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I wish companies didn't think their interviews were some weird "secret sauce" -- I've had companies flat out refuse to tell me what the interview process would

I wish companies didn't think their interviews were some weird "secret sauce" -- I've had companies flat out refuse to tell me what the interview process would be like, or even how long I should expect for the interview beyond "1-4 hours". Well, you know 1 hour is a lot different than 4 hours! Personally I think all companies should be using pair-programming or contract to hire, as I think trivia questions and whiteboarding are worse than useless. I'm happy to do take home work for a company I'm really interested in, but it does feel a little unfair and like a bit of a waste of time overall.

godzillabrennus 11y ago
Even if you hate interviews you can get paid to have them with http://www.joinjune.com http://www.joinjune.com
philwelch 11y ago
I've never had this experience. Is this a Bay Area thing? In my experience companies are usually upfront about what their process is, if indeed they have a process at all.
x0x0 11y ago
I just wish companies wouldn't lie (Why yes, today, I did just talk to a YC company that had "remote" in their job ad on their site but, when asked, was unwilling to do wfh 2 days a week for someone who lives in the peninsula and was unenthusiastic about driving in and out of sf every day. Hmm...)
imh 11y ago
I think a part of the secrecy is so that if it goes poorly they can stop the interview after a really bad session without indicating to the candidate that it's gone so badly. "Yup, it's always just two sessions, goodbye." This is an actual rational I've heard. I don't agree with it, but it's a thing.
- eric-hu 11y ago
  For anyone who finds this to be a plausible reason, I did too. Then I realized that a more transparent company would simply tell me that I they're cutting the interview short.
  - thedufer 11y ago
    There's a comfort advantage to both parties if you do rejection over phone/email instead of in your office, in my experience. Also, I've seen interviews cut short for both extremes (going really well and going really poorly) so it's easy to give the wrong impression that way.
- tdkl 11y ago
  I'd rather wish for being open, honest and direct with the rejection then tolerant and polite. It saves a lot of time and emotional investment.
  - joelx 11y ago
    As an employer, I have found that if you honestly tell 10 people the reason that you did not hire them that a minimum of 3 people will have hostile reactions to you. I do agree that it would be a better way for all employees to give feedback to all candidates and for those candidates to handle the rejection in an emotionally mature way.
    - p4wnc6 11y ago
      Most companies do not handle candidate review in an emotionally mature or professional way, and the widespread lack of feedback is one of the ways they secure protection from possible downsides of their own blatantly disrespectful and sometimes outright discriminatory hiring practices. Assuming that you are like the other 90% or so of employers who treat employees and candidates exceptionally poorly (I'm not saying you are, just assuming for a second), then getting only a 30% rate of feedback calling you out on use of superficial, inconsistent, and (in some cases) borderline (or even blatantly) illegal reasons for rejecting a candidate doesn't sound so bad. It suggests to me that candidates on the whole are more professional than companies, but companies can use certain bureaucratic policies and processes to make sure they effectively hide the unprofessionalism from ways in which it could come back to negatively affect them.
pyb 11y ago
That could be because they are inexperienced, and are making up their interview process as they go along? This is definitely quite common IME.
alleycat 11y ago
1-4 hours makes sense. If you're terrible the interview finishes in an hour, 4 hours if there seriously considering you.
shawnps 11y ago
A long time ago I was interviewing with Facebook. They told me exactly what to expect from the process. I was actually shocked that they were giving away so much information. I studied for the interview and did very well in the first half, and then horribly the second half. Overall I enjoyed it because of how honest they were.
- ToPutItBluntly 11y ago
  I had a similar experience with Facebook although I did well until the last one. Then I was just too tired and hadn't practiced enough to do a good job. After the fact, I read more of the interview questions on Glassdoor and wished I'd read them before and practiced those on a whiteboard at home. So that is what I'll do next time I want to interview at FB. Overall, I really enjoyed the process as an interviewee. I've been on both sides and I'm curious how well the other side is done at FB but I left with a good impression and thought the outcome was fair. Also bonus points to them for asking real world questions. I was asked about making a web-based text editor and a couple months later, Draft.js came out.
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  I had a different experience with Facebook. I was told what the technical phone interview would consist of, and that much was true, but I was also told I would receive feedback within a certain time frame. After my interview (in which I felt I did very well), I did not hear anything back within the time frame they told me, and then many days afterwards I finally heard back. They said they were not going to move forward with me, and also they specifically said they were sorry but they could not provide any feedback. So I actually felt like for one of the most important parts (the feedback) they were actually not straightforward or honest with me. Had I known I could not have feedback, I would not have agreed to the interview in the first place.
