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I’m a HM at a big tech company with this format as well. Honestly, I really like it. I don’t want to hire the wrong person, it’s expensive and it makes my job a

I’m a HM at a big tech company with this format as well. Honestly, I really like it. I don’t want to hire the wrong person, it’s expensive and it makes my job awful for a while. It’s great getting data points on several programming interviews, system design, etc. That makes my sell interview so much easier because I can trust the process to assess their technical skills. You need multiple people because you’re constantly training up new people and need to calibrate everyone fairly. Scaling any process to thousands of people is always hard. Is it annoying for candidates? Yeah, but we pay you a lot of money, and it does actually work for us. Is it perfect? No, but it does work. “Hire and Fire fast” doesn’t actually work well if you want to give people a chance to succeed. Also people tend to keep low performers around too long. Best to avoid this as much as possible.

alexashka 5y ago
> Is it perfect? No, but it does work. How do you know it works? > I don’t want to hire the wrong person, it’s expensive and it makes my job awful for a while. There we are. It is all about you. No need to say anything else - your life is all about you, so of course if it works for you, 'it works'.
- deleted 5y ago
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- JohnHaugeland 5y ago
  > How do you know it works? Because the hallways aren't empty.
  - mylons 5y ago
    the hallways aren’t empty due to the total compensation and perceived prestige working at a FAANG or similar company offers.
    - dwater 5y ago
      I had a startup give me 2 interviews and a paid coding exercise before making an offer, but the compensation was below market with some long shot equity comp. I had a large consulting company give me one recruiter screen and a series of 3 20 minute interviews, one tech one manager and one in between before making an offer at market rate. Sounds like generally interview time scales with total compensation, which seems fine to me. I’m a data scientist and I’ve never had a live coding interview but I also have no desire to apply to a top tier tech co.
    - frankchn 5y ago
      Then there isn’t a problem — at least for FAANG. People are willing to jump through more hoops for more rewards in all aspects of life. If a less prestigious company with worse compensation tries the same thing, then they will quickly discover they can’t hire anyone. It will be self-correcting.
    - nova22033 5y ago
      due to the total compensation Yes..it's why people do jobs.
      - lanstin 5y ago
        Probably not as much as you would guess from talking to FAANG employees. It’s been fifteen years since my compensation exceeded the amount where it makes any difference to me. Now I want to have interesting problems, a business model I am not ashamed of, good and smart coworkers and decent conditions. I won’t be retiring early, which is fine: my work is almost always a fun and valued way I contribute to the world. One of the big problems with software ethics and the joy of solving problems is the influx of people choosing software not due to intrinsic affinity but just for money. Sometimes I wish more of them still went for law degrees or MBAs or surgery. It’s just a little sad to see someone who can make beautiful and useful software gems be dissatisfied because they didn’t get to be a CTO by the time they are thirty or the like. In the 90s people getting a big software job where thrilled because they were going to change the world. My mom’s friends used stuff that ran my code. Now it seems like people want FIRE or multiple houses or lambos.
- igetspam 5y ago
  No, it's all about everyone. If I hire a person and fire them in less than a year, that's almost always because of a performance problem that's impacting the team or the org. If you're the one being fired, you probably left a job or didn't take some other job to work with us and now you're going to be unemployed. Additionally, as a hiring manager, I too am a human who wants to enjoy my job and have positive experiences and firing people sucks. It always sucks. It takes a toll on you. Filtering early is best for everyone. If that means more rounds of interviews to be sure, that's what I'm going to do. I do my best to schedule around candidates and I'm forthcoming about the process during the first call but we try hard to be thorough because we want this to work well for everyone. Would you rather be hired and then fired quickly because we didn't realize there was a misalignment? I wouldn't.
  - randmeerkat 5y ago
    > Would you rather be hired and then fired quickly because we didn't realize there was a misalignment? I wouldn't. The fact that your knee jerk reaction to a misalignment is firing someone rather than mentoring them and aligning them with the org speaks volumes about your management style… And managers wonder why they have such a hard time hiring or retaining people right now…
    - ethanwillis 5y ago
      They want to outsource the costs of developing talent. To their own detriment, then they want to blame everyone else. This is of course when they're not busy abusing someone on a visa to make them do more work than a human should have to do.
      - igetspam 5y ago
        You've had some bad jobs, haven't you? Want to talk about it? We don't abuse anyone on a visa because we're fully remote and don't do visas. We target the high side of comp in the person's country. We specifically hire senior people because we're small and building. Developing talent is great but the time to do that is expensive and until you've hit a certain scale, it's detrimental to launching a startup. Look around the industry and look at the success stories. Then look at what their early hiring looks like. If you can find a startup that succeeded by hiring new grads and junior engineering first, I'd love to read about it.
- david-gpu 5y ago
  > How do you know it works? If the company in question is growing its business and the employees and customers are happy, then whatever they are doing is working, at least for now. I'm not sure there is a much better way to measure it. When I joined NVidia they had me through two phone screens (although they originally planned for three), followed by an onsite with seven different interviewers back to back on the same day. It wasn't fun, but it wasn't the end of the world either. When I was a hiring manager at Qualcomm we would typically do a phone screen followed by an onsite with maybe four one-hour interviews back to back and there was rarely any disagreement on whether the candidate made the cut or not, so I would argue that it was sufficient.
mylons 5y ago
People get PIP’ed and fired routinely that make it through this process. I think there’s a lot of bias in your response. The process worked for you, you work at a large tech company and it gives you validation. It also makes you feel good to lord over the process and boosts your ego, reinforcing your priors.
- prepend 5y ago
  > People get PIP’ed and fired routinely that make it through this process. Compared to what? I don’t think anyone is claiming this process is perfect. Just that it’s better than alternatives. People will always get PIP’d and fired. But the goal is to reduce that as low as possible.
  - mylons 5y ago
    how is it better than alternatives? this seems like a huge straw-man given almost every company that hires developers thinks they’re a large tech company and mimics their hiring process. it doesn’t seem like serious alternatives have been explored.
    - novok 5y ago
      PIPing and firing is a huge time and emotional energy suck, and it sucks for people on both sides. To reduce the amount it happens is worthy. You can’t in practice just say, “this guy sucks, lets fire him next week” And it shows, barely anyone in my entire career has ever been fired. I only personally have been close to one.
