18 ms·

Limitations and pitfalls of the job interview

102 points by galfarragem 6y ago

Zaheer 6y ago
Related message for students / new-grads: Find an internship. Internship interviews tend to be much easier as the stakes are lower. If you perform well during your internship (arguably easier / more accurate indicator of success), the company will likely extend an offer. At big companies I've seen internship to offer rates exceed 30%.
- benbristow 6y ago
  +2 for this. Worked for me with two separate companies! One of them I had an internship and they never told me to leave, so I just kept working (and getting paid) until eventually they hired me full-time!
- sidhanthp 6y ago
  I've seen internship to offer rates exceed 80% :P Lots of Big Tech is in that general range. I actually don't know of any top companies where the offer rate is ~30%.
- peterwoerner 6y ago
  My company (defense contractor) has a goal of hiring more than 50% of our interns.
- airstrike 6y ago
  In most of Wall Street, internship to offer rates effectively start at 100% but some people during the course of internship manage to cause the employer to rethink the offer, so the final result is anywhere between 90-98% Well, not at JPM, but most everywhere else.
- jaaron 6y ago
  I'd go so far as to say, at least within tech, your primary goal during undergrad is securing one or more internships. I look at internships before grades and the school. When I interview fresh grads, if they have internships, that's what we talk about. When I have interns on my team, my goal is to hire them. At one large tech firm I was at, we had a goal of hiring 50% of our internship pool. It was the primary way we brought in new talent.
- opportune 6y ago
  30% is very low for big companies, I’ve never heard of somewhere being lower than 50% and 75-90% seems more standard (though offer does not necessarily lead to an acceptance).
- text_exch 6y ago
  This message is expressed very well here [1]. Tl;dr internships are helpful to students for a variety of reasons, like making applicants more valuable to employers, making programming less of an abstract concept, and exposing them to interesting subfields of computer science. [1] https://getatechinternship.com/2020/04/27/why-do-i-need-an-internship/ https://getatechinternship.com/2020/04/27/why-do-i-need-an-i...
- TrackerFF 6y ago
  Unfortunately, this has two sides. I've noticed that in banking - and I'm not talking about investment banking, or high-finance in general, but regular consumer banking - there's been a trend to basically hire woefully overqualified people for the lowest positions around - I'm talking about bank greeters, customer support, and what not, and then train them from there. This could very well be a local thing, but there are so many people today qualifying for these jobs - lots of BBA and MBA candidates out there, willing to do pretty much anything to get a foot inside. When I was interning for a bank, even the greeters (basically the person that just greets the clients, and forwards them to the right people within the bank - a receptionist, really) had a Bachelors degree, many were working on their Masters. The more sought after positions had been re-labeled "graduate programs" or "trainee programs", and were aimed at the top-shelf students. While the rest pretty much had to get a foot inside by working their way up from the bottom. So you suddenly have a ton of highly educated candidates applying for jobs that only 15 years ago required a HS diploma, if that even. Then when they're first inside, they tend to get moved around internally - as a lot of positions only get posted internally. It's almost the same way with internships. Internships are there to practically train and select future company workers. If you do well, you get a return offer - if not, well, at least you have some experience. With the rising number of graduates, I can foresee a future where candidates are being divided into the regulars and the elites. The regulars will, no mater how qualified they are, will have to start at the rock bottom, proving themselves for $8.5/hr, while the elites are trained for leadership/management-track positions.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    That should be a signal that's there's an oversupply for whatever Bachelors degrees these employees were holding. It's the same thing in law, the best advice to give to an aspiring lawyer is to go have a chat with a practicing lawyer at a non-elite firm.
kanox 6y ago
> What’s the best way to test if someone can do a particular job well? Get them to carry out tasks that are part of the job. See if they can do what they say they can do. It’s much harder for someone to lie and mislead an interviewer during actual work than during an interview. Using competency tests for a blinded interview process is also possible—interviewers could look at depersonalized test results to make unbiased judgments. Why would a practical test be more effective than a discussion about prior work experience? Short coding tests under pressure are extremely unrepresentative of real work and I'm not sure homework-style interviews are much better. I personally don't want to spend an entire weekend on your test and I've dropped opportunities for that reason in the past. All these "competency tests" are good for is catching blatant lying. Is this a serious problem? In my view job interviews are mostly about finding a match between skills/interests and project needs. Communications skills are a very big advantage in interviewing and that feels unfair but I'm not sure that true. Communication and persuasion skills are extremely useful and important to all office jobs, even the most technical. I'd bet that people who interview well also write beautiful code comments and commit messages.
- maksimilian 6y ago
  I imagine a good compromise might be a small piece of "contract work" where a company presents a small representative task as a project for a candidate to complete and the candidate actually gets some form of compensation for their time. There are definitely problems to this approach, but in a best case scenario, the result is a win-win situation even if a candidate doesn't get hired. At the moment every candidate that doesn't get hired represents a net loss for both parties (time for both and opportunity for the candidate)
- hellcow 6y ago
  > All these "competency tests" are good for is catching blatant lying. Is this a serious problem? Of the people I interview that claim they have years of experience, mastery over multiple languages, and expertise in various frameworks, a solid 80% or more can't pass fizz-buzz in any language they choose.
  - 6y ago
stepstop 6y ago
Wow, that headline is a stick in the mud on a nuanced topic. > What’s your biggest weakness? Where do you see yourself in five years? Why do you want this job? Why are you leaving your current job? I do a lot of tech & business interviews, and I don't ask those questions (unless they've recently left A LOT of jobs). I ask situational questions to understand how they think, who they talk to, what research they did to understand the problem, and the solution (was it simple?). If they tell me they built a Rube Goldberg machine, I ask if they would have done anything different with hindsight. If they don't realize they built a Rube Goldberg machine, well, perhaps they won't be a good fit. I look for people who can solve problems, do their own research, ask for help when they get stuck, aren't afraid to attempt solutions (many that will knowingly fail) and have the introspection to identify failures and admit it are generally people you want to hire for senior positions. Now I admit that it's a lot harder to hire this way for junior positions, when they have less examples, less job history, etc. Educational projects are a substitute, as well as working on personal projects.
- dang 6y ago
  Ok, we'll replace it with some of the mud in the headline above.
jokoon 6y ago
The first time I ever heard the expression "social filter" was from Barrack Obama. There are many things that a democracy can give to its citizens. But apparently, it seems civilization doesn't want to give up social filters. I can understand social filters when it comes to friendships, sex and intimate relationship, but for jobs, I will never understand why they exist.
- antisthenes 6y ago
