Lots of people here are describing interviews (from the perspective of the interviewee) as being an adversarial process, where people have bad experiences because the interviewer is more interested in being intimidating or showing up the interviewee, but I wonder how much of that is just the process itself being intimidating.

For me, job interviews were always incredibly nerve wracking. It feels like you're being judged, but of course you are being judged- the whole point of the interview is to judge your suitability for a position. It's also nerve wracking because I was always interviewing for something I wanted really badly, that was a step up from whatever I was doing at the time. So, I was always interviewing from a position of weakness, and it made me feel even more self-conscious.

At this point in my career I've probably been the interviewer >= 20x as often as I've been the interviewee. Some were phone screens, the rest were in person, and about half the time I was one of two interviewers (some companies do one-on-one interviews, some do two-on-one, and supposedly some do many-on-one interviews but I've never experienced that (but it sounds terrible)).

In all of that, I don't think I've ever been malicious or tried to show off or make someone feel bad, and I don't think I've ever witnessed or even heard of a colleague doing it either. Maybe I'm just lucky, and got all my jobs at companies that had a less horrible interview process, but I wonder.

Job interviews at companies I really want to work for have been intimidating because it is intimidating. I wanted to move up in the world, take the next step, and so it always felt like the people interviewing me were implicitly people I wanted to emulate. That's so awkward- it feels like approaching pseudorandom strangers and asking, "I want to be like you, am I cool enough for you to give me a job here so I can be like you?" You're being measured against a yardstick, and it feels like the yardstick is the person interviewing you, because they've already got a job at the company you want to work at.

So I would have to fight against being intimidated by the people who were interviewing me, but what I didn't realize was that although I felt intimidated, they (probably) weren't being intimidating. I was just projecting what I was feeling onto them, they were just being their normal selves and sucking at interviewing because everybody sucks at interviewing.

There's no reason for anyone to be a jerk to an interviewee, the interviewers want to have successful interviews just as much as the candidate. Nobody wants to drive away a potentially good hire just to act superior for a few minutes in front of a job seeker that they will never see again for the rest of their life.

So I would like to think that all of the horror stories about terrible interviewers come from interviewees projecting their (totally natural) stress onto other people, but who knows. People can be irrational jerks too unfortunately. :( I'm also curious if the bad interviewer behavior was exclusively in one-on-one interviews. Those seem more likely to go off the rails, since there's no other interviewer to counteract someone who is an especially bad interviewer to begin with.