Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens
One thing I realized recently while interviewing candidates at my company is that it’s one of the few opportunities that individual contributors like myself have to exert significant power over someone else, and not everyone is prepared to handle it well.<p>Recently, we had a candidate come through that wasn’t a good fit for us (he claimed to be a cypress expert so we asked him to set cypress up in a dummy react repo and he floundered the entire time). One of my coworkers took some pot shots at the candidate, being deeply critical and rude, cutting the candidate off mid-sentence, etc. I was honestly embarrassed to be on the call and I thought it reflected poorly on my company. I’d never seen my coworker act like this before and it changed the way I felt about him.<p>I wonder how much of the leetcode interviewing culture is rooted in this desire to dominate candidates, since ICs rarely have opportunities to wield such power over others.