[HN Gopher] Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become "normal"?
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Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become "normal"?
edit: I love this community! Thank you so much for all the insight.
For those who complained, I'm sorry if this post comes across as
complainy or redundant, I respect the HN hive-mind and was
genuinely curious about everyone's thoughts on the matter. Hello
fellow travelers, I'll do my best to keep this brief(ish). I've
been in IT professionally since Y2K, data
entry->QA->SysAdmin->PM->consultant->founder->sold and with the
money took some years off, bought some property and a fixer upper
and went to school and got a BSBA degree (never graduated from high
school but wanted to show my kids the importance of a degree). I
missed working and creating things with people so decided to
reenter the job market in the PM space. So now that my hat is in
the ring I have been told by recruiters what I need to "expect" in
this "new market." I was told "5 to 7 interviews is normal". What?
I genuinely feel like I'm having a 'Blast from the Past' moment in
this whole thing (good 90s romcom kids, look it up). When did a
hiring manager lose their authority and the trust of the
organization to do their job? Am I just out of touch? How is a
process like this in any way shape or form efficient or productive?
Am i missing something? HN, please help!
Author : geeky4qwerty
Score : 421 points
Date : 2022-04-02 15:39 UTC (7 hours ago)
| deprave wrote:
| Interviews are more thorough because firing became harder.
|
| It used to be that if you hired an employee and found out they
| aren't good at their job you could fire them. Today it is
| complicated and can backfire if the employee believes they were
| fired because of any reason other than their skills, or were not
| provided with ample opportunity and support to succeed.
|
| The solution is a lengthier process based on the assumption that
| once hired, the company is stuck with the employee unless they
| decide to leave.
| 0xB31B1B wrote:
| Interviews add up quickly:
|
| Initial meeting Tech screening Case study/system design Meeting
| with upper level manager Meeting with peers Doing 1 last
| interview on something the team felt was still and open question
| mouzogu wrote:
| Yeah I have 16 years experience and was asked to take an aptitude
| (IQ) test. I find it personally insulting.
|
| I think it all emerged from the recruiting/HR market. They
| started as middlemen but found a way to take on more of the
| "gatekeeping" role in hiring.
|
| This then lead to recruiters using more and more technical jargon
| and then we saw the emergence of leetcode interviews trend from
| faang, and multiple stupid interviews, because it's the trend.
| hasmolo wrote:
| this right here. i was told to fill out essays as part of the
| interview process to indicate i had a good culture fit. i'm
| talking college entrance length and prompt. shit like in 5.000
| words tell me how u r a team player.
|
| nahhhhhhh
| noir_lord wrote:
| Would have just submitted "Clearly I'm not".
| faangiq wrote:
| Many years ago I took an IQ type test for a job where I would
| have failed the practical skills assessment. I passed and it
| was a very good hire for the company.
| grapeskin wrote:
| IQ-style tests are the norm in parts of Asia. Straight up 200
| arithmetic problems in 10 minutes, draw as many perfect squares
| as possible in 30 seconds, "what's the best synonym for this
| word" type of stuff preceding a tech interview. Plus some old
| sweaty guy in a suit to berate you for not doing something
| perfectly and question why your 32nd square is slightly tilted
| to the left while the others are to the right, and how this
| will reflect upon your moral standing during working hours.
|
| It's absolutely nuts. I ignore requests from any company that
| publicly says they require it.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| Huh. I am working in IT in Southeast Asia (Indonesia and
| Vietnam mostly) and I have never heard about this.
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| You _will_ participate in the hazing rituals and you _will_
| submit to humiliation over a several day period. After all,
| anything less means you aren 't fully committed to the corporate
| vision.
| andrew_ wrote:
| TL;DR - you can say no to the people who have normalized that,
| and still be highly successful
|
| With the emergence of Google, et al, and the image of being
| elite, so came the emergence of nonsense like this:
| https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/here-are-all-the-docume....
| Getting butts in seats and long processes have replaced getting
| to know people before hiring them. The burden has been put on the
| candidate by the process.
|
| I'm with you, OP. I remember the days of simpler processes. After
| going through the hoops of 5+ interview rounds in 2019 and 2020,
| I decided to apply limits to what I was willing to do for
| interviews. For example; I won't do leetcode, I won't enter a
| process with more than three steps, I won't give more than 5
| hours to a process. This has significantly reduced the number of
| positions available to me, but the positive result is that the
| positions that do fit into my ruleset are high-quality, smaller
| companies, with more upside than the larger companies. I find
| that the companies that do fit into my ruleset about interviews
| actually want to get to know who I am and what I'm bringing,
| rather than if I'll just fit an open role or some quota. Now I'm
| not making FAANG salaries nor benefits, but I really enjoy the
| work I'm doing, the people I'm building with, and I'm very well
| taken care of financially.
| rantallion wrote:
| "TL;DR - you can say no to the people who have normalized that,
| and still be highly successful"
|
| 100%. I changed roles recently. If a recruiter described such a
| lengthy process, I simply told them I neither had the time nor
| the desire to take part. The worst interview process I actually
| went through with was originally supposed to be 4 1-hour
| sessions across multiple days, which the recruiter arranged to
| have compressed to 4 30-minute sessions back to back. I agreed
| and ended up accepting an offer.
|
| More of us need to push back on the inconsiderate demands on
| our time. There's a shortage of developers and we have plenty
| of other options if they want to make the hiring process so
| unpleasant.
| 121789 wrote:
| Yeah - this resonates. I think people understand that if you're
| a FANG and you hire many people and you have orders of
| magnitude more applicants, you can (maybe need) have a
| difficult hiring process with a high bar. The problem is that
| many other companies look to their hiring process as an
| industry best practice when it is unnecessary. Now you have to
| do leetcode and too many interviews for everything
| datavirtue wrote:
| Our senior-only contracting firm does five interviews but they
| aren't formal and do not have any gotchas. We mostly look for
| integrity (is your resume true) and the ability to be trusted
| with clients. Any of the five can veto and many do get vetoed for
| not being technical enough or getting a bad reference from anyone
| in the group. Getting fired is very rare...almost unheard of. No
| one has ever been laid off in twenty years.
| imtakmo wrote:
| I entered the software industry as a developer about 4 years ago,
| and I have been running interviews for the past 2 years or so.
| Interview hell is all I have ever known.
|
| Could you elaborate on how things worked differently in the past?
| I legitimately have no idea what a developer interview "loop"
| would look like without 5 to 7 interviews, but I desperately hope
| it can exist.
| forum_ghost wrote:
| 1st phone call directly with the hiring manager, after the
| resume has been screened by the hiring manager. 2nd meeting in
| person, a few questions, maybe a take home task. Decision made
| in 24-48 hrs.
| [deleted]
| greggman3 wrote:
| From 1983 to 2008 my interviews were basically, talk to some
| one who's doing the hiring. No testing. Get hired. Most of
| those companies were relatively small. All but 2 were under 50
| people. Only 1 of the 12 or so even asked any technical
| questions to see if I knew anything.
|
| Also, none of them were specialized. No one asked are you a
| Front End Programmer? Back End Programmer? UI Programmer?
| Graphics Programmer? etc... It was just "programmer", do
| whatever is programmers do.
|
| That part today I really dislike. The teams have gotten giant
| and you often have to choose some speciality position.
| geeky4qwerty wrote:
| Funny enough the last job I applied for was in 2006
| Etheryte wrote:
| I wouldn't say it's a thing of the past in any sense. One of
| the first things you should ask or be informed of when you make
| contact is how the interview etc process looks like. When it's
| bogus, politely decline the position and move on. There are
| plenty of good companies out there (unless you're in a tight
| spot in which case any job is better than no job). For context,
| my latest hiring experience was a call for initial contact, two
| video meetings and then some emails about the minute details if
| I remember correctly.
| treis wrote:
| The thing I've noticed is that there's not many group
| interviews any more. So it's a lot of telling the same story 5
| times to 5 different people.
|
| I think 3 interviews is probably reasonable. A leetcode style
| tech screen, a design one, and then a general work
| style/culture fit interview.
|
| Also, I don't know why more companies don't record interviews.
| Probably a legal and/or HR thing. But it'd definitely cut down
| on the need for repeated questions.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Apple used to do group interviews. If I recall I did two
| rounds of them in size interviews. One had two people in one
| then the other was the whole team of about 6 with the
| manager. There might have been a third group, can't recall.
| It was fun though.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > Could you elaborate on how things worked differently in the
| past?
|
| Here's how it worked for me 25 years ago (in France).
|
| Two-three informal interviews to make sure I wasn't too weird,
| and got offers purely based on my resume. I remember some
| companies had personality tests but never got any technical
| questions.
| geeky4qwerty wrote:
| Sure. Usually contacted by internal HR or a recruiting firm
| (depending on the position, recruiting firms use to be -almost-
| exclusively c-suite or very, very specific specialty niche
| positions. Internal HR would just setup the HM call, maybe ask
| some clarifying questions (education, certs, etc) to make sure
| it all adds up.
|
| First interview was with the hiring manager, sometimes in
| person sometimes over the phone. In person was a good sign
| because if it was a technical position you'd usually have the
| senior join the meeting. Goes well, job offer within 2 business
| days.
|
| Second interview was generally exclusively for highly technical
| OR executive leadership (depending on position). Again, it goes
| well, job offer within 2 business days.
|
| If there was another stronger candidate and the prospect was
| side-lined but later reconsidered there might be one last
| interview if enough time had gone by to put a face to the name
| again.
| davidg109 wrote:
| Ridiculous. That's what a panel interview is meant for.
|
| I would refuse unless they want to pay for my time.
| mosseater wrote:
| This is unrelated to your question. But, as another degree-less
| father in tech, I was wondering why you wanted to show your
| children the importance of a degree. You yourself didn't have one
| through all of your success. I would argue you wouldn't have been
| nearly as successful either if you had chosen from the get-go to
| go the BSBA route. The average BSBA salary seems to hover around
| 51k, with the top earners making about as much as an entry level
| dev.
|
| I don't want to be mean, and it's not all about money, I just
| don't see what value a degree adds for the most part. On the
| other hand, my son is growing up quickly, and sometimes I wonder
| if I should teach him that going to college can be worth it. So I
| really do want to hear it from your perspective.
| jjmorrison wrote:
| Well I can say in my experience firing people is such a pain
| nowadays that I feel a need to be a lot more careful in hiring.
| I've seen a bit more than half of fired employees come back with
| some form of discrimination lawsuit threat after being fired.
| rdiddly wrote:
| Paradoxically enough, that sounds like a warning against hiring
| anyone but white males, the only group that can't credibly
| claim discrimination.
| bin_bash wrote:
| Unless they're old or gay
| rdiddly wrote:
| Good call! (Edit: or young!)
| everly wrote:
| My understanding is that in most states, you can legally
| discriminate against younger candidates.
| educaysean wrote:
| Protected groups in the US extend beyond just sex and race.
| There's age, religion, national origin, sexual preference,
| and disability status just off my head.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| This is my answer as well. The two rational pairings are:
|
| hire fast, fire fast
|
| and
|
| hire slow, fire slow
|
| If for legal or cultural reasons you can't fire fast, that
| leaves you with only one choice.
| nopenopenopeno wrote:
| Choice two: get a job
| rednerrus wrote:
| Managers should be honing the hiring process. If your team is
| clear about what they're looking for and thoughtful about how
| to get at it, you should be able to figure out if a candidate
| is a good team and technical fit in a couple of hours.
| ativzzz wrote:
| Not really. You can do your best to figure it out, but
| (almost) every single candidate will be trying to game the
| interview to get hired at all costs. No matter if I'm
| interested in the job or just treating it as a throwaway
| practice interview, I will always say exactly what I think
| the interviewer wants to hear in order to hire me. This
| doesn't necessarily correlate with what will actually
| happen in reality.
| tbihl wrote:
| Maybe this is the honed hiring process.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Perhaps. But even with the current 6+ hours everyone medium
| size or larger still makes a fair number of bad hires.
| Between driving the false positive rate down and driving
| the time to decision down the value maximizing next move
| seems to be spending even more effort on the false positive
| rate.
| danamit wrote:
| I don't think that's the reason, I am a contractor and
| sometimes I take up to 7 "interviews".
| Tao331 wrote:
| Maybe you have to stop the discriminatory firings.
| Aachen wrote:
| > I've seen a bit more than half of fired employees come back
| with some form of discrimination lawsuit threat
|
| That's crazy. I have literally never heard of anyone actually
| doing that irl, only ever in the media (and then mostly
| English-speaking media at that). Half of them? Do they ever win
| those? Don't they need to pay for the company's lawyer costs if
| you can convincingly argue this claim is entirely baseless
| opportunism? Is there ever even a slight basis for this, any
| colleagues that treat them just a little bit less nicely or
| anything?
|
| Edit: upon re-reading to add the citation I noticed the word
| "threat". Additional question: anyone ever follow through on
| that, or were the threats ever credible?
| mchusma wrote:
| The challenge is that in some states, employer suits attorney
| fees are paid by the employer. So employees can hire an
| attorney on spec to threaten the company, and say "pay us
| less than the cost for you to defend this suit and win, and
| we will go away". So you put the company in a situation
| where: - if they win they are out maybe -$100k - if they
| lose, they are out maybe -$250k
|
| (Assuming the dispute is about $50k).
|
| And in many areas companies must hire attorneys to represent
| them. They can't represent themselves.
|
| I'm all for resolving actual issues, and I think the solution
| here is: - make it so parties do not need to hire attorneys -
| use things like fairclaims.com to arbitrate (must faster and
| cheaper)
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Or just give everyone you fire $10-50K in non-
| disparagement/severance/hush money to go away. That's what
| I've seen that worked fairly well.
| Aachen wrote:
| > things like <brand> to arbitrate
|
| Having commercial companies sit in a judge's seat is so
| dystopian I haven't even read the idea in any fiction yet.
| This is the second time I come across it, previous time was
| when someone pointed out that the Epic Store has such a
| clause in the TOS.
| orzig wrote:
| Can't comment on the lawsuit part, but of the handful of people
| who were "it's an open secret you need to work around them"
| bad, only 1 was fired. Even if they can be convinced to leave,
| they'll usually stay through their next annual bonus (which I
| don't fault them for, even if I fault them for other things).
| So, starting from the point where it's obvious they need to go,
| everyone who depends on their role needs to wait at least half
| a year before they can _start_ looking for a replacement. It 's
| a ton of damage, especially on smaller teams.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| As someone who's played all roles in this story (candidate,
| interviewer, hiring manager, person designing the process) I'm
| going to argue that symmetry is more important than length.
|
| By symmetry, I mean that at any point in the process, you and the
| company have invested the same amount and learned the same
| amount. If you're going to give me 5 interviews where I'm
| answering 90% or 100% of the questions, go away. If you're going
| to give me 5 interviews, where the first one is the hiring
| manager mostly telling me about the company and the role, the
| middle two or three are about 75% me answering, and the last one
| or two are mostly me getting to know some people I'm going to
| work with, that does seem long, but at least it's balanced. This
| is a big decision for the candidate as well, so presumably if the
| process is fair both the candidate and the company should want a
| process of the same length
| tomcat27 wrote:
| How's that solving leetcode att 30mins pace in 5 of 7 45mins
| rounds can get a candidate know about company. No wonder Blind
| is more vivid than interviews.
| nouveaux wrote:
| I am so tired of recruiters and hiring managers spending time
| telling me about the company. It's all the same BS. Everything
| I want to know about the company I can usually learn from the
| website.
| shrimpx wrote:
| I mostly agree about the buzzwordy description of the
| company. But it's critical to learn about the team's internal
| process and tools.
| pjmorris wrote:
| I had a day of interviews (~7 people) at my first job out of
| college in 1986, but my hiring manager had also been the person I
| first talked with at a career fair.
|
| I had a day of interviews (~7 people) in early 2000 at an
| internet consulting firm, mostly people I worked with directly
| once I was hired.
|
| Whatever virus those places had, it seems to have spread.
|
| I've also been hired after one or two conversations with one or
| two key people.
| sjg007 wrote:
| I agree that this is just dumb. We've lost our way.
| hogrider wrote:
| Increasingly ridiculous stuff will get pushed because tech
| workers refuse to see themselves as members of the proletariat
| and unionize.
| qualudeheart wrote:
| Way overkill.
| hvaoc wrote:
| To save everyone's time, I would have just two interviews
| progressively. First one explain in detail something that you
| have been part of building. Second pick and solve a problem from
| a list of problems that we face, use all the tools you need from
| the internet book etc but solve along with interviewers as if
| they need to do this but you need to convince them why it should
| be done this way.
|
| Put as many engineers as I need to be on these two calls.
|
| That's it. Anything else is an overkill.
|
| I am looking for someone who given time can play exactly shades
| of these two kind of roles in my team.
|
| Let rest of the engineers witness as you perform.
|
| Will have prep interview to help you understand the format and
| not to be intimidated by the number of interviewers or the
| format.
|
| I have hired in big tech, people who will not pass these two
| tests get hired.
|
| I don't care if you remember an algorithm. I need to know that
| you would be able to research and get to know such algorithm and
| know why to use that.
| rafiki6 wrote:
| Too many people got into this industry, and too many people were
| able to easily switch between companies and boost their salaries
| absurd amounts. The big boys decided to use interview grinds to
| reduce turnover (that's why they all more or less have the same
| process) and all the people who started companies and came from
| these companies have been through and assume this process works
| due to the success of the big boys and they themselves being
| subjected to it.
|
| The reality is this profession isn't that hard, and majority of
| people working in it are pretty much just plumbers using the
| innovations of true computer scientists.
|
| We've managed to created a much more inefficient gatekeeping
| mechanism than just creating a proper certification process and
| commended ourselves for it and pretend it's somehow more
| meritocratic than just getting a comp sci/eng degree and license.
| bjornlouser wrote:
| They are trying to find candidates that won't quit once subjected
| to micromanagement and a culture of constant fire drills, etc.
|
| A proxy for that kind of tolerance is whether the candidate will
| jump through an inordinate number of hoops while being hazed by
| future coworkers.
| geeky4qwerty wrote:
| seems extremely plausible, for sure.
| jedberg wrote:
| FWIW when I interviewed at Google in 2003 I did seven interviews.
| When I interviewed at Netflix in 2011 I did eight interviews. A
| typical Amazon loop these days is six-seven but I hear it's been
| that way for at least a decade if not more.
|
| So at least for FANNG it's been normal for a while.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Btw you don't need to do these. I and a few of my friends have
| got into FAANG and other companies in the past by having a good
| network and having really solid work in the past.
| spullara wrote:
| When I was interviewing for a software engineering position in
| 1994 I had at least 7 interviews over the course of an entire day
| on site. When I was interviewing for a senior VP position at a
| large scale web company I had 13 interviews over 2 months. When
| my company was getting acquired by a different large scale web
| company I had 6 technical interviews and a couple of non-
| technical ones. The only time I had fewer interviews was when I
| was interviewing for my first job at a startup and the entire
| team was smaller than 7. However, I did talk to the CTO on the
| phone for 10+ hours before even interviewing at the company
| formally.
| morelisp wrote:
| I have been trying for the past two years to bring our team's
| down from 2 + work sample to work sample + 1. All my effort has
| been stymied by an increasingly bureaucratic and "empowered" HR
| department that wants to standardize on 3 + work sample + test
| day company-wide. It's driving me insane just to keep the status
| quo.
|
| We are not a FAANG, not in the US, do not and cannot offer SV
| salaries. They just _do not understand_ one of the best things we
| can offer is less bullshit and a bigger chance for people with
| skills but not traditional backgrounds. So instead I have an
| endless line of young men who kind of know how to add a new JPA
| repository to a Spring application, and an MSci in some easy-to-
| get-an-EU-grant area, and we actually _spend hours time on each
| one_ instead of asking them to code first.
| bbu wrote:
| The thing I hate about this: when you spend hours and hours in
| interviews and you get rejected at the last stage the least they
| could do is to provide some meaningful feedback. But nope. They
| promise feedback but just ignore you.
|
| I think 3-4 interviews is fine, depending on context.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| I think that's because you are looking for a job at FAANG (well
| it's MAAAN now but whatever)
|
| Everyone wants to get to those so the process is as it is.
|
| That's what you get for trying to work at those companies.
| newbamboo wrote:
| Prop 13 should be repealed.
| laichzeit0 wrote:
| nicoburns wrote:
| > "5 to 7 interviews is normal"
|
| Yeah, it's definitely not. I've never done more than 3
| interviews, and that was the exceptional case. Vast majority have
| been either one interview with the hiring manager or two
| interviews where one is with the immediate hiring manager and the
| other was with someone more senior within the company.
| after_care wrote:
| Typical fang interview.
|
| --- prescreen over the phone with recruiter
|
| --- 1 hour prescreen with one or two devs
|
| --- 3-5 one hour interviews given within 1 or two days
| (previously called an onsight)
| nicoburns wrote:
| Maybe it's normal for FAANG companies, but FAANG companies
| aren't normal!
| lbrito wrote:
| Oh brother, wait until you find out about leetcode!
| drewcoo wrote:
| We're all told to treat our running software as livestock, not
| pets. That means they're disposable, you start and stop them
| rapidly, etc.
|
| If I'm being very, very kind, this kind of hiring practice means
| the company wants to treat you like a pet (in the best possible
| sense) and not livestock.
|
| Probably it has more to do with data-driven decisions to optimize
| the hiring funnel. Or possibly voodoo.
| pcurve wrote:
| For higher level jobs (i.e. directors+), 5-7 interview sounds
| pretty normal for a fairly large organization, and I don't think
| this has changed much.
|
| 1. Recruiter screening
|
| 2. Hiring Manager interview/screening
|
| 3. Hiring manager + your peer group within your org
|
| 4. hiring manager + your peer group outside your org (just
| because everybody is so busy)
|
| 5. Hiring manager + more senior leaders (this could take place
| before peer group)
|
| 6. Individual separate meetings with your future directs (more
| formality at this point)
|
| Now, if it is a contract role, I will hire just after 1-2 panel
| interviews depending on level.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I literally cannot think of a job that would be worth going
| through that. Fortunately, there are plenty of companies that
| don't do it. They may not be FAANG (which is fine with me,
| because I'm not interested in FAANG companies), but they do
| exist.
| rcgorton wrote:
| neilv wrote:
| As a principal-ish software engineer, I'd be more than happy to
| do 7 _effective_ interviews /meetings with a promising
| prospective employer.
|
| Every career move is life-changing, and I want to get as good a
| sense as I can about the people, environment, and company.
|
| I want to hear from different levels and facets of the company,
| get a feel for the team members or representative other boots-on-
| the-ground ICs (what they're like, what the environment is like,
| how they feel about the company), and also try to see their
| initial impressions of how I'd fit in.
|
| What _doesn 't_ work for that is being on the receiving end of a
| barrage of "whiteboard this Stanford new-grad shibboleth 'so I
| can see how you think'".
|
| The current Leetcode interview tells me only a little bit about
| the company -- and it's negative (but, relativism-wise, I don't
| fault people much for defaulting to currently popular ideas). But
| it doesn't tell me much more than that (unless the interviewer is
| also being rude as they go through the ritual, which would be
| another negative).
|
| The Leetcode interview also isn't a very effective way for the
| company to get a sense of what I can do that a second-year CS
| student probably can't.
| javajosh wrote:
| It isn't. Over time you will notice that counter parties in
| negotiation will often use "normal" or "industry standard"
| argument to achieve their goals. Sadly for commodities the
| enforcement machinery cannot usually accommodate variation
| anyway. The best option is to walk away.
| ww520 wrote:
| 4 to 7 45-minute to 1-hour interviews are the norm for as far as
| I can remember.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| Frankly speaking here. (O&G industry so not in IT specifically)
|
| If I interview with you once and I find out that you didn't have
| sense enough to make sure that you asked all the relevant
| questions and made sure that I met and interacted with those
| people who would be working closely with me in that position then
| the only valid conclusion that I can draw is that you are too
| bureaucratic or disorganized and that I will have to waste a lot
| of time at your company or learn to deal with the bullshit. I
| don't suffer fools very well and from experience, bureaucracy
| breeds indecision and thrives in environments with no
| accountability.
|
| In my career I have only interviewed twice with a company on one
| occasion and in that case I was notified up front that there
| would be two meetings necessary since one of the managers was out
| of the country on the date of the first meeting and others in the
| group would be traveling during the second so they needed to
| break things into time slots so that everyone could get an
| opportunity to ask questions, shoot the shit, or whatever. I
| ended up spending one full work day and part of another
| interacting with two small groups who could fit the interview
| into their schedules.
|
| I didn't get that position because I had another offer come in
| before they could make an offer and I took the other offer.
|
| Don't waste people's time. The hiring company is also being
| evaluated here and disorganization is not an attractive feature.
| baskethead wrote:
| 1) Talk with recruiter
|
| 2) Phone Screen
|
| 3) 4 tech interviews (2 coding, 2 systems design)
|
| 4) 1 behavioral interview, sometimes.
|
| To be honest, this isn't egregious. Given how much we are paid
| this doesn't seem so bad. Whether or not the coding and systems
| design questions actually provide signal is a different question
| though.
| WalterBright wrote:
| When a company is considering investing hundreds of thousands of
| dollars in a person, it would be surprising if they wouldn't do
| at least 7 hours!
