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How to Miserably Fail a Programmer Interview as an Interviewer

Some people hardly understand how to conduct a meaningful and productive interview with software developers. They tend to blindly throw out random, often irrelevant questions that have nothing to do with assessing a developer’s professionalism or experience, and their approach can be both disrespectful and demotivating for candidates. Below, I examine several such cases I encountered during interviews where I had the misfortune of being the interviewee:

Start with the Most Important Things

Start the interview by explaining your company’s inner workings: team names, the office dog’s name, or the fact that you just moved to a new office due to periodic outages in the previous one. Try to impress the candidate with your company’s unique vision, mission, and values—using as many buzzwords as possible while avoiding specifics. Make this part of the interview as lengthy as possible.

Do Not Encourage Proactiveness

Don’t let the candidate ask questions, steer the conversation toward topics they prefer, or interrupt you in any way during your performance. Make it absolutely clear that you are the one conducting the interview, while the candidate’s role is simply to be bombarded with your questions. You’re the boss here, not them.

Should the candidate persist in asking questions, inform them that your time is limited and that there are other, more important matters to discuss. Take the opportunity to reaffirm your position of authority.

Focus on Weaknesses, Not Strengths

Don’t try to identify what the candidate is good at or give them a chance to show their strengths. Instead, do your best to find out what the candidate doesn’t know or has poor knowledge of and develop that topic. Collect as many gaps in knowledge as you can. Isn’t that what interviews are about?

If your interview partner admits that they don’t know something, treat it as a weakness. Tell them that their seniority level assumes good knowledge of the topic in question. Hyperbolas may help you. Phrases such as “Every developer knows this” or “You’re a Ruby/Java/whatever developer, so you must know the exact name of the method that capitalizes a string” will definitely give you bonus points. Don’t underestimate how important it is to remember every tiny detail of some API - there is no excuse for that.

Be Practical and Concrete

Questions like “How do you test your code?”, “How do you make sure your code stays readable and maintainable?” or “What is an object in OOP?” are too broad and abstract and can lead to overly long discussions. It is much more fruitful to challenge the candidate with some sophisticated puzzle or to name the differences between Java 16 and Java 17. Leave the discussions of abstract concepts to philosophers.

Don’t Let Your Experience Be Questioned

Only discuss topics you know well yourself to reduce the risk of seeming unsure, which could put you at a disadvantage. Demonstrate that you know all the answers to the questions you’re asking and puzzles you set.

Conclusion

Interviewing a software developer is hard. It consumes time and energy for both the interviewee and interviewer, and it’s particularly costly for the company.

Following the practices mentioned above will make you look, at the very least, unprofessional. At the same time, they can also harm your company’s reputation if the candidate decides to leave feedback online. So use your time wisely: eliminate such practices from your toolkit entirely—this is the first step to meaningful, productive interviews that lead to successful hires!

Posted on: 17 March 2026.

Tags: software developer interview, worst practices