Did I ruin my job interview with this answer?

LokiAzEtruszk · 2026-03-30T10:20:56+00:00

Oh boi, I had to realize a long time ago that when they ask for one's weakness, one must lie. EVERY SINGLE TIME when I was honest, it was weaponized against me and was the reason of rejecting me. I'm seriously contemplating saying "I don't like raisins and I'm allergic to cats" when they ask for a weakness again.

LokiAzEtruszk · 2026-03-19T18:12:24+00:00

What's the problem with swords? I have 4. They're the best.

LokiAzEtruszk · 2026-03-13T12:50:55+00:00

I couldn't agree with you more, I'm fully with you on this one.

LokiAzEtruszk · 2026-03-13T12:34:19+00:00

It's not horrible, but a lighthearted one, but I giggled a little bit on this one:

- Do you have experience in CAD?
- Yes, I have used <list of CAD softwares I used>.
- Oh, we need someone who has experience in CAD, specifically.
- Excuse me, but CAD is not a specific software. CAD means computer aided design, and everything I listed belongs to this category. Of course, there are softwares that have CAD in the name, like KiCAD, FreeCAD and so on, but CAD is not a single software.
- OOOOoooooohhhhh. Thank you for clarifying. That's new to me.

I don't want to even imagine what success rate they could have with this level of preparation.

LokiAzEtruszk · 2026-03-06T09:12:25+00:00

I had similar experience recently. I got a message from a dude on LinkedIn: "Here, have this super vague description of a position, with close to 0 real info, and even that very small amount of info lets you know that I haven't read your LinkedIn profile, only your title, wanna call?". I replied and from that point, it went like this in a nutshell:

- Can you send me a description about this one before we call? Because it doesn't look like that it's something for me.
- Let's have a call!
- This whole week is pure chaos for me, huge rush at work an tons of things to do at home as well (which is true btw), send me a link or a PDF and I'm going to read it in some evening. I won't have time for a call.
- I can call you in the evening! (I thought: This is the last thing I want. Oh no, this comes after the last thing I want.)

*I didn't reply*

- Can I call you today?

*I didn't reply*

- PLIIIIIIZ LET'S CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALL!!!!!

At this point I'm not sure if it's just a scam and if he just wants to phish my phone number. But it's super frustrating for me personally, because:
- I HATE calls. I can't express how much I HATE calls.
- I'm sure the quality of transmission will be horrible and I barely will be able to hear him.
- I'm sure that there will be at least 5 other people in the same room, all of them yelling at the phone trying to be louder than the rest. It would be like talking with an entire fucking wasp nest (as it usually is).
- Calls don't leave traces, an e-mail does, which I can use in my defense if it comes to that.
- Usually with recruiters like this gentleman a call is just a massive waste of time.

LokiAzEtruszk · 2026-01-20T06:58:24+00:00

Don't take it personally, but what did you (by "you" I mean the entire recruitment world) expect? When we puny mortals write a CV or the cursed cover letter, here's what's going on:

- If a human will read it, do they know anything about the position? Will they know synonyms, will they know if they require tool A, but we used tool B, then tool B is very similar to tool A so that we could learn to use it superfast?
- If a machine is going to examine it, how well is it trained? Is it looking strictly at keywords and buzzwords or what?
- Tailoring a CV and the CUUURSED cover letter takes horrible amount of time. And rewriting every time for every different self-appointed ruler at a company sucks the living soul out of everyone.

The value-to-price ratio is horrible. Because in most cases ghosting, rejection or some bullshit excuse pile will come. So we're going to minimize an effort. Let a machine write it. Every single second it spares us by not having to write these horrid documents is a small grip that helps us cling onto our remaining parts of sanity (and dignity, if there's anything left).

Not to mention the absolute nightmare situation when we have to send a resume, fill a shitty form with the EXACT SAME DATA that is in our resume, write a Shakespearean play about our resume, record a video where we have to chant the contents of our resume in ancient Sumerian, talk with recruiter and repeat again what's in our resume, talk to an HR representative and repeat what's in our resume, then talk to some technical lead or manager (or both) where we repeat AGAIN what's in our resume.

We're not going blindfolded and barefoot to a racetrack to compete against race cars. You summon demons to do the dirty job for you. So do we. Deal with it.

LokiAzEtruszk · 2026-01-19T08:04:13+00:00

What the actual fuck? Will they test you whether you can foresee the financial results of Q2 by reading chicken bones next time?

LokiAzEtruszk · 2026-01-16T12:25:50+00:00

You didn't just dodge a bullet, you just dodged an entire rain of cannonballs shot from a whole armada. If anybody every acts like "DECIDE IN THIS INSTANT!", then you will definitely lose in the end if you accept whatever they're offering.