| mahalel wrote:
| I recently applied for an effectively specialized support job at
| a FAANG. After filling up a form ~40min, and one technical
| interview ~1hr, I got an email to congratulate me for moving onto
| the next stage and to get ready for 5x 1hr interviews.
|
| In NZ where I am from, this is unheard of, so I asked if they
| were paid interviews and what is the pay range for this job
| (since it was not discussed at all at this point). They very
| carefully made sure not to answer any of the questions so I said
| I won't proceed with my application and gave a bit of feedback
| that they are looking for desperate people, not talented people.
|
| Ridiculous, they are not worth my time.
| vsareto wrote:
| >I was told "5 to 7 interviews is normal"
|
| Be suspicious when anyone says something is normal in tech that
| tries to speak about the operations and culture of a vast array
| of companies, _especially_ recruiters and _very especially_
| recruiters who work for recruiting companies.
|
| Tech is a massive industry, and there's enough companies that
| don't do the normal thing that you can spend only a year at those
| companies and still have enough companies to remain employed for
| a lifetime. That's only 45 companies from age 20 to 65 if you
| only ever work a year at a single company.
|
| That said, 5-7 seems exceptionally high. I've only ever done a
| max of 4, personally.
| SauciestGNU wrote:
| What I'm wondering is whether people are including phone
| screens and introductions as interview rounds. I'm going
| through the process now and with those I'll probably have 7 if
| I get an offer, but without it's more like 4 (online
| assessment, in person whiteboard, system design, behavioral). I
| haven't interviewed in 7 years prior to this, so I'm out of the
| loop with what's standard.
| vikingcaffiene wrote:
| Hiring manager here. IMO the current tech hiring norms are gross
| and not sustainable. It feels like a weird hazing ritual and with
| the current market, is the single biggest reason you can't hire.
| Why on earth would someone burn a weekend on a take-home test for
| your startup when they have 15 other irons in the fire? At my
| current employer we got rid of all that ridiculousness. No take
| home test. No live coding. We've gotten the whole process down to
| a few hours over a few days. I'd like to think it's a mutually
| respectful process.
|
| I think it's time we accept that the person we are talking to is
| who they say they are on their resume. You don't see accountants
| balancing books before they get hired. Why should this be any
| different? If you aren't who you say you are, its either
| blatantly obvious in the interview or we'll find out when you
| join and we'll try to correct or part ways. This is like pretty
| much any other job out there.
| anderber wrote:
| This sounds very forward thinking and I like it. Would you be
| willing to share a bit more on the process? What does it
| entail? In the past I was hired on just 2 interviews, and all
| we did was talk as peers. It felt comfortable and honest. It's
| the reason I said yes to switching positions.
| vikingcaffiene wrote:
| Thanks! So, I'll say that we are still tweaking and trying to
| get things just right but, as of the time of me writing this,
| here is the process:
|
| - HR call 30 min.
|
| - Talk to hiring manager (me) 30 min. Get to know each other
| and feel out if there is a mutual fit.
|
| - Technical panel 1hr. Speak with several engineers on the
| team who share your discipline (front end or back end for
| example). Again no live coding. We just talk through stuff.
|
| - Talk to the team PM. 30 min. Get a sense of how you
| collaborate with our product team partners to build new
| features in our application.
|
| After that it's the usual comp negotiations, background, and
| reference checks. Assuming all that works out then hired!
|
| We're hiring so, if anyone is interested in finding out more,
| contact info is in my bio.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| Sorry, but this just sounds very easy to bullshit. Unless
| you're doing real in depth quizzing of stuff people
| wouldn't know if they didn't work with it (e.g. in HFT,
| explaining what a potential implementation of std::string
| could be and what the tradeoffs of each design choice would
| be), generic backend principles are very easy to spew
| correct answers for without actually knowing how to code.
| How are you going to filter out people that just memorize
| the concepts for their chosen language and are good at
| talking but can't code for their life?
| vikingcaffiene wrote:
| > generic backend principles are very easy to spew
| correct answers for without actually knowing how to code
|
| I'm not sure I agree with this. IMO trying to get someone
| to explain the ins and outs of a particular facet of the
| technology your team works in is less effective than
| getting a sense of how a candidate architects their code
| and manages complexity. That type of "art more than a
| science" craftsmanship is not something you can easily
| fake in my experience. Maybe I'll be proven wrong. We
| shall see. So far I've had pretty good luck with the
| approach and gotten some really great teammates.
| brian-armstrong wrote:
| Going through a few days of grueling interviews every few years
| is vastly preferable to spending a few years working alongside
| people who can't pull their own weight. Hiring managers are
| timid about letting people go and it can take an extraordinary
| amount of time to part ways with unproductive people.
| vikingcaffiene wrote:
| > Hiring managers are timid about letting people go and it
| can take an extraordinary amount of time to part ways with
| unproductive people.
|
| With respect, it sounds like you had a bad manager.
| Underperforming teammates are your managers responsibility.
| They should be working to address that issue with said
| teammate or part ways. Sucks. Not fun. It's the job though.
| brian-armstrong wrote:
| Sorry but your response is a No True Scotsman argument. It
| is understandable why irrational behavior applies here -
| sunk cost, nobody wants to have the bad news of letting a
| new hire go, explicit objective setting may require there
| to be new hires. These will generally apply to any manager.
| Unless the new hire is clearly stepping out of bounds or
| extremely negligent, it is going to be a slow process.
| ergocoder wrote:
| Interviews for other occupations are way way worse.
| kube-system wrote:
| > You don't see accountants balancing books before they get
| hired.
|
| You sure do, and not just by a hiring manager's whim, but by
| law. Accountants have occupational licensing.
|
| > I think it's time we accept that the person we are talking to
| is who they say they are on their resume.
|
| This is a straw man, I have never "caught a liar" on an a
| coding exam. What they are helpful for doing is judging the
| _quality_ of what it means to be "proficient in [x]".
|
| If there's anything I have learned from giving coding exams to
| candidates, it's that the ability of a candidate to verbally
| sell themselves in an interview has a weak correlation to their
| ability to produce quality work.
| vikingcaffiene wrote:
| > Accountants have occupational licensing.
|
| Forgive my ignorance, but is this during every interview? If
| I am reading this right this is a certification they'd need
| to get which would be on their resume. Do they need to re-
| prove those skills every time?
| kube-system wrote:
| Sometimes they are even more often, as those licenses often
| have "continuing education" requirements to keep them
| active. For example, they expire every two years in
| California. https://www.calcpa.org/cpa-licensure/renewing-
| a-cpa-license/...
|
| But no, they don't happen "during interviews". My point is
| that there's less need to test people during their
| interviews for occupations with licensing, because they've
| already been tested before they even showed up for the
| interview. By contrast, anyone can legally call themselves
| a "software developer" and show up to an interview, which
| is why the need to evaluate their skills at that moment may
| be different.
| bobabob wrote:
| > I think it's time we accept that the person we are talking to
| is who they say they are on their resume.
|
| Yea because we live in a place where everyone is super honest
| and no one is going to try and take advantage of that to make
| 500k a year.
|
| IMO, it doesn't work. Talk is cheap.
|
| I wouldn't have a job if I had to talk my way into any company,
| I'm an introvert, I suck at communicating orally. But I can
| solve problems and write really good code. You throw problems
| at me during an interview and I'll solve them. Ultimately your
| company's code is not going to write itself.
| vikingcaffiene wrote:
| > Yea because we live in a place where everyone is super
| honest and no one is going to try and take advantage of that
| to make 500k a year.
|
| You are right that there is more risk with this approach. I
| honestly think that its a better, more humane way to do
| things though. Anecdotally, I've hired a couple _really_
| solid developers via this methodology. At least in my case,
| it's been working out well. As always, you try stuff and
| iterate.
|
| > I'm an introvert, I suck at communicating orally.
|
| I get it. So am I. Its actually very hard for me to reply to
| these comments b/c of my general aversion to putting myself
| out there! I don't think there's a one size fits all
| solution. At my company at least, being able to communicate
| effectively both orally and written, is important. We do a
| lot of pairing and documentation etc. Thats not for everyone.
| YMMV.
| daenz wrote:
| >Yea because we live in a place where everyone is super
| honest and no one is going to try and take advantage of that
| to make 500k a year.
|
| I would be THRILLED if I was put into some kind of a short
| probationary period, with limited access (and potentially
| restricted salary, with retroactive reimbursement) while I
| showed what I was worth. I personally have a hard time
| demonstrating that in short interviews, and it's only once I
| come in contact with the shape of the company's problems do I
| show my value. Imo it would lower the stress and paranoia on
| both sides over a candidate's fit.
| nelsondev wrote:
| That can work for some, but imagine you already have a job,
| and time commitments, and it takes 5-10 companies to find a
| fit.
|
| Spending ~1-2 months is expensive.
| polote wrote:
| Well my hypothesis is that there is too much talent applying to
| each offer. So companies have to build a process that evaluates
| all candidates to be sure they only hire the best according to
| them. It's FOMO.
|
| In the past company I was working, they boasted off only hiring
| the best, and having like 5 interviews, skipping tons of
| candidate. And the one they were hiring at the end were
| consistently worse developers and product managers than average.
|
| I don't think that skill of tech employees is strongly linked to
| company performance (but I have no data on it). Meaning hiring
| the best developers will not impact the financial metrics of a
| company. As a result of that it doesn't really matter if your
| hiring process is performant or not
| beezle wrote:
| In the dark ages, I did coding and systems work for a large money
| center bank. Hiring back then was at most three interviews - a
| team member, manager and perhaps the next manager up. There were
| no "tests," though pertinent questions were asked - often related
| to the hardware/development environment and familiarity with
| business and process.
|
| I don't recall any of the people that I worked with directly, or
| knew from other groups, being incompetent.
| mooreds wrote:
| Depends on the size of the org and the seniority of the role, but
| I don't think that 5-7 interviews is "normal". At least in the
| USA, my experience has been 2-4.
| treyfitty wrote:
| I see a lot of responses in here that try to justify the practice
| using empirical data/logic. What we're failing to consider is the
| trade off between "efficiency" and "equitability."
|
| Just because something is 100% efficient in allocating resources
| (time, money), doesn't mean that it's worth doing. What this
| thread shows is that somehow, we've become sympathetic to
| megacorps, in winner take all markets, who want to build a world
| where their time and money is seen as the most valuable.
|
| Instead, we should account for the fact that these companies,
| with CEOs making $200mm+ per year, should have a civic duty to
| take on more risk giving people a basic right- access to a job.
|
| Credit card companies aren't allowed to underwrite based on
| certain factors heavily correlated with race, religion, or other
| things (I forget the rest) that were deemed unfair to be judged
| by. In an efficient world, we would have collectively decided
| that companies should be able to infer your ability to repay
| debts based on the zip code you live in, or the college you went
| to, or the demographics of your friends. It makes sense to not
| allow this from an equitable standpoint. Why can't the same be
| said about hiring people?
|
| Who has the luxury of going through 4 interview rounds? Who has
| the privilege of studying hours and hours of leetcode? Who has
| the privilege of staying up to date on the latest web frameworks?
| I think you get my point.
|
| What won't surprise me is that the data may suggest the youngest
| are most suited for many jobs, if one were to judge by interview
| readiness and performance. If that becomes to norm, would the
| future version of yourself deem the mechanisms of finding a job
| market acceptable?
| xivzgrev wrote:
| It is totally normal. Consider
|
| 1) recruiting needs an initial chat, to get you excited, do some
| light screening, and ensure comp expectations aren't out of whack
| 2) then the hiring manager has a screen 3) once the hiring
| manager likes you, then you need to conduct due diligence. As
| others have echoed, one interview can't possibly probe on all the
| key aspects of the job. In our case, we look at growth potential,
| tactical experience, and 2 case interviews, usually one more
| qualitative and one more quantitative.
|
| So there's 6 right there. At the end, you know several things:
| the candidate is aligned on comp, the hiring manager likes them,
| other people like them, they can do the job (as reasonably
| confident as you can be), and they have good upside potential.
| Hire!
|
| If you cut anything out, you have to sacrifice some aspect -
| maybe less confidence they can do the job etc. as others have
| echoed it's actually hard to fire someone from a practical
| standpoint esp if they are not obviously terrible, or they're
| willing to try. Better to just hold a high bar up front, to
| minimize risk on back end.
| simne wrote:
| When they paid with industry average hourly rate for position and
| location.
|
| The same is about large test tasks - tests should be small (less
| than few hours) or paid.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| You're not out of touch, the industry is.
|
| I firmly believe that nobody knows what they are doing when it
| comes to hiring and everyone is just following each other.
|
| It's as if interview loops are so long winded that only the ones
| with enough willpower/endurance survive. They also tend to expand
| so much time that each company is hopeful to find a better
| candidate in that duration. Yet corporations don't tend to take
| into account optimal stopping into their hiring practices and end
| with less than ideal candidates or come out with no candidate at
| all.
|
| Personally I think more companies should hire faster and improve
| their performance evaluation processes to fire faster. It
| shouldn't take more than 2-3 interviews to get enough "data
| points" that someone has potential to grow in the position.
| Especially at this level of pay and responsibility, you should
| have something online to show you're competent already.
| Everything else is corporatism and appeasing the social agenda.
|
| Some big tech companies you can get hired and never get fired.
| Other companies you can get PIP'd although you'd be a 10x
| contributor at another big tech company. The goal posts will
| continue to move as tech jobs become more accessible to the
| world. I think that's a good thing, but I think we should
| challenge what is normal to land a job in the first place. 5-7 is
| ridiculous and costly for all parties involved.
| lazyant wrote:
| 3-5 filtering interviews (not counting recruiter call) with a max
| distribution around 3 maybe 4 seems the most common I've seen.
| Very senior (staff+, executive) may skew towards a bit more.
| monster_group wrote:
| Most tech companies now do around 4-5 interviews. It has been
| like that for at least 7-8 years (probably more) but I just found
| out that not all companies are like that. After being subjected
| to these demeaning Leetcoding interviews I went through a
| refreshingly pleasant experience. It was an interview with just
| one person. They gave me a technical open-ended problem and two
| weeks time. After two weeks I had to do a presentation to them
| how I would solve that problem. Not much more was required. I
| could choose to do as little or as much as I'd like. I did have
| to spend around 30 hours researching that problem as it was an
| unfamiliar problem space for me. The presentation was just 1 hour
| session with the hiring manager where he and I had a technical
| discussion about my solution. No more interviews of any kind (not
| even behavioral). I had an offer three days later. I thanked the
| manager for his meaningful and humane interview process. I can't
| believe I have wasted hundreds of hours doing LeetCode when there
| are companies out there that treat candidates respectfully rather
| than code churning machines.
| jollybean wrote:
| It's been like that since the 1990's.
| namirez wrote:
| I went through a similar experience with a radically different
| outcome. I was given a coding assignment and one week to finish
| it. I spent more than 30 hours on it and came up with a
| solution that was supposedly 500 times faster that what they'd
| ever seen (they told me this later). But things took a wrong
| turn at that point. In the followup meeting the interviewer
| turned out to be rude, disruptive, and combative. He tried to
| grill me on every little thing I said and finally rejected me.
| I have no idea how it happened but I suspect they simply
| thought my solution to the take-home assignment was too good to
| be mine.
| laurent92 wrote:
| Or discrimination. You never know, maybe you worked with his
| former boss, it could be anything.
| throwaway743 wrote:
| Totally.
|
| Or the interviewer felt insecure and threatened by their
| competence. If that's the case, they dodged a bullet.
| neverminder wrote:
| I got my last 3 jobs after half an hour conversation with the
| lead/CTO. I'm not a "rockstar" either, just average dev. When
| companies are desperate to hire they don't dragg ass with
| infinite interviews. Of course, SV gravy train doesn't fall in
| that category.
| gcheong wrote:
| These companies do exist but finding them amongst the sea of
| leetcode ones is a challenge.
| yes_really wrote:
| > Most tech companies now do around 4-5 interviews. [...] After
| being subjected to these demeaning Leetcoding interviews I went
| through a refreshingly pleasant experience. It was an interview
| with just one person. They gave me a technical open-ended
| problem and two weeks time. [...] I did have to spend around 30
| hours researching that problem as it was an unfamiliar problem
| space for me.
|
| For me it's the complete opposite. What I would consider
| demeaning is to spend 30 hours across two weeks interviewing
| for just one company while they don't even bother to send more
| than one interviewer.
| nouveaux wrote:
| The company said you can spend as much time as you'd like. So
| if you're ok with two rounds of leet code for two hours, why
| not just do one hour and the one hour presentation?
| KerrickStaley wrote:
| I would argue that 30 hours invested in interviewing at a
| single company is a lot more work than you put in doing a
| couple phone screens and a one-day onsite. I personally abhor
| take-home projects because they tend to balloon in scope (I'm a
| perfectionist and want to put the best foot forward). With an
| on-site loop, when you're done you're done.
| frankchn wrote:
| Yeah, a valid philosophy is that a company should have to
| spend at least as many man-hours interviewing me as I spend
| interviewing.
| justjico wrote:
| How would you feel if they offered compensation, say for
| your 30 hrs?
| [deleted]
| throwaway743 wrote:
| If compensation was offered for an interview process,
| then it's worth the time spent going through the
| interviews.
|
| Otherwise, it feels like a gamble of a huge time sink
| that could have gone towards something actually
| beneficial/profitable.
|
| Having had too much of my time and energy drained in the
| past with the run around, I said fuck it the last time
| when facing the option to interview or go my own way,
| started my own thing and haven't looked back since.
|
| Even when you do get an offer, it's a gamble on whether
| or not you're dealing with toxic management or not. Which
| only reinforces the idea of compensation for interviewing
| in case someone needs to jump that ship and start
| interviewing again.
| nouveaux wrote:
| After going through the process of 5 interviews across
| multiple companies, I would much rather be given an open
| ended question and do a 1 hour presentation. I am so tired of
| going into a technical not knowing which leetcode question I
| have to memorize.
|
| It is absolutely absurd some of the study plans that people
| go through where they are trying to study over multiple
| months. In order to truly memorize all the solutions, most
| people need these programs. Otherwise, it's just a luck of
| the draw. I actually got stuck at an interview because I
| forgot the nlogn solution for two sums. Absurd!
|
| My favorite interview so far involved opening a raw TCP
| socket to Postgres and sending a query (Actually relevant to
| the job). I was given the prompt ahead of the interview and
| spent about 2 hours figuring it out. I learned something
| valuable and demonstrated an ability to expand my knowledge
| base. This interview has been the only one even remotely
| close to demonstrating my abilities to work at the job.
| yes_really wrote:
| > I actually got stuck at an interview because I forgot the
| nlogn solution for two sums. Absurd!
|
| Are you talking about determining a pair of numbers in an
| array that sum to a given value? That's O(n) and just uses
| a hashset/hashmap.
| nouveaux wrote:
| No. Sort the array. Then use two indexes, one on each
| side of the array. Increment indexes to meet in the
| middle.
|
| This is one of those tricks you just have to memorize and
| it's very hard to come up with the solution in 30 min.
| yes_really wrote:
| But why didn't you use the O(n) solution instead of the
| O(n log n) solution?
| nouveaux wrote:
| To be honest, I had forgotten the O(n) solution and
| vaguely remembered the nlogn solution. After that
| experience, I have both solutions lodged in my brain.
| wombat-man wrote:
| I suppose if you had to optimize for least space used
| sorting in place and doing it they way they suggested
| would be best.
| monster_group wrote:
| I agree and initially I refused but the problem space was
| interesting and I wanted to get in it so I did it.
| claaams wrote:
| I do IT so I'm not an elite member of society like most of
| the devs here. But I had an org give me some homework that
| was solving a problem they actively needed fixed. I took a
| job with a different company (still had like 5 or 6
| interviews for that place but no 12 hours of homework)
| because it felt gross to be doing 'free' work for them.
| gcheong wrote:
| 30 might be too much but it also depends somewhat on the
| probability of success. 100 hrs practicing leetcode + systems
| design for a 2% chance at a FAANG seems a worse trade off
| than 30hrs researching an interesting subject for a
| presentation with an 80% chance of success. Problem is you
| don't know what your chances are with the latter going in but
| I think it would be a fair question to ask.
| taormina wrote:
| Yet don't forget the additional double standard of you
| needing a full-time job or that looks bad, and so where do
| these hours magically spring from?
| kjeetgill wrote:
| I lean towards the status quo of one day interviews. But I
| liked how you considered probably of success as a
| consideration.
|
| Consider also that: 1-((1-.7)*3) = .97
|
| 3 interviews with a 70% chance give you a 97% chance of
| landing atleast one job. More interviews improve your
| situation rapidly. Job hunting is better seen as a campaign
| than individual battles.
|
| But I also think maybe in my estimation you FAANG chances
| aren't that low as your 2%. They hire tons of people, ALL
| THE TIME.
| gcheong wrote:
| I got the 2% from a presentation by a company in the
| business of prepping people for FAANG interviews, the
| actual number could be higher but I was just trying to
| make a point about relative probabilities.
| kjeetgill wrote:
| Ahhh, I believe that 2% of people apply might get the job
| possibly. To me that's a question of a challenging
| applicant pool.
|
| What do you think your chances are if you're actually
| qualified? My made up gut numbers: At least 70% even if
| you don't practice leetcode. That's the real question
| here in my mind, what are an otherwise qualified
| candidates chances? How much does that change with
| interview skills, prep, leetcode etc.
| gcheong wrote:
| I've made it to both Google and Facebook onsights. I
| still have no clue what my chances were going in but got
| rejected both times. If you get through leetcode then you
| can get an onsight but that's when they actually attempt
| to measure competency with a system design interview.
| Which is fine but I'd rather they just front load the
| interview with it than my chances of getting to an on-
| site be left up to whether I happen to suss out the aha
| solution to any random leetcode problem (while I'm trying
| to explain my thought process of course).
| sahila wrote:
| It might be 2% or even lower hire-rate-to-applications,
| but your set isn't all applications but those who put in
| a 100 hours of leetcode prep; that I bet is much higher
| than 2% into faangs.
| kxrm wrote:
| I was interviewing with companies last Fall and got a homework
| assignment project where I could pick from 3 different
| problems. I am not big on companies giving me 30 minutes and
| expecting hours of investment in return but I figured I would
| look into these problems to see if they were worth solving.
|
| I literally copied the questions verbatim into a search and
| found the solution to all 3 all over GitHub in multiple
| languages. How is this an appropriate evaluation? Certainly a
| candidate could simply copy the answer in their chosen
| language, tweak the structure a bit and call it their answer.
|
| I contacted their recruiter and told them I was no longer
| interested in interviewing. I told them I couldn't take them
| seriously since all they did to invest in the interview process
| was to steal questions from other hiring managers.
|
| If a company wants an efficient, honest and quality interview
| process it needs to go both ways.
| haspok wrote:
| > I literally copied the questions verbatim into a search and
| found the solution to all 3 all over GitHub in multiple
| languages.
|
| So what?
|
| Let's say you know nothing and just copy somebody else's
| code. Good for you. The next step in the interview process is
| that you have to do a code walkthrough explaining what you
| did and why. Do you really think someone can get past this
| stage with a code they just copied from github?
|
| I can even imagine that someone finds this existing code, and
| then they copy it, then they improve upon it, and present it
| as such. If they are open about it, I'd have no problems from
| the interviewing side. In fact, it could even be better,
| because the more complex the code is, the easier it is to
| talk about it (and gather information about the candidate).
| gcheong wrote:
| My cynical take is that this company views development as a
| combination of basic coding skills plus the ability to find
| solutions on stack overflow. Maybe it's exactly what they
| were evaluating.
| shrimpx wrote:
| It's the same situation with leetcode questions. The only
| difference with leetcode is that you don't know the exact
| questions in advance but you roughly have the total set of
| questions that could be asked. Complete with solutions,
| YouTube tutorials, and discussion threads.
| paxys wrote:
| Definitely longer than 7-8 years. The current process has been
| in place at least 20 years, and maybe longer (but my memory
| only goes that far).
| jddddd wrote:
| If you don't mind me asking could you share the company,
| assuming they want frontend or fullstack JS/TS node/react/*
| engineers with 15 years experience? (email is in bio). I'm
| about to go through the process and the thought of solving leet
| code over zoom with fresh grads is keeping me at my current
| place which I've outgrown.
|
| I love these take homes with discussions/presentations but
| companies keep insisting on the zoom coding over google docs
| route.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I got 5 interviews add 1 online coding test. But 3 of the 5 are
| team member interviews and I actually enjoyed a lot. I think it's
| a lot better than the hierarchical, traditional 5 interviews in
| which one meets a person higher in hierarchy each time.
| jjcm wrote:
| I've ranged in everything from 3 interviews to 20* in my tech
| career. All interviews suck, but the unifying factor I've found
| for what makes them good is when the company pays you for your
| time interviewing. I don't so much care about the money, but it's
| a positive signal that they're invested in me and they aren't
| just throwing me through more rounds for the sake of putting me
| through more rounds.
|
| I understand that a higher risk hire demands more validation.
| What I want communicated from a company though is expectations
| going in and what format it will be all the way through. I don't
| mind more as long as I don't get the "hey we're going to put you
| through 3 more interviews" email.
|
| * For Microsoft oddly enough, but it was a unique situation where
| I went through both a full design interview and a full eng
| interview for a hybrid role.
| gbuk2013 wrote:
| Our company does 5 interviews for a developer position: pre-
| screen with recruiter, hiring manager, pair programming, tech
| deep dive and one with one of the founders.
|
| Having been through the process as a candidate and now involved
| in it as an interviewer, I can't say that it doesn't make sense.
| It is also quite expensive for us as there will be 7 different
| people involved but that is 7 people who have a say in assessing
| the candidate.
|
| This allows for a good assessment of the candidate from different
| perspectives and also to reduce bias from any individual
| interviewer (conscious our otherwise).
| leowoo91 wrote:
| That is a good question I believe, it exposes how embedded
| knowledge software engineers actually have and that wouldn't be
| something to measure very quick. Every interviewer is likely just
| trying to confirm if engineer is who he/she claims to be during
| the application.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The best people don't work at places with 5-7 interviews. They
| get offers from other orgs after 1 or 2.
| theknocker wrote:
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Not really true, there are plenty of jobs with just two
| interviews. I have withdrawn from some applications where they
| said 5 or more interviews. The job market is too hot for that
| bullshit.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Do you mean 7 counting all the 5 or so different sessions during
| an on-site? Or are you counting the whole on-site day as one?
|
| I'm used to phone screen --> technical screen -> full day many
| panel on-site. With maybe a take home thrown in there somewhere
| around the technical screen.
| rdiddly wrote:
| The last two places that offered me jobs interviewed me twice
| each. The one before that, it was a fairly easy half-hour solo
| technical test, then an interview. I think that's the sweet spot,
| frankly - a fizzbuzz-level coding challenge and then a single
| interview to which all stakeholders show up. Maybe two interviews
| at most, and that's only if you can't get everybody in a room
| together at the same time. And when I say "all stakeholders," I
| really mean no more than about 4 people: a peer, a mentor, a
| boss, and at most one counterpart from another team that
| interfaces closely with that team, but I digress.
|
| I've never had to put up with more than 2 interviews, and
| probably wouldn't. But I'm not in the Valley, and I'm generally
| not applying to the Big Five as it were. You know it occurs to me
| there's a possibility your recruiter is just over-preparing every
| candidate to expect the worst. Or who knows, maybe 5 to 7
| interviews is normal for clients of _that particular recruiter_ ,
| because they've got a reputation for shoveling idiots through the
| door? In other words, it seems like there could theoretically
| exist a recruiter whose clients take their recommendations so
| seriously that they don't even interview you once!
