My Worst Tech Interview Experience
My worst tech interview was with me as the interviewer. HR told me the applicant was a coworker’s friend with 10+ years of experience, so I better be prepared to ask some tough questions.
When I asked the applicant to walk towards the whiteboard, he clapped twice and said, “Bring the whiteboard!”
I thought he was talking to me, but a greasy-looking guy wearing a beret came in. The candidate introduced him as his “Scrum Mainer,” who then produced the tiniest whiteboard from a backpack.
“Size does not matter. Truth value is everything,” the candidate whispered.
At that point, I wondered if I was dealing with someone going through a psychotic break.
Of the many questions that popped into my mind, most of which remain unanswered, I asked what’s a Scrum Mainer.
The candidate went into a politically charged rant about the founding fathers and the need for post-structuralist symbols in these dark times.
He interrupted himself and apologized for using the term “nation state,” since “the British proved they weren’t real in 1951.” I didn’t push the topic.
I figured the quickest way to end my torment would be to continue the interview as if nothing happened and ignore the Scrum Mainer, who at that point started to shuffle a deck of cards.
I stated the problem: Inverting a binary tree.
“A trie, you mean!” the candidate said.
“No, I mean tree…”
“But you do know what a trie is?” the candidate asked with a smirk.
“Yes…”
The Scrum Mainer shot double finger guns at both of us and — I’m not joking here — he immediately pulled out a prayer mat and kneeled on it.
I regretted not going more often to church, as I feared the Lord had forsaken me.
“Be it a tree or a trie, I have the algorithm for every data structure. I can give you the Big O, the Little Omega, and the Rare W.” The candidate said while sketching on the whiteboard.
“A lot of people think that the universe is some sort of simulation,” he continued, “but what if we are all chrooted, running inside of a higher-level universe — with a similar structure — that we can’t cd .. out of? Maybe all the answers lay outside of the chroot, waiting for us.”
He handed me the whiteboard, and I was surprised to see twenty-something lines of syntactically correct Bash code, which performed a zero-day Linuxchroot break, ending with the line cat ../inverted-binary-tree #schrödinger.
It was unfortunate that my face expressed approval, as that gave the Scrum Mainer the cue to shout “chroot!” in celebration.
But he didn’t stop. He stood up and continued chanting “chroot chroot chroot” in some sort of mystical trance. The candidate soon joined.
I was relieved to notice that they were dancing very slowly towards the door. Halfway out, a drum-beat started playing out of the backpack.
The Scrum Mainer threw a card backwards between his legs just before disappearing. It landed on my laptop. It contained a QR code invite for a Discord server.
I never scanned it.
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