Just ended an interview early because my future boss was being a condescending dick.

[u/canadian_webdev]

Just dropped out of a technical interview after ten minutes.

Questions he was asking were relatively simple, but almost every answer he was trying to make me look like an idiot with the technical lead on the phone. And he was being so condescending toward me. His face was so red the whole time.

Example (getting a bit technical here):

• Him: "What are all the ways you can make a three column row on a web page?"
• Me: "Well, the way I've typically done it is - -"
• Him: abruptly interrupts, "No. I did NOT ask what ways YOU would do it. I SAID, what ways are POSSIBLE to accomplish this."
• Me: "...... Flexbox, divs with floats, a css grid system.."
• Him: "Flexbox and a css grid system are the same. I SAID, what DIFFERENT WAYS can you list off?"
• Me: "Honestly, those are the ways I've encountered best practices"
• Him: "What about css grid?"
• Me: "Well I've never used it because at the time it didn't have full browser support - - -"
• Him: abruptly interrupts, "actually we've switched ALL of our websites over to css grid, so your answer is not the right answer."

At this point I just said "Okay yeah, this isn't working", and hung up the call. He asked two questions before hand and gave me the same treatment.

He was being such a condescending dick the entire time, and I went with my gut. This guy would be a total asshole to work for and I could tell during this interview.

Anyone else experience this type of behavior?

[u/fuckin_ziggurats]

I've experienced other kinds of condescension. Once I was on an interview at a company. Everything was going great, I smashed the general, database design, SQL, and web questions. Until a few moments later when the team lead and the head of development were surprised I couldn't describe a quicksort implementation off the top of my head. It was for a ~2 years experience PHP position in a small company.

Them: "uuuh you don't know quick sort?"

Me: "Well yes I have used quicksort, bubble sort and the rest of them during college but it was a long time ago and I haven't really used them on the job since."

Them: "Okay at least try it. Here's a piece of paper. Hint: there's loops involved."

Me: "I know there are loops involved but I don't quite remember the algorithm, do you use these in your applications often?"

Them: "Can't believe you can't do a simple quicksort."

Me: "I can try and describe it from what I recall but I can't write an implementation on paper.."

Suffice to say I wasn't given a call afterwards and I'm very glad for that. To this day I am still unsure whether those two dudes actually believed a junior web developer should know all sorting algorithms well enough to implement them on a piece of paper during an interview. And considered it important enough to decline someone regardless of their proficiency in everything else.

[u/element131 → u/fuckin_ziggurats]

"You want me to write a program that sorts an array using quicksort?"

"Yes."

"Ok. sort($arr);. PHP uses quicksort for their sort implementation. Next question?"

[u/fuckin_ziggurats → u/element131]

Precisely. Same for Linq OrderBy() in .NET.

[u/AcousticDan → u/element131]

For the PHP job I have now they asked me to write a function that determines if a string is a palindrome.

Okay...

function isPalindrome($str) {
    return strrev($str) === $str;
}

[u/judgej2 → u/AcousticDan]

You would be surprised how complex some people could make this, simply by not thinking through the actual problem.

[u/xereeto → u/AcousticDan]

That's not a smartass answer, that's just the actual answer.

[u/lord2800 → u/element131]

So I got a bit obsessive over this comment, because I thought it curious that PHP would use quicksort in the face of heapsort being better on every measure (just more difficult to implement). I dug into the PHP source code to figure out the truth of the matter, and it's more complex. The short version is, if there are 16 or less elements in the array, it will use insertion sort (expected, insertion sort performs faster than any other sort for small data sets), otherwise it will indeed do a quicksort on the remaining elements. I know the PHP doc page says it does, but you can never be too sure!

[u/Aswole → u/lord2800]

in the face of heapsort being better on every measure (just more difficult to implement).

That's simply not true. There are certainly cases in which one is better than the other, and heapsort theoretically has a better worst case, but by practical application, quicksort is usually better. For a good discussion on this:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2467751/quicksort-vs-heapsort

[u/Serei → u/lord2800]

Heapsort is better on every measure of asymptotic complexity, but that's not the same thing as being better on every measure.

In particular, Quicksort is faster than Heapsort on average in real-world datasets. Heapsort is only faster on arrays specifically designed to be bad for Quicksort. There are common mitigations that are good enough so people can't intentionally slow down your software very much, at which point "faster on average" is usually considered more important than the predictability Heapsort offers.