  - brianwawok 11y ago
    98% of interviews wont tell you why you got rejected. So do you not interview anywhere?
crdb 11y ago
"Trivia questions" are not useless. I've put out job ads only to receive hundreds of applications from all over the world, many not even in English or without even a word accompanying a CV. Of the "proper" applicants, I've then had to deal with dozens of candidates that claimed a competence they did not have. And guess what - that's a lot of effort and time which is taken away from the business. In my case, that's a big opportunity cost with salaries burning a deeper hole for every minute that they are not offset by client time. I suspect it's much worse for famous organisations. So now I ask a dozen questions by email that should take 5 minutes to answer in order to filter out both these groups, and that cover many basic CS concepts. Works really well, even if it's a bit annoying for candidates and probably turns off many vs just uploading your CV for HR to auto-scan for keywords. For example, if I'm hiring someone to do data modelling work and they tell me it's called the relational model because of the relations between tables, it's unlikely they'll know how to unfold EAV antipatterns. And if you have actual machine learning experience, it's unlikely you'll be stumped by my asking what high leverage means.
- marmaduke 11y ago
  Have "actual machine learning" experience, no idea what "high leverage" means.
  - crdb 11y ago
    I'm referring to leverage in statistics [1], and particularly how high leverage observations may affect your model and how people deal with them. Clearer? For context: one of the candidates I interviewed told me that the best way to pick a model was to pick the model that would have the highest R squared when fitted to the whole dataset. I asked him about overfitting and he didn't know what I was talking about. Same guy whose CV showed 4 years in a research lab doing stats [2]. A lot of people are just going through the motions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leverage_(statistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leverage_(statistics) [2] reposting for fun: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-IJo_Tkw95-o/VANnTdCFgHI/AAAAAAAADVY/3cAV6UEWiPA/s1600/Screen%2BShot%2B2014-08-30%2Bat%2B6.08.23%2BPM.png http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-IJo_Tkw95-o/VANnTdCFgHI/AAAAAAAADV...
mappy 11y ago
> Personally I think all companies should be using pair-programming or contract to hire You should qualify that with "all companies by which I want to be hired", because not all teams/developers pair program or want to pair program. The team I'm on does a phone tech interview, then an in-person interview where we dig into history, then a mix of problem solving, pseudocode problems, OO/schema design, and web app design/technologies/approach, and then more interviews with the extended team. While we will sit with each other to help out at times, sometimes for hours, we don't strictly pair- that is just when help is needed. We rely on some up-front design and all PR's code reviewed for quality control, in addition to QA and approval by application owner.
dexterdog 11y ago
If they say 1-4 hours then 1 hour usually means you aren't getting the job. 3-4 hours means you are still in the running, but still probably won't get the job. I am with you on contract-to-hire. I get that companies are cautious because a bad hire can be tough to recover from, but the processes 99% of companies do are not conducive to good hires.
- mooreds 11y ago
  This. I hired a few times and rapidly learned not to promise the candidate a fixed amount of time. Why waste everyone's time doing more interviewing if the first interviewer finds out something that reveals the candidate is not a fit?
  - p4wnc6 11y ago
    Because if they took the time to prepare for the interview and budget for an upper bound on the time range, then it is only professional and courteous of you to give them a full review. If you reject them based on their performance during hour 1, and you don't even give them the chance to show you more about themselves during hours 2, 3, and 4, it sounds like (a) your hiring process is kind of dumb and you're way too focused on what you seem to think is hyper efficient time usage than on actually learning about a candidate, and (b) you come off as unprofessional. It's a two-way street. Inviting someone in for a "1-4" hour block, then dismissing them after hour 1 makes it seem like you view it as if you're entitled to paw around the candidate like they are a cut of meat, assess them however you want, and not give them a fair chance to assess you.
    - mooreds 11y ago
      > Because if they took the time to prepare for the interview... That's very charitable of you. I dont know if it was my inability to phone screen properly, my inadequate job posting, my desperation to hire at the salary my boss allowed me, or my optimism, but I had far too many candidates that didn't pass even the above low bar. I don't even want to talk about the candidates that didn't make it through the phone screen. If it matters, the timeframe wasn't 1-4 hours, but rather 1-2, and the position was junior.
afs35mm 11y ago
Agreed. As someone in the interview process once again, and being a bit more introspective this time, it's just really amazing how BS the entire whiteboard/share-scree "code this out for me" is. It seems to be a better indicator of how many of type X problems you've seen before, and employers seem to care more about if you know how to do something cold vs work through a problem to an adequate solution.

