3 ms·

If interviews weren't scheduled at the drop of a hat and employers actually took the time to decide whether to bring someone in for an onsite interview, then th

by bpchaps 10y ago

If interviews weren't scheduled at the drop of a hat and employers actually took the time to decide whether to bring someone in for an onsite interview, then this wouldn't be a problem as big as it is. Fact is, when someone needs to take a day off of work, or to do schedule gymnastics for every one of their interviews of course your attitude's going to get screwed up in the process. It's exhausting, often humiliating and incredibly impersonal.

reitoei 10y ago
Flew to Ireland from the UK for a interview (at my own expense). Did a decent interview, never got a call/email back. People can be assholes.
- autotune 10y ago
  Did they not agree to expense your trip? Back when I was job searching and looking to move cities I would never have agreed to pay for a flight to an interview out of my own pocket, and never had a company request for me to do such a thing.
- mixmastamyk 10y ago
  Definitely should have used phone/skype/gtm for the first few interviews, until they proved their interest.
- ionforce 10y ago
  But paying out of pocket and commuting, wasn't that your decision to put yourself into that scenario? It's immediately (and clearly) lop-sided.
  - bpchaps 10y ago
    Honestly, does it matter?
    - poikniok 10y ago
      Yes?
      - bpchaps 10y ago
        When I ask that, I'm talking about the lack of email more than the lack of compensation. It's just kind of a dick move. It's kind of like that date that you both absolutely loved over a long weekend, but the other person refuses to respond to. You can't really be mad, except think bitterly, "...really?"
  - reitoei 10y ago
    Yes, I made the decision to travel on my own bat. I could easily afford it, that's not what I was annoyed about. It was the fact that I'd taken the time & effort to meet with these people and to not even get so much as an email back... it's not right. People shouldn't be treated that way, job candidate or not. It's basic manners.
lallysingh 10y ago
Yes, and I think the appropriate response is to rate-limit the interviews to one that you can handle easily. 1/week? Employers typically have pipelines designed for hiring throughput, so they won't mind spacing out stages longer (modulo any recruiter metrics, but I haven't heard of a case of that). And as they're all similar style questions, they should just read up on these. Hold off on interviews until you're confident, or just schedule the less-desirable firms first, so that you have enough time to read up. Interviewees know that these questions are coming, they can control the schedule, and they're the only ones who know their own energy and state. Nobody tells them that it's up to them to do flow control. But it's a hot market and people want good programmers. Even if you don't do tree searches or inversions in your normal work day, you can show that you're good because you can understand this stuff. Most candidates can't. So please, take your time, skim the textbooks, take a few notes, maybe do a few flash cards.
- bpchaps 10y ago
  So, are you suggesting that folks take one day off per week? That seems a little ridiculous. The number of employers who haven't even looked at my resume, even after a month long process, is insane. Is it really that hard to read a resume beforehand? Why waste everybody's time?! So please, take your time, skim their resumes and maybe do a bit of github code reviews before inviting someone to sit down. Hell, do it while you're taking a shit in the office if you, as an employer, are overworked. There's a pun in there.
  - lallysingh 10y ago
    I read the resumes, and if the code description is interesting, I'll pull up the github repo. I read a lot of them because I do a lot of interviews, and the resumes that get passed to me for interviews all look fantastic and incredibly similar. Because good programmers have remarkably similar resumes as bad programmers -- one was made by sweat & blood, the other with bullshit. It's just text on a page, there's no way of knowing which one's which. As for their code, I learn a little bit about their programming style -- and it's often unflattering and unhelpful, as these are usually personal projects where people write code below the standard they'd use at the office -- but it tells me little of what parts were hard, what parts involved real insight from the candidate, and what parts were pasted from stack overflow. Given a github URL, how much time do you think it takes to figure out where the interesting parts are? And what's the information payback of that time, given the little information you get about a person's actual capabilities from a bunch of text saved on a server? I know that everyone's their own special snow flake, but I don't have more than the 45 minutes to give them a fair shake. And it has to be fair - a question that they should probably have enough context to know, and who's answer can't be bull-shitted. I've got 45 minutes to give as objective an interview I can, balancing the Type 1/2 errors of missing someone good, and hiring someone bad. 1 a week was an example of what I was doing when I went interviewing. I mentioned that as slow enough to read up as much as you need. Did you want more? Less? [Edit: not speaking for my employer, whose name I don't want to mention. ]

by bpchaps 10y ago

reitoei 10y ago

Flew to Ireland from the UK for a interview (at my own expense). Did a decent interview, never got a call/email back. People can be assholes.

