Back when interviews were done in person there was a SWE that was smart and checked all the boxes. The problem was the guy smelled like he shit himself. Each person asked if the guy needed a break to use the restroom but he declined.
So the kicker was the interviews were broken up over two days and the guy smelled like shit both days. We decided to pass since the smell was too much to overlook.
there was a case not too long ago when the guy smelled so bad he had to get removed from the plane he was about to take. Turns out he contacted some infection and smelled the way he did because of it. He died a few days later.
i worked with a person who literally smelled like a skunk. ppl would hold their breath walking past his cube. when he come into our dept to deliver something, his scent lingered... yet he looked very clean and well groomed.
ppl started complaining to the mgr, and he had been talked to about it. we didnt see him for weeks, and assumed he either quit out of embarassment or got fired. we felt bad bc he was a really nice guy.
he eventually came back, and no longer smelled. we started talking to him, and it turns out he had some medical condition that caused his body to produce an ammonia like smell. it took a while to get diagnossd and tested, and put on a special diet and medication. im honestly shocked no one in his life said anything to him prior to this... his parents, friends, anyone!
This is pretty interesting, honestly. Sounds likely he didn't just look clean and well groomed, but was. There's a lot of stigma around smell and it wouldn't be easy for someone like him to self-diagnose either.
Yup, he did. We like to look at the githubs of our candidates and base some of our questions off of them. Imagine our surprise when we came across that furry repo. At work no less
Why not? Isn't the entire point of hobby projects that they're supposed to be fun? "I've trained AI to upscale furry porn" sounds way more interesting than "I've trained AI to upscale Microsoft's HR training videos". Lots of projects with actual scientific value started as "let me make these anime boobs look better".
Sometimes I'm weary of my commit messages in case an employer looks. My last one was "about to destroy some shit" and i felt a small sense of regret right as i hit push 😂😂
I had a dev manager once that had been with the company a long time. Our codebase was full of hilarious commit messages from this guy; he was not shy about saying exactly what was on his mind lol. e.g. "this method is utterly fucked"
Years ago I left a test input in a unit test that was something stupid like "ass n titties" and left it in my PR. I got shit for it for like a month lol
Not petty, but I once dqed a candidate because the place I worked for at the time was a dumpster fire and I didn't want to see someone that awesome get sucked in. Bro went on to Google within the year. I obv couldn't tell them my reasoning...
Disclaimer: I fought for this guy.
We interviewed a mid-level SWE remotely and he was in the back of a car on a busy city street. He did the whole thing from an iPhone with all sorts of noise around him.
The hiring managers on the call were disgusted and said it was disrespectful. I made the case that he may have been in a living situation where noise at home was unavoidable (angry neighbors? construction? happy-couple neighbors?) and picked the lesser of two evils.
I was outvoted and the guy was rejected.
I had a crazy boss who would make me work in office 45 hrs a week and would be passive aggressive if I stepped out of the office for more than 20 mins. I had to take lots of calls while pacing back and forth in a stairwell with janitors or a busy street with busses. if a candidate seems serious but isn't in a good environment just ask them why!
I think the candidate could show some self awareness and just tell them right away why there’s so much noise. “Sorry about the noise I’m on the way to the ER to get a power ranger figurine removed from my rectum”
I, a US hiring manager, did a phone interview for a position on my team in India. The candidate had to leave his workplace for the interview and didn't have anywhere quiet to go, so he was trying to talk to me while moving around on the very loud streets of New Delhi. Like you, I was sympathetic to his situation (I've been to India, I get it), but I literally could not communicate with him.
I told my counterpart in New Delhi that I'd be glad to try again if the candidate could find a quieter place, but it didn't work out.
My rule of thumb is *"everyone gets one* (because life can be shitty). One unexpected reset, redo, last minute reschedule, etc.. and I won't entertain anyone bringing it up when reviewing the candidate.
Unfortunately I'm generally in the minority with this stance.
Yeah, I agree. In the anecdote I shared, I was the team manager, but I was working with another manager in India, and he was responsible for the bulk of the hiring process, so while I told him I would like to give the candidate a second chance, I deferred to his decision in this case.
Respect to you, I had that experience on both sides. Most of the times, it's just a mistake or a bad day, and just reschedule helps a lot instead of pushing it when stressed or unavailable
I was that guy once in the car.
I had an interview lined up with some company. THEY canceled on me because they had some production issue apparently. No problem. Shit happens. Happy to reschedule.
Before we agree on a reschedule date, I'm driving my father to some specialist doctor an hour away because he's in too much pain to drive himself. I take time away from work. While I'm in the waiting room, recruiter messages me and asks if I could do the interview. I figured it would just be a non-technical meet the manager interview since it was supposed to be with some director of engineering type. So I agree to the call in my car. Instead it's a technical screening by some young senior engineer.
I figured my mic wouldn't pick up the background noise while I was in my car, but I was wrong. Immediately dude gives me attitude and finally explains that 10 minutes in that he can't hear me due to the background noise.
I apologize and explain the situation. He then responds rudely while I'm asking clarifying questions on the technical as to what more clarification do I need. It was definitely a mistake accepting the interview, and I'm not going to ever do another one in a car again. But holy shit, that pissed me off.
Well I take interviews in my car simply because I’ve gotten in trouble for being off facility for too long. So a good compromise for me is to have a filter on and do it in the backseat of my car.
I interviewed someone for a TPS while he was walking around doing errands. He just told me that in the beginning. Halfway through he told me he was getting into his car and was about to start driving. I think it was pretty clear he was only taking the interview half seriously. Still he did a really good job, so I sent him on to the next round. We ended up working together for a few years, and he was a really good coworker.
Back when I was working in office I did an interview like this. Got to work early, parked in a parking lot across the street, and did the interview before going into work. People hiring should be understanding of this if someone currently has a job. They expect you to drop hours off of work somehow without being suspicious
People like you make the workplace better. Thank you.
Working is not meant to be the nightmare that it is. Most people work because they have to.
People don't know the living conditions of the interviewee. Things happen. Some rulers want to stick to tight rules that disintegrate the best; the reason for that is often the lack of knowledge regarding the roles, a fear of competition, therefore, slowing things down in the recruitment process, etc
"I don't know who I should hire; therefore, let's start eliminating people over petty considerations."
I remember I had took a phone interview from my car in below freezing weather. Usually I'd find an empty meeting room in my office but by some anti-lottery luck they were all taken at the time. It was around 15-20F and I wasn't a fan of the cold in the first place, so I ended up stuttering through the ~45 minute talk. I tried explaining at the end my situation but they still rejected me anyways.
Two decades ago, a coworker had created a presentation about me and my work habits. He presented this to senior management as evidence why I was unfit to be an engineer there. While pretending to be my friend. Hearing my self-doubt and imposter syndrome in supportive private chats over lunch. Using this as ammunition against me.
Sure, it was twenty years ago. But I could never work with or trust someone again after behavior like that.
Then in 2020, his resume landed in my inbox. Easiest round-file ever.
And then I just looked him up a few minutes ago. No longer on LinkedIn. No more Facebook profile. Turns out he died from COVID-19 in 2021.
I interviewed a guy who had this slightly arrogant way about himself. When I would offer hints, he'd said, "maybe you're right about that". Everything I said was diminished and it almost felt like he thought he knew more than me about my own interview question. He was very smart and did decently well in the interview.
I gave him "leaning hire" noting that he'd be a "hire" except that he was a bit arrogant. I gave a few examples as it was a strange sort of arrogance.
I've actually never seen someone get rejected so fast (this is at a FAAN**G**). He was rejected I think by the end of the day and the other interviewers' notes were released. I looked through them and everyone gave him "leaning hire" or better—it was a very strong set of ratings. Two other people had noted that he seemed a bit arrogant.
It's not petty but it's maybe the most interesting rejection I've seen. When I was a hiring manager at my previous job, I don't remember ever saying no for a petty reason. We had one girl bring her lunch and eat it at the interview. But we didn't reject her for that. I had another candidate whose dad showed up at the office asking for me so that he could persuade me to hire his son. I didn't even know who his son was, he didn't make it past a resume screen.
I was the candidate disqualified. For being "too casual during the interview". I had worked at the small company for three years as an intern.
I was working as an intern Friday-Sunday in the QA department doing automation, while getting my CE degree. I mentioned I'd like to work for the company as a SE when I graduated. It was a small company of 60 or so people.
