60 ms·

The rise of never-ending job interviews

• vegetablepotpie 5y ago
  What’s happening is that companies want to completely remove risk from the hiring process. In the real world, you cannot remove risk. You can manage it, but you cannot remove it. Asking candidates to go through 6 interviews before making a decision and not telling them when a decision will be made signals a risk adverse culture that cannot make decisions.
  • DSingularity 5y ago
    The reason they want to remove the risk is because it takes years to prune bad talent.
    • chunkyks 5y ago
      And they're also in the situation where good talent isn't going to tolerate that rubbish.
      • Swizec 5y ago
        The worst performer you tolerate on your team sets the tone for the whole team. The best teams embrace and level up their low performers and make the whole team better. The delta can’t be too big.
    • hnzix 5y ago
      They'll miss most of the good talent if they're doing 6 interviews for a standard role. The candidates with skills and options will go elsewhere and you'll be left with the desperate dregs.
    • madengr 5y ago
      How? I have seen people with 25 years service (electrical engineer) walked out with zero notice. Unless you are unionized, you can be fired on the spot.
      • dahart 5y ago
        Increasing risk of liability for firing is real, as is increasing oversight of discrimination law. You can be fired on the spot for breaking company policy, or doing something illegal. Without more info, that’s what I might assume you saw. But getting fired for mildly low performance without notice is not normal, at least not among engineers in large companies, and assuming it’s not because a division or the company is being shuttered. Companies have to give people feedback and give them time to respond. Failure to do that can and sometimes does result in legal action compelling the company to prove the employee was failing and that the company did not unfairly discriminate even unknowingly, which is costly, difficult, and risky. Plus, most companies aren’t capricious with firing engineers, and are also aware that hiring is expensive and employee ROI can take time.
        • learc83 5y ago
          > result in legal action compelling the company to prove the employee was failing The company doesn’t have to prove that the employee was failing. It’s perfectly legal for a company to fire an employee because they the employee likes the wrong football team. The employee or people pursuing legal action on behalf of multiple employees has to prove that the company fires the employee(s) because they were a member of a protected class. Assuming there are no incriminating emails stating that that was the reason, the only realistic way to do that is to show a pattern. If an employee decides to sue, whether you had them on a documented performance improvement plan for 6 months or 6 days isn’t going to be the deciding factor.
          • dahart 5y ago
            > The company doesn’t have to prove that the employee was failing. They do if the employee sues claiming age discrimination, for example. At least, they have to defend the accusation to show it’s not discrimination. When someone has been at the company for 25 years like in the parent’s example, and they get fired abruptly without notice for liking the wrong football team, it’s likely the stated reason is untrue and inviting a challenge. > If an employee decides to sue, whether you had them on a documented performance improvement plan for 6 months or 6 days isn’t going to be the deciding factor. It certainly helps show that the company isn’t discriminating arbitrarily, and gave the employee notice and a chance to improve the situation. BTW actual legal action isn’t necessary for firing to be getting harder. The fear of legal action is all you need, and that is in fact going up.
    • throwawaylinux 5y ago
      Taking years to prune bad talent is another sign of a problem in the organization.
    • 2001lodyssee 5y ago
      In my long and storied career, well long at least, every single truly heinous, project-killin', crazy person actually interviewed pretty well. Honestly, I don't have a good solution to the problem.
      • Rapzid 5y ago
        Fire fast. Use that 90 day try out period. Contract-to-hire. In the past I would never have been interested in a contract-to-hire. These days though if the company and role is right, and this an option to short-cut a ridiculous interview process, I might spring for it.
        • duped 5y ago
          Just personally I would never accept an offer that was contract for hire and think it's downright insulting a suggestion. My family needs health insurance and the market has never been so cold that I'd be desperate enough to take such a garbage offer.
          • Rapzid 5y ago
            Nothing about contracting precludes having health insurance though? For the roles and situations I'm talking about this would all just be factored into the rates.
            • tfehring 5y ago
              Even if they can just pay for health insurance out of pocket, they’d be switching plans twice, and each time they’d reset their deductible and possibly need to find a new doctor. When I was an actuary we used to do “intern to hire” for unemployed recent grads, but I can’t imagine leaving a full time position for a contract-to-hire position. I think for me personally the opportunity would have to be really interesting and the comp upon converting to FTE would need to be at least double my previous comp (meaning the contracted rate would probably be something like 4x my implied hourly).
            • 5y ago
    • zhte415 5y ago
      Do you have probation period where you work? i.e. if an employee doesn't live up to expectation, release with short notice? Where I am, a 3 year contract typically carries a 3 month probation period, and a 1 year contract carries a 1 month probation period. The problem is management are often too busy or overwhelmed with other stuff to observe and provide feedback until someone's passed the probation period then releasing them becomes a bureaucratic nightmare - and when the new hire's not getting feedback, you can be sure not a lot of the rest of the team are.
      • sgerenser 5y ago
        Probation periods in the US are rare, especially for white collar positions like software engineers. Of course, that’s mostly because of at will employment where either side can choose to part ways at any time.
        • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
          That sounds like infinite probation period to me
    • technofiend 5y ago
      Isn't that one of the things Netflix is famous for getting right? Generous severance but quick to exit you if you're not a good fit.
    • caoilte 5y ago
      I don't think it's that at all. It's very easy to fire people in US. I think they are trying to hire cultists. The harder it is to get in the more people think they're special once they do and the less likely they are to leave.
      • finolex1 5y ago
        The difficulty isn't with regards to the process/legality. It's more behavioral/organizational
    • CogitoCogito 5y ago
      > The reason they want to remove the risk is because it takes years to prune bad talent. I've never understood this given that the hiring is so often at will.
    • postalrat 5y ago
      They could prune that talent overnight if they wanted.
  • twelve40 5y ago
    I don't know if you've been through the firing process on either side, but after you go through a couple of dozen of these, and the hit to the morale/performance they entail, not to mention emotions involved, you tend to at least try to vet better to avoid such huge distractions in the future (a lose-lose for everyone involved!)
    • bb88 5y ago
      One Fortune 500 company I worked for was honest enough to admit that the number one reason employees left was because they didn't like their boss. It's a huge risk on the other side as well. Not to mention that management usually gets to control the narrative and not the employees.
    • analyst74 5y ago
      I'm not sure if people prefer Amazon's PIP culture. That's what it'll lead to if companies hire more loosely and have to fire people more frequently.
  • alephnan 5y ago
    I left a hedgefund interview loop for this reason. I finished the 7th on-site interview. After I left NYC and flew back home, they wanted a 8th ( phone screen ) interview because one the interviewers lost the results. On the one hand, this space’s modus operandi is more data is always better. On the other hand, they have to trade and make decisions in a fast paced environment with imperfect information.
    • thrwaway122 5y ago
      funny same experience here. I interviewed for four months at a very select and under the radar fund. Once a week I would go in from 730 am to 9 am and speak with a member of the fund. I got all the way to the end, and in a bout of emotional torment, I turned the offer down. In hindsight, its one of the biggest regrets I have. Would have retired long ago
      • kortilla 5y ago
        Why did you turn it down if I may ask? I’ve made the decision several times to go with lower paying offers because I ended up deciding there was more to life than just a paycheck.
    • marto1 5y ago
      > because one the interviewers lost the results. yeah, no. You dodged a bullet with that one.
  • sp332 5y ago
    Companies don't want to do job training anymore. Instead of a general background and attitude check, they need to know if the candidate has all of the individual skills that will be used on the job.
    • kinkrtyavimoodh 5y ago
      Job training is not as much worth it for companies when employees can switch jobs at the drop of a hat.
      • jimbob45 5y ago
        You say that and I’ve seen several companies in practice echo what you’re saying. However, I fail to understand why they don’t simply make better use of contracts and probationary periods to solve that specific problem.
        • kinkrtyavimoodh 5y ago
          Contacts in what sense? Probationary periods could work but it's a coordination problem. Such periods are the norm in Europe (coz it's very hard to fire someone) but for an at-will place like the US, given that the industry doesn't really do probationary periods in general, any employer who starts doing it would be at a disadvantage.
          • xcambar 5y ago
            I think GP meant "reference check"
            • jimbob45 5y ago
              I meant “contract” but you’ve brought up another good idea.
          • jimbob45 5y ago
            *contracts In the sense of offering signing bonuses for term lengths that get repo’d if the contract length is broken.
  • wyager 5y ago
    The risk is artificially inflated by how hard it is to fire people.
    • jt2190 5y ago
      This is actually true. A bad hire, once in the door, can be very expensive and time consuming for an employer to rectify. This is what leads to all sorts of weirdness like “contract to hire”.
  • hiyer 5y ago
    Almost every single tech company I've interviewed at (ranging from medium-sized startups to FAANG), I've given at least 5 interviews, going up to 7. The only exceptions were very small startups and a couple of large Chinese organizations, where they stopped at 3.
    • hogFeast 5y ago
      I remember interviewing for some grad roles. No hackerrank, no bullshit, very straightforward companies with "easy processes". Both had one "interview day", and five/six interviews total. I read your comment and I was thinking in my head...wow, five seems like a lot, and then I realised that even these places I liked went pretty hard...I think they call this conditioning. I didn't get either job btw, the work was trivial but I get terrible interview nerves so tanked both of them...in both cases, I also had a 6-hour take home...the results of which were largely ignored. Neither company is ever fully staffed...ofc.
    • worker767424 5y ago
      Interviews or rounds? Phone screen and 4-5 on-site is pretty reasonable, but that's only two rounds.
      • hiyer 5y ago
        I'm not sure where the distinction lies - both seem same to me :-)
        • sokoloff 5y ago
          To me, rounds imply a decision point (and delay) in between. If I talk to HR on Monday, take a phone screen with an engineer on Wednesday, and come on-site (or Zoom now) with 4 engineers next Monday, that’s 2 rounds and 5 interviews (or 3 and 6 if you count HR)
          • hiyer 5y ago
            > To me, rounds imply a decision point (and delay) in between. My experience has been that if you clear the engineering phone screen the company asks you to go through all the rest of the (4-6) interviews, even if your performance in one or more of them has been sub-par. And at least here in India the post-screen interviews are spread out over several days to 2-3 weeks - there is no "onsite" as such, even over Zoom.
  • hogFeast 5y ago
    I was going to say that there are tons of parallels with how some fund managers approach investment. I have met lots of people who have this trait for over-analysis, not one has ever made consistently profitable investments. Over-analysis is a failure to understand what information is important. This is going to become more and more common though. In fund management, there has been a huge move towards "professionalisation"...which, ofc, means doing lots of pointless exams that select for the wrong thing. MBAs are the same. It is very hard to solve because the system selects for people who will play into this self-image (in my experience, this isn't solvable...you can either handle the risk of being wrong or you can't). This also overlaps with a lot of the issues that a lot of companies are having with hiring. A company which frames hiring as a risk rather than opportunity and has these very long, negative process of hiring (be real, the point is to uncover "weakness", not learn more about someone) is going to fail to hire people of different backgrounds. The amazing thing about the "candidate shortage" is that it isn't more severe. Companies are so bad at hiring, it is surprising they end up making any decisions at all.
    • Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
      Does any fund manager make consistently profitable investments? Most don’t even seem to make sporadic profitable investments.
  • andrewflnr 5y ago
    I think this is a problem our whole society will have to learn. Reducing risk is probably good, but we have to reach the point where trying to eliminate is universally seen as a pathology. It's already kind of a meme in consumer products ("warning labels these days, right?"), but it crops up in hiring, movie production, etc.
  • marto1 5y ago
    Reading this it just seems to me we're in for a really bad time with the new managerial class.
  • slickrick216 5y ago
    Salesforce have ever green roles which they casually do interviews for but never actually act on. The roles can be easily spotted as they’ll be posted and reposted on job boards like LinkedIn every 4 days.
  • dan-robertson 5y ago
    I find attitudes towards risk in hiring very strange. Many companies seem to treat it like an opportunity for massive downside without much thought to the potential upside. I think the downside potential is mostly less than companies seem to worry (an argument against me is that a ‘bad’ employee negatively affects their teammates too). I also think the normal interview processes aren’t even very good at filtering out those feared candidates. Instead I think companies, especially large companies where small numbers of employees aren’t a massive proportion of spending, should try to see the potential for upside more. Especially in a world where everyone does a similar interviewing process, a candidate who performs poorly at those interviews could be cheap and an excellent hire who is undervalued by the market because of their poor interviewing skills.
• voidfunc 5y ago
  People are getting less and less willing to deal with bullshit when they're in massive demand and there is a talent shortage in $x industry. And they're finding out they can move around easily now too in this remote-first world. Something is going to have to change - really a lot of things. One of them is going to be that companies need to learn to figure out how to hire people without putting them through a grind-fest. Figure out how to deal with bad hires after-the-fact, but don't let yourself get screwed not hiring good talent because you made the interview process a giant pain in the ass to catch the crap. Oh and compensation needs to go up to make some of these interview grinds worth it.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
    Nothing's going to change at FAANG until average, non-FAANG companies can compete on TC (never). I doubt things will change outside of FAANG - because most companies are merely emulating the FAANGs and hoping they emulate the success.
