Ask HN: How to deal with inexperienced interviewers?

I am at my wits end. I am getting exhausted and drained in these interviews.<p>There are times where I just botch interviews. Here and there, I look back and realize I came off the wrong way, like wow, I did that. But I reflect, and strive to get better. Sometimes it&#x27;s just not a fit. Or someone comes along that&#x27;s a better option than me.<p>But there is a growing pocket of places I interview at where they blatantly lie, bait and switch, ignore my portfolio and go right into brainteasers, code golf, and refactors that have absolutely nothing to do with the role being filled. Then radio silence.<p>I&#x27;m coming to the conclusion I&#x27;d rather earn less and work more hours on my own than enable this system. Because I have an indictment far more damning the OP: Some of the people interviewing me can barely code and are trying to survive another day. Not to mention, there are some who are afraid of letting in a stronger candidate that could replace them. Heh, what do you think they do?<p>Last interview I had, I discussed multiple times it being in Django and Python. Come the time of our call, interviewer flipped the script, it&#x27;s in JavaScript, Underscore, and the data being passed around is so ambiguous it meshed together in my mind through the remainder of our call. I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s a clueless interviewer - or a really shrewd one who knew how to lay one over me.<p>Or is it me? The problem I face is getting beat down by all these tests makes me feel I&#x27;m not a good coder. Due to the fog of Dunning-Kruger, I know I can never be sure if the deficit is really on my end or not.<p>Does anyone else out there feel this?<p>I have published code all over. I code 10+ hours a day, even on the weekends. I get hammered in technical interviews.

Some five years ago, I was having a phone interview for a company that were looking for people specializing in embedded programming with solid knowledge of OS internals and assembly. It seemed a great fit for me as that was what I have been doing since the start of my professional career.<p>As soon as the phone call started, the interviewer asked a puzzle question which had absolutely nothing to do with what I would eventually have to do if I got the offer. Bemused, I promptly solved the puzzle. He went on to ask three more puzzles after that. I solved each one of them. Now, it had already been 20 minutes into the interview and not one relevent question had been asked. I was getting a bit edgy.<p>He then went on to ask me textbook questions like difference between a process and a thread, types of memory management and so on.<p>It was one hour into the interview and he hadn&#x27;t asked meaningful question that could justify the lofty requirements they had mentioned of their desirable candidate in the Job description.<p>When after around 1 hour, he asked me another puzzle, I politely asked him the relevence of that question with respect to the job. He told me that since he was the one interviewing me, he got to decide what was relevent and what was not.<p>I told him that I would like to end the interview right there. He protested. I hung up.

Interviews aren&#x27;t only for the company to get a feel for you- it&#x27;s also your chance to get a feel for the company. Would you want to work with someone who talked over you? How about someone more interested in boosting their own ego than doing their job (interviewing you)?<p>If the company thinks this is the person best qualified to judge applicants, you&#x27;re dodging a bullet.

Make friends. If they&#x27;re inexperienced, it&#x27;s your opportunity to manage the interview and establish a rapport that an experienced interviewer might not allow, or might discount. Someone who belittles like that is afraid to encounter someone who &quot;really&quot; knows their stuff and the right words can lead to their imitating you instead of intimidating you.

Here&#x27;s the secret: Don&#x27;t apply for those jobs and cut your losses short by finishing the interview yourself and walking out.<p>TL;DR: Bad interviews are a strong, pretty reliable symptom of a lack of good company culture.<p>What few people understand is that interviews aren&#x27;t just for the employer, they are also your chance to choose who you&#x27;re working for, what you get to know and how to progress your career. Your colleagues are the people who you will regularly spend more time awake with than your spouse.<p>They say &quot;you don&#x27;t leave a company, you leave a boss&quot; — and it&#x27;s true. Interviews are exactly the other side of this coin: You will usually sit across the table of your future boss. So choose well, as your choice will have a profound impact on your wellbeing for next few years, impacting work-life balance, chances and hirability afterwards.<p>Don&#x27;t screw it up and just politely leave as soon as possible.

Normally, I also reject companies that have bad interviewers - it means that the rest of the people they actually hire are likely below average as well. Which also means poor growth, poor salary growth for you, and likelihood that you&#x27;ll have to lift some of your colleagues&#x27; weight as well.<p>Sometimes it&#x27;s just the recruiting dept that&#x27;s bad. I&#x27;ve interviewed with one company, where the recruiters were quite incompetent and insecure. Forms were extremely long, including personal things like t-shirt size and education level of siblings.<p>But the company was quite good. It was just a side effect of a rapidly growing company not hiring the right people for those slots. People who filled in those forms just treated it as another hurdle and the tech team still remains awesome.

I had the exact same problem with an interviewer recently. He came in with a preconceived notion to reject and kept moving the conversation towards that.<p>He was interviewing me for a Sr. Engg role , and his first question was what is the difference between Server side and Client side scripting. I took it in good humor and answered him. He stunned me by saying &quot;That&#x27;s not what I was looking for. You should have just said server side scripting runs on the server and client side runs on the client&quot; :P<p>I know I should have hung up there, but I was referred by a friend so had to sit through the entire hour.