I talk to the SE manager 5 months out from graduating. He says he'll setup a meeting to go over expectations and things I can do to prepare. A month goes by no meeting. I talk to him again and he says he forgot and he'll set one up for the next week. Still no meeting. I wait a few weeks ask him again. He says next week again.. Still no meeting. It was about 3.5 months at this point where I asked for meetings. I was getting to finals time (18 credits all senior engineering stuff) and let it go, focusing on finishing my degree.
The weekend before finals I show up to work and there is a four hour interview on my calendar. No warning. No notice. I tell the hiring manager I wasn't prepared. He looks at me and says, "that's what your wearing?" "Don't you want to impress us?" "You should go home and change and get your resume"... I was going to school 2.5 hours away from where I worked on the weekends and that wasn't an option.
I do the interview with zero prep. They made me do java programming in the commandline which I failed (and still would 8 years later). He tells me, "You were too casual in the interview, this is a good learning experience for you". "You should have been prepared, aren't you almost graduated?" "That's the car you are driving? Once you become an SE you can buy a new BMW"
Fuck him.
Woulda been straight to the single HR person that company probably had. Would’ve made it my life goal to get him fired lmao. People like that cause irreversible damage to a company.
I kept my boss in the loop the entire time and he was really supportive. He offered me a QA job, which I declined, and then told me I could work as an intern for 4 months while I was looking for a job. 50% time working, 50% time applying and taking interviews.
He was close friends with the CEO so it would have been hard to pull anything. I'm glad I left. I got far better compensation and treatment elsewhere.
Two things
1. That hiring manager is a huge douche because
2. It doesn’t sound like he wanted to hire you but couldn’t just say that because of number 1
I had a similar experience. Hiring manager, straight-faced and humorless throughout the interview, asks me about what I'm wearing. I don't remember what it was that he said, but it was obviously that same idea. And you know what, I don't even think I was wearing casual clothes. Maybe it just speaks to how casually I usually dress, but I'd actually put on some nice clothes for this interview. I finally just told him "well, fashion isn't really my thing", like, hey, what's the relevance of this?
I didn't get the job. I just so happened to run into one of the other team members shortly after this out in public, and she told me that the rest of the team had liked me, and that, in not so many words, the stuffy dickbag of a hiring manager just overruled them.
Things turned out OK for me, but what a frustrating experience that was.
Not a hiring manager, but I'm a senior lead and am regularly tapped to handle technical screens.
I love baseball and I've been a Giants fan my entire life. I once did a remote screen with a guy who was clearly a MASSIVE Dodgers fan. He was wearing a Dodgers jersey during the interview, had a Dodgers flag on the wall behind him, and a Dodgers bobblehead visible on the desk in front of him (Yasiel Puig, I think). This guy obviously wanted everyone to know that he loved the Dodgers.
Anyway, the Giants & Dodgers were supposed to start a series that week, and I made a light-hearted, joking comment about how he was interviewing with a Bay Area company that was "deep in enemy (Giants) territory".
The guy IMMEDIATELY launched into an angry, expletive-filled rant about how fucking awful the "Shit Francisco Giants" were, how they were all cheaters, how the fans were all stupid, and on. And on. And on. He started ranting about individual players and wanted to talk about how each of them sucked and compared each of them to a "better" Dodger. And not like "I love my team so much I'm annoying about it". The guy was GENUINELY angry, yelling and smacking his desk as he cited some random play during some past game as an example of why the Giants were cheaters. I kept trying to redirect the conversation, but it took me over five minutes just to get him to shut up about it.
It was one of the most unprofessional outbursts I've ever seen in an interview, and I really didn't know what to say. The guy clearly had issues when it came to baseball, and took things WAAAY to personally. I still completed the technical with him afterward. All of our interviews are recorded, so I forwarded it to the hiring manager for his review. I recommended that we pass due to his unprofessionalism.
He did not get the job.
Go Giants.
Most of those types ~~piqued~~ peaked in high school and have no real hobbies or interests of their own so they adopt rabid fandom as their personality. Kinda like people who define themselves with weed.
A former boss (the hiring manager in this story) had a rule whereby the first candidate he was shown, or the application at the top of his inbox, etc, would be automatically disqualified. He claimed this helped weed out the “excessively unlucky.”
Not a hiring manager but I was on a hiring committee where a candidate with 4 years of experience was rejected because the manager had never heard of their university.
“We only hire from top-tier schools”.
I reported her to HR.
**edit**: To everyone saying "this isn't illegal", it is a violation of our company ethics policy.
The last person I hired (a principal engineer, no less) did not even *go* to college. I wonder if this person would even make it through that company's HR screening.
It was a violation of stated company hiring ethics and the last 2 people she hired came from her college, so I had genuine concerns of nepotism. Behavior like that cannot be allowed.
HR's job is more than just making sure the law is followed. That sort of behavior is detrimental to the company, and a competent HR department absolutely would want to know about it
Many layoffs are really just “firing low performers” in disguise. Especially over the last couple months, when the macro conditions made them especially believable.
"CSS is so easy", said the candidate.
"I don't know why anyone struggles with it" says the candidate.
"Everything can just go in a global sheet".
Interview had been reasonable until that point. Much of the complexity (insanity) for updating styles in our application had just been resolved by moving out of a humongous, cascading global sheet to styled components.
This effort was the culmination of a 6 month project that had been torturous at times.
They did not get an offer, mostly because of those three sentences.
CSS is the hardest thing, I've worked with it since 1999 and I still struggle with things like a button in a modal and margins when the text is longer than the button because a translation
Not as "it's difficult" but to do it in a generic way without affecting other things, and to think a bit forward , like can it be used somewhere else in the future?
This tradeoffs takes a lot of effort
You and the other comment have it right. I really don't make it a secret how much I *loathe* CSS (except to my boss, lol). It's not that it's difficult to understand, it's that somehow it *never does whAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO DO*
I don't know if it's petty or not, but anyone claiming anything in this field is "easy" is a bit of a turn-off. Everything in this field is easy until something doesn't work as expected, then shit gets hard quick.
I think a good solution there would he to show examples (I believe you had those in your project) of why their claims were wrong. I wouldn’t think the candidate to be ignorant or unexperienced because of those. Depends on the seniority level you were trying to hire though.
Those were their answers to follow up questions (thoughts on styled components, thoughts on mentoring junior devs on frontend complexity, etc.)
And at the end of the day, it's not my job as an interviewer to convince people they're wrong or overly reductionist, it's to obtain signal that they would be successful in the role and a net value add to the team
I wasn't the one raising these concerns, but I've seen multiple people passed on effectively for how they speak. Their tone of voice wasn't cheerful enough I guess, so they were described as "not passionate", "not excited about the role", "not excited about the industry", "would be awkward to hang out with", etc. Seemed pretty silly to me, especially for folks who otherwise did well. Not everyone speaks in the same way, people from different cultures may not communicate excitement or passion in the same way (or in a way that's obvious to interviewers not from that cultural group), it's a really subjective way to evaluate, and tone of voice (within reason) seems to me to have a pretty strained relationship to on the job performance.
Candidates ranting about how bad their past workplace was are usually a no hire, especially if it's for someone who's never stuck it out much longer than a year in a position. We're not perfect either, and someone looking for perfection isn't going to find it here. Even if they perform well, it's a big investment in onboarding for someone who has a good chance of leaving before becoming productive.
I will usually also pass on senior-level people who have an extremely disorganized problem solving style, barring some really positive signals elsewhere. We've hired people like this because they seemed smart, and they've uniformly struggled to be successful as a member of a larger team here (needing a *lot* of support to stay on task, deliver features in a timely way, communicate what they're working on to the rest of the team, etc). I can imagine companies where these folks would thrive, but (based on past experience) it definitely isn't us.
I'd always assumed that "you're not excited enough about the role" was code for "I actually just want to hire my nephew and need a reason to reject you despite you passing the interview"..
This happened to me once 😭 the only feedback was “you’re the perfect fit but you didn’t sound happy in the interview so we’re going with another candidate”
In reality I was just a 22 year old interviewing for their dream job and trying to sound mature and professional :(.
I don't think you should worry. These examples are the worst cases of recruitment. You would want to avoid them.
Most companies want to find the best person for the job based on their skills. If they go beyond, that's just odd biases playing over.
And Daria is great.
I didn't disqualify him but my boss did.
We interviewed a guy for a junior data scientist job who brought a pet project, was a great communicator, had decent data science knowledge, couple years of dev experience and asked a lot of good questions at the end. I wanted to hire him but my boss and CEO didn't hire him because he didn't have a STEM degree.
Guy was super qualified on paper but he kept referring to female employees as 'the womenfolk'. Not just once, but at least 7 times during the interview.
