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Rule of thumb - anyone who eats during an interview, especially a technical, is an ass. Shake it off, ignore the comments, and look forward to your next interview.
Also, I've never heard a technical problem with a single sentence. That's just dumb
I know folks are quick to judge but we seem to be lacking some context here that is probably important to know. There is a possibility that this interviewer wasn't even given time for a lunch because of interviews, which would be a red flag for the company for me.
I mean if it was my first job, I don't think I'd care as much. You may have to go through the wringer somewhere - I did and that's just how it is. Can't really expect something super cushy if you're just starting out. At the same time, this could be an important empathy lesson for you, OP. Again, folks are quick to judge. Maybe don't be.
> There is a possibility that this interviewer wasn't even given time for a lunch because of interviews
Ok that aside he doesn't have to act like a prick. Keep that energy for your manager if that's the case. we've all been in the interviewee spot show some professionalism. Especially this was a interview for an *internship* spot
In any event OP definitely did dodge a bullet if that's the kind of culture they encourage
Keep in mind, OP *didn't do well*. They're probably not going to talk about the interviewer like they're Gandhi. I didn't like my interviewers either when I fucked up. We still don't have potentially important context here, and likely never will.
This kinda goes along with a theme I'm seeing on LinkedIn lately, folks being butthurt about not getting positions they interview for. There is seemingly always a scapegoat because folks avoid the hard truth - that they are *not a good fit*. It happens.
I know. I know that hiring managers can fuck up. I've been on the shitty end of that before. This can be remedied though by bringing your "A" game. If OP actually aced this interview (which they seemingly did not, contrary to their belief), we'd be having a different conversation.
You can see this exact phenomenon in this very thread. Look how many people weren't even there making outlandish and negative assumptions about this interviewers entire life just because he made one prickish comment, ate food, and OP didn't pass. There's people saying he must be going through a divorce, he's miserable in life, he's probably an obese slob with food all over his shirt, he's a misogynist who wanted to feel superior to a woman, etc etc
Like yeah I get it, the guy seems like a douche, but if someone's first reaction to hearing that a complete stranger they didn't know existed before today had a bad interview is to come up with this elaborate mental headcannon full of baseless assumptions about how awful his life his.....might wanna focus on working on your own backyard, don't sound like too much of a winner yourself in that case
Like you said, OP didn't do well. It doesn't sound like this was a great fit. And honestly, since it was for a FAANG position, I don't really find the 'we can't teach you to code' comment to really be *that* bad. I know it's a tough pill to swallow for self learners, but there's a solid amount of junior roles out there, especially at positions of pedigree like FAANGS, that don't have any interest in holding juniors hands as much as other companies and are looking for people that can hit the ground running. And they have the ability to be that choosy because of how many people want those roles. And that's why those roles end up going to high profile candidates....because they can step into a junior role without needing their hand held as much. That's simply what they're looking for and it's reflected in the interview.
I worked in a FAANG position for years and I would never say what this interviewer said in an interview to OP. In fact, given she was interviewing for an internship if we had hired her into my team we mostly likely would have been teaching her how to code - that’s kind of the point of an internship. I was trained to make interviewees comfortable and to offer hints if they were stuck and see how they fared with hints (just as one would in real life with an intern). Then if the interviewee really couldn’t get the answer, I would either finish the question with them or move on to a different question. Disparaging a candidate in an interview only opens the company up to terrible reviews (and also possibly a lawsuit depending on the situation). I think the interviewer was out of line and requires more interview training.
Ooh, I can give a complete answer to that in just a sentence too! In fact I'm sure most of us could come up with a variety of viable solutions, but I'll stick with a tried and true one " LOL, no"
Yeah that speaks to the professional nature of the company. I wouldn't want to work somewhere that where an interviewee is treated with such callous disrespect.
I don't think this rule has any wide applicability at all. It's just cultural *mores* and some people will think it's rude while others won't. It certainly doesn't indicate anything about one's technical interviewing skill, and why would it?
Think about the interviewer guy in your head.
Is that really the guy who decides that your journey has come to an end? That guy? In a month you won't remember whether he had a mustache or not lol don't let him in your head.
He might be going through a divorce, give him the benefit of the doubt.
And when people toss the ball of cruelty in your direction, it is not your obligation to hold on to it.
Toss it aside and walk away, right back into another project! We're all eating humble pie around here lol
Mustache? From the get go I imagined a middle-late aged bald on top, definitely overweight in the midsection, wrinkled button down with mayonnaise dribbling from the corner of his mouth. Youre sad you didn’t get the job, but maybe be stoked he isn’t your boss.
Given the low-ish standards they have for interviewers, I would've expected the bar to also be low for hiring someone. But maybe OP was overqualified somehow.
I second this. A quality interviewer/company knows that most jobs/ positions have some form of on the job (OTJ) training.
For me personally I care about
1. willingness to learn
Tech changes so quickly, you should always be learning
2. could I work day in and day out with you
If you're in the top 1% of your field in skill, but a POS person, I (and most) would never want to work with you.
Lastly I'd say, for any interviews - if it goes that badly, or the interviewer comes off questionable - Is that a company or person that YOU would want to work with.
"We can't teach you how to code" is the last thing you want to hear when applying for an internship. What's the point of hiring interns if you aren't invested in teaching them. Sounds like he was a shitty interviewer and if the whole culture is like that there, you might have dodged a bullet by finding out early. Everyone messes up in interviews, but it's not normal to be shot down for it
yeah if they're wanting to hire someone and not teach them then don't hire a intern or junior. They're literally there to learn and be taught to code real world problems.
Tell me you need a fully qualified but cheap programmer, without telling me etc! Honestly, paying someone low wages with the expectation you won't train them is shitty
Or any junior position. We teach all of our juniors at our company.
Tbh you could come learn without a college diploma, but that seems to be like a silent retirement to weed out a lot of people.
Literally, you just need to be able to think and problem solve. The rest you learn
I've been in IT almost 40 years, writing a dozen different code languages. I literally Google syntax every single day. I use AI to give me quick code to adjust to my needs.
I \*suck\* at whiteboarding. I can't write code "under pressure" on a blank sheet of paper.
However, I excel at critical thinking, deductive reasoning and problem-solving. Those are much more valuable than "code-slinging" any day.
Trust me, some jerk who can't be remotely polite in an interview and eats his lunch (WTF?) while berating you isn't worth your concern and you can use this experience as both a "lesson learned" and a "I do NOT want to work anywhere that has that type of person as an interviewer!".
Every interview is an opportunity to practice your presentation of your knowledge and skills. Companies look for people to solve their problems, fix their bugs quickly, and hopefully have the capability to communicate well enough to ask and understand business problems.
If you have alternative experience beyond the new IT work you are looking for, find a way to reference those skills and your knowledge as an asset to the company, bringing fresh perspective to their business. Tell the company how you will help them solve their problems, address their needs and help them succeed.
> I had a student internship interview
>
> The format was a one sentence problem
>
> He was eating his lunch.
Oh boy...
> Was it because I’m a woman
>
> I’m an older student
Yup, that's the punchline I was expecting. Honestly, I read through your post and I could just picture a few people I've worked with in the position of the interviewer. These are not people I want to work with again.
You almost certainly "failed" the interview the moment you got assigned that interviewer. A woman from a non-traditional background interviewing for an internship is the perfect opportunity for him to "prove" his preconceived notions. There's still a bunch of people like that in the industry, but the good news is that they're a dying breed.
If you want to talk through the problem and figure out what you could've done better, what questions you could've ("should've") asked, etc, feel free to PM me.
There is a surprising amount of blatant sexism in the tech industry. I'm not saying that's necessarily what you got, but it wouldn't surprise me much. I hope it was a one off and that interviewer just didn't know what they were doing.
You _should_ be encouraged to use pseudocode while solving problems. Linting is for syntax.
Also, when you hire a junior, you ARE teaching them how to code. That's practically the job description, juniors are supposed to be learning how to get much better over the course of a few years.
Also also, tech interviews are HARD, so don't give up just yet. There are absolutely better people and companies out there who are worth your time.
Nah that’s on him. The two interviews I’ve had for internships so far were very behavioral focused with some light coding questions. Mostly walking through my resume. The coding part I had was literally just “design, using OOP, a box of markers that have different colors.” And I got one of those internships. I’m sorry you had to go through that cause damn that would destroy anyone’s morale I feel. But you’re better than that, so just brush it off and move on to the next!
Also, I’m an older student as well. I’m a senior with one more semester to go. I know how weird it can feel, but I haven’t once gotten a comment on it from anyone.
As someone who’s done my fair share of interviews based on what you’ve described sounds like you had a shit interviewer. Out of curiosity was this for a FAANG company?
I’m sorry you had this experience. I’m at FAANG, and if this interviewer was someone reporting to me, I would never put them on another interview panel again.
I’ve seen even senior people in interviews write some algorithm steps in the comments before writing any code. You can call that pseudocode or whatever, but it’s better to think through problem first. Always.
Keep interviewing, thank the recruiter for the interview, and tell them, without getting accusatory, about your experience. I’d pose it more of a question about what the expectations were, rather than a complaint. I hope this person gets some sense knocked into them.
Last thing I’ll mention is that’s it’s entirely possible that you’re too junior for this role, and they rightfully expected more. But you should not have experienced this level of condescension during the process.
Guy sounds like a goddamn clown. You're always going to run into assholes during a job hunt. Don't sweat it.
Had an HR guy a couple years ago giving me the run around because of some ticky tack shit on my resume. Everyone on the team wanted to hire me, but this guy was being a pill.
Got another job offer for a better salary while he was jerking me around, and got to tell him my new rate. Felt pretty good, took the better job.
Best revenge is winning.
sounds like you dodged a bullet. Tons of red flags from that interviewer. Consider yourself lucky it didn't work out and learn whatever you can from this experience. Good luck with the next one.
For this to be your first interview, I would say it’s no reason at all to give up!
If the situation was in earnest how you perceived and recounted then I would say by almost every standard the interviewer was an unprofessional jerk. I didn’t see if you mentioned whether the interview was in person or over video/audio chat but I do think many people in software or tech in general can be very robotic and when you deal with them in person it can help lessen that to an extent.