    • vmception 5y ago
      > until average, non-FAANG companies can compete on TC (never). And that's the rub. Not only do they struggle to value my skillset, they also can't compensate it accurately. And sadly, FAANGs don't even have the roles in a lot of niches. When you can make 3x what a FAANG would offer, annually, but the companies building in your same niche are too immature and pay 1/3rd of what FAANGs do, its tricky to want to tolerate any of it!
      • CobrastanJorji 5y ago
        I'm not sure I follow. If FAANG companies would offer you 1x, and non-FAANG companies in your area of specialty would offer you x/3, who's paying 3x?
        • vmception 5y ago
          Solo. Right now I can make 3x FAANG comp on a new idea annually without reaching out to my network or needing outside capital. Given how many ways there are to do that and much more, I would like the structure of someone else’s idea to focus (aka being an employee). Doing things solo has overhead costs and liability risks, whereas employment has almost none but half to 3/4ths of your compensation is withheld the whole time. So there is a limit to what comp I’ll accept, given the opportunity costs. Would be great if that comp was FAANG level.
• LAC-Tech 5y ago
  A big part of what prompted me to become a contractor. When I last did this, everything was at least 3 interviews, + sometimes even the recruiters wanted to meet with you first. Finding your own clients doesn't start looking as bad, and a discussion to see if you'll work together is much better than an interview.
  • bississippi 5y ago
    Are you a contractor or consultant? Because SW contractors are just quasi FTEs without health insurance and no termination notice periods
• bississippi 5y ago
  > That’s a question Mike Conley, 49, grappled with earlier this year. The software engineer, based in Indiana, US, had been seeking a new role after losing his job during the pandemic This is ageism. I hope he realized this after 10 6 rounds of interviews. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19507732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19507732
  • neilv 5y ago
    Ageism absolutely is a problem in our field (I've seen/heard many people even openly boast of ageist hiring practices), but I don't know that ageism was the reason in that quoted case.
  • vmception 5y ago
    Not to invalidate ageism, there are many threads about younger people's interviewing experience that match this. The competition (other candidates) are doing much more than that, and also studying and practicing leetcode much longer than I am willing to.
    • kxrm 5y ago
      Perhaps, but I can say that I am over 40 and I can tell when the enthusiasm for my candidacy dies after they see my face that it's not due to anything but ageism.
      • vmception 5y ago
        and I'm in an underrepresented group, we all have the ability to conform our experiences to the reason that matches what other people say will limit our opportunities. It is equally important to weigh each experience against the similar experiences. I've seen plenty of linkedin posts and blogs about people bragging about their quests to get competing offers in tech, some interviewed at 60 companies and did 100 interviews, when my tolerance is 12 companies and maybe 15 interviews. Some did 700 hours of leetcode, where my tolerance is maybe 5 hours. The dataisbeautiful and some employment subreddits have flow charts that show similar quests to get an offer, visualizing how much rejection and time is used inefficiently. Like I said, not to invalidate anything, these experiences are so common amongst the whole pool that it has to be weighed accordingly.
• spoonjim 5y ago
  I think the third party screening companies will eventually win here. There will be an objective measure of skill at the job, plus some culture/fit interviews.
  • zug_zug 5y ago
    It does seem like the obvious efficient solution hypothetically. Right now we have proxies "Well he worked at FAANG so he's probably good enough for us" on the company side and glass-door (horribly subjective) on the individual side. But really no way for extremely-qualified individuals to say "show me all job offers within X miles that pay more than $y for position $z" (closest thing I'm aware of is indeed). That said, for whatever reason the startups that tried to be intermediaries (and also various recruiters) tend not do very well in my experience.
• hardwaregeek 5y ago
  If your application process starts with a human being—even better a technical human being—reaching out to me, followed by 2-3 interviews, followed by an offer, I am already on your side. If your application process starts with a HackerRank, followed by 2 phone interviews followed by on-site, followed by team matching, I will not be on your side. Oh and if there's random month long gaps in between stages, I will especially be uninterested. I've noticed though that as I've gotten more specialized to compilers and programming languages, my application experience has improved significantly. It's not a large sample size but the last few processes I've gone through have been fewer interviews that usually involve going over a project of mine or doing a problem that's related to compilers. It's really refreshing to have an interview where I actually learn something about my field of interest during it. I know that doesn't scale because we shouldn't expect compilers knowledge for junior compilers jobs but it's a very nice change of pace for me.
  • purplecats 5y ago
    the quality of your experience will depend on the desperation of the candidate employer. more competition = worse time for you
  • Dig1t 5y ago
    I agree actually, I've had a similar experience except in the mobile engineering space. Currently I'm going through the interview process with a ton of companies (because my company is really dumb and is forcing everyone to move back to a certain bay area city post-covid), and I have been happily surprised to find that most of my interviews are very practical, project based, ones instead of straight whiteboarding leetcode problems. I've received several take-home projects that are followed up with a simple add-on interview to sit down and explain the choices made during the take-home. They have all been specifically focused on domain knowledge to the mobile platform that I'm interviewing for. Its really nice! I hope this trend continues. That said, I am still reviewing leetcode problems for the stupid faang interviews I have coming up as well.
    • MattGaiser 5y ago
      Where do you find take home project interviews?
• tomrod 5y ago
  > The National Business Research Institute study shows that a bad hire can have significant costs to an organization – between $25,000 and $300,000 5 . Asking a candidate to partake in four interviews may seem like overkill, but it seems trivial compared to the cost of a “bad hire.” Organizations that hire the best data science talent ensure they spend the time to use the best hiring practices.[0] It's a risk mitigation strategy. [0] Data Science Playbook, Booz Allen Hamilton https://www.boozallen.com/s/insight/publication/data-science-playbook.html https://www.boozallen.com/s/insight/publication/data-science...
  • vagrantJin 5y ago
    No one is doubting the risk mitigation, which is why the process exists in first place. But the BS of wasting someones time also needs to be addressed. The reason most companies waste peoples time is because they are too busy with abstract concepts tangentally related to the actual job, and theoretical models by some "expert" of HR management. Software engineering has become a psuedo-religious exercise in computing witchcraft. If you want a backend engineer - book a few hours, even on a weekend, set up an IDE and get on a real world project. No bullshit. Build a small API to these requirements, using these technologies but take care of edge cases and deploy that bad boy.
  • csa 5y ago
    Are you (or they) suggesting that the 4th interview meaningfully reduces the number of bad hires? I’m guessing not. It’s poorly designed and/or poorly implemented hiring strategies that lead to bad hires, mostly through a lot of noise being collected during the interview process. This is a very solvable problem. Edit: I will add that this is an ad for Booz hiring, so of course they want more process.
    • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      6 interviews increase the chances of a bad hire (or at least decreases the chances of a great one). It restricts your hiring pool to those who are willing to be abused by the company. That's not the top-tier talent.
• Rapzid 5y ago
  I interviewed with four companies back in May for staff engineer roles(or staff equiv). Based on that experience and my current employers process a somewhat baseline expectation can be: * Phone screen with recruiter that reached out to you * Screen with the hiring manager * Behavioral interview with multiple peeps * Code pairing session with multiple peeps * System design session with multiple peeps So AT LEAST 5 hours time commitment just on interviews. Add time to research the company, its employees, and etc. Maybe the code pairing is instead an at-home test of some sort. This could potentially add hours(or in the case of Teleport like 20+ hours). Just engaging with a handful of companies was a huge amount of extra work and stress on top of existing responsibilities. I pulled out of three voluntarily and declined an offer from the last for various reasons, opting to stick out till my RSU cliff in October. For the next round of engagements I may start toying with filtering out companies based on their hiring process as well and giving push back on it to see what happens.
  • uglygoblin 5y ago
    I had the same experience earlier in the year and ended up bailing out/declining offers because the process was giving me bad feelings about the work cultures at said companies. I did actually tell one that the schedule of phone interviews (2) and video call rounds (4) was too much commitment without more details about the role and salary range. They responded with "if that's too much commitment the position is too". Dodged that bullshit!
    • nathanaldensr 5y ago
      Isn't it fun when they make you feel like you're at fault? Nice try, assholes.
  • encryptluks2 5y ago
    Most likely a 20 hour interview is required to be paid, especially if it isn't just a test and similar to the work you'd be doing.
• xyst 5y ago
  Interviewing these days is not a technical challenge. It’s a fraternity/sorority rushing week. Technically I was qualified and able to answer their questions. But ultimately was turned down after 6 rounds of interviewing. I think I was heavily dinged because I wasn’t entirely familiar with their product in the wild, and was never given any hint as to what product I would be working on.
  • bufferoverflow 5y ago
    I'm surprised good programmers have the time/patience for 6 interviews. I think 3, maybe 4 is my max. If you can't figure out my skills in that amount of time, your process is broken. I also disagree that interviewing is not a technical challenge. For most programmers it is. There are very few who can breeze through FAANG-level technical interviews.
    • bb88 5y ago
      2 total interviews. Maybe 3 if they have questions. But if they have questions, they should have figured it out between the first and second interview.
    • knuthsat 5y ago
      For me, if the 2nd interview is not me talking to someone from their company that I might work with and if I cannot ask questions about the problems they solved, their approach to programming or building teams (depending on their role), I just say to the recruiter that I'm not interested. The only reason why I'd come somewhere is if I like the engineers or if I'm in need of money. If I need the money, I won't ask a thing.
  • MarkSweep 5y ago
    At one startup I did a couple rounds of phone interviews and a full day of in person interviews. Lastly I got to chatting with the co-founder. I can't remember the precise question I asked about how they were building out the team, but I clearly remember the answer. They made the interview process longer and more involved in an effort to narrow the field of candidates. I understand the reasoning: if you think you have a special mission and want people dedicated to that mission, filter by dedication. But I'm not really sure there is a way for any one candidate to consume as much time interviewing for a role as that company could consume out of a pool of candidates. And that includes my smart-ass idea of trying to interview at Pinterest and stopping in the middle of the interview saying "please sign up to see the rest of this whiteboard solution".
• dredmorbius 5y ago
  The LinkedIn post on which this story is based: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mike-t-conley_jobhunt2021-leadership-servantleadership-activity-6812003946253705217-VF5t/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mike-t-conley_jobhunt2021-lea... (Not previously discussed on HN best I can tell.)
• throwaway984393 5y ago
  If you go to an interview, you can probably suss out which are stringing you along and which want to hire quickly. Ask if they need a candidate immediately or are taking their time. Ask if your qualifications are exactly what they're looking for, and if you feel like a cultural fit for them. Ask if they have the budget and headcount to hire you immediately. Ask which teams the people interviewing you are on, to find out if they are all in different teams/departments or the same. Ask if each interviewer even knows who the the previous interviewer is in the company ("Frank who?"). Ask if they know exactly what they want you to work on. Follow up periodically to see if they are responding to you in a timely manner. It's common for there to be some uncertainty with one or two of these things, but if there's a lot of uncertainty, you are being strung along. Best case they are waiting you out trying to find a better candidate, worst case they don't even have the budget for you and are playing politics within their company using you as leverage. Interview multiple places in parallel, and don't cancel any interviews until you've got a signed piece of paper. But of course, prioritize the ones that aren't jerking your chain.
  • ajna91 5y ago
    good advice
  • brailsafe 5y ago
    Ya, seems like decent advice.
• nowherebeen 5y ago
  > Five companies told him they had to delay hiring because of Covid-19 – but only after he’d done the final round of interviews. This is a typical HR strategy to keep themselves busy so they don't get laid off. HR is not a revenue generating department, so even if they aren't hiring, then they still need to push paper.
• alephnan 5y ago
  What’s not mentioned is companies collectively want to waste candidate’s time. If candidates have less time for interviews, they will have less offers/counter offers to use as leverage
• nine_zeros 5y ago
  Next time you hear a hiring manager complain about shortage of engineers, ask them why haven't they changed the process with recruiting instead of just trying to fan out and sending automated tests and take home assignments.
• easterncalculus 5y ago
  It's just such a waste of time, too - you toss out so many other potential opportunities when doing these. I've heard of this being done to interns, people that only have so much time to get a job. Six interviews until a rejection. If you can't start your career without this going on I don't really know what you can do. I can't imagine the recruiters conducting these in the same position, going for six interviews to get that job. For software engineers you just need it, apparently.
