So, tell us why you think you’d be a good fit for this position! Oh, you’re not willing to work overtime, donate PTO to sick colleagues or refer to your team members as “family”? I see. We’ll call you once we’ve made our decision…

Job interviews are often stressful, but one thing that can immediately take the pressure off is realizing that you don’t actually want the job at all. Redditors have been recalling infuriating interviews that made them lose their cool, so we’ve gathered their most amusing stories below. Enjoy finding out all of the juicy details, and keep reading to find a conversation with the Reddit user who started this thread!

#1

I had an interview scheduled for 14:00 that afternoon. My terminally ill parent passed away in the very early hours of the morning. I emailed my contact there at about 5ish to apologise profusely, explaining the reason I could no longer attend and letting her know that I was still interested in the position if it was possible to reschedule but I understood if not.

She responded with two words – “that’s disappointing”. This was for a mental health/wellbeing charity.

Image credits: MediumPeteWrigley

We reached out to Reddit user Slumi, who started this conversation in the first place, to find out more about his job interview experiences. He was kind enough to have a chat with Bored Panda and share that most of his job interviews have been pretty standard.

“Maybe I came off as easily offended and irritable in the original thread, but I’m actually a pretty mellow guy,” the OP says. “Those were the only two times I actually got irritated by my interviewer while simultaneously feeling like I was in the right.”

#2

I was interviewed at a BASF plant. I don’t remember the exact question, but it was something about why I quit a job or how I dealt with bad processes.

I described a long planning process where 2 weeks of work right before a holiday was ruined by a fiat decision by the head of engineering.

The interviewers were asking about “well did you consider that he had his reasons” and I said something to the effect of “sure we did. But he attends the first session, skips the next 2 weeks of us putting together a several hundred line item work plan, shows up on the final Thursday before the outage and decided he doesn’t like the plan and makes a major change that affects every other line item. Then he walks off. He could have at least offered an explanation instead of just saying ‘Do it my way.’ So I don’t deal well with that kind of leadership.”

Naturally I didn’t get the job offer, I was left with the impression that there was a lot of mysterious decision making you were just supposed to accept and never understand why.

Image credits: MrDENieland

#3

I lost my cool once when I got invited to the hiring manager around of a small company. Before this round, the recruiter was being annoying calling me and texting me about little things about the hiring manager.

Turns out the hiring manager was sick on the day of and the CEO filled in. During the call, the CEO was also on another call and his delegate/assistant was doing some of the questions. I answered a question the CEO finally asked about when to use or mention something in documentation and he didn't like my answer and asked me the same question again.

He was acting like some strict parent and keep shutting down my answers. I had enough of this and was already pissed that he was on another call during the interview anyway. I straight up said this isn't going to be a good fit, Idk what answer you want and I can't read your mind. He was stunned and only said 'ok.'

I hung up the Zoom call and also blocked the recruiter to avoid any more b******t from that circus.

Image credits: EWDnutz

Thankfully, Slumi says he’s also had a few positive job interviews. “There was one time where the guy interviewing me wanted to check if I knew how to speak English (I live in Switzerland, and my native language is French), so he asked me who my favorite painter was,” the author shared. “I answered that I was a big fan of Edward Hopper. And, as it turns out, so was he.”

“We spent a good 10 minutes talking about the guy and his paintings, it was great. In the end though, I didn’t get the job. It was for a senior role, and I had just finished my internship,” Slumi noted. “But the interviewer decided to let me know through a phone call, all while specifying ‘I’m sorry. I want you to know that you actually did extremely well during the interview. But we found someone more senior.’”

#4

I applied for a medium sized company in the financial sector. HR call, tech call, everything goes well. Then I'm sent a long programming exercise that takes me half a day.

In the problem description, they literally mention "We love design patterns at this company :)"

Okay. Well it's just a small program and there's no need for a design pattern, really. But I'll use one to make them happy.

So, the exercise takes me 8-10 hours. I use some design pattern to do it (I think it was a factory design pattern, but I can't remember for sure.)

I submit the code, and a few days later go to the followup interview they had planned to discuss the results with me.

The guy tells me "So, your code was pretty good… But why did you add a design pattern? There was no need for it."

"Yes, it wasn't really necessary. But it said on the page that you liked design patterns, so I wanted to show you I knew how to use them."

"Okay, but a factory pattern is too overkill here, it makes the code over engineered."

I actually agreed with him, but I was confused. I had spent a good mount of time considering which design pattern to add in my code, and the factory one seemed like the least terrible option. So I asked

"Which design pattern would you have used in this code?"

"I wouldn't have used any. There's no need for one here."

He told me that as if my design pattern had offended him on a personal level. I didn't take it very well.

"Obviously there's no need for a design pattern in a small piece of non reusable code that you do for a job interview. But I already had to spend a full day on this, so why wouldn't I follow the instructions to the letter? If you don't want a design pattern in the code, then don't mention them in your page."

The interview didn't last long after that.

I didn't get the job.

