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Comment by extr | Hacker News Reader

I was asked a version of this as an interview question a few months ago. Despite recognizing the form of it immediately and giving some intuition for why it converges to 1/e, the interviewer had nothing else prepared and had expected it to be new to me, so he took me through a brutal one hour of his personal "guided proof" of the answer, including drawing a massive grid on a whiteboard and stepping through iterations. At one point I may have hinted that his method was overcomplicating things and tried to steer the conversation towards other aspects of the problem (ex: the time based formulation), no, let's get back on track with this grid. I didn't get the job, and I was specifically called out for doing poorly on that portion of the interview. I used to think this problem was really cool, now it just pisses me off remembering that situation.

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On the positive side you dodged a bullet and wasted just a day. Imagine working for someone like that. Time you'll never get back.

Oh come on. Seems _highly_ probable he was stuck in an interview with a junior dev that only understood enough to follow the documented answer.

If a junior dev is interviewing candidates unsupervised in this organization, he still dodged a bullet.

It was a junior dev and this was the worst of it, but as I said elsewhere, looking back the whole thing was shitty. Whiteboard coding questions of the worst type from all levels, zero interest in my previous experience in a related area, and no respect for my time. It was an 8+ hour day and then they had the nerve to ask me to turn my car around and come back because they "forgot" to schedule me with someone senior. When I didn't get the position, they were borderline rude to my recruiter when he asked to get info on the decision ("He performed poorly in our case interviews, particularly [the one I posted about]"). And I had honestly thought I did pretty well considering what was being asked.

Huge company in my town and they do fairly well, so the whole thing left me feeling awful for about a month afterward, particularly the jab at my technical skills. Didn't mean to vent like this but I figure if anyone would understand it's people on HN. There is a happy ending: I got a new role a little while later and found multiple coworkers who also interviewed there with similar stories. So it wasn't just me.

AN 8 HOUR INTERVIEW???!!! Holy fork!

I agree with the other folks that indicated you dodged a bullet.

Also: I'm sorry that there are folks in our industry that would submit you to such inhumane conditions. I'm also glad you stuck around in spite of this shiz.

Eight hours, junior devs interviewing, pointless questions...

You can leave an interview at any time if you're not feeling it. You're not obligated to stick it out. I've bailed on interviews before. It sounds like you really wanted this job, though, so I understand wanting to see it through.

That's why I always ask candidates how they feel it's going so far when I begin an interview. Any issues on our end? You should be checking in with yourself at least between every interview to gauge how you feel. The vast majority of interviewers are shitty, so if you're not feeling great it's probably more on them than you.

well you could argue that's £400/500 - (say $600) down the drain as that's an average day rate for a contractor in the UK

Cost of doing business

so one that can be avoided by not interviewing for companies know to have broken recruitment processes

How do you know though? That's ok if you interview only for big companies where there is a lot of open dialogue about their recruitment.

Maybe you were the first person he interviewed.

the first n/e

Companies should really adopt shadow interviewing more. Go into an interview and watch someone experienced do it, so you can learn more about how to make interviews pleasant (even for a candidate that doesn't know what they're doing).

I’ve concluded 1:1 in person interviews are insta-fails. With out any witnesses, the bozo interviewing you will just do, say whatever. I’ve had a handful of experiences like the GP and there’s no recourse.

It was one of the team members, not a manager or lead, so I would have been inclined to overlook it had it not been alongside 3 other "case interviews" that were tricky whiteboard coding/math problems in disguise. I think I spent a grand total of 20 minutes of my 8 hour day discussing my history and relevant experience.

I think dolson was making a joke that the interviewer was actually following this strategy in the hiring process.

I think I replied to the wrong person.

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