Sometimes, job interviews end for dumb reasons. I want to hear them. Doesn't matter if it's the employer or candidate who ended it.
Now I don't really mean making silly mistakes during an interview process that will make you facepalm when you see them. Those are an unavoidable artifact of the interview process. I'm talking about things that don't really have any connection to your ability to perform the job, or the company's attractiveness as an employer.
I will share my own experiences below.
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I needed to pee really bad
I once strained some muscles related to bladder control... yeah, go figure. Two weeks later I had a job interview one city over, this was the first time leaving the house after those muscles had healed and unfortunately those symptoms had developed into panic attacks. Every step I took I felt like I was about to piss my pants. Managed to get to the right city, in a journey that went from toilet to toilet, and was about a 10 minute walk away, a journey that I just did not manage. Cancelled the interview at the last minute, which I'm still ashamed of.
Turned down for a position I didn't apply to
Amazingly, this happened twice. Once I was applying for a position to add AI to a product, the other time for geometric algorithms. Both times I'd made it clear in my CV that I had only very little experience with databases (which was true at the time). Both times, I was, after multiple interviews, turned down for the position of database engineer... which I didn't apply for.
They thought they were too boring for me
I once applied for a position in a team that was intended to be working on cutting edge technologies. All the buzzwords were there, like blockchain, AI, big data, cloud... and I wasn't as much of a trained cynical as I am now. The interview went well, they were excited about my abilities and they seemed like a very decent employer.
They eventually turned me down because they were afraid they might not get enough work that was actually cutting edge and I would get bored. This is actually quite a good reason to turn a candidate down, but I have to wonder how one sets up a decent team for cutting edge tech without hiring people who specifically want to work on cutting edge tech. I would have been willing to do freelancing too...
The product had no chance of success
A tiny company wanted to do drone deliveries. With wheeled vehicles. On public roads. You know, the thing Google and Amazon haven't gotten right yet? (well, not at the time anyway). The plan was to train the AI using the Unreal Engine... If you have any background in AI you probably know that it's crucial for supervised learning that the training data is representative of the data it will use in the field. Using a game to represent the real world is really far removed from that.
The owner was apparently quite enthusiastic about me after the discussion we had. IMO, it didn't bode well that my arguments hadn't completely demotivated him, so I decided to end the interview process.
I showed shock that they didn't allow Linux
One company rejected me because "I wasn't motivated enough" based solely around the fact that I showed some shock when they told me they only allowed Windows PCs. Now this was supposedly a very high-tech team with no user-facing products, so banning the OS that gets all the tools first and has the least issues getting them to work seems rather counter-productive.
Personally, I think this was an excuse. I'd asked for a standing desk for health reasons and they couldn't guarantee one as they had "flexible" working spaces. But stating that reason probably wouldn't make it past legal.
What irks me about they had all the information they used to reject me after the second interview, but went ahead and made me fill in bogus personality tests and pointless IQ tests after that anyway.