My worst interview ever was the head of HR for a Fortune 500 company that transferred to the Non-Profit side of the company. The job was working with non-technical and working with children. My interview was very invasive. I had two private investigators looking into my past, an interview at home that included my wife and two children and medical examination and physical test.<p>I arrived at the final interview and waited 50 minutes. Then the two people doing the interview never even read anything about me and came into it cold. I was prepared for a very detailed interview and instead I got ambiguous questions and when they asked me questions they actually reflected back what they heard and it was 50% just wrong. I corrected their mistake and the person gave me attitude. Later in the interview the person read their notes and he wrote down what was factually inaccurate that I corrected before. I corrected the inaccurate statement again and he was beyond pissed. I didn&#x27;t get the job. When I was called I said to the person who I was in contact with for the whole 9 months that it was the worst interview I have ever had and made me look very negative at the whole experience. He just acknowledge what i stated and stated sorry. I still get request to reapply. I still might.....

I think that commentators on this page have got this one completely wrong. It is important to let inexperienced engineers have a say in the recruitment process because they are the ones who will be working under you (right when you join or maybe in 6-12 months)!<p>Just to give an example, in one of the onsite interviews at a big tech company, I was interviewed by someone 1-2 years out of his undergrad. He asked me to solve a puzzle. Though I am not a big fan of puzzles, I answered it to the best of my ability. Then the conversation turned into what work he is doing and how he was getting frustrated on not having any meaningful projects. I gave him some standard career advice - do a side project that will improve the efficiency of your team (a new build system, test integration, wiki, etc.) and discussed higher education options. Both of us were happy by the end of interview. In addition, it also allowed me to catch a breath between the many back-to-back interviews.

If a company can&#x27;t spare the time of a senior team member to talk to you after some initial vetting they are probably not worth your time. I&#x27;ve been on the other side quite often and properly interviewing is time intense. Preparation, conducting and wrap-up can easily be 4 hours. We only assign a senior member if we think it could be a match and we need to actively persuade the candidate. So unless you really want a position, if you get an inexperienced interview partner just cut your losses and move on. Don&#x27;t think too much about it and focus on the next one.<p>Just generally, be bolder with how you select your employer. If they don&#x27;t want to know you personally, move on. If they are not interested in what you did in previous positions, move on. If they are only interested in skills you built up previously, move on (because they won&#x27;t want to develop you). Etc...

Interviews go both ways. If everyone was unpleasant, then it might be representative of the culture there and you may have dodged a bullet. If it&#x27;s just one round or one person souring the experience, let the recruiter know. Companies that care about their culture or image will take the feedback to heart.

I think the best way to handle it is: Sit trough the interview. At good companies you get to talk to more than 1 person, and a group of persons decide whether you get hired. If you really want to join the company you are interviewing with, then just try to get trough this interview, and try to make the best of out it. The company you are interviewing with also has limited developers time, and developers need to get an idea of your skill in a short amount of time. Try to be the nice person. Or try a different company if it gives you the bad buzz.

There&#x27;s nothing you can do. Complain to the recruiter afterwards, if they bother calling you, but make sure you tell them that the particular interviewer was not good.

Look somewhere else.<p>If company X has inexperienced interviewers, then company X almost certainly has other problems. Inexperienced programmers? Inexperienced managers? Bad processes? Something, anyway, because a company shouldn&#x27;t be sending people to interview who are unfit for the task.<p>And if you get past those interviewers and get hired, then you&#x27;re going to have to live with whatever else was going on that allowed those people to be the interviewers. So I think you&#x27;re better off taking those people as being a datapoint about the company. Walk away, and be grateful you found out early enough.

It is made up profession. Of course they have to make it sound and look like there is any value is HR hiring. Sure younger interviewers don&#x27;t know all the tricks yet to make it sound like it all makes sense. More than once I was talking to a guy (different ones) and when they proudly say they are in HR&#x2F;interviewing people I feel genuinely sorry. Bragging to be a parasite and being proud about the fact. I&#x27;ve been nice in this post in case anybody is wondering.

Unfortunately I don&#x27;t think there is much to do about it. The strategy I&#x27;ve adopted the past couple years is to just grin and bear it and get out ASAP. Even if I get an offer (not usually in these cases, because the interviewer is dead set on proving you&#x27;re an idiot and they are smart), I will reject it (unless I&#x27;ve been through several interviews with other teammates that I enjoyed).

I guess the answer depends on how strong your desire is to work for that company and whether you consider the (annoying) interviewer representative for the place. Who would like to work with a bunch of wise-asses?! and also it depends on your mental features - like patience and communication skills.<p>I usually just stay friendly and see what I can do to keep the interview short.

For me an instant turn-off is live coding (I get too stressed) and pointless academic questions that have nothing to do with the things I would be doing there.<p>And to be honest after I experience that combo I usually give up cause that means most people there were chosen based on that.

If you have interviewing skills, reverse the interview. Take the reins and guide them through it.

Just give up.<p>My experience is terrible with them. There is a huge chance that they will sent wrong information about you, and you will have problems with even talking with the next recruiter from the same company.

&gt;try to assert that your professional experience and knowledge is somehow inferior to theirs (or at least make you feel that way).<p>I had this exact situation happen a while ago. I applied for a front-end developer role and the interviewer insisted on asking questions about the deep internals of node. And whenever I gave a satisfactory answer he would immediately tell me an alternative answer, as if mine isn&#x27;t somehow good enough. The entire interview just felt like he had to one up me at all times.

Wrong audience