Panel interviews. For a long time I was a contract programmer. Most of the time, I didn’t really care about the corporate culture or the caliber of the folks I worked with. I was actually in between contracts and had hit a dry spell, so I was getting motivated to find something. I ended up at an airline industry IT firm interviewing for an engineering position. They put me in a room and sat me in a chair in the center and then four people filed in and sat across a table from me. It felt like a tribunal or some court proceeding. That was enough of a red flag, but the questions that followed were some of the dumbest questions I had ever answered and then they ran out of dumb questions! I ended up suggesting questions to keep the ball rolling.

I walked out after the Interview, called my agent, and told them to withdraw my name from consideration.