This interview experience was the worst interview
I have ever had. This is my review. I hope it serves as
a warning to others.
I saw an ad for GIMO. It was looking for PHP Developers.
I am a PHP Developer with 11 years experience. I spent six
years coding in a gambling environment. I looked at Glassdoor's
reviews. There were several reviews that said that the
interview process was a bit hit-and-miss, and that the
candidates had attended interviews and heard absolutely
nothing. A little alarm went off in my head and so I
decided to give them a miss.
An agent then contacted me and said he was recruiting on
behalf of GIMO. He said they had a very quick hiring
experience. All you had to do was turn up, complete a
short tech test and, as long as you passed, you were in.
I wasn't having any luck elsewhere so, in spite of my
reservations, I thought I'd give them the benefit of the
doubt, ignore the reviews and head on down there. What
could I be risking with a two hour Tech test, right?
Walked in the door. A guy introduced himself to me and
basically said "I don't know anything about you but there
are always vacancies here for PHP developers." He then
handed me a Windows laptop (which already had about 17
applications open on it) and a piece of paper which was
the 'Tech Test'. He said "it might take you anywhere between
two and six hours to do it".
Hmmm...
So I found the laptop had Xammp as a web server installed,
wrote a quick script and went to save it in the root
directory... and found at least seven previous candidates'
answers, all saved on the laptop with filenames like
'c-j-index.php', 'j-b-index.php', etc.
Hmmm again.
The test itself stated "Please write a RESTful API in
Object Oriented PHP 5 without using Frameworks and which
responds to the following commands."
So I started architecturing and was quite baffled when my
PHP 5 code started to throw errors all over the place.
Eventually, after eliminating other possibilities, I enquired
of the web server what version of PHP it was running. Answer:
PHP 7.2!
Went to talk to the interviewer again, but he wasn't a
Tech guy so didn't understand what I meant. Eventually one
of the other Devs said "Well, just write it in PHP 7 then!
After all, there's not much difference between the languages."
Fair enough, there isn't a lot of difference between the
languages but some things *are* different. It's a bit
silly to order a Dev to write in a language that isn't
installed on the web server you give to him.
I seriously considered just leaving at this point but
instead I persevered and completed the test. It had a
set of baffling instructions, asking for tables to
be created as per a specification that ignored foreign
keys, had column names between tables that contained the
same information but were named differently (a big no no
in the world of database design) but it was impossible
to tell whether the company wanted the Dev to "just do as
instructed" or "raise the issues with doing it that way
instead of blindly following instructions". I chose to
"just do as instructed" because there wasn't really anyone
to ask.
After two hours, with the system working, I said "I've
finished. So now what?" The guy said, "Stick your files
in a zip file and save it to the Desktop." OK, so that will
work for the scripts I've created, but what about the
database connection and the fact that my scripts rely on
my database tables, database tables that, like the plethora
of previous candidates' answers, are scattered all over
the place. "Oh, don't worry about that." Um.
I asked if they weren't worried that I might just copy the
answer from a previous candidate. Response: "Very few people
pass the test so that would be a big risk. You'd probably
end up copying an answer that didn't work." Amazingly
professional, right?
I went home. I received absolutely no feedback on my test.
I received no response to further enquries. I didn't get
offered a job.
Absolute waste of my time.
Consider yourself warned.