      - boisenberrier 5y ago
        So you’ve been close to one person getting fired? How do you have an opinion on the PIP process or firing at all if you have next to no experience with it? I knew a guy at a FAANG who earned himself and his report a PIP for the grave sin of choosing the wrong deputy to send upstairs while he was on vacation. The deputized person went to one meeting and ran his mouth (arguably, told the truth). Both are no longer at the company. PIP politics are absolutely routine in FAANG and if you’re arguing the other side you don’t know. FAANG is actively trying to fire or replace you at all times. I’ve worked at two so I can’t speak for three, but I’ve also worked for the two in that older acronym that you’d think of as the “nicest”. People read that that and probably hear me saying “giant evil entity is out to get you”, but it’s really middle managers cosplaying Kings Landing in the office, mostly unchecked, that does it. Seriously; people want to work at a FAANG/MAMAA or whatever so they often assume it’s good. I had someone ask me if I noticed how light my calendar was now that the org considered me irrelevant. There’s an idea that FAANG is a bunch of nerds with glasses cooking up cool shit in a Zen commune with ambient drone music but it’s honestly some of the worst office politics I’ve ever seen across what is now two careers, and the PIP process is a big tool in that kit.
gcheong 5y ago
“Is it annoying for candidates?” Not just annoying, it can be downright demoralizing going through the interview process when the standard is “reject for any one reason, only accept if all agree.” and no feedback whatsoever is given.
- StupidUser123 5y ago
  That is a fair point, thank you for commenting. Discussing how many no’s it should take to reject a candidate is a worthwhile discussion. I can override specific no’s with good reason at my company, but not all companies have that. My broader point is that this is a specific issue with the process we can iterate on. We don’t need to throw out the whole process.
- madamelic 5y ago
  Also the fact that hiring almost ends up looking to the most senior engineers for up and down which means you've just wasted multiple hours having less senior people interview them. Rarely have I ever seen a candidate be rejected by seniors or leads and still get the job even when the decision had to be argued until it was unanimous. Pretty much if a senior goes thumbs down, the decision has been made and the meeting is over. Leads and CTOs especially have to be mindful of either not being part of the decision or being the last vote, as to not taint the results... which again, means that the most senior vote will flip a "yes" to a flat "no"
danielmarkbruce 5y ago
There is another thing - if you want to work at a FAANG, presumably you want to be there a while. Anyone who can't put up with a little bit of nonsense and headache for something meaningful is likely to struggle with any nonsense and headache generally. Working on any large scale project at a FAANG is going to involve a decent amount of nonsense and headache, and you gotta roll with it. And then on the flip side - if you are really a star, and you are interviewing at a small company you should want 5-7 interviews to gauge the caliber of people you will work with.
- SmellTheGlove 5y ago
  I agree with this. Honestly, as a candidate, I don't mind the longer interview loop. What I do mind is if it's very spread out. I'm willing to invest an hour up front + a full day round, but I don't want that longer round spread out over the course of multiple days. I'll give you 6 hours in a day, but not 2-3 days of 2-3 hours each. My expectation at this point is: Pre-onsite: - 15 minute with a recruiter, tell me a little bit about the role, spend the majority of the time telling me why I should join the company, and take a few questions - 30-45 minutes with the hiring manager. Tell me about what you really want, scope, the challenges, and let's talk about how I might fit. Do enough Q&A both ways to feel comfortable, and then let's make a call right there as to whether we want to continue on. For my part, I always tell the HM at this stage whether or not I'd be excited to continue. Up to now, I've invested an hour. This is reasonable. Maybe we both like each other, so presuming we do, when you call me about the on-site, we should work out acceptable comp ranges. These may move upward after the on-site based on what I learn about the role, but let's make sure we won't waste one anothers' time with the on-site. Continuing to the on-site: - 60-90 mins on whatever technical background is required for the role. I'm fairly senior in management, so this usually doesn't involve code, but should cover whether or not I have a clue how to lead it. For an IC technical role, if we're smart about it, we'll know enough without doing 5X leetcode and 3X design here. I can also evaluate whether I care about your problem space if we don't make the content entirely synthetic. In 90 minutes, it's perfectly reasonable to do a design exercise + picking something in there to write some code around. This is it, though. One technical round! - 30 mins x 3-4 with key peers/stakeholders. Make sure my behavioral stuff works for you, that we can understand one another, and yeah, that we might actually like each other enough to work together. I like to talk, and so if the other person does, make it 45 mins. - 60 mins with the HM again to dive deeper on the role with the context gained from the interviews. Heavy Q&A. Let's give each other enough to make a decision. - If you want, 60 minutes with whatever executive (besides the HM) will be closest to the role. Whatever you want to talk about. Let's just see if we can communicate. You can cut this to half a day if you cut your most efficient interviewers down to 45 mins and don't overdo it with peer/stakeholder interviews, but I'd rather make it a full day with some breaks. This is because I need time to interview you, and that mostly happens after you've run through your things in each interview. We should all have enough information to decide here, and I'm not taking the on-site anyway if the first hour we had together didn't generate strong interest, right? After this, call me within a couple of days, let me know if we're doing an offer or not. If we are, let's confirm expectations. The only things that will offend me at this point is if we're not in the ranges we previously discussed, or you want to do more rounds. I'm open to one more if there's a good reason for it (not wanting to use that person's time for the on-site is not a good reason). But we've had a day together. While one day is not necessarily enough to know for sure that things will work well long-term, even another full day isn't going to change anything about that. Also, while the focus of the original post is mostly critical of the lengthy process and it being annoying to candidates, there's also the reality that the longer the loop, the fewer candidate throughput the hiring manager can have. There are only so many interview cycles per week before an interviewer burns out on it or can't get their job done as well. I'd argue that if you stretch these things out to a day, you will think harder about who you are bringing on-site. If we agree for the most part that the time together wasn't nonsense and a headache, as you put it, that's a good indicator that we should work together! tl;dr - I'm fine with 7 interviews if they're the right 7 interviews and planned thoughtfully.
blub 5y ago
You pay them a lot of money if they pass, but the others get zero. You’re basically annoying lots of people to make that one person happy.
- linspace 5y ago
  You can take something out from an interview: practice for other interviews, insight of how others interview (what did you think were good or bad questions, what annoyed you). I know it's not the best use of your time but it's better than a total waste
jugg1es 5y ago