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| 5 to 7 interviews? Hold my canonical beer :
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735678
| KerrickStaley wrote:
| I've worked as a software engineer in the US since 2013 and have
| gone through 12 interview loops in my career. At a typical tech
| firm, the SWE interview loop consists of:
|
| 1 recruiter screen: discussing background with recruiter to make
| sure your experience is relevant
|
| 1-2 phone screens: technical interviews with a SWE to see if it's
| worthwhile to bring you on site
|
| 4-6 on-site interviews: combination of technical and behavior
| interview sessions
|
| I think product management loops will be similar in terms of
| length, and so 7 interviews is maybe on the long side but not
| atypical. PM interviews may include a "take-home project"
| component before the on-site where you e.g. build a slide deck;
| this is uncommon for SWE interviews.
|
| Regarding the question "When did a hiring manager lose their
| authority and the trust of the organization to do their job?", it
| is very common (and a good idea in my opinion) for interview
| loops to mostly consist of people who are _not_ on the hiring
| team. Typically the only future teammate you will see in an
| interview is the hiring manager (this is not guaranteed; I met my
| current manager when I started my job). The idea is to have the
| same bar for all roles at the company instead of inconsistent
| hiring quality team-by-team.
| daviddever23box wrote:
| Hiring managers lose their authority when they cease to ask
| meaningful questions about the existence of and rationale for
| each requirement that is listed on the job description, and its
| relevance to the overall outcome.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I'd tell them that every interview will cost them X/year in more
| salary.
| jclulow wrote:
| The predictive power of a single interview with a single person
| is just not that high.
|
| For one thing, the company is not the only one doing the
| interviewing; the candidate is also interviewing the company.
| Before making a commitment to join a team, I think it's valuable
| to speak to a number of members of that team to get a sense of
| what they're like.
|
| On the company side, I have also witnessed several people who
| might have looked alright in just one interview, but when exposed
| to several it became clear they were adjusting their story
| significantly for each interviewer to the point of dishonesty.
|
| There is clearly some line beyond which more interviews would
| present seriously diminished returns, but I think six or seven
| interviews, each 30-60 minutes, is much more likely to result in
| a better outcome for a professional engineering position than
| just one interview with a hiring manager.
| ipaddr wrote:
| With people leaving in 2 years or 1 year at Amazon on average
| do you really need to talk to employees? Take a chance and make
| the best of it.
| jclulow wrote:
| I would generally try to avoid working somewhere so
| horrendous people don't even last a year. If one somehow did
| not already know that about Amazon, talking to future team
| members about the corporate culture seems like a good way to
| try to find out before making a mistake!
| pjmlp wrote:
| For me that is definitly not normal, that is something I will
| subject myself only if out of options and desperaly need a new
| job.
| tarkin2 wrote:
| I generally get about five interviews when I look for new jobs.
|
| There's a recruiter/hr phase, a project manager interview, a lead
| dev interview, engineering lead interview and often a coding
| challenge.
|
| You're talking about 6 hours per position. That's basically a
| full time job looking for a new job, and if you already have a
| job to do this is ridiculous.
|
| I generally always go for companies that 1) merge these
| interviews into three maximum 2) concentrate on the single most
| important thing: whether we can communicate well while solving a
| problem.
| gjs278 wrote:
| indymike wrote:
| I'm hiring devs in 2 interviews. It isn't that hard.
| dangerwill wrote:
| My current place had a really neat, quick (!) take home
| assignment as a filter and then a single day of interviewing with
| 4 phases (about 5 hours total). Obviously it would be nice if
| interviews were less than that even but I didn't feel like that
| was onerous. I feel like this is more the norm nowadays than the
| heights of insanity like 5 years ago but I have a sample size of
| 1 so...
| nouveaux wrote:
| As a Vim/Tmux user who lives in the terminal, I absolutely abhor
| all these coding websites. They do not have all the Vim
| keybindings I use and my own personal shortcuts I have embedded
| in muscle memory. It's such a frustrating process.
| tyingq wrote:
| >When did a hiring manager lose their authority and the trust of
| the organization to do their job?
|
| I've noticed that recently too. Hiring managers at many companies
| don't even know what the salary being offered to their candidates
| is until after they are hired.
| nickjj wrote:
| I'm not sure why part time contract style "interviews" aren't
| more common.
|
| If I ever got into a situation where I was hiring, it would start
| with a 2 hour conversation. No coding questions. I want to get to
| know you and also talk shop about applicable technologies.
|
| Then after that is simple. I would hire you to do 5-30 hours of
| contract work where we pair program on real life things. The
| interviewer would do the driving to eliminate large amounts of
| ramp up time. This could be anything from R&D to implementing
| something real that'll ship to production. This would be paid
| work of course and the schedule would be based on the
| interviewee's availability, hopefully at least a few hours a day.
| The duration depends on how well of a match they are, a better
| match would have more hours just to filter things over a longer
| sample size.
|
| The person pairing with them (a currently employed dev / tech
| lead / CTO, etc.) would be doing this work anyways so it's not a
| time sink, as opposed to them stopping their "real" work to do 5
| technical interviews.
|
| I'm guessing this would give both a good assessment of how the
| interviewee thinks through problems and you can get a good sense
| of where they're at technically. Also you get to see how well you
| mesh together from a "do I want to work with this person every
| day?" standpoint. It's also super low risk for the company
| because you don't need to go through the entire costly hiring
| process up front. It also lets the person interviewing for the
| job get a better sense of what it'll be like to really work
| there.
|
| It's a win / win. Why isn't this more popular?
| prewett wrote:
| It might be low risk for the company, but it's not low risk for
| anyone who already has a job that they want to keep until they
| find a new one. You can't take a week of vacation for a bunch
| of companies.
|
| It would work for people without a job or contractors, but in
| the latter case, they probably are looking for contract work
| not W2 employment, so you'd be better off with contract-to-
| hire.
| tbihl wrote:
| You're describing an internship, but one where (a) the intern
| gets that much attention than normal, and (b) someone
| experienced is doing an internship.
| Tao331 wrote:
| Turn the table. How would you feel about your employees doing
| work for someone else on the side? I know some people are cool
| with their employees moonlighting, but I'm pretty sure it's
| still a minority.
| nickjj wrote:
| > Turn the table. How would you feel about your employees
| doing work for someone else on the side?
|
| The alternative isn't much better. The current standard
| interview process leaves your employees going behind your
| back to interview for jobs with better compensation and the
| moment one of those offers materializes they put in their 2
| weeks notice without blinking an eye.
| marssaxman wrote:
| In addition to the obstacles others have mentioned, accounting
| for contract work creates extra nuisance at tax time. A tiny
| gig like you describe sounds like a lot of hassle for not a lot
| of money.
| riffraff wrote:
| because people don't have time to do a job and a half, so
| you'll be selecting for people with copious free time or will
| to spend the few they have working for you.
|
| Works great for students or people unemployed or just
| graduated, not so much for older people with e.g. a family.
| Fordec wrote:
| People have jobs and lives. The only people this gets are
| unemployed and self employed people who have nothing to lose or
| the time to spare. This strategy poaches nobody of worth with
| an ounce of self respect.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Its a good idea but the thing about big orgs is you aren't
| paying the big bucks for 99% of the labor, you're paying
| because the one day the developer has to make a decision that
| does impact something at scale or in the hot path they don't
| fuck up.
|
| The differentiation between good and great doesn't come into
| play on the average workday.
| nopenopenopeno wrote:
| Not a chance. I don't want to be a freelance interviewer and
| this sounds exhausting. I need a job and to move on with my
| life.
| wrs wrote:
| Most interviewees already have a full time job, and your
| existing employees don't want to spend their evening hours pair
| programming with a candidate. So this doesn't scale at all.
|
| However, this is exactly what I did to hire the first few
| employees of my startup, because those initial hires are really
| critical. I was willing to limit my choices and take more time
| in order to avoid false positives. Also, that was ten years ago
| in a somewhat less crazy job market.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| This comes up routinely. The answer that continues to be true
| is that if you want to hire talented developers, nobody would
| agree to this process.
|
| You have to understand that, as an employer in the current
| market, _you_ do not really hold any of the cards if you want
| to hire talented developers.
|
| It's not a win/win. Nobody with options is going to accept
| multiple weeks of limbo in exchange for maybe having a job.
| nickjj wrote:
| > Nobody with options is going to accept multiple weeks of
| limbo in exchange for maybe having a job.
|
| Let's say it does take 2 weeks to do 20 hours (2 hours a
| day), you would be compensated $4,000 for working 2 hours a
| day. Or if you're in between jobs you would have the time to
| do 20-30 hours in about 1 week and get paid $200 / hour.
|
| I guess I'm just picky. I did freelance work for ~20 years
| and worked on 1 contract very part time for 2 years before
| deciding I wanted to try something new and work there full
| time. There was no interview process, I just signed a
| document and that was it.
|
| I couldn't ever in a million years think about joining up at
| a place based on a few short interviews where 90% of the time
| is answering their interview questions. As someone who would
| be hired I really care about what I would be doing most days
| and what it's like to work there. Of course salary, benefits,
| TC, etc. is all important too but those are only numbers in
| the end.
|
| I think this short contracting approach looks out more so for
| the interviewee. This "talented developer" can now pick and
| choose based on really knowing what it'll be like instead of
| hoping it's decent based on a couple of interviews.
|
| I would have thought a highly talented person isn't concerned
| about jumping between interviews, getting hired, quitting
| after 3 weeks because it's not a good fit and repeating the
| process until they find a good match. Am I just way off base
| here? Do most folks bounce between jobs every few weeks
| (going through 5-7 interviews per job) until they find
| something they like?
| renewiltord wrote:
| Dude, no Bay Area engineer will take this deal. $200/hr is
| $100/hr in real post tax income. This is competitive with
| bartending on a Friday night.
|
| If you're not at $500/hr you're not even competitive. You
| can be at $300/hr if you're guaranteeing the job for a year
| but if it's a one off you have to start way higher than
| that.
|
| But free time is more precious. I'd target $1k/hr to play.
| I think break even is probably slightly less but not much.
|
| For $200/hr I'd rather spend the time on my own life.
| nickjj wrote:
| > For $200/hr I'd rather spend the time on my own life.
|
| The alternative is spending 7-12 hours doing 5-7
| technical interviews for $0.
| prepend wrote:
| My employer requires approval for any outside work. Every
| prior company except for a few early stage startups did as
| well.
|
| I would not be able to moonlight to interview contract. I
| wouldn't quit my current job for this.
|
| This is great for unemployed people who don't have offers
| from companies that hire without this process. It's
| fantastic for people who suck and can't find work and would
| love to futz around in these paid interviews for a few
| thousand.
| bobsomers wrote:
| > I would have thought a highly talented person isn't
| concerned about jumping between interviews, getting hired,
| quitting after 3 weeks because it's not a good fit and
| repeating the process until they find a good match. Am I
| just way off base here?
|
| Way off base, in my experience. The vast majority of highly
| talented developers are rarely, if ever, actually on the
| market. They have multiple competing offers before ever
| walking out the door of their previous employer. There is
| no way they're going to spend 30 hours of their time on
| maybe getting an offer from you. It doesn't even matter if
| you pay them for it. Why would I take $4000 for maybe
| getting an offer, when I'm already deciding between
| multiple guaranteed offers? It's just a huge waste of my
| time.
|
| More importantly though, this process is strongly biased
| towards young, single people with no hobbies. You'll likely
| never get a parent to commit to this kind of interview,
| because when I'm not working I'd much rather be spending
| that time with my family. Additionally, as a parent I'm
| concerned about stability because other people depending on
| me for food and shelter. Yanking me around for several
| weeks or months on a probationary period after which you
| can fire me even if I was doing everything great just
| screams amateurish to me. You're not taking my employment
| seriously, so I'd rather go with one of the four offers
| already in hand.
| paxys wrote:
| If you post a job and get 600 applicants, are you going to
| offer all 600 of them this gig? If not, how do you filter
| that down to a more reasonable number (say 3-5)? Whatever
| you do, that is your interview process.
| nickjj wrote:
| The initial pre-contract ~2 hour call would filter people
| out.
|
| You can learn a ton about someone after generally
| chatting with them for 2 hours while staying decently
| focused on tech. People who are good at only talking
| can't bs their way through a type of call that's similar
| to how 2 folks might talk shop in a private conversation
| or a podcast. You can also get a good sense of how they
| think, how they act, how they think of others, etc.. In
| my opinion this is a much better initial filter than the
| usual interview questions.
| moron4hire wrote:
| This answer lacks a lot of imagination.
|
| I _have_ successfully used this hiring method. To say
| "nobody with options would do this" is patently false. In
| fact, it can be a great way to get in with people who have a
| LOT of options, but they aren't sure they want to work for
| YOU.
|
| Every single time I've used this hiring method, I've gotten
| some of the best developers I've known. They weren't even
| looking for a job at the time. They just wanted to hustle a
| few extra hours to make some play money. I'd give them as
| much work as they wanted. Some of them stuck to just a few
| hours a week. Some decided they liked the project enough they
| wanted to do more.
| harshalizee wrote:
| I don't mean to be rude but that just doesn't compute at
| all. I've worked with a lot of devs (both at FAANG and
| outside) that I'd consider some of the best in the world.
| And absolutely none of them ever "wanted to hustle a few
| extra hours to make some play money". They all made
| ridiculous money hand over foot and highly valued their
| free time.
|
| It may be more likely you've hit a local maxima in your
| hiring system and attract the same type. It's great that
| this system works for you to hire people that you're
| looking for, but this definitely would not fly for devs
| with any semblance of an option.
| paxys wrote:
| Are you going to pay me $250/hr for that time? If not, why
| would I spend 30 hours of my life vying for a chance for a full
| time job with your company? And what about my current job?
| Aachen wrote:
| Those are some high standards, you value your time at
| 250x8x5x52= half a million a year?
|
| I don't disagree that 30 hours is _way_ over the top for an
| interview question unless you happen to find it as much fun
| as <insert your favorite hobby>, or if it's somehow usefully
| spent time for other reasons, but your response seems to be
| at an equally extreme end of the spectrum.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| An average FAANG SWE (l4-l5 equivalent across all including
| msft) is pulling in 250-400K salaried. Convert that to
| hourly corp-to-corp rates and yeah you're looking at a
| billable rate of 200/hr or more for a lot of potential
| hires.
| greggman3 wrote:
| In 2012 a Google recruiter told me the got 1 million
| applications a year. I'm guessing that number is higher in 2022
| and it's similar for other similar companies. You can't give 1
| million applicants 5-30 hours of contract work. You still need
| some process to select a few of them. What would that process
| be?
| Aachen wrote:
| Nobody said you needed to give contract work to everyone and
| their dog, or that it was specifically a great idea if you're
| big enough to get a million applications (proverbially or
| literally).
|
| If it's clearly not a good fit then this wouldn't be offered.
| If you are doubting then this could be a good way to make a
| decision with the most information you could possibly have,
| low risk for the company, the applicant gets paid when they
| might otherwise be between jobs... there are the caveats
| mentioned in sibling threads, but in some cases, yeah I can
| see this being a good idea.
|
| We recently rejected someone and I still think that was the
| right decision, but there is still a chance it wasn't. I
| wouldn't have minded giving them some contract work to find
| out if they were competent and just terrible at showing it in
| an interview. I didn't realise this was even an option.
| Though in this case it probably wouldn't have worked out due
| to them currently having a job.
| autarch wrote:
| > _I would hire you to do 30 hours of contract work where we
| pair program on real life things._
|
| You say this as if most (or any) candidates could do this.
|
| If you currently have a job, then you almost certainly won't
| have time for this, unless you're single with no hobbies. If
| you do have time, you may not be allowed to moonlight under
| your current employment contract.
|
| And if you don't have a job, you _still_ may not have the time
| or desire to do this!
|
| I'm currently jobless (by choice - I wanted a break) and I
| started interviewing a few weeks ago. It's exhausting! Even if
| I could squeeze in 30 hours of work over a couple of weeks, I
| wouldn't want to. I had 11.5 hours of interviews this past
| week, and now you want me to spend another 10-15 hours pair
| programming with you? Absolutely not.
|
| If you spread those hours out over many weeks (6 weeks at 5
| hours per week) the candidate will be done with the process
| everywhere else much sooner and they'll just accept an offer
| before this process finishes.
|
| If you want a trial period, make an offer and have a 3-month
| probation period during which you will give the new hire
| regular feedback (at least once a month but more often is
| better). Doesn't every company do this already, at least
| implicitly?
| 0des wrote:
| Do you generally have this mindset because you are very
| successful or is there another track record element I'm
| missing? I don't recognize the username and wanted to
| understand your response better.
| autarch wrote:
| Yes, to echo the other response, I don't think my mindset
| is unusual. What you're suggesting is too much for most
| candidates.
|
| Also, it's a candidate's market right now, at least for
| experienced devs like myself. I'm getting a good amount of
| interest in my applications and nowhere I've applied has
| asked for anything close to 30 hours of my time (5-7 hours
| total is typical).
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I don't understand this response? This is going to be the
| standard mindset for any experienced engineer in the Bay
| area, at minimum.
| monster_group wrote:
| The problem with this approach is that any real task requires a
| lot of internal knowledge (functional and technical) of the
| system which an outside candidate will not have. The pairing
| employee will have lots of it though and it is likely the
| candidate will appear inadequate even if the employee is aware
| of the internal knowledge difference. It is not straightforward
| to be productive on an alien code base from the get go.
| nouveaux wrote:
| I can't imagine this to be true for the vast majority of
| web/sass companies. Even if there is a lot of knowledge,
| there are so many areas of the code with technical debt that
| could just be "How would you refactor this code. Here is how
| it works." or "This is a small error that needs to be
| handled. Here is how it works. How would you handle it?"
| sahila wrote:
| > I can't imagine this to be true for the vast majority of
| web/sass companies
|
| I entirely disagree with this except for the most trivial
| things you describe. And for those trivial things, does
| your company just have a never ending list of these things
| which are not fixed. Feels like you go through 2 candidates
| (60 hours) and that backlog is now cleared.
| nouveaux wrote:
| I find it hard to believe that most web/sass companies
| are not doing the same kinds of queries to the database,
| consuming stripe APIs the same way, or adding a job to a
| queue in similar fashion. I think this is true even in
| the open source world. Any senior dev should be able to
| pair with someone knowledgeable and provide value, with
| the exception of very technical code bases. Most web/sass
| companies do not have very technical code bases.
|
| I would give the same bug to all the candidates for
| baseline purposes.
| in_cahoots wrote:
| Most people with jobs probably can't devote 5-30 hours to
| contract work during the workday. Plus most employment
| contracts won't allow this kind of side gig.
| oaiey wrote:
| Because we do silly testing, social tests, and many more test
| instead of trusting the good old "hire a smart guy by gut feeling
| + probe (not test) the extend of his knowledge" method.
|
| I am a person who does interviews and I always use this method.
| Never betrayed me.
| mabbo wrote:
| Having been an interviewer at a FAANG for many years, I can
| explain _some_ of the logic behind it. I 'm not saying this logic
| is _valid_ , but it's how we got here, imho.
|
| First: we no longer trust the hiring manager alone, because
| probably they aren't a strong developer. We instead trust strong
| developers that are well trained at evaluating good devs. At the
| same time, we don't want to thrust a dev onto a hiring manager,
| so they _also_ need to interview you too and have a say.
|
| Second: Is it really fair to have just one or two developers
| evaluate you? When I first was an interviewer, I liked everybody!
| I would have hired them all. So getting multiple data points
| _matters_. Best to have at least a couple dev interviews.
|
| Then there's the whole problem of needing to evaluate you on
| multiple dimensions. Can one interview really tell if you're good
| problem solving, coding, algorithms/data structures, and any
| specialization the role has? What about the soft skills aspect?
| We're going to need to have at least 3 or 4 interviews to cover
| all these aspects. These roles pay a huge sum of money, so
| there's a lot of worry that someone will be hired who doesn't
| really meet the bar, you know?
|
| But now we have a bigger problem: if we're going to invest 4+
| people to spend an hour of time with you each, we'd better have
| _some_ data points that you 're worth that investment. So maybe
| we need one or two initial interviews ahead of time to weed out
| any obviously unlikely candidates.
|
| After that, it's every other company going "Oh shit, Amazon does
| 6 interviews? We should do that too!".
| babyshake wrote:
| I'm convinced that the best interview is to give someone an app
| (react or node app for example) and do exactly what occurs all
| the time in the real world. Give vague indication that a
| feature appears to sometimes not work correctly.
|
| In the app code there should be one or two very obvious bugs
| and easy optimizations to make, and then put more subtle and
| challenging to fix issues there as well. And ideally make it
| something where a really sharp and experienced developer would
| identify some high-level architectural flaw and they would know
| how to rearchitect it.
|
| Everyone knows that the leetcode-style questions are contrived
| and don't usually reflect real world work but we continue to do
| it anyways.
| pqwEfkvjs wrote:
| It is somewhat easy to cheat through these N+1 interviews by
| grinding tons of practice problems before. At least that was my
| strategy. Sure I can implement DFS or a linked list, but I am a
| pretty suboptimal developer, especially when working with huuge
| codebases.
|
| Maybe they should ask to implement a feature or fix a bug in
| some huge OSS project. That would evaluate skills relevant for
| a job in FAANG more closely imho.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Everyone I've ever met who said this was a better engineer
| than they thought. They seemed to look at the very best
| engineers, see a difference between themself and that person,
| and think they weren't that good.
|
| I think there is also some kind of survivorship bias - you
| don't hear from the people who tried it and failed.
| zeagle wrote:
| Interesting. In medicine they tried to solve this issue by
| having multiple assessors in the Multi Mini Interview (MMI)
| [1]. Applicants spend 8-12 minutes with different interviewers
| in short succession and have a couple minutes to prepare
| between stations. Each station and assessor has a different
| question or goal (e.g. critical thinking, communication skills)
| which are unlinked and it is supposed to remove cumulative
| biases or the risk of the interview panel having deciding a
| negative outcome in the first five minutes. It ends up being a
| lot of behavioural interviewing but seems to work out.
|
| [1] https://students-residents.aamc.org/applying-medical-
| school/...
| StupidUser123 wrote:
| I'm a HM at a big tech company with this format as well.
| Honestly, I really like it. I don't want to hire the wrong
| person, it's expensive and it makes my job awful for a while.
| It's great getting data points on several programming
| interviews, system design, etc. That makes my sell interview so
| much easier because I can trust the process to assess their
| technical skills. You need multiple people because you're
| constantly training up new people and need to calibrate
| everyone fairly.
|
| Scaling any process to thousands of people is always hard.
|
| Is it annoying for candidates? Yeah, but we pay you a lot of
| money, and it does actually work for us. Is it perfect? No, but
| it does work.
|
| "Hire and Fire fast" doesn't actually work well if you want to
| give people a chance to succeed. Also people tend to keep low
| performers around too long. Best to avoid this as much as
| possible.
| 14u2c wrote:
| > That makes my sell interview so much easier because I can
| trust the process to assess their technical skills
|
| What makes you think that the process provides an accurate
| representation of the skills needed for the day to day job?
