I have another bad interview story.

This time I was the interviewer.

I’ve collaborated with recruiting through various parts of their pipeline: manning the booth at fairs/hackathons to pre-filter, speaking on campus, sitting on panels, calling folks for phone screens, and the face-to-face technical rounds.

The 2nd and 5th are my favorites. Y’all can read and can guess which one I’m focusing on.

We were hiring some junior folks and they tossed some rounds on my calendar.

Pretty normal routine, skim the resume. If they went to Pitt, automatically discard any projects that I know are over embellished assignments. I learned it’s rude to ask folks to explain their implementation decisions when they were following instructions.

This specific time, I glanced over, and saw a business degree instead of the usual engineering, statistics, information science, or computer science.

I’m not one to judge, definitely to a lesser extent than the CS and eng folks, but I’ve met my fair share of MIS folks who were familiar with .NET and SQL. One of the best devs I knew in undergrad was a bio major, dude was a wiz at helping me debug MIPS. So I try to not make too many assumptions off a degree.

The time was approaching so I mozzied over to the meeting room they booked for us.

I had three standard questions for college kids. Two Sum, Valid Palindromes, and Valid Parentheses.

I think I went with brackets, not 100% sure, not the important detail.

I walk them through the the problem, start with the simple case, given ((, ’(]’ and {}, how can we algorithmically determine that the first two are not balanced, while the third one is?

They said by you can tell because the first one has two opens, the second are different, and the third are matching curly ones.

So I said, yes, but how do you determine it?

They said you can tell.

Scratching my head, I wondered maybe I’m starting too simple, so I expanded it.

Given ([{}]()), how can we determine if it’s balanced?

Same answer, you tell by looking at it.

Maybe the kid had jitters, so I tried to be more specific. What steps do you take to figure it out?

Crickets.

So I offered another hint. Let’s say we’re looping through each character, what should we do when we reach this 0th index?

They looked uncomfortable and asked if they could talk to the recruiter quick. Then got up and left.

I’m now confused. What was I doing wrong?

The recruiter came in and told me that they wanted to withdraw from the interview process.

I was generous to these mind puzzle question style interviews earlier, and I’m still not entirely opposed to the not-so-secret handshake. But I do wonder how big companies effectively screen people at scale.

I was lucky, I took both data structure and algorithms; they taught me how to solve the problems. I could figure out the handshake. As tone-deaf as it sounds, it worked for me. My first big-boy job’s onsite presented me with unfamiliar riddles, I knew the tricks to decipher them.

But from this poor kid’s point of view. They walk into this fancy company being told they’re interviewing for a technology role. And during the interview, there’s this strange brown dude with a smudge on his forehead asking him about parentheses, brackets, and braces.

Then when they answer with what their eyes could see. The weird man starts asking what sounds like a philosophy question.

When you answer, he throws an even more weird combination of characters and asks again.

Makes sense they politely rage quit.

I’m not saying the kid would or wouldn’t have been a decent developer.

But we call ourselves engineers, there has to be a better solution to this problem.