  > I can understand social filters when it comes to friendships, sex and intimate relationship, but for jobs, I will never understand why they exist. Because jobs are just as social as intimate relationships, if not more so. Up to about the 2010s, the majority of marriages came from getting to know someone at work. Even if nothing intimate does come from work, it's still people you have to see 8 hours a day for years on end. If someone is repulsive/annoying/toxic, it WILL make you miserable at work, and people are very wary of disrupting a well-oiled collective.
  - tartoran 6y ago
    Aside from abusive/toxic workers, do you think some diversity (not necessarily racial but cultural as well, different age groups,etc) would do any harm? I personally enjoy working alongside older folks who I find invaluable, they have been around for a long time and have lots of stories to share, but are not as quick to jump on a new technology bandwagon. Lots of companies seem to want to keep the young vibe and avoid hiring these folks.
  - jokoon 6y ago
    > Because jobs are just as social as intimate relationships, if not more so. For very small or family companies, maybe. In small communities, maybe, but small communities could also include people from any horizon. But in other cases, I disagree. Work and production is the blood of human civilization. Generally, the free market ideology says that if you're competent, it's the only relevant parameter. Social filters are arbitrary, unnecessary and backwards. > If someone is repulsive/annoying/toxic The nazis sent people who were not desired to death camps. Today, those same people are being excluded from society through social filters. You cannot have a healthy society if you keep segregating people like this, even if it's not race, but other traits like education, politics or behavior. You're advocating social darwinism through a detour.
stove 6y ago
There's a growing rift in software between employers saying "there's a talent shortage" and a rapidly growing population of devs who feel like they're locked out due to the technical interview process. Many of the engineers not being hired are recent bootcamp grads but there are also tons of CS majors that can't seem to "crack" the interview process. Part of my job is helping companies "fix" their hiring and one of the ideas that I've been putting forth for years that's slowly gaining steam is developing a "technical apprentice" role. This role would be responsible for tasks that are frequently de-prioritized like documentation, testing, QA, bug fixes, note taking, etc. and would be a foot in the door for entry-level engineers. The role is designed to focus on communication and soft-skills while also giving the person a chance to prove their "grit" on the technical side. Even a few months in an apprenticeship role is generally enough for companies to "take a chance" on someone as an entry-level engineer. This has been a great way to shift interviews away from algorithms and more towards finding people can add immense value to technical teams even without having on-the-job programming experience. I'm curious what the HN crowd thinks about that role as a way to bridge the hiring gap.
- mac01021 6y ago
  This sounds like what most internships are intended to be? How much does it cost to employ one of these apprentices?
  - stove 6y ago
    Internships are generally thought of as something you do during college (summers or otherwise). Most CS grads would scoff at getting an "internship" after graduating. Internships are also very structured and generally involve working on a specific project within a technical team (I know they're all different). The apprentice role, the way I've been pitching it at least, is different. This is a role where you join an engineering org and learn the product by QAing it, join technical discussions and help out by taking notes for the team, show off your communication skills by documenting new features and, big picture, you find ways to add value to the team in whatever ways they need. Over time, the bugs fixed get bigger and the person can bite off small features, etc. The problem is that companies _want_ to hire new grads (even bootcamp grads) but don't feel comfortable paying SWE rates for someone who hasn't worked as a SWE (often rightfully so). The comp for this is equivalent to a QA eng but has a clear path towards being an entry-level SWE (3-6 months maximum). If after 3-6 months it's not clear if the person can add value as an engineer then it's clearly not a good fit.
manfredo 6y ago
A rather click-baity headline. The article doesn't claim that job interviews don't work so much as it claims that subjective job interviews are more subject to bias than structured job-interviews. I'd say that's true, but the caveat is that structured job interviews are more subject to people studying and honing skills specific to the job interview process. Grinding leetcode definitely makes you a better at solving algorithms problems on a whiteboard in 60 minutes but doesn't do much to improve working effectiveness. I think there are 3 core trade-offs for the job interview process: logistical feasibility, consistency, and resemblance to the actual work experience. Doing 2 rounds of coding interviews, and one round of systems design from a set list of questions with explicit rubrics is easy to implement and is very consistent. But you can leetcode your way to knowing most coding question archetypes. Systems design question archetypes are even smaller in problem space. These questions have moderate to low resemblance to the actual work experience. Sure, it can identify people who can't code or aren't experienced in systems design. But does it show how well someone takes feedback, or reviews other people's code? Not really. One of my co-workers used to conduct 90 interviews that started with one question: "how would you build a text editor?" He didn't specify whether this text editor was WYSIWYG like Word, a web-based editor, a code editor, etc. It expanded and touched on a whole variety of questions. It could be traditional data structures, or UI design, or systems (e.g. implementing auto-saving text fields on the web). This was low consistency, since the interview was mostly unique to each candidate. It had moderate logistical feasibility since it was hard to train interviewers on these open ended questions. But I think it had better resemblance to the actual work experience, since it didn't just test coding ability. It tested thinking through the problem and what the desired end behavior for the user really was and navigating how those expectations influence implementation. An idea of an interview process that I have is to do it asynchronously through github or another version control system. Give the candidate a task to open a PR on a mock codebase. See how they implement the task and justify their design decisions. How thoroughly the test. Respond to the PR with comments and see how the candidate responds. And next, have the candidate review another person's PR and see what they look for in a review. This potentially has even better logistical feasibility since it's not dependent on the candidate and employee being active at the same time. I think it would have the most direct resemblance to actual work experience, since it's emulating the workflow most developers actually use in their day to day work. Consistency may be difficult to achieve, but if evaluation was broken up into multiple segments for separate evaluation it may be able to be made consistent.
grugagag 6y ago
It is true, and not that I am trying to be dishonest myself but I am not the same person while taking an interview. It's a sad that we can't be honest or humble but in this system we have to sell ourselves, fake enthusiasm for the hiring company is a must, do whatever it takes to pass the interview then think later if we take the position or not. If not, somebody else with the same capability or or less will snatch that job. Plus that interviews like tests are gameable. In an ideal world a trial period would ensure both the employees and employers are a fit. But that could be abused as well if it becomes the norm.
- tartoran 6y ago
  How would a trial period work?
  - grugagag 6y ago
    Work on a sample project, sample team for 2 weeks. See if you like the work and the company sees if they like you. This would only work if it were a widely accepted standard practice.
    - mattkrause 6y ago
      In the US, two weeks of vacation is pretty standard so a prospective employee would either have to a) forfeit all of their vacation for the year or b) quit their previous job first and risk having no job at all.