| In my experience it simply tests whether the candidate has
| invested lot of time cramming for that very specific type of
| test. If I was running a small company I would much rather
| discuss a candidate's experience with them and leave them the
| time to build useful skills, not worthless ones for passing a
| test.
| jugg1es wrote:
| I would agree with you if the interview process included ANY
| feedback to interviewees when they were rejected. Prior to
| COVID, I got flown to Seattle mid-week for 2 nights and
| interviewed well (the recruiter told me to start looking for
| houses). But 20 days later I was basically ghosted by my
| recruiter and I had to escalate to their manager to get a
| response that I was rejected. They gave me no feedback at
| all.
|
| The interview process asks a LOT of the interviewee and then
| does not provide anything that could help the person improve
| next time, so the entire process feels like a complete waste
| of time. In my case, I was also disrespected by the
| recruiter.
|
| The next time they reached out, I failed the phone screen
| somehow by someone who sounded 20 years younger than me
| (which is frustrating when you have already passed these same
| steps before). I don't respond to Amazon recruiters anymore.
| madamelic wrote:
| > I failed the phone screen somehow by someone who sounded
| 20 years younger than me
|
| I am definitely a little pretentious for saying this but I
| get kinda peeved when I am interviewing for high-level
| roles and my initial tech screen is by a junior engineer.
| It's not so much that I think I am too smart to be properly
| evaluated by them or that they aren't worth being part of a
| hiring pipeline (they very much should be!), but my opinion
| is that junior engineers aren't properly tuned for what is
| and isn't a good engineer and if they are, they shouldn't
| be a junior engineer.
|
| The other side is when I get reached out to interview for a
| high-level role then get talked down to about how I don't
| fit their criteria and I basically wasted the executive
| vice president of external internal engineering's time.
| alexashka wrote:
| > Is it perfect? No, but it does work.
|
| How do you know it works?
|
| > I don't want to hire the wrong person, it's expensive and
| it makes my job awful for a while.
|
| There we are. It is all about you.
|
| No need to say anything else - your life is all about you, so
| of course if it works for you, 'it works'.
| david-gpu wrote:
| _> How do you know it works?_
|
| If the company in question is growing its business and the
| employees and customers are happy, then whatever they are
| doing is working, at least for now. I'm not sure there is a
| much better way to measure it.
|
| When I joined NVidia they had me through two phone screens
| (although they originally planned for three), followed by
| an onsite with seven different interviewers back to back on
| the same day. It wasn't _fun_ , but it wasn't the end of
| the world either.
|
| When I was a hiring manager at Qualcomm we would typically
| do a phone screen followed by an onsite with maybe four
| one-hour interviews back to back and there was rarely any
| disagreement on whether the candidate made the cut or not,
| so I would argue that it was sufficient.
| [deleted]
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| > How do you know it works?
|
| Because the hallways aren't empty.
| mylons wrote:
| the hallways aren't empty due to the total compensation
| and perceived prestige working at a FAANG or similar
| company offers.
| nova22033 wrote:
| _due to the total compensation_
|
| Yes..it's why people do jobs.
| lanstin wrote:
| Probably not as much as you would guess from talking to
| FAANG employees. It's been fifteen years since my
| compensation exceeded the amount where it makes any
| difference to me. Now I want to have interesting
| problems, a business model I am not ashamed of, good and
| smart coworkers and decent conditions. I won't be
| retiring early, which is fine: my work is almost always a
| fun and valued way I contribute to the world. One of the
| big problems with software ethics and the joy of solving
| problems is the influx of people choosing software not
| due to intrinsic affinity but just for money. Sometimes I
| wish more of them still went for law degrees or MBAs or
| surgery. It's just a little sad to see someone who can
| make beautiful and useful software gems be dissatisfied
| because they didn't get to be a CTO by the time they are
| thirty or the like.
|
| In the 90s people getting a big software job where
| thrilled because they were going to change the world. My
| mom's friends used stuff that ran my code. Now it seems
| like people want FIRE or multiple houses or lambos.
| frankchn wrote:
| Then there isn't a problem -- at least for FAANG. People
| are willing to jump through more hoops for more rewards
| in all aspects of life.
|
| If a less prestigious company with worse compensation
| tries the same thing, then they will quickly discover
| they can't hire anyone. It will be self-correcting.
| dwater wrote:
| I had a startup give me 2 interviews and a paid coding
| exercise before making an offer, but the compensation was
| below market with some long shot equity comp. I had a
| large consulting company give me one recruiter screen and
| a series of 3 20 minute interviews, one tech one manager
| and one in between before making an offer at market rate.
| Sounds like generally interview time scales with total
| compensation, which seems fine to me. I'm a data
| scientist and I've never had a live coding interview but
| I also have no desire to apply to a top tier tech co.
| igetspam wrote:
| No, it's all about everyone. If I hire a person and fire
| them in less than a year, that's almost always because of a
| performance problem that's impacting the team or the org.
| If you're the one being fired, you probably left a job or
| didn't take some other job to work with us and now you're
| going to be unemployed. Additionally, as a hiring manager,
| I too am a human who wants to enjoy my job and have
| positive experiences and firing people sucks. It always
| sucks. It takes a toll on you.
|
| Filtering early is best for everyone. If that means more
| rounds of interviews to be sure, that's what I'm going to
| do. I do my best to schedule around candidates and I'm
| forthcoming about the process during the first call but we
| try hard to be thorough because we want this to work well
| for everyone. Would you rather be hired and then fired
| quickly because we didn't realize there was a misalignment?
| I wouldn't.
| hobs wrote:
| If I could get a job in a week instead of 3 months of
| interviews? Yeah I'd be fine with that.
| igetspam wrote:
| A week for a single candidate interviewing with a US only
| company is entirely reasonable. I don't think two is bad
| either. I would not stay engaged with a company that took
| a month, the same way I don't stay engaged with a
| candidate that can't find time to schedule three or four
| calls in less than six weeks (I am more forgiving with
| candidates than I would be with companies).
| ethanwillis wrote:
| It's not "best for everyone."
|
| Hired and fired quickly is better because when I have to
| dedicate weeks or a month of unpaid, uncompensated time
| to your process then I'm the one losing. You are already
| getting paid for putting in the work of interviewing me.
| If your team is stretched so thin that you need to put
| your time at a premium, that's a problem with your
| process not having enough throughput.
|
| How many people do you reject to fill one position? How
| many are "filtered" at later stages to fill one position?
| igetspam wrote:
| If it's taking months, then they're doing it badly. Our
| hiring process is five rounds but it never takes more
| than a couple weeks, including the negotiation phase. Our
| data shows that we need something like 14 resumes to get
| one candidate worth interviewing. Of those, it takes 4-6
| candidates for one hire. Hiring and firing fast means we
| also have to invest in onboarding, training and allowing
| people to settle in. During that time, we've filled the
| current position and we're no longer interviewing
| candidates. Once someone is fired, we have to go through
| the whole mess again. That would be the most wasteful
| model for everyone involved. By my math, that's a minimum
| of two months of time on a single person (I think six
| weeks to fully productive is reasonable) just to go back
| to searching again. And that's just the US and ignores
| the two week notice (or more) for each candidate.
|
| I hire in APAC too. Indian engineers are giving 60-90 day
| notices now and that's contractual. Two candidates, using
| your model, could easily take up a year. (Hiring in APAC
| take a long time already.)
|
| I can only assume you've had some bad experiences lately
| but your personal bias has created a really bad mental
| model for you that would be a net negative for everyone.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > If it's taking months, then they're doing it badly.
|
| is not responsive to
|
| > I have to dedicate weeks or a month
| igetspam wrote:
| Sure it is. If a company's hiring process for a single
| candidate takes multiple months, that's bad. The
| candidate experience is critically important. We have
| five stages of our interview process, two of them involve
| speaking with multiple engineers. The whole process takes
| less than a month, as long as the candidate has time. In
| general, it's 2-2.5 weeks and that involves coordinating
| calls with engineers in the Americas, Europe and APAC.
|
| If it takes longer, it's always an issue with
| coordinating with the candidate schedule. (this is my
| experience with my hiring process)
| ethanwillis wrote:
| No it sure isn't because I never said months or multiple
| months.
| igetspam wrote:
| Fine. I'm mixing replies. A single month is still
| unreasonable. That's a bad candidate experience. That
| changes nothing about the number of people who interview
| you though, just how quickly.
| ethanwillis wrote:
| Well due to real world constraints of scheduling even
| with people who's sole job is to interview candidates the
| speed at which you interview is most likely going to be a
| function of how many people need to interview you.
| madamelic wrote:
| > Filtering early is best for everyone.
|
| This is a lie that everyone tells themselves to make them
| feel secure and safe.
|
| The best interview is working with the person. Do a few
| basic interviews for competency, give them a 2 week -
| month long 1099 contract and put them on guard rails for
| the contract duration.
|
| Their daily work isn't just about whether they can jump
| through time-based hoops or answer basic questions. No
| one is going to know whether it is a mutual match until
| the person gets into the codebase and start working.
|
| Plenty of great engineers have "performance problems" not
| because they are bad engineers but because of problems an
| interview will never expose or detect like a bad teammate
| or lead match causing disagreements, a bad codebase, poor
| planning that only builds tech debt, bad business plan,
| disagreement on business direction, etc.
|
| The idea that an interview can filter good or bad
| engineers is laughable. The most you can determine from
| an interview, regardless of how many flaming hoops and
| balls the candidate bounces off their nose, is whether
| they know how to code and _probably_ know what you need
| them to know.
| randmeerkat wrote:
| > Would you rather be hired and then fired quickly
| because we didn't realize there was a misalignment? I
| wouldn't.
|
| The fact that your knee jerk reaction to a misalignment
| is firing someone rather than mentoring them and aligning
| them with the org speaks volumes about your management
| style... And managers wonder why they have such a hard
| time hiring or retaining people right now...
| igetspam wrote:
| I used "misalignment" as a kind way to say "because we
| realized we don't want to work with you." But you're
| chasing a different thread anyway. We're talking about
| quick hiring and firing being better than thoroughly
| vetting a candidate. If we want to talk about how to hire
| junior engineering talents specifical, we can do that.
|
| I definitely spend less time per person, trying to find
| juniors. You have to because t What you're looking for is
| different. My only goal for hiring junior engineers is to
| find out if they know enough to not drown and if I think
| they're willing and able to learn fast. That takes less
| time and the risk is generally less because my
| expectations are lower and so is the compensation.
|
| It's been a while since I hired junior people though. The
| roles I take are always in early phase startups and I
| don't have budget for people who need on-the-job
| training.
| ethanwillis wrote:
| They want to outsource the costs of developing talent. To
| their own detriment, then they want to blame everyone
| else.
|
| This is of course when they're not busy abusing someone
| on a visa to make them do more work than a human should
| have to do.
| igetspam wrote:
| You've had some bad jobs, haven't you? Want to talk about
| it? We don't abuse anyone on a visa because we're fully
| remote and don't do visas. We target the high side of
| comp in the person's country. We specifically hire senior
| people because we're small and building. Developing
| talent is great but the time to do that is expensive and
| until you've hit a certain scale, it's detrimental to
| launching a startup. Look around the industry and look at
| the success stories. Then look at what their early hiring
| looks like. If you can find a startup that succeeded by
| hiring new grads and junior engineering first, I'd love
| to read about it.
| gcheong wrote:
| "Is it annoying for candidates?" Not just annoying, it can be
| downright demoralizing going through the interview process
| when the standard is "reject for any one reason, only accept
| if all agree." and no feedback whatsoever is given.
| madamelic wrote:
| Also the fact that hiring almost ends up looking to the
| most senior engineers for up and down which means you've
| just wasted multiple hours having less senior people
| interview them.
|
| Rarely have I ever seen a candidate be rejected by seniors
| or leads and still get the job even when the decision had
| to be argued until it was unanimous. Pretty much if a
| senior goes thumbs down, the decision has been made and the
| meeting is over.
|
| Leads and CTOs especially have to be mindful of either not
| being part of the decision or being the last vote, as to
| not taint the results... which again, means that the most
| senior vote will flip a "yes" to a flat "no"
| StupidUser123 wrote:
| That is a fair point, thank you for commenting.
|
| Discussing how many no's it should take to reject a
| candidate is a worthwhile discussion. I can override
| specific no's with good reason at my company, but not all
| companies have that.
|
| My broader point is that this is a specific issue with the
| process we can iterate on. We don't need to throw out the
| whole process.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| On one hand, I don't want to ever get hired for a position
| and in a culture where I am not a match, so I myself believe
| that the more datapoints, the better.
|
| On the other hand, I struggle with impostor syndrome. While
| fairly successful in my day-to-day, I will likely fail
| whiteboarding sorting algorithms etc. Imagining a series of
| five interviews stresses me out and I'm not even looking
| right now :)
| joelthelion wrote:
| It may work well for hiring young people.
|
| I can guarantee that you will never see me in one of your
| interviews. Would I be valuable to your company? Maybe, but
| we will never know because the process is too long.
| blub wrote:
| You pay them a lot of money _if_ they pass, but the others
| get zero. You're basically annoying lots of people to make
| that one person happy.
| linspace wrote:
| You can take something out from an interview: practice for
| other interviews, insight of how others interview (what did
| you think were good or bad questions, what annoyed you). I
| know it's not the best use of your time but it's better
| than a total waste
| mylons wrote:
| People get PIP'ed and fired routinely that make it through
| this process. I think there's a lot of bias in your response.
| The process worked for you, you work at a large tech company
| and it gives you validation. It also makes you feel good to
| lord over the process and boosts your ego, reinforcing your
| priors.
| thematrixturtle wrote:
| YMMV, but it's actually quite difficult to get a PIP in
| many tech companies, and it's rarely if ever for lack of
| tech skills. The ones I've seen usually involve either
| motivation, output, or both plummeting to zero for extended
| periods of time due to burnout or a similar extended
| personal crisis.
| mandeepj wrote:
| > it's rarely if ever for lack of tech skills.
|
| isn't output related with lack of tech skills?
| piptastic wrote:
| not really, plenty of talented lazy people out there
| fataliss wrote:
| Not if output was satisfactory before and then drops
| hibikir wrote:
| To a point, but it's rarely the inability to code that is
| leading to lack of output. Output often means "did
| sufficient work that was seen, by management, as
| impactful enough". This has more to do with communication
| and task choice than anything. This is not really a skill
| that we even really attempt to measure in interview.
|
| In my experience in high performing tech companies, I've
| seen about 40 PIPs. There are 'utter tech incompetence'
| PIPs in the world, but as far as I've seen, they are far
| less popular than 'thoroughly uninterested in working'
| PIPs, 'disliked by new manager' PIPs and 'person has a
| work unrelated crisis' PIPs. Those tech related PIPs will
| normally have all the symptoms already in the first
| review cycle. If someone made it to their 2nd year in the
| company, tech incompetence is not really the issue. It's
| just unfortunate that nobody provides stats for this kind
| of thing, so we don't have to just rely on "you have
| seen" vs "I have seen" arguments.
| gcheong wrote:
| From what I've seen it's almost always as you describe or
| something political like a manager taking over a group
| and wanting to make room for their friends. But if
| employees are burning out and then being PIPed instead of
| getting support I think that is a rather sad indictment
| of our industry in an of itself.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> if employees are burning out and then being PIPed
| instead of getting support I think that is a rather sad
| indictment of our industry in an of itself_
|
| The thing is most big companies don't care about your
| burn-out or personal situation, they either have product
| launch deadlines to meet, or revenue targets or customers
| to please, and people in the trenches are considered
| replaceable so churn is something they account for in
| order to meet those commitments.
|
| If you're lucky you might have an understanding manager,
| but he himself may have targets to reach for his bonus or
| promotion, and if you're dragging his team down and his
| bonus promotion with it, then ... it's nothing personal,
| it's just business, you will be let go.
|
| I worked for a major European semi company and the churn
| there is insane, either they fire people or people leave
| by themselves within the first 2 years. All because
| managers are given near impossible targets, along with
| great bonuses and stock packages to incentivize them to
| use whatever means necessary to deliver on those targets,
| usually at the expense of people in the trenches which
| are treated as expendable commodities.
| efitz wrote:
| Your manager might also have a specific target for
| "unregretted attrition", i.e. getting rid of people using
| the PIP process. If there is not a clear person who is
| the weakest link, then the manager will pick their least
| favorite. And remember, performance is very subjective.
|
| I have seen a couple of people get fired for cause; that
| was always clear. I've never seen an unambiguous PIP.
| sgerenser wrote:
| As far as I know only Amazon has targets for "unregretted
| attrition."
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > YMMV, but it's actually quite difficult to get a PIP in
| many tech companies
|
| Generally, the more the company practices "hire fast,
| fire fast" the easier and more common it will be to PIP
| people.
|
| The companies with 4+ stage interviews and entire
| departments devoted to recruiting and candidate
| evaluation tend to not have as many PIPs because they've
| studied their interviewing processes and prevented most
| of the underperformers from getting hired in the first
| place.
|
| The most quick-to-fire company I ever worked for had
| barely a 1-hour interview process. They'd hire anyone who
| seemed remotely qualified and then they'd fire everyone
| who didn't work out. It was terrible and now I'm actually
| suspicious of companies that don't do much technical
| screening for applicants.
| boredtofears wrote:
| How do extended interviews root out people that are going
| to later go through some kind of major personal issue or
| have burnout or have a lack of motivation?
|
| Lack of motivation and burnout maybe could be somewhat
| sussed out in an interview if it was obvious, but the
| people that I've been around that's happened to (and
| myself at one point in my career) were completely fine,
| but I'm skeptical of any interviewer that says they can
| reliably fish that out.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| Isn't that only at a handful of companies?
| StupidUser123 wrote:
| How does me being okay with a smaller role in the overall
| hiring process equate to me wanting to lord over people?
| I'm a hiring manager, it's literally my job to pick people
| to hire. I'd rather have the opinions of my colleagues in
| addition to my own.
|
| My response was in good faith, and yours is not.
| franklampard wrote:
| megous wrote:
| Objective answer? Pretty much every single sentence is a
| subjective statement... "I like it,... I don't want... ,
| my job would be awful, ....I can trust...."
|
| And all the two non-subjective statements are provided
| with "trust me" and 0 data.
| ethanwillis wrote:
| And yet, when you fail these interview processes it's
| racism from Chinese or Japanese interviewers. Very
| interesting.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30520988
| prepend wrote:
| > People get PIP'ed and fired routinely that make it
| through this process.
|
| Compared to what? I don't think anyone is claiming this
| process is perfect. Just that it's better than
| alternatives.
|
| People will always get PIP'd and fired. But the goal is to
| reduce that as low as possible.
| mylons wrote:
| how is it better than alternatives? this seems like a
| huge straw-man given almost every company that hires
| developers thinks they're a large tech company and mimics
| their hiring process. it doesn't seem like serious
| alternatives have been explored.
| novok wrote:
| PIPing and firing is a huge time and emotional energy
| suck, and it sucks for people on both sides. To reduce
| the amount it happens is worthy. You can't in practice
| just say, "this guy sucks, lets fire him next week"
|
| And it shows, barely anyone in my entire career has ever
| been fired. I only personally have been close to one.
| tartoran wrote:
| > PIPing and firing is a huge time and emotional energy
| suck, and it sucks
|
| So is the 7 interview gauntlet. But I guess it just
| shifts the burden on the candidates and externalizes
| cost.
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| Cost externalization is the entire basis of
| businesses/corporations these days it seems.
|
| Maybe it was always that way though
| hinkley wrote:
| It also selects for people who will put up with anything,
| which to a cynical manager might sound like a good
| employee, except that our job is to replace labor with
| machines.
|
| People who put up with anything are expensive. They keep
| billing you hours for tasks that could have been reduced
| to minutes by someone with a lower tolerance for BS.
| igetspam wrote:
| I swear some of you have had terrible work experiences.
| I've been an engineer for the last 20 years. The first
| time I tried being manager, I sucked and it sucked. (I
| definitely sucked more because the place sucked but I
| wasn't great.) That was a decade ago though and I've
| gradually stepped back into management because I've had
| great leadership and learned a ton along the way. My
| primary goal as a manager is to ensure the team is happy
| and healthy, so that they are able to work effectively.
| Our hiring process supports this by ensuring we're not
| hiring dead weight, toxic people or engineers that can't
| provide value and drag the team down.
|
| Where do you people work because I'd like to (a) avoid it
| and (b) poach people because your world view sucks and I
| can only assume that's a direct response to a shit
| environment.
|
| To put it into perspective, my first 1:1 with everyone on
| the team includes questions like "what have previous
| managers done to help you be successful?" Managing people
| can be difficult but managers shouldn't be.
| bluescrn wrote:
| It's probably also selecting for people who are
| unemployed and therefore much more able to attend the
| entire gauntlet than those already employed.
| swader999 wrote:
| How would this really be possible while currently
| employed, kids, real deliverables?
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| In my experience, it seems to take a company about 1-1.5
| years to fire someone that's well intended but
| ineffective in their role. 15 or so "wasted" person-hours
| up front is well worth avoiding thousands of wasted
| person-hours, especially considering maybe 1 in 5
| candidates that make it to a full interview are a good
| fit.
| thirdwhrldPzz wrote:
| How do we know this isn't blind faith and the numbers are
| "made up"?
|
| Other than fiat wealth generation, what gains are there
| to treating each other like this?
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean? Are you suggesting that
| companies shouldn't avoid hiring unqualified people that
| generate less value than their cost on average?
| Retric wrote:
| 15 extra hours * N candidates per opening * M people
| onboarded per additional marginal employee discovered.
|
| Picking numbers from a hat say 15 * 7 * 20 = 2,100
| unproductive hours to avoid a subpar employee that still
| actually gets something done in the ~3,000 hours before
| being fired. That could easily be a net loss depending on
| how much onboarding time is needed and how unproductive
| they are on average.
|
| Honestly, I think those numbers may be overly generous to
| long onboarding processes.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| _shrug_ hiring the wrong person into an engineering role
| is incredibly expensive and painful for organizations
| with a long term outlook. It cancels out the productivity
| of at least one good engineer, and stresses out at least
| 3 people.
|
| I've been a hiring manager before, and hiring good people
| is a huge time investment. The reality is that something
| like 99% of applicants aren't qualified, and the majority
| seemingly lack enough self-awareness to know it. The
| really good people also tend to be bad at marketing
| themselves. I don't think of interviews as a waste of
| time, though, even when it's a no-hire.
| boisenberrier wrote:
| So you've been close to one person getting fired? How do
| you have an opinion on the PIP process or firing at all
| if you have next to no experience with it?
|
| I knew a guy at a FAANG who earned himself _and_ his
| report a PIP for the grave sin of choosing the wrong
| deputy to send upstairs while he was on vacation. The
| deputized person went to one meeting and ran his mouth
| (arguably, told the truth). Both are no longer at the
| company.
|
| PIP politics are absolutely routine in FAANG and if
| you're arguing the other side you don't know. FAANG is
| actively trying to fire or replace you at all times. I've
| worked at two so I can't speak for three, but I've also
| worked for the two in that older acronym that you'd think
| of as the "nicest". People read that that and probably
| hear me saying "giant evil entity is out to get you", but
| it's really middle managers cosplaying Kings Landing in
| the office, mostly unchecked, that does it.
|
| Seriously; people want to work at a FAANG/MAMAA or
| whatever so they often assume it's good. I had someone
| ask me if I noticed how light my calendar was now that
| the org considered me irrelevant. There's an idea that
| FAANG is a bunch of nerds with glasses cooking up cool
| shit in a Zen commune with ambient drone music but it's
| honestly some of the worst office politics I've ever seen
| across what is now two careers, and the PIP process is a
| big tool in that kit.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| I worked at a FAANG for 3 years and I'm pretty sure no
| one I worked with was on a PIP. A PIP is extreme. It's
| sufficient to simply not give people raises, most people
| can and will easily find another job earning 10% more.
| gusgus01 wrote:
| I've worked at a FAANG for almost 5 years. I know
| probably a dozen or two people who have been PIP'd. I
| even know one guy who was PIP'd twice and then left when
| he was given his third PIP.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| This sounds awful. Disrespectful. Glad I never worked for
| a FAANG.
| doktorhladnjak wrote:
| How would you really know? People don't usually talk
| publicly about their PIP.
|
| I went from long time IC to manager at a faang adjacent
| company. It was eye opening to see who was on a PIP and
| go through calibrations.
|
| There were well liked, competent people who others on the
| team got along with but they just were not delivering at
| the expected level. Sometimes the problem was lack of
| motivation or bad role fit.
| asveikau wrote:
| > but they just were not delivering at the expected
| level. Sometimes the problem was lack of motivation or
| bad role fit.
|
| Another i think is when management doesn't understand
| that someone is, in your wording, a "well liked,
| competent person", doesn't adequately understand what
| they bring to the team. Performance reviews, especially
| of ICs but not exclusively, have a bias towards perceived
| individual contribution and against teamwork.
| jchw wrote:
| Been at one of FAANG for a few years. Never saw this play
| out. Sounds like something that is more likely to happen
| on the management side than it is the IC side...
| asveikau wrote:
| Most ICs are pretty well insulated from this, because if
| they understood what went on at calibration a lot of good
| contributors would become pretty bitter.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Almost every alternative you can imagine has been tried.
| Lots of interviews, few interviews, take home projects,
| pair programming, hire fast fire fast, trial periods and
| on and on and on.