Image credits: Slumi

#5

In an interview when they offered me less than the lower part of the published salary range (at this point it was like a 5% better than my current job at the time), i asked if it was possible for the salary to be higher, as it wouldn’t justify changing jobs. (Take into account at this point i had aced all tests and interviewer were really happy with me, but in this specific interview there was like a manager or ceo or accountant idk but was a higher up that i didnt really met before)

this higher up laughs a little and proceeds to say something like “well we dont have- i mean, we do have the money but we reserve it for someone with more experience than you”. i was like wtf does that even mean, i told them in the spot “well ok” and walked away. There were like 6 people there and were basically there to welcome me in the job as they really liked my interview and this a*****e showed up to f**k things up lol. Some time later i still got a call from one of the interviewer saying something like “we finally got [a*****e] to accept your salary requierement!” but at that point i was literally receiving the call from a new job place lmao.

Image credits: MamaMeRobeUnCastillo

Slumi also noted in his post that he’s currently on the job hunt, so we asked how that’s been going. “I do feel like it is harder to find jobs in the Data Science field now than it was 6 years ago. You’d think I’d get more interview opportunities now that I have professional experience under my belt, but I actually get less responses to my postulations today than I did when I was fresh out of college,” he revealed.

#6

Not an interview but I lost my cool at a recruiter once.

I had been unemployed for a bit and finally landed a job, quite a few months (could be closer to a year) into my new job a recruiter calls.
I didn’t land the best paying job, or even in my “field”, so I opt to humor her, see if it might lead to something better. Big misstake on my end.

Starts out fine enough, she introduces herself, says she’s from X-recruiting company, looking for someone for a position in my “field” asks a bit about my previous work bla bla bla.
Then she asks what about what in the add made me think I would be a good fit for them.
I answer truthfully that I can’t recall the add from the top of my head, lady gets _pissed_ .
I ask if maybe she could tell me what company she is recruiting for and maybe I’ll remember it?
Wrong move, lady is now fuming and telling me I should have saved a copy of the add.

Whole thing just devolved into a mess where she found me unprofessional because I had aplied to several jobs at the same time and didn’t know her add by heart, and me basically telling her that no I didn’t remember jobs I aplied for _months_ ago and if they expect candidates to remember them without being able to provide any info on the job or company they needed to stop doing their job at a snails pace.

She continued being condecending and all “no you aplied for this only 3 weeks ago”.
Told her I hadn’t looked for a job since I got this new one and started on X-date, “that’s Y months ago isn’t it?”. She tried backpaddling saying there must have been an error and my profile really fit this job.
Told her to f-off and never call again.

Could definetly have been a computer error but holy hell… I have jobs I aplied for last week, that I’m all nerves hoping I’ll get, I can’t remember _those_ adds or my cover letter by heart even.
And she got all snotty because I couldn’t remember the job based on the name of _her_ recruiting company!?

Image credits: Aint_much

#7

I apply for a startup that works on some robotic "walkers" that are meant to help patients going through physical therapy. I thought that sounded like a really cool concept so I applied with a custom resume and enthusiastic cover letter. After one week I get an interview. It's 1h30 away and it's finals week, so I'd be losing precious studying time. But, whatever, it sounds like a cool internship so I'll go.

I arrive at the interview, I feel like everything is going well on the technical side. Then the guy asks me "why do you want to work at our company?". I reply "I've always really liked biology and medicine. In fact before I settled on becoming a data scientist I wanted to study life sciences. So, this sounds like a great opportunity to bring my two passions together". This was a 100% truthful answer, by the way

Anyway. The interview ends, and then the guy kind of implies that they're going to go for another candidate. Not sure why, but okay. Then he tells me "By the way, next time someone asks you why you want to work for a company, be more precise than 'I like medicine'".

That comment irked me. Because I had been genuine about why this job interested me, and I felt like it was a pretty damn good reason. So, I answered. "When I explained my motivations, I was being truthful. What did you expect me to say? 'I'm a leg fetishist so I'm super interested in working with legs specifically'? No. I like medicine, I like biology. I don't care if it's the legs, the feet, the hands or whatever else. It's the field I'm interested in and I have the competencies to do Data Science in it.".

The guy didn't really say anything after that. He seemed a bit embarrassed and went "oh… okay."

I didn't get the internship.

Image credits: Slumi

The OP noted that the lack of responses he’s gotten could be due to a variety of reasons, and he’s unsure which one’s the biggest. “But I’d say one of the main ones is that I’m mostly specialized in NLP (natural language processing), which consists of using machine learning methods to process text,” he told Bored Panda. 

“This used to be a very dynamic field that was constantly evolving, because text is a messy data type and you can do a lot of different things with it. But with the arrival of state-of-the-art models that can be used out of the box like ChatGPT, my skill set has become less valuable,” he explained.

#8

Had an interview at Crapple many years back – 4 rounds, I got a close to perfect score on the technical test but on round 4 they decided to give me exactly the same test again.

Figured out they hadn’t been talking to each other so asked them why I’m getting the same test, when they realized what they had done they asked me if I could just do it again.

This is after being grilled several times by engineers on progressively more difficult questions…

Got up and grabbed my stuff, basically said if this is what your interview process is like I don’t want to go any further.