I would agree with you if the interview process included ANY feedback to interviewees when they were rejected. Prior to COVID, I got flown to Seattle mid-week for 2 nights and interviewed well (the recruiter told me to start looking for houses). But 20 days later I was basically ghosted by my recruiter and I had to escalate to their manager to get a response that I was rejected. They gave me no feedback at all. The interview process asks a LOT of the interviewee and then does not provide anything that could help the person improve next time, so the entire process feels like a complete waste of time. In my case, I was also disrespected by the recruiter. The next time they reached out, I failed the phone screen somehow by someone who sounded 20 years younger than me (which is frustrating when you have already passed these same steps before). I don't respond to Amazon recruiters anymore.
- madamelic 5y ago
  > I failed the phone screen somehow by someone who sounded 20 years younger than me I am definitely a little pretentious for saying this but I get kinda peeved when I am interviewing for high-level roles and my initial tech screen is by a junior engineer. It's not so much that I think I am too smart to be properly evaluated by them or that they aren't worth being part of a hiring pipeline (they very much should be!), but my opinion is that junior engineers aren't properly tuned for what is and isn't a good engineer and if they are, they shouldn't be a junior engineer. The other side is when I get reached out to interview for a high-level role then get talked down to about how I don't fit their criteria and I basically wasted the executive vice president of external internal engineering's time.
  - grog454 5y ago
    > but my opinion is that junior engineers aren't properly tuned for what is and isn't a good engineer and if they are, they shouldn't be a junior engineer. Presumably they aren't instructed to evaluate for that, but instead to identify glaring communication or other interaction issues.
- bluedevil2k 5y ago
  I went through the exact same thing at a big tech company a few weeks ago. Basically told me I got it, ghosted me for weeks, I had to escalate to higher managers, got told a generic “someone was a better match”. Do these companies think about the reputation hit these kinds of things cause? Amazon is the best example - I’m sure half the people on here would never apply to Amazon because their reputation is beyond repair at this point. Some other companies aren’t far behind. They alienate and disrespect people and those are the people that talk and spread the word.
joelthelion 5y ago
It may work well for hiring young people. I can guarantee that you will never see me in one of your interviews. Would I be valuable to your company? Maybe, but we will never know because the process is too long.
andrei_says_ 5y ago
On one hand, I don’t want to ever get hired for a position and in a culture where I am not a match, so I myself believe that the more datapoints, the better. On the other hand, I struggle with impostor syndrome. While fairly successful in my day-to-day, I will likely fail whiteboarding sorting algorithms etc. Imagining a series of five interviews stresses me out and I’m not even looking right now :)
mdoms 5y ago
> Is it annoying for candidates? Yeah, but we pay you a lot of money, and it does actually work for us. Is it perfect? No, but it does work. I've never been paid for interviewing. You mean you pay the successful candidates well, which is what? 10% of the people you subject to this obnoxious process?
- secretfriend789 5y ago
  My FAANG team does 2x screening interviews plus a round of 3 to 4 full interviews. We try to interview at most 4 candidates in the full loop. That’s about 5 hours of interview time, and the average candidate will succeed by the 3rd or 4th interview. Given that we are making a $200-600k+ decision and that the average candidate stands to gain tens of thousands of dollars or more, the 20-40 hours spent interviewing seems time well spent on both sides.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > and the average candidate will succeed by the 3rd or 4th interview. What does this mean? It seems unlikely that the average candidate succeeds at all.
cortesoft 5y ago
> Is it annoying for candidates? Yeah, but we pay you a lot of money, and it does actually work for us The best candidates can get jobs paying the same or more money with fewer interviews, so the very best aren’t going to pick you.
- Sebb767 5y ago
  Yeah, but the worst will also have an easier time. Missing out on a great developer is still a good deal if you also prevent 10 mishires.
- mattnewton 5y ago
  I'd be very suprised if this is the case, I just finished a few months of interviewing and very few places outside very small startups deviate from this format. Not saying I am the very best, but I just didn't find opportunities for anyone to out earn by skipping the FAANG style loop. Unless you mean getting lots of equity and riding it to an outsized liquidity event, these places just tend to be not competitive to the top FAANG compensation; you would join for other reasons.
  - cortesoft 5y ago
    Top engineers are often recruited by people they worked with before, and aren’t going through the normal interview process.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> I’m a HM at a big tech company with this format as well. Honestly, I really like it. The truth is that nobody likes being interviewed. Getting tested and judged by strangers isn’t fun. But developers also really don’t like being surrounded by unqualified developers who slipped through a weak interview process. They also don’t like having significant numbers of their teammates fired and replaced all the time because the company had “hire fast, fire fast” interview styles. It’s miserable and slightly terrifying to work at a company where nobody really wants to invest much time into building relationships with new hires because many of them are going to be PIPed out before the year is over. So while the interviews may not be fun, the reality is that strong developers really appreciate the outcome of such a rigorous process. It also helps protect people from becoming false negatives because they didn’t mesh with a single interviewer or struggled with a single interview problem. So now we’re at this weird equilibrium where devs simultaneously hate the interview process for themselves but appreciate it being applied to everyone around they (even if it’s not immediately obvious).
- kortilla 5y ago
  > the outcome of such a rigorous process. It also helps protect people from becoming false negatives because they didn’t mesh with a single interviewer or struggled with a single interview problem. Not really. When I was at Google there were tons of candidates that would get passed on because of one of the interviews going badly.
- dento 5y ago
  > The truth is that nobody likes being interviewed. Getting tested and judged by strangers isn’t fun. I do. It might be because I'm way better at performing in interviews than in the actual job. It's also way more exciting to do. I have also done interviews on the hiring side of the table, and that's not nearly as enjoyable. However, especially finding people to work with you is quite rewarding.
- anyfoo 5y ago
  > The truth is that nobody likes being interviewed. Getting tested and judged by strangers isn’t fun. I sort of do. It's fun problem solving, at least sometimes.
14u2c 5y ago
> That makes my sell interview so much easier because I can trust the process to assess their technical skills What makes you think that the process provides an accurate representation of the skills needed for the day to day job? In my experience it simply tests whether the candidate has invested lot of time cramming for that very specific type of test. If I was running a small company I would much rather discuss a candidate's experience with them and leave them the time to build useful skills, not worthless ones for passing a test.
turdprincess 5y ago