godzillabrennus 11y ago

Even if you hate interviews you can get paid to have them with http://www.joinjune.com http://www.joinjune.com

philwelch 11y ago

I've never had this experience. Is this a Bay Area thing? In my experience companies are usually upfront about what their process is, if indeed they have a process at all.

x0x0 11y ago

I just wish companies wouldn't lie (Why yes, today, I did just talk to a YC company that had "remote" in their job ad on their site but, when asked, was unwilling to do wfh 2 days a week for someone who lives in the peninsula and was unenthusiastic about driving in and out of sf every day. Hmm...)

imh 11y ago

I think a part of the secrecy is so that if it goes poorly they can stop the interview after a really bad session without indicating to the candidate that it's gone so badly. "Yup, it's always just two sessions, goodbye." This is an actual rational I've heard. I don't agree with it, but it's a thing.

eric-hu 11y ago
For anyone who finds this to be a plausible reason, I did too. Then I realized that a more transparent company would simply tell me that I they're cutting the interview short.
- thedufer 11y ago
  There's a comfort advantage to both parties if you do rejection over phone/email instead of in your office, in my experience. Also, I've seen interviews cut short for both extremes (going really well and going really poorly) so it's easy to give the wrong impression that way.
tdkl 11y ago
I'd rather wish for being open, honest and direct with the rejection then tolerant and polite. It saves a lot of time and emotional investment.
- joelx 11y ago
  As an employer, I have found that if you honestly tell 10 people the reason that you did not hire them that a minimum of 3 people will have hostile reactions to you. I do agree that it would be a better way for all employees to give feedback to all candidates and for those candidates to handle the rejection in an emotionally mature way.
  - p4wnc6 11y ago
    Most companies do not handle candidate review in an emotionally mature or professional way, and the widespread lack of feedback is one of the ways they secure protection from possible downsides of their own blatantly disrespectful and sometimes outright discriminatory hiring practices. Assuming that you are like the other 90% or so of employers who treat employees and candidates exceptionally poorly (I'm not saying you are, just assuming for a second), then getting only a 30% rate of feedback calling you out on use of superficial, inconsistent, and (in some cases) borderline (or even blatantly) illegal reasons for rejecting a candidate doesn't sound so bad. It suggests to me that candidates on the whole are more professional than companies, but companies can use certain bureaucratic policies and processes to make sure they effectively hide the unprofessionalism from ways in which it could come back to negatively affect them.

pyb 11y ago

That could be because they are inexperienced, and are making up their interview process as they go along? This is definitely quite common IME.

alleycat 11y ago

1-4 hours makes sense. If you're terrible the interview finishes in an hour, 4 hours if there seriously considering you.

shawnps 11y ago

A long time ago I was interviewing with Facebook. They told me exactly what to expect from the process. I was actually shocked that they were giving away so much information. I studied for the interview and did very well in the first half, and then horribly the second half. Overall I enjoyed it because of how honest they were.

ToPutItBluntly 11y ago
I had a similar experience with Facebook although I did well until the last one. Then I was just too tired and hadn't practiced enough to do a good job. After the fact, I read more of the interview questions on Glassdoor and wished I'd read them before and practiced those on a whiteboard at home. So that is what I'll do next time I want to interview at FB. Overall, I really enjoyed the process as an interviewee. I've been on both sides and I'm curious how well the other side is done at FB but I left with a good impression and thought the outcome was fair. Also bonus points to them for asking real world questions. I was asked about making a web-based text editor and a couple months later, Draft.js came out.
p4wnc6 11y ago
I had a different experience with Facebook. I was told what the technical phone interview would consist of, and that much was true, but I was also told I would receive feedback within a certain time frame. After my interview (in which I felt I did very well), I did not hear anything back within the time frame they told me, and then many days afterwards I finally heard back. They said they were not going to move forward with me, and also they specifically said they were sorry but they could not provide any feedback. So I actually felt like for one of the most important parts (the feedback) they were actually not straightforward or honest with me. Had I known I could not have feedback, I would not have agreed to the interview in the first place.
- brianwawok 11y ago
  98% of interviews wont tell you why you got rejected. So do you not interview anywhere?

