In the real world, people have to apply to dozens if not hundreds of jobs just to get an offer. The company has all of the power, so you tell them what they want to hear or you starve.

The job application process varies immensely by position and profession. For a junior developer there are hundreds of new listing each day but hundreds of qualified people applying, so the company has all the power and your comment would be true in that context. For a very qualified senior dev, there are dozens of positions posted each day where the company is truly set back until the role is filled, with only a handful of qualified people applying, so the senior dev has a lot of power.

In another profession like say a specialized electrical engineer, there may be only a few positions posted a month and a handful of qualified people so both the engineer and the company would be desperate that they could together be a fit.

This story was about an anecdotal experience where the power dynamic was fairly equal

That's true of unskilled jobs where there are usually more applicants than positions. That's not what's being discussed here.

Well - not true for all industries. In some, there’s a lot of competition for candidates.

We don't even need to look at other industries. It's demonstrably not the case for professional software developers at the moment. The companies are simply doing whatever is in their best interest which is retaining expensive and hard to hire for talent, ergo they'll treat you nicer. The second it's no longer expensive or hard to hire, things will take a turn for the worse (for the candidates).

I really love this kind of thinking. This isn't the first time I have happen upon it, but I really like the idea that the work I do for a company is an exchange in which both the company and I get something out of it.

Certainly when I got my first job I felt like I was there to take a job, not seeing if the company was a good fit.

Yeah, and obviously that's an ideal, not necessarily reality -- fresh out of college, or just looking more urgently for a job, I think the stakes are a little different and you gotta be a little more willing to just "take the job."

But as someone with experience, looking for higher-level positions, ideally with some time on your hands / savings in the bank to take your time interviewing around? Yeah, it should totally be a two-way street.

"Experienced software developer" is a comically in-demand job title. It's good to know that fact, and to be proportionately selective.

I don't think I could make a decision about whether I'd want to work for a company on the basis of a single employee's attitude. That person might not even be part of my day to day work group.

And yet the company chose to let themselves be represented by this person. It might also go the other way around, you are interviewed by someone that's awesome and you end up with another team that truly sucks.

In that case bad luck but if they send a dick to interview you it is more likely that the rest of them are also gonna be dicks. I like companies where you actually interview with some of the people you will be working with at least as the last interview round.

I mean, this is all the surmise of the person writing the article. I'd like to draw your attention to the fact that the interviewer never actually did anything wrong in the actual event described.

In terms of your idea that a single interviewer should turn you off from working for a company, possibly. Companies can be pretty big. I am skeptical that there are many medium or large companies that can prevent all negative interviewing experiences. Especially if the negative experience is, "I saw my interviewer make a facial expression that I over-analyzed and made a huge narrative about."

That said, if you want to use that as a signal that's your prerogative. My guess is that you'd mostly get false negatives from this signal but if you have many options for employment that's hardly a major problem.

It's true that there will be some false negatives. I basically have to go with my gut that if I get a certain strength of a vibe I have to interpret it some way. In one case it was one of the top senior devs interviewing me and didn't like the terms I was using or pronouncing them and seemed to be somewhat hung up on it. I considered that trivial and was trying to get to the meat of the discussion. I took that as a cue for the engineering culture, how would you interpret it?

Fair points though I was really only replying to your comment here, not the article any longer. I do agree that the article seems to "overanalyze" the situation, potentially there was literally nothing and he gave the 'wrong answer' for no good reason at all. Makes a nice article though I guess. FWIW I have experience with giving the "hard truth" in the "wrong situation" and I've come out unscathed, because I was very objectively correct and there was no way around it. Nothing pedantically debatable in my case, just "this is how the protocol works, not the way you say, no interpretation possible, look it up in the RFC". Not the actual example but like someone saying it's "SYN, ACK, ACK ACK" instead of "SYN, SYN ACK, ACK".

Companies can be large and in that case it's likely you will be encountering a fair number of people you won't like while there anyway. The question is whether you interview with "random interviewer of the day" (still bad if that's a bad apple but if the company is large you might take your chances while if the company is small, it's likely this is 'their best' or you will work closely with this person) or if you're actually interviewing with the team members you'll work with. If the company is large but you know you are interviewing with the team members you'll be working with and the feeling just isn't there or worse, then I think I'd take the possible false positive if I wasn't in a bind for a job.

At my current place for example I interviewed with a bunch of people in various rounds, from the typical HR stuff at the front, through various layers from CTO, my boss, our architect and then a sample of people from my immediate team. All of them very pleasant, had the best interview experience ever with the architect. We had a great discussion of pros and cons of various choices I made for the code I had to write, alternative approaches etc. Really awesome. Felt basically like a regular working session, no leetcode quizzing BS.

Previously I have interviewed with other companies where it just became clear after some time that the company and I were on very different terms with regards to how we think software development should work. A different interviewer might have been able to 'hide' some of it and I might have joined that company and been miserable.