I had something similar. I was given an extensive exam to take before the interview, and it consisted of weird things like 200 arithmetic problems in 15 minutes, picking the best synonym for 100 words in 5 minutes, etc. Things not humanly possible without immense preparation for that precise test.

The interviewer comes in and starts berating me for not finishing and how I must’ve gone to a bad school, must not be smart, etc. Then he goes on and on about how I’m clearly not suited for the job and his young assistant is sitting beside him laughing.

It was a crazy interview. I mentally gave up after a few minutes because the guy was clearly fucking with me and didn’t want me, so I started giving smart ass responses since there was no reason to let myself get beat up.

I get a call a few hours later telling me I can start any time. I told the recruiter to tell the company that the interviewer was a dick (in nicer words) and I’d pass.

Worse than no feedback is opposite feedback. Don’t play mental games with people.

I interviewed at twitter for a job working with their infra team. They had an Atlanta data center and they were interviewing me for that role to be remote out of Atlanta. I had to fly to SF to interview via video calls with the team in Atlanta because the manager was in SF. He told me he would prefer someone local in SF over lunch so I knew I was just filler.

After lunch interview was with a xoogler and everyone earlier warned me it would be a “google interview”. So he struts in and asks what I know about number theory. I say nothing and he tells me he was a math major and proceeded to ask math proof questions and push on the math side of things the whole time. Weirdly instead of asking how to make a Cartesian product in SQL he had this round about way of describing baseball players and teams and generating a report of games played.

So as it went on I gave up. He asked me toward the end how many prime numbers there are... I answered “optimus prime”. He looked at me and asked if I seriously wanted him to write down “optimus prime” for my answer and I swear on my life I looked at him and said “yep. Autobots roll out”.

>I looked at him and said “yep. Autobots roll out”

Man I've been steady on the job hunt and I have to say I needed a funny story like this. Thank you.

I'd like to think there is a good follow up but my guess is you got ghosted.

This may sound shocking, but I did not get the job ;)

hahahahahahahah :D

I don't think it's possible to have a finite number of primes though? But it's a programming interview, so really, who gives a shit?!

Yes, it's not possible to have finite primes. Take all the primes from 2 to N, multiply them together, and add one to get a prime. If there's always another prime, there's infinite primes!

You don't always get a prime. For example, 4! = 2 * 3 * 4 = 24, 24 + 1 = 25, 25 is not prime. The point is that N! + 1 is not divisible by any number from 2 to N (always leaves a remainder of 1), so either it is prime, or it is divisible by something larger than N!, therefore larger than N. In the case of 25, it is divisible by 5 (> 4).

The parent said to multiply _only the primes_ from 2 to N, and then add one not factorial plus one.

In your example it would be (2 * 3) + 1 = 7, prime.

Oh, sorry, didn't realize that. It still doesn't work, though, as the example of 2 * 3 * 5 * 7 * 11 * 13 + 1 = 59 * 509 shows.

Right, but if you were testing N=13 as the highest prime, then (2 * 3 * 5 * 7 * 11 * 13) + 1 must either be prime itself, i.e. have no prime factors, or must have a prime factor greater than 13. And in either case, a prime greater than 13 exists - in your example, 59.

This is Euclid's proof [1] and it's some 2300 years old.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid%27s_theorem

It's a little bit more subtle. Assume that there is a finite number of primes, and P is the set of all primes p0, p1, p2... pn. If you multiply all these together and add 1, you have a number Q that's not divisible by any number in P. So P cannot be the set of all primes.

I don't interview much, but one of my first interviews out of school was in style of good cop, bad cop. The "nice guy" even had a black eye, IIRC.

I was distraught by it, but then I talked to a friend and he told me - well, maybe they were looking for someone to handle stress really well, and it's not you.

Looking back, I think it was utterly bizarre (for a programming job, anyway). But, hey, to each his own.

Sounds like you had a bad recruiter setting you up with bad interviews. You can throw a pebble and hit five recruiters so no need to stick with a dud anyways.

I won't do 1:1 interviews any more. I want witnesses.

Would you be willing to share the details?