“I Didn’t Get The Job”: 30 Times People Snapped At A Job Interview

We reached out to Reddit user Slumi, who started this conversation in the first place, to find out more about his job interview experiences. He was kind enough to have a chat with Bored Panda and share that most of his job interviews have been pretty standard.

“Maybe I came off as easily offended and irritable in the original thread, but I'm actually a pretty mellow guy,” the OP says. “Those were the only two times I actually got irritated by my interviewer while simultaneously feeling like I was in the right.”

Thankfully, Slumi says he’s also had a few positive job interviews. “There was one time where the guy interviewing me wanted to check if I knew how to speak English (I live in Switzerland, and my native language is French), so he asked me who my favorite painter was,” the author shared. “I answered that I was a big fan of Edward Hopper. And, as it turns out, so was he.”

“We spent a good 10 minutes talking about the guy and his paintings, it was great. In the end though, I didn't get the job. It was for a senior role, and I had just finished my internship,” Slumi noted. “But the interviewer decided to let me know through a phone call, all while specifying ‘I'm sorry. I want you to know that you actually did extremely well during the interview. But we found someone more senior.’”

Slumi also noted in his post that he’s currently on the job hunt, so we asked how that’s been going. “I do feel like it is harder to find jobs in the Data Science field now than it was 6 years ago. You'd think I'd get more interview opportunities now that I have professional experience under my belt, but I actually get less responses to my postulations today than I did when I was fresh out of college,” he revealed.

The OP noted that the lack of responses he’s gotten could be due to a variety of reasons, and he’s unsure which one's the biggest. “But I'd say one of the main ones is that I'm mostly specialized in NLP (natural language processing), which consists of using machine learning methods to process text,” he told Bored Panda. 

“This used to be a very dynamic field that was constantly evolving, because text is a messy data type and you can do a lot of different things with it. But with the arrival of state-of-the-art models that can be used out of the box like ChatGPT, my skill set has become less valuable,” he explained.

“Even if the models I can design would do better than ChatGPT on specific problems, it's time to market and return on investment is simply unbeatable,” Slumi continued. “You also don't need extensive data science skills to make ChatGPT work. A layman can get good results out of it with little coding skills, and even less mathematical ones.”

“Keep in mind though, I live in Switzerland. I don't know how widespread this data science hiring trend is,” he added. “But I know that the big tech companies in the US have laid off a fair amount of employees right now, so I wouldn't be surprised if the competition there had gotten fiercer too.”

We also asked the OP why he thinks job interviews are so torturous nowadays. “The most painful part of computer science interviews is when they want to evaluate your coding skills,” he shared. “I can understand why companies feel the need to do it. Coding is what the employee is going to do at the end of the day, so it would be best if they were proficient at it.”

“The problem is: it's pretty much impossible to get a good idea of a person's coding skills in so little time. Still, that's not going to stop them from trying,” the author continued. “And they will usually do so in one of two ways: By either asking you to work on a project (5+ hours) at home, or by asking you those dreaded leetcode questions.”

“Both are incredibly painful in their own way. The project because it's disrespectful of your time, and leetcode questions because they're so irrelevant to 99% of what your work will actually consist of,” Slumi says. “They can also be very difficult, which is why people who apply at FAANG literally learn hundreds of such problems by heart only to regurgitate them during their job interviews."

“There are also companies that ask you to work for them, possibly for free, for a few days (or weeks) before they can evaluate if you're a good match,” the OP continued. “That one should be straight up illegal. Thankfully it's not that common.”

So why do companies make the hiring process so painful? “For a lot of them, it's because they simply don't know how to evaluate your skills in other ways than in those. I also think a lot of them don't care, it's not them who are going to spend dozens of hours learning algorithms by heart,” Slumi says. “This is especially true of big companies. When you have thousands of people interested in your position, so what if 90% of them get discouraged by the interview process? That still leaves hundreds of candidates who will actually walk the walk."

Next, we asked the OP what he thought of the replies to his post. “Most people seemed to understand where I was coming from. The ones that didn't seemed to be under the impression that I'm an easily angered person that always lashes out at his interviewers, or at people in general,” he shared. “Just to make things clear: I don't. You have to take the context into consideration for both of those cases.”