First red flag :
I was told at the beginning of the tech phone screen call, that this would involve a shared coding exercise but had been given no advance warning as to what would be required.
Second red flag :
The problem presented required specialist knowledge of specific image compression theory. No problem I thought, giving the interviewer the benefit of the doubt that they were a reasonable human being and I would be able to get clarification along the way about the data structure so that I could solve the problem. What happened through the rest of the call would prove that I was wrong.
Third, fourth, fifth red flags :
The interviewer gave a vague "explanation" of what the data type was and what the problem to be solved was. It was unintelligible and he often mumbled his responses no matter how many times I tried to ask different questions. He seemed purposefully and unnecessarily cryptic.
I spent over 15 minutes trying to get a clear explanation out of him with no luck.
By this point I was more than half way through the time allocated to solve the problem.
I politely concluded that the interviewer had no understanding of the data structure let alone how to solve the problem without the fore-knowledge that he had.
He impatiently wanted to push on without even helping me understand the problem clearly.
I started to write some code while he watched someone who he had denied any understanding try to solve his interview hazing question.
While I was able to get fairly far I was well aware that the code was not going to solve the problem. He never came across as genuine in his communication at any point. In fact he even used the word "perfect" for describing part of my code when I knew that it was flawed.
A few days later on a Saturday morning I received a 'no-reply' cookie-cutter rejection email.
The positive part of the interview was that it didn't go beyond this and it told me everything that I needed to know about this company :
- That it's culture is not collaborative and doesn't inspire trust.
- It's not at all interested in assessing if someone is intelligent or skilled enough to solve a problems from first principles.
- It's engineers are possibly incompetent but definitely disingenuous and sadistic.
- When it's hiring managers no longer have a use for you any basic common decency toward the candidate vanishes.