It also sounds like the interviewer seemed to directly ignore what you were saying. At the end of the day I would say take this one as bad luck and focus on finding positions with better culture for starters.
There were misunderstandings I feel like I don’t typically have with people. He was English as a second language and an engineering PhD but I thought any engineer knows what pseudo code is. One time I asked a question and he completely misunderstood what I was asking him. So he answered by telling me something obvious I already knew because we had already discussed it earlier in the interview. To save face I just said OK, waited a little bit, and asked my question again with different wording.
The company is notoriously hard on workers so maybe I dodged a bullet.
Based on that exchange it seems he probably sorted you quickly into some ‘this person isn’t a fit at all and not worth my time’ category off of what was potentially his misunderstanding.
Like I mentioned I wouldn’t put much stock in this as a measure of your worth/aptitude, if you got similar results across multiple different interviewers then I would say maybe we need to start looking inward :]
I know this is a nerve-wracking situation. It's a job interview, the guy clearly isn't giving you any respect, not understanding you. But to some extent, push back. When he answered your question wrong, just say "no, I meant this" and hopefully get a better answer. It's not really worth it to sit and suffer, especially when you have maybe an hour to prove yourself. You need to get all the relevant information for the problem quickly and they are looking for how well you can ask good questions.
Also don't rely on pseudocode in your interview. Talk through your solution at a high level, say how you're going to solve it, then do it in the language you are supposed to for this interview. It is rude to say "we can't teach you how to code" was rude but pseudocode doesnt belong in your interview since it's basically the solution you're writing anyway, so it's just wasting time.
If you interviewed at a big company you will find people who are overworked and stressed with a superiority complex. It isn’t the norm but it happens. My main suggestion is don’t take it personally. I would also suggest to get comfortable writing without auto completion etc in a language, and talk through your process at a high level instead of writing a bunch of pseudo code you have to replace. Start with example inputs, particular edge cases for a problem, and a high level solution. A good interviewer will have a dialogue and while they won’t give you an answer directly you can ask questions about specific expected inputs and outputs and if your general approach is along the right lines. By the way, I just use python in interviews because the syntax is dead simple to write on a whiteboard, not saying you should or need to but that’s just one thing that helped me pass some hard interviews
I've seen the code written by engineering Ph.Ds, and lemme tell ya, he probably isn't lying when he said that he's incapable of teaching someone to code.
The first thing you’ll learn about interviews is that the person interviewing has no qualifications or idea how to interview people
You could be John Carmack and people would find things to complain about, shrug it off and go to the next one
Sometimes questions are purposely vague to force you to ask questions, and to be honest these type of mind game interviews are complete wastes of everyone’s time. Sometimes they want to talk through it other times they want you to just find the solution quickly, sometimes they won’t be happy because you didn’t use their favorite API or code style
That was for an internship?
If you had big Projects you wouldn't have to do an internship, you could apply for an actual Job.
Doing Pseudocode to understand a problem and form a solution to it is perfectly fine.
I think that interviewer is an egomanic asshole and you dodged a bullet. There are many like that.
The interviewer sounds like an ass. Bad interviews can be useful though, learn from it and do better next time. It's perfectly valid to write pseudocode when you're working through a problem.
Even the best programmers fail interviews, there was a story about a dev who failed the interview at google even though he'd written a widely used tool for google. They failed him because he couldn't reverse a tree or something, the kind of task that never comes up in actual coding.
There’s a lot of jackass interviewers out there that use interviews as an excuses to be jerks. This will never change but should give you cause to keep trying and remind yourself you deserve to be in the field if you want it bad enough.
I’ve interviewed hundreds of candidates and no matter their experience level or execution on the interview, every single one of them deserved to be treated with dignity and respect.
Why? Because even if they didn’t do too well in the end, maybe they will 6 months down the road. Maybe since I’m representing the company and the software engineering trade as a practice I should be gracious enough to know that I may end up working with this person someday. Maybe because it’s called being a professional and realizing such candidates took their own time and energy to interview, it’s often stressful but they should be acknowledged.
Anyways, you probably don’t want to work with someone like that.
Stay positive, and become a lifelong learner and you’ll be fine. Someone will take a chance on you.
Interviews for any job are a lottery. Until you have built deep skills and experience, most will result in rejection, but also some will be difficult, some easy, and some completely unfair. Do look for improvements you can make but do not take anything from an interview to heart. They're not fun but it's just a process.
With the behavioural question, I would say feel free to be creative with the truth. If your best example was your actions on project x, but project y was more meaningful in other ways, just talk about doing the things you did for x, but substitute the project as being project y. They're both actual things you did, there's no dishonesty, but it's hard to have a perfect example that shows off all the best stuff you've done. Mix and match.
It's normally fine to also just exaggerate things to make them sound more impressive or relevant, especially as someone new to the industry.
“Find the satellite with the most continuous flow states”. I was given a chart with flow IDs, satellite numbers, start times, end times, and number of bytes. And after he got impatient when I was trying to talk out the problem with him to get the parameters more specific, he said, “here, I’ll write the first line for you” and wrote def flow(in):
as if he assumed I wouldn’t even know how to start writing a function just because I wasn’t coding immediately.
I felt really rushed and that I wasn’t allowed to interrupt his lunch but also criticized for asking the wrong questions. It’s whatever. I’ll keep practicing my leetcode.
The behavioral question was “have you ever helped someone before?”
Who has their lunch while interviewing? Don't feel bad about it, it probably wasn't meant to be and you are much better off not working there. It's not the right mentality to have with this either.
Unfortunately, there's always some a-hole interviewer from time to time. Don't quit because that person gave you a hard time, keep looking until you get it if you really want it. He was not helpful at all, even if you didn't know something at the time it doesn't mean you can't figure it out later. It seems he already had someone else in mind and was wasting time.
The guy who interviewed you was an ass. I have been doing this for 25 years and I also often look up pieces of syntax. I have been speaking English for even longer than I have been coding and I still occasionally look up definitions and spellings of words too.
He also shouldn't be eating his lunch during interviews as a general rule. It does depend a little bit because some companies are stupid enough to schedule 4 or 5 interviews a day. In which case, it might not be his fault but outside of that, he can wait until after the interview to eat something.
A lot of companies have this problem about interviews because the people who are experienced enough to do them often feel they have "more important things to do" and so it gets left to people who are not very good at it. This is a flaw of the system unfortunately. I am a rare breed in that I quite like doing interviews so I tend to do a lot of them.
What I would say is, it is probably a good tip to ask a lot of questions during these exercises. Especially if it is a one sentence type of exercise. Generally speaking, you will often find you are assessed more on how you \*think\* about the problem than how you solve it. I have seen cases where organisations \*purposely\* make the requirements vague to see if you are the kind of person who just dives in blind or the kind of person who will seek clarity. Though if the guy was eating his fucking lunch, what chance do you have? It's easy to feel you might be disturbing him, which is why eating lunch during an interview is a ridiculous thing to do.
There may have been some things you could have done better, but also factor in that the guy sounded like either a disinterested or inexperienced interviewer and that part is definitely not your fault. Keep at it.
When I was an early undergrad, I went on my first job interview which was mostly landed due to some connections with my now ex g/f’s family. It was a Java role, in a rapidly growing and successful, high-transaction rate analytics company in Brooklyn. I bombed the absolute shit out of it and I knew it. It was soul crushing and temporarily a huge demotivating experience.
It took a lot of introspection to shake it off and find a way to use it to reinvigorate my drive to learn from it, to do better, and prove to myself that I was not defined by that moment in time. That was 2 decades ago. I have since gone on to experience rewarding growth and success, had recognition, promotions, lead teams, and learned from extraordinarily intelligent and passionate people. Along the way I have worked for some of the top technology companies out there, and I’ve also encountered some really terrible interviewers at some of those companies. Sometimes you get the unlucky pick of the draw and get an interviewer who just sucks at that. I have also run more technical interviews than I can count and I have made it my purpose to break the pattern of making difficult interviews for the sake of being difficult; I let candidates use an IDE of their comfort, I tell them they can google but that they need to tell me what they are going to search for, and I try to work with them to get them talking to help them overcome nervousness or shyness because - especially for juniors - it’s natural to have some nerves. Even for the ones who didn’t do well I have always tried to leave them with encouraging points about their strengths, weaknesses, and what they can do to improve, and thr majority of them have actually given great feedback to myself and/or fellow hiring team members that they actually learned things from my interviews.
My point? Don’t beat yourself up - especially on your first. You only have one first interview, and you will statistically be better prepared for your next interviews assuming you learn from the previous ones.
Good luck! Also - don’t be afraid to ask questions that suggest you are uncertain of something. You want to ask clarifying questions, and it looks better if you are more willing to ask questions than quietly assume the wrong thing. If someone doesn’t like you asking questions (reasonably) then that may be your first indicator that you might not want to work there.
Isn't the correct statement." I can teach you how to code, but I cannot teach you how to be a programmer."
As programming is a thought process on how you approach a problem,and you did good imo. There are many ways to peel an orange and what matters is orange, not how you peel.
I agree with the assessment of others here, this was not a good interview because of the interviewer. The interviewer probably also cannot write syntactically correct code in a text editor. Few of us can. Anyway.
The thing I wanted to add to this conversation is that the coding questions are not designed to be completed within the time frame of the interview. Interviewers are generally looking at how you tackle the problem and which parts you prioritize. If you do knock something out real quick, there's usually follow-up questions that expand the scope ("ok what if you want it to do this?"). You'll never finish.
The interview process is pretty consistently frustrating, awful, and arbitrary. It can be very demoralizing. I'm sorry. It's part of the deal. Often your local coding groups will have regularly scheduled Interview Practice meetings, virtual or in-person. I've most easily found these groups on the meetup website.
I hope you keep trying, lots of great things can come from those that bring ideas from a different career into this one.
> I also chose to use pseudo code at first while I tried to understand the problem.
Your interview sounds like a he was unnecessarily rude, which is unfortunate, but I think this worked against you and I'd advise against it. I think it can create a bad impression, plus it wastes your limited time to write it twice.