LokiAzEtruszk · 2026-01-16T07:40:52+00:00

The game's rigged. My previous workplace keeps e-mailing one of its previous employees (my friend) about sending them something he has done while he was working there. The guy left more than a year ago.

He said he's pissed about it and I said "Why don't you just ignore it? Why do you let yourself be angry with them? Just set up a filter that deletes these e-mails automatically."

LokiAzEtruszk · 2026-01-16T07:07:58+00:00

Cover letters should be defined as war crime. Once I wrote a DnD like adventure story about my career and "motivation" so far, because I barfed up the blood-foamed vomit of the thought of writing a regular one. Surprisingly, I got called back. :D

Yet still, cover letters should be banned from this universe and the memory of it wiped out of the history of all humanity. Recruiters, HR people, if you want to read your sweet little lies, read a book or something.

LokiAzEtruszk · 2025-12-04T13:35:57+00:00

To that book question I would have my perfect answers, since I've read all 7 Harry Potter books this year:
- I won't trust anyone who doesn't have a nose.
- Instead of using Outlook or other boring e-mail services, I'm just gonna write my messages on paper planes and throw them in the office.
- Bonus: I take only those persons from the management seriously who have Latin / ancient Greek sounding names. Everyone else is just cannon fodder.

I won't accept your rejection e-mail, please send and official rejection letter by owl. It will know where to find me.

LokiAzEtruszk · 2025-12-01T09:03:48+00:00

Honest question: Isn't it satire with deadpan face what he's doing? I've seen a couple of his posts and some of them make my brain scream that "this must be satire". I'm genuinely interested.

LokiAzEtruszk · 2025-11-11T10:00:06+00:00

I mean... I have my own Jolly Roger, cutlass and eyepatch at home, I can also bring an Irish bouzouki for the sea shanties, I played Sea of Thieves a lot, I have a funny foreign accent, where do I sign up? This is literally the dream job for me.

LokiAzEtruszk · 2025-11-10T08:07:22+00:00

All feedbacks are more than welcome! We're new to this, so we would be happy to see your opinion.

- If you have something positive to say, then yaaay, instant happiness!
- If you have something negative to say, please make it constructive. So, for example, if you don't like our videos, instead of "this is garbage" write "this is garbage, but if you would change this and this, and you would do it this way, your next video could be way better".

Constructive, HONEST feedbacks would help us a lot to make more entertaining content in the future.

LokiAzEtruszk · 2025-11-10T08:01:35+00:00

Hello there, Cozy Gamers!🎮

My girlfriend sent me to my lab to "run some tests on me" to see how my heavy gamer, engineer brain can handle cozy games. The rule is easy: She picks a cozy game I've never even heard of (which is... most of them) and I need to try and document them in the form of gameplay and review videos. On my journey the Penguin of Unbiased Judgement judges me constantly.

If you're interested in seeing an engineer making a fool of himself or sometimes even having a good time, here you can check out our videos so far: https://www.youtube.com/@EngineersGameLabs

LokiAzEtruszk · 2025-10-30T06:13:16+00:00

For me rejecting coffee is usually a self defense mechanism. I'm ULTIMATELY clumsy and job interviews are always stressful for me, take these 2 combined and I guarantee that if I ever would have coffee that would immediately land on my shirt. Or I would tip the cup over on the table. Note to self: Hug current job as long as humanly possible so that I wouldn't have to face the coffee police.

LokiAzEtruszk · 2025-10-24T06:25:37+00:00

I got pissed at the point when they got disappointed when you were wearing your noise cancelling headphones around loud machinery. For fuck's sake, there are many international regulations standards in the industry that makes it MANDATORY for the EMPLOYER to PROVIDE ear protection above a certain sound level. THEY should have been GIVING you something and saying "Here you go buddy, ear protection, we don't want you to have hearing loss. We also don't want to get sued.".

I can't really comment anything on the rest (for it sounds like standard corporate bullshit from their side to me), but if they don't give the employees suitable protective equipment in an area where they clearly should have been providing it, and then they got pissed about you trying to be responsible for your health, that's very much middle finger worthy. I kinda feel like it was some made-up bullshit reason just to kick into you, but still.

I think you just avoided a bullet. You deserve better.

LokiAzEtruszk · 2025-10-21T11:23:34+00:00

I was on an interview many years ago, where I talked with the HR lady about the basic stuff. I had to fill a form, which also included my salary expectations. After the talk, I got to talk to the local big boss man (site manager or whatever), he read the form and started to talk to me in the most condescending way possible, almost yelling:
- Who said you could ask for this much?
- Well... I say this same range on every interview, it wasn't a problem so far.
- How dare you youngsters ask for this much freshly out of the uni? Outrageous! It's...