Took me to security and searched me, threatened getting the police involved, apparently they came to the conclusion I was some corporate espionage spy because “nobody has ever terminated an interview like this”, absolutely cracked me up, never laughed so hard in a work environment.

Probably would’ve made my career a lot easier just doing the test again, I never got into FAANG after that but still feel I did the right thing.

Image credits: turdor

#9

Yes indeed! This was for a part time research assistant position at a herb shop. Immediately when I get there, the owner’s attitude was disgusting. He barks at me that I “can’t sit like that” when I go to sit on his “temple’s” floor. First red flag. Then he starts complaining about the look on my face, even though I don’t have an attitude. He’s telling me to “relax”. Second red flag. The final straw is he tells me randomly we can’t sit in here and we go back out to the main hall where we sit in chairs. From there, it turns into this entire bash fest! He had asked me to show him an example of some of my writing, which I had already emailed to his assistant who was printing it out. Before he even sees it, he’s already criticizing it. I keep telling him “you haven’t even read it! How are you already rejecting something you haven’t even read?” He’s like “I vetted your resume, I see how you write.” Okay so why am I even sitting here? Why did you call me in to do a second interview? Against my better judgement, I send him another piece of work and this trifling clown had the nerve to say my work was “copy and paste” writing. Excuse me???? At that point I just got up and left, telling him that he has no idea what he really wants, apologizing to the assistant that I will not be working there (she was a sweetheart) and he’s not even worth the trouble. I also reported this on Yelp for the store and the Better Business Bureau for the generality of the business. He’s supposed to be this spiritual “healer” working with all these herbs and wellness products and yet this is his disgusting attitude? Dangerous. The pay, the hours, none of it was worth it.

Image credits: thedollofthestars

“Even if the models I can design would do better than ChatGPT on specific problems, it’s time to market and return on investment is simply unbeatable,” Slumi continued. “You also don’t need extensive data science skills to make ChatGPT work. A layman can get good results out of it with little coding skills, and even less mathematical ones.”

“Keep in mind though, I live in Switzerland. I don’t know how widespread this data science hiring trend is,” he added. “But I know that the big tech companies in the US have laid off a fair amount of employees right now, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the competition there had gotten fiercer too.”

#10

I had a similar experience recently. A recruiter ping me on LinkedIn for a opportunity at a start-up that looked interesting and it matched my profile. He send them my CV and they say, we’d like to skip the initial HR interview and go straight to the test scenario. Cool, they send me an email with a set of instructions on what i need to do and a zip json attached. The instructions were to basically ingest the file, normalize it build some schema layers and then produce an SQL output report, they said you can use any language you like and any DB you want.
I build it all in AWS, dropped the file in S3 ingested in into AWS PostgreSql hosted DB and then produce the final output using Dash and hosted on Heroku. Wrapped it all into a nice and clean repo with read-me and comments and all the ETL layer nicely presented. I though i nailed it as it was clean, efficient and it included extra stuff just to prove a point that i’m not just a coding monkey.
You know what their reply was…. a single line saying “oh very nice output but we wanted you to build the transformation in Python instead of SQL” . Their reply was forwarded to me by the recruiter and i told him to go back to them and tell them:

1. They mentioned use any language you want.
2. that this is incredibly disrespectful and a complete joke to ask someone to spent 3+ h to build something and then reply with a single line.

He apologies and said that he though their reply was very harsh and that he will forward my feedback.
I hope karma teaches this interviewee a lesson.

Image credits: MarjanMucek

#11

Applied for a marketing role a recruiter called me about. They email me with a list of questions. One of the questions was basically craft a social media post based on this info. This was not entry level position, so basically I professionally worded a response back to them that said “I’ve been doing this for nearly 15 years. I don’t have time to do homework. If you need examples of my creativity and content creation here’s a link to my current company’s social media platforms. I’m responsible for about 90% of the content. Feel free to judge my work there.”

Never got a call back….

Image credits: NoLuck4824

We also asked the OP why he thinks job interviews are so torturous nowadays. “The most painful part of computer science interviews is when they want to evaluate your coding skills,” he shared. “I can understand why companies feel the need to do it. Coding is what the employee is going to do at the end of the day, so it would be best if they were proficient at it.”

#12

I was an executive assistant. I interviewed for a rather fancy office position.

I arrived 10 minutes early. They left me waiting for 30 minutes without apologies for running late.

Then they were basically stuck up. Condescending, talked to me like I was a second class citizen and I should be begging for their job. When they said “why do you want to work here” I told them I don’t and I wasn’t going to sit there and lie to them when I can’t think of a damn reason I would want to work there.
We wrapped up the interview.

The agency were pissed and black listed me ?.

Image credits: Adorable-Town-4583

#13

I’ve posted this in another thread but it bears repeating:

Interviewed for a Ruby/Rails programming job. The lead developer was Indian and she had a thick accent so that made things worse. Everything was going fine until she asked me “What do you know about gem?”

And I said “Ok gem, sure. What about them?” Ruby gems are just what Ruby devs call software libraries.

She repeated, “Tell me about Gem.”

