I once failed an interview because they asked how I’d solve a geospatial problem in Postgres and I said I’d use PostGIS and order by ST_Distance. The guy said “what’s postgis” and I knew it was over.
I believe we all failed as an industry that day. A friend of mine worked at the company and tried to get me to reapply a year later and promised they had scrapped the old interview process, but I just couldn’t.
They apparently wanted me to do some geometry, and know that the naive geometry doesn't account for the curve of the earth, and that there are indexing concerns. This was for a company that makes HR software and the interviewer who devised this exercise had never heard of PostGIS and sort of implied it was a real thing that people used.