crdb 11y ago

"Trivia questions" are not useless. I've put out job ads only to receive hundreds of applications from all over the world, many not even in English or without even a word accompanying a CV. Of the "proper" applicants, I've then had to deal with dozens of candidates that claimed a competence they did not have. And guess what - that's a lot of effort and time which is taken away from the business. In my case, that's a big opportunity cost with salaries burning a deeper hole for every minute that they are not offset by client time. I suspect it's much worse for famous organisations. So now I ask a dozen questions by email that should take 5 minutes to answer in order to filter out both these groups, and that cover many basic CS concepts. Works really well, even if it's a bit annoying for candidates and probably turns off many vs just uploading your CV for HR to auto-scan for keywords. For example, if I'm hiring someone to do data modelling work and they tell me it's called the relational model because of the relations between tables, it's unlikely they'll know how to unfold EAV antipatterns. And if you have actual machine learning experience, it's unlikely you'll be stumped by my asking what high leverage means.

marmaduke 11y ago
Have "actual machine learning" experience, no idea what "high leverage" means.
- crdb 11y ago
  I'm referring to leverage in statistics [1], and particularly how high leverage observations may affect your model and how people deal with them. Clearer? For context: one of the candidates I interviewed told me that the best way to pick a model was to pick the model that would have the highest R squared when fitted to the whole dataset. I asked him about overfitting and he didn't know what I was talking about. Same guy whose CV showed 4 years in a research lab doing stats [2]. A lot of people are just going through the motions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leverage_(statistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leverage_(statistics) [2] reposting for fun: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-IJo_Tkw95-o/VANnTdCFgHI/AAAAAAAADVY/3cAV6UEWiPA/s1600/Screen%2BShot%2B2014-08-30%2Bat%2B6.08.23%2BPM.png http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-IJo_Tkw95-o/VANnTdCFgHI/AAAAAAAADV...

mappy 11y ago

> Personally I think all companies should be using pair-programming or contract to hire You should qualify that with "all companies by which I want to be hired", because not all teams/developers pair program or want to pair program. The team I'm on does a phone tech interview, then an in-person interview where we dig into history, then a mix of problem solving, pseudocode problems, OO/schema design, and web app design/technologies/approach, and then more interviews with the extended team. While we will sit with each other to help out at times, sometimes for hours, we don't strictly pair- that is just when help is needed. We rely on some up-front design and all PR's code reviewed for quality control, in addition to QA and approval by application owner.

dexterdog 11y ago

If they say 1-4 hours then 1 hour usually means you aren't getting the job. 3-4 hours means you are still in the running, but still probably won't get the job. I am with you on contract-to-hire. I get that companies are cautious because a bad hire can be tough to recover from, but the processes 99% of companies do are not conducive to good hires.

mooreds 11y ago
This. I hired a few times and rapidly learned not to promise the candidate a fixed amount of time. Why waste everyone's time doing more interviewing if the first interviewer finds out something that reveals the candidate is not a fit?
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  Because if they took the time to prepare for the interview and budget for an upper bound on the time range, then it is only professional and courteous of you to give them a full review. If you reject them based on their performance during hour 1, and you don't even give them the chance to show you more about themselves during hours 2, 3, and 4, it sounds like (a) your hiring process is kind of dumb and you're way too focused on what you seem to think is hyper efficient time usage than on actually learning about a candidate, and (b) you come off as unprofessional. It's a two-way street. Inviting someone in for a "1-4" hour block, then dismissing them after hour 1 makes it seem like you view it as if you're entitled to paw around the candidate like they are a cut of meat, assess them however you want, and not give them a fair chance to assess you.
  - mooreds 11y ago
    > Because if they took the time to prepare for the interview... That's very charitable of you. I dont know if it was my inability to phone screen properly, my inadequate job posting, my desperation to hire at the salary my boss allowed me, or my optimism, but I had far too many candidates that didn't pass even the above low bar. I don't even want to talk about the candidates that didn't make it through the phone screen. If it matters, the timeframe wasn't 1-4 hours, but rather 1-2, and the position was junior.

afs35mm 11y ago

Agreed. As someone in the interview process once again, and being a bit more introspective this time, it's just really amazing how BS the entire whiteboard/share-scree "code this out for me" is. It seems to be a better indicator of how many of type X problems you've seen before, and employers seem to care more about if you know how to do something cold vs work through a problem to an adequate solution.