My interviewer was sitting in a room full of people when they called me, asked me questions and then proceeded to have conversations with the other people in the room without listening to me and would ask me to repeat my answers. And do it again.
15 minutes of this and I hung up on them. This was about 4 years ago and the equity that I have in the company I joined instead is on an upward trajectory instead of what Uber just did. Phew.
Ouch. I'm glad you cut it short. I had a variation on that.
Earlier in dotcoms, I wanted to work in a then-prominent organization. The technical phone screen went well. When they asked what I'd like to work on, I said something like HCI-ish R&D (in which I also had experience) for their important product, so they scheduled me for another phone screen, with the person who was in charge of that.
I'm reasonably good at hearing tone, and the person on this second phone screen didn't seem to want to talk with me, from the start. They asked me to talk about ideas, then they muted their end. I knew this wasn't going well, but I really wanted to work there, and I was trying to figure out how to salvage it, and I had to start talking immediately, so I started going into some applicable research ideas/approaches. Still muted, no comments, no questions, no backchannel cues whatsoever, so I kept going. When apparently the time block for the interview was up, he un-muted his end, and said something like, "I'd hoped you'd talk about a GUI enhancement to <product>." And that was the end of the interview.
That gave a bad impression of the organization, that they'd have someone who'd behave like that, managing people in a key group. So I didn't pursue things with the original group, which liked me.
It's a little validation, but no consolation, that their market-leading product later got driven into the ground, losing to an innovator who entered the market.
But that no one shut down the asshole, and that this was allowed to continue happening in an interview situation means that in addition to an asshole guy, there are also a bunch of asshole employees who don't care enough to speak up, or would rather have side conversations with the main asshole guy.
Especially when in a new hire/interview situation, HR is absolutely involved. So the HR department is also full of assholes who won't enforce the policies of the company.
Interviewer was not a guy and would have been my manager.
I guess I'm glad it went this way for other reasons. It was for an entirely new team within Uber to build something very specific that nobody had done successfully yet (though there was a paper about it...it's security-related). The manager was an external hire and the entire team was to be as well. This was a big warning sign to me that management didn't care very much about this team or if they accomplished what they set out to.
4 years later they still haven't delivered on that feature yet.
My interviewer was sitting in a room full of people when they called me, asked me questions and then proceeded to have conversations with the other people in the room without listening to me and would ask me to repeat my answers. And do it again.
15 minutes of this and I hung up on them. This was about 4 years ago and the equity that I have in the company I joined instead is on an upward trajectory instead of what Uber just did. Phew.