7 ms·

My general thought is that your compensation scale should be proportional to the complexity of the interview process. If you're going to be copying the FAANG i

My general thought is that your compensation scale should be proportional to the complexity of the interview process. If you're going to be copying the FAANG interview process, then the candidate should expect an offer similar to what they'd get from FAANG. In general, I haven't been disappointed on this front, but I fear that many people are. If you want to be super transparent about the interview process, you should probably define what compensation range you're going to offer and realize that some candidates will simply never contact you. Saves everyone time.

pdimitar 6y ago
This is strongly misaligned with many companies' incentives so it will never happen, I am afraid. A lot of interviewing processes are kind of like fishing. They hope that if they wasted you 6-10 hours of your time before an actual offer then you'd make a decision based on the sunk cost fallacy ("not sure how much time the other companies will waste me, let's take this one on their offer, it's not so bad"). I am glad that your experience has been positive but as you correctly intuited yourself, many others' experiences are very far from it. (To clarify, the employer I started onboarding with is nothing like that; I am talking about all the others that I talked with before I stumbled upon them.)
- claudeganon 6y ago
  The solution is to make companies pay people for their time during interviews, at an hourly rate equivalent to compensation for the position. Everyone else in the interview is getting paid by the company, after all. Suddenly, managers, hiring committees, and recruiters will stop wasting people’s time and everyone will know what to expect to get paid!
  - freedomben 6y ago
    That's an interesting idea, tho I expect it would have the unintended consequence of making it really hard to get an interview.
    - Teever 6y ago
      That's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that prospective employers would stop wasting the time of applicants.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    I'd love that but I am pretty sure it won't ever happen. A compromising variant I found is to make public the GitHub repos where I did homework assignments, with the company name removed and with the README enriched to clearly explain what was the task and how was it successfully done (although I do that preliminarily regardless). At one point 4 companies told me that they actually went through my accumulated interview assignments in GitHub and liked them and wanted a HR/manager interview without the tech interview before, which was a pleasant surprise.
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    That brings to mind a funny hypothetical niche of "interview tricksters" who lack qualifications but can land an interview sustainably. Probably not sustainable and they would be incentivized to bullshit their way into a full time job (like normal status quo really) but still pretty funny. It is essentially a counterpart of the joke abuse of the current system of building software by giving out pieces as "code interview questions" and never hiring anybody. Actually being able to devise and intergrate such a thing would probably be cheaper and less effort to do the work yourself.
- schoolornot 6y ago
  Goes both ways. I make a point of working at well-funded tech companies and if a recruiter neglects to raise salary from the get-go I use it to my advantage to make them and the hiring manager squirm as they re-arrange the department budget to pay me an extra 20%+ over the initial offer. As you mentioned, time is money :) and interviewing sucks even more after you find the right candidate.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    True true, and I mostly did the same this time around. But the pandemic thinned my savings much earlier than I anticipated (I should have been able to coast on them all the way to Christmas) so at one point I was forced to play the numbers game -- while ignoring obvious bad signs -- much more than I wanted. Lessons learned though. I quickly started putting very steep conditions on the table in response to employers whose conditions I had reservations about. It worked. 99% bailed out, only 2 agreed with my conditions. But by then I had much better offers overall so it didn't help them.
- slg 6y ago
  >They hope that if they wasted you 6-10 hours of your time before an actual offer then you'd make a decision based on the sunk cost fallacy You might be overthinking this. I doubt many companies really have this viewpoint for the simple fact that falling for this is a trait of a bad employee. You don't want to actively select your employees based on their flawed decision making process.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    I definitely could be overthinking it and I said the part you quoted kind of out of spite as well. But there are bad employers out there, be sure of it. Some of them definitely do employ that tactic. Might be unconsciously but they do. They definitely lack the self-awareness to know what does it mean to hire a bad employee. They kind of just go through the motions. One skill I never wanted to have but gradually developed pretty well was to recognize early such employers and bail out.
    - slg 6y ago