      - grugagag 6y ago
        It was a suggestion if it wasn’t broken. The system is currently broken with respect to both employers and employees finding eachother on multiple dimensions not just salary but basically the best possible fit
- Afton 6y ago
  Someone always suggests this. The issue is that if you did this, 95% of the candidates that would agree to this kind of setup would be the kind you didn't want. If I'm sitting on 2 offers, one is a hire and one is a "Let's see how this works out after 2 weeks of work", I'm going to take the first one. And that says nothing for the necessary benefits question in the states, where changing jobs often involves expensive (in money or time) changes to health care insurance.
deleted 6y ago
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exabrial 6y ago
Silicon Valley interviews are worthless. The algorithm pop-quiz is just a way for the interviewer to beat his chest about some obscure facts and demonstrate his superior knowledge to the interviewee. Has anyone found a better process than casual conversation? I've found it effective as long as engineers and non-engineers get a chance to participate. Usually I talk about what they want, talk about what you need, talk about expectations from both parties, talk about needs, and talk about past experiences both good and bad. Once expectations are set, there's literally no opportunity for a "bad hire", because if they don't live up, it's a simple conversation to refer back to the expectations that are set and help them achieve , or worst-case, offer them severance.
- the_jeremy 6y ago
  > because if they don't live up, it's a simple conversation to refer back to the expectations that are set and help them achieve , or worst-case, offer them severance. That is a bad hire. You are describing a PIP and then firing someone that you wasted time and resources recruiting, on-boarding, and training.
  - exabrial 6y ago
    That's not what I said... If a person doesn't feel they can meet the discussed expectations, you wouldn't hire them in the first place.
simonw 6y ago
If you want a really big competitive advantage, figure out how to hire great people who don't interview well.
- bluedino 6y ago
  Find them through word-of-mouth.
  - simonw 6y ago
    Yeah that definitely helps a lot. But it means you won't get to hire great people from outside your two-layer deep professional circle (people known by people you know).
  - jaaron 6y ago
    Double edged sword. Certainly helps to find great talent and build a cohesive team. Also tends to perpetuate our biases, create cliques and echo chambers. Makes it harder for new talent to break in. When I build my teams, I try to balance referrals with newly sourced talent far outside my network.
    - nogabebop23 6y ago
      everyone also has a pretty shallow pool of quality talent, so it doesn't scale well. Once you've been involved in hiring you see why a company will pass on a likely good candidate to avoid a maybe bad experience. In the longer term it's way less work.
      - bluedino 6y ago
        Works well for the first 20-100 employees. After that you’re bound to get a solid chunk of bad ones no matter what you do.
    - closeparen 6y ago
      Judgement, taste, sensibility, intuition - this is what human professionals are for. The value of an experienced worker is in the biases he has accumulated.
jaaron 6y ago
I'm wondering if much of the discussion here is even about the article, which advocates for things we long know work better: * Structured interviews * Blind auditions * Competency-related evaluations The title "Job interviews don't work" is rather bait-clicky when clearly they advocate that _some_ form of job interviews work. Or are at least better. As a technical hiring manager for over a decade, here's where I'm at: - The best interview is an internship. We can't always do that and often we need senior talent now. - The next best interview would be a portfolio. I am so envious of artists with their public portfolios. If there's one thing I wish we as an industry could figure out, it would be some way of stopping to test and retests ourselves as if we have to constantly reprove what we've already done and instead find a way to better showcase our work. - The next best technical interview would be a "homework" project, but I've come around to the mentality that this just isn't fair to candidates. As a hiring manager I love it, but most folks just don't have the time to do a bunch of unpaid work. Even if you compensate them, it's unrealistic for many. So we're mostly back to the suggestions in the article. They're good. A good hiring process is not easy but it's worth it. And finally, a bit of anecdotal evidence: yes, there are folks out there you probably shouldn't hire. They aren't a good fit for the role. You want to set them and yourself up for success. That said, there are probably more people who can excel than you realize. A major factor in their success is the maturity of the team and leadership that's already in your company. Sometimes you'll get lucky and hire some rare talent, but if all you're doing is looking for "rare" talent, then you're likely poorly calibrated and relying too much on outside talent to come in an fix the mess already on your hands.
- RangerScience 6y ago
  > The next best interview would be a portfolio. I tried using my (limited) open source hobby project portfolio as a substitute for coding interviews. Companies either didn't take me up on it, or still also required me to do their regular take-home. Twice now, I have had two companies ask for the same take-home, although in the first case they asked me to re-do the work in their preferred language.
  - jaaron 6y ago
    I think it's a great idea and you should keep trying. Lots of places (somewhat understandably) won't deviate from their policy because consistency of the interview process is a good goal. But at places that are a bit more flexible, it may work.
MisterTea 6y ago
My boss tasked me with hiring my assistant. HR filtered most of them and I was left with three applicants. So I ran it the way I'd like to be hired which was skip the useless small talk and other painful BS and just bring the applicants around the shop and show them what I did. The first applicant seemed like his mother dressed him and reminded him to breath that morning. The second guy was pretty sharp but disinterested during the walk and talk. The third applicant immediatly stood out. He was excited and fascinated by our systems and kept asking technical questions - winner. Excellent co-worker until he moved on to greener pastures. All that wear your best suit and where do you see yourself in 5 years (best answer: prison) nonsense sounds like it was lifted from one of those cheesy 1950's self help shorts the MST3K crew routinely riffed.
bartread 6y ago
This was potentially interesting but then: > They are in no way the most effective means of deciding who to hire because they maximize the role of bias and minimize the role of evaluating competency. I can believe that badly planned and executed job interviews do the above but I've overseen or been directly involved in the interviewing of hundreds of candidates over the years, for dozens of roles, and the hit rate has been pretty good. Two probation failures, and that's about it. We're looking to assess skill and character in our interview process. We are interested in whether you can do the job, and whether you're a reasonable human being, and that's it. We have strong structures and guidelines in place in terms of questions, answers, and evaluation. And inasmuch as it's possible we strive to make our hiring process a pleasant experience, regardless of whether a candidate is successful or not (obviously there's some level of stress inherent in going through a selection process). We also give feedback that we hope will help unsuccessful candidates in future (I realise this is unusual and even frowned upon in some circles but our experience has been that most people appreciate it enough that it's worthwhile to deal with the headaches caused by the odd person who wants to argue about it). I get it. There's a cohort of people on HN who don't like job interviews. Honestly, I'm one of them. But done well, they work well. Our process isn't perfect, and we're always looking for ways to improve it - there was quite a lot of tweaking early on, for sure - but for us it's worked well. We've spent a lot of time on it because - although my role is as a CTO in a mid-sized firm, and this might not fit with everybody's expectations of that role - literally my most important job has been and continues to be hiring, building, and maintaining a strong, effective team. And I am very happy with the people we've hired. Just as important, I'm also happy with the decisions we've made about people we've chosen not to hire.