• dredmorbius 5y ago
  In domains in which the underlying domain is complex, with an irreducible informational complexity, as well as rich and frequently highly significant interactions, there's a frequent emergence of faddish, or ritual-driven, behaviours. Both seek to reduce risks and accountability, as well as to increase credible signalling of traits. Both sides of the technical recruiting transaction (job-seeking and recruiting) exhibit these behaviours and tendencies (what to wear, how to format resumes, presentation, side projects, for seekers, interviewing, tests and screens, and other filtering practices for hiring teams). The consequence is a tremendous amount of friction, inefficiency, and fear-driven lore. Some years ago a senior Google staffer commented that they'd found a guaranteed hiring heuristic: "No". That is, reject all candidates. My response was that if this was serious (and it was at least partially), that this was a profound sign of weakness within Google: an inability to seek out and onboard talent successfully. There are other possibilities. It could be that the notion of private firms hiring highly-skilled talent is inherently flawed. I've speculated that one of the justifications for the ancient Egyptians to build pyramids was as a combination of a skills-development, skills-retention, skills-demonstration, and brain-drain-mitigation programme. From what I've read there's at least some independent informed speculation along similar lines. One of the functions of writing a book, a notoriously unremunerative practice, is as a credible signalling of skill and ability. (And of book-writing capabilities, for what that's worth.) Books are very fat sales brochures. In a tech world in which typical tenures are measured in months or single-digit years (2--3 years being typical from what I understand), and correlations between any hiring practices and actual performance ... at best weak, there's an inherent issue. There's also the question of equitability of a process in which employers have vastly greater access to information on individual prospects than prospects do on companies or hiring managers / management teams. George Akerlof's "Market for Lemons" suggests that more information makes markets more efficient, though my fear is that highly asymmetric information access further tilts the employment market in the hiring firms' favour. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1879431 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1879431 http://libgen.rs/scimag/10.2307%2F1879431 http://libgen.rs/scimag/10.2307%2F1879431 Some of my earlier fad/information theoretic musing here: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/62uroa/clothing_music_diets_art_management_theory_fad_as/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/62uroa/clothin...
  • 5y ago
• a3n 5y ago
  I've never been interesting enough to have gone through that many interviews. I suspect that these companies have structural problems that inhibit their decision making. Possibly also personal problems. I also suspect that if they can't say yes after a third interview then the candidate is non-judgmentally not a good fit, by demonstration. Both parties should consider that.
• underseacables 5y ago
  Top Grading: A complete waste of time and effort.
• andrew_ 5y ago
  I recently agreed to go through a 5-round process which totaled to about 6 hours. I'm the first person to bitch about the ineffectiveness of leetcode/hackerrank bullshit for people with 10+ of verifiable experience, but I went through this one because it was a field I had never worked in before, and the personnel I was speaking with were truly interesting. Sans all of those qualifiers, anything more than 3 rounds is a deal breaker for me. If you don't know if I'm the right fit after 3 hours, verifiable experience, a public body of work, and a list of references, then your company culture isn't a good fit for me.
  • echelon 5y ago
    Devil's advocate. Every bad hire costs the company $50,000 - 200,000. Sometimes more. They can also sink or demoralize teams. Many of the people conducting interviews are new to the process and don't know how to extract signal. Sometimes scales don't line up. When you have a revolving door of employees (because that's the way things are these days), have trouble scheduling interviews (busy engineers trying to get their own work done), and can't get enough skilled interviewers on a panel, then of course the process will be a suboptimal experience for candidates. To a degree, companies would rather a good candidate was passed over than a bad candidate was accepted. Type I and II errors. Companies also don't like telling candidates how they did because that opens them up to lawsuit liabilities. You have to do enough interviews to get signal yet not piss off candidates. (Or your employees in the interview pool!) It's a hard problem for companies too.
    • MattGaiser 5y ago
      > because that's the way things are these days Why is nothing done about this? As turnover soars and tenure plummets, I am willing to buy that companies do not value codebase knowledge, domain knowledge, or believe that it takes time for an engineer to get going. I can buy them seeing us engineers as replaceable widgets. But we are at the point where a lot of companies cannot replace us and yet nothing is done about the endless parade out the door. The focus is entirely on shovelling new people in.
      • 5y ago
• phibz 5y ago
  I interviewed with a company out of SV that did this. They started with 3, added another 3, one hour interviews and finally another 3. 9 interviews over the course of almost a month. I was being interviewed for a principal engineer. I was very clear and kept saying I wanted a management track position. They kept saying we love your background we can work with you on this. Ninth interview was with the CTO. He said the same. Them ghosted. Wouldn't answer my emails or calls. 9 hours, plus prep time wasted. The company I ended up getting hired by also did a large number of interviews, 8. And they took even longer. Just over three months from initial contact. They're fantastic to work for, but I do think there comes a point where if you keep digging you're going to find something you don't like.
  • wittyusername 5y ago
    I think it's time to name and shame not sure why you are being coy when they jerked you around so much.
    • jay_kyburz 5y ago
      I'm too shy to name and shame, but my former company would ask us to advertise and interview for jobs, but only after countless hours of interviews decide they didn't want to increase headcount. I lost about 1 day week for months doing our best to find great people. We would fly them in from all over the place. This happened multiple times. I think I left to make indie games after the third time.
    • gedy 5y ago
      Yeah it really bugs me when companies reach out to experienced people, put you through multiple rounds, only to ghost and ignore you after. I'm looking at you Glassdoor.
    • phibz 5y ago
      Fandom.
• gumby 5y ago
  I talked to a company for three weeks — I went over and would talk to a couple of people, a couple of times a week — and then decided they wouldn’t get their act together. I didn’t mind the way it unfolded — people were busy, I wasn’t working, and it was only a couple of minutes away from me, so really it was only perhaps 8 hours. But after three weeks I felt I wasn’t getting the answers I needed and they didn’t seem to be making progress on the hire. So I said no thanks. This was a company with 50 or so people — I have no idea how they managed to hire them.
• 100-xyz 5y ago
  I have recently been through this. Google took 3 months. 1 month was from the virtual onsite final interviews to the Hiring Committee decision. It was a miserable month and even my wife hated Google by the end. Second was for a Director of Engg position at a mid sized company. It took 2 months and finally I had to force them to answer. It was a company with weak leadership and it showed in their inability to make a decision.
  • adventurer 5y ago
    It's odd. I'm tending to think going through recruiters is the answer. The recruiter can be the bad guy and actually get a yes or no by putting pressure on otherwise I'm emailing multiple times and lucky to even get a response. If you weren't sure what the next steps were then why are you even hiring?
• pts_ 5y ago
  Interviewees should demand payment by the hour at their going rate.
• mitsuchen 5y ago
  For everyone saying that it's risk mitigation, I recently asked about something similar[0] for a junior position, and the process still hasn't finished. For context, the company is a medium-size tech company with presence mostly in Europe and Asia. I don't know these things well enough but it makes no sense to me. For starters, in the tech sector in my country the salary for fresh grads like me actually come mostly from the government. Moreover, these companies are all secretive about compensation, and they probably think they can get away with it by dangling their "reputation" in front of you like a carrot. In most cases the salary is about the same as a small startup because, again, they get the money from the government. People can argue about spending time and resources on training and what not but basically every job ad, from "top" companies to the web dev garage down the road, expects us to learn by ourselves anyway? It's frustrating for early career starters that most of my friends and I are going through. It's such a huge waste of everyone's time and people are just churning because of this crap. Please get rid of non-technical HR and interviewers. Sorry for the emotional rant. I would really like to know what risks (other than useless non-technical HR keeping their jobs) there are after candidates have past a certain threshold for quality, particularly for junior positions. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27881668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27881668
  • yarky 5y ago
    > I would really like to know what risks (other than useless non-technical HR keeping their jobs) there are after candidates have past a certain threshold for quality, particularly for junior positions. It's harder to deal with emotional kids than it is to deal with incompetent engineers. Maybe that's why those non-technical HRs might not be as useless as you think.
    • mitsuchen 5y ago
      You made the mistake to assume that we are idiotic enough to be emotional for job interviews. It's harder to deal with people who think they are competent and know it all than emotional kids.
      • 5y ago
• pabs3 5y ago
  It would be nice if hiring processes were defined publicly up-front in the job advert.
• pts_ 5y ago
  HR gets paid for it candidates should demand payment too at their current rates.
• irrational 5y ago
  It’s weird I’m seeing this on the same day as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28029344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28029344 So… which is it? Or did some employers not get the memo? Or is this tech vs non-tech positions?
  • kxrm 5y ago
    Perhaps it depends on where you are in your career.
• jijji 5y ago
  the best jobs I've had were at most three or four interviews and then hired. The worst ones were more than 5 interviews and they still couldnt make a decision or one guy out of six didn't like you so you don't get hired...
• ironman1478 5y ago
  I don't mind going through a single day with many rounds, but when it's spread out it's super frustrating. It feels really disrespectful of my time. I interviewed at Apple and had like 3 onsites with different teams all in one week and got the results quite quickly. It was such a good experience compared to some companies where it's such a chore. I also think the attitude of companies during interviews really sucks. Many feel like they're doing you a favor or you're wasting their time. That was a distinct feeling I got when interviewing at Google, but not at Apple and I really think it's why I passed those and not google. They were collaborative and fun at Apple. I put a lot of effort into making candidates at my company feel welcomed and like they are already part of the team and IMO it really helps them succeed.
  • kamkazemoose 5y ago
    Part of the problem is that Manton the interview panel do feel like they're wasting their time. It is valuable to the company but for the engineers, they want to get back to coding or whatever else they are working on. It isn't fair to the person applying because they didn't pick the people on the panel, but if the one doing the interviewing doesn't hide their feeling it's obviously not great.
    • ironman1478 5y ago
      That's true. I want to say that that's Google's fault right? Because not everybody is on the team you're interviewing for (I might be wrong)? At Apple you are interviewed by the team, who presumably needs another person to assist them. Also, regardless of whether or not they want to be there, it's a bad look for the company. Somebody took a day off to talk to you, it's only fair that an interviewer reciprocates
      • ladberg 5y ago
        Can confirm everything you said is true and that at Google you'll likely never see your interviewers once you start working there but at Apple you'll be working with your interviewers on a daily basis. It has upsides and downsides, like as you said you had to go through 3 different on-sites (one for each team), but you'll get a good sense of the team before getting an offer (and they'll get a good sense of you). I like the Apple method much better but I had an unusually bad Google interview process so it's possible other people had better experiences.
• robertwt7 5y ago
  Aren't FAANG companies doing at least 4-5 interviews now? More and more companies are doing this now in tech space (AU) as well. My last 4-5 job app contains 5 interviews, even the medium sized one. It is super annoying for me, but I'm not sure what to do about it, some of my dream big tech companies are like that so I have to go through that. I'm pretty sure a lot of people go through with that because that's their dream job too, not because they liked it
• kxrm 5y ago
  I am actually going through the hiring process now. I was a hiring manager at my last shop and I tried to be very respectful of the candidates time. The process was first interview was 30 mins and basically a getting to know you and us session. Second interview was a two hour technical interview with debugging/fix this function type question and a single from scratch example question in the candidates language of choice. The final round was purely optional if the CTO or CEO wanted to meet the candidate (they rarely did). If you made it through all that you got an offer. Of all the candidates I hired only 1 didn't work out long term. Now that I am on the other end, I don't understand the need for this overly complex and generally noncommittal (on the employer side) process. If it's FAANG I am lucky if I can even get a fucking job description these days. They want to interview me for jobs I can't know about and best fit me for their needs. What about my needs? What about my time? If I can't even get a job description, why do you think I want to waste 3 hours doing "homework" before I can even talk to anyone for more than 10 minutes about what possible job I could be actually doing for you? Hiring in Tech is broken and I don't know what we can do to fix it.
  • echelon 5y ago
    > If it's FAANG I am lucky if I can even get a fucking job description these days. They want to interview me for jobs and best fit me for their needs. What about my needs? What about my time? If I can't even get a job description, why do you think I want to waste 3 hours doing "homework" before I can even talk to anyone for more than 10 minutes? Why don't you find people working on a problem you like, then ask them if they have open positions? Working though engineers is almost always better than filtering though company recruiters. You'll wind up with a role you like rather than being stuffed into open head count. I've done this. It works.
    • kxrm 5y ago
      > Why don't you find people working on a problem you like, then ask them if they have open positions? That's not always straight forward. Once you get patched over to HR, it's their process. I am glad to hear that this is still working for you, hopefully a serendipitous moment will occur soon to open a door for me as well. > Working though engineers is almost always better than filtering though company recruiters. Doesn't this say something about hiring being broken when you have to dig through profiles on a company website or linkedin and cold contact devs to get your foot in the door? I am by no means suggesting that what you are saying is a bad idea, just that this reeks of poor and inefficient hiring policies.