I said “Ok, which one?”

“Gem.”

“Um…what gem?”

“So you don’t know gems?” Then she went on to explain what gems were. I was so frustrated that I cut her off with a bit of attitude and said “I know what gems are, I’m asking what about gems do you want to know about?”

It just went downhill from there and needless to say I didn’t get the job and, while I was sad at first, I’m now glad I didn’t.

Image credits: Namlegna

“The problem is: it’s pretty much impossible to get a good idea of a person’s coding skills in so little time. Still, that’s not going to stop them from trying,” the author continued. “And they will usually do so in one of two ways: By either asking you to work on a project (5+ hours) at home, or by asking you those dreaded leetcode questions.”

“Both are incredibly painful in their own way. The project because it’s disrespectful of your time, and leetcode questions because they’re so irrelevant to 99% of what your work will actually consist of,” Slumi says. “They can also be very difficult, which is why people who apply at FAANG literally learn hundreds of such problems by heart only to regurgitate them during their job interviews.”

“There are also companies that ask you to work for them, possibly for free, for a few days (or weeks) before they can evaluate if you’re a good match,” the OP continued. “That one should be straight up illegal. Thankfully it’s not that common.”

#14

Oh gosh, I have a tale to tell. For context I am (24F) and only 5 feet tall and I look like the poster child for innocence. I had an interview with an Arborist company and they told me that I needed to follow a dirt road and that the interview would take place at the end of the road.

This was an 8am interview, and as I used to be a bartender 8am was extremely early for me. I got up at 7, got all dolled up to look good for this interview.

I get to driving to the spot, and I can’t find the end of this dirt road that I’m supposed to be at. There’s just a graveyard of campers on one side of the road and a cemetery on the other. As I’m driving along I see a truck with the name of the company I’m supposed to be interviewing at pulled over to the side of the road.

I stopped and rolled down my window to ask the truck for directions to my interview and the guy in the truck rolled down his window too.

“Are you (my name)?” He called over to me without getting out of his truck.

Me, suspicious: “Yes…..”

Him: “Hop on in and we’ll conduct the interview”

Me, absolutely floored that this is happening: “Yeah, no. I’m good. Thank you tho!”

Over my dead body am I getting into some random strangers truck for a “Job interview”. I wasn’t born yesterday and I know that I’m very easily takeable. I didn’t even get out of my car and just left. I still can’t believe that they had the audacity to call that an “Interview”.

Needless to be said, I didn’t get the job.

Image credits: dahl019

#15

Oooo I lost my cool at a recruiter once! A little context: I had just moved to California from Washington and had my WA drivers license still. Washington does dl id numbers different than California. CA is typically this format: A572349 while WA uses a different format, ie. John Smith would have a dl number like SMITHJO198DR.

I showed up to some dingy building to apply to a variety of customer service jobs. The recruiter asked for my ID to get my started. She looked at the ID numbers and said “You have a weird ID number, why did you choose those numbers?” I asked her what she meant by that because I was genuinely confused. She told me “if you’re going to get a fake ID to hide your identity, maybe get something less obvious than your name.” Excuse me?? I snapped on her, “I don’t like being accused of things that are not true, and what exactly are you implying anyway? That I’m a criminal that needs to hide their identity to get a job at a rundown recruiting agency?”

Needless to say, I left and didn’t get any jobs at that agency as a result but no great loss. People can be so darn weird.

Image credits: InternationalWolf437

So why do companies make the hiring process so painful? “For a lot of them, it’s because they simply don’t know how to evaluate your skills in other ways than in those. I also think a lot of them don’t care, it’s not them who are going to spend dozens of hours learning algorithms by heart,” Slumi says. “This is especially true of big companies. When you have thousands of people interested in your position, so what if 90% of them get discouraged by the interview process? That still leaves hundreds of candidates who will actually walk the walk.”

#16

I interviewed for a position right at the end of quarantine. My wife was working with children so we needed to be careful with COVID, so I wore a mask to the interview. The hiring manager instantly made jokes about me being “one of those idiotic libtards” because of my mask. The real kicker was that it was an informatics job where they did PCR testing for COVID…

Image credits: theawesumelf

#17

I once applied to a creative writing job, marked as entry level. “No writing sample needed! Just send us your portfolio!” Ok, sure, I got one ready to go.

They return to me and say “We liked your enthusiasm, but none of your stuff in your portfolio was really *our style*. Maybe add that next time!”

That really got to me, because that is what a writing sample is for. You want the candidate to show they understand your style. A generic portfolio, in nature, cannot cover every single style out there (because then they start to complain that your portfolio is too bloated).

I got a bit annoyed because in my area, there aren’t many jobs in my field and I had some great credentials and expertise for the job. So I wrote back a rather uncouth email about “hey, if it’s supposed to be entry level, ASK FOR A WRITING SAMPLE IF YOU ACTUALLY WANT ONE”.

Nowadays I would’ve probably added a sample to my portfolio, but back then it really ticked me off because it was one of the most realistic job opportunities to me in a long time at the time.