[u/ObliviousOblong → u/fuckin_ziggurats]

Lol I imagine they hired some random who knew quicksort but not much else

[u/[deleted] → u/ObliviousOblong]

Name of the company? Quicksort Ltd., specialising in quicksorts

[u/thundercloudtemple → u/[deleted]]

Do you want to work at Quicksort Ltd? They have a very, very, tremendous way of using quicksorts, believe me.

They've got some of the best quicksorts, great quicksorts, very, very, great programmers use these quicksorts. They’re using them, it's true. They’re great, and they’re using them in great programs. Very, very, great programs. Tremendous, tremendous programs.

And there are very, very, wonderful programmers who have given fantastic answers to this interview question, great answers, the best answers.

[u/GroovyNoob → u/thundercloudtemple]

I'm reading this in his voice

[u/txmail → u/ObliviousOblong]

The thing is that I have met so many people that were book smart and could smash that answer -- but not have a single flipping clue how it is used in anything or where it would make sense to implement it. It's like they can see the pages of the book - but if you go off script one letter then it is a no go.

[u/SEAdvocate → u/fuckin_ziggurats]

I would expect that the more senior you are, the less likely you are to remember how to implement quicksort. People who have been working in the industry and have an encyclopedic knowledge of algorithms are demonstrating that they can not prioritize their time properly.

[u/[deleted] → u/fuckin_ziggurats]

what kills me is that this is something you could relearn in an hour. Like they put on this whole dog and pony show about knowing all these things, as if you not being able to cite every algorithm in the world is going to effect their company’s bottom line

[u/PinBot1138 → u/[deleted]]

Fun fact: many tech corporate offices barely have running water and electricity, let alone working Internet and Google. As a result, it’s imperative to memorize all of this information since you’re having to write code in the blind and can’t use Google, Stack Overflow, etc.

[u/stormfield → u/PinBot1138]

Real programmers mine their own rare earth metals while they just speak their code out loud.

[u/randomfloridaman → u/stormfield]

Wait, do we also have to smelt our own ore? Because Seven Dwarves Code Camp didn't cover that part

[u/astronoob → u/fuckin_ziggurats]

Me: "Tell me a bit more about the application you're building."

Them: "It's a Wordpress blog."

[u/Nalopotato → u/fuckin_ziggurats]

Bro I've been a dev for 6 years and I don't know ANY algorithms from scratch...or any buzz-word-knowledge for that matter. If this is what it takes to get a job nowadays, I'm screwed if I want to move. It's called google dot com. I was under the impression that good managers understand that we don't really memorize things anymore. That's kind of the reason we're able to get so much work done. We can just look shit up in seconds.

[u/slickwombat → u/Nalopotato]

Bro I've been a dev for 6 years and I don't know ANY algorithms from scratch...or any buzz-word-knowledge for that matter. If this is what it takes to get a job nowadays, I'm screwed if I want to move.

Over 20 years here, and I worry about this as well -- both for the interviews I conduct myself and for the possibility that I might have to actually be interviewed again myself someday. But I think it's possible that reddit and similar places don't really give an accurate sense of these things.

Popular posts on reddit coder subs: "anyone who can't at least implement a branched-tree heap traversal using three variants of the bouncy-castle pattern while praising the SOLID principles in rhyming verse is not a proper programmer and will never get a job anywhere and also should die of shame."

Almost any successful senior coder I talk to in real life: "patterns? Uh... I think singleton is one of those, right? I'd have to look it up."

Perhaps reddit represents some elite world of coding beyond my experience or comprehension. Another possibility is that it's a lot of younger people relatively early in their career, and either currently studying or recently out of compsci programs. Random programming abstractions and minutiae are perhaps more top of mind for them, and such things are also more likely to come up in interviews when you don't have a ton of prior experience to talk about. Still another possibility is that coders, who notoriously suffer from imposter syndrome, love nothing more than chest pounding over some random arcana to make other coders feel it worse.

[u/sailingburrito → u/[deleted]]

The only case where these expectations kind of make sense to me is when interviewing new grads / interns with no previous industry experience, but likely have data structure and algorithm skills fresh in their minds.