• silisili 5y ago
  My one and only Google interview went this way years ago. Each round they'd send me more books to study, which frankly I couldn't be bothered to read given the circumstances. My experience ended when an interviewer in round 3 or 4 asked me an obviously scripted question. I answered sarcastically, he got peeved, and I never heard from them again. I'm not claiming I'm Google caliber, whatever that means. Obviously I'm not because I don't have the patience for their interview questions. To be clear, the entire question was: What's not in a Linux inode? My answer was: Lots of things...dinosaurs, the moon... The interviewer told me very matter of factly that it was in fact, the filename. I honestly lost all respect for the process, sorry Googlers.
  • Analemma_ 5y ago
    Google is infamous for jerking people around in the interview process. I had a very similar experience, as did several people I know. They do it because they know they can get away with it, but I do wonder if they have a backup plan if the lustre of working for Google ever fades, because it's an open secret that their interview process is a fucking nightmare for no reason.
    • billytetrud 5y ago
      That lustre has faded already.
      • newsyyswen 5y ago
        Yeah, it's probably been 3-4 years since I've heard anyone use the word "Xoogler" in a positive or unironic way. Darn the wheel of the world! Why must it continually turn over?
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
      • SCUSKU 5y ago
        Mine (and the public's) growing awareness of surveillance adtech really has taken away from my desire to apply to Google or Facebook.
• austincheney 5y ago
  I remember the one time I worked at a design agency. 6 separate interviews in one day. The account managers were thrilled with me and absolutely did not want anybody else. The technical people were far less confident because nobody in their right mind could possibly hate jQuery. That meant some more interviews. What’s maddening about that is that this was for a consulting position not a developer position. It didn’t matter though because the contract written one way, the management at the client refused to accept the terms of the signed contract, and the developers I was there to help thought I was their subordinate to dictate.
• chadcmulligan 5y ago
  Don't they have a 3 month probation period where they can just say nah, it's not working?
• kook_throwaway 5y ago
  A family member went through five interviews for blockchain.com at 4-5am (they were in England). For the last one they (blockchain) were asked to do 6-7pm their time but couldn't be assed to have a call after hours and suggested another 4:30am (to us) interview, yet they had no problem asking people who didn't work there to be up at ridiculous hours week after week. The cherry on top was being offered the job at half of what the position should have paid and at a $20k pay cut from what they were told my family member was already making.
• wdb 5y ago
  Yeah, two phone interviews, day of interviews, get job offer and then they rescind your job offer.
• devnull3 5y ago
  We only hire the best ... just like everybody else! - Unknown (I read this sometime back on HN and it stuck with me)
• jedeye 5y ago
  failing on the 4th interview is vsry traumatizing
  • jedeye 5y ago
    I completely broke down and put in all my sick leave. I haven't cried like this in years and I have to go through therapy and all the things. I'm going to be ohkay at least my code still works and is still making the company I currently work for a lot of money. So I am just taking some time off to heal myself and address my burnout at the same time. There is hope after falling hard like that.
• hizxy 5y ago
  If you need more than 3 interviews then you don’t know how to hire. Unfortunately, so many people don’t know how to hire. Myself included ;)
• jedeye 5y ago
  I got recruited for a an interview at a fund management firm. Went through four interviews and got rejected a week later after the 4th interview. Companies don't realise some of as are so burnt out and have worked so hard during the pandemic. I removed myself from LinkedIn because of it. No hard working dedicated dev should be treated like the past didn't happen. I know what you guy's and girls are going through and I just want you to remind you you are more precious than gold and diamonds and you don't need beaurocrazy to validate determine your value. We will continue to build a better world and treat our future candidates with respect they deserve and not make them jump through impossible hoops designed for idealist machinemen
• strenholme 5y ago
  I’ve interviewed with Google twice. It’s not that many separate rounds: You have the recruiter sell Google to you, then there are two phone screens, then it’s the all day interview (with multiple people). Which is reasonable. I didn’t get the Google job, but, looking back, my life is better because I didn’t relocate back to Silicon Valley to work for Google. I’ve never had a company string me along. Four separate phone screens or interviews seems to be the limit. I’ve even been hired after one video conference interview. I once was given a “we want to hire you, but we need to get the funds together before we can give you the offer” spiel during the great post-mortgage economic recession, but they did hire me after about a month. After five separate rounds (again, talking to multiple teams on the same day after one or two technical phone screens and one recruiter call doesn’t count; that’s standard practice with many companies), I would tell a company they need to either, as my father put it, “shit or get off the pot”. In terms of take home assignments, I have no problem doing them, as long as the employer has no problem having me put my answers on a public GitHub repo. I will not do Codility tests, because my experience is that employers who do those kinds of tests are Unicorn hunters.
• paulmendoza 5y ago
  I have a small startup. We try to be super responsive when someone applies to a job. Generally within 2 weeks of an resume being submitted we can have an offer letter to the person.
• suchislife 5y ago
  So much time and money is spent interviewing it seems like it would be cheaper to just subcontract the candidate to do a real task as a trial run. That would give a much more meaningful signal. People say it's a risk mitigation strategy to do so much interviewing; but, is it? Are we sure it isn't just making us feel like we are mitigating our risk? Do we have any data that hire quality goes up with each incremental interview?
• itsbits 5y ago
  Here most of them seems to be pointing at number of interviews that's being conducted for a candidate by the companies and how emotionally torment it can be. I can tell you it's not an easy job to take interviews as well. I have been interviewing candidates for my company for past 4-5 years. It drains your brain a lot than giving interviews IMO. Sometimes I get exhausted and frustrated for the day after taking 4-5 interviews. start to feel, brain stops functionating. And frustrating thing is you have to provide feedback for audit purposes in more than 100 words. Especially rounds like System Design, Hands On coding, Knowledge of Technologies, Resume drilling. Also interviews been happening continuously at least for past 2 years due to attrition issues linked of pandemic. So never ending process now a days to take interviews in the company.
• graderjs 5y ago
  I've had this experience too. Including with a 10-person YC backed company. I'm glad it's not just software engineers experiencing this. I suppose hiring is broken everywhere...
• firefoxd 5y ago
  They can also drop you in the middle of the process. With just an email saying thank you. I had a long interaction at Amazon where the recruiter told me they are trying something new. Their goal is to keep the candidates mental health in mind and create a welcoming and open process. I spent 2 hours in the phone where she presented me with different process and what not. I even learned the name of her grand daughter, and her dog, and how she had to raise the grand kids when the mother was going through a phase, and how she had to paint her hair pink to keep up with the new generation. She gave me her personal cell, and we communicated everyday until my assessment test. I passed the coding challenge. But that cultural or psychological test? No idea. Anyway, never heard from her again despite emailing and texting.
  • itronitron 5y ago
    I bet the recruiter you spoke with wants everyone returning to the office.
• phendrenad2 5y ago
  Meanwhile you can go down the street and make 70% as much money with less hassle. Companies with grueling interview processes are inadvertently weeding out people who value their time, which seems like a good kind of employee to have.
  • planet-and-halo 5y ago
    Yep. This interview process is pretty much why I'm out of the market. Could I increase my comp? Probably. But the hours of my life are slipping by, and those never come back. I used to enjoy the hours I spent learning to code. Absolutely loved it. Doing this Leetcode crap just to jump through hoops is a miserable waste of life, though.
• karmasimida 5y ago
  If all interviews are scheduled at the same day, I am OK with it.
• sebyx07 5y ago
  Just do interviews with at least 5 companies at the same time. Pick the first which offers you the position, semi ghost others(keep them for backup), profit and no hurt feelings.
• user3939382 5y ago
  Recently hired for director level at big startup. 11 interviews.
• stacker8888 5y ago
  Thanks God it isn't just me! When I lost my job during the pandemic, I had multiple jobs I was interviewing for, each took maybe a month to get through all of the interviews. Do they really expect unemployed people to suffer through a month of interviews? Some people actually need a job fairly urgently! And these companies I was interviewing with, they all had a fake air of superiority, like they were the next Google. This interview culture needs to change back to how it was.
• hasa 5y ago
  I developed software professionally over 20 years and I get impression that I would not have survived any of these interviews. I remember the times in 90's when I had most of the Java classes & methods in my "working memory", but after that came syntax helpers and search engines. That ruined whole concept of programming with just text editor. I don't know if anyone else has similar experiences.
  • solumos 5y ago
    > That ruined whole concept of programming with just text editor. What "ruined" it for you, "made" it for me :) I absolutely hated my CS courses in undergrad and dropped the major after 2 classes. Didn't get back around to programming until a few years later - using Google makes it way more doable.
    • hasa 5y ago
      Actually I agree with you as I would not be able to program much without Google today. But many reported here about interview situations where they had like white paper and task to develop something. It is something they never face in real work.
• cik 5y ago
  I've never understood this. The first interview exists to sell me on the company, and for me to express my desire to work there. It's for alignment. Three questions I always ask are 1. What's your hiring process, 2. What's the base salary range, 3. How does the company demonstrate its commitment to ongoing learning. Any reticence to discuss these items means that I learned about how the company just isn't for me.
• mouzogu 5y ago
  I think the post-covid wfh job market has clouded something a bit which is that the tech industry in particular is becoming increasing oversaturated. There is so many people applying for positions now that companies are resorting to these more and more annoying filtering processes. My first job in this field 14 years ago was one interview and I got the job the next day. That would be almost impossible today. I blame it on two things, oversaturation of the "learn to code" meme and the rise and growth of recruitment agencies and their influence on HR practices. They have to justify their own jobs after all - just 10 years ago there wasn't really much of a concept of an HR or IT recruiter as far as I recall - or it was just emerging. I've said this before but I believe this field is becoming increasingly commodified. Soon you will be either a "white-collar" fang or a blue-collar "independent contractor".
  • nextlevelwizard 5y ago
    As someone who is stuck with a "junior developer" who hasn't produced a single line of working code during past 1.5years in my team the "one interview and done" isn't working these days.
    • theonething 5y ago
      how is this person not fired?
      • nextlevelwizard 5y ago
        We have too good employee laws. As long as you are trying your best it is really hard to fire anyone. There needs to be evidence that they aren't capable and even then they need to be given multiple chances over multiple months to correct this problem. Only way to fire someone on the spot is if they are breaking law or refusing to do the work
        • valdiorn 5y ago
          this is 100% your companys fault. If this person is literally not producing anything useful, then set them a basic piece of work and tell them to complete it. If they can't give them a warning, tell them to upskill. Repeat after a month. And again a month after that. If they still can't do it then you have plenty of evidence to justify firing them, anywhere in the world.
• imroot 5y ago
  Redhat: This one was for you. From the moment I applied through a recruiter until I got an offer letter was about 13 months. In that time, I had already started my new job -- I didn't actually take the role at RedHat, but, I was able to use their offer letter as leverage to increase my salary. I've worked for YC companies, I've worked for large companies. The larger companies seem to be a little bit easier to get into: my only interview at Luxottica was literally someone asking me about some retail experience I had about 20 years ago and some very basic Linux questions (retail technical architect position), but, I've had YC companies have a multi-month long interview process where I've been told after 10 or 11 interviews that they thought I was "Too senior for the role," which, just kinda blew my mind. The whole process is broken, but, there's not really a good solution to fix it.
• nextlevelwizard 5y ago
  I think there should be initial round with HR just to see that you aren't out right lying on your application and/or CV. Then you should have at home coding exam (still time limited to an hour or two) and if your code looks good then there should be the final interview with the team/manager where you are going to work. EDIT: now that I think about it there probably needs to be one more where you can negotiate the sallary and benefits and actually sign the contract.
• elmolino89 5y ago
  I am fine that up to the ~3 interviews covering the different aspects (say HR person checking the general personality, IT guy for i.e. Linux sysadmin knowledge mini-test, the team manager). In 2020 after the Covid started, I got into the endless spiral of I believe 6 interviews spaced over a month or so, then the long wait and getting shorter contract with same salary but different from the advert job title. With the back against the wall I took the job. Within 3 months or so (including a 1 month training) they re-posted a job advert for my position. I had to extract from them an info that my contract described as "with almost automatic extension" will not be extended ("we run out of funds"). I work off my posterior for months to get this. In short: shit on input does not bide well
  • epicureanideal 5y ago
    > HR person checking the general personality I would say that's the worst person to do the personality check. Instead, engineers the hire would actually work with should probably do the personality check. Often HR is either a bureaucrat with a non-technical degree, or an inexperienced young "internal recruiter" with a non-technical degree and a pleasant appearance meant to attract responses on LinkedIn. Neither of those are uniquely well suited to judging personalities. (Unless this is another case of, #wontfix, we want to screen out engineers who have personality characteristics that random 24 year old sociology students don't like.)
    • higeorge13 5y ago
      Exactly this! They are probably the most incompetent people included in the hiring process, and yet they will take part in the decision making with their ‘magic’ personality judgement and culture fit skills, always making the wrongest decision ever. I had candidates rejected by HR because they were too charming, too lively, too <insert random characteristic>, to find them later employed in way better companies and roles. Well done HR, now you have your culture and team fit, for a team and culture you are not even managing. Ah and your professionalism stops as soon as you hire someone. The rest of candidates might be left without a response even in their 3rd reminder. I guess it’s tough to even setup the auto email notification in the ATS tool you are using.