I’ve been employed by everyone from small consulting firms to big tech to FAANG and I’ve never seen anyone let go for performance. This includes serial low performers that produced nothing for years. Aside from a very few (like 1 or 2) select companies, the bar to staying employed is laughably low in tech. In my opinion this is a big problem. I wish there was a stronger culture of letting low performers go quickly in tech. This would reduce the need for exhaustive interview loops and ultimately make the industry more inclusive because you could afford to take a chance on someone without being chained to them for years to come.
squeaky-clean 5y ago
> Is it annoying for candidates? Yeah, but we pay you a lot of money I had to go through 8 interviews for a senior position at Facebook and ended up not getting the offer. I wasn't paid a dime and had to use a few vacation days at the job I had at the time in order to take the interviews. Technically I lost money interviewing at FB.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  I went through the same interview for senior at Facebook and failed. Thankfully I got a Google offer a couple of hours after I got my Facebook rejection. What pushed me over the bar for Google was probably making fewer mistakes on the technical loops but also having more people vouch for me on the inside (they like refs that work at Google).
  - squeaky-clean 5y ago
    Yep that's similar to how I got my current job. Strong referral from someone else inside the company, we had worked together for about 4 years. I had one phone screen which was a combination "culture fit" and general talking about my experience programming. One technical interview which was way less abstract than the FB ones. And a final meet-the-team interview which was more of a hangout. The pay isn't Facebook-tier but is still pretty darn good, and I'm enjoying it a lot, which I'm not sure I would have at Facebook. It was probably the better path for me overall.
- icedchai 5y ago
  In over 20 years, I've never used vacation days for an interview. I just either 1) called in sick, 2) needed to stay home waiting for a repair person (your internet is having trouble!), 3) had a few doctor's appointments. With working from home, fewer of these excuses are necessary. Last couple jobs I'd just disappear for an hour here and there. Nobody notices.
joe_the_user 5y ago
Yeah, but we pay you a lot of money, and it does actually work for us I just want to highlight that this works specifically because there are a very finite number of these we pay you a lot of money companies competing for talent and that's the primary reason candidates put up with this [expletive deleted] treatment. And the result are beneficial for these companies, yes.
d0mine 5y ago
How do you know that it actually works? Are there formal studies that compare different approaches? (it doesn't look like the difference can be easily evaluated and therefore it is extremely easy to mislead yourself on the effectiveness of some baroque process)
cgio 5y ago
Anecdotal, but I am a HM. The process goes I review cvs with senior engineers, we filter, 1 tech interview to validate cv, one with me to validate decision. Done. 3rd interview only for someone who would be a HM themselves. To be fair, if we could validate that cv is accurate we would not even need the interviews. Junior people are our responsibility to develop, senior you can understand their fit with some key indicators. I believe the detail in recruitment either reflects lack of trust in team or focus on accurate placement of people, which does not lineup with my expectations about how a team of creative people should be run.
stackbutterflow 5y ago
Is it annoying for candidates? Yeah, but we pay you a lot of money Well, no you don't. You pay a lot of money only the people you hired.
atoav 5y ago
However what does a hiring process like this communicate to those being hired? I had more than one interview, where the things I discovered during the interview made me reconsider my options and go for another company. Not because I wouldn't have fit with the team or my skills were not there, but because this kind of thing tells me how processes are organized or not organized within your company, how people treat each other etc. What candidates does a hiring process like this drive away? Are it specific character traits that pass through the sieve? If yes, how will that shape your corp and the culture in it in the long term?
lodovic 5y ago
Are candidates paid for their time when doing such extensive interviews? Doing 7 rounds, including preparation and travel time, may well add up to a full week.
lawwantsin17 5y ago
YZF 5y ago
I'm a HM at a big tech company as well. We do 3 one hour slots. In a previous company we pair interviewed, 1/2 hour screen + 2 one hour slots. I liked that format a little bit better. I've been interviewing people for about 40 years now, I was just reflecting on my first ever interview that I participated in when I was still a teenager. I would say there are some factors that are not going to come out in any number of interviews. Conversely there are factors that are immediately noticeable. I can tell in 10-15 minutes how strong someone is technically. At least I can tell the difference between "weak", "maybe", "strong" in 10 minutes. Going back to my first ever interview. The guy was brilliant. He was technically good. He ended up being a not so good hire for reasons that would have been very hard to discover during the interview. It was partly the intersection of very smart without the experience to match and partly that he was just weird in some other ways. He was hired, he left within a year or so. I think the science says the best predictor is an IQ test. The rest of our practices are not really evidence based. We tend to want to hire people that are like us, that know the things we know, we have all sorts of biases during the interview process, and throwing more people/time at it doesn't really seem to make a big difference. I would say the most important thing you can do to get good people is to make your company a place that good people want to be. I.e. what matters is more what enters the pipeline then the interview process. I would bet that having 7 interviews vs. 3 has a difference that's completely in the noise and that at least there's no solid evidence that it gets you anything re: the quality of people working in a company. Every company says it has the best people. Mostly channeling Joel Spolsky here but I've seen this principle in action. EDIT: Another random thought is that there are other factors that influence whether someone is going to be successful in a given role. Even the best software engineer can fail if the conditions for him to be successful aren't there.
lubujackson 5y ago
Multiple interviews is annoying as a candidate, but how they are used (or appear to be used) is the bigger problem. Instead of being used to strengthen a consensus they tend to be a series of filters where any "fail" invalidates everyone else's input. After all, why hire someone who everyone doesn't love? But that is the same logic as combining bad mortgages into tranches reduces their risk - sounds good on paper but doesn't work in reality. Since you have a chance of getting cut at each round as an interviewee you are left hoping not to run into: some esoteric corner of programming you could learn in 10 minutes but haven't seen before; an interviewer who always asks a pet question (even if told not to do this); a personal dislike that is illegal but not challenged (age, gender, race, etc., waved away as "a bad fit"). If multiple interviews were used only to strengthen assumptions about a candidate and each interview had a narrow intent, they COULD help companies avoid more bad hires. But after interview #3 you are probably just filtering reasonable or even exceptional candidates based on random chance. On the other hand, this may be a fantastic method to strengthen a "hive mind" culture, but that doesn't sound like a worthy goal.

