Lets have some fun, and come up with the worst job interview question you can think of.
We have all heard about the job interview questions which are simply bad. Questions which test no practical skill, like asking people to write a quick sort implementation on a whiteboard. Or simply weird questions, which you have no idea about what they could imply, like "Are you a dog person or cat person?".
So let me hear the worst interview questions you can come up with. Which are so bad, that they become funny. (Bonus points if this was an actual question.)
Top comments (87)
Interviewer: "Did you heard about this facebook thing?"
Me: "Sure"
Interviewer: "Can you than develop something like that?"
Me: "What?"
Interviewer: "What?"
Me: Of course. Actually, I have developed many things like that.
Interviewer: Such as?
Me: Well,I've developed a program called Tic-Tac-Toe that's like that.
Interviewer: What does it do?
Me: It plays Tic-Tac-Toe.
Interviewer: That isn't like Facebook.
Me: Oh? I'm sorry, perhaps I didn't fully understand your requirements. Can you elaborate?
Actually that's hilarious :,)
Interviewer: When you are planning to get married?
Me (Surprised): Why do you ask this question?
Interviewer: Since people may take Some time off if they got married, soo?
Me (I was like what???): I am 21. I didn't plan for the next 5 years. And basically, I am a guy. there are no chances that I go for paternity leave. Moreover, it is a very personal question.
The above was the question asked to me by some HR in the last round of interview. I declined the company offer because of it.
I bet that company doesn't hire women at all, as they might get married and might get pregnant.
The question is so terrible it overshoots being funny and lands to being just plain horrible.
I have a feeling this company also likes to ask women if they're planning on having children anytime soon. NOT ok.
Uh wtf
I do not think that this happened in USA because it is illegal to ask any sort of questions like. Do you have wife? Do you have children etc..
Yeah sure later when you are hired, you got to put Married, 15 kids and 3 cats for your insurance and taxes but at interview? Nope.
Interviewer (CTO): "I don't know anything about frontend. But look at this regex on this piece of paper and tell me what it does"
Me: "This is impractical, but It looks like an email validation"
Interviewer: "Tell me what is wrong with it"
Me: "I mean I would use a computer for this"
What's wrong with it is that you can't validate an email address using a regular expression - the syntax is too complex. But as an answer (or, indeed, a question) that's extraordinarily niche...
I would say it's fairly simple to validate-- just not with regex.
With regex; I'd just test
([^]+)@([^]{1,255}). Or with JS:/(.+)@(.{1,255})/su.By that logic, shouldn't you ask your candidates if they are practicing a sport where they might injure themselves and miss work? A man tells you he is skyiing in the weekends is as big a risk as a woman who might want a baby some day don't you think?
If he breaks his leg and has to miss a few months of work, those poor colleagues will suffer the consequences. Do your futur employees even have the right to have a life outside of work? Or must they be living for the job, and be sure to never do anything that "might" make them miss work?
"What's your favorite Star Trek series?"
It's really bad to expect your employees to fit into some kind of arbitrarily-defined "nerd" culture.
The obvious correct answer here would be "the original trilogy".
"The one with the daleks"
As a fan of Star Wars, I must say...
Same problem with sports. It may not come up as much in tech, but as someone working at not-a-tech-firm, people love to talk about sports. And I just don't find any appeal in it. There's no room for me in those conversations.
Also, DS9, obviously.
Quick way to confuse the interviewer: 'I'd say the one with ... stars in it. Yeah, that one. Go sportsball.'
You probably wouldn't get hired there, but would you really want to?
The one the boldly goes where no one has gone before.
Somebody who's a stack would obviously always work on the latest thing which was given to them. And a queue person would always finish the things which came in first.
A skip list person organized all their work in layers, where each layer has a bunch of tasks linked together.
The bloom filter person could reliably answer that they are not working on something. But cannot be completely sure if they are working on something.
TIL I'm a bloom filter.
"If our company starts with a Z does that mean it will be at the bottom of googles search list?"
These ones were real for me.
Interviewer: "Do you get along well with your family?"
Me: "What?"
--
Interviewer: "Why is JavaScript single threaded"
Me: "Have you heard of threadpool?"
--
Phone call.
Me: "Hello, I have an interview and I wasn't allowed in the building"
Interviewer/HR: "Oh no problem, the whole team got fired."
--
Interviewer: "Write me the code for reversing a string"
Me: writes string.reverse()
Interviewer: "I have no idea if this works"
--
Interviewer: "How important is the salary for you?"
Me: ...
And now fictional.
Would Shrek be a good weatherman?
What you are describing is absolutely, 100% illegal in the US. And FOR GOOD REASON. As someone who ran my own business, no, this is not how the world works. If your number one priority as a company is to make money, you're going to go out of business. Or you're going to make your life and everyone else's life a living hell. There are plenty of options to pay for paternity leave as a company. And the cost of hiring and firing people usually outweighs what you lose do to paternity leave.
Also, before I started coding, I worked in the HR department of my university's career center. This isn't how good HR works.
Even further, I am a type 1 diabetic. The idea that you're going to discriminate based off of health, is also definitely illegal. I've had one interview where I mentioned my insulin pump (I made a game about it kind of, and it was relevant to a question they asked). The lead software developer asked if I had type 1 diabetes (which I mean, no one just uses a insulin pump for the fun of it). The HR rep stopped the interview, pulled him out of the office, talked to him, and then he came back in and apologized immensely. Of course I understand the mistake, but the point is any decent HR rep knows there are clear limits to what you can ask, much less base a hiring decision off of.
I truly hope you either have learned from this thread, or don't have any hiring power where you're at.
The HR person overreacted. You already said that you have an Insulin Pump. As far as I know, only people with diabetes type 1 need one of those. The software developer just connected the dots
To be clear, I don't believe she forced him to apologize or anything. She likely just explained the situation to him and he realized he didn't really mean to ask me that question. You're right in that in this particular case, she totally could have left it alone, but it's better to be safe than sorry. A good HR rep is going to establish a clear boundary. The point still stands, in the US, this is illegal and more importantly, not common practice by any stretch of the imagination. At least, not for companies which want to continue to exist and remain productive.
That's the number one priority of a company, especially in the US. Individuals in it might have different priorities (and I'd hope they do!) but don't kid yourself about capitalism. If the company wants to implement equal hiring policies it is entirely because they have evaluated (risk of being fined by the government + sued + bad PR) > (risk of extra expense of paying maternity leave).
Some companies definitely do operate simply to make money, most of which struggle immensely to do so, and waste a ton of money in the process.
Profit is definitely a priority. But most companies exist for other reasons, and focusing solely on making money often leads to huge booms and bust.
As for the second part of your comment. You're missing some important pieces of information. Happy employees are much more productive. And a diverse workforce is almost always more productive. High productivity leads to higher profit margins. Think about this, would you say your code is "better" (more maintainable, cleaner, faster, flexible, whatever) when you're working 80 hours a week, or 40? For me personally the quality of my code drops off sharply after 8 hours of work. Plenty of studies confirm this notion, and most project leads I've worked with have agreed (though not all were in a position to actually improve working conditions).
Companies have a vested interest in a diverse and happy work force. If they decide not to hire a women simply because she might take time off, then the assumption is they're picking a "worse" developer who in the long run will cost them more.
So they'd trade short term profit for long term profit by hiring the better developer, even if they end up paying for maternity leave.
And that's seen by the company as something that's good because it means they will make more money.
Yes, vested as in "profitably motivated".
Yes... Lol. I didn't say it's not a priority at all. My point was it's about more than just the fines they're avoiding.
One from then often brilliant Twitter account @iamdevloper
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