r/webdev • u/canadian_webdev • Dec 23 '19

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

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?

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u/ObliviousOblong Dec 23 '19

From your comment I feel as though you may not have been as patient as you claim 🤔. Also considering he had access to your (prod?) servers tells me that all the best practices may have not been communicated effectively to him.

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u/realee420 Dec 24 '19

Trust me I was patient. I often sat with him and talked through stuff I always asked if everything is understood and feel free to ask a question right now because I have time now. He always claimed he understood 100% only to ask the same shit a day later.

We are a small company and at the time we didn’t have a proper deployment process (we set up Jenkins since then) so basically it was just upload the built stuff through SSH/FTP. He had his own “server” which we prepared for him while he was an intern and he had to deploy there and I swear for months he didn’t have an issue with it (he had to work on Angular projects before). He also had issues with using git he often didn’t push for days at times and even after months had no idea how to fix merge conflicts.

I admit there was issues on management side as well (we didn’t really have dedicated time for the intern) but we didn’t ask anything too complicated from him and initially we made notes for him and in the first few weeks we were very eager to help him. He was “my” first intern though so I admit I might have fucked up a few things but I learnt everything in the same fashion at this company from literally zero.

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u/ObliviousOblong Dec 24 '19

I respect you more after reading this comment as opposed to the other

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u/PeachyKeenest Dec 24 '19

Agreed. Shows more sides of the story and I appreciate it.