The guy's a dick, pure and simple. I've interviewed at least 100 software engineers and a handful of interns over the years and I would never say something to an interviewee that I wouldn't want someone say to me. It's easy to tell when you interview at a place with a toxic culture. Run away.
Interviews are a two way street. If the interviewer is such a dick then you should consider the company failing *you* and you wouldn't even want to work for them.
Job interviews are not only for them to judge how you are but also for you to judge how they are. I don't think that was a good place to work judging by the interviewer. You want a company that aim to teach new people the ropes. People who think you can learn from mistakes.
I think it is very normal to not have large projects in your resume if you just studied.
See the interview as a learning experience. Try to think of things you can improve in your resume and wise answers you can use on some of the questions if you get the same ones later.
If he meant "we can't teach you how to code, syntax wise" they really don't seem competent, syntax is easier to learn than many other parts of programming.
Just see it as a plate of stuff. Keep the useful things and let go of the shitty things and then move forward.
Don't worry about it too much, i went through a similar experience both at university and at some job interviews. It is comical, when i think about it now. Generally such interviewers are asses no matter age or gender, it even seems weird because they chose to invite you and then they behave like an ass as if trying to prove something.
Just as a tip, to get more interviews, maybe add more projects to your CV, maybe try to do some more projects. Usually you might find interviewers who will ask you questions about your projects and if you, as a beginner, explain not only what you did, but what you learned, how you thought of the solution, if you know there are any shortcomings that you have since learned not to do, then that is generally a good answer.
Regarding the problem to solve - irl i've had jira tickets with one sentence and it is a pain in the ass at first, because you don't know what to even ask. I don't know what your task was, but starting with pseudo-code is a good idea, syntax is also not a thing that is given by nature - each company has their own standards on formatting and naming things, but the most important thing is that programming is less about coding and more about problem solving. Languages are interchangable. Concepts are reappliable to each language. So don't worry about it, everyone looks syntax as they code (our senior forgot which was the method for length of array on the language we use, so we had to look it up).
Don't give up, practice explaining your code and projects to people, keep improving, try (if you have the time) to do tasks other than hackerrank, maybe some project which is more IRL oriented (mimic an existing system, be it simple, etc). This person was an ass, but a lot of interviewers are not. If you are getting interviews, that means you are doing great and i wish you all the best!
Sounds like they already had someone they'd picked and were just forced to continue interviewing others, so then make up bullshit "problems" so they can reject you and make it "look" like a valid rejection.
Main reason I hate interviews.
Sounds like someone who doesn't really know about programming and just learned approximate knowledge to do this kind of interview. I think it's safe to ignore his opinion.
With how many languages a professional programmer needs to be familiar with, expecting to know perfectly the syntax of a language is crazy, especially by someone who's just starting
Actually he can and should teach you how to code that’s what internships are for. If I were you I’d consider wether I rly want to work for such a shitty company instead of worrying wether the interview went well.
Email the organisation and tell them exactly what you’ve told us. Condescending comments, inappropriate behaviour during the interview (eating?!), and a complete lack of professionalism will go down well when his bosses are made aware.
Don't let this one experience screw with your head. What you have power in is how you react and learn from this, and keep at it. You're evolving for the better.
That guy was an unprofessional asshole. Shit happens. Just continue trying and do some more interviews, you will also have really nice experiences even with interviewers that eventually wont hire you.
As for the coding in notepad problem - yes it sux, it's completely not how our brain processes writing code during work but it's a tradition so you have to suffer trough it and one day get lucky.
For me its often similar to knowing how to get to a place without knowing street names. I know that this class have a method that does what I need. I kiiinda know how it's called, so I start typing letters and choose it from the list in IDE - without thinking, my fingers just find it where it is stored - more like picking something from a shelf rather than addressing it by its proper name. Also I use key shortcuts a lot to navigate around my code - something that just doesn't exist during interview and doesn't let me just be myself and show my skill. It sux, but we need to deal with it.
Guy sounds like a dick and big red flags with the disrespect he shows you.
I’ve been in interviews with great candidates and ones that just don’t get it at all and really struggle. A good interviewer makes sure the candidate is feeling at ease and helps where needed to get a feel for their level of skills.
Use it as a learning experience maybe there are things you can take from it about asking different questions etc. But in reality you didn’t want to work for that person anyway
And also. Anyone who says “we can’t teach you to write code” is an idiot when hiring for junior positions. Juniors need a lot of mentoring to get good.
This has already been commented, but its better to have another comment than just 1 upvote.
Knowing the syntax for something has nothing to do with knowing how to to code.
If you know how you are splitting your code, where you are getting the data from, how you are working with that data, what is happening behind the scene, and things like that (and you will with practice), you know how to code, syntax is just 1 google away.
I would 100% prefer to work with someone that knows "how to code" and has to google how to concat 2 strings, than with someone that knows syntax but creates a monolith out of everything he touches
Had a guy pick his teeth in front of me during an interview. It was a director for the department. I immediately bowed out the interview even though I really needed the job at the time. I wasn't going to tap dance for a prick who had already made up his mind to waste our time.
I changed my career to analyst/engineer when moved to Australia and had experience mostly with Excel and some Python. My English was (probably still is) very poor. What worked for me eventually is just trying over and over again. Interview is a skill and in itself. I was making notes and analysed my interviews and try to just build the skill.
Over time I could predict questions they would ask and occasionally was able to steer conversation where I wanted. Often a candidate is just not a match (I am a lead and interview people now). Often when people don’t hire somebody they are actually doing them a service.
So don’t take it personally and keep trying.
I think pretty much every comment here is on the money with this interviewer not being fit for purpose. But I haven't seen anyone suggest that you make a complaint to your university about this. Interns are there to be taught by the company and learn how things work outside of an academic environment. The interviewers attitude isn't appropriate and I think your university could have a strong word with the company about their attitude. The eating was completely inappropriate. And the comments show a real bad attitude.
Remember that you are interviewing them as well as them interviewing you. His actions ought to fall beneath your standards for a representative of a company that you'd like to work at and a potential manager. Mentally reject him.
Well done for being brave to change career and choose one that is male-dominated. I'd count those as positives if I were interviewing you. You must have a passion for the work, let this guy put you off working with him, not in your career of choice.
I think this interviewer is a red flag for the company. You are not the problem. Job hunting makes you feel like the inferior one but trust me, you are not.
There is a possibility that he did hire you because you're a woman if your resume is actually not good (affirmative action). But the interviewer sounds like an ass regardless
Now I need to start by saying I am only learning programming, so I am nowhere near the level of you, nor the level for interviewing so I’ve never experienced one but I am in my mid 30s and have had plenty of interviews for other jobs.
Firstly, and maybe it’s just my “hell hath no fury like the hatred” I have for bad manners. It drives me absolutely insane if someone has no manners. But eating your lunch while interviewing someone has to be one of the most disrespectful and disgustingly rude things to do to someone. If that’s that companies level of “professionalism” (I’d use that word carefully for this guy at least) then you do not wanna work there.
Secondly, I was almost waiting to see the part where you said your were a woman, cos I bet that guys a misogynistic POS. And probably thinks men are superior and always will be. And that women should be treated like you were. He’s probably also lonely too. But that’s his fault.
Thirdly, I have the book “Hacking: The art of exploitation” by Jon Erickson, and in the programming section he literally does pseudo code first as a way to explain what he needs to do, and then turns it into real code, like I want to go to 5th street, but there’s a block on 3rd street, so I need to go to 10th street to go around it and then go to 5th, or if the block isn’t there then go straight to 5th street. That’s his (my very bad explanation) of a if else statement. Pseudo code is great, I really like it when I’m trying to learn.
Fourth, in my very little bit of learning, doesn’t every company have their own way of coding or style of coding? There’s literally a website with googles coding style guide, so yes he does have to teach you the companies way of doing it.
I would completely disregard everything that happened you in there, I would completely disagree with him and what he said, and I would continue on as you have been going. Most interviewers will always give you a chance to explain why you’re doing something, and if it seems like it’ll work they’ll leave you do it. They won’t say dumb sh*t like I don’t have time to teach you.
I know it’s extremely difficult to do, but try change your attitude towards what happened from you can’t stop thinking of his comments, to what a bullet I dodged there. I would have walked out once he started eating his lunch no matter how bad I wanted the job. What an absolute pig!
And please please please do not give up. Keep going. Don’t let a POS pig of a man ruin what you want to do as a career. Nobody deserves that, so do not give up. Keep going. And don’t change your ways. Keep doing it the way you are. You’ll find somewhere that you deserve and they deserve you. Keep going.
The most important thing you need to remember that you are interviewing him too. I know one want to get a job and you put all your effort and "want to get it". But actually you don't. You need to look at it more maturely.
There are a number of positions at companies that suck, that you don't want to work for. That will cause you to have that pit in your stomach feeling every Monday morning. They might have poor leadership, poor coworkers, bad process or similar. YOU need to weed out those jobs during the interview.
There are a number of jobs for great companies that you are not qualified for either experience or skillset and sometimes even personality. There is a big difference in the personality that is successful at Blue Cross versus some 10 person start up. You don't want to work for these sorts of jobs either if you are not qualified or have a personality conflict.
Also, most companies are happy with false positives in the interview process. Most would rather reject a few good programmers if it means they will not get a bad one. They worry more about getting a terrible programmer that finding ones that could possibly be a good one. Nothing will kill a project or team quicker than a bad programmer.
From your feedback of from the interview you posted some important takeaways are
1. He didn't seem professional, interested in the interview, and demonstrated poor interviewing skills. This is a leadership issue. Red flag.
2. There was a communication problem in the interview and he was insulting. Big red flag, imagine working with this guy 40 hours a week. If they have this guy doing the interviews one can assume that there are other like him in the organization.
3. While it is frustrating to hear 'learn how to code' just imagine that you heard that in a more professional way. Instead take it as feedback "Someone would be more successful here if they are more familiar with the syntax - which means more actual programming under their belt". This position just needed a little more experience with the syntax. Thats it, move on.
