The shortest, strangest engineering interview I've ever done

In case OP reads this:

You didn't do anything wrong. Odds are that "Adam" was a scammer. Perhaps he doesn't know how to code at all and was looking for a job that would hire based on his resume, let him cruise for 2 weeks while "onboarding," let him flail around for 4 weeks, be put on a PIP for 2 more, then fired with severance after getting 8 free weeks of bay-area pay.

Or perhaps he does know how to code but was looking for a second job (to do the exact same thing I mentioned above).

You didn't do anything wrong. You just dodged a bullet.

I'm really on a kick these days applying Maya Angelou's quote to people in our industry: "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."

People who say arrogant things, even in a light-hearted joking tone, often truly are arrogant. Whatever people show you early in an interview process is often true. If they show you good things, believe it. If they show you bad things, believe it. If they either get off-track or hyper-focus on the wrong things... believe it.

I've been on h.news for 12 years, but rarely post. Mostly listen and learn. This one just hit me.

I do a fair amount of hiring. In the past 5 yrs-ish, I've seen a new level of arrogance in interviews. People can (and do) think very highly of themselves. That's ok. But the outright person-to-person rudeness and breakdown of simple courtesy is new. My suspicion is the prevalence of social media as a primary comms method for many, and its tendency to stoke open conflict, has lowered the bar on what is considered "acceptable" in interpersonal contact.

I'm a pretty kind and forgiving soul. But folks like that go on a special list. I don't want to make the mistake of letting that particular person pass through in future hiring rounds. That kind of naked toxicity can kill a team, or at the very least, create a giant management and HR headache.

"Adam" will eventually figure out that everybody you pass on the way up, you meet on the way down. Experience is what you get just after you need it.

As someone who has acted in a similar way, I would strike this up to mental health issues. He feels he has the power in the relationship and gets his jollies off playing the big shot and trying to tear you to pieces. If this is a foreign concept to you then you are probably emotionally stable and not consumed by self obsession and fear. Again, I have been this way in the passed, but have hopefully worked it out with professional help and happy pills :).

Normal people don’t act like this. They need help. But until they get help it’s best to avoid feeding the monster.

The first mistake was not tossing the application after "Yes, I'm the best". If this is the vibe he's putting out at a time when first impressions are being made, not sure why you'd expect anything different later. This played out very unsurprisingly for me (though I gotta say, I haven't seen that level of negging from a candidate before). Perhaps there are shades of Nigerian scams here: "if they eat up my original ridiculous message, I bet I can get away with more."

I’ve hired at the largest tech companies and the smallest.

Generally you filter out toxic personalities as an absolute priority so this interview was a success.

I also think your process is appropriate for a smaller company. The key difference in my experience is that at the big high paying companies you filter on red flags and the green flags are just checkboxes that must all be passed. At the startups which simply can’t match on salary you have to instead hire on green flags instead and allow some red flags to pass. It’s harder to manage but it’s the only choice you have. So your interview which looks for green flags and is ok with some potential red flags was a sensible process.

Adam seems too naive to understand that different companies by necessity have different processes. Smaller companies are more informal and are looking for green flags not red flags. He couldn’t pass even at a smaller company willing to allow some red flags to pass.

> By the way, I hope you don’t mind, I’ve added an AI note taker to the call.

BTW, I recommend disclosing this and getting consent before the call.

By the time they've joined the call, whatever service you're using has already captured the person's identity, face, and voice.

And we all know how our field is currently respecting privacy, rights, and even existing regulations, especially in the current AI goldrush.

I used to think "they'll tell me what to build and I'll build it." I was plain wrong. Good business doesn't work that way. The more correct way to think is "we're going to figure out together what makes sense to build, from many perspectives, and then we'll build it iteratively and collaboratively."

That implies that on the way to success there will be a lot of communication, push-back, changing requirements, slipped deadlines, disagreements, compromise, shortcuts, refactoring, team meetings, celebration, interviews, promotions, and growth. The best companies have people who work well with other people. The best companies don't need prima donnas.

There are many possibilities around the candidate's behavior. They could be going through a manic episode, or autistic, or just a jerk, or scammer.

OP handled it well, but two things I would do differently in responding.

1. "Sorry you feel that way". I never apologize for other people's feelings, only my own actions, when am am sincerely sorry. "Not-really-apologies" are, IMO, always in bad taste.

2. Not sign emails using "best". Best what? Obviously this is up for interpretation but a dangling best is (IMO) corny and exudes "I am writing unnaturally and I think this is how professional people write"

That's the reason why you still need to do interviews. Do feed out such folks. Even if you only catch them by accident.

Wow. Dodged a major bullet. Your process is very similar to how I would like to run interviews on both sides.

I expect that guy is playing a different game - looking for overemployment or obligated to apply for a certain number of jobs per week. He might also just be in a really bad mental place right now and unable to see not everyone is stupid and against him. Absolutely doesn't excuse the bullying and rudeness but might be part of an explanation.

If Adam reads HN maybe these comments will push him to reflect or get some help.

This is part of why we still need to do interviews!

