DISCUSS: Technical Interview Horror Stories

In this week's Ladybug Podcast episode we discussed the frontend technical interview process.

Technical interviews are terrifying, and I'm sure we've all had bad experiences. Hopefully talking about why our experiences were not so great can help educate the tech ecosystem about how to give a great technical interview!

I'll go first.

Years ago, probably in 2016, I was interviewing with an overseas company. It was a startup and it was a product I genuinely liked. I had a great talk with the recruiter but decided to pull out of the interview process as I was unprepared to move abroad at the time.

I truly had a great experience with the recruiter though so I wanted to stay in touch.

Fast forward two years later, I re-connected with the same interviewer except this time was... not so great.

He called me at 6 am my time (due to time zone differences), and proceeded to badger me with technical interview questions like "whats the difference between const and let?", which I explained correctly but he made me feel like I gave the wrong answer.

I was duly unprepared for the technical interview questions, and explicitly stated as much, yet he kept throwing them at me.

Not only that, but the recruiter seemed like a different person.

The first time we interviewed he was SUPER down-to-earth and made me feel special. This time around he started the conversation with "have we met before" which threw me because A) we spent a lot of time communicating and you made me feel like you remembered me through email communication and B) you clearly didn't take two minutes to check if we had previously interviewed.

He even was answering Slack messages during our interview because "my teammate is having Zoom issues and I'm the only one who knows how to fix them."

Horribly unprofessional.

I left the interview and told him "thanks but no thanks."

He just reached back out to me (a year later) and needless to say I won't be following up with him.

What's your technical interview horror story? Leave it below!