      I totally agree with you that some employers are downright bad and that how a company runs an interview process is indicative of how they run everything. I have turned down multiple interviews and a job offer before because I was soured by how a company operated that process. I just don't think the reason for those bad processes is necessarily nefarious. Hanlon's razor and all.
  - Viliam1234 6y ago
    Technically, company is not a single mind that could have a viewpoint on something. It is a group of people, who sometimes have different incentives. Maybe someone's incentives make this a good strategy, even if it is harmful for the company as a whole in long term. I don't know how exactly people in HR are rewarded, but I have noticed a few situations where the company had a generous salary range in mind, but HR fought against mentioning it. It didn't make sense from the company perspective, because the company wanted the people, and the salary was above market average so the potential candidates would have liked it too. The resistence of HR makes me suspect that their incentives didn't align with the company interest, but I have no idea how specifically.
- lmilcin 6y ago
  I conduct interviews with candidates almost every other day. Believe me, interviewing is a huge cost for the company and nobody wants to organize interview to "fish" for the candidates. We have screening process to remove candidates that don't have chance passing next stage so that we can spend more time with candidates that pass screening. It is really difficult to figure out if you want to work with somebody after 1.5-2h discussion. For 2 hour interview I must fit following things: * Spend 5 minutes getting everything to order, bringing water, solving connection problems etc. * Spend couple minutes introducing myself, who we are and what we are doing * Spend couple more minutes trying to calm the candidate, break the tension. People react very differently to stressful situation and we would really want to get the candidate little bit more calm to level the field (we don't want just the people that deal well with stress). * Ask couple technical questions from various areas. I can understate how difficult is to gauge candidates knowledge and experience from 30m of technical questions * Give a coding task. I can't tell how many time we had a candidate that was able to answer questions quite well but was unable to organize process to write simple piece of code. It is when the candidate is solving the task when we learn for example if the candidate can react to hints or how it feels to have a discussion on a technical problem. This typically takes 0,5h to 1h * Have a discussion on the candidate experience, past projects, what was his/her involvement, etc. * Let the candidate ask his/her own question about our project. * Spend couple of minutes to close the discussion on a good tone regardless of how the candidate fared. Our HR does not like us to extend the discussion over 2h supposedly because it "scares" candidates but you have to understand, it is very difficult to do all of this and get to know the candidate in such a short time. I can totally understand somebody wanting to spend couple more hours with a candidate that shows really good promise. Hiring a bad employee is a huge cost and totally worth spending couple more hours trying to ensure this person does not have "dealbreaking" faults. You would not believe what kind of things I met in my past. Candidates who passed technical questions really well just to start googling solution to our coding task? Candidates we give the same critical hint 5 times and each time he/she tells me that's not right and dismissed to go continue with his/her faulty line of reasoning?
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    I can't find a single point of disagreement with you. :) The problem with these HN discussions is that they attract the good apples from both sides while the bad apples won't ever read and correct their practices by participating in these threads. We kind of put ourselves in a rather positive filter bubble here and that can skew our reality a bit. I wish I've met more interviewers like you during my nightmarish 4 months of job hunting that just finished 1-2 weeks ago.
awithrow 6y ago
This is a big reason why I talk compensation up front during initial conversations. I'm not sinking hours of time into an interview process only to find out they're only offering less than half of what I'm expecting. Plenty of recruiters say no they don't discuss this up front at which point I'm fine not continuing the conversation.
tschwimmer 6y ago
I’ve actually found that there’s an inverse correlation: companies with worse comp seem to have more rounds, more take home and harder questions. The confounding variable is that the lower comp companies tend to be startups.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Also confounding is that start ups usually offer equity which is an unknown variable. Financial planning-wise it is geneally best to assume it is worth nothing but there is a small chance that it will utterly outstrip the certain compensation.
  - tschwimmer 6y ago
    Usually there is some sort of VC funding and usually there is a valuation and ergo a price per share. I find that startups are usually at part with public companies or slightly worse with the promise that there's tons of growth right over the horizon.
bootlooped 6y ago
I don't think many companies will be able to come to terms with not being able to hire FAANG-level engineers if they can't offer FAANG-level compensation. I can't remember where I once read the quip, "we only hire the best, and so does everybody else".

