3 ms·

There's tons of information online about what the big companies' interview processes are like. If you show up to an interview without bothering to do any resear

There's tons of information online about what the big companies' interview processes are like. If you show up to an interview without bothering to do any research or preparation (like the author clearly did), then it's not going to be surprising when it doesn't go well. Maybe I'm setting too high a bar, but I feel like it's not unreasonable to expect someone to spend an hour or two doing research on the interview process before flying out to Seattle. If he had, he'd have realized it was going to be heavy on the white boarding and algorithms, and then could have chosen either not to waste anyone's time, or to really prepare. The recruiter totally should have let him know what to expect of course, but it's a strange sort of entitlement that leads someone to be upset when they don't get a job just for showing up.

hibikir 10y ago
I look at it backwards: Rejecting a candidate to day doesn't mean that they won't be exactly the kind of person I'll need to hire 3 years later, as both my needs ad theirs have changed, and therefore, I think that a good candidate experience is crucial. I want people that are rejected, or that leave the process early, to remember the experience positively. Thus, I do not expect anyone to do research on the interview process: Before anything other than the basic recruiter chat, every candidate should receive a pretty good picture of how the recruiting process goes: Number of interviews, style of content, time to wait between an interview and its next steps... If a candidate is ever surprised, It's the company that fails. If a shop that has a couple of hundred developers can do that in a cost effective way, so can the bigger tech companies. If they fail, it's because their standards for how to run a company are way too low.
- nolemurs 10y ago
  Yeah, I totally agree with this actually. Amazon totally should have done everything you say. As it happens, I know that Google is really good at doing the things you list. The fact that Amazon screwed up doesn't mean that the author of the blog post didn't also screw up though. He really should have figured out what he was getting into before getting on a plane. My take on the blog post is that everyone involved was incompetent.

hibikir 10y ago

I look at it backwards: Rejecting a candidate to day doesn't mean that they won't be exactly the kind of person I'll need to hire 3 years later, as both my needs ad theirs have changed, and therefore, I think that a good candidate experience is crucial. I want people that are rejected, or that leave the process early, to remember the experience positively. Thus, I do not expect anyone to do research on the interview process: Before anything other than the basic recruiter chat, every candidate should receive a pretty good picture of how the recruiting process goes: Number of interviews, style of content, time to wait between an interview and its next steps... If a candidate is ever surprised, It's the company that fails. If a shop that has a couple of hundred developers can do that in a cost effective way, so can the bigger tech companies. If they fail, it's because their standards for how to run a company are way too low.

nolemurs 10y ago
Yeah, I totally agree with this actually. Amazon totally should have done everything you say. As it happens, I know that Google is really good at doing the things you list. The fact that Amazon screwed up doesn't mean that the author of the blog post didn't also screw up though. He really should have figured out what he was getting into before getting on a plane. My take on the blog post is that everyone involved was incompetent.