Ask HN: Junior devs, what frustrates you the most at the recruitment process?
In reality culture fit means &quot;do I like you or not?&quot;. To get disqualified on culture fit, all you need is one single interviewer that will not feel 0 comfortable working with you. You can get discriminated on anything really, if you seem smarter than the interviewer, if the interviewer is having a bad day, your voice, the way you look, your laugh, etc. In other words, it&#x27;s nearly impossible to figure out the exact reason why you&#x27;d get disqualified on &quot;culture fit&quot;. It&#x27;s in the interviewer&#x27;s brain only. He or she will obviously never share the real reason why. Sometimes it&#x27;s not even explainable on paper, it&#x27;s just a personal feeling, you haven&#x27;t connected with the candidate for no particular reason. So you can&#x27;t write an official feedback based on culture fit. Interviewers will never share their personal tastes because it doesn&#x27;t seem professional. That&#x27;s why &#x27;we&#x27; use algorithm questions :)<p>Speaking of &quot;technical&quot; questions - the good news is that there&#x27;s absolutely no difference between Junior and Senior dev nowadays. Questions are identical so you can learn it once and re-apply for life. Everything you&#x27;ve learned in college is what will get you a job, even 10 years down the road so forget about your professional experience. Majority of interviewers have no skills interviewing candidates. They apply the same evaluation whether you&#x27;re a tech lead or fresh out of school. If you happen to have 10 years of experience or at least one project on your Resume, they might fill up the blanks by asking you a few questions about your previous projects. But the goal is to jump straight into the basic CS questions (algo) because this leads to a YES or NO answer. That&#x27;s what interviewers use to make a decision and let you go to the next round or not. You can&#x27;t fail answering questions like &quot;tell me about your project XYZ, what was difficult, how did you solve it&quot;. Though if you can&#x27;t reverse a linked list because you forgot to google it prior to the interview, you will get disqualified right away since it gives the interviewer a solid feedback to write down that will never get challenged by the hiring manager.<p>To answer your question - what I just wrote is what frustrates me the most in the recruiting process in the Software world. I&#x27;ve been dealing with this thing for years... as an interviewer and interviewee. Things are getting worse in 2017 because I see 500 applicants per job. You get disqualified on questions like &quot;do you use a new line for curly braces?&quot;. The trick is to not answer right away and to return the question back to the interviewer - &quot;good question, what do YOU use?&quot;. Then just say &quot;me too&quot;... safe bet.