eminence32 6y ago
In the summer before my senior year at college, I did a 3 month internship at a software development company. The interview for the internship was very soft, partly because it was only an internship, and also because I knew someone at the company who helped me get the position. After I graduated, I applied for a full-time position there and have been there for 10 years. The interview process for the full-time position was also fairly soft and non-technical because I was hiring into a team that I worked with during my internship. I like to describe it as a 3-month long interview process. Not only did the company get to know me and what I was capable of, but I got to know the company and its people (in order to make a decision about if it was some place that I would like to work). Surely this isn't scalable (internship are fairly rare, and generally are not available to anyone except students or recent grads), but the whole internship process worked out very well for me. It allowed me to bypass the traditional tech interview, which is something I feel very fortunate about.
k__ 6y ago
Never say no, but don't say yes unless you're sure about it. You won't believe how often that will be good enough. "Can you code in X?" "I can program in many languages!" Didn't answer the question, but was often enough for the interviewer.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  Yikes, I don't know about that. If somebody asked me if I could program in, say, Perl, I'd say I knew what it was but that was about it. That's like somebody asking if I can speak Chinese: I know what it sounds like, but no, I can't.
- TrackerFF 6y ago
  But on a serious note - if some interviewer ask you outright "Have you programmed in [x], and what's your opinion on it?", try to be positive. I used to be very honest about my opinion on languages, but my experience is that if you start being too honest (on the negative side) regarding some language you're being asked about, it will have few upsides. For whatever reason, some devs. are very personal about the tools and languages being used, and will even get hurt or agitated by criticism. So whenever I get asked about that now, I just try to come up with the positive things I enjoy about [x] language.
kube-system 6y ago
> A job interview is meant to be a quick snapshot to tell a company how a candidate would be at a job. > Unstructured interviews can make sense for certain roles. The ability to give a good first impression and be charming matters for a salesperson. But not all roles need charm, and just because you don’t want to hang out with someone after an interview doesn’t mean they won’t be an amazing software engineer. If that's the attitude someone has towards interviews, then no wonder they draw the conclusion that they don't work. The real issue is that most teams either don't give much attention to interviewing (because they have their primary job to attend to), or too much of the process is delegated/outsourced elsewhere (where people only tangentially understand the work area, and/or have no deep knowledge of the job role). Lean on interviews for measuring soft skills, and lean on demonstrations (portfolios, code tests, pseudo-code, problem solving, etc) for measuring hard skills. Every job requires some balance of hard and soft skills. If you use the wrong tool for the evaluation, or if the person using the tool doesn't know how to use it, you get the wrong result. Interviews have their place, but technical evaluation is not it.
mundo 6y ago
I interview a lot of people and found much to complain about in this essay. This is the main thing: > The key is to decide in advance on a list of questions, specifically designed to test job-specific skills, then ask them to all the candidates. In a structured interview, everyone gets the same questions with the same wording, and the interviewer doesn’t improvise. This is good advice, if and only if you're interviewing an undifferentiated group of applicants, as in the cited examples (college entrance and army recruits). If you're hiring a QA III and you have three different applicants, it's terrible advice. You need to ask about the candidate's specific experience, and ask follow-ups. More generally, I don't think the stated goal of an interview according to this essay (peering in to the candidate's soul to suss out traits like "responsibility" or "sociability") is possible or reasonable. My goal is more modest - I just want to figure out whether you were good at your last job or not. If you say you're responsible, I can't prove you right or wrong in a one hour conversation. But if you say you're a whiz at Selenium UI automation, and you're lying, I will figure it out pretty easily.
mathattack 6y ago
This is very true. Sometimes it’s hard to know about hiring someone after a 10 Week internship. Crazy to think a 30 minute interview is better.
ironman1478 6y ago
This is a great article. An undiscussed issue I've personally seen when conducting interviews and being parts of roundups is a lack of self understanding. lots of people who conduct interviews think they are way smarter than they are (me included!). They hold up candidates to very high standards and then dismiss them at the slightest mistake, however many of these people also make many mistakes on the job. When I give interviews I always just ask the easiest and clearest questions I possibly can that still try to be relevant to the job to minimize this bias.
booboolayla 6y ago
Give existing employees coding interview questions of their colleagues once every three months. It will be very easy to pinpoint the bad players.
29athrowaway 6y ago
Does your interview process perform better than a coin flip? (50% chance of making the correct decision). If the answer is yes, you have a useful process.
xelxebar 6y ago
This hits home too hard. My job search is going so poorly, that I have started to doubt my technical value at all. Confusingly, personal one-on-one interactions with companies or hiring agencies almost invariably result in positive feedback and comments, "you are exetremely hirable," "you have a strong technical background," etc. However, none of these interactions has gone anywhere. Either they "move forward with someone else" or simply evaporate into thin air. A few have even evaporated after extensive interviews and claiming that they wish to hire. Is positive-sounding feedback just a polite way of avoiding some "elephant in the room" problem? Am I inadvertantly projecting an image of ineptitude or hostility? I have over 20 years of experience on Linux, tinker and program as a hobby, and also lightly contribute to open source projects. I believe I have what it takes, but geez, sometimes this job search is just soul crushing. I just want to offer my skills and talents---to be a valuable member on a good team. </vulnerable-rant>
- putsjoe 6y ago
  Hang in there. I have a friend who's in a similar position, she's interviewed and been ghosted a few times and it has really gotten her down. It can take time but eventually a company will come to their senses and realise your value.
lasereyes136 6y ago
Finding good people to work with is hard. Nothing you do will find 100% of the good people (finding 50% of them is extremely good) and filter out 100% of the bad people. Nothing you do will be effective for everyone. Trying to develop a hiring strategy based on what you want interviews or hiring processes to be like will be biased. Accept that you will make mistakes. Accept that many of the good ones will get away or be undiscovered. Accept that you will make hiring mistakes and have to fix those. If you are interviewing, do you really want to spend a few years of your life at a place that does the bare minimum to vet you? They do that for everyone and guess what kind of coworkers you are going to get. Sure taking PTO and spending a day in an interview process is a lot of time. What is the alternative? Not really being vetted and working with horrible people. Finding the person or the right company to work with it hard. Take the time to be comfortable that it can work for both sides.