pdimitar 6y ago

This is strongly misaligned with many companies' incentives so it will never happen, I am afraid. A lot of interviewing processes are kind of like fishing. They hope that if they wasted you 6-10 hours of your time before an actual offer then you'd make a decision based on the sunk cost fallacy ("not sure how much time the other companies will waste me, let's take this one on their offer, it's not so bad"). I am glad that your experience has been positive but as you correctly intuited yourself, many others' experiences are very far from it. (To clarify, the employer I started onboarding with is nothing like that; I am talking about all the others that I talked with before I stumbled upon them.)

claudeganon 6y ago
The solution is to make companies pay people for their time during interviews, at an hourly rate equivalent to compensation for the position. Everyone else in the interview is getting paid by the company, after all. Suddenly, managers, hiring committees, and recruiters will stop wasting people’s time and everyone will know what to expect to get paid!
- freedomben 6y ago
  That's an interesting idea, tho I expect it would have the unintended consequence of making it really hard to get an interview.
  - Teever 6y ago
    That's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that prospective employers would stop wasting the time of applicants.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  I'd love that but I am pretty sure it won't ever happen. A compromising variant I found is to make public the GitHub repos where I did homework assignments, with the company name removed and with the README enriched to clearly explain what was the task and how was it successfully done (although I do that preliminarily regardless). At one point 4 companies told me that they actually went through my accumulated interview assignments in GitHub and liked them and wanted a HR/manager interview without the tech interview before, which was a pleasant surprise.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  That brings to mind a funny hypothetical niche of "interview tricksters" who lack qualifications but can land an interview sustainably. Probably not sustainable and they would be incentivized to bullshit their way into a full time job (like normal status quo really) but still pretty funny. It is essentially a counterpart of the joke abuse of the current system of building software by giving out pieces as "code interview questions" and never hiring anybody. Actually being able to devise and intergrate such a thing would probably be cheaper and less effort to do the work yourself.
schoolornot 6y ago
Goes both ways. I make a point of working at well-funded tech companies and if a recruiter neglects to raise salary from the get-go I use it to my advantage to make them and the hiring manager squirm as they re-arrange the department budget to pay me an extra 20%+ over the initial offer. As you mentioned, time is money :) and interviewing sucks even more after you find the right candidate.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  True true, and I mostly did the same this time around. But the pandemic thinned my savings much earlier than I anticipated (I should have been able to coast on them all the way to Christmas) so at one point I was forced to play the numbers game -- while ignoring obvious bad signs -- much more than I wanted. Lessons learned though. I quickly started putting very steep conditions on the table in response to employers whose conditions I had reservations about. It worked. 99% bailed out, only 2 agreed with my conditions. But by then I had much better offers overall so it didn't help them.
slg 6y ago
>They hope that if they wasted you 6-10 hours of your time before an actual offer then you'd make a decision based on the sunk cost fallacy You might be overthinking this. I doubt many companies really have this viewpoint for the simple fact that falling for this is a trait of a bad employee. You don't want to actively select your employees based on their flawed decision making process.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  I definitely could be overthinking it and I said the part you quoted kind of out of spite as well. But there are bad employers out there, be sure of it. Some of them definitely do employ that tactic. Might be unconsciously but they do. They definitely lack the self-awareness to know what does it mean to hire a bad employee. They kind of just go through the motions. One skill I never wanted to have but gradually developed pretty well was to recognize early such employers and bail out.
  - slg 6y ago
    I totally agree with you that some employers are downright bad and that how a company runs an interview process is indicative of how they run everything. I have turned down multiple interviews and a job offer before because I was soured by how a company operated that process. I just don't think the reason for those bad processes is necessarily nefarious. Hanlon's razor and all.
