I hate to share ugly interview experiences in the tech industries but I am sure you may have plenty of such experience too to share. This is all about “so called” interview Gods in our tech industry. I wanted to mention a few which were funny, unethical and non sense in my opinion. Industry should not encourage such interviewers in their panel..
Problem is, there is no feedback system to tell them and if there is, it doesn’t reach the Gods from the HR.
I worked many years in India.. As a passionate technologist I always loved building new innovative products in my leisure.. at the same time I love to share them in my two page resume ( Yes it’s one pager in a landscape orientation ). I wouldn’t agree to the HR if they ask for a bigger and descriptive resume, I was ready to pass that org if they insist to do so. Ok enough now on the minute details lets jump on to some Godly experience.
I was appearing a tech interview for a senior position in an e-commerce company back in Bangalore almost 10 years back. Interview was scheduled onsite. 1st round it was a typical coding with a design question with an engineer for 45 minutes. He was very impressed and without any hesitation he sent me for the next round.
I was meeting an Architect for the 2nd round. He scanned my Resume .. Ohh you have built many projects using some languages other than c++ and java.. I usually mention my personal projects written in Java, python, angular and android etc .. He started firing questions, so many sometimes like rapid fire with no relation to the last one. Finally he was done with java.. Then he started front end, browser based and then angular .. I am not sure if he even knew the answers for the questions he was asking and I was trying my best to give as much as I knew. Finally at some point I couldn't and told its my personal experience and I don’t know something very specific about that particular thing but I can tell how it might have been designed or if you ask how can i build such a lib I can do it with core java.. He laughed literally laughed .. I got really annoyed but composed myself .. then he started firing android questions and yeah after asking so many questions. finally one point I mentioned the same it’s again my personal experience and I don’t know the internal stuff but I have used it and this is how it works .. He laughed again .. I think he felt very satisfied when I said I don’t know or I can’t answer what he was expecting to hear from me.. 2 hours gone.. omg over 2 hours can you imagine, we covered probably tons of questions from all sectors ? Then finally he asked me to write a program to translate a given integer to its plain text english form .. I don’t want to go into details but it was easy for me, I had few simple methods, one of them where a switch case for 0,1,2,3 to 9 as Zero,One, Two.. Nine .. He asked this is how you would translate 1 to “One” ? I said yeah or may be I can have a map or array here what I thought at that moment, I wrote He laughed again .. I asked anything wrong, do you have any other recommendation ? He answered “I am interviewing, not you insane !! Someone knocked the door .. He said I am done and do you have any question..
I was tired already, over 2.5 hours almost and counting , there was a pattern when he laughs. he was insane for sure. He thought for some reason that I was lying about my projects and He is Omniscient. I have my last opportunity to ask some question ..So I asked him as an architect, have you published any personal, web or android app that is publicly available ? He answered No ! Finally I got a chance to return a happy smile and left the room. ( Of a Tesco architect )
Learning from this ? Any thoughts ? I would discourage to add many programming languages and skills in your resume, when you are interviewing for service based industry, it is even better to not to mention too many skills if you are appearing interviews in India ! It may be appreciated for startups or Maang companies in a separate section ( I usually mention them in the last category as Achievements )
Definitely ask questions and set your expectations too when you meet your interviewers. Most HR’s are dumb, if they insist you to write a descriptive resume, better to skip that interview, cause if someone can’t filter with limited information, how can they with too much of information.