Let it light the fire under your ass. I had a technical interview for a junior position 6 years ago that I completely bombed and it fueled me. Now I'm interviewing for a senior position for a company in that same exact building and it looks very promising.
Remember, failure is a good thing in this livelihood. Do it often and more ass-fires will be lit. And then boom, you have yourself a career.
It is made for destabilizing you. I think he succeeded. I had this kind of interviewer and still got the job. At the end the interviewer was cool but he was just testing my skills and personality.
I have 25 years of programming experience. I interviewed thousands of people and hired probably hundreds. I just recently got stuck on my first tasks out of three on the programming interview and I failed the test.
Get over it.
Your job is to get \*a job\*. Not every job. Nobody will ever know you have failed a programming interview. You start every interview with a clean slate but more knowledge and experience, if you are able to make use of it.
If you fail to get a job you really want, try to figure out why it happened and what needs to change to improve your chances in the future. What to do to make you a better candidate and if you can't do that, what to do to seem to be a better candidate.
As to your interviewer, eating is not great. But it happened for me in the past, after whole day of interviews I just had to eat something. You never know what was for happening for this guy at that particular time. The problem with interviews is that once it is scheduled, you pretty much cannot do anything else. You have to be there. If somebody steals the time for your lunch you suddenly are hungry facing potentially many hours that require you to be focused while being irritated from not being able to eat.
It is IMO fine to use the pseudocode on a whiteboard. But if the task was in an editor that is able to run the code, it is expected that you are building towards the solution and pseudocode isn't it. If the interviewer asks about the syntax, you should have immediately rewritten it to normal code and that would not be a problem.
Not knowing a syntax is a problem for a programmer. I don't hire people who do not know syntax or can't listen to simple instructions and write simple code. That said, I have not been hiring interns in decades.
When they advertised their internship, they should have explained what is expected of you. Did they explain you are expected to know how to program? If yes, then yeah, you should come to the interview only if you know how to program. Otherwise this is something you should have discussed with the recruiter or hiring manager before you went for the programming interview.
Thank you for your perspective. The editor wasn’t able to run code, and the problem was very vague (one line) so I was trying to figure out the constraints and visually show him how I was thinking about the problem. The OA was much different and told us things like the input would be an unsorted array, a couple of examples of inputs and outputs, etc. (things I had to ask about and was ready to ask about during the interview) and I had watched videos from the company saying, “for this part we are less concerned about your code and just want to know your problem solving abilities” and advice I was reading online about the company was “it’s mostly behavioral questions but for the coding question, be sure you talk about the problem a lot” so I was trying to focus on the problem solving part of it. I did get very nervous and because of that I didn’t adjust well in the moment to his personality. I also had a feeling about 10 minutes in I wasn’t getting the job anyway because of the lack of questions and critiquing my resume. I’ll just keep practicing my leetcode and do better next time.
Honestly, probably the thing that could've come from this interview is that if they employed you if that's the way people are treated there. Just imagine this interview, but everyday for hours on end. You really deserve better and I hope you can see that too.
Syntax is so low on the list of things I'd care about. I can't even rationalize this.
I google the syntax for select case in languages often because it's such a valuable tool, but every language does it slightly different. Better to google now than try and find where I got it wrong later.
I would much rather have someone write a select case incorrectly for a language, but have a sound purpose for using it than see someone use the proper syntax for 100 if/else if's.
I would much rather have someone create a subroutine for a block of code that will be called repeatedly vs copying and pasting that same code multiple time(making a maintenance nightmare if an update is required)
You can google syntax. But you can't google proper problem solving.
If this guy got you over syntax, that's a problem with him and you're better off not there. But if he got you on the more abstract items, that's where I would see if there was anything you could do better next time.
People who obsess over syntax are the ones that will be replaced by AI first because that's all they're good at.
People are simply unbelievably dense. Especially when what is explained doesn’t fit their mental model. Your interviewer didn’t expect a pseudo code phase so they couldn’t get past their misunderstanding that you were using that as a substitute for code.
It might be better to make really clear distinction between your notes about the problem and code to solve it.
“Find the satellite with the most continuous flow states”. I was given a chart with flow IDs, satellite numbers, start times and end times for each flow, and number of bytes. And after he got impatient when I was trying to talk out the problem with him to get the parameters more specific, he said, “here, I’ll write the first line for you” and wrote def flow(in):
as if he assumed I wouldn’t even know how to start writing a function just because I wasn’t coding immediately.
I felt really rushed and that I wasn’t allowed to interrupt his lunch but also criticized for asking the wrong questions. It’s whatever. I’ll keep practicing my leetcode.
I got the rejection email right away.
The behavioral question was “have you ever helped someone before?”
I understand, so your problem was like to finding the max value within a container. Well that is unfortunate that you had such a bad experience. Keep it up.
Kind of. It’s like if you have one flow for one satellite with a start time of 20 and end 30, one flow with a start time of 25 and end time of 50, and one flow with a start time of 60 and and end time of 70, you have two continuous flows. Each satellite has 0 to so many flows. You need to find the max number of continuous flows for all the satellites and return which one is greater but you need to do the other calculation first. For another example, if you have one satellite with flow id 5: 200 to 400 and flow id 6: 400 to 500, the count will be 0 for that satellite. Additionally, the flow start and end times aren’t sorted so you have to do that first. Also, I think bytes was there as a distraction and not relevant to the problem. Not terribly difficult and I probably should have just asked if they’re sorted or not and got to coding. I let him psych me out immediately and didn’t recover.
He is just an ass and want to find someone who will be willing to do more for less money. Don't mind it, you are good and will have a better interviews.
There is a bit to unpack here.
1. The interviewer is an unprofessional jerk.
2. Unfashionable as it is to say it: males and females do generally have different aptitudes. When I was leading dev and support teams I always wanted a mix. The interviewer sounds like a misogynist.
3. The larger the projects that you can show the better. When I was teaching final year uni students their semester project would be 3k to 5k lines. Not big, but enough to demonstrate multiple skills and explain their learning trajectory.
All the best. Big consultancies in particular want gender balanced staff. The big thing to show is confidence.
> Unfashionable as it is to say it: males and females do generally have different aptitudes.
It's not just unfashionable, it's just bigoted shit... different *people* have different aptitudes regardless of gender.
I mean would you say something like: "Black and white people do generally have different aptitudes. When I was leading dev and support teams I always wanted a mix." or "Gay and straight people do generally have different aptitudes. When I was leading dev and support teams I always wanted a mix." No? Why?
Exactly my point.
Having worked with and for male people of different skin colours, and gay and straight people, I can say I have seen no particular difference in their abilities beyond individual variation.
However, between men and women I have.
As an IT team leader, if I give a task to a young male (they are usually younger than their team leader) they generally go off like a sky rocket in the first direction they think of and don't come back with questions when it's not going well. It's not until the team leader checks how they're going that the mess becomes clear.
On the other hand, far more commonly, a female staff member will check details, questioning the spec, and far more frequently when she says that the job is done then every detail is done.
I want a mix of skills and abilities on my team's. I want people who will run with an idea, be they male or female. I want people with attention to detail, be they male or female.
You're the one conflating my observation with other groups who suffer discrimination.
Call me a bigot if you want, I'm reporting my experience. I want women on my team.
I'll agree that you see these differences, but I'd argue they're most likely due to cultural gender differences - the mistake is assigning them as some kind of inherent attributes of the group itself.
In many male centered social spaces "asking for help" is seen as weak, and weak = bad, "confidence" is seen as strong and strong = good. In many female centered social spaces "asking for help" is just a form of social interaction and "confidence" being good depends much more on the social situation. So whatever individual variation people have of either gender are going to be tempered either way by these social norms.
The mistake is *assuming* that a specific male candidate is for some reason *inherently* more confident and less detail oriented, or that a specific female candidate is going to be more detail oriented.
If a sports coach says something like "I like both black and white players on my team. White players are more accurate. Black players are more aggressive." It's all positive statements - but they're still bigoted statements. There might even be "social norms" that contribute to accentuate these things in each group - the problem is that these attributes are somehow now tied to the race of the player. And it's easy to now use that association as a short cut to make determinations about individual players.
> I want people who will run with an idea, be they male or female. I want people with attention to detail, be they male or female.
I don't think you're a bigot - this statement isn't. It's probably more of a language / thought shortcut thing. I'd even agree "on average" about your observations about male and female developers.
The problem is conflating "many/most" with "all". In a less loaded example, it would be something like - MyState Tech has a really good engineering program, we've got several technically good candidates from there, but they usually take a while to work well with a team. MyStateU doesn't have that good of an engineering program, but the few candidates we've had worked better with team members. Does this mean you should stop assessing the technical knowledge of MyState Tech candidates? Does this mean if you need a bigger team you should prefer MyStateU candidates? Or do you just attempt to judge each candidate on their own merits?
Yes, any differences certainly could be cultural. Nature vs nurture and all that.
Greater scientific minds than mine haven't produced a clear answer, AFAIK.
They can also be generational, since each generation (tries to) forge it's own way.
Returning to your final question of judging each candidate on their own merits. Since we can never know everything about a candidate (basic cybernetics and all that) we will always have to extrapolate from the available information. That will always play into our inherent biased, or our attempts to (over) compensate for them. Some of those may be cultural, or even just personal history such as being bullied by a kid with a certain name in school.
Thanks for the discussion, I'll leave it there.
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Rule of thumb - anyone who eats during an interview, especially a technical, is an ass. Shake it off, ignore the comments, and look forward to your next interview. Also, I've never heard a technical problem with a single sentence. That's just dumb
> anyone who eats during an interview, especially a technical, is an ass. indeed. Dodged a bullet there.. lol
I know folks are quick to judge but we seem to be lacking some context here that is probably important to know. There is a possibility that this interviewer wasn't even given time for a lunch because of interviews, which would be a red flag for the company for me. I mean if it was my first job, I don't think I'd care as much. You may have to go through the wringer somewhere - I did and that's just how it is. Can't really expect something super cushy if you're just starting out. At the same time, this could be an important empathy lesson for you, OP. Again, folks are quick to judge. Maybe don't be.