• rcarmo 5y ago
  I’m usually OK with doing more than three calls after a recruiter call (which are ideally with a hiring manager, peer manager, and a prospective peer), but that is usually because I quite like getting a feel for company culture. More than that is just silly and contrived (although I usually end up talking to a VP or similar these days on account of my seniority). There are usually three major red flags that make me step away (or at least curb my expectations): - Any kind of automated coding test (I have a GitHub profile and plenty of public code, plus HackerRank and the like can be gamed if you have enough free time) - Whiteboard or live coding interviews (I find contrived discussions about algorithms stupid when I can reach into my actual, physical bookshelf to a well thumbed-through copy of Skiena, get a tested approach going and _then_ figure out how best to optimize things) - When I am asked for compensation on the very first interview. I see it as culturally rude, and if they read through my CV at all and have a target for the role they are interviewing me for they should have already done the math. But as I am edging towards 50, a lot of the above just doesn’t happen. Instead I have long, rambling conversations about company values, people culture, and even end up doing free corporate strategy consultations, in which I am obviously expected to utter the right buzzwords that fit the interviewers’ worldview. I quite enjoy those conversations for the insights they provide into how completely broken some companies are - instead of getting down to brass tacks and discussing their challenges, many startups end up coming across as cargo culting FAANG concepts without addressing their actual pain points (how to grow, how to retain employees, how to actually deliver product, etc.).
  • vdomingos 5y ago
    Hear, Hear! For me it's when they put junior people doing interviews to senior roles. I get the point - not enough resources, culture check, etc - but at a certain level we're not even talking the same language or even working experience. On the other hand, any Amazon interview has tons of people :)
  • lixoaqui 5y ago
    regarding the last point, nowadays what I see is the opposite where candidates still struggle with getting a clear salary range before engaging into time wasting exercises.
• jesusthatsgreat 5y ago
  Technical interviews are high pressure situations that don't just check someone's technical proficiency but rather their ability to cope with pressure, communicate effectively while under that pressure and their willingness / unwillingness to ask for help or recognise their own weaknesses as soon as they realise they can't do something. All are essential, day-to-day situations any developer will find themselves in. It's difficult to replicate that in anything other than a technical interview. Having said that, tech employers don't hold the same power they once did. Decent developers with people skills know they can always find work or just make work for themselves if need be. We're entering an era where these guys will set their own hours and pay and the employer will be the interviewee.
• badbetty 5y ago
  Fuck these pretentious companies, almost everyone with average intelligence can work in the role and just pick things up rather than making you run through a maze just for an entry level position.
• qubyte 5y ago
  I once interviewed for a large game company. Their main office in Europe is in Dublin, but at the time they were opening an outpost in Brighton, UK (where I am) and were hiring a server engineer for their e-sports division. There were a lot of interviews. For the fourth or fifth they flew me out for a whole day of interviews in Dublin. These included at least three different departments that I remember with separate coding interviews, and I had to give an hour long presentation. I didn't get the role, and shortly after the Brighton outpost was axed. In hindsight I'm pretty sure that I didn't get the role because someone high up didn't want the outpost office to exist (it was only there because someone important they wanted was determined to live here). I'm not sore though. Not long after the company hit the news for having a toxic culture (amongst other issues), particularly toward women.
  • qubyte 5y ago
    I should add, this was several years ago. I'd never put up with that sort of crap now.
• andix 5y ago
  Decision fatigue, one of the biggest problem of this century. There is a lot of pressure, if you hire the wrong person, someone has to be responsible. That's why they developed a lot of processes. So if the person turns out to be the wrong person for the job, you can tell everyone you thoroughly vetted them, and it's not your fault. From my perspective the only way is: Interview people once or twice, hire them as quickly as possible, work with them for a few days/weeks and make a quick decision (together with the person) if it is going to work out.
• Clewza313 5y ago
  I had fourteen (14) interviews at my current employer, with a similar "how about this position instead?" switch in the middle, including redoing a whiteboard coding interview. I've been there 8 years and counting now, and my current job bears virtually no resemblance to what I was hired to do.
• napolux 5y ago
  I once had a 3 hours live coding session (without any previous warning it was a live coding session) on a problem described by some examples, while the 3 interviewers were clearly watching me and commenting my code or what I said in their chat. The expectation was that I made the example exercise + tests. Fu*k them.
• nmstoker 5y ago
  This is a major red flag that the firm isn't sufficiently serious about hiring and I would always walk away from a firm without a clear idea of their needs and the number of rounds. My experience with a firm that started with three, then paused, had an "open evening" for interviews and then wanted more (which I politely declined and privately blacklisted them) reminds me of the lucky escape I had: the firm went through this mess only to uncover (a little later) an operational error that left them refunding several billion to clients, trundling on as a zombie firm!
• napolux 5y ago
  Klarna, is that you? ;)
• DrBazza 5y ago
  I would have thought in 2021 companies would say "if it's a 'not sure', then it's a no", but I've worked at some places recently where "not sure" would get additional interviews. That's one problem. Another problem is in certain companies, senior management don't trust their own staff and want to be involved in the recruitment process. Yet another problem is poor CV vetting. You really can tell a lot about a candidate just from the CV. Even if (in the UK) an agency has mangled the CV into its own 'template' for companies. Demonstrating knowledge of algorithms is fine. Having to implement a red-black tree in an interview, or some arcane template corner of C++'s standard library from scratch, is not a good use of anyone's time. If companies don't keep consistent interview processes, if they have two 'yes' candidates for one role, they can't fairly compare them and choose. My worst/most lengthy interview was for a certain bank, that famously expects employees to work 12-14 hr days, and weekends. Total interview time: 24 hours. The result boiled down to the MD/partner interviewing me last, and having the yes/no decision.
• cowanon22 5y ago
  I'm fine with having 6-8 interview - every
• cowanon22 5y ago
  Every quality job I've had consisted of 6-8 different interviews. However, all of those jobs also send me a schedule and list of job titles of who I will be interviewing with, and conducted all of them on the same day. At this point I consider it a big red flag if a company excessively spreads them out.
• dexen 5y ago
  Two months ago there was a news that raised some eye-brows, "Amazon has a quota for the number of employees it would be happy to see leave (businessinsider.com)" [1]. Some of the comments were quite negative, reading it as a dehumanizing practice with no clear upsides. Re-upping my reply [2]: The article paints a needlessly bleak picture. The neutral reading of the practice is, "managers are able to take riskier hiring decisions, because they are given an allowed turnover rate". Which surprisingly enough is a solution to the ever-growing worry of false negatives in hiring - i.e., overlooking good candidates whos resume or interview did not shine strongly enough, or who perhaps are from a shunned, misunderstood culture, or who otherwise did not fit the generic hiring practice prevalent in the society. This solution allows an organization to make riskier hiring decisions at a well understood rate - hopefully catching the false negatives that did slip through competing organizations' hiring process. -- [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27369910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27369910 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27370538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27370538
  • dijit 5y ago
    The issue is with setting a quota as “must” vs “acceptable” If you “must” find a way to pick fault with your employees because you can only give out 1 “exceeds expectations” and at least 1 “meets most” then you’re likely creating a toxic environment from that. Similar to telling managers that they “probably should” thin the herd.
• blodkorv 5y ago
  Am i the only one who thinks modern dating has the same sort of problem?
• lormayna 5y ago
  Before pandemic, I was contacted by a recruiter for a position in a growing security startup for a role in technical pre sales. It start with a call with the recruiter, then a call with the VP that sent me an exercise to make in a short time (4 days). I had a full time job, so I worked hard during the weekend and in the night to finish the task and I was not able to finish everything (just last step was missing). Then I presented everything to VP and he gave me more time to finish and last step and schedule another meeting to discuss everything. After this time I was contacted by recruiter, that told me that I was in the very short list of two candidates. He then arrange an interview with the VP of HR and the VP of sales. After those two interview they completely disappeared and ghosting me. I had other job opportunities, then I tried several times to ping them and they never replied back. After 5 emails without reply, I told them that I was going to accept another job offer and the recruiter replied that this was the right decision, because the company made other choices. I lost so many hours on this interview process that I would like to send them an invoice :)
• notjes 5y ago
  There might be a psychological part in it to seek candidates that are willing to go through degrading interview meat grinders. I am not sure those candidates would be what a humane society needs.
• tomcooks 5y ago
  Currently investing 2 hours of my time per job offer: - investigating the role, the company, their stupid website, their made up culture - doing the unpaid take home tests (currently investing 8 hours doing a technical test for yet another stupid startup) - answering dumb questions ("why do you want to work for $neverheardofstartup?") on fancy js forms - having to register to their stupid career backend, thanks for yet another chance of having my inbox filled with spam because you don't know how to encrypt data - uploading hours and hours of video presentations (as if cover letters weren't dumb enough) only to be canned with a copy-paste "due to the amount of curricula we received unfortunately we cannot provide feedback - good luck with your job search" nonsense. And if I'm lucky enough not to be weeded out by a bored-to-death HR person with the attention span of a starving kitten, this was just interview step 1/5 Fuck you, from the bottom of my heart.
• postit 5y ago
  That's not about selecting the most qualified, the extra "lunch", "coffee", "working habits", "cultural fit" ..., it's a way found by companies to involve the maximum number of people in the hiring process to make people in the team feel confortable with the new hire. It's a very expensive team bounding exercice.
• jack_riminton 5y ago
  Reading all the replies its still quite a surprise that more engineers don't go and build their own products. Building companies is hella risky and hard, but if you're a senior engineer you could quite easily do it on the side
• chriski2021 5y ago
  I run a company. When I need to hire someone it’s because I need someone to do something, and either do it now or really soon. I have never had the time (or inclination) to do any more than two interviews
• cudgy 5y ago
  “Google, for example, recently examined its past interview data and determined that four interviews was enough to make a hiring decision with 86% confidence, …” Does this mean that 14% of Google hires are incompetent for their role at Google?
• FinanceAnon 5y ago
  All you complaining about the length of FAANG interviews... One of my family members was recently applying for a job to stack shelves in a supermarket. They had to do a tricky 3-hours long multiple choice questions test. After that, they got an email asking to record a video about themselves. No idea what would come after that, but they gave up at this point. All this is also very difficult to go through if you are older and not technologically well-versed.
• lysecret 5y ago
  So, I have been hiring a lot for 2 startups i was involved one was a kind of bootcamp which involved basically a never ending hiring process. I learned a lot about hiring there and how incredibly stupid and broken the standard hiring process is of big comps. If anyone tells me to invert a binary tree now i just get up an leave haha. But my main takeaway there was that this is actually a huuuge competitive edge Startups have. They dont have to adhere to the BS standard process and can snatch up a lot of good talent which falls out of the standard metrics.
• dzhiurgis 5y ago
  Aaah the impossible captcha of hiring! Amazing. Some companies could use this to drive some nutters ever crazier.
• neilwilson 5y ago
  Once you realise that they are trying to leverage the 'sunk cost fallacy' to try and get cheaper staff, you tend to bin these earlier. This is nothing to do with removing risk from hiring processes. It's to filter for those who want to be in the fraternity so much they will do anything to get there - including being chronically underpaid and badly treated. There is still a shortage of good people. Let these companies have the less good people. Good employers know talent is in short supply.
• sdfjkl 5y ago
  > Research shows that if interview processes drag on, good candidates lose interest - and go elsewhere I certainly would! More than one hour of interviewing is a sure sign of a diseased company that probably suffers from massive management overhead, internal conflict resulting in inability to make decisions or someone's complete paralysis out of fear of making wrong decisions. You'd have to be pretty desperate wanting to start work at such a place. If not, better to keep looking and not waste your time.
• ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  I’ve pointed out, before, that one advantage I have, is a huge portfolio (check my SO story[0]). It’s tens of thousands of lines of code, in multiple shipping product form. All you need to do is clone a repo, hit “Archive,” and you have a built and App Store-ready app. Some of these apps are still on the App Store (most have been deprecated, over the years). I have full source for shipping apps (over 20), going back to 2012. I've been writing Swift -every single day-, since the day it was announced, in 2014, and have released quite a few apps, written entirely in native Swift. I'm working on a big one, right now. Here’s an example of a repo for a currently shipping free app that is available as an iOS/iPadOS app, a Mac app, a Watch app, and a TV app. It’s a Bluetooth BLE explorer app (yes, you can sniff Bluetooth on an Apple Watch)[1], [2], [3], [4]. It uses this cross-platform Swift BLE SPM module[5]. All of the repos also include things like graphic asset originals (usually Adobe Illustrator). I’m a passably good designer. At one time, I considered becoming a professional artist. All of my work is localizable and accessible. A number of my apps have been localized in multiple languages. These days, I also tend to do things like support Dark Mode. I have a ton of SPM modules, tested, documented, tagged and available for immediate integration. I use most of them in my own work. I have full source for a couple of server systems, that are in heavy use, today (I use them in my own work, and one is a worldwide standard, in use by thousands, daily). I have dozens of blog posts, articles, tutorials, explorations and other online writings[6]. I go into great detail, how I design, test, architect, and think. Most of this stuff is extremely detailed, and comes with supporting playgrounds. I’m a fairly good writer. There’s a lot there, but it’s quite readable. I have given instruction on technical stuff for years. The most recent one was a Zoom class on intro to Core Bluetooth, using Swift[7]. It was received well. I don’t know if I have a single fork. I’m the original author of all of it. Since I have over a decade of commit history, across multiple public repository systems, that’s easy to prove. I also tend to have fairly informative (and frequent) checkins. It’s simple to see how I work. My GH Activity Graph is solid green[8]. My technical ability is not a matter for debate, it’s easy to see what I bring to the table (including limitations). I'm satisfied that there's lots of stuff I can do. I won't bother trying to claim abilities that I don't have. Any interview should be only determining whether or not I’d get along, and whether or not I would be a good “personality fit.” Since I spent decades at my jobs, including at one of the most famous brands on Earth, that should also be easy to figure out. I could definitely see that some companies would not want me, but that should be simple to determine. I’m a completely open book. My LinkedIn profile is full of testimonials, by former managers, coworkers, employees, and open-source project partners. It’s been my experience that all this has been completely ignored, in favor of ridiculous 50-line binary tree tests. In one interview, I sent the recruiter links to several public repos of code for shipped applications, that pretty much exactly fit the requirements of the job they contacted me for. This was ignored. Instead, I was passed to an obviously bored tester, who gave me a binary tree test in a language not used by the open position, and I was dinged for not using a formulaic approach, unique to that language (which, did I mention?, was not the one used for the posted job). The repos that I had sent, were in the language that was specified in the opening. After a few of these broken, insulting, awkward, hazing rituals, I simply gave up looking. It’s plain that no one wants me, and I won’t go where I’m not wanted. I'm fine, doing my own thing. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall (SO Story) [1] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/BlueVanClef https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/BlueVanClef (App Source) [2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/blue-van-clef-for-mobile/id1511428132 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/blue-van-clef-for-mobile/id151... (iOS/iPadOS App - Includes Watch App) [3] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/blue-van-clef-for-tv/id1529181618 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/blue-van-clef-for-tv/id1529181... (TV App) [4] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/blue-van-clef/id1529005127?mt=12 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/blue-van-clef/id1529005127?mt=... (Mac App) [5] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_BlueThoth https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_BlueThoth (BLE SPM Module) [6] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/ https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/ (Writing) [7] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY/ITCB-master https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY/ITCB-master (Core Bluetooth Course) [8] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#github-stuff https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#github-stuff (GH ID)
• thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
  >According to a survey from global staffing firm Robert Half, 62% of US professionals say they lose interest in a job if they don’t hear back from the employer within two weeks – or 10 business days – after the initial interview. That number jumps to 77% if there is no status update within three weeks. Ha, that's familiar. I'm not in the US but, during my last job hunt, I'd already accepted a job offer before some of the companies I'd applied to replied to me. Companies that are paying recruiters to bombard my inbox or paying staff bonuses to refer me. Hiring is a very human, very broken process. There's little incentive for an individual to do it well short term but fatal repercussions if the group do it badly long term.
• vector_spaces 5y ago
  I had an interview with a YC company last year. I went through -- not exaggerating -- 8 interviews, almost all of which aside from the initial phone screen were an hour or more in length. 2 of them were technical interviews. I had finally gotten to the take home project, naturally a project in Ruby on Rails despite the fact that I haven't written a lick of Ruby in my life. Anyway, I was rejected after this step. To be fair, the take home step was paid, which was nice, but not nearly enough for the time it took me to learn enough Rails to be productive, learn best practices / idiomatic Ruby, and solve the problem they gave me. Incidentally I've noticed that the Ruby community has this weird thing about insisting on either N years of Ruby experience or requiring interviewees use Ruby during technical interviews or take home projects. Ruby shops were the only places where I've ever been required to use a particular language during an interview. I suppose it's because there's so much magic happening in DSLs like Rails that they assume it'll take too long for even experienced engineers to come up to speed? Obviously there's risk involved in the hiring process. But I think there's a lot more risk involved in procedurally treating people like garbage. Anyway, after that ordeal I'm going to insist on being allowed to interview in a language I'm familiar with. They'll judge me on my best work or not at all.
  • wodenokoto 5y ago
    How far in the process were you before you found out you had to code Ruby on Rails and present it?
• tekkk 5y ago
  I think the biggest give-away from the article and from the comments written here is that companies neglect recruiting as a chance to generate positive brand impressions and in general, use it for marketing. If people walk away from your interviews feeling disappointed or mistreated there's a good chance they won't recommend or advocate for that company in the future. You'd think spending some executive muscle to smoothen out the warts in the process would be beneficial to any company trying to recruit smart people. But I guess having regular engineers or other employees with whatever ineptitudes in empathy or social skills won't be fixed by somebody telling them to "be sensible and nice." If that's how they were treated and think it's ok to treat others the same way, that's how it will be.
• yawaworht1978 5y ago
  Indeed, almost nothing is available without investing 5 or more hours of your time. I have seen interview 1,2 plus full day on site development with senior dev for a front end job and something like 10 hours worth of assessments at FAANG. These are not high paying jobs btw.
• wesleywt 5y ago
  Not a "tech" job, but I found that the best hires were people who worked on contract for a few months. They did not necessarily have the skills when they started, but you could see drive, diligence and competence in those few months. This attitude needs to be maintained every day and cannot be faked as easily as you can an interview. A bonus is that they get paid for their time while getting valuable job experience. It might only work for low-level entrants. For higher positions you are hiring the person for their experience, not on how well they can jump through arbitrary hoops.
• plondon514 5y ago
  I’ve applied to and been rejected by Codecademy 3 times. After the 3rd time I decided to build my own just to prove to myself that I could and that the interview process is broken: https://codeamigo.dev https://codeamigo.dev
• martindbp 5y ago
  I'm starting to think these interviews are not about skill, but about resiliency. It filters out people with (occasional) physical/mental health issues, difficult/many kids or other difficult life situations etc. Which is fair I suppose, companies would prefer perfectly healthy 26 year-olds that can dedicate their life to the company without burning out.
  • FinanceAnon 5y ago
    I think "resiliency" is a positive way of phrasing it. In my opinion, it's more of a case of checking if you can fit in and put up with corporate BS. I also doubt that companies are on purpose designing the interviews to be this long. It's probably more of the case of "more is better" thinking and no one being able to make a decision by themselves to streamline the process.
• lmilcin 5y ago
  Aside from being tech lead for my project I am also technical interviewer and I regularly interview candidates. Recently I have asked my HR if they could set up longer meetings with candidates because, honestly, 1.5h is in my opinion not enough to evaluate candidate. I would like to ask some technical questions, I would like to see the candidate write some code, I would like to have a discussion on general tech topics just to get the feel of the candidate. And also have time to respond to questions that the candidate may have. Usually it is the coderpad part that overflows and takes more time but it is also hugely helpful in understanding how candidate works and deals with problems. So the response from HR was that they "don't want to scare the candidate". And if I need, maybe they will set up follow up with the candidate "just don't tell the candidate upfront to not scare them". So that's that.
• kebman 5y ago
  Preferably one. Perhaps two if there are unanswered questions. You're really, really pushing it at three, however. Unless I'm compensated for the time I'm about to waste, I might not bother meeting up to a third interview.
• DebtDeflation 5y ago
  I remember over a decade ago interviewing at a bank and being asked how much experience I had with [insert list of systems] and integrating data specifically between two of those systems. I had never even heard of any of the systems on the list. Got home and Googled them, nothing. Called up a friend who worked there and he told me those were internal names for their systems, no one who did not work there would have any idea what they were, and he was shocked they were asking about them using their internal names during interviews. Oddly enough, one was just an Oracle data warehouse fed by Informatica ETL and generating Cognos reports, and I had experience with all of that technology, but answered "no" when asked if I had experience with "the Pulsar system".
• bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  I had a round at accenture about 8 months ago, multiple interviews over a month and a half maybe; and it went first interview with a manager wanted me to go forward, second interview someone who okayed me for tech interview and what position I should be looking at, third interview tech interview said fine now you need to talk to HR head and she will make final determination, HR head said send you info later in day some days later still nothing, about a week later message from HR needed to have another interview with someone, consulting offer came in I figured well this isn't going anywhere took consulting offer. 1 week later the managerial guy called up and said ok everything went through now we can talk about the job I said "sorry, I took a job". He wished me good luck but I'm not sure from his voice if he really meant it.
• js4ever 5y ago
  In 2007 I had 13 interviews with Microsoft before finally being rejected at the last step. Reason invoked was "Not enough corporate spirit". That was my last rounds of interviews, since then I have my own consulting company and never regretted this failure, quite the opposite in fact :)
• Ensorceled 5y ago
  I think a big part of the problem is how much software engineers are being paid now. 4, 5 or more rounds is not unheard of for a VP/CTO role. Companies are acting like that Intermediate Developer is a critical role because the pay is making it seem like a critical role, they are making what would have been a Director salary within institutional memory. I just had candidate that was already getting paid what would have been an insane amount a few years ago, get a counter offer that included a 20% raise and significant equity.
  • ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    Reminds me of this MonkeyUser (love that comic): https://www.monkeyuser.com/2020/new-hire/ https://www.monkeyuser.com/2020/new-hire/
• simonbarker87 5y ago
  I actively tell career switchers to avoid coming with more then 3 rounds unless they really really want to work for that company. I did 5 rounds over 7 hours with a top tier company recently only to loose out for my solution to one of the 3 coding tests not being as elegant as the interviewer would have liked. I’ve been told to speak to them again in 6 months, we’ll see.
• buro9 5y ago
  Ah Amazon... 14 interviews, an additional 5 hour technical test, spanning a total of 3+ months. Only to be informed at the end that I was too technical for the role they had in mind but they were offering me a Senior Principal SDE role instead. By the time we got to the end of the process I'd already concluded that the hiring process was a reflection of their internal decision making and that this was not a company (or department) I wanted to work for. Then I was hired elsewhere and I saw something similar happen to a candidate and realised that this was truly an indication of the indecision. We had lots of roles, just none shaped in a way that fitted the person, and what we should've done is reject the person but on that occasion we hired and it was a terrible decision. They were a good person and very capable, but not a fit for the role finally offered. I had the sense that if I had accepted the Amazon role that would've been true for me too. An interview process of more than 3-4 defined steps that takes longer than a month to schedule, is a bad sign. Top tip for candidates: Ask what the process is, if they cannot conclusively tell you then double down on interviewing at a company that can.
  • TheHypnotist 5y ago
    As i mentioned in another post, don't forget to work in those LP's otherwise you get 0 Bezos points and your experience is worthless. Edit: Meant LP's. Leadership Principles.
    • quietbritishjim 5y ago
      What's GP? Gaussian process? General practitioner? Or, most commonly on HN, grandparent [post]? Or maybe the whole point of using that abbreviation is to exclude those outside Amazon?
      • fridif 5y ago
        I think he means LPs, Leadership Principles
        • TheHypnotist 5y ago
          Right - I meant LP's, for some reason they are "Guiding Principles" in my head this morning.
• gorpomon 5y ago
  On my team, I inherited an interview process with 7 steps. It's a long one for sure, and it's not a process I can change. But as a hiring manager I mitigate issues brought up in this article by doing a few really easy things: 1. On my first chat with a candidate, I layout the entire interview process. I acknowledge that it is long and I preemptively thank them for going through the process and say that we value their time. I make sure our recruiters can reiterate the process as clearly as I can. 2. I let the candidate know that at any time if they want to pull out, that is a-ok, and that they are welcome to apply again in the future in good standing. I also tell them that during our coding assignment, we really mean it when we say it's ok to ask for more time, and that we don't judge them negatively. 3. I tell the candidate that if at any point we decide to decline, that I will send them a written letter of feedback so as to make the process worth their time. This isn't always easy, but it's always been appreciated. Sometimes it is hard to write these letters, how do you tell someone multiple interviewers didn't like them? I do it by pressing our interviewers to state clearly what didn't come across well, and then I relay those things to the candidate. Sometimes even still the letters probably aren't super satisfying to the declined candidates, but I do my best and hope everyone realizes that job hunting in general is rarely satisfying. Basically, transparency, honesty and specifically thanking them have gone a long way for me. I fully understand that an underfunded/understaffed startup might balk at the feedback part, especially when lawyers can get involved. But offering up items #1 and #2 to candidates should just be table stakes of your hiring process.