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| Hire fast fire fast is by far the best one, should you
| really need it. A 20 minute technical conversation and
| then firing within 2-3 weeks if they do not seem self-
| directed has worked in my experience.
|
| If you can't get someone up to speed with your internal
| processes fast enough to at least gauge if they're
| following along that indicates an internal problem.
|
| The problem is, I think, that HR does not want technical
| staff to see the hires for (probably made up) legal
| reasons. So the decision is mostly made by people who
| can't actually gauge competency.
| igetspam wrote:
| How do you handle the obvious problems of churn and
| reviews at places like Glassdoor? I can just see it now:
|
| "Interview was weak. They don't know what they're doing."
|
| "Aced the interview. Fired after two weeks. Leadership
| doesn't know how to hire or manage."
|
| "Never seen a place with so much churn. In the last six
| months, I've seen at least half a dozen engineers exit
| after two or three weeks."
|
| Know what raises the level of difficulty for finding
| candidates? Shit reviews about the company. You can have
| the best tech but if you have a toxic smell, you can't
| hire. To the outside, perception is reality and reviews
| are how you get that perception. You can't do the
| opposite though and say "J Smith passed interview but we
| let them go after two weeks because they couldn't do more
| than pseudo code on a whiteboard." and even if you could,
| you'd look like a shit company and you'd still have an
| impossible time hiring but for other reasons.
|
| This idea of quick hire/fire is so bad that all you have
| to do it go one or two steps further to find the obvious
| problems. But hey, start a company and use that model.
| See how it goes. Prove us all wrong.
| ballenf wrote:
| I've worked and interviewed at dozens of companies and
| literally never experienced a company that had more than
| 2 interviews plus a discussion with a hiring manager or
| HR.
|
| I make half-ish of a FAANG salary, but it's enough to
| comfortably support a family and I'm generally pretty
| happy and get to work on cool stuff. The only challenge I
| never get at work are problems that have huge scale
| components.
| sgerenser wrote:
| Interesting, I've interviewed at all of the FAANGs other
| than Netflix, plus maybe 10 or so much smaller companies.
| In general the smaller companies all seemed to want to
| emulate the FAANG hiring process with 4-6 rounds of
| interviews with engineers after an initial phone screen.
| I think only 1 or 2 of them limited their interview to
| just 2 rounds.
| arroz wrote:
| What is PIP?
| _0ffh wrote:
| I was wondering the same thing! After a bit of searching,
| my best guess is "Performance Improvement Plan".
| cookiecaper wrote:
| "(Personal|Professional|Performance) Improvement Plan".
| It's the first formal stage in the firing process at most
| companies with HR depts, which would almost certainly
| include any publicly-listed company.
|
| If you're at the PIP stage, it generally means your boss
| and your superboss have decided that it's time for you to
| go, but for legal purposes, they need to look like they
| tried to give you a chance, so they work with HR to craft
| specific-but-typically-unattainable goals which would
| theoretically allow you to save your job if you hit them
| all. But with boss+superboss already wanting you gone,
| the likelihood that they'll agree you've hit an
| improvement goal that's usually a thinly-veiled form of
| "stop me from hating you anymore, lol" is pretty low.
|
| If you get a PIP, in nearly 100% of cases, you should
| just take it as notice that your employment is going to
| end at the specified review date in the PIP. It's not
| usually worth trying to hit the goals. Focus on
| interviewing.
|
| That said, I once managed an individual who had survived
| 4 PIPs by the time he reported to me. I heard that he was
| eventually fired about 2 years after I left, but not sure
| if it was his 6th or 7th PIP. He was a particular
| discrimination liability at a company that was very
| sensitive to that type of thing.
| homonculus1 wrote:
| That rules
| jreese wrote:
| PIPs are not exclusively foregone conclusion/CYA before
| firing. I've personally been on a PIP while in the "red
| zone" before an expected promotion, and came out the
| other side with an "exceeds" rating and said promotion
| during the next cycle. Sometimes, it's legitimately just
| a formal way of stating "this is what we expect from you
| if you want to stay here"; if you can meet those
| expectations, then great!
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Are you sure that was a PIP? That's really not what a PIP
| is used for.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| In your exp
| jreese wrote:
| The cover sheet has the words "Performance Improvement
| Plan", with key goals to achieve in a 30 day period, with
| the final page to be signed by me and my manager.
|
| https://cdn.n7.gg/pip/pip-1.png
|
| https://cdn.n7.gg/pip/pip-2.png
|
| Not every company is awful.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I wonder what these performance expectations are.
| linspace wrote:
| > it generally means your boss and your superboss have
| decided that it's time for you to go
|
| The problem is that those are two highly correlated data
| points. Toxic bosses are eventually found but at that
| point they leave a track of dead bodies.
|
| What I have seen sometimes is moving around disgruntled
| employees. It has its own problems but a lot of the times
| they are recovered and even become very productive again.
| rincebrain wrote:
| I once was told by an HR person at a prior job, who
| almost certainly shouldn't have said it, regarding my PIP
| (I had extremely pathological sleep outcomes sometimes,
| unpredictably, but my boss and boss's boss etc loved my
| work), "It's really neat to see - usually when we get
| people on PIPs, it's because their bosses want them gone,
| but your boss really really wants to keep you. "
|
| It rather stuck in my mind.
|
| (I also did not, ultimately, end up exiting the company
| as a result of the PIP, just for completeness given the
| context of the thread.)
| andrewcarter wrote:
| At the company I work for PiPs _usually_ lead to issues
| being solved. There are several developers I've worked
| with on PiPs (we do specific mentoring and follow ups on
| the areas of concern) that were able to improve and are
| now doing great. It isn't always a terrible thing,
| certainly not comfortable for the person on the PiP but
| it can be a positive thing in the long run!
| efitz wrote:
| Good on your company; PIP should focus on shoring up
| skill gaps or finding better role fit or invinting
| someone to take unpaid LOA to work through whatever life
| challenge they have.
|
| BUT, I've only ever seen the "unattainable goal" type.
| desas wrote:
| Performance improvement plan.
| newbamboo wrote:
| Performance improvement plan. It's basically a social
| credit rating system for employees.
| [deleted]
| azinman2 wrote:
| I don't think that's routine. While I know it happens,
| certainly I've personally never worked with someone who
| this has happened to.
|
| There will always be burning mistakes, or people who lie or
| are otherwise hard to predict will be a disaster. What else
| would you propose?
| mylons wrote:
| making the interview process similar to the job is a good
| first step. when I worked at Invitae this was my proudest
| achievement from my time there. I suggested that we
| change the interview process to a paired programming
| session that were situations from our day to day work.
| the candidate brought in their own laptop or was provided
| one (their choice). the session was 90-120 minutes and
| didn't involve leetcode hard problems, just practical day
| to day stuff a web developer might run into on the job.
| tartoran wrote:
| I think this would be the most fair to the candidates,
| especially ones with prior experience who don't want to
| spend time on useless leetcode questions that have zero
| to do with the job itself. I can't help but feel this is
| just gate keeping.
| azinman2 wrote:
| The problem with this is that many jobs require weeks
| worth of on ramping into internal systems, code bases,
| etc, not to mention many aspects of the job would be
| working on otherwise secretive stuff. I don't think this
| would work at a FAANG, and many bigger companies.
| mylons wrote:
| of course -- so you have to make it accessible to the
| candidate. using the internal code base is probably not
| the best choice. we had them write up a small API with
| specific requirements in the tech of their choice, and
| tried to have someone programming with them familiar with
| their choice of tech.
| cortesoft wrote:
| > Is it annoying for candidates? Yeah, but we pay you a lot
| of money, and it does actually work for us
|
| The best candidates can get jobs paying the same or more
| money with fewer interviews, so the very best aren't going to
| pick you.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Yeah, but the worst will also have an easier time. Missing
| out on a great developer is still a good deal if you also
| prevent 10 mishires.
| mattnewton wrote:
| I'd be very suprised if this is the case, I just finished a
| few months of interviewing and very few places outside very
| small startups deviate from this format.
|
| Not saying I am the very best, but I just didn't find
| opportunities for anyone to out earn by skipping the FAANG
| style loop. Unless you mean getting lots of equity and
| riding it to an outsized liquidity event, these places just
| tend to be not competitive to the top FAANG compensation;
| you would join for other reasons.
| mdoms wrote:
| > Is it annoying for candidates? Yeah, but we pay you a lot
| of money, and it does actually work for us. Is it perfect?
| No, but it does work.
|
| I've never been paid for interviewing. You mean you pay the
| successful candidates well, which is what? 10% of the people
| you subject to this obnoxious process?
| secretfriend789 wrote:
| My FAANG team does 2x screening interviews plus a round of
| 3 to 4 full interviews. We try to interview at most 4
| candidates in the full loop. That's about 5 hours of
| interview time, and the average candidate will succeed by
| the 3rd or 4th interview.
|
| Given that we are making a $200-600k+ decision and that the
| average candidate stands to gain tens of thousands of
| dollars or more, the 20-40 hours spent interviewing seems
| time well spent on both sides.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| There is another thing - if you want to work at a FAANG,
| presumably you want to be there a while. Anyone who can't put
| up with a little bit of nonsense and headache for something
| meaningful is likely to struggle with any nonsense and
| headache generally. Working on any large scale project at a
| FAANG is going to involve a decent amount of nonsense and
| headache, and you gotta roll with it.
|
| And then on the flip side - if you are really a star, and you
| are interviewing at a small company _you_ should want 5-7
| interviews to gauge the caliber of people you will work with.
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| I agree with this. Honestly, as a candidate, I don't mind
| the longer interview loop. What I do mind is if it's very
| spread out. I'm willing to invest an hour up front + a full
| day round, but I don't want that longer round spread out
| over the course of multiple days. I'll give you 6 hours in
| a day, but not 2-3 days of 2-3 hours each.
|
| My expectation at this point is:
|
| Pre-onsite:
|
| - 15 minute with a recruiter, tell me a little bit about
| the role, spend the majority of the time telling me why I
| should join the company, and take a few questions
|
| - 30-45 minutes with the hiring manager. Tell me about what
| you really want, scope, the challenges, and let's talk
| about how I might fit. Do enough Q&A both ways to feel
| comfortable, and then let's make a call right there as to
| whether we want to continue on. For my part, I always tell
| the HM at this stage whether or not I'd be excited to
| continue.
|
| Up to now, I've invested an hour. This is reasonable. Maybe
| we both like each other, so presuming we do, when you call
| me about the on-site, we should work out acceptable comp
| ranges. These may move upward after the on-site based on
| what I learn about the role, but let's make sure we won't
| waste one anothers' time with the on-site.
|
| Continuing to the on-site:
|
| - 60-90 mins on whatever technical background is required
| for the role. I'm fairly senior in management, so this
| usually doesn't involve code, but should cover whether or
| not I have a clue how to lead it. For an IC technical role,
| if we're smart about it, we'll know enough without doing 5X
| leetcode and 3X design here. I can also evaluate whether I
| care about your problem space if we don't make the content
| entirely synthetic. In 90 minutes, it's perfectly
| reasonable to do a design exercise + picking something in
| there to write some code around. This is it, though. One
| technical round!
|
| - 30 mins x 3-4 with key peers/stakeholders. Make sure my
| behavioral stuff works for you, that we can understand one
| another, and yeah, that we might actually like each other
| enough to work together. I like to talk, and so if the
| other person does, make it 45 mins.
|
| - 60 mins with the HM again to dive deeper on the role with
| the context gained from the interviews. Heavy Q&A. Let's
| give each other enough to make a decision.
|
| - If you want, 60 minutes with whatever executive (besides
| the HM) will be closest to the role. Whatever you want to
| talk about. Let's just see if we can communicate.
|
| You can cut this to half a day if you cut your most
| efficient interviewers down to 45 mins and don't overdo it
| with peer/stakeholder interviews, but I'd rather make it a
| full day with some breaks. This is because I need time to
| interview you, and that mostly happens after you've run
| through your things in each interview. We should all have
| enough information to decide here, and I'm not taking the
| on-site anyway if the first hour we had together didn't
| generate strong interest, right?
|
| After this, call me within a couple of days, let me know if
| we're doing an offer or not. If we are, let's confirm
| expectations. The only things that will offend me at this
| point is if we're not in the ranges we previously
| discussed, or you want to do more rounds. I'm open to one
| more if there's a good reason for it (not wanting to use
| that person's time for the on-site is not a good reason).
| But we've had a day together. While one day is not
| necessarily enough to know for sure that things will work
| well long-term, even another full day isn't going to change
| anything about that.
|
| Also, while the focus of the original post is mostly
| critical of the lengthy process and it being annoying to
| candidates, there's also the reality that the longer the
| loop, the fewer candidate throughput the hiring manager can
| have. There are only so many interview cycles per week
| before an interviewer burns out on it or can't get their
| job done as well. I'd argue that if you stretch these
| things out to a day, you will think harder about who you
| are bringing on-site.
|
| If we agree for the most part that the time together wasn't
| nonsense and a headache, as you put it, that's a good
| indicator that we should work together!
|
| tl;dr - I'm fine with 7 interviews if they're the right 7
| interviews and planned thoughtfully.
| turdprincess wrote:
| I've been employed by everyone from small consulting firms to
| big tech to FAANG and I've never seen anyone let go for
| performance. This includes serial low performers that
| produced nothing for years. Aside from a very few (like 1 or
| 2) select companies, the bar to staying employed is laughably
| low in tech.
|
| In my opinion this is a big problem. I wish there was a
| stronger culture of letting low performers go quickly in
| tech. This would reduce the need for exhaustive interview
| loops and ultimately make the industry more inclusive because
| you could afford to take a chance on someone without being
| chained to them for years to come.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > I'm a HM at a big tech company with this format as well.
| Honestly, I really like it.
|
| The truth is that nobody likes _being interviewed_. Getting
| tested and judged by strangers isn't fun.
|
| But developers also really don't like being surrounded by
| unqualified developers who slipped through a weak interview
| process. They also don't like having significant numbers of
| their teammates fired and replaced all the time because the
| company had "hire fast, fire fast" interview styles. It's
| miserable and slightly terrifying to work at a company where
| nobody really wants to invest much time into building
| relationships with new hires because many of them are going
| to be PIPed out before the year is over.
|
| So while the interviews may not be fun, the reality is that
| strong developers really appreciate the outcome of such a
| rigorous process. It also helps protect people from becoming
| false negatives because they didn't mesh with a single
| interviewer or struggled with a single interview problem.
|
| So now we're at this weird equilibrium where devs
| simultaneously hate the interview process for themselves but
| appreciate it being applied to everyone around they (even if
| it's not immediately obvious).
| kortilla wrote:
| > the outcome of such a rigorous process. It also helps
| protect people from becoming false negatives because they
| didn't mesh with a single interviewer or struggled with a
| single interview problem.
|
| Not really. When I was at Google there were tons of
| candidates that would get passed on because of one of the
| interviews going badly.
| dento wrote:
| > The truth is that nobody likes being interviewed. Getting
| tested and judged by strangers isn't fun.
|
| I do. It might be because I'm way better at performing in
| interviews than in the actual job. It's also way more
| exciting to do. I have also done interviews on the hiring
| side of the table, and that's not nearly as enjoyable.
| However, especially finding people to work with you is
| quite rewarding.
| benreesman wrote:
| > First: we no longer trust the hiring manager alone, because
| probably they aren't a strong developer
|
| This is a huge problem IMHO. I topped out at L7 on the FAANG EM
| track, but that's dozens of ICs and a few EMs in your org and I
| still think you need to be able to build the software and
| review diffs and write serious ones now and again. Clearly this
| is now only part of your job, not the focus of it, but it's
| very difficult to manage a process that you don't understand
| with some sophistication.
|
| In everything from law to management consulting to steel
| fabrication: the person in charge is the most knowledgeable
| person. Carmack is the best hacker, Mike Krieger wrote code.
| Hell pg wrote this site and the language it's written in while
| building the most successful early-stage investment firm in the
| world.
|
| Obviously directors and VPs and CEOs are delegating the details
| at same point, but this idea that an L6 manager shouldn't need
| to seriously understand the subject matter seems wrong to me
| both in principle and based on watching it go to hell countless
| times.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| An L6 manager and an L6 IC do different work though. And it's
| rarely (read: never) the case that the person in charge is
| most knowledgeable about all the details.
|
| If an L6 manager could keep all of the details of all of the
| things all their reports are working on organized, they
| aren't handling enough scope. Imo that's the difference
| between 5 and 6. You can no longer track all the details in
| one person's head.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| > If an L6 manager could keep all of the details of all of
| the things all their reports are working...
|
| That's not what they said, is it? There is a huge
| difference between what they said and how you interpreted
| it. They said "you need to be able to build the software
| and review diffs and write serious ones now and again" and
| "it's very difficult to manage a process that you don't
| understand with _some_ sophistication " (emphasis mine).
| How do you get 'know every little detail about everything'
| from that?
|
| It seems obviously true to me that any manager who can't
| "build the software", "review diffs", and "write serious
| [diffs] from time to time" is useless. Anyone who disagrees
| with this is probably dead wood, spends their time fighting
| political wars about issues they don't understand, and
| their team is more likely than not constantly fire fighting
| and in serious trouble (in my opinion).
|
| If I had a dollar for every time some clueless manager
| lectured me about how to write software, and I rolled my
| eyes and ignored them, and they never found out (because
| they had no idea what was going on to begin with, and were
| just posturing based on something someone said) I would
| have at least $100. I obviously have a chip on my shoulder
| here, but managers who barely know what is going on still
| tend to want to 'contribute', which of course they can't do
| in reality, so they end up playing keyword matching and
| 'helping' the team avoid 'duplicate effort'. For example,
| they will see one team building something, and another team
| building something, and notice some of the words are the
| same, and then make a big show of 'avoiding duplicate
| work', but in reality the use cases are extremely different
| and nothing was being duplicated. Once they have alienated
| enough of the team, people just start telling them nonsense
| and they have no way to know it. Productive, smart people
| start to leave or lose motivation. A fast pace is replaced
| with constant excuses and a team that is basically no
| longer showing up for work. The manager can't tell the
| difference. This is what managers who aren't in the details
| are like, pretty much without exception.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| You seemed to skip their second paragraph, which is what
| I was replying to.
|
| Someone who can review diffs and even write a serious
| change every now and again _isn 't_ the most
| knowledgeable person on the team. The person who is
| writing and reviewing all of the serious diffs is. And
| for many L6 EMs, you'll have three of those people
| reporting to you, they're all working on different
| projects, each of which you have partial but imprecise
| knowledge of (and sometimes, very little because L5s and
| FAANG are expected to be able to operate mostly
| independently). So you spend your time ensuring that
| everyone on the team has career growth opportunities, and
| that your less experienced people have mentorship, and
| hiring and arguing about headcount allocation and
| prioritization, which all matter, but which are all
| things that most engineers don't want to touch!
|
| Yes, managers should still have engineering experience
| (at least up to like director/vp levels, where IDK maybe
| they don't need it) but having a baseline knowledge of
| how to do a software is not the same as being the most
| knowledgeable person on the team.
| benreesman wrote:
| I made a concrete statement about what I think the
| minimum technical bar for EMs is up to at least L7. I
| also remarked that "clearly this isn't your main focus"
| at that seniority, which _you_ seemed to skip.
|
| The second paragraph, the one you seem to have an issue
| with, a combination of 2 things:
|
| - a few examples of extremely senior, extremely
| successful engineering leaders who stayed at or near the
| top of the game technically, and those are but a few
| examples from a very long list
|
| - an observation that in other fields, law for example,
| they call in the highly-knowledgable, highly-expensive,
| person capable of solving problems few in anyone else in
| the organization can and that this person carries titles
| like "partner" and makes the most money.
|
| I know this is a touchy subject and I've been trying to
| be less flamey on HN so I didn't go hard like the GP, but
| they're fundamentally right even if the language is a bit
| intemperate: there is a prestigious and important job
| track for people who are pretty damned
| technical/quantitative but not wildly hands-on and
| generally concerned as much or more with coordination and
| communication, particularly in cross-functional or
| externally-facing scenarios than software systems per se:
| product manager. As a wild oversimplification: when an EM
| becomes senior enough they end up as a CTO, and when a PM
| becomes senior enough they end up as a CEO. This is
| natural and healthy division of labor.
|
| An EM is concerned first and foremost with the health,
| happiness, and therefore productivity of engineers. On
| the foundation of the trust and rapport and deep
| knowledge that comes from that kind of engagement with
| their team, they are able to also be concerned with how
| their team fits into the bigger business picture: is this
| the right team for the needs of the business, what hiring
| and performance management would be necessary to make it
| so if not, what is a realistic schedule for the work that
| needs to be done given the strengths and weakness of the
| team members both generally and _at this moment in time_?
|
| When I'm wearing my hacker hat I have no interest in
| reporting to an EM who couldn't do my job in a pinch, I
| might respect that person on a lot of levels but I won't
| be interested in their opinion of how I should do my job.
| And at no time in my career has it been so easy to
| identify such managers: they are the "back to the office
| damn the torpedos" crowd. When the task tool, and the
| code review tool, and the oncall/incident situation, and
| the build wiki are not sufficiently comprehensible to an
| EM to form an opinion of who is doing a good job, the
| instinct to do "ass-in-seat" performance evaluation is
| strong, the instinct to be "visible" is strong, and
| narrative that there's value add looks very threadbare
| over Zoom.
|
| This bloc is probably too big and too entrenched to
| dislodge, but WFH for 2 years working out just fine is
| the best chance we're going to get. IMHO.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| > - a few examples of extremely senior, extremely
| successful engineering leaders who stayed at or near the
| top of the game technically, and those are but a few
| examples from a very long list
|
| But all of these are the exception, not the norm. You
| said you've been in a FAANG style org, so you've been
| able to view the org-chart. For every Jeff Dean or John
| Carmack, there's three-dozen directors and VPs who manage
| large orgs whose names you've never heard of and who
| haven't checked in code in half a decade. They're still
| usually very good managers.
|
| (A reasonable opinion I've seen, btw is that if you're
| managing a team of say 5 or more people, if you have time
| to make regular code contributions,you probably aren't
| focusing enough on your other managerial responsibilities
| and are letting your reports down)
|
| > - an observation that in other fields, law for example,
| they call in the highly-knowledgable, highly-expensive,
| person capable of solving problems few in anyone else in
| the organization can and that this person carries titles
| like "partner" and makes the most money.
|
| This is pseudo-true. Partners are called partners not
| because they're capable of solving problems no one else
| can, but because they carry an ownership stake, and I'm
| not a lawyer (and presumably neither are you) but the
| impression I get is that law is far more delegatory than
| software, where a partner may call in some favors to
| address a problem, but will also have 20 Jr. associates
| investigate 20 different possible approaches and write 20
| different briefs to then choose between.
|
| > When I'm wearing my hacker hat I have no interest in
| reporting to an EM who couldn't do my job in a pinch,
|
| Maybe we have different definitions here, but I've never,
| or perhaps once, had a manager who I felt could do my job
| in a pinch, and I was a new grad and he was the worst
| manager I've had at the time (although he _very_ quickly
| got better as he learned to be more hands off). A manager
| who could do my job in a pinch is too micromanaging.
| Maybe you mean something different in that they could,
| given a week or two to turn-up on the project take over,
| but that 's not really what I'd consider "in a pinch".
| polio wrote:
| Do people call it a diff in the rest of AANG?
| benreesman wrote:
| I think it's called "changeset" at Google, or at least was,
| and "PR" is becoming pretty common everywhere because of
| GitHub. But "diff" seems to be gaining some ground as a
| general term in the monorepo/unified-build/trunk-only
| world. Uber uses/used Phabricator and I think there are
| some other high-profile shops as well.
|
| I don't know that there's like one leading term, but I
| think everyone knows what "diff" means both literally and
| as a connotation that it's a rebase rather than merge
| workflow.
| jrockway wrote:
| It was "CL".
| soheil wrote:
| > These roles pay a huge sum of money, so there's a lot of
| worry that someone will be hired who doesn't really meet the
| bar, you know?
|
| No, I don't. Making the wrong hire is costly not because of the
| total annual compensation, but because of the upfront cost
| which is realized the moment the employee signs the offer
| letter.
|
| All the admin stuff.
|
| By your logic you shouldn't fire someone either (at least not
| that easily) and maybe that's why so many FAANG engineers end
| up "cruising" because the company is so scared of hiring new
| talent.
| georgeburdell wrote:
| >Second: Is it really fair to have just one or two developers
| evaluate you? When I first was an interviewer, I liked
| everybody! I would have hired them all. So getting multiple
| data points matters. Best to have at least a couple dev
| interviews.
|
| Except FAANG interviews require excellence on almost all of the
| interviews, so the extra people only represent further
| opportunities to be denied.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| It's the same principle behind using large numbers of disks
| in certain RAID configurations. If the pool can't tolerate a
| disk or two failing, adding more disks increases the chances
| of one or more failures occurring and tanking the pool.
| cableshaft wrote:
| Exactly. Many of these interviews it only takes one person to
| feel 'eh' or negative on the person to tank the candidate, so
| the more people you interview that person, the more likely
| you're going to have that impression on one of those people
| (especially if it's an all day series of interviews, you'll
| probably start to get mentally exhausted near the end of it),
| and the more likely any given candidate will be rejected.
| jeffybefffy519 wrote:
| Why not just do 1-2 interviews with all relevant parties.