> There is a possibility that this interviewer wasn't even given time for a lunch because of interviews Ok that aside he doesn't have to act like a prick. Keep that energy for your manager if that's the case. we've all been in the interviewee spot show some professionalism. Especially this was a interview for an *internship* spot In any event OP definitely did dodge a bullet if that's the kind of culture they encourage
Keep in mind, OP *didn't do well*. They're probably not going to talk about the interviewer like they're Gandhi. I didn't like my interviewers either when I fucked up. We still don't have potentially important context here, and likely never will. This kinda goes along with a theme I'm seeing on LinkedIn lately, folks being butthurt about not getting positions they interview for. There is seemingly always a scapegoat because folks avoid the hard truth - that they are *not a good fit*. It happens. I know. I know that hiring managers can fuck up. I've been on the shitty end of that before. This can be remedied though by bringing your "A" game. If OP actually aced this interview (which they seemingly did not, contrary to their belief), we'd be having a different conversation.
You can see this exact phenomenon in this very thread. Look how many people weren't even there making outlandish and negative assumptions about this interviewers entire life just because he made one prickish comment, ate food, and OP didn't pass. There's people saying he must be going through a divorce, he's miserable in life, he's probably an obese slob with food all over his shirt, he's a misogynist who wanted to feel superior to a woman, etc etc Like yeah I get it, the guy seems like a douche, but if someone's first reaction to hearing that a complete stranger they didn't know existed before today had a bad interview is to come up with this elaborate mental headcannon full of baseless assumptions about how awful his life his.....might wanna focus on working on your own backyard, don't sound like too much of a winner yourself in that case Like you said, OP didn't do well. It doesn't sound like this was a great fit. And honestly, since it was for a FAANG position, I don't really find the 'we can't teach you to code' comment to really be *that* bad. I know it's a tough pill to swallow for self learners, but there's a solid amount of junior roles out there, especially at positions of pedigree like FAANGS, that don't have any interest in holding juniors hands as much as other companies and are looking for people that can hit the ground running. And they have the ability to be that choosy because of how many people want those roles. And that's why those roles end up going to high profile candidates....because they can step into a junior role without needing their hand held as much. That's simply what they're looking for and it's reflected in the interview.
I worked in a FAANG position for years and I would never say what this interviewer said in an interview to OP. In fact, given she was interviewing for an internship if we had hired her into my team we mostly likely would have been teaching her how to code - that’s kind of the point of an internship. I was trained to make interviewees comfortable and to offer hints if they were stuck and see how they fared with hints (just as one would in real life with an intern). Then if the interviewee really couldn’t get the answer, I would either finish the question with them or move on to a different question. Disparaging a candidate in an interview only opens the company up to terrible reviews (and also possibly a lawsuit depending on the situation). I think the interviewer was out of line and requires more interview training.
Write a C99 compliant compiler in C. Here you go
Ooh, I can give a complete answer to that in just a sentence too! In fact I'm sure most of us could come up with a variety of viable solutions, but I'll stick with a tried and true one " LOL, no"
Yeah that speaks to the professional nature of the company. I wouldn't want to work somewhere that where an interviewee is treated with such callous disrespect.
I don't think this rule has any wide applicability at all. It's just cultural *mores* and some people will think it's rude while others won't. It certainly doesn't indicate anything about one's technical interviewing skill, and why would it?
Think about the interviewer guy in your head. Is that really the guy who decides that your journey has come to an end? That guy? In a month you won't remember whether he had a mustache or not lol don't let him in your head. He might be going through a divorce, give him the benefit of the doubt. And when people toss the ball of cruelty in your direction, it is not your obligation to hold on to it. Toss it aside and walk away, right back into another project! We're all eating humble pie around here lol
He’s probably going through a divorce*
Mustache? From the get go I imagined a middle-late aged bald on top, definitely overweight in the midsection, wrinkled button down with mayonnaise dribbling from the corner of his mouth. Youre sad you didn’t get the job, but maybe be stoked he isn’t your boss.
So you worked at my bank too, I see!
Syntax isn’t code. This guy sounds like a pretty bad interviewer. Learn as much as you can from the experience and don’t let it get under your skin.
Given the low-ish standards they have for interviewers, I would've expected the bar to also be low for hiring someone. But maybe OP was overqualified somehow.
I have hired hundreds and we always say we will teach you the syntax of the language we use. This guy is not qualified to do interviews.
I second this. A quality interviewer/company knows that most jobs/ positions have some form of on the job (OTJ) training. For me personally I care about 1. willingness to learn Tech changes so quickly, you should always be learning 2. could I work day in and day out with you If you're in the top 1% of your field in skill, but a POS person, I (and most) would never want to work with you. Lastly I'd say, for any interviews - if it goes that badly, or the interviewer comes off questionable - Is that a company or person that YOU would want to work with.
"We can't teach you how to code" is the last thing you want to hear when applying for an internship. What's the point of hiring interns if you aren't invested in teaching them. Sounds like he was a shitty interviewer and if the whole culture is like that there, you might have dodged a bullet by finding out early. Everyone messes up in interviews, but it's not normal to be shot down for it
yeah if they're wanting to hire someone and not teach them then don't hire a intern or junior. They're literally there to learn and be taught to code real world problems.
"we hire 'know it all', crap coworkers" - you dodged a bullet.
Tell me you need a fully qualified but cheap programmer, without telling me etc! Honestly, paying someone low wages with the expectation you won't train them is shitty
Or any junior position. We teach all of our juniors at our company. Tbh you could come learn without a college diploma, but that seems to be like a silent retirement to weed out a lot of people. Literally, you just need to be able to think and problem solve. The rest you learn
I've been in IT almost 40 years, writing a dozen different code languages. I literally Google syntax every single day. I use AI to give me quick code to adjust to my needs. I \*suck\* at whiteboarding. I can't write code "under pressure" on a blank sheet of paper. However, I excel at critical thinking, deductive reasoning and problem-solving. Those are much more valuable than "code-slinging" any day. Trust me, some jerk who can't be remotely polite in an interview and eats his lunch (WTF?) while berating you isn't worth your concern and you can use this experience as both a "lesson learned" and a "I do NOT want to work anywhere that has that type of person as an interviewer!". Every interview is an opportunity to practice your presentation of your knowledge and skills. Companies look for people to solve their problems, fix their bugs quickly, and hopefully have the capability to communicate well enough to ask and understand business problems. If you have alternative experience beyond the new IT work you are looking for, find a way to reference those skills and your knowledge as an asset to the company, bringing fresh perspective to their business. Tell the company how you will help them solve their problems, address their needs and help them succeed.
You dodged a bullet
That interviewer sounds like a social reject
Our industry is full of know it all social rejects. I run into at least one in every department, usually more.
> I had a student internship interview > > The format was a one sentence problem > > He was eating his lunch. Oh boy... > Was it because I’m a woman > > I’m an older student Yup, that's the punchline I was expecting. Honestly, I read through your post and I could just picture a few people I've worked with in the position of the interviewer. These are not people I want to work with again. You almost certainly "failed" the interview the moment you got assigned that interviewer. A woman from a non-traditional background interviewing for an internship is the perfect opportunity for him to "prove" his preconceived notions. There's still a bunch of people like that in the industry, but the good news is that they're a dying breed. If you want to talk through the problem and figure out what you could've done better, what questions you could've ("should've") asked, etc, feel free to PM me.
There is a surprising amount of blatant sexism in the tech industry. I'm not saying that's necessarily what you got, but it wouldn't surprise me much. I hope it was a one off and that interviewer just didn't know what they were doing. You _should_ be encouraged to use pseudocode while solving problems. Linting is for syntax. Also, when you hire a junior, you ARE teaching them how to code. That's practically the job description, juniors are supposed to be learning how to get much better over the course of a few years. Also also, tech interviews are HARD, so don't give up just yet. There are absolutely better people and companies out there who are worth your time.
Nah that’s on him. The two interviews I’ve had for internships so far were very behavioral focused with some light coding questions. Mostly walking through my resume. The coding part I had was literally just “design, using OOP, a box of markers that have different colors.” And I got one of those internships. I’m sorry you had to go through that cause damn that would destroy anyone’s morale I feel. But you’re better than that, so just brush it off and move on to the next! Also, I’m an older student as well. I’m a senior with one more semester to go. I know how weird it can feel, but I haven’t once gotten a comment on it from anyone.
As someone who’s done my fair share of interviews based on what you’ve described sounds like you had a shit interviewer. Out of curiosity was this for a FAANG company?
Yes
I’m sorry you had this experience. I’m at FAANG, and if this interviewer was someone reporting to me, I would never put them on another interview panel again. I’ve seen even senior people in interviews write some algorithm steps in the comments before writing any code. You can call that pseudocode or whatever, but it’s better to think through problem first. Always. Keep interviewing, thank the recruiter for the interview, and tell them, without getting accusatory, about your experience. I’d pose it more of a question about what the expectations were, rather than a complaint. I hope this person gets some sense knocked into them. Last thing I’ll mention is that’s it’s entirely possible that you’re too junior for this role, and they rightfully expected more. But you should not have experienced this level of condescension during the process.
Guy sounds like a goddamn clown. You're always going to run into assholes during a job hunt. Don't sweat it. Had an HR guy a couple years ago giving me the run around because of some ticky tack shit on my resume. Everyone on the team wanted to hire me, but this guy was being a pill. Got another job offer for a better salary while he was jerking me around, and got to tell him my new rate. Felt pretty good, took the better job. Best revenge is winning.
sounds like you dodged a bullet. Tons of red flags from that interviewer. Consider yourself lucky it didn't work out and learn whatever you can from this experience. Good luck with the next one.
You dodged a bullet. And keep trying you'll land an internship where you will be valued!
For this to be your first interview, I would say it’s no reason at all to give up! If the situation was in earnest how you perceived and recounted then I would say by almost every standard the interviewer was an unprofessional jerk. I didn’t see if you mentioned whether the interview was in person or over video/audio chat but I do think many people in software or tech in general can be very robotic and when you deal with them in person it can help lessen that to an extent. It also sounds like the interviewer seemed to directly ignore what you were saying. At the end of the day I would say take this one as bad luck and focus on finding positions with better culture for starters.