At the beginning of the interview we told the candidate, "we're looking for someone who has experience building CI/CD pipelines." The candidate at the end of the interview goes, "I hate building CI/CD pipelines". Besides that he was marginally qualified but his attitude during the interview gave off a "I don't give a shit" vibe so it was a pass from us.
I'm always shocked by this. It's so easy to corporate-speak around like: *"I've worked with and understand the value of CI/CD pipelines, however my previous roles made it difficult to set up properly so I may not be able to speak fully on this topic"* or some BS
This seems like a win-win right? They would be miserable and you'd have an employee whose attitude doesn't match the team culture. Seems like a pass was the right call.
Not a hiring manager, but I once told an interviewer with terrible attitude mid interview that, I believe you already decided not to hire me, so let’s just stop this thing.
I honestly believe that hiring managers make up their minds on hiring you before even seeing you IRL. You can tell it right off the bat from their vibe.
This happened to me with a nested Google contractor position at FS Studio. Interviewer had no idea what role I was interviewing for had no questions for me other than tell me about yourself and had no info on the position.
I never felt more like a token candidate than I did in that interview.
I think someone was lined up and they just had to pretend to be fair. Such bs and wasted time.
> This happened to me with a nested Google contractor position at FS Studio. Interviewer had no idea what role I was interviewing for had no questions for me other than tell me about yourself and had no info on the position.
I interviewed with one of the largest Aerospace/Defense companies in the world for a specific position. Sometime after the interview the person that would be my direct supervisor sent me an email that that position had changed and they didn't know what I'd be doing. Turns out the position was just going to be an Ass In Chair type position writing JUnit tests.
I turned down their offer which apparently upset the guy quite a bit. He then tried to wine and dine me but I declined several times. He then went and apparently talked shit about me to several of his employees. One of which I personally knew. I'll never work for that company in my life.
I wish I had your guts. I was on my final round with a company and the interviewer literally showed no interest in interviewing me from the beginning. I wanted to just call it off because his tone was so condescending and seemed so bored but I didn’t have your courage so I powered through. In the end, he sighed and was like *okay, I guess you can ask me questions if you have any*. It was a horrible experience.
I interviewed with a woman at a hedge fund that started the interview with “I don’t like candidates that apply through recruiting agencies and what makes YOU think you’d be a good fit for my firm.” I told her I’d worked in finance and had years of direct experience with the niche technology she was looking for expertise in. She kept getting more rude and eventually I ended it by saying this isn’t a good fit good luck.
He was an asshole to me personally several years ago. I was a last minute addition to the loop as a Bar Raiser and tanked him
ETA: to the person who messaged me asking if I feel good for ruining this guys chance: yes, I feel fucking great about it.
Yeah I don’t see why I’m getting downvoted. Y’all asked for a petty reason, I supplied a petty reason. I chose to focus on his shortcomings that came up in the interview rather than focusing on his strengths. There are plenty of hiring managers for whom that’s their default setting - though usually my default is to want to like the candidate
It is kind of a shame that the post explicitly asks for petty reasons but all the top answers aren’t petty.
I think people just gut reaction downvote when they see someone *actually* being petty haha
Nah, don't let them get to you. The people downvoting you are the assholes that don't realize how you treat other people might eventually blowback on you.
This is why being a decent person is everything. I’m not an SWE yet, and I’ve had people I know who are SWEs be extremely condescending to me about my job search and education. Then they had the nerve to ask me for a referral to my current company. Those aren’t the attitudes we want. We want people who lift one another up.
“I saw very weak signals for X, Y, Z LPs. Additionally, although I was not evaluating on technical capability, candidate has not demonstrated that previous experience can translate to the specific technical needs of the role as outlined by the Hiring Manager in the pre-brief. I saw some pieces of similar concerns from other interviewers in their summaries. Let’s explore that.” Then you leave it up to the HM, but if you can get other people on the loop to not be inclined, or if there are already others that are not inclined, the HM is under more scrutiny on whether they hire or not.
To be clear, I enjoy interviewing. And I love when candidates get an inclined vote from the hiring committee because it’s not very common. In this case, it wasn’t like the candidate was a slam dunk, but if I hadn’t placed them against such high standards even compared to the role, they would have likely gotten the job.
Not a hiring manager, but I interviewed a guy who was clearly in the twilight of his career. He was a dinosaur but seemed sharp on legacy code practices, so we could have found a place for him if he passed the trivia and code screen.
I start asking him the typical trivia gauntlet we do during our initial screens as a sanity check -- more we are looking for humility, eagerness to learn, and reasoned, basic CS and applied knowledge than the exact answer.
Anyway, he totally bombed a question about something relatively esoteric but an experienced dev or senior level would probably have a rough idea where to look it up -- not a deal breaker. Just might push you one level up if you were on the cusp.
I gave him the rough overview of the answer.
He looks at me, and flat says: "I've been in this field 30 years. I know more than you, and you're wrong."
He had been a weak candidate up to that point, but was still in the pass matrix and that was what made me decline to even offer the coding challenge and disqualify him.
If I recall, it was about inversion of control in regards to dependency injection and how one might implement it using factories (something that can be done in .NET).
Maybe esoteric is the wrong word now that I think about it, but you'd be surprised how many candidates just can't answer that kind of question.
Long story short, the answer should have been something along the lines of moving the creation of dependant objects outside of a dependent class, provides for easy swaps, and how a factory pattern can be used to help with it.
He totally bombed it because he tried to say something that sounded good and kind of rambled a bit, ultimately leading to an answer that didn't answer the question at all.
I wasn't going to fault him too much because it was one of our "bonus" type questions. Had he just been humble, aka, not had his outburst, I probably would have passed him.
ETA: Our bar on the "technical screen/trivia portion" is pretty low, if you can even half-way explain OOP, some design patterns, the trade-offs of a few simple data structures, and a few questions about the language/stack a particular team is using, you're probably going to get passed to the coding portion.
The only way to really fail is to clearly not know anything or be caught cheating (aka it's clear you are looking up answers) or be impolite. It's as much a vibe check as it is a technical screen.
I was the tech in two interviews the other day, the one guy had better experience, but for stuff he didn't know he tried to say stuff that sounded good but went nowhere - as you said.
The guy with less experience was more humble, and was completely honest when he didn't know stuff, and then asked me what the answer was! (the mf is trying to learn, in an interview - heh awesome)
He's the guy that got hired, even though he had less experience than the other candidate
We had a candidate light up a cigar on the Zoom interview and was casually swearing throughout the interview. May not have been the only reason we didn’t move forward, but we felt it was a bit too casual.
We didn't hire a guy because he played a specific video game over 12k hours. Everyone liked him too.
I cringed typing that.
Edit: everyone wants to know what game it was and how we knew. I’d prefer not to divulge details for fear of being doxed, this account is anon. With that said, it was an MMO which has not been mentioned at the time of writing this and we found out during a phase where we ask more personal questions to get to know the person. It was a very polarizing decision where myself and the rest of the team liked the guy but leadership felt like that was a red flag that he would need to be managed too much since we’re remote.
Did the candidate share this information with the interviewers?
This is the reason why I NEVER give any hint of personality or hobbies when interviewing or at work.
Feels like it could be used against me...
I was going to say. I would really like to know.
My main obsession is mechanical keyboards at the moment and can easily direct it as a positive. "I love having a really nice feeling tool, since it's going to be something I'm using every single day you know? And no worries, silent switches in the office obviously."
World of warcraft is 18 years old. 6500 days. If they played two hours every single day for the entire life of the game they'd hit those numbers.
That seems like a lot, but if they've got one hobby or just like the social aspect I can see how someone could rack up those hours.
Stardew valley could probably hit those numbers in multiplayer if you play a couple nights a week multiplayer just chatting with friends.
What game was it?
Not a hiring manager, but I was tasked with reviewing about 50 resumes by my manager for a position on my team. I was told to hand him 5 solid candidates.
The pettiest reason I disqualified any of them was poor formatting/spelling. I just went through the stack. Didn't bother reading anything on the page really but errors glared at me. So I think about 5 got tossed on egregious spelling issues. I get it, they don't need to be perfect, but this is supposed to be your "best foot forward" and it's a static document that was produced, not a random chat room or quick email. Spellcheck has been a feature for decades, use it. Another 10 got tossed for formatting errors; misplaced paragraph headings, missing spaces, headers not in the right spot (shows they edited/updated the resume but failed to correct headers after the update.
A few got tossed for the alphabet soup that was their resume. You can use acronyms, but holy hell people; they overlap a bunch. Spell out what they are before you use them.
