I had the worst interview of my life today. I guess you could consider it a big N company. Definitely not an entry-level position, but not senior level either, so I can be treated like entry-level and asked algorithm questions even though it's been years since I've used a bubble sort algorithm (etc.). DM if you want more information.

I will preface this with an overall question that doesn't require reading the details below: Does HR personality check the coding interviewers before they are allowed to interview candidates? Have you ever had an interviewer interrupt you throughout the process without even hearing your full solution, even if the solution is valid?

Summary: I left work early and took PTO for a phone interview on HackerRank.

The interviewer had a heavy accent and spoke softly, but was a little snippy when telling me it was hard to hear me. That's fine, though. I know bad signal is annoying, so I put on a headset, and it was clear.

He explained the interview format. Standard stuff. The first part was about career. The second part was a coding challenge.

He asked me about my current project, and I explained {dev job 2}. It wasn't bad.

He responded, "Nothing about this {dev job 1}." I forgot how he phrased it, but I remember it being really passive-aggressive, like implying that job 1 was a joke.

I explained job 1.

He then asked a concurrency question related to work, and I responded with how I deal with concurrency issues now. I thought I would preface it by explaining what the problem arises from and then detailing how I solved it. But while I was explaining it, he cut me off (quite loudly and aggressively), "TELL ME HOW YOU FIXED A CONCURRENCY PROBLEM." I almost wanted to reply, "If you would relax and wait, I will tell you." But I am professional; I laughed it off and told him, and shortly explained what it solved.

Fine, let's move to the coding question.

He gave me a coding question. It was pretty simple, but he made it unnecessarily difficult as it went on.

He told me, "Let's talk about the solution," which is fine. I did. The only issue is that he proceeded to shoot down everything I said. And not in a way like, "Oh, okay, how would you do that?" but full-on, like, "That's dumb." It was as if I had seen this problem for an hour and already had an idea of the solution. It felt like I wasn't proposing my solution, but just talking out loud because, in coding interview books, they suggest talking about your thought process so they can see it. It's really hard to get an idea and concentrate when you're just talking and then someone interrupts you and tells you that's dumb.

Then I thought, "Fine, I'll go with the second part of the suggestions from the book, stating, 'get a brute-force solution then optimize it.'" Well, this guy basically began to mock me for suggesting such an iterative approach. Like, I know there are memory issues when the number is huge; I'm trying to get a solution for you.

After the interview, I looked up possible solutions, and all solutions involved replicating the data structure or using a bubble sort. Cool, but he said I couldn't modify the original data structure and couldn't create a temporary data structure to sort it because what if there were a billion elements? So that implies an iterative approach. At this point, I'm just like, "What the hell." I started spinning my wheels.

This guy made me feel stupid with every suggestion. So then I went back to the iterative approach just to get a solution, and then I suggested a queue or stack as a secondary data structure, saying I was trying to think what would be a better structure for what I was trying to do. Then he asked, "Do you even know what a stack is?" This was the point where I wanted to hang up, but I thought, "Whatever, I've worked with abrasive people before."

Officially stuck because I hadn't had a second to think without this interviewer interrupting me every two seconds, talking down to me, I began to lay out the requirements he had now laid out in front of me that complicated the original issue. I explained how possible solutions were shot down by these new conditions he stated.

He responded something along the lines of, "I don't know how to solve it, however you want to solve it." Lol, not really.

Then he said, "Well, this is only supposed to be an hour interview, and it's been 30 minutes."

I swore I heard him say, "You aren't smart enough," and I said, "Excuse me?" He slowed his horses and said, "The onsite interview questions are harder, so I think we can just stop right now."

It took every piece of my soul to say, "Oh, okay," instead of pointing out how terrible of an interviewer he was. I've never had an interview be so disruptive and disrespectful.

I swore it was like I was taking up too much of his precious time when I had to use my vacation time to take this interview so nicely placed in the middle of the workday.

Now I'm questioning how this guy was the one interviewing people. Was this guy just going through the motions before outsourcing this position?

Do you even know what a stack is?