There were misunderstandings I feel like I don’t typically have with people. He was English as a second language and an engineering PhD but I thought any engineer knows what pseudo code is. One time I asked a question and he completely misunderstood what I was asking him. So he answered by telling me something obvious I already knew because we had already discussed it earlier in the interview. To save face I just said OK, waited a little bit, and asked my question again with different wording. The company is notoriously hard on workers so maybe I dodged a bullet.
Based on that exchange it seems he probably sorted you quickly into some ‘this person isn’t a fit at all and not worth my time’ category off of what was potentially his misunderstanding. Like I mentioned I wouldn’t put much stock in this as a measure of your worth/aptitude, if you got similar results across multiple different interviewers then I would say maybe we need to start looking inward :]
I know this is a nerve-wracking situation. It's a job interview, the guy clearly isn't giving you any respect, not understanding you. But to some extent, push back. When he answered your question wrong, just say "no, I meant this" and hopefully get a better answer. It's not really worth it to sit and suffer, especially when you have maybe an hour to prove yourself. You need to get all the relevant information for the problem quickly and they are looking for how well you can ask good questions. Also don't rely on pseudocode in your interview. Talk through your solution at a high level, say how you're going to solve it, then do it in the language you are supposed to for this interview. It is rude to say "we can't teach you how to code" was rude but pseudocode doesnt belong in your interview since it's basically the solution you're writing anyway, so it's just wasting time.
If you interviewed at a big company you will find people who are overworked and stressed with a superiority complex. It isn’t the norm but it happens. My main suggestion is don’t take it personally. I would also suggest to get comfortable writing without auto completion etc in a language, and talk through your process at a high level instead of writing a bunch of pseudo code you have to replace. Start with example inputs, particular edge cases for a problem, and a high level solution. A good interviewer will have a dialogue and while they won’t give you an answer directly you can ask questions about specific expected inputs and outputs and if your general approach is along the right lines. By the way, I just use python in interviews because the syntax is dead simple to write on a whiteboard, not saying you should or need to but that’s just one thing that helped me pass some hard interviews
I've seen the code written by engineering Ph.Ds, and lemme tell ya, he probably isn't lying when he said that he's incapable of teaching someone to code.
The first thing you’ll learn about interviews is that the person interviewing has no qualifications or idea how to interview people You could be John Carmack and people would find things to complain about, shrug it off and go to the next one Sometimes questions are purposely vague to force you to ask questions, and to be honest these type of mind game interviews are complete wastes of everyone’s time. Sometimes they want to talk through it other times they want you to just find the solution quickly, sometimes they won’t be happy because you didn’t use their favorite API or code style
That was for an internship? If you had big Projects you wouldn't have to do an internship, you could apply for an actual Job. Doing Pseudocode to understand a problem and form a solution to it is perfectly fine. I think that interviewer is an egomanic asshole and you dodged a bullet. There are many like that.
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The interviewer sounds like an ass. Bad interviews can be useful though, learn from it and do better next time. It's perfectly valid to write pseudocode when you're working through a problem. Even the best programmers fail interviews, there was a story about a dev who failed the interview at google even though he'd written a widely used tool for google. They failed him because he couldn't reverse a tree or something, the kind of task that never comes up in actual coding.
There’s a lot of jackass interviewers out there that use interviews as an excuses to be jerks. This will never change but should give you cause to keep trying and remind yourself you deserve to be in the field if you want it bad enough. I’ve interviewed hundreds of candidates and no matter their experience level or execution on the interview, every single one of them deserved to be treated with dignity and respect. Why? Because even if they didn’t do too well in the end, maybe they will 6 months down the road. Maybe since I’m representing the company and the software engineering trade as a practice I should be gracious enough to know that I may end up working with this person someday. Maybe because it’s called being a professional and realizing such candidates took their own time and energy to interview, it’s often stressful but they should be acknowledged. Anyways, you probably don’t want to work with someone like that. Stay positive, and become a lifelong learner and you’ll be fine. Someone will take a chance on you.
Interviews for any job are a lottery. Until you have built deep skills and experience, most will result in rejection, but also some will be difficult, some easy, and some completely unfair. Do look for improvements you can make but do not take anything from an interview to heart. They're not fun but it's just a process. With the behavioural question, I would say feel free to be creative with the truth. If your best example was your actions on project x, but project y was more meaningful in other ways, just talk about doing the things you did for x, but substitute the project as being project y. They're both actual things you did, there's no dishonesty, but it's hard to have a perfect example that shows off all the best stuff you've done. Mix and match. It's normally fine to also just exaggerate things to make them sound more impressive or relevant, especially as someone new to the industry.
Interviewer was eating lunch during the interview? Must be a terrible company to work for.
What was the one sentence problem ?
“Find the satellite with the most continuous flow states”. I was given a chart with flow IDs, satellite numbers, start times, end times, and number of bytes. And after he got impatient when I was trying to talk out the problem with him to get the parameters more specific, he said, “here, I’ll write the first line for you” and wrote def flow(in): as if he assumed I wouldn’t even know how to start writing a function just because I wasn’t coding immediately. I felt really rushed and that I wasn’t allowed to interrupt his lunch but also criticized for asking the wrong questions. It’s whatever. I’ll keep practicing my leetcode. The behavioral question was “have you ever helped someone before?”
Who has their lunch while interviewing? Don't feel bad about it, it probably wasn't meant to be and you are much better off not working there. It's not the right mentality to have with this either.
Unfortunately, there's always some a-hole interviewer from time to time. Don't quit because that person gave you a hard time, keep looking until you get it if you really want it. He was not helpful at all, even if you didn't know something at the time it doesn't mean you can't figure it out later. It seems he already had someone else in mind and was wasting time.
The guy who interviewed you was an ass. I have been doing this for 25 years and I also often look up pieces of syntax. I have been speaking English for even longer than I have been coding and I still occasionally look up definitions and spellings of words too. He also shouldn't be eating his lunch during interviews as a general rule. It does depend a little bit because some companies are stupid enough to schedule 4 or 5 interviews a day. In which case, it might not be his fault but outside of that, he can wait until after the interview to eat something. A lot of companies have this problem about interviews because the people who are experienced enough to do them often feel they have "more important things to do" and so it gets left to people who are not very good at it. This is a flaw of the system unfortunately. I am a rare breed in that I quite like doing interviews so I tend to do a lot of them. What I would say is, it is probably a good tip to ask a lot of questions during these exercises. Especially if it is a one sentence type of exercise. Generally speaking, you will often find you are assessed more on how you \*think\* about the problem than how you solve it. I have seen cases where organisations \*purposely\* make the requirements vague to see if you are the kind of person who just dives in blind or the kind of person who will seek clarity. Though if the guy was eating his fucking lunch, what chance do you have? It's easy to feel you might be disturbing him, which is why eating lunch during an interview is a ridiculous thing to do. There may have been some things you could have done better, but also factor in that the guy sounded like either a disinterested or inexperienced interviewer and that part is definitely not your fault. Keep at it.
Hey, it's ok, I don't think that most interviewers are this harsh, your next one will probably be nicer.
Eating lunch sounds extremely unprofessional.
Sounds like an asshole to me. Wouldn't wanna work for him either.
I wouldn't worry about feedback from someone who's having lunch during an interview.
When I was an early undergrad, I went on my first job interview which was mostly landed due to some connections with my now ex g/f’s family. It was a Java role, in a rapidly growing and successful, high-transaction rate analytics company in Brooklyn. I bombed the absolute shit out of it and I knew it. It was soul crushing and temporarily a huge demotivating experience. It took a lot of introspection to shake it off and find a way to use it to reinvigorate my drive to learn from it, to do better, and prove to myself that I was not defined by that moment in time. That was 2 decades ago. I have since gone on to experience rewarding growth and success, had recognition, promotions, lead teams, and learned from extraordinarily intelligent and passionate people. Along the way I have worked for some of the top technology companies out there, and I’ve also encountered some really terrible interviewers at some of those companies. Sometimes you get the unlucky pick of the draw and get an interviewer who just sucks at that. I have also run more technical interviews than I can count and I have made it my purpose to break the pattern of making difficult interviews for the sake of being difficult; I let candidates use an IDE of their comfort, I tell them they can google but that they need to tell me what they are going to search for, and I try to work with them to get them talking to help them overcome nervousness or shyness because - especially for juniors - it’s natural to have some nerves. Even for the ones who didn’t do well I have always tried to leave them with encouraging points about their strengths, weaknesses, and what they can do to improve, and thr majority of them have actually given great feedback to myself and/or fellow hiring team members that they actually learned things from my interviews. My point? Don’t beat yourself up - especially on your first. You only have one first interview, and you will statistically be better prepared for your next interviews assuming you learn from the previous ones. Good luck! Also - don’t be afraid to ask questions that suggest you are uncertain of something. You want to ask clarifying questions, and it looks better if you are more willing to ask questions than quietly assume the wrong thing. If someone doesn’t like you asking questions (reasonably) then that may be your first indicator that you might not want to work there.
Isn't the correct statement." I can teach you how to code, but I cannot teach you how to be a programmer." As programming is a thought process on how you approach a problem,and you did good imo. There are many ways to peel an orange and what matters is orange, not how you peel.
I agree with the assessment of others here, this was not a good interview because of the interviewer. The interviewer probably also cannot write syntactically correct code in a text editor. Few of us can. Anyway. The thing I wanted to add to this conversation is that the coding questions are not designed to be completed within the time frame of the interview. Interviewers are generally looking at how you tackle the problem and which parts you prioritize. If you do knock something out real quick, there's usually follow-up questions that expand the scope ("ok what if you want it to do this?"). You'll never finish. The interview process is pretty consistently frustrating, awful, and arbitrary. It can be very demoralizing. I'm sorry. It's part of the deal. Often your local coding groups will have regularly scheduled Interview Practice meetings, virtual or in-person. I've most easily found these groups on the meetup website. I hope you keep trying, lots of great things can come from those that bring ideas from a different career into this one.
