Techie Walks Out Of Interview After Being Asked To Draw Indian Flag: 'I Lost It'

A job interview typically involves questions about an applicant’s experiences and skills, but one woman was taken aback when she was asked to draw the Indian flag using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). A tech professional from Bengaluru, the woman who holds 10 years of frontend development experience, shared her frustrating interview experience on Reddit, detailing how the process took an unexpected turn.

“Hi, today I had an interview with a small company..since it’s near to my home, so I thought to give it a try. I have a total of 10 years of experience in frontend technologies like angular, javascript, typescript, HTML, CSS, etc. Generally, at this experience level, people ask more of real-life scenarios based questions or coding skills to test logical thinking or some advanced concepts,” she wrote.

She further opened up on how the interview took an unexpected route when the interviewer started asking theoretical questions about CSS and eventually asked her to draw the Indian flag. Despite finding it “completely absurd,” she proceeded as asked. It was then that the interviewer asked to make the Ashoka Chakra in the flag and even the spikes. “There I lost it. I asked her for reasons for such kind of questions. She said that she wanted to test my knowledge,” the post continued.

Recognising the absurdity of the questions, the tech professional admitted that she ultimately decided to quit the interview out of frustration. In her post, she sought feedback from fellow Reddit users, questioning whether interviewers should improve their skills before conducting interviews. While some agreed with her and emphasised that interviewers need to take the process more seriously, others suggested that the unusual question might have been a clever tactic to test her technical skills.

A user wrote, “I think, they were not seriously taking the interview or the interviewer didn’t have frontend knowledge. She might have thought in frontend people only do drawings but using code,” while another commented, “Maybe she was just testing when you would lose your temperament.”

“What is the pay? They seem to not care about money given that they pay money for their employees to make jokes out of interviews. They also seem to bear quite incompetent employees,” a user wrote.

One suggested, “I think this is a good question for freshers would give the interviewer a sense of CSS knowledge that the interviewee has, as it may include absolute and relative positioning, pseudo-elements, etc. That being said, for someone with 10 years of experience, this would be totally unexpected and unnecessary the time spent on this question could be very well used in asking more meaningful questions.”