| emrah wrote:
| > Is it really fair to have just one or two developers evaluate
| you?
|
| Output of multiple interviewers are combined by AND'ing, so
| when any one interviewer has even the slightest hesitation, you
| are out. Because of this, more is not necessarily better
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| If we're talking about a one phonecall + one in person session
| with different teams, lasting 2, 3 hours max, sure. If you
| expect me to take time off work 4, 5, 6 times and get
| inteviewed for several hours each time, you're either paying me
| for the lost time, or I'm not going through the process the
| moment i find out the length.
| gcheong wrote:
| Why not extend this same criterion to the work itself? I mean
| you can't really trust that any developer is writing the best
| code at any given point in time so it would seem at least a
| minimum of 5 or 6 developers should weigh in on any given pull
| request. Maybe that is the way it works there idk and probably
| never will.
| khazhoux wrote:
| It's extremely common to have that many +1's required for a
| PR that touches several parts of the codebase.
|
| And fixing a bad commit doesn't require 6 months of
| emotionally draining work.
| igetspam wrote:
| Don't forget the need to filter for bias. Many many moons ago,
| when Google's ATS was young, they didn't weight scores based on
| the interviewer. After some incredibly confusing low scores and
| some obviously bad hires, it was determined that there was a
| need to account for internal bias. That lead to applying
| weights to the interviewer's score because you still needed
| them to interview but you also knew that you couldn't trust
| them outright. More interviewers, more data points and better
| selection even with accounting for bias.
| karaterobot wrote:
| That's probably true, but I think at least part of it is just
| smaller companies doing what bigger companies do, in a kind of
| cargo cult ritual.
|
| The last company I worked at had 8 interviews, which I thought
| was a lot. My current company (about 100 people) had no less
| than 11 scheduled interviews!
|
| Of those, only the first 2 were with people in my department --
| my manager first, then my manager and immediate coworkers.
| There was another group call with people in a related team I
| might conceivably be expected to liason with eventually. Fair
| enough.
|
| The remaining 8 calls were with leadership in every other
| division in the company, most of which I would never work with.
| People with jobs where I don't even know what they do, and I'm
| sure they had no idea what I do. I just politely made
| conversation with them and answered their (very general)
| questions.
|
| Now that I've worked there a while, I have never spoken with
| these people again, or worked in any way with the teams they
| oversee.
|
| I've also participated in a few interviews at this company now,
| from the other end of the Zoom call, and I know how it works:
| literally every branch of the org chart gets a meeting for
| every interviewee, regardless of what they're applying for.
| Everyone has a chance to say "no", but in practice nobody
| outside the relevant teams is going to exercise that veto,
| because they are well aware that they are unqualified to judge
| the candidate's skills, and will never have to work with them
| anyway.
|
| It's just a big waste of time for everyone involved.
| imapeopleperson wrote:
| All great points - you obviously condense this into a single
| day, right?
| dleslie wrote:
| What I'm reading here is that even as an experienced
| interviewer you struggle to make the format effective and
| equitable.
|
| Sounds to me like the format isn't worth keeping; time to hire
| more, and fire fast?
| kjeetgill wrote:
| I never understand answers of this format: "status quo has
| flaw of some known, finite impact" time to "completely
| ridiculously overcompensate, overreact, and make arbitrary
| move?"
|
| I can't even fathom in what ways you think "time to hire
| more, and fire fast?" is more "effective and equitable"? You
| just shove even more risk onto individuals who might be
| getting their footing still.
|
| You're just turning a 8-9 hours commitment to an interview
| into a 6 month commitment. Sure, you get paid but you also
| have to deal with churn and burn.
|
| I mean, did you think stack ranking was a good idea?
| dleslie wrote:
| The response is to the needless growth in complexity of the
| hiring process; advocating for reducing that complexity is
| appropriate.
|
| You're tacitly expressing a concern that a fast hiring
| commitment would be riskier; but that's not necessarily so.
| A minimal set of filters are meaningfully effective:
| resume, references, and meet the team. Anything beyond that
| doesn't have just diminishing returns, it can negatively
| impact the company by narrowing the field of viable
| candidates too far.
| kjeetgill wrote:
| I guess I don't think 2 phone calls and 5-6 hr onsite is
| _that_ complex. Maybe the onsite could be 3 instead: 2
| code + behavioral, but I can 't imagine wanting to do
| less than that.
| dleslie wrote:
| 5-6 hr onsite is a strong filter against folks who are
| presently employed; particularly those who cannot spare
| personal days or unpaid days for every interview.
| GeneralMayhem wrote:
| I don't think that argument is particularly relevant in
| the tech industry. It's not that hard to find a "sick"
| day, even if you don't have unlimited PTO. And especially
| during COVID, where going missing for a day might go
| unnoticed for a lot of people.
| mahalel wrote:
| Are you really advocating people take sick days to
| interview for other jobs?
| prepend wrote:
| > expressing a concern that a fast hiring commitment
| would be riskier; but that's not necessarily so.
|
| I think it is necessarily so. Hiring fast is effectively
| hiring randomly and that is way riskier.
|
| Would you read random books? Watch random movies? Maybe,
| but probably not.
|
| Would you buy a random car? Of course not. Would you buy
| a random home? Etc etc
|
| You can logistically reduce the number of days by maybe
| doing multiple interviews into a single day, but that's
| still hours.
|
| I've worked back in the dot com days where you were hired
| on the spot and that was fun until they fired on the
| spot.
|
| Having a well-designed process that takes a while is not
| perfect, but is better than the other options. "Slow to
| hire, slow to fire" is a good maxim.
| dleslie wrote:
| I'm not advocating for hiring literally anyone. If they
| pass your credential requirements, reference checks, and
| team meet then they're already passing through
| significant filtering.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| Resumes aren't really credentials. They're lists of
| things provided by the individual themselves and are
| almost always inflated in some way. Reference checks are
| just "I got someone you don't know (and shouldn't trust)
| to say good things about me", and meet the team is just
| "I can talk to people and sound smart for about an hour
| or two".
|
| There are a very large number of idiots who can do those
| things. I strongly disagree that this is a significant
| filter.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Have you ever been fired before? It sucks.
|
| I'd much rather not get hired then get fired "fast".
| sokoloff wrote:
| To be honest, it sounds like "the format with only 3-4
| interviews wasn't effective and equitable, so we adjusted it
| to make it more so, resulting in the current 5-7 format..."
| dleslie wrote:
| Yah, and I expect they'll find that insufficient and find
| themselves considering 8-9 interviews! ;)
| vsareto wrote:
| Fire fast is a harmful policy to employees in the US due to
| health insurance being tied to employment.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| I'm not sure that's feasible. Not sure what the roadblocks
| are, but every company I've ever worked for seems to have
| real reservations, usually at the HR level, with simply
| getting rid of bad eggs.
| lbotos wrote:
| 1. Often, legally, firing people is harder than hiring.
|
| 2. Hire more, fire fast sounds good on paper but will destroy
| morale as the team identity will be constantly influx.
|
| 3. Engineers will spend _less_ time onboarding newer
| engineers to the detriment of everyone because well, they
| might not just last.
| dleslie wrote:
| Basically everywhere in NA has allowances for probationary
| periods with at-will employment. Moreover, prospective
| hires could start on contract.
|
| Morale is improved when team members feel like they have
| some control over their membership.
|
| It seems like you're assuming that a great many people
| would be fired; why so? In my experience, having worked for
| several such companies, firing is rare because even minimal
| filters are effective.
|
| Resume check, reference check, and meet the team. Done.
| GeneralMayhem wrote:
| What's practically possible is always a subset of what's
| legally possible. I think probationary periods/contract-
| to-hire situations are extremely unlikely to work for
| anything beyond absolute entry level, for a number of
| reasons.
|
| For one thing, it's a huge amount of uncertainty to put
| on the potential hire, which means you'll be strongly
| biasing your hiring pool towards people who don't have
| better options. It feels like in an effort to reduce the
| interview time, you've effectively expanded it to
| multiple months.
|
| Second, how do you calibrate the "default" option? Is the
| expectation that everyone on a probation period will be
| hired unless proven otherwise, or is it that most will be
| let go unless actively vouched for? Is that expectation
| clear across the team? If there's a mismatch across team
| members, you have big problems. People who want to keep a
| prospect will be annoyed if they're let go, and vice
| versa. People who need to work with a prospect will have
| to figure out whether it's safe to actually trust them
| with anything - on the one hand, you have to give them
| enough work to prove themselves; on the other hand, you
| can't give them anything too important or with too long a
| horizon, because they might be gone before they get to
| launch.
|
| And finally - how long does that trial period need to go
| on to be useful? The goal in designing a hiring process
| is to get a reasonable level of precision/recall
| (different companies will balance differently between
| those) with a reasonable level of investment. If you've
| increased investment without increasing precision, then
| you've done something wrong. Given how long it takes to
| ramp up a new hire and have them actually be productive,
| I don't think you're going to learn much in a ~6 month
| probationary period that you couldn't already tell in a
| day of interviews.
| prepend wrote:
| How many people have you hired? This doesn't seem like a
| perspective from experience but a proposed hypothetical
| in a world that doesn't exist.
| ratww wrote:
| _> Basically everywhere in NA has allowances for
| probationary periods with at-will employment._
|
| Yep. Lots of places with even stricter pro-employee laws,
| including Europe, also have it.
| StupidUser123 wrote:
| I'm not saying you're categorically wrong, but this
| doesn't match with my experience, at all. If you're an HM
| and this works for you and your company, great, but the
| HMs responding here don't agree.
|
| The processes you are questioning scale to thousands of
| people with varying backgrounds. It's not an accident all
| of these companies do this. Your process places extreme
| trust in one group of people. It's just so risky.
|
| Also, resumes are mostly bullshit, IMO. Reference checks
| are complete bullshit, IMO. I've worked with my buddies
| at startups (who get lofty titles) and just have them
| give me reference checks. Other references have asked me
| for call scripts.
|
| Also keep in mind that most of these big tech jobs are
| highly competitive. Your solution eventually requires a
| coin toss if you have limited spots. There's only so much
| data you can collect from the process you propose. The
| natural thing is to then assess each candidate a bit more
| until you're confident you've picked the right one. And
| then you're here.
| dleslie wrote:
| I've hired more than my share, yes.
|
| Truly bullshit credentialing is immediately apparent to
| teams that receive new hires. In some places, it's fraud
| and actionable by the company as fraud.
|
| I don't think companies with billions in revenue really
| have a budget constraint on hiring; it's structural
| constraints that are holding them back. They can, and do,
| engage in mass hiring and construction of whole new
| departments when it suits their strategy.
|
| That said, further constraints can happen at the
| credentialling level; I'm not advocating hiring literally
| anyone.
| abeppu wrote:
| 4. I think there's also a potential cost to your future
| ability to recruit. Once people know you're quick to fire,
| candidates will view your offer less favorably if they also
| have an offer from a company with a longer interview
| process, but who doesn't have the reputation for firing
| quickly.
| b20000 wrote:
| in the US employment is at will or whatever it's called so
| they can fire you on the spot for no reason at all.
| GeneralMayhem wrote:
| They can _legally_ fire you on the spot, yes, but all
| that means is that the fired person can 't sue their
| former employer. That doesn't mean it's actually a good
| strategy for the employer to do so frequently, because
| the employer's relationship with any given employee
| doesn't exist in a vacuum, and has effects on the
| employer's relationship with other employees and
| potential hires.
| thrtythreeforty wrote:
| This is true but if it's well known that you fire, say,
| 30% of your hires after 6 months then you'll have a much
| harder time attracting the kind of candidates you want to
| be attracting. You can compensate for the devs'
| opportunity cost with, well, compensation, but you'll be
| competing with FAANG, whose high-turn reputation isn't
| even 30% bad (with the possible exception of Netflix)
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Hire fast and fire requires even more effort and commitment
| from a candidate, I'm not sure how that would be an
| improvement. Firing fast would be like 3 months of
| interviews!
|
| I'd also like to add that having multiple interviewers, if
| they have diverse backgrounds, is more likely to be equitable
| than a single interviewer.
| newsclues wrote:
| But with being hired you get paid.
|
| If employers with lengthy interviews want to pay people for
| their time that would be fair.
| dleslie wrote:
| It's not so much effort or commitment if the team is fully
| remote.
| StupidUser123 wrote:
| You're asking someone to quit their job to maybe get this
| new job. And you won't know for months so all your other
| offers are gone. So if it doesn't work out, you're
| unemployed with no prospects. Sounds terrible.
|
| I'd take 15 interviews before taking that risk.
| dsugarman wrote:
| I assume there is some level of exaggeration here?
|
| If not, it might help to actually try this. Take an
| aggregate of 15 interviews in the next couple of months
| and you're bound to learn something. My hypothesis would
| be some new empathy for interviewees but maybe you find a
| better role at a better company in the process. If the
| worst case is that it is a colossal waste of time, then
| you again have found empathy for the interviewee.
|
| Ultimately, you might be narrowing your pool of
| applicants to only those willing or unwitting to go
| through that process.
| dleslie wrote:
| If it takes months to determine that someone is a bad fit
| for a team then the team has internal issues that need to
| be resolved.
|
| Moreover, if someone has the skills on paper, and the
| references to support that, then any tech screening is
| unnecessary. It just tests for ability to pass tech
| screens.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| That's what internships are in a way. Do you think that's
| a bad idea?
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Internships are probably the best way to hire, but they
| only work for people at that specific stage of life.
|
| University students already have a three-month gap in
| their schedule where they aren't doing anything, so they
| are willing to take a temporary role to fill that gap.
|
| Experienced people who already have a job aren't going to
| drop that to take on a temporary role unless they have an
| unusually high risk-tolerance or unless they are
| desperate.
| dleslie wrote:
| In my point of view, most hiring requires a form of
| internship. No one drops on to an established team with
| full knowledge and experience with the internal tools,
| procedures and products.
|
| And yes, I lament that internships are so maligned. It
| shouldn't be that interns are poorly paid; we should be
| able to hire someone with decades of experience in a
| tangentially-related field at a competitive salary, and
| consider them to be interning on an unfamiliar field.
| sahila wrote:
| The problem is "skill on paper" is just that, words.
| There's tons of java developers but not all the same.
| References too are pretty easy to game. Alternatively if
| by skills on paper you mean open source projects, that's
| fair but most developers (and certainly most new grads)
| won't have anything worthwhile to show.
|
| The tech screens can show a person's skill. Sure, lots of
| people are gaming that too and memorize solutions, but
| that's not most candidates.
| dleslie wrote:
| There's a difference between: Foo Corp
| - Wrote Java on Bar project
|
| And: Foo Corp - Designed and
| developed infrastructure for Baz for Bar project (Java)
|
| A resume that doesn't give an idea of what someone did,
| beyond the tech they used to accomplish their goals,
| isn't likely to pass my interest test.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| There's only a very, very small difference between those
| two things though. I'm not hiring anyone based on either
| of those bulletpoints or similar ones; no matter how many
| there are.
|
| It's so easy to inflate your role on a project and what
| you contributed and the people who are best at it are
| usually also able to talk, talk, talk.
|
| The first interview question I ask is so easy that I
| don't think anyone should be paid to write software
| anywhere if they can't solve it. And yet, I have
| candidates with plenty of nice bulletpoints like your
| second one on their resume who can't solve it or take
| 30-45 minutes to solve it. Good candidates take less than
| 10 minutes, very good ones take less than 5.
| StupidUser123 wrote:
| I think we should agree to disagree. We both seem to like
| our own process and see major flaws with the other's. The
| best solution is to work at different companies.
| dleslie wrote:
| FWIW, I was introduced to this method by others, and have
| used/been a part of this method at several companies now;
| and I find that each company where I have seen it
| employed has had remarkably low turn-over and high team
| morale. Much lower turn over, and higher morale, than the
| companies I've been at that have done otherwise. Also
| anecdotally, the companies that employ this method have
| been the same companies that seemed most willing to train
| and aid an under-performing employee, rather than simply
| let them go.
|
| I think it's because the awareness of the need to ensure
| performance is baked-in to the process; rather than
| having an assumption that the hire should have a high
| level of performance. Employees aren't like other
| physical assets, like computers and other hardware,
| they're malleable human beings that are accepting of
| improvement.
|
| But I don't know of any large studies on the merits of
| this approach, so perhaps I've simply been lucky to have
| had positive experiences.
| marssaxman wrote:
| "Hire more, fire fast" does not sound like a company I'd want
| to work for.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Ok well, that makes sense on the other hand I went through a 7
| interview round and I ended up taking another job before the
| last call to tell me you got the job!
|
| That said it was mainly because they said after several
| interviews oh you just have one more to go but then the next
| interview said you have one more to go and they would also say
| you will be hearing from us in a week but it turned out I heard
| from them in two weeks.
|
| But in the end, actually, both jobs paid the same, but one of
| them seemed to me to value my time more.
| ozzythecat wrote:
| > First: we no longer trust the hiring manager alone, because
| probably they aren't a strong developer. We instead trust
| strong developers that are well trained at evaluating good
| devs. At the same time, we don't want to thrust a dev onto a
| hiring manager, so they also need to interview you too and have
| a say.
|
| We decided to ignore this protocol and hired a senior lever
| manager from IBM. After the next two years, we had an IBM
| fiefdom. This person hired his IBM buddies, who hired their own
| IBM talent.
|
| None of these people accepted our culture. It reflected in the
| organization's output. Turns out, when you bring in people from
| these legacy companies where people seemingly coast by and
| don't actually produce out, and you have little oversight on
| what they actually output, it just turns into an inefficient
| and ineffective mess.
|
| This went on for a while until the entire org was gutted with
| over half the people fired.
| hinkley wrote:
| You've already identified several ways to improve this. You
| don't want to waste the devs' time so you screen with low tech
| questions, which are also the only ones the HM is qualified to
| ask.
|
| (Also, nothing is as expensive to a dev as a manager with too
| much free time. Spending a little on HR may be a QoL
| improvement even if we never hire)
|
| I am also exceptionally fond of being a silent party in an
| interview.
|
| Nobody wants to walk into a room with four people who are all
| asking questions, but I can learn a lot about people just by
| watching their interactions. Indeed I learn more about
| secondary characteristics than the interviewer because they're
| wrapped up in the answer, not side comments the candidate makes
| about development philosophy.
|
| Additionally, it takes less investment in an interview to ride
| shotgun like this. So jumping from 1 to 2 is not twice as
| expensive, and it protects you from hiring decisions being made
| with only one employee having been privy to the conversation.
| Especially with all of the EEO concerns that come from he said
| she said situations like this.
|
| Three is the most I would put in a room, and only if two are
| asking questions and the third only answers them.
|
| But you can still easily get seven people in front of the
| candidate with only 3 sessions in this way.
| angarg12 wrote:
| I was going to say this.
|
| To add more: a single person (HM) might have biases for or
| against certain candidates. More people in the loop brings in
| diversity and helps to keep interviewers honest and consistent.
|
| Also these roles are usually high stakes and the cost of a bad
| hire is too high.
| nowherebeen wrote:
| > usually high stakes
|
| You obviously haven't worked in finance. Google is as far
| from high stakes as you can get.
| pards wrote:
| Exactly. The Knight Capital incident springs to mind.
| randmeerkat wrote:
| > Exactly. The Knight Capital incident springs to mind.
|
| Sure, but was that the engineering team's fault or the
| fault of bad management culture? I suspect it was
| management that failed to adequately support their
| engineers and ensure they were well staffed, compensated,
| and didn't have to work extraordinary hours to meet
| absurd "deadlines" that resulted in that fiasco.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| Most orgs use a veto model. If not everyone is a strong hire,
| the candidate is rejected. The bias is still there, just not
| a positive bias now. It's a strong negative bias. And
| obviously most people don't want to come across as "too
| easy". Essential you're positively reinforcing to reject more
| and more candidates and make the whole process a nightmare.
| igetspam wrote:
| I will accept a veto but only if the interviewer can
| explain it sufficiently. I think it's important to trust
| but it's also important prevent abuse from bias. (Someone
| who abuses interview vetoes is likely a poison pill
| themselves and that's something I have to deal with as a
| manager.)
| mabbo wrote:
| Amazon had an interesting system for this: one of the
| interviewers, the 'bar raiser' gets the final decision,
| ideally based on what everyone else says (but not
| necessarily).
|
| That BR has done 100+ interviews, took a lot of additional
| training, and is empowered to ask a lot of questions to
| dive into the feedback people are giving about the
| candidate. So if someone is being too hard, or has a weird
| bias, the BR can override them.
|
| It's a fascinating system and seems to work okay.
| mabbo wrote:
| Yeah this also is a big issue. It was nice having the
| "debrief" meeting afterwards. This meant that people had to
| back up what they had written.
|
| " _Why_ do you think this person 'isnt a good culture fit'?
| Oh because the team you run are all 20-something male
| brogrammers and this candidate is a 38 year old woman with
| kids? Hey cool, that's illegal discrimination."
| daviddever23box wrote:
| Keep in mind that the hiring and interview process is bi-
| directional: if one finds that the company to which one has
| applied potentially consists of terrible human beings, exit
| quickly and move on to the next opportunity (unless you are
| yourself a toxic influence, at which point the culture fit
| may very well be right).
| mnd999 wrote:
| jorpal wrote:
| At least half of them are Indian, in my experience.
| uxp100 wrote:
| (For a definition of white that is heavily Asian)
| [deleted]
| prepend wrote:
| I've worked in tech for decades and I've never experienced
| a process with "7 straight white guys" much less every
| time.
|
| First, how do you know the sexual orientation of
| interviewers?
|
| Next, tech is like 50-70% Asian so it would be so weird to
| only have white guys doing programming interviews.
|
| The guy pet is spot on as programming is way heavy in guys.
|
| But I'm not sure why you would think that 7 interviews = 7
| straight white guys.
| bigcloud1299 wrote:
| I joined a subsidiary of a large company. I was the
| second non white guy at the company. Never knew a tech
| company could be so white.
| ezrast wrote:
| That is great signal for the candidate, though. If a
| company is putting all of their decision-making power into
| the hands of douchebros, it's best to make that clear in
| the interview process so that talented candidates can stay
| away.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| I experienced almost that complete opposite of that, for
| sure..
| Aeolun wrote:
| > To add more: a single person (HM) might have biases for or
| against certain candidates.
|
| That would be true for all organisations. You could do 6x
| more interviews if they were all a single round.
|
| > Also these roles are usually high stakes and the cost of a
| bad hire is too high.
|
| Hiring a brain surgeon is high stakes. I don't know a lot of
| software positions where it is true.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Hiring a brain surgeon is high stakes. I don't know a
| lot of software positions where it is true. _
|
| Arguably it's not.
|
| But if I think I'm doing a guy a favour by 'giving them a
| chance' and hiring them when they're marginal, and they
| quit a stable job and move across the country, then I fire
| them? In that case I didn't do them a favour by giving them
| a chance.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| I mean brain surgeons tend to be board certified. Don't
| really have that process for SWE, do we?
| ballenf wrote:
| A determined senior engineer could destroy a company in a
| day. At large companies they could cost the company
| millions.
|
| While we like to pretend there are technical controls to
| prevent this, actually effective measures would come at a
| high cost to productivity.
|
| And at huge FAANG companies replace "department or team"
| for company above. A bad hire can destroy a team or product
| or the team's reputation in the company.
|
| Brain surgeons are not high stakes hires because they're
| not operating on their employer's brain and there are
| inherent barriers to entry in that field. The "brain
| surgeon" license actually means a lot.
| alexashka wrote:
| > these roles are usually high stakes and the cost of a bad
| hire is too high
|
| Really? High stakes? This fucking site.
|
| Have you ever worked as a software developer at a
| corporation? _Nothing_ about it is high stakes. You spend
| most of your time dealing with useless idiots who report to
| other useless idiots, who report to other useless idiots,
| about a useless product they think is a great idea that every
| non-idiot knows is useless garbage.
|
| That's how you get Google not creating a single non garbage
| product over the past 15 years.
|
| When they did Google Maps, did they have 7 interview
| processes? I bet you they didn't.
|
| Here is how the real world works - 0.0001% create something,
| then 99.9999% turn it into what 99.9999% of people are. What
| that is - I leave to you as an exercise.
| what-the-grump wrote:
| Hey stop stepping on fragile egos. We gave out
| participation trophies to a whole generation.
|
| Hiring one wrong dev will end google!
| nowherebeen wrote:
| I have to agree with you. So many people try justify the
| interview process with their intelligence or "costing the
| company multi-millions". It's all tied to their ego. I
| wonder how much of it is stockholm syndrome.
| greenyoda wrote:
| > When they did Google Maps, did they have 7 interview
| processes?
|
| Actually, the original work for Google Maps was done by
| three companies that Google acquired:
|
| > _Google Maps first started as a C++ program designed by
| two Danish brothers, Lars and Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen, and
| Noel Gordon and Stephen Ma, at the Sydney-based company
| Where 2 Technologies. It was first designed to be
| separately downloaded by users, but the company later
| pitched the idea for a purely Web-based product to Google
| management, changing the method of distribution. In October
| 2004, the company was acquired by Google Inc. where it
| transformed into the web application Google Maps.
|
| In the same month, Google acquired Keyhole, a geospatial
| data visualization company (with investment from the CIA),
| whose marquee application suite, Earth Viewer, emerged as
| the highly successful Google Earth application in 2005
| while other aspects of its core technology were integrated
| into Google Maps. In September 2004, Google acquired
| ZipDash, a company that provided realtime traffic
| analysis._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps#Acquisitions
|
| Android was also acquired:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#Hi
| s...