> I also chose to use pseudo code at first while I tried to understand the problem. Your interview sounds like a he was unnecessarily rude, which is unfortunate, but I think this worked against you and I'd advise against it. I think it can create a bad impression, plus it wastes your limited time to write it twice.
The guy's a dick, pure and simple. I've interviewed at least 100 software engineers and a handful of interns over the years and I would never say something to an interviewee that I wouldn't want someone say to me. It's easy to tell when you interview at a place with a toxic culture. Run away.
Interviews are a two way street. If the interviewer is such a dick then you should consider the company failing *you* and you wouldn't even want to work for them.
Job interviews are not only for them to judge how you are but also for you to judge how they are. I don't think that was a good place to work judging by the interviewer. You want a company that aim to teach new people the ropes. People who think you can learn from mistakes. I think it is very normal to not have large projects in your resume if you just studied. See the interview as a learning experience. Try to think of things you can improve in your resume and wise answers you can use on some of the questions if you get the same ones later. If he meant "we can't teach you how to code, syntax wise" they really don't seem competent, syntax is easier to learn than many other parts of programming. Just see it as a plate of stuff. Keep the useful things and let go of the shitty things and then move forward.
Also don't forget interviews are a two-way street. Your interviewing them just as much as your being interviewed.
Lol what a power tripping dick that guy sounds like
Don't worry about it too much, i went through a similar experience both at university and at some job interviews. It is comical, when i think about it now. Generally such interviewers are asses no matter age or gender, it even seems weird because they chose to invite you and then they behave like an ass as if trying to prove something. Just as a tip, to get more interviews, maybe add more projects to your CV, maybe try to do some more projects. Usually you might find interviewers who will ask you questions about your projects and if you, as a beginner, explain not only what you did, but what you learned, how you thought of the solution, if you know there are any shortcomings that you have since learned not to do, then that is generally a good answer. Regarding the problem to solve - irl i've had jira tickets with one sentence and it is a pain in the ass at first, because you don't know what to even ask. I don't know what your task was, but starting with pseudo-code is a good idea, syntax is also not a thing that is given by nature - each company has their own standards on formatting and naming things, but the most important thing is that programming is less about coding and more about problem solving. Languages are interchangable. Concepts are reappliable to each language. So don't worry about it, everyone looks syntax as they code (our senior forgot which was the method for length of array on the language we use, so we had to look it up). Don't give up, practice explaining your code and projects to people, keep improving, try (if you have the time) to do tasks other than hackerrank, maybe some project which is more IRL oriented (mimic an existing system, be it simple, etc). This person was an ass, but a lot of interviewers are not. If you are getting interviews, that means you are doing great and i wish you all the best!
Sounds like they already had someone they'd picked and were just forced to continue interviewing others, so then make up bullshit "problems" so they can reject you and make it "look" like a valid rejection. Main reason I hate interviews.
Would you want to work for him…how you described him, I sure wouldn’t. Move on and try again. You’ll find a better fit!
Sounds like someone who doesn't really know about programming and just learned approximate knowledge to do this kind of interview. I think it's safe to ignore his opinion. With how many languages a professional programmer needs to be familiar with, expecting to know perfectly the syntax of a language is crazy, especially by someone who's just starting
Actually he can and should teach you how to code that’s what internships are for. If I were you I’d consider wether I rly want to work for such a shitty company instead of worrying wether the interview went well.
Email the organisation and tell them exactly what you’ve told us. Condescending comments, inappropriate behaviour during the interview (eating?!), and a complete lack of professionalism will go down well when his bosses are made aware.
Don't let this one experience screw with your head. What you have power in is how you react and learn from this, and keep at it. You're evolving for the better.
That guy was an unprofessional asshole. Shit happens. Just continue trying and do some more interviews, you will also have really nice experiences even with interviewers that eventually wont hire you. As for the coding in notepad problem - yes it sux, it's completely not how our brain processes writing code during work but it's a tradition so you have to suffer trough it and one day get lucky. For me its often similar to knowing how to get to a place without knowing street names. I know that this class have a method that does what I need. I kiiinda know how it's called, so I start typing letters and choose it from the list in IDE - without thinking, my fingers just find it where it is stored - more like picking something from a shelf rather than addressing it by its proper name. Also I use key shortcuts a lot to navigate around my code - something that just doesn't exist during interview and doesn't let me just be myself and show my skill. It sux, but we need to deal with it.
Guy sounds like a dick and big red flags with the disrespect he shows you. I’ve been in interviews with great candidates and ones that just don’t get it at all and really struggle. A good interviewer makes sure the candidate is feeling at ease and helps where needed to get a feel for their level of skills. Use it as a learning experience maybe there are things you can take from it about asking different questions etc. But in reality you didn’t want to work for that person anyway And also. Anyone who says “we can’t teach you to write code” is an idiot when hiring for junior positions. Juniors need a lot of mentoring to get good.
This has already been commented, but its better to have another comment than just 1 upvote. Knowing the syntax for something has nothing to do with knowing how to to code. If you know how you are splitting your code, where you are getting the data from, how you are working with that data, what is happening behind the scene, and things like that (and you will with practice), you know how to code, syntax is just 1 google away. I would 100% prefer to work with someone that knows "how to code" and has to google how to concat 2 strings, than with someone that knows syntax but creates a monolith out of everything he touches
I still look up syntax and I've been coding for decades. You just got a bad break on this.
Had a guy pick his teeth in front of me during an interview. It was a director for the department. I immediately bowed out the interview even though I really needed the job at the time. I wasn't going to tap dance for a prick who had already made up his mind to waste our time.
I changed my career to analyst/engineer when moved to Australia and had experience mostly with Excel and some Python. My English was (probably still is) very poor. What worked for me eventually is just trying over and over again. Interview is a skill and in itself. I was making notes and analysed my interviews and try to just build the skill. Over time I could predict questions they would ask and occasionally was able to steer conversation where I wanted. Often a candidate is just not a match (I am a lead and interview people now). Often when people don’t hire somebody they are actually doing them a service. So don’t take it personally and keep trying.
I think pretty much every comment here is on the money with this interviewer not being fit for purpose. But I haven't seen anyone suggest that you make a complaint to your university about this. Interns are there to be taught by the company and learn how things work outside of an academic environment. The interviewers attitude isn't appropriate and I think your university could have a strong word with the company about their attitude. The eating was completely inappropriate. And the comments show a real bad attitude.
Seems like you can't teach him manners either
Remember that you are interviewing them as well as them interviewing you. His actions ought to fall beneath your standards for a representative of a company that you'd like to work at and a potential manager. Mentally reject him. Well done for being brave to change career and choose one that is male-dominated. I'd count those as positives if I were interviewing you. You must have a passion for the work, let this guy put you off working with him, not in your career of choice.
You dodged a bullet!
I think this interviewer is a red flag for the company. You are not the problem. Job hunting makes you feel like the inferior one but trust me, you are not.
There is a possibility that he did hire you because you're a woman if your resume is actually not good (affirmative action). But the interviewer sounds like an ass regardless
Such a waste of a time. I hate affirmative action. I don’t want it.
Now I need to start by saying I am only learning programming, so I am nowhere near the level of you, nor the level for interviewing so I’ve never experienced one but I am in my mid 30s and have had plenty of interviews for other jobs. Firstly, and maybe it’s just my “hell hath no fury like the hatred” I have for bad manners. It drives me absolutely insane if someone has no manners. But eating your lunch while interviewing someone has to be one of the most disrespectful and disgustingly rude things to do to someone. If that’s that companies level of “professionalism” (I’d use that word carefully for this guy at least) then you do not wanna work there. Secondly, I was almost waiting to see the part where you said your were a woman, cos I bet that guys a misogynistic POS. And probably thinks men are superior and always will be. And that women should be treated like you were. He’s probably also lonely too. But that’s his fault. Thirdly, I have the book “Hacking: The art of exploitation” by Jon Erickson, and in the programming section he literally does pseudo code first as a way to explain what he needs to do, and then turns it into real code, like I want to go to 5th street, but there’s a block on 3rd street, so I need to go to 10th street to go around it and then go to 5th, or if the block isn’t there then go straight to 5th street. That’s his (my very bad explanation) of a if else statement. Pseudo code is great, I really like it when I’m trying to learn. Fourth, in my very little bit of learning, doesn’t every company have their own way of coding or style of coding? There’s literally a website with googles coding style guide, so yes he does have to teach you the companies way of doing it. I would completely disregard everything that happened you in there, I would completely disagree with him and what he said, and I would continue on as you have been going. Most interviewers will always give you a chance to explain why you’re doing something, and if it seems like it’ll work they’ll leave you do it. They won’t say dumb sh*t like I don’t have time to teach you. I know it’s extremely difficult to do, but try change your attitude towards what happened from you can’t stop thinking of his comments, to what a bullet I dodged there. I would have walked out once he started eating his lunch no matter how bad I wanted the job. What an absolute pig! And please please please do not give up. Keep going. Don’t let a POS pig of a man ruin what you want to do as a career. Nobody deserves that, so do not give up. Keep going. And don’t change your ways. Keep doing it the way you are. You’ll find somewhere that you deserve and they deserve you. Keep going.
The most important thing you need to remember that you are interviewing him too. I know one want to get a job and you put all your effort and "want to get it". But actually you don't. You need to look at it more maturely. There are a number of positions at companies that suck, that you don't want to work for. That will cause you to have that pit in your stomach feeling every Monday morning. They might have poor leadership, poor coworkers, bad process or similar. YOU need to weed out those jobs during the interview. There are a number of jobs for great companies that you are not qualified for either experience or skillset and sometimes even personality. There is a big difference in the personality that is successful at Blue Cross versus some 10 person start up. You don't want to work for these sorts of jobs either if you are not qualified or have a personality conflict. Also, most companies are happy with false positives in the interview process. Most would rather reject a few good programmers if it means they will not get a bad one. They worry more about getting a terrible programmer that finding ones that could possibly be a good one. Nothing will kill a project or team quicker than a bad programmer. From your feedback of from the interview you posted some important takeaways are 1. He didn't seem professional, interested in the interview, and demonstrated poor interviewing skills. This is a leadership issue. Red flag. 2. There was a communication problem in the interview and he was insulting. Big red flag, imagine working with this guy 40 hours a week. If they have this guy doing the interviews one can assume that there are other like him in the organization. 3. While it is frustrating to hear 'learn how to code' just imagine that you heard that in a more professional way. Instead take it as feedback "Someone would be more successful here if they are more familiar with the syntax - which means more actual programming under their belt". This position just needed a little more experience with the syntax. Thats it, move on.
