I've interviewed people before and thought "I'm going to reject you, and you should thank me".
To be clear, not all of the jobs I've hired for sucked. But there was one project that was designed to chew up your soul (mine included), and we had very specific requirements- and people that had "extra" skills weren't qualified. I learned A LOT from that project.
I was working for a small department inside of a large company. The large company was migrating databases (it was a 2 year journey), our department was TRYING to get sold.
In our area, we had 2 teams racing VERY FAST to 2 different objectives:
1) migrate ALL code and data to the new system (because it needs to be available on the new system) AND
2) archive everything (because we might sell all of our stuff and be unemployeed)
It was gut wrenching to look at code that I put my heart and soul into and know it would never run again. Or to look at code with comments like "I just threw this garbage together - it needs to be fixed, circa 5 years ago" and know it would never be fixed.
To be clear, not all of the jobs I've hired for sucked. But there was one project that was designed to chew up your soul (mine included), and we had very specific requirements- and people that had "extra" skills weren't qualified. I learned A LOT from that project.