alexashka 5y ago

> Is it perfect? No, but it does work. How do you know it works? > I don’t want to hire the wrong person, it’s expensive and it makes my job awful for a while. There we are. It is all about you. No need to say anything else - your life is all about you, so of course if it works for you, 'it works'.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
JohnHaugeland 5y ago
> How do you know it works? Because the hallways aren't empty.
- mylons 5y ago
  the hallways aren’t empty due to the total compensation and perceived prestige working at a FAANG or similar company offers.
  - dwater 5y ago
    I had a startup give me 2 interviews and a paid coding exercise before making an offer, but the compensation was below market with some long shot equity comp. I had a large consulting company give me one recruiter screen and a series of 3 20 minute interviews, one tech one manager and one in between before making an offer at market rate. Sounds like generally interview time scales with total compensation, which seems fine to me. I’m a data scientist and I’ve never had a live coding interview but I also have no desire to apply to a top tier tech co.
  - frankchn 5y ago
    Then there isn’t a problem — at least for FAANG. People are willing to jump through more hoops for more rewards in all aspects of life. If a less prestigious company with worse compensation tries the same thing, then they will quickly discover they can’t hire anyone. It will be self-correcting.
  - nova22033 5y ago
    due to the total compensation Yes..it's why people do jobs.
    - lanstin 5y ago
      Probably not as much as you would guess from talking to FAANG employees. It’s been fifteen years since my compensation exceeded the amount where it makes any difference to me. Now I want to have interesting problems, a business model I am not ashamed of, good and smart coworkers and decent conditions. I won’t be retiring early, which is fine: my work is almost always a fun and valued way I contribute to the world. One of the big problems with software ethics and the joy of solving problems is the influx of people choosing software not due to intrinsic affinity but just for money. Sometimes I wish more of them still went for law degrees or MBAs or surgery. It’s just a little sad to see someone who can make beautiful and useful software gems be dissatisfied because they didn’t get to be a CTO by the time they are thirty or the like. In the 90s people getting a big software job where thrilled because they were going to change the world. My mom’s friends used stuff that ran my code. Now it seems like people want FIRE or multiple houses or lambos.
igetspam 5y ago
No, it's all about everyone. If I hire a person and fire them in less than a year, that's almost always because of a performance problem that's impacting the team or the org. If you're the one being fired, you probably left a job or didn't take some other job to work with us and now you're going to be unemployed. Additionally, as a hiring manager, I too am a human who wants to enjoy my job and have positive experiences and firing people sucks. It always sucks. It takes a toll on you. Filtering early is best for everyone. If that means more rounds of interviews to be sure, that's what I'm going to do. I do my best to schedule around candidates and I'm forthcoming about the process during the first call but we try hard to be thorough because we want this to work well for everyone. Would you rather be hired and then fired quickly because we didn't realize there was a misalignment? I wouldn't.
- randmeerkat 5y ago
  > Would you rather be hired and then fired quickly because we didn't realize there was a misalignment? I wouldn't. The fact that your knee jerk reaction to a misalignment is firing someone rather than mentoring them and aligning them with the org speaks volumes about your management style… And managers wonder why they have such a hard time hiring or retaining people right now…
  - ethanwillis 5y ago
    They want to outsource the costs of developing talent. To their own detriment, then they want to blame everyone else. This is of course when they're not busy abusing someone on a visa to make them do more work than a human should have to do.
    - igetspam 5y ago
      You've had some bad jobs, haven't you? Want to talk about it? We don't abuse anyone on a visa because we're fully remote and don't do visas. We target the high side of comp in the person's country. We specifically hire senior people because we're small and building. Developing talent is great but the time to do that is expensive and until you've hit a certain scale, it's detrimental to launching a startup. Look around the industry and look at the success stories. Then look at what their early hiring looks like. If you can find a startup that succeeded by hiring new grads and junior engineering first, I'd love to read about it.
david-gpu 5y ago
> How do you know it works? If the company in question is growing its business and the employees and customers are happy, then whatever they are doing is working, at least for now. I'm not sure there is a much better way to measure it. When I joined NVidia they had me through two phone screens (although they originally planned for three), followed by an onsite with seven different interviewers back to back on the same day. It wasn't fun, but it wasn't the end of the world either. When I was a hiring manager at Qualcomm we would typically do a phone screen followed by an onsite with maybe four one-hour interviews back to back and there was rarely any disagreement on whether the candidate made the cut or not, so I would argue that it was sufficient.

mylons 5y ago

People get PIP’ed and fired routinely that make it through this process. I think there’s a lot of bias in your response. The process worked for you, you work at a large tech company and it gives you validation. It also makes you feel good to lord over the process and boosts your ego, reinforcing your priors.

prepend 5y ago
> People get PIP’ed and fired routinely that make it through this process. Compared to what? I don’t think anyone is claiming this process is perfect. Just that it’s better than alternatives. People will always get PIP’d and fired. But the goal is to reduce that as low as possible.
- mylons 5y ago
  how is it better than alternatives? this seems like a huge straw-man given almost every company that hires developers thinks they’re a large tech company and mimics their hiring process. it doesn’t seem like serious alternatives have been explored.
  - novok 5y ago
    PIPing and firing is a huge time and emotional energy suck, and it sucks for people on both sides. To reduce the amount it happens is worthy. You can’t in practice just say, “this guy sucks, lets fire him next week” And it shows, barely anyone in my entire career has ever been fired. I only personally have been close to one.
    - boisenberrier 5y ago
      So you’ve been close to one person getting fired? How do you have an opinion on the PIP process or firing at all if you have next to no experience with it? I knew a guy at a FAANG who earned himself and his report a PIP for the grave sin of choosing the wrong deputy to send upstairs while he was on vacation. The deputized person went to one meeting and ran his mouth (arguably, told the truth). Both are no longer at the company. PIP politics are absolutely routine in FAANG and if you’re arguing the other side you don’t know. FAANG is actively trying to fire or replace you at all times. I’ve worked at two so I can’t speak for three, but I’ve also worked for the two in that older acronym that you’d think of as the “nicest”. People read that that and probably hear me saying “giant evil entity is out to get you”, but it’s really middle managers cosplaying Kings Landing in the office, mostly unchecked, that does it. Seriously; people want to work at a FAANG/MAMAA or whatever so they often assume it’s good. I had someone ask me if I noticed how light my calendar was now that the org considered me irrelevant. There’s an idea that FAANG is a bunch of nerds with glasses cooking up cool shit in a Zen commune with ambient drone music but it’s honestly some of the worst office politics I’ve ever seen across what is now two careers, and the PIP process is a big tool in that kit.

