Candidate Falls Asleep During Monday Video Interview, Blames 'Residual Tryptophan'

A senior software developer in Portland reportedly fell asleep during a video interview this morning, waking up 12 minutes later to find the interviewer had ended the call and sent a calendar invite for "a better time when you're rested."

The candidate, who requested anonymity but whose LinkedIn shows he's "Open to Work" (awkward), was answering a question about his experience with microservices architecture when he "just needed to rest his eyes for a second." That second turned into a solid nap complete with visible drooling.

The Turkey Defense

In his follow-up apology email - which he definitely didn't draft with ChatGPT despite it having the exact tone and structure of every ChatGPT apology ever written - the candidate blamed "residual tryptophan from Thanksgiving weekend" and suggested the interviewer "should understand as a fellow human who also presumably celebrates American holidays."

The interviewer, who is based in the company's Bangalore office and does not celebrate Thanksgiving, was reportedly confused but impressed by the confidence.

Zoom's New Auto-Snooze Detection

The incident was captured by Zoom's experimental "engagement analytics" feature, which flagged the candidate's activity as "closed eyes (12:47), head tilt (13:02), possible REM sleep (14:38)." HR is now debating whether this counts as a rejection for cause or if they need to reschedule because "technically he didn't say no."

The candidate's last words before dozing off were "Yeah, we implemented a service mesh using Istio and it really helped with—" and then silence except for what the interviewer described as "concerning breathing sounds."

LinkedIn Profile Update

As of press time, the candidate has updated his LinkedIn headline from "Senior Software Engineer | Microservices Expert" to "Senior Software Engineer | Microservices Expert | Early Morning Interviews Preferred." He's also marked himself as "taking a break from job search" which typically means "hiding from that one recruiter who definitely told their whole team about this."

The hiring company has reportedly added "Are you fully awake and caffeinated?" to their pre-interview confirmation emails, along with a checkbox that requires candidates to acknowledge "Monday morning interviews after holiday weekends are inadvisable."

Industry experts suggest scheduling interviews after 2 PM this week unless you want your candidates conducting the entire conversation with their eyes at half-mast while fighting the urge to nap like a toddler.

No actual interviews were ruined in the making of this story, but let's be honest, it definitely happened to someone today.