|
| Some of the things that Google is best known for were not
| invented by Google employees.
| novok wrote:
| High stakes means high investment. You can't just hire a
| dev and have them running in a week, their bad work could
| cost the company multi-millions in obvious and non obvious
| ways and proper onboarding takes months at minimum.
|
| On the other hand, a cashier can be replaced in a week, and
| they don't effect the entire future of the company as SOP.
| deckard1 wrote:
| > their bad work could cost the company multi-millions
|
| That's such patently absurd bullshit. Google has a code
| review process. Almost any large tech company has this
| today. The review process is to ensure that it's a team
| effort when a major screw-up happens. You don't just let
| some new employee merge untested and unreviewed code.
|
| You know who I always see harming the company with
| outages and downtime? Seniors and managers _that cut
| corners_. I 've had managers before that put in place all
| these safe guards that go out the window the very second
| a deadline is threatened. They merge untested code. They
| route traffic haphazardly. They fuck around with DNS or
| user accounts on a whim. Because no one is there to tell
| them not to. They believe they are the exception. The
| rules are for the minions below them. If you're working
| late on a weekend cleaning up a huge mess, there is a
| good chance it's because some manager-turned-arsonist
| fucked around with _the process_. They cut corners on the
| planning, the implementation, or the roll-out.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Eh I don't believe it is a million dollar hit. If it is
| then you have bad controls and bad process.
|
| Google is optimizing for the wrong things. The reason
| Google has hard interviews is to minimize attrition and
| make everyone who passes the interview feel smart.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| Ok, for the record, I haven't worked at a FAANG company
| so the stakes weren't as high. Just video game studios,
| so million dollar companies not billion.
|
| Even on our systems, we had so many redundancies and test
| servers run, that even when a mistake did run through
| (which was exceedingly rare, given the testing), the roll
| back was quick. A single dev, especially a new hire, was
| unable to make multi-million dollar mistakes. It had to
| be several systems to fail, in order to be released to
| the wild. I can't believe any of the FAANG companies got
| to where they are with such a "cowboy" attitude as to
| say, "it's your third day, push that untested code
| straight to prod".
|
| Edit: autocorrect hates me
| sgustard wrote:
| > we had so many redundancies and test servers run
|
| How did you hire the developers who built those systems?
| Was the bar higher then?
|
| Lots of companies have institutional memory of how their
| first few hires were crucial to make the company
| successful. It's a tough decision whether to keep
| standards high, or risk losing the skills that got you
| this far. Eventually the early people leave. Where I
| work, the stuff they built is viewed as some kind of
| godlike crystalline shrine that you dare not touch.
| nowherebeen wrote:
| > their bad work could cost the company multi-millions
|
| They is false and hyperbole to justify your argument. If
| a single employee can cost a big company like Google
| multi-millions, then there is a company structure
| problem. You make it sound like there are no system of
| checks. The very definition of being 1 in 10,000
| employees at big corp is that no one is important enough
| to cost the company multi-millions.
| lokar wrote:
| Google has has 6+ interviews since at least 2003
| logifail wrote:
| > Can one interview really tell if you're good problem solving,
| coding, algorithms/data structures, and any specialization the
| role has?
|
| Sorry, but if it can't, aren't you doing the interview wrong?
| azinman2 wrote:
| They all are doing the interview wrong and everyone knows it.
| Unfortunately there aren't a lot of great alternatives that
| don't take up even more time.
| logifail wrote:
| > They all are doing the interview wrong and everyone knows
| it
|
| Most countries manage to devise the testing for a driving
| licence based on - at most - one theory test and one
| practical test. The practical test typically includes many
| different situations and manoeuvres in order to assess the
| candidate's suitabilty for being allowed to drive.
|
| You don't sit a practical driving test in which you
| consider one single aspect of driving. The test attempts to
| cover everything. In one test.
|
| Why would one not attempt to devise an interview along the
| same lines?
| politelemon wrote:
| > When I first was an interviewer, I liked everybody!
|
| I've been interviewing for a long time and I _still_ really
| like everybody. I want everyone to join and even if they're not
| a fit I want them to join and want us to spend time on bringing
| them up to speed and nurturing them. Of course I'm aware that
| an org isn't always able to do that.
| zerr wrote:
| What do you think about missing on people who are not desperate
| enough to go through such processes?
| rl1987 wrote:
| When they were crying about developer shortage for so long that
| they switched from regular tears to crocodile tears...
| temptemptemp111 wrote:
| jrmg wrote:
| I think people here (perhaps not OP) are not all thinking 'an
| interview' is the same thing.
|
| In our company, it's normal to spend 1/2 - 1 day at the office -
| or nowadays by video - being interviewed by 5-10 _people_, in
| sets of 2. It's been like this for all my 20 years in the
| industry.
|
| It's not normal to have to interview on 5-10 different
| _occasions_ - that would be terrible!
| jl2718 wrote:
| Because they can. There's way too many of us, so the expectation
| has changed from 'trainable' to 'pre-trained'. It keeps changing
| too. Just 5 years ago, hiring was mostly leetcode from junior to
| principal. Now I think it's changing again, but I don't know what
| to. I've found that developer productivity is mostly determined
| by facility with the DevOps tools and frameworks. I hate to say
| that because it turns hiring into buzzword bingo, and this has
| become impossibly complex.
| rmk wrote:
| Sadly, 5-7 interviews are quite common. I think this is because
| of a few factors:
|
| - Instituting a multi-round interview process makes the company
| feel like it's very selective and hires only the best. This also
| discourages 'shoppers'.
|
| - It is perceived to be more 'democratic': if there are 5-6
| people in the team plus one manager, by giving everyone the
| chance to interview and weigh in on the hiring decision, it will
| be felt that everyone has got a say in who they work with. Plus
| it now becomes a collective decision owned by the team: if they
| hire a dud, they have no one but themselves to blame and they
| still have to work with him and produce results. This will reduce
| the incentive to hire someone less skilled (no one will admit
| that it will also reduce the incentive to hire someone more
| skilled or with a different background that is not easily
| evaluated).
| nopenopenopeno wrote:
| OP is not kidding about 'Blast From The Past'
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=9_mi3qoA_QY
| _tom_ wrote:
| Here's a 2013 article on google's results on evaluating various
| factors in hiring.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-...
|
| Basically, no one really knows how to hire.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Tech companies are extremely risk adverse when it comes to hiring
| the "wrong" person. More interviews means more people to spread
| to blame over if a wrong hire happens. At seven interviews, if
| everyone signed off on the bad hire, that wasn't anyone's fault,
| it must have been that the hire was skilled at deception or some
| other deflection.
| py_or_dy wrote:
| Curious, what is the "wrong" person? I've worked with some co-
| workers before that were clearly not a fit, but it was so
| obvious. One time I was asked to help a new hire with a project
| that was falling behind. He had spent 2 months trying to get
| some javascript (that he copied from a project I had done)
| working. He didn't even know what the web console was. As soon
| as I opened it and saw the javascript errors the fix was
| simple. But he spent 2 months just smearing random javascript
| around... Surely it would be easy to filter that person out
| during interviewing.
|
| But on the other end... I've worked with some people that are
| pretty good at leetcode and very fast coders. But even though
| they write many pages of code every day and tons of commits,
| their code is absolutely horrible, full of bugs, impossible to
| read. They got stuff done, but it was at great cost in the
| future. That was mostly why I left my original job in the first
| place (looking for work now for 18+ months). We hired a couple
| of new people and they were pumping out so much code I couldn't
| keep up with all their commits. Bugs started rolling in and
| they were too busy working on the new projects to fix their old
| crap. Boss had me hunting down and digging through their
| garbage code while my projects were getting behind and I was
| the one "under-preforming". I started going insane, unable to
| get out of bed, staring out the window for 12+ hours a day
| unable to look at their code. Mostly walked out. Those new
| people all quit after I left as well but the company's market
| crashed due to covid so we would have all be laid off anyway.
| emerged wrote:
| Where "wrong" person means "doesn't want to subject themselves
| to a ridiculous amount of submissive hoop jumping" -- which
| excludes a tremendous amount of the best possible hires.
|
| They want cogs for the machine.
| shrimpx wrote:
| The best possible hires don't go through this interview
| nonsense anyway.
| geeky4qwerty wrote:
| Doesn't this seem like the (hopefully inadvertent) perfectly
| structured model for hiring sociopaths? I'm speaking semi-
| hyperbolic but seriously... An employee isn't a romantic
| partner or social club member. Some (most?) of the most
| brilliant and hyper-productive people I've hired and worked
| with were socially inept. In fact I once hired a guy whose
| resume was -barely- legible and horribly structured who turned
| out to be my top tech.
| prepend wrote:
| Sociopaths are frequently great employees. Psychopaths are
| bad news, but some of the best people I've ever worked with
| were total sociopaths whose goals aligned with the
| organization's.
|
| I actually there's quite a few "ethical" sociopaths who don't
| care about anything but success but aren't willing to hurt
| people or break laws to do so. They don't have empathy toward
| people but accept that not hurting people will advance their
| cause.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| Negotiate a 30-day money back guarantee with the firms who send
| you candidates. They will only send you proven candidates that
| have been successful elsewhere. Don't bother interviewing or
| maybe have a one person 30 minute culture sanity check.
|
| I worked at a household name non-tech company and we negotiated
| such a deal. It worked great.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| I'm not sure how a recent trend this is. My father dropped the
| hiring process at IBM (France) after 3 or 4 interviews in the
| early 80 because he was told there would was three interviews
| left. Maybe it's just big company whose management really want to
| feel secure about their hire (or justify their job, who knows).
| anothernewdude wrote:
| It's a red flag, but a punished one. Because if you're looking
| for jobs it's a race for the competing hiring managers. 7
| interviews means these people will be last and getting the
| candidates that the other managers rejected.
| nazgulnarsil wrote:
| College is slowly become a worse conscientiousness/agreeableness
| filter since it is now the default.
| erdos4d wrote:
| This sounds to me like the place is wacky for "culture fit" or
| whatever. If you go for remote gigs I can't imagine it gets
| beyond 2 or 3 interviews, mostly technical, since they won't ever
| hang out with you anyway.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| My God, I am so glad to be out of the rat race.
|
| I was chased out, by the _very first contacts_ from companies,
| or, in a couple of cases, the second contact, being directly
| hostile and insulting.
|
| I'd assumed that this was because I'm older, and people just
| wanted me to self-delete from the hiring process (it worked).
| However, hearing all these nightmare stories makes me think that
| _everyone_ has to go through that.
|
| If that's the case, then it's really just a hazing ritual;
| preparation for new hires to be pliant and subservient.
| hungro wrote:
| I recently interviewed at <hot startup>, got past HR, then
| while prepping for the tech screen they told me "by the way if
| you get past this stage there will be FIVE technical
| interviews." It was almost a relief to fail the technical
| screen and realize I got back an entire day or two of my life.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| At least they let you know pretty early on what you would
| have to go through to finish to process. It would have been
| better if they let you know before the HR interview, perhaps
| in the job posting, but now I'm getting into fantasy world
| even though it should be a reasonable thing to do.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| It's normal. A company that doesn't do this, unless it's tiny, is
| a warning sign. Why?
|
| Short answer: It's very difficult to work with incompetent
| colleagues colleagues.
|
| Long answer: We don't rely on a credentialing process like other
| fields do. Some people lie on their resumes or embellish their
| skills. Other people overestimate their skills. As a result,
| employers have to determine competence in the interview process.
|
| A single coding question is often not enough. At a minimum bias
| can creep in, but also poor interviewer skill can make a good
| candidate appear poor, or could allow a poor candidate to pass.
| Furthermore, often companies need to screen for particular skills
| that are critical for a given product.
|
| Furthermore, I think it's useful to be exposed to everyone's
| communication style, and for everyone to be exposed to your
| communication style. Often that has more to do than just
| technical competence.
|
| FWIW: My wife is a pediatrician and her job interviews were
| mostly mutual interest. But, she had to go through a rather
| intense credentialing process. Our industry doesn't seem to trust
| credentials for reasons that I never understood, therefore, we
| tend to rely on employers gauging technical competency instead of
| a third party gauging technical competency.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Any company that _does_ do this is, at a minimum, telling you
| that they 're incompetent at interviewing. And that might be a
| warning sign - what else are they incompetent at?
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| I feel like I'm some kind of outlier because I only had one
| interview for my first perm job, and a phone and in-person for
| the current one. But both are small companies (not startups, just
| not behemoths).
|
| Then again I also feel like an round here for not making 500k, so
| maybe I'm just a failure!
| FpUser wrote:
| My last interview was about 2 years ago. It was single 1.5 hour
| long interview with the company owner and their CTO. Still
| contracting to them.
|
| I am an independent vendor, so it was kind of different interview
| (I develop products for my own company and for hire).
| dave333 wrote:
| My best and it turned out my worst hiring experience as the hiree
| was when I was reentering the workforce as a dot-com-bust refugee
| after a few years of self-(un)employment. I was switching to the
| new language javascript from Java and didn't know much yet. After
| a nominal phone interview I was called in for a single in-person
| interview with the founder of a startup and was hired on a
| probationary basis. After a week I was fired for incompetence in
| javascript which was quite true however I increased my javascript
| knowledge that week by an order of magnitude. The cost to the
| startup was a lot less than disrupting their overburdened devs
| work to interview me.
| qq66 wrote:
| There needs to be something like the SAT for computer
| programming. Getting a 1500 won't mean you're a genius but it
| will mean you can do the job, and then there can be 1-2
| interviews for domain-specific skills and culture fit.
|
| I know many have tried this, some have built great businesses,
| but nobody has yet become "The Credential" but I do believe this
| will eventually exist.
| prewett wrote:
| I've had some companies give a Codility test, which is
| basically 3 leetcode-style problems, 30 min each, solvable in
| 10 or 15 lines of code, any language you want. Then the actual
| interview can focus on discussing your solutions and higher
| level questions.
|
| (Turns out the company started as a 10% project of the first
| company I encountered that used it)
| er4hn wrote:
| You just have leetcode their next product idea.
|
| They'll rent some office space, put you in a room for 2 hours
| on a computer with no internet, and see how well you can grind
| through their problems.
|
| Your score will arrive via the Blockchain to save on physical
| trees and allow for ready verification by future employers.
| mdm12 wrote:
| Generate an NFT with a user's score on it, and you've got VC
| money all over it.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| I know too many people who do well at tests but suck at life.
|
| Standard tests this and universal metric that are shite.
| rhexs wrote:
| Sure, and then this test will closely correlate with IQ,
| strongly select for you-know-who, and we'll be right back where
| we started.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Hopefully it would correlate with programming ability and not
| general IQ.
| Tao331 wrote:
| IQ tests tend to cluster around a pretty specific kind of
| thinking. Pattern matching. Logic. Math. Sometimes
| vocabulary.
|
| This doesn't _correlate_ with programming ability: it is
| _indistinguishable_ from programming ability.
| yes_really wrote:
| This might be an unpopular opinion, but I actually like the
| current format of 1-2 phone interviews + 4-5 onsite interviews,
| most of them Leetcode style. All other solutions seem to just
| increase subjectivity on hiring decisions and make the interview
| _more_ gameable.
|
| Take home interviews are horrible if you are interviewing for
| more than one company at a time. It will take a lot of time if
| you are serious about it, and it will test you much more on how
| much you dedicate yourself to the problem than on what's your
| actual skill.
|
| Also the fewer interviews there are, more is the importance of
| subjective and unjust metrics. I received offers from large (and
| somewhat good) companies with 1-2 interviews because of my
| resume. Although I personally benefitted from that, I think it
| brings a lot of problems for people who went to bad
| universities/companies, and that is not worth it.
| daviddever23box wrote:
| It hasn't, and isn't.
|
| IMHO, if a company cannot execute a hire in three interviews (or
| generally less), there are serious structural issues that one
| should steer clear of.
|
| That said - the applicant screening process is where the most
| significant work-multiplication value lies; to this end, I cannot
| stress the significance of writing and communications skills with
| regard to the quality of a CV / resume. If the execution in this
| area is poor, it will be poor elsewhere. This is one's pitch
| deck, of sorts.
|
| Frankly, there is a more critical question IMHO than (the
| existence or quality of) one's university degree or developer
| skill set: can a prospective hire with relevant experience and a
| history of execution be put in front of clients, co-workers and
| investors to communicate concisely and clearly?
|
| Answer: they can certainly start with selling themselves during
| the interview process.
|
| With the right hire, it can then be possible that requirements
| gathering is better defined, technical documentation is accurate,
| and work sizing becomes an exercise in clear communication of
| risk. It also makes culture fit a much simpler proposition.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I think it really depends on where you're interviewing,
| especially now that lots of places are desperate to find people.
| Sure, at the big FAANG companies you still have to jump through a
| lot of hoops, but at newer, smaller companies they seem (in my
| recent experience, anyway) to be much more willing to hire after
| 2 or 3 interviews (phone interviews even). The place where I'm
| working now I had a total of 3 phone interviews (not in person
| due to covid, plus it's a completely remote company). The 3rd
| interview was with the CTO. He basically said: "It's really hard
| to find people to hire right now. We'd like to hire you, do you
| have any questions for me?"
| emteycz wrote:
| Ever since we make 10x more than anyone else. Hiring a wrong
| developer can liquidate a smaller company, and make serious
| problems for a medium one. Large companies can take it for a
| while, but it definitely doesn't help.
| rr808 wrote:
| One reason is its easier to apply for jobs. Previously applying
| for a job took a lot of time and effort, screening rounds were
| done on phone so not a good signal. Now you can apply for dozens
| of jobs quite easily and do interviews while you're "working from
| home". Which means more applicants for each role.
| downrightmike wrote:
| This is largely because companies are no longer vested in growing
| and maturing talent. Used to be that they hired and trained, now
| that is all on the employee to skill themselves up for the
| laundry list of things companies want. So instead of training and
| learning about people and evaluating them as you go, the
| interviews have become the surrogate for what used to be done
| while training. You could take any engineer and make them viable,
| they used to _have_ to because the market was so small. But now
| they complain about not being able to find good people, because
| they don 't want to put any effort into someone. If we look at
| this as a human relationship, like if this were how you looked at
| your spouse or partner, you'd realize you're being a dick and
| probably just using the partner. This has become normal, but is
| toxic in the long run. But hey the only way to get a raise is to
| leave, which is another data point on toxicity and clearly shows
| the fundamental switch away from healthy relationships and
| quality organizational building.
| Aachen wrote:
| For my job, this was in 2018, I sent an email with CV, ~90
| minutes interview a few days later, had an offer iirc the next
| day or the one after, then went by once more for negotiating the
| contract details. Of course I'm skipping the job searching part
| (that took several weeks and this wasn't my first interview - the
| area doesn't have that many opportunities for me in the first
| place and I didn't speak the language), but if you're wondering
| how many interviews is too many... That's my experience in
| Germany.
|
| Since then, was approached by and interviewed with another
| (German) place during the pandemic, had first a video call with
| the CEO, then a more technical quizzing by three would-be
| colleagues, then an offer. Seems a little different because they
| approached me based on online info where they apparently liked
| what they saw, that might have helped skip a screening step or
| so.
|
| My girlfriend, also applying for a technical position, had iirc
| one interview in the German office, then one with the CEO in the
| headquarters (3h driving; I booked a hotel for us and made it
| into a weekend trip), then an offer.
|
| Seven seems rather excessive.
|
| There is a trial period here, where you can leave or be fired
| with like two weeks' notice, for the first three months or so.
| Unless you're hiring across a border, especially EU borders, that
| lowers the threshold considerably as you can just "try out" what
| someone is like without much hassle. Maybe that's different
| compared to where you live?
| oyebenny wrote:
| C3 AI does this bullshit.
| Apreche wrote:
| I don't know, but it's a huge problem, and it makes no sense.
|
| Companies are desperate to hire, all they do is complain they
| can't find anyone. Yet, when it comes to actually hiring they are
| so afraid of hiring the wrong person, or someone who is faking
| it, that they put up a huge barrier to entry. Beggars can't be
| choosers!
| ergonaught wrote:
| I've built international teams, technical and otherwise, for 20
| years and the reality is that unless you are hiring for an
| extremely specific role with extremely specific requirements,
| which is almost never the case in reality, any more than 3
| interviews is a waste of time. Two within the same team, if
| relevant, one outside the team.
|
| Furthermore, evaluating anything other than "Do you want to work
| with this person?" (on a scale of "I'll quit if you hire them" to
| "I'll quit if you don't hire them") is a waste of time.
|
| But, as you see, people absolutely adore wasting their time and
| yours, as if no one has anything better to do.
|
| Hire people that your people want to work with. Put them to work
| and see how it goes. Let go of people that didn't work out. There
| is no further secret sauce for hiring in nearly every ordinary
| circumstance.
|
| IMO.
| [deleted]
| szczepano wrote:
| Hiring today is like meeting your wife after a wedding and just
| before you go to bed. And there are bigger questions, why we even
| need resumes if those are disconnected from hiring process and
| mean nothing except passing trough ATS algorithms. Hiring got
| broken exactly at the same time when it became separate
| profession not strictly connected with demand from people who
| need help with their work. I never fully understood why developer
| who need help can't hire people directly to help him. Those
| people would spend together 8 hours a day for at least couple of
| months if not couple of years and they often meet at the very
| end. If there's no chemistry between them why hire ? There's lots
| of talks about scaling and toxicity, but this is result of hiring
| people who don't talk with each other cause they didn't know they
| would work together before they got into this big brother show on
| company island called agile team. What was wrong with this idea
| of helping each other that worked 15 years ago that established
| this whole industry ?
| kstenerud wrote:
| Tech is very cargo cultish, which comes from having a young
| average age, and a strong survivorship bias in the media.
| Remember the Google brainteasers? Fizzbuzz? "Culture fit"?
|
| Tech companies have the lowest infrastructure costs of any
| industry, and so they have no place to hang their risk aversive
| paranoia except on personnel (the safer you are, the more trivial
| the things you fear).
|
| There's nothing logical about it, but since they have to fear
| something, it'll be whatever some douchebag with a following puts
| in their next "XYZ considered harmful" blog post.
| grapeskin wrote:
| All we need is a "3+ interviews considered harmful" post to hit
| HN a few months in a row and we can finally solve this problem.
|
| That, or we'll have some representative from the big 5 saying
| "Hey guys, Jayden from (x soulless Silicon Valley company)
| here. Not speaking on behalf of my employer but actually at X
| Corp(tm) we've found that anything less than 37 interviews
| (+tip) isn't enough to let the real stars shine through. We're
| all about finding the true team players who are a good culture
| fit" within 2 minutes of the post going up.
| hiyer wrote:
| Well, it's not only big SV corporates that are doing 5-7
| rounds of interviews. In my experience even 3-4 year old
| startups with under 100 employees do at least 5 rounds - 2
| coding, 2 system design and one hiring manager. The most
| common 6th round is either "culture fit" or "bar-raiser" but
| small startups usually don't do this.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| > All we need is a "3+ interviews considered harmful" post to
| hit HN a few months in a row and we can finally solve this
| problem.
|
| I'll get cracking on it. It'll be my next hit after my last
| blog post about tech hiring "Hiring Developers: How to avoid
| the best" - https://www.getparthenon.com/blog/how-to-avoid-
| hiring-the-be...
| 0des wrote:
| Its always a Jayden.
| _dain_ wrote:
| living in fear of my name becoming a byword for some
| unpleasant stereotype person in 20 years
|
| no i'm not telling you what it is :(
| mistrial9 wrote:
| I just noticed a research paper called "A Silicon Valley love
| triangle: Hiring algorithms, pseudo-science, and the quest for
| auditability" Feb 2022 Mona Sloane,Emanuel Moss,Rumman
| Chowdhury
| orzig wrote:
| If you can't calculate the optimal design (for hiring, in this
| case) from first principles, what option do you have but
| empirical observation? And when steady-state performance takes
| at least 2 years to obtain, is it unreasonable to have fads at
| roughly that frequency?
|
| Resumes suck, take-homes suck, interviews suck, nepotism sucks;
| yet people still need to invest $x00,000 based on something. I
| don't have the answer, but let's not pretend it's not a hard
| question.
| ipaddr wrote:
| If you are hiring someone with 10 years experience it becomes
| a lot easier. Just try them out, 9/10 will succeed.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| This simply isn't true. Some people can coast/hide within
| big companies, especially non-tech companies, with mediocre
| or poor skills. Some people can lie; they can be very good
| at storytelling.
|
| Hell, even for the interviews, some people cheat one way or
| another. But it's at least harder to do that than to make
| up stuff on your resume.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I believe there is _at least_ a factor of 2* in performance
| among qualified /not-outright-failing software engineers.
| If that's the case, anything you can spend less than 100
| hours on to increase your chance of hiring someone whose
| performance at your company will be on the right half of
| that distribution is worth it.
|
| * I think the actual factor is higher, but I think most
| people would agree to a factor of 2 without much debate.
| scarmig wrote:
| There are just different skills, and a balance of
| different individuals is often the most effective.
|
| There are definitely 10x (and even 100x) engineers, but
| throw five 10x engineers together and you will get
| substantially less than 50x results. There's always
| mundane but time consuming shit that can best be handled
| by a 1x.