gcheong 5y ago

“Is it annoying for candidates?” Not just annoying, it can be downright demoralizing going through the interview process when the standard is “reject for any one reason, only accept if all agree.” and no feedback whatsoever is given.

StupidUser123 5y ago
That is a fair point, thank you for commenting. Discussing how many no’s it should take to reject a candidate is a worthwhile discussion. I can override specific no’s with good reason at my company, but not all companies have that. My broader point is that this is a specific issue with the process we can iterate on. We don’t need to throw out the whole process.
madamelic 5y ago
Also the fact that hiring almost ends up looking to the most senior engineers for up and down which means you've just wasted multiple hours having less senior people interview them. Rarely have I ever seen a candidate be rejected by seniors or leads and still get the job even when the decision had to be argued until it was unanimous. Pretty much if a senior goes thumbs down, the decision has been made and the meeting is over. Leads and CTOs especially have to be mindful of either not being part of the decision or being the last vote, as to not taint the results... which again, means that the most senior vote will flip a "yes" to a flat "no"

danielmarkbruce 5y ago

There is another thing - if you want to work at a FAANG, presumably you want to be there a while. Anyone who can't put up with a little bit of nonsense and headache for something meaningful is likely to struggle with any nonsense and headache generally. Working on any large scale project at a FAANG is going to involve a decent amount of nonsense and headache, and you gotta roll with it. And then on the flip side - if you are really a star, and you are interviewing at a small company you should want 5-7 interviews to gauge the caliber of people you will work with.

SmellTheGlove 5y ago
I agree with this. Honestly, as a candidate, I don't mind the longer interview loop. What I do mind is if it's very spread out. I'm willing to invest an hour up front + a full day round, but I don't want that longer round spread out over the course of multiple days. I'll give you 6 hours in a day, but not 2-3 days of 2-3 hours each. My expectation at this point is: Pre-onsite: - 15 minute with a recruiter, tell me a little bit about the role, spend the majority of the time telling me why I should join the company, and take a few questions - 30-45 minutes with the hiring manager. Tell me about what you really want, scope, the challenges, and let's talk about how I might fit. Do enough Q&A both ways to feel comfortable, and then let's make a call right there as to whether we want to continue on. For my part, I always tell the HM at this stage whether or not I'd be excited to continue. Up to now, I've invested an hour. This is reasonable. Maybe we both like each other, so presuming we do, when you call me about the on-site, we should work out acceptable comp ranges. These may move upward after the on-site based on what I learn about the role, but let's make sure we won't waste one anothers' time with the on-site. Continuing to the on-site: - 60-90 mins on whatever technical background is required for the role. I'm fairly senior in management, so this usually doesn't involve code, but should cover whether or not I have a clue how to lead it. For an IC technical role, if we're smart about it, we'll know enough without doing 5X leetcode and 3X design here. I can also evaluate whether I care about your problem space if we don't make the content entirely synthetic. In 90 minutes, it's perfectly reasonable to do a design exercise + picking something in there to write some code around. This is it, though. One technical round! - 30 mins x 3-4 with key peers/stakeholders. Make sure my behavioral stuff works for you, that we can understand one another, and yeah, that we might actually like each other enough to work together. I like to talk, and so if the other person does, make it 45 mins. - 60 mins with the HM again to dive deeper on the role with the context gained from the interviews. Heavy Q&A. Let's give each other enough to make a decision. - If you want, 60 minutes with whatever executive (besides the HM) will be closest to the role. Whatever you want to talk about. Let's just see if we can communicate. You can cut this to half a day if you cut your most efficient interviewers down to 45 mins and don't overdo it with peer/stakeholder interviews, but I'd rather make it a full day with some breaks. This is because I need time to interview you, and that mostly happens after you've run through your things in each interview. We should all have enough information to decide here, and I'm not taking the on-site anyway if the first hour we had together didn't generate strong interest, right? After this, call me within a couple of days, let me know if we're doing an offer or not. If we are, let's confirm expectations. The only things that will offend me at this point is if we're not in the ranges we previously discussed, or you want to do more rounds. I'm open to one more if there's a good reason for it (not wanting to use that person's time for the on-site is not a good reason). But we've had a day together. While one day is not necessarily enough to know for sure that things will work well long-term, even another full day isn't going to change anything about that. Also, while the focus of the original post is mostly critical of the lengthy process and it being annoying to candidates, there's also the reality that the longer the loop, the fewer candidate throughput the hiring manager can have. There are only so many interview cycles per week before an interviewer burns out on it or can't get their job done as well. I'd argue that if you stretch these things out to a day, you will think harder about who you are bringing on-site. If we agree for the most part that the time together wasn't nonsense and a headache, as you put it, that's a good indicator that we should work together! tl;dr - I'm fine with 7 interviews if they're the right 7 interviews and planned thoughtfully.

blub 5y ago

You pay them a lot of money if they pass, but the others get zero. You’re basically annoying lots of people to make that one person happy.