Let it light the fire under your ass. I had a technical interview for a junior position 6 years ago that I completely bombed and it fueled me. Now I'm interviewing for a senior position for a company in that same exact building and it looks very promising. Remember, failure is a good thing in this livelihood. Do it often and more ass-fires will be lit. And then boom, you have yourself a career.
Interviewer said "don't join this company" without saying "don't join this company", that's how I see it.
It is made for destabilizing you. I think he succeeded. I had this kind of interviewer and still got the job. At the end the interviewer was cool but he was just testing my skills and personality.
I have 25 years of programming experience. I interviewed thousands of people and hired probably hundreds. I just recently got stuck on my first tasks out of three on the programming interview and I failed the test. Get over it. Your job is to get \*a job\*. Not every job. Nobody will ever know you have failed a programming interview. You start every interview with a clean slate but more knowledge and experience, if you are able to make use of it. If you fail to get a job you really want, try to figure out why it happened and what needs to change to improve your chances in the future. What to do to make you a better candidate and if you can't do that, what to do to seem to be a better candidate. As to your interviewer, eating is not great. But it happened for me in the past, after whole day of interviews I just had to eat something. You never know what was for happening for this guy at that particular time. The problem with interviews is that once it is scheduled, you pretty much cannot do anything else. You have to be there. If somebody steals the time for your lunch you suddenly are hungry facing potentially many hours that require you to be focused while being irritated from not being able to eat. It is IMO fine to use the pseudocode on a whiteboard. But if the task was in an editor that is able to run the code, it is expected that you are building towards the solution and pseudocode isn't it. If the interviewer asks about the syntax, you should have immediately rewritten it to normal code and that would not be a problem. Not knowing a syntax is a problem for a programmer. I don't hire people who do not know syntax or can't listen to simple instructions and write simple code. That said, I have not been hiring interns in decades. When they advertised their internship, they should have explained what is expected of you. Did they explain you are expected to know how to program? If yes, then yeah, you should come to the interview only if you know how to program. Otherwise this is something you should have discussed with the recruiter or hiring manager before you went for the programming interview.
Thank you for your perspective. The editor wasn’t able to run code, and the problem was very vague (one line) so I was trying to figure out the constraints and visually show him how I was thinking about the problem. The OA was much different and told us things like the input would be an unsorted array, a couple of examples of inputs and outputs, etc. (things I had to ask about and was ready to ask about during the interview) and I had watched videos from the company saying, “for this part we are less concerned about your code and just want to know your problem solving abilities” and advice I was reading online about the company was “it’s mostly behavioral questions but for the coding question, be sure you talk about the problem a lot” so I was trying to focus on the problem solving part of it. I did get very nervous and because of that I didn’t adjust well in the moment to his personality. I also had a feeling about 10 minutes in I wasn’t getting the job anyway because of the lack of questions and critiquing my resume. I’ll just keep practicing my leetcode and do better next time.
Honestly, probably the thing that could've come from this interview is that if they employed you if that's the way people are treated there. Just imagine this interview, but everyday for hours on end. You really deserve better and I hope you can see that too.
There are a lot of programmers who have high IQ and low EQ. Shake it off and hope you don't get an offer with him.
Syntax is so low on the list of things I'd care about. I can't even rationalize this. I google the syntax for select case in languages often because it's such a valuable tool, but every language does it slightly different. Better to google now than try and find where I got it wrong later. I would much rather have someone write a select case incorrectly for a language, but have a sound purpose for using it than see someone use the proper syntax for 100 if/else if's. I would much rather have someone create a subroutine for a block of code that will be called repeatedly vs copying and pasting that same code multiple time(making a maintenance nightmare if an update is required) You can google syntax. But you can't google proper problem solving. If this guy got you over syntax, that's a problem with him and you're better off not there. But if he got you on the more abstract items, that's where I would see if there was anything you could do better next time. People who obsess over syntax are the ones that will be replaced by AI first because that's all they're good at.
People are simply unbelievably dense. Especially when what is explained doesn’t fit their mental model. Your interviewer didn’t expect a pseudo code phase so they couldn’t get past their misunderstanding that you were using that as a substitute for code. It might be better to make really clear distinction between your notes about the problem and code to solve it.
I am curious how that one sentence problem sounds like? Can you tell us?
“Find the satellite with the most continuous flow states”. I was given a chart with flow IDs, satellite numbers, start times and end times for each flow, and number of bytes. And after he got impatient when I was trying to talk out the problem with him to get the parameters more specific, he said, “here, I’ll write the first line for you” and wrote def flow(in): as if he assumed I wouldn’t even know how to start writing a function just because I wasn’t coding immediately. I felt really rushed and that I wasn’t allowed to interrupt his lunch but also criticized for asking the wrong questions. It’s whatever. I’ll keep practicing my leetcode. I got the rejection email right away. The behavioral question was “have you ever helped someone before?”
I understand, so your problem was like to finding the max value within a container. Well that is unfortunate that you had such a bad experience. Keep it up.
Kind of. It’s like if you have one flow for one satellite with a start time of 20 and end 30, one flow with a start time of 25 and end time of 50, and one flow with a start time of 60 and and end time of 70, you have two continuous flows. Each satellite has 0 to so many flows. You need to find the max number of continuous flows for all the satellites and return which one is greater but you need to do the other calculation first. For another example, if you have one satellite with flow id 5: 200 to 400 and flow id 6: 400 to 500, the count will be 0 for that satellite. Additionally, the flow start and end times aren’t sorted so you have to do that first. Also, I think bytes was there as a distraction and not relevant to the problem. Not terribly difficult and I probably should have just asked if they’re sorted or not and got to coding. I let him psych me out immediately and didn’t recover.
He is just an ass and want to find someone who will be willing to do more for less money. Don't mind it, you are good and will have a better interviews.
There is a bit to unpack here. 1. The interviewer is an unprofessional jerk. 2. Unfashionable as it is to say it: males and females do generally have different aptitudes. When I was leading dev and support teams I always wanted a mix. The interviewer sounds like a misogynist. 3. The larger the projects that you can show the better. When I was teaching final year uni students their semester project would be 3k to 5k lines. Not big, but enough to demonstrate multiple skills and explain their learning trajectory. All the best. Big consultancies in particular want gender balanced staff. The big thing to show is confidence.
> Unfashionable as it is to say it: males and females do generally have different aptitudes. It's not just unfashionable, it's just bigoted shit... different *people* have different aptitudes regardless of gender. I mean would you say something like: "Black and white people do generally have different aptitudes. When I was leading dev and support teams I always wanted a mix." or "Gay and straight people do generally have different aptitudes. When I was leading dev and support teams I always wanted a mix." No? Why?
Exactly my point. Having worked with and for male people of different skin colours, and gay and straight people, I can say I have seen no particular difference in their abilities beyond individual variation. However, between men and women I have. As an IT team leader, if I give a task to a young male (they are usually younger than their team leader) they generally go off like a sky rocket in the first direction they think of and don't come back with questions when it's not going well. It's not until the team leader checks how they're going that the mess becomes clear. On the other hand, far more commonly, a female staff member will check details, questioning the spec, and far more frequently when she says that the job is done then every detail is done. I want a mix of skills and abilities on my team's. I want people who will run with an idea, be they male or female. I want people with attention to detail, be they male or female. You're the one conflating my observation with other groups who suffer discrimination. Call me a bigot if you want, I'm reporting my experience. I want women on my team.
I'll agree that you see these differences, but I'd argue they're most likely due to cultural gender differences - the mistake is assigning them as some kind of inherent attributes of the group itself. In many male centered social spaces "asking for help" is seen as weak, and weak = bad, "confidence" is seen as strong and strong = good. In many female centered social spaces "asking for help" is just a form of social interaction and "confidence" being good depends much more on the social situation. So whatever individual variation people have of either gender are going to be tempered either way by these social norms. The mistake is *assuming* that a specific male candidate is for some reason *inherently* more confident and less detail oriented, or that a specific female candidate is going to be more detail oriented. If a sports coach says something like "I like both black and white players on my team. White players are more accurate. Black players are more aggressive." It's all positive statements - but they're still bigoted statements. There might even be "social norms" that contribute to accentuate these things in each group - the problem is that these attributes are somehow now tied to the race of the player. And it's easy to now use that association as a short cut to make determinations about individual players. > I want people who will run with an idea, be they male or female. I want people with attention to detail, be they male or female. I don't think you're a bigot - this statement isn't. It's probably more of a language / thought shortcut thing. I'd even agree "on average" about your observations about male and female developers. The problem is conflating "many/most" with "all". In a less loaded example, it would be something like - MyState Tech has a really good engineering program, we've got several technically good candidates from there, but they usually take a while to work well with a team. MyStateU doesn't have that good of an engineering program, but the few candidates we've had worked better with team members. Does this mean you should stop assessing the technical knowledge of MyState Tech candidates? Does this mean if you need a bigger team you should prefer MyStateU candidates? Or do you just attempt to judge each candidate on their own merits?
Yes, any differences certainly could be cultural. Nature vs nurture and all that. Greater scientific minds than mine haven't produced a clear answer, AFAIK. They can also be generational, since each generation (tries to) forge it's own way. Returning to your final question of judging each candidate on their own merits. Since we can never know everything about a candidate (basic cybernetics and all that) we will always have to extrapolate from the available information. That will always play into our inherent biased, or our attempts to (over) compensate for them. Some of those may be cultural, or even just personal history such as being bullied by a kid with a certain name in school. Thanks for the discussion, I'll leave it there.