Image credits: Tenshinohana

#18

My Sr year in college I was once in a 4th round logistics interview and interviewer asked how much i wanted to make in the next 5 years. Thinking i should be realistic i gave him 300k. The starting salary was like 30k and you didn’t make commission until after you passed your base salary.

They ended the interview with telling me they wanted to hear numbers in the millions and i didn’t want the job bad enough/ planned to put in enough work for them so they said we weren’t a fit. LOL.

Image credits: Boomer_Madness

Next, we asked the OP what he thought of the replies to his post. “Most people seemed to understand where I was coming from. The ones that didn’t seemed to be under the impression that I’m an easily angered person that always lashes out at his interviewers, or at people in general,” he shared. “Just to make things clear: I don’t. You have to take the context into consideration for both of those cases.”

#19

I had an interview for a job heading a group for new regulations that would be implemented in two years. We had to prepare for the regulations and implement procedures for them for audits prior to the regulations’ go-live. Part of the requirements would be a summary report. I have written summary reports, but not that type as they were not required yet.

So, I go to the interview and the interviewer asks me at least 5 times if I have written summary reports. My answer is always, “Yes, but not this type as this regulation isn’t live yet.” She just got more and more irritated with my answer. The fifth time I answered, I was rather pedantic about it and she huffed. I explained that the summary reports that I had written were quite different in nature, but following one regulation’s requirements for one summary report isn’t different than following another regulation’s requirements. I spoke to her like she was 5 because I was sick of that question. I didn’t get the job even though I knew her manager well and worked with him really well. I think she wanted a reason not to hire me.

Image credits: Delicious_Arm8445

#20

I’ve never lost it in an interview, but I have told more than my fair share of ghosting recruiters to pound sand. The last one was super excited at the “great fit” I’d be at one of their clients. A month later, nothing heard (I’d sent at least three check-ins since our first discussion – 100% ghosted). A few months later, the same recruiter tried the same exact thing with another “great fit” job. I asked her why she would expect me to have any interest since she ghosted me last time. To that, I got a “But it’s YOUR responsibility to contact us”…I DID, you idiot.

Image credits: skeeter72

#21

I actually just lost it a bit with a training thing. I thought it was going to be like a job with embedded training, bit like a graduate scheme, paying for your exams while you’re on the job, etc.

I found out this morning that its not, you will have to pay thousands of your own money, and get no job and theres no job at the end, this wont really improve anything. If it helped me get a job I’d pay a bit for a course, but they wanted thousands upon thousands for a line on your resume that probably wont improve your situation.

They rang me and left a voicemail and the person was talking but sounded like siri. She just went ‘please. tell. meeee. when. I can. call. you.’ and I sent them a message saying you expect me to pay thousands for a training course with no job at the end, no help to find a job, you’ve just classed it as a job ad to make people think its an actual paid position, no thank you.

“For the first one (the medical startup), I had sacrificed 4+ hours of my time during a very stressful and busy finals week to go to that interview in person. I was genuinely interested in the job due to the field, and made sure to communicate that in both my cover letter and in person,” Slumi explained. “So to then essentially be told that my motivations were too weak when they came from a genuine place, I think you can appreciate why that would irritate me a bit.”

“For the second [interview story I shared] (the financial company), I had spent 8 hours or so of my free time coding in the way they said they preferred in order to leave a good impression. So to then be told ‘Hmmm why did you code in the way you asked you to? You shouldn’t have done that’ did not sit well with me,” the OP says.

#22

Interview for federal IT position.
Everything is going well until they ask when I can start. I told them I had mandatory reserve training for a month but could start after that.
They said that wouldn’t work for them and they would have to go with a different candidate. The kicker was this was for VA and I was being penalized for being a reservist.

#23

The best thing that ever happened to me was not getting a role at a financial firm.

I had applied for a network engineer role that looked interesting but was vaguely described.

I fire off a resume, pass two different screening phone calls and I get a request to come in and interview.

I knew something was off when I receive a timeline for the interview, and the six hours it was going to take.

During my time I talk with everyone (insert Gary Oldman meme) from the company, Co CEO’s, HR, Trading, company psychologist, hiring manager, line supervisor, the network team, etc.

The first time I met the line supervisor he came in with his heavy hitter and decided to play stump the chump. That immediately turned me off, I’ve conducted countless interviews myself and have had to play technical resource during interviews.

Team fit, willingness to learn and a basic understanding of how the technology works are the most important things are the most fundamental aspects to me.

I was white boarding a bunch of items during the interview and a switch just flipped in my head, this was so stupid that I just stopped and told the guy no. I would never do binary math on paper to come up with an answer. I have an app of my phone, I understand what is going on behind the scenes, that’s all one needs to know. He misunderstood my disengagement as a lack of understanding on my part; I know what’s going on, the guy is a dipshit going on a power trip who’s never had any leadership training.

At this point I’ve gone total sunk-cost fallacy, I should have just left, but I stayed for the remainder. I get to near the end and I have a one on one with the line supervisor. Things start to go down hill when he tells me how only one person has ever left while he’s been the supervisor and then starts to go on and on about how that personal was the biggest mistake ever because they left.

