When I got laid off from Norton in 2023 I had no idea the insane experience I was about to go through.

This is a collection of stories from my experience going through the interview process for a bunch of companies and serves as illustration as to why my opinion on company hiring practices is basically in hell.

Company 1

I was genuinely very excited for this company. The position was for iOS platform engineer, which basically was the work I was doing at Norton. The venn diagram of the job posting and my skillset was a circle. A bit of iOS dev, a bit of devops/platform (whatever you want to call it). Really great interview process too, at first. Highly responsive recruiter, take-home project that was not too time consuming, and the “onsite” was a review of the take home. Then came the last behavioral interview with the directors of iOS and platform teams. They started grilling me on iOS-specific things which I tried my best answering. Internally I was confused though, the recruiter said this would be behavioral? They did not ask me any behavioral questions at all, it was purely technical Q&A, and spefically iOS. I thought I did fine but a couple days after the recruiter called me and claimed that they were looking for someone with more iOS experience. I ask him to clarify if this was for the iOS platform engineer position and he said yes.

Alright, man.

Company 2

Another fairly fascinating company, they actually had me do their onsite in their offices! Which was an hour drive away. A little annoying but whatever, I thought the product as really cool and I had a good experience with the guy during the technical screening. The first red flag was that after the technical screen they ghosted me for 3 weeks. Then a different recruiter contacted me and told me the previous recruiter was on vacation. Okay, maybe.

Anyway during the onsite it was very clear to me that none of them prepared for any of the interviews. One guy literally googled, on his phone, “python interview questions”. Another admitted he didn’t know much about devops (fair) and used a LLM to generate interview questions. I guess I appreciate the honesty but wow, they couldn’t find folks that had some experience? How was he supposed to judge if I was saying the right things?

Afterward, they gave me a shitty lunch, showed me around campus, and said goodbye. I made my way back home and was ghosted for several weeks until they finally responded to one of my emails with a generic “no thanks”.

Company 3

This interview was for a SDET position, so I wasn’t super jazzed about it. Nothing against SDET, just not my favorite type of work to do.

First interview during the onsite had his camera on, but was pointed at the ceiling. After pointing this out, he acknlowedged it, ignored me, and continued asking about things that were neither on my resume or on the job description. Great.

Second interviewer was way more personable and I actually enjoyed our conversation. He admitted that he hasn’t typed on his computer in over a year, giving that responsibility to a LLM that he would speak to and have full control of his system. Jesus.

Third interviewer straight up told me at the beginning that he would be grading me on “key words” I say during our conversation and to remember to say as many key words as possible. What? What does that even mean?? I failed this one pretty handily.

By the time we got to the fourth interviewer as well as the hiring manger, I was burned out and figured I already failed so I frankly don’t really rememeber what we talked about. I’m sure it went as swimmingly as the rest.

Company 4

Another company I thought I would love to work at. Well, that is until I went through their interview process.

The position was for iOS engineer, so most of the interview questions were supposed to be related to that. Well the recruiter either lied or was mistaken because no, it was mostly leetcode. Which is fine! I do think I would’ve done a bit better if I had known that going in, though.

Also one of the interviewers was conducting it via a conference room but he sat all the way at the back of the room so the mic and camera could barely pick him up. I asked him if he could move closer and he moved 1 seat forward. Lol.

What was weird is that they ghosted me afterward. Never responded to any of my emails. I literally just logged into their Workday right now and I still see my candidacy as “in progress”. Incredible work, everyone.

Company 5

The recruiter for this company was mostly the problem. After our call all seemed well so I scheduled a chat with the hiring manager. Five minutes into that call, I realized that he was interviewing for a different position. I brought this up and he was baffled because he said there is no job posting for the position that I was talking about. What?? He claimed he would ask the recruiter and have her follow up with me, but I never heard from them again.

Company 6 and 7

I’m lumping these two companies together because the exact same thing happened. After the recruiter call, they got laid off. Yep.

Company 8

I only got to the technical screen for this company because the person interviewing me was extremely unprepared and uncooperative. Pretty basic leetcode-type interview within a coderpad but he basically refused to answer any clarifying questions I had about the problem. He also seemed to be taking the call at his desk in an open-office layout so I could just.. see everyone else working in the background? Really weird and I failed to even complete his problem because of how confusing it was and how he didn’t want to answer anything I had to ask.

So yea, plenty of truly awful experiences. I didn’t even include the number of companies where I was ghosted after recruiter calls. Or all the AI ones where they expected you to do the screening talking to a bot. Something really needs to change because the interview process for tech (tbh, I assume for everyone) has become so dehumanizing. What are we doing, man.