Show HN: I wrote a review of my last job review

Please withdraw my application for UnnamedCompany Software Developer position. Soon after my interview on Friday, I received a written offer for another position that I accepted.

I must admit that my technical interview was incredibly troubling, so much so that I believe it is essential to share my concerns and hopefully with HR.

Normally in a Zoom call, only video and sound are transferred via the Internet, however, Interviewer 1 was successful in transferring his apathy as well, if that wasn’t enough Interviewer 2 was late.

As I mentioned my frontend skills were moderate at best and absolutely everything on my resume is truthful. However, I was asked very detailed questions about the front end, far beyond my knowledge, which I openly declared I didn’t have an answer. The next question was about “ES6”, which I said that I had no knowledge of and I responded by asking if he was even looking at that correct resume? Interviewer 1 didn’t respond but appeared that he need to recalibrate his computer desktop.

Interviewer 2 asked me a question or two about AWS load balancing. I have never been in a position where I had to work with that type of AWS, typically that would be either Dev Ops or a programmer that was assigned a secondary task of managing AWS. (There is no discussion on my resume about advanced AWS load balancing.) In my experience, I can’t imagine a front-end developer also going all the way back in the stack to deal with load-balancing issues? I have never been in any team where this would happen and by the size of the teams that you have at UnnamedCompany I can’t imagine that would be the case.

Never once was I asked a question in Laravel, Codeigniter or PHP. Interviewer 1 and Interviewer 2 conducted a traditional coder interview, where they can feel good about themselves by asking hard and ridiculous questions so they can play a game of “gotcha”. It also allows the coder to feel important about themselves as they regurgitate the correct answer to a captive audience.

Make no mistake, I’m sure my feedback will be negative from two inexperienced coders forced to make interact with something other than a chat room. If your organization is really looking for quality people that add value to the team and not just write code, you might want to hide these stereotypical coders in the basement, out of the light of human contact. After dealing with these two, if they are the slights indication of what a team looks like at UnnamedCompany, I am really dodging a bullet and for that I’m thankful.

Cheers,

interviewee, 10 years experience PHP