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  Technically, company is not a single mind that could have a viewpoint on something. It is a group of people, who sometimes have different incentives. Maybe someone's incentives make this a good strategy, even if it is harmful for the company as a whole in long term. I don't know how exactly people in HR are rewarded, but I have noticed a few situations where the company had a generous salary range in mind, but HR fought against mentioning it. It didn't make sense from the company perspective, because the company wanted the people, and the salary was above market average so the potential candidates would have liked it too. The resistence of HR makes me suspect that their incentives didn't align with the company interest, but I have no idea how specifically.
lmilcin 6y ago
I conduct interviews with candidates almost every other day. Believe me, interviewing is a huge cost for the company and nobody wants to organize interview to "fish" for the candidates. We have screening process to remove candidates that don't have chance passing next stage so that we can spend more time with candidates that pass screening. It is really difficult to figure out if you want to work with somebody after 1.5-2h discussion. For 2 hour interview I must fit following things: * Spend 5 minutes getting everything to order, bringing water, solving connection problems etc. * Spend couple minutes introducing myself, who we are and what we are doing * Spend couple more minutes trying to calm the candidate, break the tension. People react very differently to stressful situation and we would really want to get the candidate little bit more calm to level the field (we don't want just the people that deal well with stress). * Ask couple technical questions from various areas. I can understate how difficult is to gauge candidates knowledge and experience from 30m of technical questions * Give a coding task. I can't tell how many time we had a candidate that was able to answer questions quite well but was unable to organize process to write simple piece of code. It is when the candidate is solving the task when we learn for example if the candidate can react to hints or how it feels to have a discussion on a technical problem. This typically takes 0,5h to 1h * Have a discussion on the candidate experience, past projects, what was his/her involvement, etc. * Let the candidate ask his/her own question about our project. * Spend couple of minutes to close the discussion on a good tone regardless of how the candidate fared. Our HR does not like us to extend the discussion over 2h supposedly because it "scares" candidates but you have to understand, it is very difficult to do all of this and get to know the candidate in such a short time. I can totally understand somebody wanting to spend couple more hours with a candidate that shows really good promise. Hiring a bad employee is a huge cost and totally worth spending couple more hours trying to ensure this person does not have "dealbreaking" faults. You would not believe what kind of things I met in my past. Candidates who passed technical questions really well just to start googling solution to our coding task? Candidates we give the same critical hint 5 times and each time he/she tells me that's not right and dismissed to go continue with his/her faulty line of reasoning?
- pdimitar 6y ago
  I can't find a single point of disagreement with you. :) The problem with these HN discussions is that they attract the good apples from both sides while the bad apples won't ever read and correct their practices by participating in these threads. We kind of put ourselves in a rather positive filter bubble here and that can skew our reality a bit. I wish I've met more interviewers like you during my nightmarish 4 months of job hunting that just finished 1-2 weeks ago.

awithrow 6y ago

This is a big reason why I talk compensation up front during initial conversations. I'm not sinking hours of time into an interview process only to find out they're only offering less than half of what I'm expecting. Plenty of recruiters say no they don't discuss this up front at which point I'm fine not continuing the conversation.

tschwimmer 6y ago

I’ve actually found that there’s an inverse correlation: companies with worse comp seem to have more rounds, more take home and harder questions. The confounding variable is that the lower comp companies tend to be startups.

Nasrudith 6y ago
Also confounding is that start ups usually offer equity which is an unknown variable. Financial planning-wise it is geneally best to assume it is worth nothing but there is a small chance that it will utterly outstrip the certain compensation.
- tschwimmer 6y ago
  Usually there is some sort of VC funding and usually there is a valuation and ergo a price per share. I find that startups are usually at part with public companies or slightly worse with the promise that there's tons of growth right over the horizon.

bootlooped 6y ago

I don't think many companies will be able to come to terms with not being able to hire FAANG-level engineers if they can't offer FAANG-level compensation. I can't remember where I once read the quip, "we only hire the best, and so does everybody else".