All of these interviews occurred in mid 2023 for software, devops, or cloud engineering roles.
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No questions allowed
It was my third interview for this company, having completed the recruiter screen and hiring manager screen. This interview was supposed to be a tech screen focused on DevOps.
My interviewer stated he was a contractor and didn’t know why he was asigned to conduct an interview and therefore didn’t have any questions prepared. I gave him a quick intro about myself. He didn’t allow any questions for the position because he didn’t know anything about it. I was rejected the next day.
5 Minute Hiring Manager Rejection
I joined the hiring manager screen for a backend software engineering position at a popular SaaS company. It was my first interview there and I skipped the recruiter screen stage.
The manager skipped introductions and went straight into a behavioral question about a past project. I spent a few minutes going through it and I could tell by the middle of my story he was completely disinterested. He didn’t have any other questions. I spent a few minutes asking him questions about the role but it was clear that the interview was already over. I received my rejection email the following morning.
I suspect they already had a candidate chosen and only conducted this interview to comply with policy. Skipping introductions is highly unusual and the story I gave typically does well.
Recruiter Screen Fail
I was having a terrible day and joined a recruiter screen call. The questions were standard, such as “tell me about yourself” and then going down the list of position requirements. I realized she was just reading out bullet points from the job listing in a format of “Do you have experience in X?” and I was mostly just answering with “Yes”. A few lines down with most of the bullet points remaining, she stopped asking questions and moved to end the interview prematurely. She ended the call with a very sassy “Byeeeeeeeee”. I realized she was getting frustrated with my sad tone of voice. The entire interview was only around 10 minutes.
I was rejected the next day for the reason that I was not located in the same city as the role. Major cap.
Flown out for what?
After completing the recruiter, behavioral, programming, and system design interviews I was flown out for a final onsite interview. They refused to give any information on what the interview would be about, just that it would be a 1 hour long session. I arrived to the interview and found out we were doing another system design problem with a written prompt. During the course of the interview any questions I had such as establishing requirements or asking for areas to focus on were just met with disinterest and I could decide everything myself. Any sort of discussion was declined, it was a similar experience to doing a practice system design problem on my own.
I was rejected for not having enough experience.
Weird Tech Screen Rejection
I spoke with a startup CEO about the role and company mission and we both agreed it was a good fit. I moved forward to the technical screen interview and immediately recognized the Leetcode medium problem being asked, the only difference was the input was a string instead of a linked list. I told the interview I had seen the problem before and he wanted to keep going with it. I solved the problem and created the test cases while explaining my thought process in around 15 minutes. It was quite easy because I had practiced the problem several times. The interviewer kept adding requirements such as switching the input to an array of undefined length and making it scaleable. I nailed each part of it with optimal complexity. I was rejected the next morning.
I’m not sure if the interviewer thought I was cheating because I had seen the problem before.