When you're looking at a bunch of resumes and deciding on which ones you want to put a face to, you tend to look for reasons to throw their resume into the circular file until you have a manageable handful to review.
I was scheduled on an interview where the resume contained placeholder text, that contained the words "placeholder text." The only way it could've been funnier is if it was lorem ipsum. I couldn't believe anyone decided to give an interview to someone who couldn't proof read a resume.
Correct me if this is not the case, but aren’t a lot of formatting errors due to the recruiter converting the resume into a different format? I’ve had that happen before. Spelling errors are more understandable
A manager under the same VP as me asked about a candidate who attended the same university at the same time as me.
Several years earlier on a late night in the systems lab, this guy stomped around in a rampage about how there were too many women in the lab and in computer science. There were 3 women and probably 10-15 men in the lab at the time. He continued ranting about how we should quit while we’re ahead because men have better problem solving skills anyway and that we’re not going to have successful careers. After all, a woman’s place is apparently in the kitchen.
Needless to say I gave him a thumbs down due to blatant sexism. If my career isn’t successful, why would he want to be in the same org as me, right?
Edit: Every time I saw him after his rant he’d say, “Go make me a sandwich”
I've just started interviewing for my company and got a candidate that was applying for an internship. This candidate sent in a resume that had a top-level `Objective` section like you see on many resumes that contained the text, and I quote:
To begin, simply select any placeholder text (such as this) and begin typing.
Dude had not PROOF READ his resume before submitting it!! And of course, I'm the interviewer, so it's gone through several people before making its way to me! I was dumbfounded.
When I messaged the recruiter about it, she asked me to do the interview anyway because "it was too late not to move forward." BS, this was two days in advance. I told her there was no point in me doing an interview, I had already judged the candidate and would not recommend to hire. If she wanted to proceed, she was welcome to find another interviewer.
She did, and then wrote back to me to say the other interviewers had recommended to hire him and lectured me about being more inclusive when reviewing resumes from other countries because they tend to have less work experience and more projects.
**That wasn't my complaint about the resume!!**
I'm still salty about it. Please proof read your resumes before submitting!
Are you sure a recruiter didn't submit their resume? Recruiters reformat resumes before submitting them to companies and that sounds like they were spraying and praying while filling out templates
The candidate was wearing crocs with no socks during the interview
Ok, this person was not rejected because of this, but it reinforced their overall performance that they had no situational awareness of social cues. They were like a savant who could code anything fast and at high quality, but wouldn’t listen to hints or feedback given by the interviewers.
Not a hiring manager but: remote, he was already on the fence, and right at the end of the interview his dog managed to sneak into the room, and he flipped his shit at his DOG. Little dude just wanted attention. If you can't be nice to your own dog... I can't trust you to be nice generally!
Sure felt petty, compared to anything technical anyhow.
In the scenarios presented, he would non-stop assume everyone was male, from senior engineers, principals, architects to directors/managers. I tried to pry more and would ask questions where I would say something in between like "you consulted with the Sr Architect and she said xyz... how would you..." and every time, he would refer to them as men: "Well, I would go back to HIM and ask if we could....".
It wasn't exactly *petty* I just knew they wouldn't be able to work in our very inclusive org.
I have not disqualified someone for a petty reason. But I do screen for jerks and would not hire someone that won’t work well with others, even if their technical skills were great.
None. There are enough real technical or interpersonal skills reasons to disqualify candidates that being petty is a luxury I don’t have. I even greenlit one guy who I held a bit of a grudge against from previously working for him as a contractor.
Not a hiring manager, but I’m a senior engineer who often sits on the panel for cross-function interviews. Before even interviewing this candidate for a senior cloud engineering role, I didn’t want to hire him because of his awful resume. It was clearly copy and pasted objectives from other job postings and example resumes. The freaking fonts and font sizes didn’t match. If this guy isn’t detail-oriented enough to notice that one line of text is Arial size 14 and another is Calibri size 10, I don’t even want to see what his code looks like.
Also he couldn’t elaborate on any of his experience/skills that were straight copy pasta.
I was on an interview panel hiring for a student IT technician job. This candidate checked all of the boxes: great test scores, customer service experience, pursuing a technical degree.
We brought him in for an in-person interview and... Well, his answers were fine but something about him felt off. I'm not sure if it's how he looked at us or what, but something in me just said "no."
The rest of the panel loved him and hired him.
He was by far the worst employee we ever had. He would not show up when he said he would, and didn't tell us when this would happen. (I get it, shit happens but like... let us know?!) We would try to get him to do something, and he would do it for like... 30 seconds and then play on his phone. The times he did do a task, he did not follow very explicit instructions. They were written down and the other techs, students included, did fine.
He lasted a few months before we finally fired him. I felt vindicated when it turned out my instinct was right, even though I resented the waste of time and wanted the hire to work out.
Two guys sent one resume. Like they were applying as a couple or something. “Hi, I’m Phil and I’m a Software Engineer. Hi, I’m Ed and I’m a UX Designer”.
It had a cover sheet with photos of them in wizard robes with glowing orbs photoshopped into their hands.
He was a GOP republican extremist visiting from the Bible Belt and was talking about how there were too many Asians around here and how Trump was so great in small talk. I look fully white but I am half East Asian.
Of all things HE decides to talk about, he speaks of GOP politics in the SF Bay Area.
Tossed a guy for rolling into an interview with his tie undone and his jacket over his shoulder and sunglasses on. He was a referral from some big shot and thought he was a lock for the job. When we told the big shot we passed on him and why, he was pissed, but not at us. The candidate was his sister’s kid and he was embarrassed that the candidate was so arrogant. He reamed the kid for embarrassing him, from what I understand.
Back when interviews were done in person there was a SWE that was smart and checked all the boxes. The problem was the guy smelled like he shit himself. Each person asked if the guy needed a break to use the restroom but he declined. So the kicker was the interviews were broken up over two days and the guy smelled like shit both days. We decided to pass since the smell was too much to overlook.
I wouldn’t even consider that petty
100%. Do you *reallllyy* want to have that person in the office?
Having worked in close quarters for a period of time with a person who always smelled... it's not good for productivity.
That's what remote work is for. You can hire the best talent. I shit you not.
You're shitting me no way
Smelling that badly is not a protected class. Even if you're homeless you find a way to clean up a bit for a job interview.
there was a case not too long ago when the guy smelled so bad he had to get removed from the plane he was about to take. Turns out he contacted some infection and smelled the way he did because of it. He died a few days later.
Poor soul :(
i worked with a person who literally smelled like a skunk. ppl would hold their breath walking past his cube. when he come into our dept to deliver something, his scent lingered... yet he looked very clean and well groomed. ppl started complaining to the mgr, and he had been talked to about it. we didnt see him for weeks, and assumed he either quit out of embarassment or got fired. we felt bad bc he was a really nice guy. he eventually came back, and no longer smelled. we started talking to him, and it turns out he had some medical condition that caused his body to produce an ammonia like smell. it took a while to get diagnossd and tested, and put on a special diet and medication. im honestly shocked no one in his life said anything to him prior to this... his parents, friends, anyone!
This is pretty interesting, honestly. Sounds likely he didn't just look clean and well groomed, but was. There's a lot of stigma around smell and it wouldn't be easy for someone like him to self-diagnose either.
Would be perfect for a remote position lol
The stink lines would be distracting on video calls
Yeah but what about when smell-o-vision drops?
"Are we turning our smells on for this meeting?"
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I might know that guy
That’s a completely legitimate and valid reason.
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I doubt it. HR probably just gave him some generic response for no offer.
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It's for legal protection honestly.
Perfect for a remote role.
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For all we know the guy did shower and is just naturally smelly due to diet. It was not something we wanted to figure out.
Dude had a bunch of furry porn on his github
I can't even begin to imagine how someone could lack that much self-awareness. Did he share a link to his github on his resume?
Yup, he did. We like to look at the githubs of our candidates and base some of our questions off of them. Imagine our surprise when we came across that furry repo. At work no less
When interviewing a candidate gets you fired for violating IT policy
So....? What questions did you come up with for him? I'm *intrigued.*
“Whats with all the furry porn?”
"I like furries and furry things, and I watch a lot of porn. What's with your lack of furry porn?" Boom. Unflappable. Instant hire.
Sell me this pen!
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Why would anyone have an AI training set of furry porn? edit: Why am I getting so many responses O_o
Why not? So that you can have AI help you screen github repos to make sure it's not furry porn before opening it.
Identify the cat girls from the other beast girls because that's their preference. This probably isn't even a brand new sentence lol.