Job interview for a potential hire: Candidate had a decent resume with previous experience, had passed the initial non-tech interview, and seemed excited about the job. We talked about the job and how they would approach doing it.

Came to the part of the interview where we do about five minutes of sample work - very basic, no tricks.

Candidate opened up screen sharing, stared at the screen for a few seconds, and then unleashed a tirade about about how much they hated the role we were hiring for and that they had quit their previous job doing this because they passionately hated this job, etc.

It was shocking to have them go from excited about X to ranting about X. Still don't know what was going on.

The funniest part of this is that this is an incredibly nice / chill interview process.

Given how everything went it seems clear that Adam was just trolling from the start. He seems awfully bitter about something else in his life and decided to harass an interviewer. At least he did it in a somewhat novel and amusing way so that Daniel could get a good story out of it!

How to tell the difference between someone who's been burnt a few times too many and someone you probably don't want to work with in one easy conversation.

Hiring is a hard problem of computer science, maybe even harder than naming things!

dodged a bullet. this guy is an asshole, regardless of his skills. imagine him interacting with junior devs

I hope none of the "decline" feedback I sometimes offer comes across like Adam.

Recently was one of the biggest feedbacks from me.

I got an outreach from a third-party recruiter I hadn't talked with before, for head of engineering at an early startup.

Not even screening call yet, I asked a quick question, they answered it and gave the name of the company, and I spent a few hours of due diligence...

The actual business model they were telling business journalists sounded very predatory. Especially considering they seemed to be making very different claims to consumers (and, apparently, to recruiters) about what they do.

So I messaged the recruiter, thanking them for reaching out, unfortunately not a match, and quick bulleted feedback on why, for their eyes only: (1) I wouldn't be able to build a good team to work on that predatory and deceptive stuff; (2) some other thing, about how the company was incubated, and why that would be unattractive to a lot of early startup eng/tech leadership; and (3) a suggestion to get the actual business model from the company, and be upfront to candidates about it (or have people keep dropping off late in the process, or leaving soon after they join, whenever they realize).

I figured the recruiter would either round-file or respect that. But now I have this "Adam" stereotype to try even harder not to sound like. :)

I'm kind of more curious how this guy even got an interview in this job market, meanwhile I'm getting maybe 1 every 30 applications.

This article seemed to be going good/interesting places, with a few good questions to explore, but then (as told) it suddenly degenerated into someone who appeared to have a personality problem (or going through a really difficult time).

Not only did the personality thing derail other topics in this particular conversation, but the Adam character is tainting some valid points by association.

And what’s with this GitHub thing, I know a lot of employed software engineers that can get the job done and have no GitHub commits.

To play devil's advocate, talking to the head of customer success seems concerning, not because it's not relevant, but because non-engineers risk not being objective in their assessment. At the very least, the head of customer success should not have veto rights in the interview.

OP - I felt like he was contemplating all along (to do or not to do the interview) & suddenly made a decision during the interview. He wasn't prepared to end the interview gracefully. Even if he is an excellent coder, I don't think he would have helped you much.

It could be worse, he could have been hired and then turned out to be a remote North Korean worker using fake ID!

https://x.com/zachxbt/status/1824047425822310580

He hinted at wanted to be convinced to work at the company. It seems as if he wants people to just know he’s good and people offer him the job instead of applying for it. It’s a bit contradictory since he applied for the job in the first place.

Looks like the interview process triggered him and your intuition was right about it.

> Yes I am the best Node/React developer in San Francisco by far.

This reminds me of candidates who put "Expert in C++" on their resume. To me it's a good indicator that someone is on "Mount Stupid" of the Dunning Kruger curve[1].

[1] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-12-28

This is why you interview.

Unrelated, please don't use platforms that don't let you zoom in on images with very small fonts.

On my phone it was really uncomfortable to read the messages back and forth

Feels like the guy was a douche, sociopath or some kind of scammer. It's not worth interacting and definitely not worth trying to figure out what happened.

Fun red flag things candidates have said to me in interviewing:

1) Me: I see you have a PhD in computer science, what was your thesis topic? (Because I hadn't managed to find their thesis)

Candidate: Object orientation

2) Candidate (for a unix sysadmin role): I don't see how these questions are relevant to the role.

Me: I do the role currently and these questions are a selection of some of the more interesting shell-scripting things I've had to do in the last couple of weeks.

Candidate (yelling over the phone): I WROTE THE LINUX KERNEL (they didn't have any linux kernel code contributions and weren't even active on lkml)

3) Me: Here's an interesting challenge we're facing right now. See it's right in the hot path of some code that gets called a lot and basically we need (as fast as possible) to count the number of bits that are set in millions of flag variables. How would you approach that?

Candidate (with a smile, leaning back, arms crossed): You're never going to interest a pure computer scientist in optimizing a O(1) problem.

I was given a job "offer" for an international company without any interview whatsoever. It seemed like a scam so I insisted the recruiter set up an interview with the hiring manager. I blew them off as I was traveling for another interview and at least one party was definitely shady. I got a call from an irate recruiter while in the airport returning from a successful interview. Their comeuppance was a delight.