  • pnt12 5y ago
    I'd really appreciate a letter with feedback after a lengthy interviewing process, I think that's really valuable. However, I don't think I'd value it after more than 3 interviews. Candidates are applying after work hours and there's a time / energy limit to how many processes they can take at a time. After a given point, you're wasting not hours but possibly months of their life.
    • IshKebab 5y ago
      I didn't really realise it until I was on the other end, but if you don't get any feedback you can totally ask for it and there's a decent chance you'll get some. But I agree, it's usually pretty obvious if you just weren't good enough, or you had a bad day, or they just didn't like you for some random reason.
• binarymax 5y ago
  If you can’t make a decision after 3 rounds then you have no business recruiting anyone and should just give up. You’ll not only irritate and push away all your good candidates, but you’ll also make your staff angry that they’re always wasting time interviewing people.
• ryeguy_24 5y ago
  I work for a big 4 consulting firm and I think our process works well and is extremely short. We hire financial engineers (quants) and data scientists. I’ve lived through working with hundreds of hires and can say from actual experience it works quite well. This is our process: 1. Review resumes to see who meets the criteria based on credentials. 2. Recruiter phone screen to screen for any glaring issues 3. We conduct an interview day and the candidate interviews with 3-4 people (30 minutes each). We have a mix of levels conducting interviews but make sure to have at least 2 leaders from our practice. We try to make sure we collectively poke around all areas (technical, cultural, communication). 4. That same day or the following day (want to make sure candidate is fresh in our heads) we discuss candidate. 5. Each interviewer (starting with the most junior) has to speak about candidate and rate them from 1-3. It can be any decimal rating but cannot be a 1.5 (an “I don’t know” answer). 6. Interestingly, we are mostly in the same ballpark on these calls and when we move forward, we are generally happy with that person. I can’t speak for the candidate who may have to wait a bit between application, recruiter conversation, and interviews. But at the very least, the interview to decision process is pretty painless and you’ll have a decision within 2 days max.
• shanev 5y ago
  DAOs are fixing this in the crypto world. You contribute to the protocol and get paid by the DAO. Everything is transparent and open. If you do this enough and earn the respect of the dev team it could even turn into a full-time role.
• niklasrde 5y ago
  I've done two long ones - McKinsey Digital (~7 interviews over 3 months) and Bloomberg (~5 interviews over 1 month). Whilst it was dragging, I do feel they were both adequate processes for me to learn about the companies and the role, and for them to get to know me and my fit for the team. I ended up learning quite a lot about myself, too, and got useful feedback out of the process. It also was during the pandemic where organisations where finding their feet with remote hiring; I reckon in a pre-pandemic session, they would've been compressed into sessions together. The scheduling, and comms about it weren't always amazing, but that's down to the recruiters rather than the hiring team, imho.
• theshadowknows 5y ago
  I work at Big Ass Corporation, Inc. in the US (there’s a very strong chance you use one or more of our services). Hiring is fucking awful. First of all it’s nearly impossible to get approval for a req in the first place. I’m actively looking to leave just because of that…but that’s a different rant than this one. Once a req is approved then it goes out to the team to disperse as well as hr. Some roles get handed off to the critical search team if the hiring manager pushes hard enough. But that doesn’t really matter. We get flooded with candidates. Almost every one of them could probably do the job so we have to figure out who could do it best through the interview process. I personally never ask stupid gotcha puzzle questions because those annoy me as much as they do most folks here. I ask people to talk about their experience as it relates to the role. Usually this means I ask about how they solved a truly difficult problem at work, what made it difficult and how they were able to overcome it. Then I like to get into the technical stuff of what they implemented and why. Mostly I just like letting people who are proud of something they’ve done get a chance to talk about it. Anyway we’re supposed to score people based on these arbitrary metrics like longevity (how long we think they will stay) and communication ability (this is very, very close to being racist…draw your own conclusions). I never score people. Managers ask me why and I say because I don’t interview spreadsheets. Anyway I’m one of usually 4 interviews. I interview by myself and the rest are all panel interviews. And once you finish the last panel that’s the last you hear from us unless you get an offer. I hate it.
  • FinanceAnon 5y ago
    It sounds like you do what you can. Unfortunately, people like you leave as they can't put up with it any longer and the company is just left with people who are happy with the status quo.
  • autarch 5y ago
    > communication ability (this is very, very close to being racist…draw your own conclusions) I'm trying to draw my own conclusion but I'm confused. Communication ability is very important for developers and other technical roles. We need to be able to talk to each other about our work, and in many organizations we also need to be able to work effectively with other non-technical staff. Of course, this doesn't mean that you have to speak or write the company's primary language in some particular way, as long as you can make yourself understood. Nor does it require that you speak that language as your first language. Is there something specific about _how_ Big Ass Corporation is evaluating communication ability that is racist?
• StriverGuy 5y ago
  We are looking to solve this over at Chatkick (https://chatkick.com https://chatkick.com) if anyone is interested in working on this problem.
• duxup 5y ago
  I call it the 'hiring people industrial complex'. It's endless, every little bit of concern about personality or "We did this at X." place and "Need this guys input." are added and has zero proven value, but it is added. At one company I worked at it wasn't uncommon for a department to decide to hire someone and HR or the recruiters somehow were able to hold things up for months. My most recent job was at a smaller (not a start up) company and as an applicant I was talking to people I would work with and was asked legitimate questions and etc.
• diogenescynic 5y ago
  A lot of jobs will put you through multiple interviews then ghost you. I interviewed at several tech companies last year and it was crazy how few would email a simple letter saying they had moved on in their search. It's like they want the option to put you on the back burner for weeks and then reach out again if things fall through with others. Really gross and selfish.
• wly_cdgr 5y ago
  IMO, for new grads and career changers in particular, it would make good sense for Google and other companies that have to interview vast quantities of candidates to develop and publish some rigorous MOOC sequences that candidates can complete on their own schedule to develop and demonstrate relevant competencies in a way the companies can trust more than they trust 3rd party degrees. Candidates who complete the MOOC sequences successfully could be fast-tracked into an expedited interview process. Plus they get a marketable, public credential out of it, rather than just going through a super long interview process with nothing to show the world / other companies for it Google is already kinda doing this with Grow With Google, so I am just thinking of an even more extensive and rigorous version of this And/or just ask people about their best Factorio factories and EXAPUNKS solutions :)
• zschuessler 5y ago
  I was semi-actively hunting for a role a year ago. The worst offender was a company I had five meetings with, 3 of which were identical code reviews for the same code test. None of the reviewers realized I already had the code review with their peers. None knew what the next step was. Most companies just didn't have an organized funnel for candidates. The one that did I quickly took the job offer at. Here's what they did right: 1. The recruiter prepped me for each interview as if they were a good friend looking out for me. They told me who I was talking with and what hobbies they had so I could relate to them. 2. I knew of each meeting and its format in advance. It's weird I'm calling this out as it seems simple, but here we are :-) 3. The code review was paid. And actually quite fun. The previous company code review was unpaid and 20 hours of 'implement a REST API' 4. The engineering team was actually trained on recruiting. Each one had read my resume and asked detailed questions about my hobbies, experiences, etc. Engineers elsewhere hadn't read my resume at all. 5. I always had quick feedback on technical meetings and didn't have more than three. The most important difference I noticed is that most companies were ambivalent seeing me fail.. a select few even seemed to crave that.
  • musingsole 5y ago
    > select few even seemed to crave that I've seen the same thing. It makes no sense. I keep telling myself the incentives can't really be such that your hiring process be actively antagonistic...not if we want anything good right? But perhaps the market can stay irrational longer than I can go without income. Hold strong to the companies that bother to acknowledge you're a person.
    • Cheezemansam 5y ago
      >I've seen the same thing. It makes no sense. I keep telling myself the incentives can't really be such that your hiring process be actively antagonistic...not if we want anything good right? See, if your test is so difficult that people are failing, then it must mean that you are being selective and only hiring the best!!!!!
  • Taylor_OD 5y ago
    The paid code review or paid technical is a big one for me. If a company is willing to actually value my time during the interview process then I'm going to be much more interested in them. Instead of just inventing steps and adding seemingly worthless technicals
• discmonkey 5y ago
  Having recently won the google hiring lottery, I wanted to add my experience total length of time ~ 7 months emails sent/received ~ 50 phone calls ~ 20 technical interviews: 7 (1 with screen with recruiter, 6 with engineers) team match interviews: 3 (for me at least these were real interviews, in that I "flunked" the first 2, and decided to take the 3rd one very seriously before getting an offer) Before getting hiring approval, I honestly felt that I would get rejected, and I can honestly say that being more "personable" and very "communicative" probably had a lot to do with why I made it through. My honest advice would be to stop thinking of these long interview processes in terms of a a binary outcome that you have complete control over. Instead, think of it as trying to maximize some hidden parameter of a binomial distribution, where every interaction slightly increases your odds in the final coin flip.
  • moistoreos 5y ago
    I agree w/ the sentiment of your last statement. However, I wholeheartedly could not disagree more w/ "having won the <insert_x_silicon_valley_company_here> hiring lottery". 80+ hours of interviewing? No offense, that doesn't sound like winning the lottery. That sounds like you don't value your time. Unless you're getting paid for that many hours of interviewing or receive a signing bonus to make up for it, any company that does 10+ hours of interviewing can take a rusted iron rod and shove it up their own arse. In a market where software engineers are in super high demand, if a company cannot refine the technical interview(s) down to a max of 3 hours for any specific role, then why waste your time? I understand wanting to gauge a candidate's technical abilities. But there's a balance between understanding the candidate's technical abilities, the technical knowledge required for the job, and (the most important bit) what can be learned on the job for the role.
    • discmonkey 5y ago
      Agreed that the hour invested may not be worth it for a large percentage of people (again I got lucky, I would feel so differently if I was rejected after 7 interviews). Google's point is just that they prefer to avoid false positives at the cost of (potentially) a lot of false negatives. The current interview process is probably some local optimum; I haven't worked at a company yet that is actually good at interviewing. Where good is optimized over high recall and accuracy and a small time investment. I know that Google does have one big advantage, in that a good percentage of people that get the offer end up accepting. That (unfortunately) gives Google a lot more leeway and possibly less incentive to further optimize the interview process. Software engineers are in high demand, but also Google is in high demand among software engineers. At my previous job, trying to find a candidate for a role essentially involved lowering the bar until somebody was no longer in demand, since we weren't "in demand".
• blueyes 5y ago
  The hiring process is fundamentally broken, but not always in the ways that job-seekers think. It's hard to establish during the interview process that someone will be able to do the job you need them to do. Hiring them is a huge risk, both legal and cultural. It's not easy to fire people, and lawsuits/arbitration are common. The endless interview process, which costs companies many good candidates, is there because they fear the bad ones they can't recognize.
• eplanit 5y ago
  These stories reinforce my decision to go into consulting so long ago. People hire me because they can't get stuff done, and they need it done now. We're not getting married, and I'll be gone as soon as the project/mission is accomplished. And, no BS coding tests.
• Amin699 5y ago
  Trial and error is bad and costly for companies who are hiring, so they often compensate by making the recruitment process more and more forensic. This means conducting multiple interviews to gather valuable information to help them more clearly determine which candidate has the most potential. In the best-case scenario, this is a great investment for all involved: it ensures that the candidate won’t struggle in the job, and that the company won’t have to repeat the process all over again.
• matoyce 5y ago
  But some are pulling strings like connections for them to get the job that they want. It is quite rampant, and it even gives the job to those who are not quite competent enough for that certain position.
• deedubaya 5y ago
  In-house recruiting have few incentives to provide a fast and efficient hiring pipeline. Slow pipelines mean low conversion rates (survival of the most pain tolerant), generating more internal demand. Natural reaction to to widen the pipe (more recruiters) not speed it up.
• ravishankark 5y ago
  While interviewing with a start up, I was asked to do an assignment which took almost a week to complete. After the assignment, I went through 6 rounds of interview. Then they kept me hanging for a week, only so send me a rejection mail.
• RIDDLERTHIS 5y ago
  I can relate to the whole "never-ending job interviews" as described in the article. Two months ago, in June, a company reached out to me regarding a senior level back/front hybrid role. This company previously ghosted me two years ago but still had my resume and were now willing to hire me right away for a substantial increase in pay. Before I accepted any offer, I shopped myself out on Indeed and found there is a huge demand for folks like myself right now. Here's a taste of how it went: Company #1: Fintech startup. Two separate 30 minute, non-technical interviews. Third interview was a four-hour long interview involving multiple LeetCode problems. Fourth interview they wanted to discuss my performance during the third interview, and then schedule a fifth interview. I declined because a) I felt this was overkill and unnecessary, and b) one of their developers was rude and condescending because I am self-taught. He went out of his way for 8 minutes to berate me. I had never experienced anything like it. Company #2: AI-focused firm in analytics. Hiring for a management-level role. Went through three interviews. First was a 30 minute screening. Second was an hour long overview of my technical background. Third was mostly a follow-up to the discussion that took place during the second interview. And at the end of the third interview they informed me there would be four more interviews to meet the team, write code, and a whiteboarding session. I declined and said I'm not interested, again because of the time factor mostly. And I noticed this process repeat itself for most companies. It's mentally exhausting, plus I have a family, my current job requirements, and other responsibilities. The interview process is really unpredictable to a degree. Some folks want to see substantially more coding than others, taking into account similar job roles and descriptions. I see a lot of folks who have interviewed with FAANG companies, and while I don't have any experience with them, the process sounds somewhat similar.