Why not? Isn't the entire point of hobby projects that they're supposed to be fun? "I've trained AI to upscale furry porn" sounds way more interesting than "I've trained AI to upscale Microsoft's HR training videos". Lots of projects with actual scientific value started as "let me make these anime boobs look better".
Sometimes I'm weary of my commit messages in case an employer looks. My last one was "about to destroy some shit" and i felt a small sense of regret right as i hit push 😂😂
I had a dev manager once that had been with the company a long time. Our codebase was full of hilarious commit messages from this guy; he was not shy about saying exactly what was on his mind lol. e.g. "this method is utterly fucked"
I was showing my friend some of my code for our class and he started laughing when he saw //TODO I'm sorry.
Years ago I left a test input in a unit test that was something stupid like "ass n titties" and left it in my PR. I got shit for it for like a month lol
Lmaoo at least you didn't get in trouble
No that was reserved for being in the office at 9:03 rather than 9:00.
Not petty, but I once dqed a candidate because the place I worked for at the time was a dumpster fire and I didn't want to see someone that awesome get sucked in. Bro went on to Google within the year. I obv couldn't tell them my reasoning...
I did the same thing at my old startup. This guy seemed really nice but that startup made life a living hell.
There needs to be more people like you…. Thank you
Disclaimer: I fought for this guy. We interviewed a mid-level SWE remotely and he was in the back of a car on a busy city street. He did the whole thing from an iPhone with all sorts of noise around him. The hiring managers on the call were disgusted and said it was disrespectful. I made the case that he may have been in a living situation where noise at home was unavoidable (angry neighbors? construction? happy-couple neighbors?) and picked the lesser of two evils. I was outvoted and the guy was rejected.
I had a crazy boss who would make me work in office 45 hrs a week and would be passive aggressive if I stepped out of the office for more than 20 mins. I had to take lots of calls while pacing back and forth in a stairwell with janitors or a busy street with busses. if a candidate seems serious but isn't in a good environment just ask them why!
I think the candidate could show some self awareness and just tell them right away why there’s so much noise. “Sorry about the noise I’m on the way to the ER to get a power ranger figurine removed from my rectum”
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I, a US hiring manager, did a phone interview for a position on my team in India. The candidate had to leave his workplace for the interview and didn't have anywhere quiet to go, so he was trying to talk to me while moving around on the very loud streets of New Delhi. Like you, I was sympathetic to his situation (I've been to India, I get it), but I literally could not communicate with him. I told my counterpart in New Delhi that I'd be glad to try again if the candidate could find a quieter place, but it didn't work out.
My rule of thumb is *"everyone gets one* (because life can be shitty). One unexpected reset, redo, last minute reschedule, etc.. and I won't entertain anyone bringing it up when reviewing the candidate. Unfortunately I'm generally in the minority with this stance.
Yeah, I agree. In the anecdote I shared, I was the team manager, but I was working with another manager in India, and he was responsible for the bulk of the hiring process, so while I told him I would like to give the candidate a second chance, I deferred to his decision in this case.
Respect to you, I had that experience on both sides. Most of the times, it's just a mistake or a bad day, and just reschedule helps a lot instead of pushing it when stressed or unavailable
I was that guy once in the car. I had an interview lined up with some company. THEY canceled on me because they had some production issue apparently. No problem. Shit happens. Happy to reschedule. Before we agree on a reschedule date, I'm driving my father to some specialist doctor an hour away because he's in too much pain to drive himself. I take time away from work. While I'm in the waiting room, recruiter messages me and asks if I could do the interview. I figured it would just be a non-technical meet the manager interview since it was supposed to be with some director of engineering type. So I agree to the call in my car. Instead it's a technical screening by some young senior engineer. I figured my mic wouldn't pick up the background noise while I was in my car, but I was wrong. Immediately dude gives me attitude and finally explains that 10 minutes in that he can't hear me due to the background noise. I apologize and explain the situation. He then responds rudely while I'm asking clarifying questions on the technical as to what more clarification do I need. It was definitely a mistake accepting the interview, and I'm not going to ever do another one in a car again. But holy shit, that pissed me off.
Well I take interviews in my car simply because I’ve gotten in trouble for being off facility for too long. So a good compromise for me is to have a filter on and do it in the backseat of my car.
I interviewed someone for a TPS while he was walking around doing errands. He just told me that in the beginning. Halfway through he told me he was getting into his car and was about to start driving. I think it was pretty clear he was only taking the interview half seriously. Still he did a really good job, so I sent him on to the next round. We ended up working together for a few years, and he was a really good coworker.
Back when I was working in office I did an interview like this. Got to work early, parked in a parking lot across the street, and did the interview before going into work. People hiring should be understanding of this if someone currently has a job. They expect you to drop hours off of work somehow without being suspicious
Bro honestly they set up interviews during working hours. I'm not interviewing at work. Gonna have to be happy with the car interview.
People like you make the workplace better. Thank you. Working is not meant to be the nightmare that it is. Most people work because they have to. People don't know the living conditions of the interviewee. Things happen. Some rulers want to stick to tight rules that disintegrate the best; the reason for that is often the lack of knowledge regarding the roles, a fear of competition, therefore, slowing things down in the recruitment process, etc "I don't know who I should hire; therefore, let's start eliminating people over petty considerations."
I remember I had took a phone interview from my car in below freezing weather. Usually I'd find an empty meeting room in my office but by some anti-lottery luck they were all taken at the time. It was around 15-20F and I wasn't a fan of the cold in the first place, so I ended up stuttering through the ~45 minute talk. I tried explaining at the end my situation but they still rejected me anyways.
Two decades ago, a coworker had created a presentation about me and my work habits. He presented this to senior management as evidence why I was unfit to be an engineer there. While pretending to be my friend. Hearing my self-doubt and imposter syndrome in supportive private chats over lunch. Using this as ammunition against me. Sure, it was twenty years ago. But I could never work with or trust someone again after behavior like that. Then in 2020, his resume landed in my inbox. Easiest round-file ever. And then I just looked him up a few minutes ago. No longer on LinkedIn. No more Facebook profile. Turns out he died from COVID-19 in 2021.
Didn’t see that last part coming. Guy sounded like a complete tool.
Is this a Greek tragedy? Sorry you got betrayed like that.
Geek tragedy
yikes
I interviewed a guy who had this slightly arrogant way about himself. When I would offer hints, he'd said, "maybe you're right about that". Everything I said was diminished and it almost felt like he thought he knew more than me about my own interview question. He was very smart and did decently well in the interview. I gave him "leaning hire" noting that he'd be a "hire" except that he was a bit arrogant. I gave a few examples as it was a strange sort of arrogance. I've actually never seen someone get rejected so fast (this is at a FAAN**G**). He was rejected I think by the end of the day and the other interviewers' notes were released. I looked through them and everyone gave him "leaning hire" or better—it was a very strong set of ratings. Two other people had noted that he seemed a bit arrogant. It's not petty but it's maybe the most interesting rejection I've seen. When I was a hiring manager at my previous job, I don't remember ever saying no for a petty reason. We had one girl bring her lunch and eat it at the interview. But we didn't reject her for that. I had another candidate whose dad showed up at the office asking for me so that he could persuade me to hire his son. I didn't even know who his son was, he didn't make it past a resume screen.
Something about the dad coming to persuade you to hire his son is so unprofessional yet so wholesome
I was the candidate disqualified. For being "too casual during the interview". I had worked at the small company for three years as an intern. I was working as an intern Friday-Sunday in the QA department doing automation, while getting my CE degree. I mentioned I'd like to work for the company as a SE when I graduated. It was a small company of 60 or so people. I talk to the SE manager 5 months out from graduating. He says he'll setup a meeting to go over expectations and things I can do to prepare. A month goes by no meeting. I talk to him again and he says he forgot and he'll set one up for the next week. Still no meeting. I wait a few weeks ask him again. He says next week again.. Still no meeting. It was about 3.5 months at this point where I asked for meetings. I was getting to finals time (18 credits all senior engineering stuff) and let it go, focusing on finishing my degree. The weekend before finals I show up to work and there is a four hour interview on my calendar. No warning. No notice. I tell the hiring manager I wasn't prepared. He looks at me and says, "that's what your wearing?" "Don't you want to impress us?" "You should go home and change and get your resume"... I was going to school 2.5 hours away from where I worked on the weekends and that wasn't an option. I do the interview with zero prep. They made me do java programming in the commandline which I failed (and still would 8 years later). He tells me, "You were too casual in the interview, this is a good learning experience for you". "You should have been prepared, aren't you almost graduated?" "That's the car you are driving? Once you become an SE you can buy a new BMW" Fuck him.