linspace 5y ago
You can take something out from an interview: practice for other interviews, insight of how others interview (what did you think were good or bad questions, what annoyed you). I know it's not the best use of your time but it's better than a total waste

jugg1es 5y ago

I would agree with you if the interview process included ANY feedback to interviewees when they were rejected. Prior to COVID, I got flown to Seattle mid-week for 2 nights and interviewed well (the recruiter told me to start looking for houses). But 20 days later I was basically ghosted by my recruiter and I had to escalate to their manager to get a response that I was rejected. They gave me no feedback at all. The interview process asks a LOT of the interviewee and then does not provide anything that could help the person improve next time, so the entire process feels like a complete waste of time. In my case, I was also disrespected by the recruiter. The next time they reached out, I failed the phone screen somehow by someone who sounded 20 years younger than me (which is frustrating when you have already passed these same steps before). I don't respond to Amazon recruiters anymore.

madamelic 5y ago
> I failed the phone screen somehow by someone who sounded 20 years younger than me I am definitely a little pretentious for saying this but I get kinda peeved when I am interviewing for high-level roles and my initial tech screen is by a junior engineer. It's not so much that I think I am too smart to be properly evaluated by them or that they aren't worth being part of a hiring pipeline (they very much should be!), but my opinion is that junior engineers aren't properly tuned for what is and isn't a good engineer and if they are, they shouldn't be a junior engineer. The other side is when I get reached out to interview for a high-level role then get talked down to about how I don't fit their criteria and I basically wasted the executive vice president of external internal engineering's time.
- grog454 5y ago
  > but my opinion is that junior engineers aren't properly tuned for what is and isn't a good engineer and if they are, they shouldn't be a junior engineer. Presumably they aren't instructed to evaluate for that, but instead to identify glaring communication or other interaction issues.
bluedevil2k 5y ago
I went through the exact same thing at a big tech company a few weeks ago. Basically told me I got it, ghosted me for weeks, I had to escalate to higher managers, got told a generic “someone was a better match”. Do these companies think about the reputation hit these kinds of things cause? Amazon is the best example - I’m sure half the people on here would never apply to Amazon because their reputation is beyond repair at this point. Some other companies aren’t far behind. They alienate and disrespect people and those are the people that talk and spread the word.

joelthelion 5y ago

It may work well for hiring young people. I can guarantee that you will never see me in one of your interviews. Would I be valuable to your company? Maybe, but we will never know because the process is too long.

andrei_says_ 5y ago

On one hand, I don’t want to ever get hired for a position and in a culture where I am not a match, so I myself believe that the more datapoints, the better. On the other hand, I struggle with impostor syndrome. While fairly successful in my day-to-day, I will likely fail whiteboarding sorting algorithms etc. Imagining a series of five interviews stresses me out and I’m not even looking right now :)

mdoms 5y ago

> Is it annoying for candidates? Yeah, but we pay you a lot of money, and it does actually work for us. Is it perfect? No, but it does work. I've never been paid for interviewing. You mean you pay the successful candidates well, which is what? 10% of the people you subject to this obnoxious process?

secretfriend789 5y ago
My FAANG team does 2x screening interviews plus a round of 3 to 4 full interviews. We try to interview at most 4 candidates in the full loop. That’s about 5 hours of interview time, and the average candidate will succeed by the 3rd or 4th interview. Given that we are making a $200-600k+ decision and that the average candidate stands to gain tens of thousands of dollars or more, the 20-40 hours spent interviewing seems time well spent on both sides.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > and the average candidate will succeed by the 3rd or 4th interview. What does this mean? It seems unlikely that the average candidate succeeds at all.

cortesoft 5y ago

> Is it annoying for candidates? Yeah, but we pay you a lot of money, and it does actually work for us The best candidates can get jobs paying the same or more money with fewer interviews, so the very best aren’t going to pick you.

Sebb767 5y ago
Yeah, but the worst will also have an easier time. Missing out on a great developer is still a good deal if you also prevent 10 mishires.
mattnewton 5y ago
I'd be very suprised if this is the case, I just finished a few months of interviewing and very few places outside very small startups deviate from this format. Not saying I am the very best, but I just didn't find opportunities for anyone to out earn by skipping the FAANG style loop. Unless you mean getting lots of equity and riding it to an outsized liquidity event, these places just tend to be not competitive to the top FAANG compensation; you would join for other reasons.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  Top engineers are often recruited by people they worked with before, and aren’t going through the normal interview process.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> I’m a HM at a big tech company with this format as well. Honestly, I really like it. The truth is that nobody likes being interviewed. Getting tested and judged by strangers isn’t fun. But developers also really don’t like being surrounded by unqualified developers who slipped through a weak interview process. They also don’t like having significant numbers of their teammates fired and replaced all the time because the company had “hire fast, fire fast” interview styles. It’s miserable and slightly terrifying to work at a company where nobody really wants to invest much time into building relationships with new hires because many of them are going to be PIPed out before the year is over. So while the interviews may not be fun, the reality is that strong developers really appreciate the outcome of such a rigorous process. It also helps protect people from becoming false negatives because they didn’t mesh with a single interviewer or struggled with a single interview problem. So now we’re at this weird equilibrium where devs simultaneously hate the interview process for themselves but appreciate it being applied to everyone around they (even if it’s not immediately obvious).

kortilla 5y ago
> the outcome of such a rigorous process. It also helps protect people from becoming false negatives because they didn’t mesh with a single interviewer or struggled with a single interview problem. Not really. When I was at Google there were tons of candidates that would get passed on because of one of the interviews going badly.
dento 5y ago
> The truth is that nobody likes being interviewed. Getting tested and judged by strangers isn’t fun. I do. It might be because I'm way better at performing in interviews than in the actual job. It's also way more exciting to do. I have also done interviews on the hiring side of the table, and that's not nearly as enjoyable. However, especially finding people to work with you is quite rewarding.
anyfoo 5y ago
> The truth is that nobody likes being interviewed. Getting tested and judged by strangers isn’t fun. I sort of do. It's fun problem solving, at least sometimes.