Then we get the conversation around to me and how he has grave reservations on my skill set and my ability to learn. That’s the point where I start to go off on the guy. Could I have handled it better, yes. But the guy was a walking, taking example of the Peter Principle, I was tired and was looking for a fight at that point.

I got a phone call from HR a week later saying I did not get the job, everyone liked me but the line supervisor. I did manage to get a quick exit interview where she admitted the line supervisor has had multiple HR complaints about his attitude and that he was “working” on it.

Because I did not get that job, I ended up in my current role which has ended up being the best job I’ve ever had. So I always thank that company for having a c**p network supervisor. Best thing that never happened to me.

#24

I had 2, both with recruiting agencies.

1, Lady emails me about this great opportunity. So I sent her my resume, and I have to take this test that I can only describe as a basic reasoning and math skills test. The minimum passing score was 70. I got 99. So I sent this woman an email that I finished the test, as requested. She takes a week to forward the results to the employer. I send not 1, not 2, but 4 follow-up emails in the next 2 weeks about the position, confirmed delivery receipts, and I get nothing back. I figure she ghosted me, so I moved on. 2 months later, she calls me and says that she needs my resume again and another test for the same employer. I asked why the first round wasn’t good enough. She says I didn’t get them to her in time. So, submitting both within 1 day of her contacting me isn’t fast enough? I find that really hard to believe. I ask if she’s sure I didn’t lose that first opportunity because she can’t read her emails and that this isn’t a totally new position? She got snippy with me about never getting my emails. So I got to read her my emails verbatim complete with delivery time and date. As she stutters some nonsense, I say I won’t be dealing with her as a recruiter anymore. She can forward me to someone else or forget that I exist and hang up. The audacity to blame me was just stunning.

2, I had a call from a recruiter with a very thick Indian accent, offering me another “great opportunity.” He was kinda hard to understand through his accent and had difficulty with some words, but we got there eventually. He asked me for my resume via email and was waiting on the phone to continue the conversation until he got it. Bear in mind that this is 8 am and I currently work nights, and I had just gotten to bed about 3 hours ago. When he gets it, he starts critiquing my resume, saying I could word this better, and take this out and whatnot. I had this resume professionally built, but go off, I guess. He had asked for a text file and not a PDF, which I’d never been asked for from another recruiter, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. After pontificating for 45 minutes, he finally hangs up. For the next 6 HOURS, I get calls from restricted numbers, no vm left, just repeated spam calls. At some point, I finally answered, angry as hell, and it’s this guy again demanding to know why i didn’t pick up before. “My caller ID said restricted number, I don’t answer those. They’re always scams. Why do you have your number restricted when you’re calling clients?” He got pissy about it and tried giving me the business about “being open to contacts regarding new opportunities.” I told him “I AM open to new opportunities, just not to people trying to sell me extended warranties on cars I don’t even f*****g own. Unrestrict your number or maybe try to not spam call people for 6 hours without leaving a single voicemail, you maniac.” He stopped contacting me after that.
Oddly enough, the employer reached out to me around this guy afterward because they were so interested. I got an interview, and during this they mentioned my qualifications based on my resume…. but those qualifications weren’t on my resume. This egghead edited my resume to get a better outcome for himself. The employer was rather upset to hear that, but thanked me for my honesty and we terminated the interview.

I also had another recruiting agency reach out to me, and in their 3rd email they asked for a 10 minute video where I introduce myself and answer a series of questions. I was asked to “make it look professional.” My response was “absolutely not, this is what interviews are for.” Never heard back.

“Anyway, another thing to mention is that I wasn’t in a huge state of anger or anything. I didn’t scream or get physical or anything, I just spoke my piece, and that was that,” Slumi clarified. “I mean, interviewers aren’t god; you’re allowed to talk back to them if you feel like they are in the wrong. It may cost you your opportunity, but when they make those kinds of remarks it’s not a good sign anyway. So you may as well go for it, it’s therapeutic. Just don’t do it if you’re going to apply for another job at the same company in the future.”

#25

I lost my cool at an interview once. I saved 90% of the anger for later …

I was interviewing with a well-known company in my area. I knew I would be interviewing with someone I had worked with years before, so I was especially wooried about embarassing myself.

During the interview the person asked “How have you use ‘technology XY’ in your work?” I had to answer “i have not use ‘technology XY’ at all. I am sudying, but I cannot even claim more than a minimal understanding”. The interviewer said “But it is on your resume that you have this skill. It is the primary reason we called you for an interview.” I showed them my own copy of my resume and we compared.

The recruiter had altered my resume to include several skills I did not claim. It was for the recruiter that I saved 90% of my anger. This was the same recruiter that attempted to convince me to take a 20-year step backwards in technology (i.e. switching back to COBOL mainframe from C# .NET) for his own gains.

#26

Interviewed at this health tech startup once. Rounds 1 and 2 were great, as I was mostly interviewing with HR and the marketing director.

I was asked to do a 3 hour personality aptitude test out of my workday—to which I was told I scored well.

When it came to the final round where I was interviewing with the startup founder herself, that’s when all hell broke loose.

