experience but just didn't list it on my resume. Fuck you too.
That would be frustrating to tell them your preferences and then be completely ignored. On the flip-side, there are some interviews that are specifically testing how you are at familiarizing yourself with a new-to-you framework or codebase. It might not have been the case here, but for example you can learn a lot about how a person learns and works if you give a skilled React developer a project in a framework that they are unfamiliar with, like Angular. Of course, documentation and other resources should be available during that interview as well.
Again, not sure if that’s what was happening in your case, and giving someone a different OS would only hamper them if they were unfamiliar with the environment. Personally I like the challenge of learning a new framework, so long as that’s the intention of the interviewer.
Frat bro vibes. Bragging about alcohol in the office, offering me liquor around 1pm, talking about how great every is to hang out with at the office late. I don’t have a problem with others enjoying things, but assuming they are a major selling point for people during the interview is a big red flag to me.
I'm not sure I would even know how to answer that first question. When I was working, I spent many weekends and late nights traveling. It was my "own initiative" I guess in the sense that it was sort of my job.
I realize that probably doesn't describe a lot of people in which case it's probably the right job for them.
* If they are a small company who outsources any step of their interview process to another company. If you're only interviewing for a couple positions—people you will work with every single day—take the time to do it yourself.
* If they are a startup that says they are looking for people who are interested in solving exciting problems. For some people, this is going to be an enticement, but based on my experience, what I hear is "we're going to work you like a dog and pay you in equity, and at the end neither your work nor your equity will matter because we're definitely going to go out of business". I recognize this is a bias, but it's happened to me a couple times, and I'm in my 40s now and just not having it anymore. Plus, the problems are never that exciting, they're usually "how to sell a SaaS product that is basically a CRUD app, in a crowded marketplace with lots of competitors".
* If the interview is composed of like 10 rounds of 30 minute interviews, each with different groups in the company, that to me is an indicator that Conway's Law is at the helm of that organization: lots of groups that want input into everything, nobody empowered to make a decision on their own. Plus, it's just not a very good format. Give me a smaller number of hour long sessions where we can actually get into it, rather than racing through pro forma questions.