I cringe whenever I look back to the days I was the interviewer for roles at the companies I worked for. When I was just starting out my career at a company with hundreds of developers, I remember thinking and feeling that being the developer picked to interview someone meant that “you made it.” This is a true testament to how deeply insecure I was.

I am not a good interviewee either, as I shared before, but the good thing is that I never felt like I needed to use my rare experiences as the interviewer as a power trip. I was just happy to be there! To be included! I “made it”! They consider me “smart enough” now. But I really did suck at it.

It’s been over seven years since I last interviewed someone, and I remember the dread of looking up “front-end interview questions” beforehand. I was looking at them and remembering how much I hated them all. I remember how I hated those questions when they were asked me when I was the one looking for a job. Yet, I wasn’t confident enough to create a whole new process. I only had similar experiences. At most, I was just really keen not to have someone write code in front of me because I knew that was complete torture. Just after the last time I interviewed someone, one particular memory was, “I’m not smart enough to be doing this”. “Who the fuck do I think I am?”.

Obviously, I wasn’t just spitting random front-end questions out. I remember trying to ask how a task could be tackled on a high level, but honestly, I don’t remember much.

So many people have shared how the interview process is broken and how it sucks. I completely agree. I have no brilliant ideas of what to share to improve it.

I know that like myself many years ago, most of us are probably repeating what others have done to us, and that means we all suck at being interviewers.