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I had a pretty lovely live coding interview back in September at a company that flew me out. The task was to complete a web application (or get as far as you can anyway) in roughly a day's worth of work. HR set up my flight to arrive at about 12:30, which means I didn't get to my hotel until 1am or so. I was scheduled to get picked up at 7am and start programming by 8am. I definitely wanted to get a good night's rest so I asked to push it back by an hour so I could be sharp and at full power. They at least agreed to that much, but they didn't budge on the 4pm deadline which, gave me one less hour or so to work with. Additionally, the day was split up into segments like: come up with data model, get it signed off by DBA, have lunch and chat, resume programming, followed by the presentation. Because they didn't adhere to their own schedule they had set up for me (I got my modeling done ahead of schedule but my DBA guy was late on top of that), I had even less time than was intended for an already timeboxed challenge. The application itself wasn't that crazy - it was a timeclock app where you input tasks to track them through to completion. The other devs there were goofing off a lot, shooting each other with nerf guns and playing video games - which was cool, I guess it left the feeling of a relaxed work environment, which I super dig but at the same time their expectations seemed misaligned with that kind of culture. Some older dev was sitting across from me and I watched him pound 3 or 4 beers between lunch and my presentation. Come time for the presentation, I wasn't entirely happy with how far I got but I went ahead and gave it my best shot anyway. At some point the subject of automated tests came up, and I talked briefly about how and why I thought they were important to use in development. Beer drinker guy chastises me in front of everyone for not having written tests for this app. In my head I was, like "YEAH gently caress YOU I DIDN'T WRITE ANY TESTS, I BARELY GOT SOMETHING PRESENTABLE DONE". The entire dev department (as well as remote employees) sat in on the review and it felt... incredibly one-sided. They were all silently judging me while I had to maintain composure and give some show of confidence. Really, toward the end of it I wasn't even that upset or anxious - it was such an absurd experience that I started to find it funny. There was one guy who was super friendly and kept thanking me for my time and telling me he still had nightmares about his coding test. The rest were stone. I decided from that point on that I was going to be more careful about what job opportunities I'd take seriously. It's like, I get that the intention was to see how well I could hack it given some constraints, but I felt like they could've come up with a more reasonable way to vet candidates. I repeatedly got the impression that the devs didn't hold themselves to the standards they were holding me to. All in all, a shitshow.
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Mar 28, 2016 01:11
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 07:22 |
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Cicero posted:Did you post a review on glassdoor? Because I'd post a review on glassdoor. I've been meaning to. You're totally right, I should. Thank you for the encouragement.
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Mar 28, 2016 01:18
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