Social misfits and group interviews: Yup, it's the startup interview circuit A lot of people have either worked with or know someone who worked at a startup. Lots have good experiences while some have bad experiences – and they have the scars to prove it. Their stories are funny, odd and sometimes downright weird. I have had an on-off relationship with startups ever since I left university. One thing …
That aside the usual start-up will push you to give them all of your waking (and sleeping) hours), try to defer paying you, be full of devs who've tried to do the sysadmin tasks without any real understanding. The devs will continue to insist on full permissions and continue to break stuff which you'll be expected to run around fixing. The project will lurch from one way of working to another, one idea to another, often turning on the hapless sysadmin when he can't magic away their self-imposed problems.
Most often the result is nowhere enough pay to justify the stupid amount of hours you put in, a break down in any relationships you had before you started the work and sometimes very little pay at all. Of course there's always the one in a million which eventually leave you quite rich!
Where they try to see if you the dumb/ingornat/wanting to do your best candidate can fix the problem that has had them stumped for weeks.
so you write that nifty bit of code
does it get you the job?
What do you think then sucker!
Maybe not so prevalent over here but in parts of the USofA? yep.
don't even get me started on the phantom interview. The one where even the person doing the interviewing won't tell you anytihng of relevance about the company because they are so paranoid about telling anyone what they are doing that makes the whole procees a total waste of time.
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