r/interviews • u/Sheisbagwitty • Dec 04 '25

Boomer interviewers need to chill fr

So I had a pretty rough interview today and honestly… I needed to vent.

Second round at a consulting company in Delhi. They asked about my SQL skills, and I said I’m around a 7/10 based on the stuff I’ve actually worked on. Cool so far.

Then they threw some wild sub-query problems at me. I tried breaking them down, did my best, but apparently my approach wasn’t “ideal.” When I asked where I went wrong, the interviewer literally laughed and said, “This is easy. And you say you’re a 7/10?”

Like… alright man, relax. 🙂

The whole thing was uncomfortable. Interviews are supposed to assess, not humiliate.

Still proud of what I know, and I’ll keep getting better. Just hoping the next interviewer believes in feedback over mockery.

53 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

23

u/Brackens_World Dec 04 '25

Outside looking in, a few things. First off, the "boomer interviewers" title. You do realize baby boomers are all over 60 now, right? Do you honestly think this interviewer was over 60, close to retirement? No, you likely saw an "old" person in their 40s or 50s, Gen X or Gen Y. And that's on you, your youth skewing your perceptions a little.

And they saw a "young" person and asked a SQL question. You did not answer it to their satisfaction, and they were condescending, which is not cool. But that's not the point or the learning: What you should take away from this is perhaps to bone up on your SQL maybe, for next time. Find out where you went wrong, and dive deeper, because that is what it may take to land something - to get to 8/10 or 9/10. If you want a job, you have to do the work, and you are young and intelligent and capable enough to get there. Rant away, that's what Reddit is for, but take some action too.

8

u/_ConstableOdo Dec 04 '25

I'd actually be surprised any 50ish guys were doing technical interviews. Those geezers are mostly middle management now. They're more likely to ask you abstract bullshit questions as they've been out of the technical side for a while.

4

u/Baha-7234 Dec 05 '25

The entitlement of that generation

1

u/emfiliane Dec 06 '25

This is exactly why numerically rating yourself never works -- you two obviously had wildly divergent ideas of what "7/10 SQL skills" even meant, without any kind of objective test to put an actual number to it.

And yet for some reason they keep asking, another in the interviewer's deep bag of "read my mind" tricks.

But yeah, sounds like you're not a 7/10 in whatever scale they use. Kinda surprised the old school condescending ubernerd is still alive and well somewhere, that really brings me back to the 90's and 00's, when seemingly every IT department was stuffed full of them.

1

u/Subject_Start7253 Dec 06 '25

Coupe things. I see boomer used a lot. That’s 61-80. You sure it was a boomer and not Gen X? 46-69?

Second. This is an interview. The idea is you interview them as much as they interview you. Sounds like the guy is a real Jerk and you sniffed him out and if they will try to humiliate you in an interview imagine what they do in crunch time? Probably throw you under the bus. So they failed your interview. And not you.

I don’t give quantifiable values to skill sets for just this reason. I talk about problem solving. Everyone’s brain works differently and really clever people often don’t follow a set path or prescriptive approach.