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I interviewed ~500 people in a fairly large (~2000 devs) company. Interviews used to take about 6-8 hours of my week, and I was usually completely destroyed by
by zulgan 7y ago
I interviewed ~500 people in a fairly large (~2000 devs) company.
Interviews used to take about 6-8 hours of my week, and I was usually completely destroyed by the context switch. I remember many days when a deadline was very close, and I absolutely did not want to do the interview, but had to.
In general some days I was in good mood, some in bad mood and even though I tried to make the interview as objective as possible, I am absolutely sure I failed. Keep in mind, one interview has 5 interviewers and guess what they had bad days too.
From those 500 interviews, I was certain for about ~5 cases, for the rest I could not say if it was my fault, or the candidate's fault that the interview went south, in that case I pretty much voted as the majority was voting.
I still feel very bad about people's livelihood being decided in such shitty process, there is absolutely no way that in 1 hour I can find out if someone is good. I knew that, my managers knew that, their managers knew that, and yet we kept going..
I feel that adding more time/people to the process only increases the variance, adding more structure to the process only increases the bias (like we get people who can pass interviews, but not do their job).
- wuliwong 7y agoI am pretty sure I'm a terrible interviewer and interviewee. I've had generally bad experiences all the way around. Interviewing (both sides of the table) has been a big time-suck, yielded mostly unsatisfactory results, and has been an emotionally draining process.
- adregan 7y agoI noticed that my job enjoyment took a hit during a period of heavy interviewing for new devs for all the reasons you mention. A one hour interview required a minimum of 30 minutes prep to read the resume, etc and generate questions. Then at least 30 minutes to write up my findings in a way that would allow me to participate in the roundup, which could be up to a month away if I was the phone screen. The roundup itself accounted for at least another 30 minutes. So you were 2 hours and 30 minutes into it assuming everything goes perfectly. It's a huge time suck. But beyond the time that I lost, it's a very difficult and crushing experience to have candidate fail and have to be the one that says "no" (and that is happening way way more than yes, especially if you are interviewing early in the pipeline). But it's equally disheartening to see a spark of something in an interview, tease it out, imagine that the person can be raised up to become a good developer only to have the candidate get shot down by all your colleagues because they didn't have a similar experience. I disliked losing time during the day, but I really disliked the emotional burden of interviewing and saying "no." I empathize with the person on the other side as I've been there.
- zulgan 7y agoI really hated the cases were when "no" can not be explained. In some cases when there is "no" it comes with clear instructions like: hey you need to know v8 more or understand hotspot better and try again in 6 months, but then there were those cases where the committee was incapable of giving feedback.