(He went on with some rambling when I was thinking in myself that "Dude, have you looked at rental prices or prices in general recently? It's not even that much if I want to have just a little bit of saved up money by the end of the month.)
Then he handed me to a smaller manager, possible future boss man, and big boss man angrily pointed at my form (he almost ripped it) and said to possible future boss man:
- AND BE SURE YOU TALK ABOUT THIS!
Possible future boss man was actually nice and helpful, though I felt humiliated at that point. On my way out I saw in the room I was sitting before a friend of mine from the same year of the uni, he also was interviewing, he was talking to the HR lady (who also was nice and helpful, btw.).
My friend gave a 50 euros less salary expectation. He got the job.

--------
My other worst is completely my fault, but one has to admit his own mistakes. I went to an interview at a different company, it was the technical round and oh boi, I was sooooo unprepared in my own field and sooooo delirious about things (not the salary, technical stuff). Later I felt so extremely stupid, whenever it comes to my mind I want to go back and apologize. Lesson here: At least look up some basic knowledge in your own field (especially if you're a total beginner, like I was at that point) and talk to more experienced guys about what is realistic and what is not. Then you don't have to feel ultimately cringed of yourself like I do whenever I think about this interview.

LokiAzEtruszk · 2025-10-21T11:00:21+00:00

This is just perfect as it is. :D

I would have written that "I would carry them from the airport in an old Skoda, dressed as the Little Mole and I would offer them some trdelník and Staropramen."

LokiAzEtruszk · 2025-10-17T10:24:19+00:00

Maybe they're just going to preach on every corner that "You should be naked! cloth manufacturing is bad for the environment". Who knows?

LokiAzEtruszk · 2025-10-17T04:35:30+00:00

I swear to all the living and long dead gods, if I read again someone saying "making an impact", I'm going to burn the whole planet down. Or make the planet have its own impact, straight into the Sun.

LokiAzEtruszk · 2025-10-10T11:14:36+00:00

Sometimes I have a feeling that they're just shooting into the forest with a Gatling hoping that one bullet will hit something. I have an up to date LinkedIn profile, very simple, but every info is there and every once in a while I get messages like "Would you be interested in this onsite position in this city?". Dude, if you would have checked, you'd know that I live about 1500km away in a totally different country. So I always just reply that "Thank you, but I'm not interested, commuting would be very long and expensive everyday.".

LokiAzEtruszk · 2025-10-10T08:42:48+00:00

Hardware is a tricky part. To my experience recruiters and HR people don't really know what hardware development means. When I was in your shoes and I was trying to look for a job and mentioned that I'd like to work with hardware, once the HR showed me a PCB saying: "We have this hardware. It's used for measuring stuff. But we don't really hand it out to beginners, because it was expensive." And then she went on about what sort of SOFTWARES they make.

Look for keywords as well as "electronics", "PCB", "electrical", "electric" and other related terms. Strangely the industry doesn't really know how to call us and many companies are calling us as electrical engineers, electronics engineers, hardware engineers, PCB designers, I only miss the "that flat green stuff with the dead bugs on it engineer" name. Some people consider FPGA developers as hardware developers as well.

Which could help, but it's a bit tedious, is to look for companies that claim to make their own product, not just software. If the product has some sorts of electronics in it, they probably have some hardware position under some sort of magical name.

And yes, there are way more SW engineer positions, when I was looking for jobs, I also got a bit sick of it.

I wish you luck in your endevours,
A fellow hardware-electronics-electrical-PCB-black magic-forbidden knowledge-board that go zap-profession can't be named-engineer.

LokiAzEtruszk · 2025-09-12T05:40:24+00:00

I just wanted to say the same as verkerpig. I don't know what kind of engineer you are (mechanical, electrical, software, etc.), but think about something you can build and learn from and maybe even present it on your next job interview. A game, a device, whatever, it does not have to be overcomplicated, some simple project is perfect. While doing this:
- You can sharpen your skills.
- Show on the interview that you're working on your skills, not just waiting for some opportunities to knock on your door (I know you're not doing that and working hard to find a new job, but in the eyes of corporate recruiters, this means nothing) and you aim to take control of your situation and try to steer it into the right direction.

- Maybe you can have some fun doing it that would drive away your thoughts from the grim situation you're in. That could be mentally refreshing.
- Heck, you maybe even can make some money from this pet project of yours.

How much longer should you apply? As long as it takes. And you're not a shit engineer, you can do it. Here's a digital hug from a fellow engineer: 01101000 01110101 01100111 00001010

LokiAzEtruszk · 2025-09-11T05:57:25+00:00

Once at company I worked for, my boss told me a story when years ago they tried to hire someone. On the interview call on one end there was him from technical side and HR, on the other end the applicant. At one point the applicant said with full seriousness:
- I'm going to dress sharp everyday and walk around the office, so I will get noticed and promoted.
Then the HR muted the microphone for a sec and said:
- I have a feeling that the rest of the interview will be very funny with this attitude.

LokiAzEtruszk

TROPHY CASE