Interviewer got upset with me because I refused to provide an example of how I implemented a concurrency control policy in my former employer's production codebase. How would you handle this?

Posted by 9ubj@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 124 comments

I have been shopping around for a new role and I landed a few interviews here and there. Also, I am a C++ dev and I have mainly worked on the internals behind distributed systems and for the defense sector. So think stuff like preventing deadlocks, mutual exclusion around operations on file descriptors and other I/O devices from multiple threads, yada yada.

I had an interview with a big-ish company recently and the interviewer straight up asked how I implemented a concurrency control policy and asked for specific details. I could not answer this exact question for IP (and TS) reasons, so I paused and explained to him this and then I tried to "reframe" the problem such that I could answer his question without revealing any secrets.

Lo and behold, he cuts me off and starts saying "I need you to explain to me exactly how you implemented the solution - no tangential examples or anything!" and then he sprinkles in "You need to be a better job showing me your knowledge of C++"

This was interview 4. They invited me for interview number 5 and the technical question was to solve the Ages of Three Children puzzle with "woman" misspelled as "women" numerous times in some word document. At this point I snapped and just asked the guy to withdraw my application.

Part of me feels like we can't be picky in today's job market but on the other hand, I feel like all of this points to how crappy the workplace would have been should they have made an offer. What would you do?