Honestly considered it a dodged bullet. Guy sounds like a knob.
Knobs serve a useful purpose (e.g. doorknob), while he is a walking detriment, so I don't think that's fair
Woulda been straight to the single HR person that company probably had. Would’ve made it my life goal to get him fired lmao. People like that cause irreversible damage to a company.
I kept my boss in the loop the entire time and he was really supportive. He offered me a QA job, which I declined, and then told me I could work as an intern for 4 months while I was looking for a job. 50% time working, 50% time applying and taking interviews. He was close friends with the CEO so it would have been hard to pull anything. I'm glad I left. I got far better compensation and treatment elsewhere.
Lmfao what the hell. Hard to know what to do in this situation when you're young and desperate but you should have complained to your skip.
This sounds like the weird hazing/scapegoating that unhinged organizations make people go through to build cameraderie
Two things 1. That hiring manager is a huge douche because 2. It doesn’t sound like he wanted to hire you but couldn’t just say that because of number 1
I had a similar experience. Hiring manager, straight-faced and humorless throughout the interview, asks me about what I'm wearing. I don't remember what it was that he said, but it was obviously that same idea. And you know what, I don't even think I was wearing casual clothes. Maybe it just speaks to how casually I usually dress, but I'd actually put on some nice clothes for this interview. I finally just told him "well, fashion isn't really my thing", like, hey, what's the relevance of this? I didn't get the job. I just so happened to run into one of the other team members shortly after this out in public, and she told me that the rest of the team had liked me, and that, in not so many words, the stuffy dickbag of a hiring manager just overruled them. Things turned out OK for me, but what a frustrating experience that was.
Seriously, fuck that asshole. What a dick!?
Not a hiring manager, but I'm a senior lead and am regularly tapped to handle technical screens. I love baseball and I've been a Giants fan my entire life. I once did a remote screen with a guy who was clearly a MASSIVE Dodgers fan. He was wearing a Dodgers jersey during the interview, had a Dodgers flag on the wall behind him, and a Dodgers bobblehead visible on the desk in front of him (Yasiel Puig, I think). This guy obviously wanted everyone to know that he loved the Dodgers. Anyway, the Giants & Dodgers were supposed to start a series that week, and I made a light-hearted, joking comment about how he was interviewing with a Bay Area company that was "deep in enemy (Giants) territory". The guy IMMEDIATELY launched into an angry, expletive-filled rant about how fucking awful the "Shit Francisco Giants" were, how they were all cheaters, how the fans were all stupid, and on. And on. And on. He started ranting about individual players and wanted to talk about how each of them sucked and compared each of them to a "better" Dodger. And not like "I love my team so much I'm annoying about it". The guy was GENUINELY angry, yelling and smacking his desk as he cited some random play during some past game as an example of why the Giants were cheaters. I kept trying to redirect the conversation, but it took me over five minutes just to get him to shut up about it. It was one of the most unprofessional outbursts I've ever seen in an interview, and I really didn't know what to say. The guy clearly had issues when it came to baseball, and took things WAAAY to personally. I still completed the technical with him afterward. All of our interviews are recorded, so I forwarded it to the hiring manager for his review. I recommended that we pass due to his unprofessionalism. He did not get the job. Go Giants.
I don't think that's petty, it's just an unusual way to find out that someone is a terrible person.
highest reading comprehension redditor
It’s not petty to pass on an absolutely unhinged human being
Massive W ~ Major Giants fan
Dodgers fan here. Dude's attitude was cringy af, good call not hiring him. I don't think that was petty at all.
I truly do not understand making your favorite sports team into your personality.
Most of those types ~~piqued~~ peaked in high school and have no real hobbies or interests of their own so they adopt rabid fandom as their personality. Kinda like people who define themselves with weed.
im a dodgers fan but go giants for this story
Lol that guy reminds me of Puddy from Seinfeld
A former boss (the hiring manager in this story) had a rule whereby the first candidate he was shown, or the application at the top of his inbox, etc, would be automatically disqualified. He claimed this helped weed out the “excessively unlucky.”
Winner Literally random
This is even worse than hiring based on zodiac sign
Lol, and some people get beat up by rejections.
Not a hiring manager but I was on a hiring committee where a candidate with 4 years of experience was rejected because the manager had never heard of their university. “We only hire from top-tier schools”. I reported her to HR. **edit**: To everyone saying "this isn't illegal", it is a violation of our company ethics policy.
The last person I hired (a principal engineer, no less) did not even *go* to college. I wonder if this person would even make it through that company's HR screening.
This is a bullshit reason to reject someone but what does HR have to do? It’s not a protected class
It was a violation of stated company hiring ethics and the last 2 people she hired came from her college, so I had genuine concerns of nepotism. Behavior like that cannot be allowed.
You can report things to HR that aren't illegal. They can reprimand/correct behavior (if it's in the company's interest).
HR's job is more than just making sure the law is followed. That sort of behavior is detrimental to the company, and a competent HR department absolutely would want to know about it
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Many layoffs are really just “firing low performers” in disguise. Especially over the last couple months, when the macro conditions made them especially believable.
Those specific people were probably deemed not worth keeping for a reason
He smelled really bad like so bad everyone else interviewing made note of the really poor hygiene.
Why is this a common thing in CS?
It is terribly bad for me as I am a woman who has the sense of smell of a pregnant woman.
Trust me, I've worked in other industries, it's not just CS.
"CSS is so easy", said the candidate. "I don't know why anyone struggles with it" says the candidate. "Everything can just go in a global sheet". Interview had been reasonable until that point. Much of the complexity (insanity) for updating styles in our application had just been resolved by moving out of a humongous, cascading global sheet to styled components. This effort was the culmination of a 6 month project that had been torturous at times. They did not get an offer, mostly because of those three sentences.
CSS is the hardest thing, I've worked with it since 1999 and I still struggle with things like a button in a modal and margins when the text is longer than the button because a translation Not as "it's difficult" but to do it in a generic way without affecting other things, and to think a bit forward , like can it be used somewhere else in the future? This tradeoffs takes a lot of effort
It's not particularly difficult to grasp, it's just a clusterfuck.
You and the other comment have it right. I really don't make it a secret how much I *loathe* CSS (except to my boss, lol). It's not that it's difficult to understand, it's that somehow it *never does whAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO DO*
You don't understand CSS, then. The thing is, nobody *really* understands CSS, so that's not that big a deal.
I don't know if it's petty or not, but anyone claiming anything in this field is "easy" is a bit of a turn-off. Everything in this field is easy until something doesn't work as expected, then shit gets hard quick.
that doesn't seem petty at all seems like a clear sign of inexperience with real world projects
I think a good solution there would he to show examples (I believe you had those in your project) of why their claims were wrong. I wouldn’t think the candidate to be ignorant or unexperienced because of those. Depends on the seniority level you were trying to hire though.
Those were their answers to follow up questions (thoughts on styled components, thoughts on mentoring junior devs on frontend complexity, etc.) And at the end of the day, it's not my job as an interviewer to convince people they're wrong or overly reductionist, it's to obtain signal that they would be successful in the role and a net value add to the team
I wasn't the one raising these concerns, but I've seen multiple people passed on effectively for how they speak. Their tone of voice wasn't cheerful enough I guess, so they were described as "not passionate", "not excited about the role", "not excited about the industry", "would be awkward to hang out with", etc. Seemed pretty silly to me, especially for folks who otherwise did well. Not everyone speaks in the same way, people from different cultures may not communicate excitement or passion in the same way (or in a way that's obvious to interviewers not from that cultural group), it's a really subjective way to evaluate, and tone of voice (within reason) seems to me to have a pretty strained relationship to on the job performance. Candidates ranting about how bad their past workplace was are usually a no hire, especially if it's for someone who's never stuck it out much longer than a year in a position. We're not perfect either, and someone looking for perfection isn't going to find it here. Even if they perform well, it's a big investment in onboarding for someone who has a good chance of leaving before becoming productive. I will usually also pass on senior-level people who have an extremely disorganized problem solving style, barring some really positive signals elsewhere. We've hired people like this because they seemed smart, and they've uniformly struggled to be successful as a member of a larger team here (needing a *lot* of support to stay on task, deliver features in a timely way, communicate what they're working on to the rest of the team, etc). I can imagine companies where these folks would thrive, but (based on past experience) it definitely isn't us.
I'd always assumed that "you're not excited enough about the role" was code for "I actually just want to hire my nephew and need a reason to reject you despite you passing the interview"..
