cover image: Interrogation of Joan of Arc by Paul Delaroche

Sharing our experiences with technical interviews can help cultivate a better ecosystem for technical interviews, so what has your experience been? I'd like to hear about the worst you've been through.

I'll go first: my worst tech interviews have been bad for a number of reasons, some of them weren't anyone's fault:

• I was interviewed for an ops position that I really shouldn't have been up for. When posed with a log-parsing question that required grep, I spent my hour trying to write a node program to do what I needed. I got about 5% done.

• Interviewing for a Rails role, I did well until it came up that I hadn't heard of a specific Ruby gem, I believe it was Capistrano. I've still never used it.

Other experiences were... easier to point fingers

• the one that stands out over all the others was for a company doing b2b services with some multimedia servers. It looked a bit old and creaky to me but I went in with a brave heart. At the technical, the lead dev asked me some pointed questions, and it became clear he'd found my blog. Worse he'd read every single post (about 30), looking for stuff to confront me on. At one point I recall him saying 'you mentioned you don't like learning JSX, we use JSX, why are you even interviewing here!'

After the interview he went through my github and accused me of plagarizing my code samples.

Okay, I've shared my worst ones, tell me yours in the comments.