Alright, so this is a 100% real story that happened to a friend (not me, trust me bro) of mine back in early 2022. We were in the final stretch of our computer engineering degree, just in time for campus placements. And thanks to the pandemic, every hiring process had moved online.
The Online Assessment
An ed-tech startup from Mumbai was one of the first to visit both my college and my friend’s. He was from a different college, but we were under the same university, so we both got a shot. The salary they offered wasn’t bad bad, especially considering most companies treated our tier-3 colleges like NPC buildings in GTA.
So we both gave the first round a try: Online Assessment (OA).
This was a proctored test with some MCQs and Leetcode-style coding questions. Two mentally draining hours later, I had already made peace with the fact that I wasn’t moving forward. My friend, on the other hand, made it to the next round: the interview.
And here’s where the story truly begins.
Interview Turned Interrogation
So my friend hops onto the interview call, does the polite hi hello, and the interview starts off fine. After a brief intro, the interviewer asks, "So, which question did you find the hardest in the OA?". My friend picks a problem and starts explaining how he solved it. The interviewer, being way too proactive for anyone’s comfort, pulls up my friend’s submission and opens up the code on the spot.
Now, I don’t remember the exact problem. But what I do remember is this: my friend had used a flag variable in his solution. And he named it… bruh.
Yes.
bruh.
The Flag That Waved Goodbye
My friend would've never imagined in his wildest dreams that someone would be reading his code in a job interview. But here we were. And of course, the interviewer’s eye immediately locked onto thebruh variable.
He immediately asks "What does this variable 'bruh' do? And… why is it named bruh?"
Now pause. Think about this situation. You're in an interview. You're trying to seem smart. And a fully grown man just asked you why you named your variable bruh.
You can't just say “Oh, I was panicking, and that’s just the first word my tired brain thought of.” So what does my friend do? He improvs. He panics with style. He tells the interviewer that bruh is short for brother and he was using it to keep track of neighboring elements in the array.
Smooth. Almost believable. Almost.
The Aftermath
The interviewer starts explaining how his adolescent son was also using the word "bruh" while playing games. And just like that, things went from awkward to "please end this call now" levels of weird. My friend's fighting for life here.
The interviewer kept poking at the name for another five minutes. And while he eventually let it go and moved on with the interview, it was clear he wasn’t impressed. My friend didn’t clear the round.
His first ever job interview derailed by a single variable named bruh.
The Redemption Arc
Thankfully, the story doesn’t end there. My friend later joined a much better company with a less suspicious interviewer. He’s now built some really cool web and mobile apps, and we’ve even worked together on freelance projects since then. So it’s all good.
But this story? This legend? Lives forever.
But I also want to emphasize something: Your choice of variable names, especially in a time-bound, anxiety-filled online test, is not a reflection of your skills as a developer.
But…
Don’t name your variables bruh.
Because if someone asks you to explain it, you absolutely won’t be able to.
Trust me.