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This is strange... Suddenly everybody agrees with raganwald. Who's been posting those negative comments then? In my experience, technical interviews are always

This is strange... Suddenly everybody agrees with raganwald. Who's been posting those negative comments then? In my experience, technical interviews are always about passive-aggressive attitudes and open demonstration of "I'm smarter than you are, now prove me wrong" mentality. Every single interview I've been at was just like that. I remember one guy asked me "do you even write unit tests?" to which I gave up and honestly answered "why are you even implying that I don't?". This was one of the first questions and the dude had absolutely no ground for phrasing his question this way. For god's sake, ask me about my favorite book, or about my favorite computer scientist, or about my favorite programming language - there is so much you can talk about figuring out what kind of an engineer I am. A typical programming interview is a sham: an interviewee googles questions and an interviewer googles answers, and the job offer comes as a positive probability of them googling the same thing. And the most ridiculous thing of all, is that more often than not, after drilling you on various hashing techniques and optimizing tricky algorithms in space and time and quick-sorting bible on a whiteboard, they'll assign you to a high-school level job - pushing SQL statements and HTMLizing the output, web 2.0 style. Yikes.

Periodic 17y ago
I have to agree with the passive-aggressive mentality being common. I think all the nervousness surrounding interviews shows how adversarial they are. For how aggressive some interviewers are, I believe half of that aggression comes from the interviewee. If they start with some passive-aggressive questions and you get defensive then you're just as much a barrier to communication as them. When you read someone else's answer to an interview question and are struck by how well they answered it is rarely because they had a witty answer that stunned the interviewer, but rather that they were open, honest, and entirely non-aggressive and so were able to show how smart they really were.

Periodic 17y ago

I have to agree with the passive-aggressive mentality being common. I think all the nervousness surrounding interviews shows how adversarial they are. For how aggressive some interviewers are, I believe half of that aggression comes from the interviewee. If they start with some passive-aggressive questions and you get defensive then you're just as much a barrier to communication as them. When you read someone else's answer to an interview question and are struck by how well they answered it is rarely because they had a witty answer that stunned the interviewer, but rather that they were open, honest, and entirely non-aggressive and so were able to show how smart they really were.