Interview from Hell

Today, I experienced the Interview from Hell.

I applied for a job via AJC yesterday, and an hour later an HR rep for the company called me. She said the interview would take 30 minutes, and to be there at 9 AM.

When I got there at about 8:45, they herded me and 60 other people into a very small room, and gave us an application to fill out, and a huge test.

The test was initially no big deal: written communication (write out an email about something) and windows trivia (what is a 32-bit operating system?).

However, the majority of the test was the logic questions. Each question had a row of numbered boxes, and in the boxes were numbers, and you had to follow a flowchart that had instructions like ‘add the number in the first box with the number of the box that has the number of the first box in it’, and then ‘change instruction 2 to increment one number in the first numbered box mentioned’, and so on. There were fifteen pages of questions like that, and each question got harder, and progressively more complex.

Three hours later, everyone was still crammed into the room, working, and I decided I no longer wanted to work for this company.

I stopped answering the logic questions after about the 10th question.

Three and a half hours after I arrived, they finally called me in for the interview, and things went well … until the the tech support manager noticed that I didn’t complete his exam.

He asked me why I didn’t finish it. “I felt that the questions weren’t an adequate use of my time.”

He actually got angry, and said, in a hateful tone, “So you didn’t think the position was important enough to finish the questions?”

At that point, I probably still could have saved face, and even gotten the job, if I’d come up with a slick answer. However, I realized that this jerk who was yelling at me would be my boss.

“Actually, by the tenth question, I realized that this is not the kind of company I would enjoy working for. I’m sorry I wasted my time and yours. Thanks, though.” And I walked out.

I count this as another Life Lesson: “If you loathe the company before you get a chance to interview, just leave”. I’m sad that it took me a whole morning to learn that.