So... how is that "worst" interview experience? You probably haven't seen really bad interviews. My favourite was switching conference rooms until we ran out o

So... how is that "worst" interview experience? You probably haven't seen really bad interviews. My favourite was switching conference rooms until we ran out of time and the interviewer thanked me and invited for a next session. There was also one when the guy was late 30 minutes to a 30 minute interview. And the one when they spent 1h with me and at the end told me the position has already been taken. I had one where interviewer smelled really, really bad -- I left when I learned he would be my boss. I also had one where the guy said he is "best programmer in the world". I thought he is joking. Unfortunately, he wasn't. He became my boss. I left a month later when his code failed in prod (he parsed XML by specifying a line and character number to extract piece of data) but he blamed it first on the vendor (they apparently changed the format when they turned off pretty printing) and then on me (I haven't even touched the code). Apparently he never makes mistakes -- he always blames somebody else. To be fair, I have also a lot of "bad candidate" stories. Like a guy with a lot of knowledge who says at the end of interview he doesn't want to get hired, he just came to exercise before going to another company. From my PoV as interviewer I think the only real egregious error here asking the candidate to write in unfamiliar language. It doesn't matter what the language the project uses, the whiteboard needs to use language that is comfortable for the candidate. We can discuss knowledge of the language as a separate issue. Now, asking the candidate to write a particular algorithm on a whiteboard from memory is just a waste of time. The purpose of programming exercise is to see if the person knows how to program, not if they have memorised particular algorithm. Writing an algorithm like merge sort could still be productive if the interviewer has first explained the algorithm and then asked to implement it. But I still feel merge sort is a bad choice -- I prefer simple task but one that I created myself so no candidate is familiar with it. I am interested how the candidate works on the task and how he can communicate with me to solve it. You would be surprised how many candidates dismiss hints they are being offered.