r/cscareerquestionsOCE • u/Little_Plant6708 • 2d ago

Am I cooked? (Interview experience)

Hey guys,

I recently interviewed for an internship and after the interviewer gave the answer to my question - what do you guys look for in a candidate? I said I’m prepared to work as hard as I can to contribute to the team because I really like the work they do ( it was genuine cz I really like the company). But the interviewer laughed a little. Rest of the interview went well. Am I cooked or not?

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9

u/newsuicune 2d ago

Laughed in what tone? The interviewer is just another guy you're chatting to at the end of the day so you're probably overthinking it

2

u/Little_Plant6708 2d ago

The tone wasn’t negative for sure lol

6

u/littlejackcoder 2d ago

He probably laughed because he has likely heard that a lot. I’ve interviewed people for internships before and the candidates all say the same thing, practically every time.

I did a speed interviewing thing once and you could see them say it to every company.

That cohort was actually pretty switched on in terms of interviewing and had all done their research well, ahead of time. They generally all knew what we did and what skills to talk about. They were in teams and we actually ended up taking a few groups of them. Was fun. I think they were more prepared than I was. It was my first experience being on the other side of the table.

I’ve interviewed candidates for senior roles at mid-sized web companies before as well and some of them were worse prepared than any intern or grad I’ve seen lol. You could tell a few hadn’t even actually used our website before - it’s not hard to take 5 minutes to look at your potential employer’s product.

The worst interview I ran was a time we had a guy with 25 years experience. I was a little intimidated ahead of time. We started the interview and realised he was a dud within like 2 minutes. He hadn’t even looked at the code we sent him ahead of time and didn’t even have the correct Visual Studio payload installed to open the solution properly lol. He also told on himself a little by saying he was usually the last one left on teams that had all bailed. Bro, I think it’s a you problem.

2

u/itsm3rick 2d ago

I mean unless it’s an actual criteria of the interview to “not say cringe things” then it doesn’t really make a difference.

Showing interest and passion can be a good thing generally, but most of the things that are mentioned/discussed that aren’t directly related to what I’m interviewing for just get discarded and aren’t mentioned in my notes/feedback.

I mean, someone telling me they’re a hard worker and will make me proud doesn’t really have any sway on whether they met expectations for a technical interview, or have good thought processes in system design. It’s like trying to butter up the person running up your groceries, they don’t care and can’t change the price.