She came in hot-headed and would roll her eyes whenever I’d answer her questions.

She was simply in horrendous mood—you could tell something had happened (or maybe that was just the way she was).

When it was my turn to ask her questions about company culture/expansion plans, role progression and standard things of the nature, she responded “seriously? is that what you’d ask me?”

She then went silent, didn’t answer any of them and folded her arms.

I was clearly feeling awkward and decided to speak about how excited I was about potentially joining the team, to which she continued rolling her eyes whilst scoffing.

It was just so nasty and mean-spirited. Truly the worst interview I’ve ever had to experience.

Just downright weird and disrespectful.

#27

Had an interview with this lady for a small media/content agency. She immediately asks me questions such as if I live at home still as the job didn’t pay enough for me to afford to live even though it was apparently a mid level role. She also mentions that I don’t have quite the experience she’s looking for and asking me why I came from working in call centers(had to work any job I could atm despite it not being my desired field so I wouldn’t be homeless and have food). It was so damn uncomfortable I thought about leaving right then and there like why did you even bother giving me an interview if you were more focused on my personal life than my ability to work the job…I’d rather have an auto reject or something if I had to deal with that again.

Finally, Sumi noted that he doesn’t expect the pain of job interviews to go away anytime soon. “But here’s my vision of a perfect job interview in the tech sector: What previous projects have you worked on? What problems did you encounter? How did you solve them? If you had to solve them again today, would you do anything different? I think that’s much more effective to evaluate a person’s technical skills than copy pasted LeetCode questions and thousand year old logic puzzles.”

#28

One of the worst interview experiences I’ve ever had was involving a recruiter who had no business recruiting:

cold call, of course, and paraphrased:

“hello, mr Walrus, I have this opportunity for you… yadda local yadda yadda in-field… yadda yadda contract position”

“oh, sorry I’m not currently interested in anything but full-time hire. I don’t plan on accepting a contract role at all, but thanks”

“no problem we can negotiate that later if you land the position”

“ok, whatever, submit me if you think it’s a fair shot”

he does, and they like my resume because I’m well experienced in my field. a day or two before the interview, I go to check the email he’s sent me so I can mentally prep for the interview, and I notice, peculiar, that one of the line descriptions he’s provided me looks familiar… a little too familiar… it’s directly off my own resume, and he’s presented it to me as if it’s part of the job description. I pop him an email professionally telling him to stop f*****g around and provide me the job description or I’m not going to know what to expect. after initially denying any wrongdoing, he sends over the actual description. ok, fine, whatever. he’s trying to prevent me from applying underneath him and cutting him out

days later, i’m sitting in front of a camera for a zoom interview.

now, i’m a wet-lab synthetic scientist. as the minutes and questions tick on, I realize very swiftly that this position is not only not what i’m specialized in, it’s a data entry role, updating data from a list. once that’s done, the job is done. this is a contract position and there’s no way to negotiate around that. as I ponder this over, I am asked another question by the hiring team on the call:

“Mr. Walrus, it says here on your resume that you have lots of skill in -insert incredibly specific set of buzzwords here- can you tell us a little bit more about that?”

huh? that’s not on my resume at all. I didn’t put that in there, because I’m not skilled in that at all. but I’m sure I’ve heard that set of words before…

in the job description he emailed me

which means this f*****g recruiter not only lied to me about the position, but he lied to the position about ME. not knowing how much damage had been done, and seeing red, I responded that that wasn’t on my resume, shouldn’t be on my resume, they were lied to by the recruiter, and I’m unfortunately not skilled with that. there was an awkward silence, I let them know I would send over my ACTUAL resume once the interview was complete.

afterwards, I did just that, and tried to get in contact with the recruiter to chew him a new one. I tried to get in contact for THREE DAYS. I was searching for this man’s boss on linkedin so I could dress him down and get him reprimanded.

finally he reaches back out to me, unprompted, via phone call and, having ignored every email I sent him, the first words out of his mouth are:

“Mr. Walrus, I have good news! the company wants to hire you!”

of course they do, I’m great and well-established

“they want to hire you for a 6 month contract basi-“

“no, I told you at the beginning of all of this I’m not taking contract work, and also, how DARE you”

this next part is NOT paraphrased, and will forever stick with me:

“oh please, mr Walrus, I’ve worked so hard for this”

“excuse me? you lied to me, the position, wasted the time of everyone involved, and then were unreachable for DAYS”

“mr Walrus, maybe i better put my boss on to speak with you”

“YEAH, PLEASE, YOU DO THAT”

and he did, the mad f****r actually did, and I sure did dress him down to his boss. the audacity was absolutely unbelievable, and the guy was a moron with no training. For what it’s worth, his boss was professional and understandably horrified at the situation, as she and her team had been hiring for that company for years, and this idiot just jeopardized the entire account. she agreed there was no way to negotiate the position into a full-time role (obviously). I told her if she can figured out how to negotiate what I was ACTUALLY looking for, I’d be happy to take the position. She said “I’ll see what I can do” and I never heard back.

couldnt believe it, i’ll never forget it.

