How to Fail a Big Company Interview (a Short Guide)

So you’ve landed this incoming interview with Googamazbook, and you’re determined to fail it. Or maybe you’re not determined, you just don’t trust the 99.9%+ rejection rate these companies are known for and would like some say in how you fail. Either way, you’re in the right place.

The recruiter screening is surprisingly hard to fail, especially if school had trained you to give the expected, correct answers. Some people do stumble here because they don’t “speak the same language” as the company’s current employees, but they’re a minority.

So if:

1. you’re set on failing the recruiter screening;
2. you have plenty of experience;
3. you were good at quizzes in school…

…you’re practically guaranteed to pass. Sure, you could invent wrong answers, but that’s cheap. Let’s skip ahead.

Now you’re talking to an engineer, maybe two. No more quizzes, just problems to solve.

Failing here is easier: solve the problem using a different method than the one your interviewer had in mind. You could offer a brute-force solution as a quick exit, but if you take pride in doing things well, that’s a real struggle. You’ll probably find the optimal solution and fail at failing. Fortunately, a few things can help:

• Call quality: If you can’t really understand the interviewer, failure is almost guaranteed. Even if you catch the rough ideas, you’ll miss on nuance and tone. Pray for a bad line, and firmly refuse any callback.
• Interviewer benevolence: Sometimes you get a genuinely kind interviewer who wants to help you solve the problem. That makes failing very hard. You need to hope for someone with a radically different attitude.
• Open-ended questions: Dive straight into the immediate problem as you see it. Never ask what’s actually needed or expected. If you ask clarifying questions first, you’re likely doomed to pass.
• Questions at the end: Ask only about perks and work/life balance. It’s no guaranteed fail, but you’re on the right track.

Against your wishes, you’ve made it to the onsite. Time to bring out the big guns.

The lazy way to fail is not showing up. If they flew you to a new city, you could enjoy a free mini-vacation with most expenses covered. But you’re not that lazy: you show up on time, sober and prepared for the long day.

The classic way to fail is not solving the interviewer’s problem, whether it’s a coding challenge or a debugging task. But some problems seem easy or average, which makes failing tough. A few ideas:

• Debugging scenario: Stop as soon as you’ve found the issue the interviewer had in mind. They expect you to carry it through to a conclusion, such as a definitive fix. Leaving it without closure is an easy way to fail.
• Architecture design scenario: Propose round-robin DNS as the load-balancing strategy for your service. It’s a lightning-fast failure, so make a note of it. At some companies it may even shorten your interview day. More free time!
• Logging: If logging comes up, stick to internal (local) logging and refuse to consider any alternatives.

If nothing works, trust the stats: at this stage, more than 90% of candidates don’t get an offer, so put your hopes to that.

A few days or weeks after the onsite, the recruiter asks for several people to vouch for you. That’s bad news, because even a lukewarm reference from someone who barely knows you could push you to an offer.

Your best bet is to develop a multiple personality disorder, get phone numbers from another country, and answer the reference calls yourself, though that only works if you’re good at faking voices. Otherwise, try convincing someone to say something along the lines of “Who? Don’t get me started on that lazy pr1ck!” That should do it.

Tough luck: at this point, you have to turn the offer down. But you won’t get here by following the advice in this article, so don’t give it too much thought.

That’s all for today. Thanks for reading!

NB: This text is not necessarily based on my personal experiences, so please take any advice here with a grain of salt.