14u2c 5y ago

> That makes my sell interview so much easier because I can trust the process to assess their technical skills What makes you think that the process provides an accurate representation of the skills needed for the day to day job? In my experience it simply tests whether the candidate has invested lot of time cramming for that very specific type of test. If I was running a small company I would much rather discuss a candidate's experience with them and leave them the time to build useful skills, not worthless ones for passing a test.

turdprincess 5y ago

I’ve been employed by everyone from small consulting firms to big tech to FAANG and I’ve never seen anyone let go for performance. This includes serial low performers that produced nothing for years. Aside from a very few (like 1 or 2) select companies, the bar to staying employed is laughably low in tech. In my opinion this is a big problem. I wish there was a stronger culture of letting low performers go quickly in tech. This would reduce the need for exhaustive interview loops and ultimately make the industry more inclusive because you could afford to take a chance on someone without being chained to them for years to come.

squeaky-clean 5y ago

> Is it annoying for candidates? Yeah, but we pay you a lot of money I had to go through 8 interviews for a senior position at Facebook and ended up not getting the offer. I wasn't paid a dime and had to use a few vacation days at the job I had at the time in order to take the interviews. Technically I lost money interviewing at FB.

seanmcdirmid 5y ago
I went through the same interview for senior at Facebook and failed. Thankfully I got a Google offer a couple of hours after I got my Facebook rejection. What pushed me over the bar for Google was probably making fewer mistakes on the technical loops but also having more people vouch for me on the inside (they like refs that work at Google).
- squeaky-clean 5y ago
  Yep that's similar to how I got my current job. Strong referral from someone else inside the company, we had worked together for about 4 years. I had one phone screen which was a combination "culture fit" and general talking about my experience programming. One technical interview which was way less abstract than the FB ones. And a final meet-the-team interview which was more of a hangout. The pay isn't Facebook-tier but is still pretty darn good, and I'm enjoying it a lot, which I'm not sure I would have at Facebook. It was probably the better path for me overall.
icedchai 5y ago
In over 20 years, I've never used vacation days for an interview. I just either 1) called in sick, 2) needed to stay home waiting for a repair person (your internet is having trouble!), 3) had a few doctor's appointments. With working from home, fewer of these excuses are necessary. Last couple jobs I'd just disappear for an hour here and there. Nobody notices.

joe_the_user 5y ago

Yeah, but we pay you a lot of money, and it does actually work for us I just want to highlight that this works specifically because there are a very finite number of these we pay you a lot of money companies competing for talent and that's the primary reason candidates put up with this [expletive deleted] treatment. And the result are beneficial for these companies, yes.

d0mine 5y ago

How do you know that it actually works? Are there formal studies that compare different approaches? (it doesn't look like the difference can be easily evaluated and therefore it is extremely easy to mislead yourself on the effectiveness of some baroque process)

cgio 5y ago

Anecdotal, but I am a HM. The process goes I review cvs with senior engineers, we filter, 1 tech interview to validate cv, one with me to validate decision. Done. 3rd interview only for someone who would be a HM themselves. To be fair, if we could validate that cv is accurate we would not even need the interviews. Junior people are our responsibility to develop, senior you can understand their fit with some key indicators. I believe the detail in recruitment either reflects lack of trust in team or focus on accurate placement of people, which does not lineup with my expectations about how a team of creative people should be run.

stackbutterflow 5y ago

Is it annoying for candidates? Yeah, but we pay you a lot of money Well, no you don't. You pay a lot of money only the people you hired.

atoav 5y ago

However what does a hiring process like this communicate to those being hired? I had more than one interview, where the things I discovered during the interview made me reconsider my options and go for another company. Not because I wouldn't have fit with the team or my skills were not there, but because this kind of thing tells me how processes are organized or not organized within your company, how people treat each other etc. What candidates does a hiring process like this drive away? Are it specific character traits that pass through the sieve? If yes, how will that shape your corp and the culture in it in the long term?

lodovic 5y ago

Are candidates paid for their time when doing such extensive interviews? Doing 7 rounds, including preparation and travel time, may well add up to a full week.

lawwantsin17 5y ago

YZF 5y ago

I'm a HM at a big tech company as well. We do 3 one hour slots. In a previous company we pair interviewed, 1/2 hour screen + 2 one hour slots. I liked that format a little bit better. I've been interviewing people for about 40 years now, I was just reflecting on my first ever interview that I participated in when I was still a teenager. I would say there are some factors that are not going to come out in any number of interviews. Conversely there are factors that are immediately noticeable. I can tell in 10-15 minutes how strong someone is technically. At least I can tell the difference between "weak", "maybe", "strong" in 10 minutes. Going back to my first ever interview. The guy was brilliant. He was technically good. He ended up being a not so good hire for reasons that would have been very hard to discover during the interview. It was partly the intersection of very smart without the experience to match and partly that he was just weird in some other ways. He was hired, he left within a year or so. I think the science says the best predictor is an IQ test. The rest of our practices are not really evidence based. We tend to want to hire people that are like us, that know the things we know, we have all sorts of biases during the interview process, and throwing more people/time at it doesn't really seem to make a big difference. I would say the most important thing you can do to get good people is to make your company a place that good people want to be. I.e. what matters is more what enters the pipeline then the interview process. I would bet that having 7 interviews vs. 3 has a difference that's completely in the noise and that at least there's no solid evidence that it gets you anything re: the quality of people working in a company. Every company says it has the best people. Mostly channeling Joel Spolsky here but I've seen this principle in action. EDIT: Another random thought is that there are other factors that influence whether someone is going to be successful in a given role. Even the best software engineer can fail if the conditions for him to be successful aren't there.

lubujackson 5y ago

Multiple interviews is annoying as a candidate, but how they are used (or appear to be used) is the bigger problem. Instead of being used to strengthen a consensus they tend to be a series of filters where any "fail" invalidates everyone else's input. After all, why hire someone who everyone doesn't love? But that is the same logic as combining bad mortgages into tranches reduces their risk - sounds good on paper but doesn't work in reality. Since you have a chance of getting cut at each round as an interviewee you are left hoping not to run into: some esoteric corner of programming you could learn in 10 minutes but haven't seen before; an interviewer who always asks a pet question (even if told not to do this); a personal dislike that is illegal but not challenged (age, gender, race, etc., waved away as "a bad fit"). If multiple interviews were used only to strengthen assumptions about a candidate and each interview had a narrow intent, they COULD help companies avoid more bad hires. But after interview #3 you are probably just filtering reasonable or even exceptional candidates based on random chance. On the other hand, this may be a fantastic method to strengthen a "hive mind" culture, but that doesn't sound like a worthy goal.