#29

Damn, I feel like we both have the same personality! I’m also a pretty much reserved and calm person unless someone wronged me in some way, and I do have a few stories to share (but might not be as interesting as yours):

Interview 1

I interviewed for a telesales position. The introduction part went smoothly. And then we went to the sales part. He asked, can you list a few strategies or ideas to improve sales? So I asked him what kind of products or services are we talking about. He said it could be anything. I told him well, I can’t really give you any practical ideas or strategies when I don’t even know what kind of products or services are we selling. Then he said something really weird like “All my years working here, I’ve never encountered any practical ideas anyways.” which I don’t even understand what he meant. So i tried to explain my perspective, “So what I’m trying to say is that different products and services require different strategies. There isn’t a one size fit all solution. For example, you wouldn’t ask a twitch streamer to help you promote an IT solution, and fb ads might work better on something like computer peripherals than something like toilet paper.” And then he kinda ignored everything i said and asked me again, “So your answer is?” At that point I got fed up and told him, “Nevermind, thanks.” and left the online interview before he could say anything.

Interview 2

This was for a part-time customer service rep position (Max 20 hours per week, $5 per hour). I actually applied it on January (I’ve already forgotten about it), and they only reached out to me recently. So I thought they were pretty desperate at that point, and I might get the job. Same as usual, started with the self introduction bla bla bla. Then the interviewer asked why did you apply for this position (She acted as if I was applying for a full-time job), so I just gave some random bs like i’m looking to increase my income aside from my current full time job and to also gain more experience to develop my career bla bla. She even proudly said “Oh, you’d definitely learn a lot of new things in this job! (lmao woman, you think this is some sort of managerial position??) And then she asked if I’m able to commit to this job despite being a part-time job because there’s gonna be a lot of work to do. I said yes.

Things started to get weird here. So she further explained, “Also, you need to make sure to get everything done before you leave work, so you might need to stay back and work overtime sometimes. Are you able to do that?” I said, “Yeah sure, I’ll just make sure to get everything done on time.” Then she asked, “Are you able to work overtime?” to which I replied, “If i’m getting paid for the extra time, then yes.” She then said, “Uhm, actually we’re not gonna pay any overtime. But sometimes, you might need to stay back and make sure everything is completed.” I started to feel a bit annoyed, but kept my cool and said, “Well if that’s the case, I’ll just make sure to get things done on time so that I don’t need to stay back.” Then she said, “Yeah, but sometimes, for example, you reach out to another agent to check on something, and they didn’t reply even when your working time is over. So you still need to stay back and follow up with that.” I got so pissed off at that point I let out a laugh in a mocking way, and then I said, “Yeah, so I feel like for $5 per hour, that’s a bit too much to ask from anyone, don’t you think? Have a nice day!” and same as above, left the online interview before she could say anything.

Interview 3

Well, this isn’t technically an interview, but more of an early screening stage via a phone call. It’s for a customer service rep position as well. I thought this was a fully remote position, but then she told me i still need to go to the office once a week. I explained to her that i thought this was a fully remote position, plus I’m disabled, so it’s pretty inconvenient for me to commute to work, and asked if she could grant me an exception. I could maybe go there once or twice every month if it’s something urgent. She said she’ll ask the boss about it later. And then she asked if I could work 16 hours per day for 4 days a week. I said, “But the max number of working hours per week according to the employment law is 45 hours (I’m Asian). That’s already more than that.” And then she started raising her voice and said in an extremely entitled way, “Not every job is 45 hours only. You need to understand that bla bla bla…” That entitled and condescending tone was what pissed me off. Before she could finish, I interrupted and told her, “You know what, I think this job isn’t for me. Thanks.” And even when i was saying that, she was still babbling away. But I ended the phone call anyways. After that, the more I think about it, the angrier I got. So i sent a follow up message to her on whatsapp (a common way to communicate here), I told her the employment act specifically said the max is 45 hours, 16 x 4 that’s already 64 hours. You sound like it’s morally wrong to want a work-life balance. People are humans too. We have our lives to live too. Not everyone is entitled to be your corporate slave. I withdraw my application, good luck in finding a suitable candidate. And then i blocked her.

I used to be like no matter how ridiculous or entitled the interviewer is, I’ll just say yes to everything thinking that would land me the job. Years of working experience told me the otherwise. So nowadays, I don’t deal with their bs anymore.

#30

Yea, I’ve been entry level data science, and had several experiences just like this:

I got into an argument over programming languages, apparently I really list the guy off according to the recruiter.

Another time, this company interviewed me, asked about their problem, and I explained how learning algorithms work. They kept pumping, and I realize I was being used in a consulting role, for free. I just put my marker down, and sort of walked backwards. Didn’t get the job, they “promoted” someone in the room to do the role.

Same job, the CEO asked me how much I liked recycling. It’s great! I said, but honestly I couldn’t care less.

Entry level data science at small companies is almost always a mess. They need to hire you as an expert, but you’re also a junior employee, so there’s this weird problem of fit. It’s often likely that they are hiring with an ad how process, so it’s always a bit sloppy!

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