102 points by galfarragem 6y ago

Related message for students / new-grads: Find an internship. Internship interviews tend to be much easier as the stakes are lower. If you perform well during your internship (arguably easier / more accurate indicator of success), the company will likely extend an offer. At big companies I've seen internship to offer rates exceed 30%.

benbristow 6y ago
+2 for this. Worked for me with two separate companies! One of them I had an internship and they never told me to leave, so I just kept working (and getting paid) until eventually they hired me full-time!
sidhanthp 6y ago
I've seen internship to offer rates exceed 80% :P Lots of Big Tech is in that general range. I actually don't know of any top companies where the offer rate is ~30%.
peterwoerner 6y ago
My company (defense contractor) has a goal of hiring more than 50% of our interns.
airstrike 6y ago
In most of Wall Street, internship to offer rates effectively start at 100% but some people during the course of internship manage to cause the employer to rethink the offer, so the final result is anywhere between 90-98% Well, not at JPM, but most everywhere else.
jaaron 6y ago
I'd go so far as to say, at least within tech, your primary goal during undergrad is securing one or more internships. I look at internships before grades and the school. When I interview fresh grads, if they have internships, that's what we talk about. When I have interns on my team, my goal is to hire them. At one large tech firm I was at, we had a goal of hiring 50% of our internship pool. It was the primary way we brought in new talent.
opportune 6y ago
30% is very low for big companies, I’ve never heard of somewhere being lower than 50% and 75-90% seems more standard (though offer does not necessarily lead to an acceptance).
text_exch 6y ago
This message is expressed very well here [1]. Tl;dr internships are helpful to students for a variety of reasons, like making applicants more valuable to employers, making programming less of an abstract concept, and exposing them to interesting subfields of computer science. [1] https://getatechinternship.com/2020/04/27/why-do-i-need-an-internship/ https://getatechinternship.com/2020/04/27/why-do-i-need-an-i...
TrackerFF 6y ago
Unfortunately, this has two sides. I've noticed that in banking - and I'm not talking about investment banking, or high-finance in general, but regular consumer banking - there's been a trend to basically hire woefully overqualified people for the lowest positions around - I'm talking about bank greeters, customer support, and what not, and then train them from there. This could very well be a local thing, but there are so many people today qualifying for these jobs - lots of BBA and MBA candidates out there, willing to do pretty much anything to get a foot inside. When I was interning for a bank, even the greeters (basically the person that just greets the clients, and forwards them to the right people within the bank - a receptionist, really) had a Bachelors degree, many were working on their Masters. The more sought after positions had been re-labeled "graduate programs" or "trainee programs", and were aimed at the top-shelf students. While the rest pretty much had to get a foot inside by working their way up from the bottom. So you suddenly have a ton of highly educated candidates applying for jobs that only 15 years ago required a HS diploma, if that even. Then when they're first inside, they tend to get moved around internally - as a lot of positions only get posted internally. It's almost the same way with internships. Internships are there to practically train and select future company workers. If you do well, you get a return offer - if not, well, at least you have some experience. With the rising number of graduates, I can foresee a future where candidates are being divided into the regulars and the elites. The regulars will, no mater how qualified they are, will have to start at the rock bottom, proving themselves for $8.5/hr, while the elites are trained for leadership/management-track positions.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  That should be a signal that's there's an oversupply for whatever Bachelors degrees these employees were holding. It's the same thing in law, the best advice to give to an aspiring lawyer is to go have a chat with a practicing lawyer at a non-elite firm.

kanox 6y ago

> What’s the best way to test if someone can do a particular job well? Get them to carry out tasks that are part of the job. See if they can do what they say they can do. It’s much harder for someone to lie and mislead an interviewer during actual work than during an interview. Using competency tests for a blinded interview process is also possible—interviewers could look at depersonalized test results to make unbiased judgments. Why would a practical test be more effective than a discussion about prior work experience? Short coding tests under pressure are extremely unrepresentative of real work and I'm not sure homework-style interviews are much better. I personally don't want to spend an entire weekend on your test and I've dropped opportunities for that reason in the past. All these "competency tests" are good for is catching blatant lying. Is this a serious problem? In my view job interviews are mostly about finding a match between skills/interests and project needs. Communications skills are a very big advantage in interviewing and that feels unfair but I'm not sure that true. Communication and persuasion skills are extremely useful and important to all office jobs, even the most technical. I'd bet that people who interview well also write beautiful code comments and commit messages.

maksimilian 6y ago
I imagine a good compromise might be a small piece of "contract work" where a company presents a small representative task as a project for a candidate to complete and the candidate actually gets some form of compensation for their time. There are definitely problems to this approach, but in a best case scenario, the result is a win-win situation even if a candidate doesn't get hired. At the moment every candidate that doesn't get hired represents a net loss for both parties (time for both and opportunity for the candidate)
hellcow 6y ago
> All these "competency tests" are good for is catching blatant lying. Is this a serious problem? Of the people I interview that claim they have years of experience, mastery over multiple languages, and expertise in various frameworks, a solid 80% or more can't pass fizz-buzz in any language they choose.
- 6y ago

stepstop 6y ago

Wow, that headline is a stick in the mud on a nuanced topic. > What’s your biggest weakness? Where do you see yourself in five years? Why do you want this job? Why are you leaving your current job? I do a lot of tech & business interviews, and I don't ask those questions (unless they've recently left A LOT of jobs). I ask situational questions to understand how they think, who they talk to, what research they did to understand the problem, and the solution (was it simple?). If they tell me they built a Rube Goldberg machine, I ask if they would have done anything different with hindsight. If they don't realize they built a Rube Goldberg machine, well, perhaps they won't be a good fit. I look for people who can solve problems, do their own research, ask for help when they get stuck, aren't afraid to attempt solutions (many that will knowingly fail) and have the introspection to identify failures and admit it are generally people you want to hire for senior positions. Now I admit that it's a lot harder to hire this way for junior positions, when they have less examples, less job history, etc. Educational projects are a substitute, as well as working on personal projects.

dang 6y ago
Ok, we'll replace it with some of the mud in the headline above.

jokoon 6y ago

The first time I ever heard the expression "social filter" was from Barrack Obama. There are many things that a democracy can give to its citizens. But apparently, it seems civilization doesn't want to give up social filters. I can understand social filters when it comes to friendships, sex and intimate relationship, but for jobs, I will never understand why they exist.