autotune 10y ago
Did they not agree to expense your trip? Back when I was job searching and looking to move cities I would never have agreed to pay for a flight to an interview out of my own pocket, and never had a company request for me to do such a thing.
mixmastamyk 10y ago
Definitely should have used phone/skype/gtm for the first few interviews, until they proved their interest.
ionforce 10y ago
But paying out of pocket and commuting, wasn't that your decision to put yourself into that scenario? It's immediately (and clearly) lop-sided.
- bpchaps 10y ago
  Honestly, does it matter?
  - poikniok 10y ago
    Yes?
    - bpchaps 10y ago
      When I ask that, I'm talking about the lack of email more than the lack of compensation. It's just kind of a dick move. It's kind of like that date that you both absolutely loved over a long weekend, but the other person refuses to respond to. You can't really be mad, except think bitterly, "...really?"
- reitoei 10y ago
  Yes, I made the decision to travel on my own bat. I could easily afford it, that's not what I was annoyed about. It was the fact that I'd taken the time & effort to meet with these people and to not even get so much as an email back... it's not right. People shouldn't be treated that way, job candidate or not. It's basic manners.

lallysingh 10y ago

Yes, and I think the appropriate response is to rate-limit the interviews to one that you can handle easily. 1/week? Employers typically have pipelines designed for hiring throughput, so they won't mind spacing out stages longer (modulo any recruiter metrics, but I haven't heard of a case of that). And as they're all similar style questions, they should just read up on these. Hold off on interviews until you're confident, or just schedule the less-desirable firms first, so that you have enough time to read up. Interviewees know that these questions are coming, they can control the schedule, and they're the only ones who know their own energy and state. Nobody tells them that it's up to them to do flow control. But it's a hot market and people want good programmers. Even if you don't do tree searches or inversions in your normal work day, you can show that you're good because you can understand this stuff. Most candidates can't. So please, take your time, skim the textbooks, take a few notes, maybe do a few flash cards.

bpchaps 10y ago
So, are you suggesting that folks take one day off per week? That seems a little ridiculous. The number of employers who haven't even looked at my resume, even after a month long process, is insane. Is it really that hard to read a resume beforehand? Why waste everybody's time?! So please, take your time, skim their resumes and maybe do a bit of github code reviews before inviting someone to sit down. Hell, do it while you're taking a shit in the office if you, as an employer, are overworked. There's a pun in there.
- lallysingh 10y ago
  I read the resumes, and if the code description is interesting, I'll pull up the github repo. I read a lot of them because I do a lot of interviews, and the resumes that get passed to me for interviews all look fantastic and incredibly similar. Because good programmers have remarkably similar resumes as bad programmers -- one was made by sweat & blood, the other with bullshit. It's just text on a page, there's no way of knowing which one's which. As for their code, I learn a little bit about their programming style -- and it's often unflattering and unhelpful, as these are usually personal projects where people write code below the standard they'd use at the office -- but it tells me little of what parts were hard, what parts involved real insight from the candidate, and what parts were pasted from stack overflow. Given a github URL, how much time do you think it takes to figure out where the interesting parts are? And what's the information payback of that time, given the little information you get about a person's actual capabilities from a bunch of text saved on a server? I know that everyone's their own special snow flake, but I don't have more than the 45 minutes to give them a fair shake. And it has to be fair - a question that they should probably have enough context to know, and who's answer can't be bull-shitted. I've got 45 minutes to give as objective an interview I can, balancing the Type 1/2 errors of missing someone good, and hiring someone bad. 1 a week was an example of what I was doing when I went interviewing. I mentioned that as slow enough to read up as much as you need. Did you want more? Less? [Edit: not speaking for my employer, whose name I don't want to mention. ]