3 ms·

It is on everyone who is not in a desperate job seeking situation to push back on any practice you deem wrong. Expect a respectful and fair treatment throughout

It is on everyone who is not in a desperate job seeking situation to push back on any practice you deem wrong. Expect a respectful and fair treatment throughout and when you're being manipulated, take the initiative. If you can tell the interview isn't going well, why not leave on your terms? "My experience and expertise is in A and B, and it seems the job is more about C and D, maybe this isn't a good fit? Ok thanks, pleasure to meet you, let me know if something comes up related to A and B. Bye". Only you can keep the other side honest. Do it for your own dignity and for all the others who really need a job and will put up with anything.

johnnyb9 10y ago
I regret not doing this the few times lines were crossed (on one interview someone ridiculed me for not being able to answer a ridiculous math question because I went to a top CS program).
bsvalley 10y ago
If you do that you'll end-up jobless. It is not a candidate's market right now :)
- laughfactory 10y ago
  I disagree. There's always jobs for valuable candidates. It's average to below-average candidates who find any market challenging. I believe in always having standards, and if you run across this kind of bullshit, set them straight and move on. The reason this kind of crap persists is because too many people put up with it.
alexandercrohde 10y ago
This is actually something I did one time, and I'm glad I did. I was enduring a scala phone-screen and the interviewer kept asking questions of the form "What's the #1 reason people use recursion?" "What are the 3 common examples of monads?" When he told me the main value of recursion was avoiding state I disagreed with him [e.g. a chess engine is highly-recursive potentially but shares state]. He kept going with all-or-nothing questions and then responding to my answers with "eh..." Eventually I said, "Hey can we put this on pause for a second? I'm not sure how you think this interview is going, but for me it's not feeling like it's going so well... I feel like the questions I'm getting asked are really put-you-on-the-spot type questions and then you're disagreeing with my answers but not explicitly so I don't even get a chance to explain my position. After a while he said "Listen I need you to prove to me why you're better than 9 other candidates," at which point I knew I couldn't work with this person at a personality level. To that I said "Well I need you to prove to me that you're better than 9 other companies." For some reason he kept talking and eventually went to "Can I give you some advice?" I said "Look man, I'm not too sure why we're still talking honestly. I want to be honest, I think at this point it's pretty clear you don't want me to work for you and I don't want to work for you either." He said "You don't want to work for me?" Apparently he couldn't even tell that he had gone so far over the line that I confronted him, something I had never done in an interiew in my entire career before. "Nooo," I chuckled. In the end, I'm glad I only had this awful experience when I was 30, because if I had been new to engineering at the time I might have blamed myself.

johnnyb9 10y ago

I regret not doing this the few times lines were crossed (on one interview someone ridiculed me for not being able to answer a ridiculous math question because I went to a top CS program).

bsvalley 10y ago

If you do that you'll end-up jobless. It is not a candidate's market right now :)

laughfactory 10y ago
I disagree. There's always jobs for valuable candidates. It's average to below-average candidates who find any market challenging. I believe in always having standards, and if you run across this kind of bullshit, set them straight and move on. The reason this kind of crap persists is because too many people put up with it.

alexandercrohde 10y ago

This is actually something I did one time, and I'm glad I did. I was enduring a scala phone-screen and the interviewer kept asking questions of the form "What's the #1 reason people use recursion?" "What are the 3 common examples of monads?" When he told me the main value of recursion was avoiding state I disagreed with him [e.g. a chess engine is highly-recursive potentially but shares state]. He kept going with all-or-nothing questions and then responding to my answers with "eh..." Eventually I said, "Hey can we put this on pause for a second? I'm not sure how you think this interview is going, but for me it's not feeling like it's going so well... I feel like the questions I'm getting asked are really put-you-on-the-spot type questions and then you're disagreeing with my answers but not explicitly so I don't even get a chance to explain my position. After a while he said "Listen I need you to prove to me why you're better than 9 other candidates," at which point I knew I couldn't work with this person at a personality level. To that I said "Well I need you to prove to me that you're better than 9 other companies." For some reason he kept talking and eventually went to "Can I give you some advice?" I said "Look man, I'm not too sure why we're still talking honestly. I want to be honest, I think at this point it's pretty clear you don't want me to work for you and I don't want to work for you either." He said "You don't want to work for me?" Apparently he couldn't even tell that he had gone so far over the line that I confronted him, something I had never done in an interiew in my entire career before. "Nooo," I chuckled. In the end, I'm glad I only had this awful experience when I was 30, because if I had been new to engineering at the time I might have blamed myself.