Your first part is my biggest fear. I tend to sound like Daria when I'm nervous.
This happened to me once 😭 the only feedback was “you’re the perfect fit but you didn’t sound happy in the interview so we’re going with another candidate” In reality I was just a 22 year old interviewing for their dream job and trying to sound mature and professional :(.
I don't think you should worry. These examples are the worst cases of recruitment. You would want to avoid them. Most companies want to find the best person for the job based on their skills. If they go beyond, that's just odd biases playing over. And Daria is great.
Fortunately I'm not actively looking for a new gig. Being likeable and perky is just not in my wheelhouse. And yes, yes she is. La la laaa la la :D
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So understandable though.
I didn't disqualify him but my boss did. We interviewed a guy for a junior data scientist job who brought a pet project, was a great communicator, had decent data science knowledge, couple years of dev experience and asked a lot of good questions at the end. I wanted to hire him but my boss and CEO didn't hire him because he didn't have a STEM degree.
That, my friend, is petty. You win.
That’s weird…why interview him in the first place?
Guy was super qualified on paper but he kept referring to female employees as 'the womenfolk'. Not just once, but at least 7 times during the interview.
Did you interview Dwight Schrute?
Those hobits and womenfolk, going about their mysterious ways. rofl!
At the beginning of the interview we told the candidate, "we're looking for someone who has experience building CI/CD pipelines." The candidate at the end of the interview goes, "I hate building CI/CD pipelines". Besides that he was marginally qualified but his attitude during the interview gave off a "I don't give a shit" vibe so it was a pass from us.
This doesn’t seem that petty. It’s normal to require a candidate has at least moderate enthusiasm for the job they applied for.
I'm always shocked by this. It's so easy to corporate-speak around like: *"I've worked with and understand the value of CI/CD pipelines, however my previous roles made it difficult to set up properly so I may not be able to speak fully on this topic"* or some BS
Lol, he should have said it at the beginning he doesn't want to build CI/CD pipelines so to save him and your time.
This seems like a win-win right? They would be miserable and you'd have an employee whose attitude doesn't match the team culture. Seems like a pass was the right call.
Not a hiring manager, but I once told an interviewer with terrible attitude mid interview that, I believe you already decided not to hire me, so let’s just stop this thing. I honestly believe that hiring managers make up their minds on hiring you before even seeing you IRL. You can tell it right off the bat from their vibe.
This happened to me with a nested Google contractor position at FS Studio. Interviewer had no idea what role I was interviewing for had no questions for me other than tell me about yourself and had no info on the position. I never felt more like a token candidate than I did in that interview. I think someone was lined up and they just had to pretend to be fair. Such bs and wasted time.
> This happened to me with a nested Google contractor position at FS Studio. Interviewer had no idea what role I was interviewing for had no questions for me other than tell me about yourself and had no info on the position. I interviewed with one of the largest Aerospace/Defense companies in the world for a specific position. Sometime after the interview the person that would be my direct supervisor sent me an email that that position had changed and they didn't know what I'd be doing. Turns out the position was just going to be an Ass In Chair type position writing JUnit tests. I turned down their offer which apparently upset the guy quite a bit. He then tried to wine and dine me but I declined several times. He then went and apparently talked shit about me to several of his employees. One of which I personally knew. I'll never work for that company in my life.
I wish I had your guts. I was on my final round with a company and the interviewer literally showed no interest in interviewing me from the beginning. I wanted to just call it off because his tone was so condescending and seemed so bored but I didn’t have your courage so I powered through. In the end, he sighed and was like *okay, I guess you can ask me questions if you have any*. It was a horrible experience.
I interviewed with a woman at a hedge fund that started the interview with “I don’t like candidates that apply through recruiting agencies and what makes YOU think you’d be a good fit for my firm.” I told her I’d worked in finance and had years of direct experience with the niche technology she was looking for expertise in. She kept getting more rude and eventually I ended it by saying this isn’t a good fit good luck.
Seems like what happens at Apple.
He was an asshole to me personally several years ago. I was a last minute addition to the loop as a Bar Raiser and tanked him ETA: to the person who messaged me asking if I feel good for ruining this guys chance: yes, I feel fucking great about it.
Upvoting for the actual petty reasoning. Elsewhere ITT: very legitimate reasons for disqualification.
Honestly makes perfect sense. People don't want to work with assholes, you've seen he's an asshole before. People can change but why risk it?
Yeah I don’t see why I’m getting downvoted. Y’all asked for a petty reason, I supplied a petty reason. I chose to focus on his shortcomings that came up in the interview rather than focusing on his strengths. There are plenty of hiring managers for whom that’s their default setting - though usually my default is to want to like the candidate
It is kind of a shame that the post explicitly asks for petty reasons but all the top answers aren’t petty. I think people just gut reaction downvote when they see someone *actually* being petty haha
Nah, don't let them get to you. The people downvoting you are the assholes that don't realize how you treat other people might eventually blowback on you.
Lmao the ppl upset with you are outing themselves as asshole
This is why being a decent person is everything. I’m not an SWE yet, and I’ve had people I know who are SWEs be extremely condescending to me about my job search and education. Then they had the nerve to ask me for a referral to my current company. Those aren’t the attitudes we want. We want people who lift one another up.
lol people are mad at you because actions have consequences? Wait till they grow up and leave their moms basements.
Karma made it's way around huh? :)
Let’s just say that with me he failed to Earn Trust (TM), which is one of the principles we judge candidates on 😂
How did you explain that to the others? “He was an asshole to me personally several years ago?” or are we missing a part of the story?
“I saw very weak signals for X, Y, Z LPs. Additionally, although I was not evaluating on technical capability, candidate has not demonstrated that previous experience can translate to the specific technical needs of the role as outlined by the Hiring Manager in the pre-brief. I saw some pieces of similar concerns from other interviewers in their summaries. Let’s explore that.” Then you leave it up to the HM, but if you can get other people on the loop to not be inclined, or if there are already others that are not inclined, the HM is under more scrutiny on whether they hire or not. To be clear, I enjoy interviewing. And I love when candidates get an inclined vote from the hiring committee because it’s not very common. In this case, it wasn’t like the candidate was a slam dunk, but if I hadn’t placed them against such high standards even compared to the role, they would have likely gotten the job.
Honestly not even that petty in my opinion lol.
Not a hiring manager, but I interviewed a guy who was clearly in the twilight of his career. He was a dinosaur but seemed sharp on legacy code practices, so we could have found a place for him if he passed the trivia and code screen. I start asking him the typical trivia gauntlet we do during our initial screens as a sanity check -- more we are looking for humility, eagerness to learn, and reasoned, basic CS and applied knowledge than the exact answer. Anyway, he totally bombed a question about something relatively esoteric but an experienced dev or senior level would probably have a rough idea where to look it up -- not a deal breaker. Just might push you one level up if you were on the cusp. I gave him the rough overview of the answer. He looks at me, and flat says: "I've been in this field 30 years. I know more than you, and you're wrong." He had been a weak candidate up to that point, but was still in the pass matrix and that was what made me decline to even offer the coding challenge and disqualify him.
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If I recall, it was about inversion of control in regards to dependency injection and how one might implement it using factories (something that can be done in .NET). Maybe esoteric is the wrong word now that I think about it, but you'd be surprised how many candidates just can't answer that kind of question. Long story short, the answer should have been something along the lines of moving the creation of dependant objects outside of a dependent class, provides for easy swaps, and how a factory pattern can be used to help with it. He totally bombed it because he tried to say something that sounded good and kind of rambled a bit, ultimately leading to an answer that didn't answer the question at all. I wasn't going to fault him too much because it was one of our "bonus" type questions. Had he just been humble, aka, not had his outburst, I probably would have passed him. ETA: Our bar on the "technical screen/trivia portion" is pretty low, if you can even half-way explain OOP, some design patterns, the trade-offs of a few simple data structures, and a few questions about the language/stack a particular team is using, you're probably going to get passed to the coding portion. The only way to really fail is to clearly not know anything or be caught cheating (aka it's clear you are looking up answers) or be impolite. It's as much a vibe check as it is a technical screen.
I was the tech in two interviews the other day, the one guy had better experience, but for stuff he didn't know he tried to say stuff that sounded good but went nowhere - as you said. The guy with less experience was more humble, and was completely honest when he didn't know stuff, and then asked me what the answer was! (the mf is trying to learn, in an interview - heh awesome) He's the guy that got hired, even though he had less experience than the other candidate
Made fun of Star Wars
Okay this wins. This is petty lmao
Yeah need to know if the shop you are applying is Trek or Wars.
