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Programmers of Lemmy, what are your interviewing horror stories?
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this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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I had an interview where they asked me to set up 3 micro services (with full functionality), a Kafka broker, a frontend and to configure everything to run on Kubernetes.
According to them this would take "more or less 4 hours" and those hours would obviously not be paid.
I'm still not sure whether they were just trying to get free work out of people or if their expectations for what a software engineer is supposed to do in half a day are completely absurd.
I had an interview like this, it was supposed to be Pair Programming which i had been doing very well for 5 years in RoR.
I get to the interview and they haven't actually done any pair programming, they WANT to.
And the interview was 'write a tic tac toe game in ruby on rails in one hour'
And they literally had nothing, we were in the zoom call the guy was like 'okay go' but every time i asked him any questions he told me to just do whatever i thought was right and he didn't want to influnce me.
I got RoR and dependencies and apache installed and either finished or almost finished mariadb in that hour but i was doing it all over my own home internet so didn't really get very far and they seemed really annoyed!?!
Then the best part was the senior programmer told me that they don't have time to do code reviews and all the engineers just merged whatever they wanted into master, but it was fine that way. I think he didn't like having anyone review his code.
LOL
That last part is a nightmare
Oh my god I hate that, just set up an entire infrastructure before you even get to the question. The very least they could do is set up the cluster for you so you wouldn't have to spend the time
If they are familiar with these task a solution can get outlined with words easily.
The author summarized it perfectly.
The biggest red flag is how all over the place the task is. They were trying to test every single thing they could come up with at the same time.
I had a similar task to
"Set up a web service, load balancer and infrastructure to scale it to handle a large amount of requests. Harden the security of it to the best of your ability. Document how it works, how to scale it, why you built it the way you did, what measures you took to harden it and why, and any future improvements you would suggest. All code and documentation should be production quality. This should take about four hours."
Maybe you can write this code in four hours, but all this documentation and motivation as well? Fuck off.
They also asked for a made up report from a security audit (this was for a security engineer position) containing a dozen realistic vulnerabilities with descriptions, impact assessments, and remediation suggestions. Once again of production quality. This is at least six pages of highly technical, well researched, and carefully worded text. Four hours is tight for this task alone.
And if those are their expectations going forward they can keep their position. Imagine doing twice that much every day.
it's definitely free labor for them, they're incompetent and likely checking notes on how other more competent people would approach deploying in whatever fashion they want to