I was contacted by HR after applying for a role at IFDS Toronto. The HR representative said that she would like to schedule me for an onsite technical interview. I explained that I lived far from Toronto and asked if it would be ok to have the interview over the phone. She said coming in person was mandatory so I agreed.
Upon arriving one of the interviews asked about my commute and I told him that I decided to take the train so I wouldn't have to worry about parking after a four hour drive. He was shocked that I had traveled so far and said they could have done the interview over the phone... They clearly didn't even look at my resume before I came in... My address is literally right underneath my name. I'm not sure if I was even being seriously considered.
The other interviewer was worse, surprisingly. He asked if I had written anything in Java. I said I had and started telling him about an android application that I had worked on. I said I used XML and Java in Android Studio to develop it. He heard XML and he told me that I made a "website". I tried to explain to him that if he looked at my Github (which should have been done before the interview, no?) that he could see the Java code that I had written. He outright refused to and told me to write, verbatim, the code I used to contact the database that I was using. Really? I was using Google's Firebase Firestore database which integrates with Andriod Studio... The code to contact the database is specific to Firebase and only requires a reference to the database to perform actions (get, put, etc). I used the Firebase documentation to write those calls and couldn't recall them off the top of my head. Again, I tried to explain this and he just didn't care.
After this, yet another interviewer was called up on the phone who was actually great. He asked me questions about Angular and JavaScript. I didn't know a few of the questions, but he would give me a hint to see if I could answer it. A few of them I was even able to answer with his help. He was the only one of the three that showed me an ounce of respect during this whole ordeal.
It's almost like the technical interviewer on the phone wanted me to succeed, the one in person wanted me to fail and belittle projects that I worked really hard on. This was, by far, the absolute worst interview experience I have ever had. I've interviewed at startups, where the interviewers were literally wearing sweatpants and hoodies, that were far more professional than the suits at IFDS.