• gregmclaughlin 5y ago
  I was paid $300 to complete a take-home project for the final interview round at the company I currently work at. Give candidates a 1-2 day take-home project and pay them for their time. Outcome: You learn how they work, while showing that you value their time.
• nothing_special 5y ago
  We are a mid/small-sized company (~3K) which is hungry for "freshers" (those just out of college). We are out competed by the big sharks who pick the best of the students and we have to search among the remaining. Our hiring pipeline involves a written test (coding - mix of Multiple choice and coding - in favour of only MC nowadays and analytical skills) provided to us by a third party. The test isn't really great (fixed small set of questions which doesnt change, some arcane C coding questions (the likes of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28034019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28034019), etc.). So we have 2 rounds of TA (technical assessment) and 1 HR round at the end. This is resulting in a lot of filtering and we get a success ratio of about 4-5 per 1K students. Management does not like this and blames the assessment team for having "high standards" and feels that we are wasting previous time (of assessors) and not getting desired results. The assessment team feels that the written tests are not a good indicator of coding skill and that most applicants fail in the basics of coding (logic, for loops, pointers etc.). Management has given a new target to reduce the time to hire and increase our hit rate. The solution will mostly consist of removing HR round (no value add, can be assessed in TA), reducing or eliminating TA (!) and relying solely on the written test. Given the written test quality (though it has mininal configurability in terms of the split between MC and coding questions) this seems likely to get in a lot of "false positives". My questions - is it really feasible to use only a online automated assessment (not specifically the one we are using) to get a right coding assessment done for freshers? is there a "good" (efficient and effective) "standardized" framework/solution for fresher assessment which one can follow which you have used? (Note: we are a software company providing solutions and consulting in domains like automotive, networks, devices, embedded, etc.)
• Twirrim 5y ago
  I had a friend who had a similar experience to the candidate in the article, but at T-Mobile. He was unemployed. They interviewed him 5 times over a month and a half, and tried to get him on site for a 6th interview loop roughly 2 months after starting the whole process. They were most put out when he told them he'd already got another job. He was amazed at how offended they were, especially that he'd wasted their time. He was, apparently, supposed to just sit around and wait for them to make a decision, because who needs money to pay for things like rent, food etc?
• towtow 5y ago
  Just recently experienced this. Interviewed at a FAANG company, process started 5 months ago, about 50 emails exchanged, a dozen or so phone calls of various kinds. 6 interviews, they came back and asked to re-do 1 of them, which I obliged. Then, they were silent for about 2 weeks, I asked about the status and they said they want to re-do 2 more interviews. I kindly refused and they said they wouldn't move forward.
• known 5y ago
  Interviews are an "activity" for HR/Managers to fill in their time sheets;
• eh9 5y ago
  I get so jealous of my mechanical/structural engineering friends who's interviews usually span one or two rounds, and they're never asked for anything resembling spec work. Hiring should never take more than a day or two of interviews.
• vincewolff 5y ago
  Since I finished college I was on a interview loop. I'm so tired, at this point making my own company and freelancing seem more reasonable. I don't understand why there must be 4 different persons asking me the same questions just so in the final to give me a lower offer than we previously discussed or to ghost me. I had a bad opinion about HR when I was a student and didn't work based on how a few of my friends and family treated, now that I'm looking for work and have to deal with their bullshit daily I literally started to hate the people working on this dep and their lack of respect.
• Ithildin 5y ago
  This trend is absolutely ridiculous. I'm currently in "Round 3" and have FIVE interviews this week, four of which are technical. I already passed the technical in Round 2. As someone with 10+ years experience in the industry, I've about had it with these technicals. I'm just going to start refusing. I'm happy to have a long technical discussion on my work experience and to provide you with portfolio examples. Take your hacker rank problems and get out of here.
• karaterobot 5y ago
  The last two jobs I applied for were like this. The first one had 8 interview rounds on 8 separate days. It was a remote company, and I was working in an office at the time, so I had to figure out 8 separate excuses for sneaking away from work for an hour to take video calls. It was ridiculous.
• ivolimmen 5y ago
  I don't recognize this at all in my country (Netherlands). I have 2 interviews max. My current employer I actually had one interview with the boss in a restaurant. We had a nice chat and he offered a job on the spot. I signed and never left. As I am a consultant I ofter do interviews and I always stear the conversation to the most important part of IT: communications.
• ab_testing 5y ago
  I know BBC is writing this from the perspective of a new interviewer. However anybody who is preparing for FAANG or even hangs out on Blind knows that getting into any of these big companies, now includes multiple leetcode style programming tests and system design interviews . Just as a point of reference, CTCI is now on its 6th edition and it is still playing catch up to the ever changing interview processes at these companies. In fact if you spend time on leetcode , you would get a fair idea of what companies ask LC medium/hard, which ones ask Dynamic Programming and which one will specifically ask questions that are not on LC
• rfwhyte 5y ago
  Think of it this way. Company A is hiring for role X. They get 100 candidates, interview 10, with each candidate going through a 5 interviews at an average of an hour each, assuming they hire 1 candidate, that's 45 hours of people's lives that have now been utterly wasted. The problem is companies don't care about you and your time until you are their employee. They'll gladly waste hours and hours and hours of your time, because doing so costs them nothing. There's actually a super simple solution to this problem. Require interviews be paid. Doesn't have to be a lot, a simple honorarium scaled to the role's salary would suffice. If your time has a cost to companies, they'll stop wasting it and start optimizing to minimize the time hiring takes instead of optimizing for other factors and ignoring the negative externality of wasting peoples time.
• mlengineerio 5y ago
  I have a lot of friends got FB offers and most of them spend between 3 months to 6 months to prepare for the interview. With that level of preparation, some of them have to sacrifice their responsibilities on their day job. It's tough. (you can read some stories from my blog).
• runbathtime 5y ago
  Do diversity hires have never-ending job interviews? Or are they just streamlined in? It would be considered oppression if black candidate where given as many interviews as white candidates. Actually it is a serious question. When diversity is apparent what is the difference in the number of interviews required? Are white and asian males more scrutinized to make up for the logical shortfall of affirmative action hires that just get to mess stuff up while the asians clean up their mess?
• runbathtime 5y ago
  Do diverse candidates have the same amount of interviews as non affirmative action hires?
• dzonga 5y ago
  problem, is as an industry we're treating software engineering as a science only. forgetting it's part science part art. now you can be smart, but not be artistic. which is a major problem, google n other faangs have notorious interviews which wannabes copy. yet can't make software that works half the time. maybe it's high time, the software industry looks at how creatives get hired. coz after all we're a creative industry - just only using engineering principles to create art
• a_square_peg 5y ago
  The trouble with interviews these days is that there is no penalty for false negatives. Long, multiple interviews are great for those who are already in the group - it provides legitimate excuse to hold off doing actual work, feel smug with their peers about how difficult the job is, and also provides acceptable excuse for project delays. As a senior engineer, it's amusing being interviewed by intelligent but very junior engineers who clearly cannot understand the scope of what's in the resume. This usually happens with a quick scan of the resume followed by a realization (there is this peculiar look) that they don't have any relevant questions to ask about the experience, and finally landing on their favourite puzzle questions because what they really want to know is how my thought process works.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• spfzero 5y ago
  I once interviewed at a very well-known computer manufacturer, with 21 people over two full days. But it was known by all that after the two days, you got an offer or you were never going to get an offer. It was fine, no problem, I enjoyed it. It was respectful of my time. They were serious. I felt valued. Don’t know why today’s tech companies have abandoned something that so obviously promotes good will in the new employee as well as the one passed by.
• nineteen999 5y ago
  One of the most interesting interview processes I went through was for a VFX house as a systems administrator. I had been into their offices for multiple interviews, done video interviews with their HR manager who worked in a different country, and was told that I was their preferred candidate. Six weeks later, I was told I was still their preferred candidate. However they still did not offer me the job. I think they were waiting for me to make a lowball offer since the industry typically doesn't pay well for artists or the systems people.
• Quickshooter 5y ago
  This is beautiful, thank you
• robpal 5y ago
  During my maths phd time in France I really enjoyed so-called "colles". It was a 1h long 1 on 1 conversation with the student where (s)he was given a complex problem (way too difficult to simply solve in an hour) and a sequence of hints and smaller, easier tasks, leading to the solution. I would often help the interviewee when stuck/correct computations, let them follow the wrong path to make them realize why it was wrong and generally allow for unsupervised exploration of the task. Even though quite often students were not able to get to the end, or even close, I could get a decent idea about their knowledge and understanding of the matter. When I first did it, I instantly thought that's a good way to do a job interview -- being prepared and interactive, have a conversation instead of one way question-answer traffic. The caveat: I needed to really think through the problems beforehand, understand other possible solutions, traps and potential dead ends (ie. spend time on it). When a few years later I was asked to do some recruiting at my company (DS/R&D positions, not SE), first thing I did was to prepare a few sets of interconnected problems, to gauge the person's knowledge and how does (s)he think when encountering a new problem with all necessary tools at hand. The problems were difficult but I never expected anyone to actually solve them. I did dome technical interviews as a candidate, being asked about random math puzzles/algos one can google in 30 sec and which are already implemented in standard libraries -- even though I usually could solve most of them I sincerely wish such interviewers would ef off and stop wasting my time. We are grown-ups, I already spent my fair share of time solving elementary riddles during high school math competitions and I'd like to be treated like a serious professional. During my years as a ML Engineer/dev I never EVER needed to implement a single tree/graph/whatever algorithm from scratch. Also, many adults have a life, family, other full-time job and grinding leetcode is not something anyone should be expected to do. To be honest, quite a few times I doubted that the interviewer would know how to solve a similar problem without having the solution checked in company's interview problems database. Also, time pressure and stress are a buzzkiller. As for multiple interview rounds -- a non-starter. Recently, while exploring the market, a top-tier betting company asked me to do a take home, 4h technical interview and then another long take-home (unpaid, of course). I told them that they are ridiculous and asked to never contact me again. I'm at liberty to do so as I have a job I'm happy with and zero need to actually change it, but if someone has been laid off I can see people get grinded to death -- both mentally and physically -- by such interview processes.
• fukmbas 5y ago
  What is happening is too many people with MBA degrees are sneaking into IT and overcomplicating everything
• KETpXDDzR 5y ago
  Can't confirm. Not at all. I interviewed during COVID, around summer 2020, and really preferred the adjusted interview process. I interviewed w/ Facebook, NVIDIA, TwoSigma, Citadel, Google, Apple, Cerebras, Rivian, and Amazon. I usually got feedback a week or two after the final interview. It's quiet common in this industry that hiring managers and headhunters "ghost" you instead of sending a message if they think you're not worth their time.
• galaxies 5y ago
  I read this article yesterday. Then literally two companies rejected me with the follwoing reasons today! I found it a funny coincidence so posted it here :) (a) You are clearly too technical, we need a more managerial experience for this role (b) You have too much managerial experience but for this role we need a more technical person. Similar roles in leadership area, different companies.
• sudcha 5y ago
  Long interview rounds are not only a significant cost for companies, but also for individuals. Each hour of interview costs a company ~$100, in the time of the interview alone, not to mention scheduling overhead, frustration and recruiter's time spent. 5 rounds for 5 candidates == $2,500 (1 week's salary on average at big tech beginner roles). For each candidate, that's 5 * (whatever they are getting paid, let's say $50) == $250. If companies think of it this way, they might as well get some candidates for short amount of time to see a fit, instead of countless rounds spanning months. Ideally, they should also compensate interviewees for their time, which I doubt will ever happen.
• DoubleGlazing 5y ago
  I refuse to engage in long interview processes or technical/programming tests. My CV goes back 20 years and it is quite clear about what my technical skills are. For me the most I will do is one phone interview, one HR interview and one technical interview. If the recruiter has any questions about my skills they can ask them in the technical interview and I can also put them in touch with people who can vouch for me as well. I've experienced a few recruitment processes where there were multiple round and also take home tests that took up way to much of my time. To me the time investment required to go though these is too high as the risk of coming away with nothing is too great. If a potential employer can't figure me out from my CV and a few interviews then I don't think that is a place I would want to work.