|
| And a bigger issue is that no company can hire a team of
| 10x engineers, because it's very expensive, 10x engineers
| are relatively rare, and dedicating more resources to the
| interview process gets diminishing returns in terms of
| identifying and hiring them. Not even companies with
| effectively infinitely deep pocketbooks manage to succeed
| at that.
|
| It's best to design systems optimized for the 1x case,
| focus a lot on avoiding the -1x candidates, and grab the
| exceptional candidates opportunistically when you get the
| chance, usually by working outside the process. Which
| seems to be what the industry has defaulted to.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I agree they're rare, but my experience is they almost
| never make even 2x the norm for their level, so if you're
| able to find them, hiring a small team of them is one of
| the best financial deals you can get as an employer.
| sahila wrote:
| Succeed at what though? Yeah most could probably code, but
| can they all design and run a team? Have they all worked on
| the same problems, scale, and should be principal
| engineers? You also interview to level as well as to get
| them into the door.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| I've seen way too many "experienced devs" who are terrible
| coders.
| ipaddr wrote:
| In the end prioritize for the position.
|
| If you want good coders look for resumes with startup
| experience. You don't survive as a senior developer at a
| startup without being being able to write code under
| pressure.
|
| If you want someone who can glue various systems while
| cross communicating to various stakeholders look for
| someone at a larger company.
|
| If you want both, look for both sets of experience on the
| resume.
|
| People with 10+ will filter out positions that won't
| succeed at better than you can filter them out.
| greenyoda wrote:
| > If you want good coders look for resumes with startup
| experience. You don't survive as a senior developer at a
| startup without being being able to write code under
| pressure.
|
| Lots of code that's written under pressure isn't good
| code. It's code that barely works and is hard to
| maintain. For a startup that's trying to get an MVP out
| quickly (and may not be around in a couple of years),
| that may be just what they need. But a huge company like
| Google needs developers who can write software that's
| reliable, performs well and is maintainable for years
| after the original developer is gone.
| ripper1138 wrote:
| I've seen way too many people show up after a 12 week
| "SWE interview bootcamp", pass interviews, and not know
| how to read an API doc and write code against it. I'll
| take the experienced dev.
| geeky4qwerty wrote:
| This is incredibly insightful, thank you.
| kjeetgill wrote:
| I think the OP has a clever concept, and in online discussion
| that can make an idea unduly appealing to me, but is it
| really more right?
|
| The straightforward, obvious answer of: maybe it makes more
| sense than you think has no _appeal_ to it, but I think it 's
| closer to the truth.
|
| I'll let you answer for yourself if the answer had insight or
| appeal. Both tickle that novelty button, but only one has
| (elements) of truth.
| greggman3 wrote:
| Is FizzBuzz cargo cult? I had my own company in 1995. We tried
| to hire programmers. The candidate would come in and we'd spend
| an hour interviewing. 9 out of 10 could not program at all and
| effectively wasted our time.
|
| So, we switched to "here's a short test, go in this room and do
| the test". Then we'd look at their answers. If the answers were
| wrong/poor we'd thank them for their time and excuse them. This
| way, less of our time was wasted. That test included an
| extremely small task like FizzBuzz. If you can't answer it you
| can't program, period! It filtered out the 9 out of 10
| applicants who should never have applied in the first place and
| saved us a bunch of time.
|
| At a big company the phone screen is supposed to do that but
| phone screens still take a hour or more of some engineer's
| time.
| ratww wrote:
| FizzBuzz is definitely not in the cargo cult category. It is
| merely extremely popular.
|
| It literally takes a few minutes and is great for weeding bad
| candidates. It is a win-win for everyone involved.
| prepend wrote:
| I had a similar experience in the late 90s. We had people who
| couldn't program but represented that they could.
|
| We would give them a quick screen of "write in one of the
| languages this position requires a program that takes in a
| string, reverses it and prints it out." And we changed it to
| any language once we started working with novel stuff like
| JavaScript that any programmer could pick up.
|
| It was so weird how many people would fail this test.
|
| I always wondered how other industries dealt with people just
| flat out lying on resumes and applying for positions they
| shouldn't. Programming is lucky that we have some litmus
| tests.
|
| I feel bad for people who freeze up and can't even write a
| three line program on paper.
| mamcx wrote:
| > I feel bad for people who freeze up and can't even write
| a three line program on paper.
|
| I do the same kind of interview, and after figure this
| issue happens, also LEFT the room.
|
| Then eventually add: You can do it any language (even
| different to any we was hiring), then add: You can do
| whatever you want to succeed (hinting to the fact the
| machine used has the docs, internet, YouTube influencers,
| whatever at their fingerprints).
|
| It STILL have huge casualty rates.
|
| What all of this left me to wonder: How the heck this
| industry absorb they?
| paxys wrote:
| People who complain about software interviews being a high
| barrier to entry have never dealt with any other high-
| skilled high-paying profession.
|
| Want to become a doctor? Study for 12-15 years. Lawyers,
| accountants, pilots, actuaries all have similar multi-year
| licensing requirements. Places like investment banks and
| consulting firms will put candidates through a multi-week
| interview process involving stuff like case studies which
| make a 1 hour technical interview seem like a joke. And on
| top of it all you still have to "make an impression" which
| involves networking and ass kissing the right people in the
| chain.
|
| Being able to walk into any company with just a 4-5 hour
| mostly objective interview is one of the best parts of the
| software industry.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > Want to become a doctor? Study for 12-15 years.
|
| Yeah, and all of those years are filled with constant
| punishment. In my experience it was common for medical
| students to have depression, severe anxiety, panic
| attacks before and after tests and exams. Binge drinking
| was extremely common after. At least two students
| committed suicide.
|
| A glimpse into US medical school life:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20101218031844/http://www.med
| sch...
|
| Definitely not something to be emulated.
| 0des wrote:
| Investment banks might not have been the greatest example
| here, many of them hire whoever under the auspices that
| while during incodtrination they work a play portfolio
| for free and those in the cohort who profit above a
| certain deviation and who can justify the strategy behind
| it get hired, the rest don't.
| auntienomen wrote:
| Investment bankers don't manage portfolios. They do
| paperwork for companies which want to sell stocks and
| bonds. What you're describing is a trading operation and
| a crappy one at that.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > So, we switched to "here's a short test, go in this room
| and do the test". Then we'd look at their answers. If the
| answers were wrong/poor we'd thank them for their time and
| excuse them.
|
| I remember about a dozen years ago taking one of these tests
| at an interview. Interviewer takes me to a room and says
| "We've got this little test, I'll be back in 2 hours.". I
| take the test. Guy comes back in and says ok, we'll look this
| over and let you know... Crickets. Didn't hear back so I
| figure I must've bombed the test. 2 years later that guy
| calls me up and asks if I want to come in for an interview. I
| say "I never heard back so I figured I bombed your test" He
| says "No, you did great, we just got kind of busy". I
| politely declined to interview with them again.
| ratww wrote:
| That says a lot about the company and nothing about the
| test. Also 2h is not exactly FizzBuzz territory.
| zahllos wrote:
| Not in my opinion no, and I don't mind people asking me
| simple questions either. There are quite a few people who
| simply don't understand basic concepts and cannot actually
| write code. Higher qualifications are usually weakly
| positively correlated with competence, but there are plenty
| of outliers and exceptions.
|
| I do generally agree with the cargo cult sentiment, but not
| in this case.
|
| The main thing I dislike about the 7+ interviews is that I
| dislike interviews and there are 7 of them to get through. I
| once did four in one day, back to back, and I was extremely
| tired afterwards. So my big fear as a candidate is that
| either 7 interviews will happen over 1-2 days and I'll be
| absolutely fried after the first 2, or they'll be so hard to
| schedule it'll take 6 months just to have them all. I'm also
| a bit afraid they'll cargo cult some of the interview
| questions and I get a bit sick of "please recite 1st year CS
| algorithm" questions (I never ask these personally) but
| otherwise 7 interviews is fine, if they accept I am a human
| candidate and I'm not really comfortable in the process
| anyway.
| dharmab wrote:
| Agreed, a team I worked with added a very short (few minutes)
| screener quiz because we had about 10-20% of candidates make
| it past phone screen who struggled to write a simple
| function.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| It pains me so much that we've gone from hiring a couple of
| supersmart ubernerds over a cool demo and setting them loose
| to... this.
|
| Now, everything sucks. People who only know the tech they
| trained for. Tools are written for idiots, and the only thing
| even more written for idiots than that is the code we're
| supposed to be producing. Teams believing whatever stupid fad
| some trendy consultant prepared for them. Way too much support
| staff when I used to be able to call the stakeholder up
| directly and square any issues, now I have to go through like 4
| idiot nontechnical PMs.
|
| One of my previous managers compared us to a basketball team.
| Ew ew ew ew ew ew EW!
|
| Tech sucks now. Get the business and nontechnical people out!
| All they contribute is bloat and mediocrity. The only people
| who should be in charge are those that have been at this for
| life.
| nharada wrote:
| I think part of the reason is also that tech has matured to
| the point where it's so complex that nobody can handle it
| alone or even in a small group. A couple of people (no matter
| how supersmart) simply could not build and maintain even a
| single product of a large tech company.
|
| Similar stuff happened with other technology too. A couple
| people could build an early airplane but a modern jetliner is
| so tremendously complex that you need years and a full
| company to get one out the door.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| And how much of that complexity is truly needed? Or is that
| another one of the lies proferred by its financiers?
| fleetwoodsnack wrote:
| In the case of the airplane, it's essential.
| ratww wrote:
| Yep. IMO the largest part of the complexity today is
| caused by the things you mention in your post: trend-
| chasing among engineers, especially inexperienced ones,
| and non-engineers constantly bending the process, trying
| to make themselves useful and pushing too hard for
| useless micro-features and nice-to-haves, to the point
| the architecture of applications is compromised.
| Bayart wrote:
| Mediocre people bring mediocrity. Business and management
| illiteracy among tech people is what allows snake-oil sellers
| to get a foot inside the door.
| angarg12 wrote:
| Why do people simply assume big tech companies are dumb and
| they haven't thought their hiring process through?
|
| Amazon literally has a research team focused in hiring, and
| they run A/B experiments to continually improve the process.
| The current interview format is not a cargo cult, is a high
| refine process through the years.
|
| Is it perfect? hell no, but it isn't the mindless copycat
| people make it to be. They have actual data to back up what
| works and what doesn't, although it might take several years to
| happen (like when Google finally dropped brain teasers).
| Redoubts wrote:
| > Why do people simply assume big tech companies are dumb and
| they haven't thought their hiring process through? Amazon
| literally has a research team focused in hiring ...
|
| Well it's been a while for me, but "we just do what the other
| guys do" was the impression I got when I interviewed there.
| Except they added a lot more "here's a terrible workplace
| situation, how would you handle it".
|
| I'd love to know what their research is revealing, beyond
| questions like the latter case being emphasized.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Amazon literally has a research team focused in hiring, and
| they run A/B experiments to continually improve the process.
| The current interview format is not a cargo cult, is a high
| refine process through the years.
|
| The median time an employee stays there is now under 2 years.
| Clearly Amazon isn't hiring the calibre of people they need.
| Dudeman112 wrote:
| Alternative hypothesis: they did hire the correct people,
| but working there is so unpleasant that very few people
| decide to stick around.
| ummonk wrote:
| That's how long they can milk the employees with demanding
| work expectations until the backloaded vesting kicks in.
| auntienomen wrote:
| Maybe they are?
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| How many formats have they tested? For AB testing to work, A
| and B should be at least distinguishable. Every single tech
| company has the exact same process. Sometimes even the same
| questions. And that applies even to any point in the ladder.
| And to every single role as well. (Only PM interviews are
| slightly different but in tech companies even they have to go
| through the same process until that differentiating round)
| passivate wrote:
| When people complain about hiring practices, often, but not
| always, the concern is a false negative - missing out on
| hiring a talented and qualified candidate.
|
| Ultimately, if the point is "you guys are doing it wrong",
| they're going to look back at their financial success,
| shrug and say "seem to work for us". They have had problems
| with treatment of employees and other issues, but I'm
| assuming we're talking about hiring in the context of
| people being hired to do a job that financially benefits
| the company. Just my $.02
| csomar wrote:
| > Amazon literally has a research team focused in hiring, and
| they run A/B experiments to continually improve the process.
| The current interview format is not a cargo cult, is a high
| refine process through the years.
|
| Yeah, sure. We got all these smart people in a room. They
| can't be wrong. /s
|
| I'd actually say the opposite. These researches are probably
| making hiring worse.
| b20000 wrote:
| it became normal when people stopped saying no and instead of
| banding together decided this was a good thing to let them prove
| they are smarter than the next guy. meanwhile nobody wins.
| matt_s wrote:
| Asking what the full interview process is at first contact can be
| telling of the culture and can be used to screen companies as
| much as looking at tech stack, company size/details, comp, etc.
|
| That many interviews for a PM is ridiculous.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| Google had looked at some internal data and decided that after
| four interviews, you don't really get any increase in signal:
| https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/google-rule-of-four/
| znpy wrote:
| Respectfully, I'd like to call bs on that one.
|
| The article you linked ins from 2017.
|
| I interviewed for an are position in 2019, and I still had to
| go through 7 interviews: hr screening with dumb trivia
| questions, phone screen with coding questions and then five
| (!!!) more interviews in a single day on-site.
|
| (For the record, I didn't pass something on the in-site
| interviews, in my opinion nothing I couldn't have learned)
| dlevine wrote:
| I worked at Google from 2004 - 2007, and I remember hearing
| this towards the end of the time I was there in a presentation
| shared by the people ops team.
|
| It's possible that this wasn't really followed in the hiring
| process - doesn't mean that the conclusion isn't true. I guess
| it seems counterintuitive on some level that more interviews
| wouldn't yield more signal.
| dolni wrote:
| I interviewed at Google around 2012 and I definitely went
| through more than four interviews. It was seven or eight in
| total, if memory serves.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Yeah, I had the same Jikes feel when I thought I would try work
| for a company for once for a bit than start my own; they said 'we
| normally conduct 7 interviews over a 3 week period'. So that was
| it for my experiment working somewhere for now.
| py_or_dy wrote:
| Best of luck. I have no idea how to get hired. I jumped shipped
| from my last employer in May of 2020 thinking I'd take a 2 month
| break and then start interviewing. Over 18 months I submitted
| over 80 applications, and got interviews at 40-50 different
| companies. Total phone and video interviews ended up being over
| 110 before I basically gave up. I was trying to transition from a
| full stack dev mostly with perl backends into a full stack django
| dev. But I don't think the fact that most of my experience being
| in perl was the issue, as in some cases my past experience was
| not talked about much or not mentioned at all. Plus I've re-
| written my resume and linkedin to mostly only mentioned python
| and django projects that I've worked on.
|
| The interviews were all the same mostly. Do a take home project
| or do leetcode problems while the interviewer stares at you.
| Sometimes I did bad, sometimes I did alright, and other times I
| did great. It didn't seem to matter. The funny thing is as I got
| more desperate, I started applying to crappier companies and more
| junior positions for lower pay. As I went down the ladder, the
| interviews got even more complicated and challenging!
|
| A couple of years ago I got interested in HVAC technology after
| having my HVAC unit replaced and researching options. As I'd
| mostly depleted my savings, I started debating on jumping ship to
| be an HVAC tech. I could cram for an EPA certification test over
| a couple of weeks and get a refrigeration cert and then be nearly
| guaranteed a position at a couple of local HVAC shops for $15 an
| hour. The only reason I haven't done that (yet) is like you said
| because of my kids. My life story would be I went to tech school
| out of high school and was an avionics tech for 3 years, followed
| by 5 years to get through university, followed by 10 years of
| software developer experience and then 2 years of no work
| followed by becoming an HVAC tech working with high school drop
| outs as co-workers. There would be no telling my kids to get an
| education when this (forced) path I'm on shows how worthless it
| is. I've never felt so lost and useless in my entire life.
|
| The other reason for not jumping ship (yet) is that I feel so
| qualified on django/python stacks. You could drop me into any
| dumpster fire of a django project and I'd be fine. It is
| extremely insane that the only people getting hired in that space
| are people with under 2 years of experience or people with over
| 10 years of django only experience. There is absolutely no middle
| ground (which is where I fall in).
|
| I'm now debating jumping on a difference language with a smaller
| community (similar to how perl used to be) like golang or elixir.
| But there is no guarantee there but I feel like hiring in that
| space would more likely respect past experience or at least know
| that if you graduated college and have years of experience that
| you would be able to "mostly learn anything" and be reliable.
| Dunno...
| geeky4qwerty wrote:
| Thanks, and best of luck to you as well. Based on all these
| nightmare stories I'm hearing I'm half tempted to start a
| "island of misfit toys" consulting company. Seems like a lot of
| amazing talent going to waste in the pursuit of being trendy or
| feigning sophistication
| hungro wrote:
| I've thought this same thing. I've done interviewing for a
| small shop inside a big co., and I managed to have about an
| 90% hit rate and a strong percentage of excellent talent
| without doing ANY of this bullshit. No leetcode, no 7
| interviews. HR screen, tech discussion, senior manager
| interview, done. It's not that hard to hire great people if
| you have the slightest inkling of what you're doing and HR
| and corporate processes don't dramatically get in your way.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| When did needing to spend a month prepping for interviews become
| the norm :sadface:
|
| I understand that companies in Silicon Valley have a huge influx
| of applicants and so the filtering needs to be high, but the way
| interviewing practices have spread to other parts of the world
| because of cargo culting is frustrating.
|
| Companies have a hiring crisis but shoot themselves in the foot
| during the interview process.
| yes_really wrote:
| For people complaining about 4-6 interviews in tech companies,
| remember that in a lot of other industries (e.g. finance,
| consultancy, law) they take into account much more information
| about you. For example: the school you went to, your GPA, and the
| company you are currently working at. If these are not what they
| expected, they won't even interview you. So that's how they can
| save 1 or 2 interviews: by transferring the filter to your
| university and companies that hired you.
|
| And I personally think that's bad. I'd rather have to do 2 hours
| more of interview when I'm changing jobs than have to worry for
| years during high school and university on a ton of metrics that
| I'm being evaluated on (the vast majority of which are useless
| for the job).
| rootusrootus wrote:
| This is why I won't ever work for a FAANG company. I am too old
| for such shenanigans, and I am not underpaid at my current gig.
| Plus, I'm spoiled -- every single job in my career (even the
| first one, LOL) has been a trusted referral. So I usually just
| sit down with the hiring manager and one of their tech leads (if
| I'm not interviewing to _be_ the tech lead...) and it 's pretty
| relaxed. Sometimes we just go to a local pub and meet over beers.
| I'm no 10x developer, but I'm pretty good at cutting out the
| bullshit, unfucking existing projects, and getting them out the
| door. A solid track record makes it really easy to get referrals.
| hungro wrote:
| This is where I'm ending up too. Word of mouth from people I
| trust is really the only way to go any more. Too many companies
| have dogshit cultures, and I'm happy where I am. Unless my
| current job suddenly goes downhill, why dance through this
| insane bullshit for some comp that will barely make me any
| happier?
| bcantrill wrote:
| I need to write a longer piece on our approach at Oxide, but for
| us it takes effort (not always successful!) to hold ourselves to
| 9 conversations. This may (or perhaps does?) sound obscene, but
| (1) these are conversations not oral exams (we don't do red-
| black-trees-on-whiteboards), hopefully making them less stressful
| for the candidate (2) we take hiring really, really seriously and
| (3) I have learned from mistakes at past companies with grievous
| mishires, for which the downside is essentially unlimited. We
| have a front-loaded, writing-heavy process (we don't schedule
| conversations with anyone about whom we are less than
| enthusiastic), so for us, the conversations are an opportunity to
| really begin to explore what the dynamic with our potentially
| future colleague will look like. And time and time again, I have
| been appreciative of this broad approach: because different folks
| take such different paths in their conversations, it is not
| unusual for one person to see something that others either missed
| or didn't dig into -- and that becomes a serious concern. Of
| course, it also happens that one person has a concern that others
| have also looked at and feel has been addressed; we aren't
| necessarily seeking to build absolute consensus all of the time,
| but it's essential that we ferret out those concerns.
|
| tl;dr: I think you have every right to ask a company what their
| process is, and when they can expect to be at a decision point --
| but I think there are reasons (good reasons!) why companies may
| wish you to have many conversations before making a hiring
| decision.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| 9 "conversations" over how much actual time? 30 mins isn't a
| lot of time to get a good impression and ask all you need to.
| If you're telling me that those nine will be conversations then
| I would decline as you ain't wasting my time.
| soared wrote:
| If a recruiter told me there would be 8 additional interviews,
| I would definitely not move forward unless the pay was
| ridiculously good. At least when amazon does the loop its 6
| hours in a single day, and their pay is very good.
| bcantrill wrote:
| Totally understood and appreciated. We also don't use
| recruiters -- and we ask a lot of applicants up front. We
| know we're not a fit for everyone, and that's okay.
| mrwebmaster wrote:
| Recently did 5 interviews, and I liked it. I'd had no issues
| doing more if needed, just to be on the safe side for both
| parties.
|
| I guess that when a family doesn't depend on your job or you are
| not leaving a good position, it could be OK to join a company
| after 3 or 4 interviews. But if you have a family or are leaving
| a good position, there is much more at stake. 7 interviews is not
| that high of an investment to lower the risk of a bad move, that
| could have a negative impact on your career and the future of
| your family.
| MadSudaca wrote:
| > 7 interviews is not that high of an investment to lower the
| risk of a bad move
|
| To me it seems that for this to be true, either my time must be
| worth very little or I must be really risk averse.
| Veelox wrote:
| It depends on what you are counting as interviews. Normally there
| is 1 recruiter/hiring manager initial call. Then there is 1 phone
| screen of some sort. If you pass that it's normal to have 4
| onsite interviews in a day. That gets to 6. Sometimes there is a
| follow up interview and sometimes you skip the phone screen. I
| feel like 5-7 is the normal routine. Is there something else you
| expect?
| claytonjy wrote:
| This has been my experience, but what used to be 4 interviews
| during the onsite is now 4 remote interviews, sequential, each
| one dependent on passing the previous. Thus the process takes
| longer overall, and has twice the periods to stress about "did
| I do well enough".
| kens wrote:
| When I interviewed at Microsoft for an intern position in 1988,
| about 7 people interviewed me with coding/puzzle questions. So
| this style of interviewing has been around for a long, long time.
| lupire wrote:
| 7hrs of interview for $300k+/yr seems fine.
|
| The US President interviews for a whole year, for $400k/yr
| smnrchrds wrote:
| He would be an idiot if he did it for money.
| toast0 wrote:
| The President gets that salary for life. A tech job stops
| paying when it ends; even if there are any jobs with pensions
| left, you only get them after working a long time.
| jleyank wrote:
| People like the prez interview constantly...
| forum_ghost wrote:
| Not even making FAANG staff level salary, smh
| simne wrote:
| > The US President interviews for a whole year, for $400k/yr
|
| That's why very few presidents we could name not even great but
| at least good. - Just most good candidates don't even try to
| enter this nightmare.
| efficax wrote:
| Nobody runs for president for the salary
| issa wrote:
| C'mon. A ghost-written post-presidency book is worth $20million
| easy, guaranteed.
| jcbrand wrote:
| Presidents get tens of millions in "speaking fees" and millions
| in donations to their foundations.
| faangiq wrote:
| And billions to their offshore accounts.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > How is a process like this in any way shape or form efficient
| or productive?
|
| Because hiring the wrong person becomes a colossal waste of time
| and money.
| csa wrote:
| As mentioned above, does 5 or 7 produce a significantly better
| result than 3 (or 2 or 1)?
|
| I'm guessing not.
|
| Two or _maybe_ three interviews should be adequate for most
| positions.
|
| I think the reality is that most people are pretty bad at
| selection, no one wants to shoulder the blame when things go
| sideways, so the solution is just to create a system where
| everyone (and therefore no one) is to blame. In reality, this
| creates an environment that is default No instead of default
| Yes. Whether that's good or not for a specific company at a
| specific instant of time is really something only they can
| decide.
|
| Fwiw, pro-tip, eliciting work samples that are close to the
| actual job are the best predictors of success. This may create
| some burden on the hiring org to create a good process, but it
| reaps huge dividends.
| gcheong wrote:
| That's the standard excuse but how much less of a chance do you
| really think there is to hire the wrong person after 7
| interviews vs say 3 or even 1 done well vs the time you're
| spending trying to reduce that risk? More opinions isn't always
| better. You can't eliminate risk entirely and I don't think
| it's as as much of a waste as companies often claim it is.
| ipaddr wrote:
| That's only because you spent thousands having candidates go
| through 7 interviews.
| b20000 wrote:
| this
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Stronger: You're also rejecting more candidates. So you're
| not only wasting the time of 7 interviews, you're wasting the
| time of 7 interviewss times the N people you interview before
| you find one you're willing to hire.
|
| And then, as others have said, there's the cost of the people
| who look at your hiring process and decide that they won't
| bother to try to jump through your hoops. Hint: They are
| _not_ the least valuable candidates.
| Apreche wrote:
| If the hiring process is faster, then the time wasted bringing
| in the wrong person is decreased significantly.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Definitely not, the hiring process is just a tiny part of
| "the time wasted bringing in the wrong person" - onboarding
| and training take far more of company time than that.
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