antisthenes 6y ago
> I can understand social filters when it comes to friendships, sex and intimate relationship, but for jobs, I will never understand why they exist. Because jobs are just as social as intimate relationships, if not more so. Up to about the 2010s, the majority of marriages came from getting to know someone at work. Even if nothing intimate does come from work, it's still people you have to see 8 hours a day for years on end. If someone is repulsive/annoying/toxic, it WILL make you miserable at work, and people are very wary of disrupting a well-oiled collective.
- tartoran 6y ago
  Aside from abusive/toxic workers, do you think some diversity (not necessarily racial but cultural as well, different age groups,etc) would do any harm? I personally enjoy working alongside older folks who I find invaluable, they have been around for a long time and have lots of stories to share, but are not as quick to jump on a new technology bandwagon. Lots of companies seem to want to keep the young vibe and avoid hiring these folks.
- jokoon 6y ago
  > Because jobs are just as social as intimate relationships, if not more so. For very small or family companies, maybe. In small communities, maybe, but small communities could also include people from any horizon. But in other cases, I disagree. Work and production is the blood of human civilization. Generally, the free market ideology says that if you're competent, it's the only relevant parameter. Social filters are arbitrary, unnecessary and backwards. > If someone is repulsive/annoying/toxic The nazis sent people who were not desired to death camps. Today, those same people are being excluded from society through social filters. You cannot have a healthy society if you keep segregating people like this, even if it's not race, but other traits like education, politics or behavior. You're advocating social darwinism through a detour.

stove 6y ago

There's a growing rift in software between employers saying "there's a talent shortage" and a rapidly growing population of devs who feel like they're locked out due to the technical interview process. Many of the engineers not being hired are recent bootcamp grads but there are also tons of CS majors that can't seem to "crack" the interview process. Part of my job is helping companies "fix" their hiring and one of the ideas that I've been putting forth for years that's slowly gaining steam is developing a "technical apprentice" role. This role would be responsible for tasks that are frequently de-prioritized like documentation, testing, QA, bug fixes, note taking, etc. and would be a foot in the door for entry-level engineers. The role is designed to focus on communication and soft-skills while also giving the person a chance to prove their "grit" on the technical side. Even a few months in an apprenticeship role is generally enough for companies to "take a chance" on someone as an entry-level engineer. This has been a great way to shift interviews away from algorithms and more towards finding people can add immense value to technical teams even without having on-the-job programming experience. I'm curious what the HN crowd thinks about that role as a way to bridge the hiring gap.

mac01021 6y ago
This sounds like what most internships are intended to be? How much does it cost to employ one of these apprentices?
- stove 6y ago
  Internships are generally thought of as something you do during college (summers or otherwise). Most CS grads would scoff at getting an "internship" after graduating. Internships are also very structured and generally involve working on a specific project within a technical team (I know they're all different). The apprentice role, the way I've been pitching it at least, is different. This is a role where you join an engineering org and learn the product by QAing it, join technical discussions and help out by taking notes for the team, show off your communication skills by documenting new features and, big picture, you find ways to add value to the team in whatever ways they need. Over time, the bugs fixed get bigger and the person can bite off small features, etc. The problem is that companies _want_ to hire new grads (even bootcamp grads) but don't feel comfortable paying SWE rates for someone who hasn't worked as a SWE (often rightfully so). The comp for this is equivalent to a QA eng but has a clear path towards being an entry-level SWE (3-6 months maximum). If after 3-6 months it's not clear if the person can add value as an engineer then it's clearly not a good fit.

manfredo 6y ago

A rather click-baity headline. The article doesn't claim that job interviews don't work so much as it claims that subjective job interviews are more subject to bias than structured job-interviews. I'd say that's true, but the caveat is that structured job interviews are more subject to people studying and honing skills specific to the job interview process. Grinding leetcode definitely makes you a better at solving algorithms problems on a whiteboard in 60 minutes but doesn't do much to improve working effectiveness. I think there are 3 core trade-offs for the job interview process: logistical feasibility, consistency, and resemblance to the actual work experience. Doing 2 rounds of coding interviews, and one round of systems design from a set list of questions with explicit rubrics is easy to implement and is very consistent. But you can leetcode your way to knowing most coding question archetypes. Systems design question archetypes are even smaller in problem space. These questions have moderate to low resemblance to the actual work experience. Sure, it can identify people who can't code or aren't experienced in systems design. But does it show how well someone takes feedback, or reviews other people's code? Not really. One of my co-workers used to conduct 90 interviews that started with one question: "how would you build a text editor?" He didn't specify whether this text editor was WYSIWYG like Word, a web-based editor, a code editor, etc. It expanded and touched on a whole variety of questions. It could be traditional data structures, or UI design, or systems (e.g. implementing auto-saving text fields on the web). This was low consistency, since the interview was mostly unique to each candidate. It had moderate logistical feasibility since it was hard to train interviewers on these open ended questions. But I think it had better resemblance to the actual work experience, since it didn't just test coding ability. It tested thinking through the problem and what the desired end behavior for the user really was and navigating how those expectations influence implementation. An idea of an interview process that I have is to do it asynchronously through github or another version control system. Give the candidate a task to open a PR on a mock codebase. See how they implement the task and justify their design decisions. How thoroughly the test. Respond to the PR with comments and see how the candidate responds. And next, have the candidate review another person's PR and see what they look for in a review. This potentially has even better logistical feasibility since it's not dependent on the candidate and employee being active at the same time. I think it would have the most direct resemblance to actual work experience, since it's emulating the workflow most developers actually use in their day to day work. Consistency may be difficult to achieve, but if evaluation was broken up into multiple segments for separate evaluation it may be able to be made consistent.

grugagag 6y ago

It is true, and not that I am trying to be dishonest myself but I am not the same person while taking an interview. It's a sad that we can't be honest or humble but in this system we have to sell ourselves, fake enthusiasm for the hiring company is a must, do whatever it takes to pass the interview then think later if we take the position or not. If not, somebody else with the same capability or or less will snatch that job. Plus that interviews like tests are gameable. In an ideal world a trial period would ensure both the employees and employers are a fit. But that could be abused as well if it becomes the norm.

