Submitted by FortiethAtom4 t3_11m4pf4 in tifu
FU itself happened some months ago. Repercussions came in today.
I'm a college senior desperately looking for programming jobs in my area. It's been a grueling process with rejection after rejection and dozens of intense interviews. As part of my resume, I have included a coding project I worked on last summer, a card game written in Python. I worked on it alone with no professional supervision, and I DEFINITELY did not think too much about notes written for myself.
Last month, it seemed I had gotten somewhere with a company which asked me to come back for a second interview, the last one before they chose to accept or reject me. I sent them my resume and game code and got ready for the interview.
Overall it went well; I was able to answer just about every question they threw at me related to programming. One interviewer gave me a "challenge question" related to bit shifting and I was able to answer it, which he congratulated me on. At the end of the interview they told me I would receive their decision within 2 weeks. I was excited and thought that I had finally gotten a job lined up for after college.
Less than 3 days later I received a rejection email. I was beyond frustrated and had no idea what I had done wrong. The next day I sent an email to the head interviewer asking her what she found wrong in the interview so that I could avoid making the same mistake later. Here is the response email I received today, paraphrased:
"Hi u/FortiethAtom4-
Thanks for reaching out and I’m really glad that you asked for feedback. I’m going to be totally honest with you when I tell you that we found some of the naming conventions and comments in your code offensive and unprofessional for an interview setting and we were unable to get past your lack of attention to detail and judgement. It’s unfortunate because other than that you demonstrated strong technical knowledge and communication skills.
I know this is probably disappointing for you to hear but hopefully you won’t make this same mistake in future interviews.
Thanks,
Interviewer"
Sweating, I went and checked on the card game code.
It turns out that I had named all of my turn-taking variables different versions of the word "penis." ALL of them. As in, every single time a player takes a turn, the program uses "penis" to denote that turn.
And I had just shown that to a group of professional programmers.
There goes my chances at a job.
TL;DR: Programmed a card game, used the word "penis" for a bunch of variable strings, and promptly forgot about them. Tried to use that code for a job interview. They noticed. I got rejected immediately.