Five Minutes. One Question. Youre Not the Candidate We Were Looking For.

A startup interview ended after five minutes. The interviewer skipped introductions, asked a single coding question, and when the candidate answered, declared: "No, according to me, you're not the candidate we were looking for!" The candidate — who had prepared extensively and had open-source contributions to discuss — posted on Reddit about the experience. Commenters were split between "you dodged a bullet" and suspicion that the company had already decided before the call began, possibly to meet an internal interview quota for a role that was never genuinely open.