tartoran 6y ago
How would a trial period work?
- grugagag 6y ago
  Work on a sample project, sample team for 2 weeks. See if you like the work and the company sees if they like you. This would only work if it were a widely accepted standard practice.
  - mattkrause 6y ago
    In the US, two weeks of vacation is pretty standard so a prospective employee would either have to a) forfeit all of their vacation for the year or b) quit their previous job first and risk having no job at all.
    - grugagag 6y ago
      It was a suggestion if it wasn’t broken. The system is currently broken with respect to both employers and employees finding eachother on multiple dimensions not just salary but basically the best possible fit
Afton 6y ago
Someone always suggests this. The issue is that if you did this, 95% of the candidates that would agree to this kind of setup would be the kind you didn't want. If I'm sitting on 2 offers, one is a hire and one is a "Let's see how this works out after 2 weeks of work", I'm going to take the first one. And that says nothing for the necessary benefits question in the states, where changing jobs often involves expensive (in money or time) changes to health care insurance.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

exabrial 6y ago

Silicon Valley interviews are worthless. The algorithm pop-quiz is just a way for the interviewer to beat his chest about some obscure facts and demonstrate his superior knowledge to the interviewee. Has anyone found a better process than casual conversation? I've found it effective as long as engineers and non-engineers get a chance to participate. Usually I talk about what they want, talk about what you need, talk about expectations from both parties, talk about needs, and talk about past experiences both good and bad. Once expectations are set, there's literally no opportunity for a "bad hire", because if they don't live up, it's a simple conversation to refer back to the expectations that are set and help them achieve , or worst-case, offer them severance.

the_jeremy 6y ago
> because if they don't live up, it's a simple conversation to refer back to the expectations that are set and help them achieve , or worst-case, offer them severance. That is a bad hire. You are describing a PIP and then firing someone that you wasted time and resources recruiting, on-boarding, and training.
- exabrial 6y ago
  That's not what I said... If a person doesn't feel they can meet the discussed expectations, you wouldn't hire them in the first place.

simonw 6y ago

If you want a really big competitive advantage, figure out how to hire great people who don't interview well.

bluedino 6y ago
Find them through word-of-mouth.
- simonw 6y ago
  Yeah that definitely helps a lot. But it means you won't get to hire great people from outside your two-layer deep professional circle (people known by people you know).
- jaaron 6y ago
  Double edged sword. Certainly helps to find great talent and build a cohesive team. Also tends to perpetuate our biases, create cliques and echo chambers. Makes it harder for new talent to break in. When I build my teams, I try to balance referrals with newly sourced talent far outside my network.
  - nogabebop23 6y ago
    everyone also has a pretty shallow pool of quality talent, so it doesn't scale well. Once you've been involved in hiring you see why a company will pass on a likely good candidate to avoid a maybe bad experience. In the longer term it's way less work.
    - bluedino 6y ago
      Works well for the first 20-100 employees. After that you’re bound to get a solid chunk of bad ones no matter what you do.
  - closeparen 6y ago
    Judgement, taste, sensibility, intuition - this is what human professionals are for. The value of an experienced worker is in the biases he has accumulated.

jaaron 6y ago

I'm wondering if much of the discussion here is even about the article, which advocates for things we long know work better: * Structured interviews * Blind auditions * Competency-related evaluations The title "Job interviews don't work" is rather bait-clicky when clearly they advocate that _some_ form of job interviews work. Or are at least better. As a technical hiring manager for over a decade, here's where I'm at: - The best interview is an internship. We can't always do that and often we need senior talent now. - The next best interview would be a portfolio. I am so envious of artists with their public portfolios. If there's one thing I wish we as an industry could figure out, it would be some way of stopping to test and retests ourselves as if we have to constantly reprove what we've already done and instead find a way to better showcase our work. - The next best technical interview would be a "homework" project, but I've come around to the mentality that this just isn't fair to candidates. As a hiring manager I love it, but most folks just don't have the time to do a bunch of unpaid work. Even if you compensate them, it's unrealistic for many. So we're mostly back to the suggestions in the article. They're good. A good hiring process is not easy but it's worth it. And finally, a bit of anecdotal evidence: yes, there are folks out there you probably shouldn't hire. They aren't a good fit for the role. You want to set them and yourself up for success. That said, there are probably more people who can excel than you realize. A major factor in their success is the maturity of the team and leadership that's already in your company. Sometimes you'll get lucky and hire some rare talent, but if all you're doing is looking for "rare" talent, then you're likely poorly calibrated and relying too much on outside talent to come in an fix the mess already on your hands.

RangerScience 6y ago
> The next best interview would be a portfolio. I tried using my (limited) open source hobby project portfolio as a substitute for coding interviews. Companies either didn't take me up on it, or still also required me to do their regular take-home. Twice now, I have had two companies ask for the same take-home, although in the first case they asked me to re-do the work in their preferred language.
- jaaron 6y ago
  I think it's a great idea and you should keep trying. Lots of places (somewhat understandably) won't deviate from their policy because consistency of the interview process is a good goal. But at places that are a bit more flexible, it may work.

MisterTea 6y ago

My boss tasked me with hiring my assistant. HR filtered most of them and I was left with three applicants. So I ran it the way I'd like to be hired which was skip the useless small talk and other painful BS and just bring the applicants around the shop and show them what I did. The first applicant seemed like his mother dressed him and reminded him to breath that morning. The second guy was pretty sharp but disinterested during the walk and talk. The third applicant immediatly stood out. He was excited and fascinated by our systems and kept asking technical questions - winner. Excellent co-worker until he moved on to greener pastures. All that wear your best suit and where do you see yourself in 5 years (best answer: prison) nonsense sounds like it was lifted from one of those cheesy 1950's self help shorts the MST3K crew routinely riffed.

bartread 6y ago

This was potentially interesting but then: > They are in no way the most effective means of deciding who to hire because they maximize the role of bias and minimize the role of evaluating competency. I can believe that badly planned and executed job interviews do the above but I've overseen or been directly involved in the interviewing of hundreds of candidates over the years, for dozens of roles, and the hit rate has been pretty good. Two probation failures, and that's about it. We're looking to assess skill and character in our interview process. We are interested in whether you can do the job, and whether you're a reasonable human being, and that's it. We have strong structures and guidelines in place in terms of questions, answers, and evaluation. And inasmuch as it's possible we strive to make our hiring process a pleasant experience, regardless of whether a candidate is successful or not (obviously there's some level of stress inherent in going through a selection process). We also give feedback that we hope will help unsuccessful candidates in future (I realise this is unusual and even frowned upon in some circles but our experience has been that most people appreciate it enough that it's worthwhile to deal with the headaches caused by the odd person who wants to argue about it). I get it. There's a cohort of people on HN who don't like job interviews. Honestly, I'm one of them. But done well, they work well. Our process isn't perfect, and we're always looking for ways to improve it - there was quite a lot of tweaking early on, for sure - but for us it's worked well. We've spent a lot of time on it because - although my role is as a CTO in a mid-sized firm, and this might not fit with everybody's expectations of that role - literally my most important job has been and continues to be hiring, building, and maintaining a strong, effective team. And I am very happy with the people we've hired. Just as important, I'm also happy with the decisions we've made about people we've chosen not to hire.

