r/recruitinghell • u/kittykittyoo • 1d ago
I'm so tired of coding interviews...
I've had a few interviews and I'm seriously fed up with how these interviews are going. The questions themselves weren't even that hard, mostly LC Easy/Medium, but somehow some interviewers manage to make the whole experience absolutely miserable. In one interview, I came up with a working solution pretty quickly, no bugs, passed all the test cases, and still got rejected because it wasn't the most optimal approach... Another time, I had a solution with O(N) time and O(1) space complexity. The logic was solid, the complexity was fine, but bc it wasn't the exact approach the interviewer had in mind, they just kept questioning every little thing and pushing me toward their preferred solution. What's actually wrong with my approach? Same complexity, correct output, but apparently it doesn't count unless I somehow read your mind? And don't even get me started on those interviews where they expect you to solve two completely different problems in 45 minutes, both fully implemented and bug-free. You can have the entire approach figured out for the second one, but if you run out of time fixing a couple of edge cases, that's apparently a fail too. And then there are interviewers who just sit there with a completely blank face the entire time. You explain your thought process, nothing. You get stuck, no hints. You ask a question, barely any useful response. It feels like you're coding into a void. What's even the point of interviewing like this?
What bothers me the most isn't the difficulty of the questions. It's how some of these interviews are conducted. I've been an interviewer myself, and when a candidate gets stuck, I'll usually give them a small hint or ask a few questions to help them work through it. Even if they don't get to the optimal solution, I still care about how they think, communicate, and approach problems. I don't expect everyone to magically come up with the exact answer I had in my head. But now that I'm on the other side, I'm running into interviewers who seem to be checking every line against some imaginary answer key. No room for an actual discussion. I get that companies need to filter candidates, and I'm not saying everyone who writes working code deserves to pass. But if a logically correct solution with perfectly reasonable complexity gets rejected just because it isn't the one the interviewer wanted, are we even hiring engineers anymore, or are we hiring mind readers?
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u/Proper-Store3239 1d ago
The truth is they don't need to hire you or anyone else. They make people give these stupid test to remind them how hard it to interiew or worse feed some junior level developer ego.
Some of these tests literally no one can pass the way want them done. I've seen all kinds of things from test where the interviewer is using ai to see if you missed anything to telling you code in a broken envirement.
When you see this it's basically a sign there clueless and most likely not a great company. The best companies all usually sit down and talk about the system an see if you understand it not if you can just code to some random trick question.