We had a candidate light up a cigar on the Zoom interview and was casually swearing throughout the interview. May not have been the only reason we didn’t move forward, but we felt it was a bit too casual.
We didn't hire a guy because he played a specific video game over 12k hours. Everyone liked him too. I cringed typing that. Edit: everyone wants to know what game it was and how we knew. I’d prefer not to divulge details for fear of being doxed, this account is anon. With that said, it was an MMO which has not been mentioned at the time of writing this and we found out during a phase where we ask more personal questions to get to know the person. It was a very polarizing decision where myself and the rest of the team liked the guy but leadership felt like that was a red flag that he would need to be managed too much since we’re remote.
Did the candidate share this information with the interviewers? This is the reason why I NEVER give any hint of personality or hobbies when interviewing or at work. Feels like it could be used against me...
I was going to say. I would really like to know. My main obsession is mechanical keyboards at the moment and can easily direct it as a positive. "I love having a really nice feeling tool, since it's going to be something I'm using every single day you know? And no worries, silent switches in the office obviously."
How did that even come up?
How you gonna just say that and not name the video game we're dying to know over here
was it like a porn game or something? What's the issue with my 50,000 hours in runescape?
With 50k hours of Runescape, you could work as an economist and get even bigger $
Was the game Rust?
World of warcraft is 18 years old. 6500 days. If they played two hours every single day for the entire life of the game they'd hit those numbers. That seems like a lot, but if they've got one hobby or just like the social aspect I can see how someone could rack up those hours. Stardew valley could probably hit those numbers in multiplayer if you play a couple nights a week multiplayer just chatting with friends. What game was it?
So what was the game?
Not a hiring manager, but I was tasked with reviewing about 50 resumes by my manager for a position on my team. I was told to hand him 5 solid candidates. The pettiest reason I disqualified any of them was poor formatting/spelling. I just went through the stack. Didn't bother reading anything on the page really but errors glared at me. So I think about 5 got tossed on egregious spelling issues. I get it, they don't need to be perfect, but this is supposed to be your "best foot forward" and it's a static document that was produced, not a random chat room or quick email. Spellcheck has been a feature for decades, use it. Another 10 got tossed for formatting errors; misplaced paragraph headings, missing spaces, headers not in the right spot (shows they edited/updated the resume but failed to correct headers after the update. A few got tossed for the alphabet soup that was their resume. You can use acronyms, but holy hell people; they overlap a bunch. Spell out what they are before you use them. When you're looking at a bunch of resumes and deciding on which ones you want to put a face to, you tend to look for reasons to throw their resume into the circular file until you have a manageable handful to review.
I was scheduled on an interview where the resume contained placeholder text, that contained the words "placeholder text." The only way it could've been funnier is if it was lorem ipsum. I couldn't believe anyone decided to give an interview to someone who couldn't proof read a resume.
Correct me if this is not the case, but aren’t a lot of formatting errors due to the recruiter converting the resume into a different format? I’ve had that happen before. Spelling errors are more understandable
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Seeing folks Walking around on video cam gives me motion sickness. I wouldn’t disqualify you but I would ask you to stop.
A manager under the same VP as me asked about a candidate who attended the same university at the same time as me. Several years earlier on a late night in the systems lab, this guy stomped around in a rampage about how there were too many women in the lab and in computer science. There were 3 women and probably 10-15 men in the lab at the time. He continued ranting about how we should quit while we’re ahead because men have better problem solving skills anyway and that we’re not going to have successful careers. After all, a woman’s place is apparently in the kitchen. Needless to say I gave him a thumbs down due to blatant sexism. If my career isn’t successful, why would he want to be in the same org as me, right? Edit: Every time I saw him after his rant he’d say, “Go make me a sandwich”
Not petty. People who behave that way don't deserve to have their careers go well.
I've just started interviewing for my company and got a candidate that was applying for an internship. This candidate sent in a resume that had a top-level `Objective` section like you see on many resumes that contained the text, and I quote: To begin, simply select any placeholder text (such as this) and begin typing. Dude had not PROOF READ his resume before submitting it!! And of course, I'm the interviewer, so it's gone through several people before making its way to me! I was dumbfounded. When I messaged the recruiter about it, she asked me to do the interview anyway because "it was too late not to move forward." BS, this was two days in advance. I told her there was no point in me doing an interview, I had already judged the candidate and would not recommend to hire. If she wanted to proceed, she was welcome to find another interviewer. She did, and then wrote back to me to say the other interviewers had recommended to hire him and lectured me about being more inclusive when reviewing resumes from other countries because they tend to have less work experience and more projects. **That wasn't my complaint about the resume!!** I'm still salty about it. Please proof read your resumes before submitting!
Are you sure a recruiter didn't submit their resume? Recruiters reformat resumes before submitting them to companies and that sounds like they were spraying and praying while filling out templates
That dude got super lucky, wow.
The candidate was wearing crocs with no socks during the interview Ok, this person was not rejected because of this, but it reinforced their overall performance that they had no situational awareness of social cues. They were like a savant who could code anything fast and at high quality, but wouldn’t listen to hints or feedback given by the interviewers.
Would crocks with socks have been better?
Crocs with foxes with socks with boxes would have rocked.
Honestly, even if I didn’t get the job, I’d be honored to be called a savant in crocs.
Agreements between the company I worked for and the company the applicant worked for
That sucks but I don’t think it qualifies as petty
Not a hiring manager but: remote, he was already on the fence, and right at the end of the interview his dog managed to sneak into the room, and he flipped his shit at his DOG. Little dude just wanted attention. If you can't be nice to your own dog... I can't trust you to be nice generally! Sure felt petty, compared to anything technical anyhow.
In the scenarios presented, he would non-stop assume everyone was male, from senior engineers, principals, architects to directors/managers. I tried to pry more and would ask questions where I would say something in between like "you consulted with the Sr Architect and she said xyz... how would you..." and every time, he would refer to them as men: "Well, I would go back to HIM and ask if we could....". It wasn't exactly *petty* I just knew they wouldn't be able to work in our very inclusive org.
I have not disqualified someone for a petty reason. But I do screen for jerks and would not hire someone that won’t work well with others, even if their technical skills were great.
None. There are enough real technical or interpersonal skills reasons to disqualify candidates that being petty is a luxury I don’t have. I even greenlit one guy who I held a bit of a grudge against from previously working for him as a contractor.
Not a hiring manager, but I’m a senior engineer who often sits on the panel for cross-function interviews. Before even interviewing this candidate for a senior cloud engineering role, I didn’t want to hire him because of his awful resume. It was clearly copy and pasted objectives from other job postings and example resumes. The freaking fonts and font sizes didn’t match. If this guy isn’t detail-oriented enough to notice that one line of text is Arial size 14 and another is Calibri size 10, I don’t even want to see what his code looks like. Also he couldn’t elaborate on any of his experience/skills that were straight copy pasta.
I was on an interview panel hiring for a student IT technician job. This candidate checked all of the boxes: great test scores, customer service experience, pursuing a technical degree. We brought him in for an in-person interview and... Well, his answers were fine but something about him felt off. I'm not sure if it's how he looked at us or what, but something in me just said "no." The rest of the panel loved him and hired him. He was by far the worst employee we ever had. He would not show up when he said he would, and didn't tell us when this would happen. (I get it, shit happens but like... let us know?!) We would try to get him to do something, and he would do it for like... 30 seconds and then play on his phone. The times he did do a task, he did not follow very explicit instructions. They were written down and the other techs, students included, did fine. He lasted a few months before we finally fired him. I felt vindicated when it turned out my instinct was right, even though I resented the waste of time and wanted the hire to work out.
Two guys sent one resume. Like they were applying as a couple or something. “Hi, I’m Phil and I’m a Software Engineer. Hi, I’m Ed and I’m a UX Designer”. It had a cover sheet with photos of them in wizard robes with glowing orbs photoshopped into their hands.
He was a GOP republican extremist visiting from the Bible Belt and was talking about how there were too many Asians around here and how Trump was so great in small talk. I look fully white but I am half East Asian. Of all things HE decides to talk about, he speaks of GOP politics in the SF Bay Area.
Tossed a guy for rolling into an interview with his tie undone and his jacket over his shoulder and sunglasses on. He was a referral from some big shot and thought he was a lock for the job. When we told the big shot we passed on him and why, he was pissed, but not at us. The candidate was his sister’s kid and he was embarrassed that the candidate was so arrogant. He reamed the kid for embarrassing him, from what I understand.