eminence32 6y ago

In the summer before my senior year at college, I did a 3 month internship at a software development company. The interview for the internship was very soft, partly because it was only an internship, and also because I knew someone at the company who helped me get the position. After I graduated, I applied for a full-time position there and have been there for 10 years. The interview process for the full-time position was also fairly soft and non-technical because I was hiring into a team that I worked with during my internship. I like to describe it as a 3-month long interview process. Not only did the company get to know me and what I was capable of, but I got to know the company and its people (in order to make a decision about if it was some place that I would like to work). Surely this isn't scalable (internship are fairly rare, and generally are not available to anyone except students or recent grads), but the whole internship process worked out very well for me. It allowed me to bypass the traditional tech interview, which is something I feel very fortunate about.

k__ 6y ago

Never say no, but don't say yes unless you're sure about it. You won't believe how often that will be good enough. "Can you code in X?" "I can program in many languages!" Didn't answer the question, but was often enough for the interviewer.

commandlinefan 6y ago
Yikes, I don't know about that. If somebody asked me if I could program in, say, Perl, I'd say I knew what it was but that was about it. That's like somebody asking if I can speak Chinese: I know what it sounds like, but no, I can't.
TrackerFF 6y ago
But on a serious note - if some interviewer ask you outright "Have you programmed in [x], and what's your opinion on it?", try to be positive. I used to be very honest about my opinion on languages, but my experience is that if you start being too honest (on the negative side) regarding some language you're being asked about, it will have few upsides. For whatever reason, some devs. are very personal about the tools and languages being used, and will even get hurt or agitated by criticism. So whenever I get asked about that now, I just try to come up with the positive things I enjoy about [x] language.

kube-system 6y ago

> A job interview is meant to be a quick snapshot to tell a company how a candidate would be at a job. > Unstructured interviews can make sense for certain roles. The ability to give a good first impression and be charming matters for a salesperson. But not all roles need charm, and just because you don’t want to hang out with someone after an interview doesn’t mean they won’t be an amazing software engineer. If that's the attitude someone has towards interviews, then no wonder they draw the conclusion that they don't work. The real issue is that most teams either don't give much attention to interviewing (because they have their primary job to attend to), or too much of the process is delegated/outsourced elsewhere (where people only tangentially understand the work area, and/or have no deep knowledge of the job role). Lean on interviews for measuring soft skills, and lean on demonstrations (portfolios, code tests, pseudo-code, problem solving, etc) for measuring hard skills. Every job requires some balance of hard and soft skills. If you use the wrong tool for the evaluation, or if the person using the tool doesn't know how to use it, you get the wrong result. Interviews have their place, but technical evaluation is not it.

mundo 6y ago

I interview a lot of people and found much to complain about in this essay. This is the main thing: > The key is to decide in advance on a list of questions, specifically designed to test job-specific skills, then ask them to all the candidates. In a structured interview, everyone gets the same questions with the same wording, and the interviewer doesn’t improvise. This is good advice, if and only if you're interviewing an undifferentiated group of applicants, as in the cited examples (college entrance and army recruits). If you're hiring a QA III and you have three different applicants, it's terrible advice. You need to ask about the candidate's specific experience, and ask follow-ups. More generally, I don't think the stated goal of an interview according to this essay (peering in to the candidate's soul to suss out traits like "responsibility" or "sociability") is possible or reasonable. My goal is more modest - I just want to figure out whether you were good at your last job or not. If you say you're responsible, I can't prove you right or wrong in a one hour conversation. But if you say you're a whiz at Selenium UI automation, and you're lying, I will figure it out pretty easily.

mathattack 6y ago

This is very true. Sometimes it’s hard to know about hiring someone after a 10 Week internship. Crazy to think a 30 minute interview is better.

ironman1478 6y ago

This is a great article. An undiscussed issue I've personally seen when conducting interviews and being parts of roundups is a lack of self understanding. lots of people who conduct interviews think they are way smarter than they are (me included!). They hold up candidates to very high standards and then dismiss them at the slightest mistake, however many of these people also make many mistakes on the job. When I give interviews I always just ask the easiest and clearest questions I possibly can that still try to be relevant to the job to minimize this bias.

booboolayla 6y ago

Give existing employees coding interview questions of their colleagues once every three months. It will be very easy to pinpoint the bad players.

29athrowaway 6y ago

Does your interview process perform better than a coin flip? (50% chance of making the correct decision). If the answer is yes, you have a useful process.

xelxebar 6y ago

This hits home too hard. My job search is going so poorly, that I have started to doubt my technical value at all. Confusingly, personal one-on-one interactions with companies or hiring agencies almost invariably result in positive feedback and comments, "you are exetremely hirable," "you have a strong technical background," etc. However, none of these interactions has gone anywhere. Either they "move forward with someone else" or simply evaporate into thin air. A few have even evaporated after extensive interviews and claiming that they wish to hire. Is positive-sounding feedback just a polite way of avoiding some "elephant in the room" problem? Am I inadvertantly projecting an image of ineptitude or hostility? I have over 20 years of experience on Linux, tinker and program as a hobby, and also lightly contribute to open source projects. I believe I have what it takes, but geez, sometimes this job search is just soul crushing. I just want to offer my skills and talents---to be a valuable member on a good team. </vulnerable-rant>

putsjoe 6y ago
Hang in there. I have a friend who's in a similar position, she's interviewed and been ghosted a few times and it has really gotten her down. It can take time but eventually a company will come to their senses and realise your value.

lasereyes136 6y ago

Finding good people to work with is hard. Nothing you do will find 100% of the good people (finding 50% of them is extremely good) and filter out 100% of the bad people. Nothing you do will be effective for everyone. Trying to develop a hiring strategy based on what you want interviews or hiring processes to be like will be biased. Accept that you will make mistakes. Accept that many of the good ones will get away or be undiscovered. Accept that you will make hiring mistakes and have to fix those. If you are interviewing, do you really want to spend a few years of your life at a place that does the bare minimum to vet you? They do that for everyone and guess what kind of coworkers you are going to get. Sure taking PTO and spending a day in an interview process is a lot of time. What is the alternative? Not really being vetted and working with horrible people. Finding the person or the right company to work with it hard. Take the time to be comfortable that it can work for both sides.