Interactive humpday: Worst job-hunting stories
I think just about everyone’s got a story about the worst thing they’ve seen someone do while looking for work. Whether it’s showing up to the interview drunk or publicly badmouthing the company you’re trying to work for, there are all kinds of pitfalls to be avoided. Sometimes it’s just as simple as wearing the wrong clothes to an interview; sometimes it’s much much worse.
Today I’d like to hear everyone’s worst job-hunting stories. I’ll start with two of my own.
The first one is my personal horror story. I was doing a phone interview for a job in another country, and it was about midnight where I was. I had a drink to sip from as I talked on the phone to them. All was going well til I swallowed my drink the wrong way and started to choke. It took me a few minutes of coughing, wheezing, and retching before I could carry on. I had no idea how to deal with the situation. Luckily I managed to squeeze out “excuse me!” and put down the phone for a minute, then apologise and carry on. They even gave me the job, but I’m sure it can’t have made a great impression.
The second one is one I saw when I was one of the people reviewing applications for a software dev position. All the applications had to be made through a web form where you could enter your contact details, upload your resume, and so on. This one guy had written “Fuck you, I hate this stupid fucking forms!” in the entry fields. Needless to say we didn’t interview him.
What’s the worst you’ve heard of (or done)?
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The worst story I’ve ever heard was one my boss told me about a potential co-op that he interviewed. The Co-ops were from one of the 12 month computer schools and was supposed to have basic experience in a wide range of web technologies.
Part of the deal with their program was that they were required to do a co-op for free so we wouldn’t have to pay them (something that was very attractive to our company at the time).
After reading through the resume my boss asks:
“So, I see you’ve got XML listed here on your resume. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about that.”
“Ummm,” says the interviewee, “I think I might have been sick that day.”
“Oh,” says my Boss, “Well, how about JSPs. You have that listed here as well.”
“Ah. Well, I think I might have been sick that day as well.”
“I see.”
He was not hired, even for free.
A friend of mine (no really) once collapsed from heat exhaustion on arrival at an interview, cut his head open and left in an ambulance. They offered him another chance at the interview but he’d already taken another job.
I’ve heard of any number of code applications for dev positions where the sample code has been submitted in a Word file.
I suppose it’s possible occasionally that said applicants can actually code but for whatever reason are missing the part of their brain that is capable of learning that you can attach non-Word documents to email, or alternatively they’re following “applications in Word” directions to the letter, but it usually turns out that they have opened up a textbook and copied the code into Word and think that that compiling and testing thing is one of those funny little things university CS courses make you do.
It’s not etiquette, but I have quite a few more “but no one uses this in the real world!” stories from my CS teaching days. The best one was the student who patiently explained to me that threading (and related concurrency problems) were all just so much academic fantasy bullshit that we were making him learn in order to prevent his superstar IT career taking off. (I despaired for the human race in the seventh week of that course, when we’d spent five weeks talking about deadlocks and a bunch of students then told me that “my assignment program is randomly freezing and won’t start again, is that a problem?”)
A story from another friend (I haven’t been in hiring positions much). The company in question has a technical test, about 10 pages long. It’s quite hard, you’re not really meant to be able to finish it, but it gives you a chance to show off your knowledge of pointer arithmetic and order of operations in C, some crypto and so on, and then they talk to you about your answers and thought processes in the interview and it’s an easy way to distinguish people who “know C” from people who know C.
So a candidate shows up, and they hand him the test and explain that he has 30/45 minutes or whatever to have a go at it and then they’ll come back and interview him (I’m not sure whether candidates also get advance warning when the interview is arranged). The candidate asks if he can go to the toilet first, they say sure, off he goes. And they wait and wait and wait, fifteen minutes later a soft alarm goes off somewhere in the building, they ignore it, and wait about another fifteen minutes before someone goes to find out if he’s had a heart attack in the loo or something. He’s not in there, the only sign of him is the window he’s forced open to escape through, and the related alarm that’s been set off.
Maybe there’s a related etiquette question here. You’re at a job interview and it turns out that the job is outside what you’re looking for by a long way. How do you get out of it without breaking out of the building?
“I’m sorry, but I’d like to cut our interview short to save your time and mine. I can see here that we’re not going to be a match for this position. I’m very interested in the company, and would love to re-interview for another position that’s more closely aligned with my skills.”
Mary: We had one of those a while back. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I wasn’t the one to interview him, but my co-worker who did the interview said that within 5-10 mins they’d figured out the mutual incompatibility and managed to say, “Hey, I don’t think this is a good fit, shall we just leave it at that?”
I was sent by a headhunter to a job interview where it was patently obvious to me and the interviewer in about 5 minutes that it was a mismatch. We spent the rest of the time talking about a network problem he had in the Melbourne office.
I’ve not done much interviewing, I have had some pretty dire resumes though. THe illegible photocopy one done on one of those old wet-type photocopiers was particualrly memorable.
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