3 ms·

Doesn't the company invest significant amount of money in the process too?

by golergka 5y ago

diatone 5y ago
Does “the company” need to sleep?
- golergka 5y ago
  The company is built by investment from VCs from hedge funds from 401k or pensions of real people who not only need to sleep, but on average make less then senior software engineers.
BlargMcLarg 5y ago
Wouldn't that be more reason to push back against this? There's an implicit assumption that more sessions -> more security. I've yet to find evidence this session inflation is doing anything beyond making companies feel more secure. Same goes for a lot of other things related to interviewing. If there's no clear evidence, it should be treated as the bread and circuses it is.
- spyspy 5y ago
  I’ve found that the more people you throw at a candidate the higher the chances that _someone_ is going to find _something_ they don’t like about him/her and burn them in the end, especially when approvals have to be unanimous. I’ve seen engineers give glowing praise for one particular candidate but they got passed on because they made some comment about disliking scrum/agile/jira and that just rubbed the 2nd project manager they interviewed with the wrong way.
  - tough 5y ago
    Right on. Never say anything you've not been asked for. You don't need to create traps for yourself. Interviewing sucks... The best jobs I had I just started on -trial- or whatever doing good work on their GH and from then i'ts pretty easy to know if we're a match or not. (Paid) Trialhires should be a more common thing. Companies should hire and fire more easily. I just don't understand I work mostly as a contractor so they really can fire me with 1, 10, or whatever days in advance... It's not like I'm an employee with protection to being fired or compensation or whatever... Why so much hassle?
    - pph 5y ago
      It's not reasonable to expect a candidate to give up their secure job / salary for a two week trial. It gets more complicated as within the first weeks you're probably mostly ramping up and not very productive yet, so it's both a cost-sink for the company and difficult to judge anyhow. For fresh graduates this might be more viable, but internships are already a thing.
      - vsareto 5y ago
        Trials should be an option but not the only route. Multiple interview formats would be good too.
    - NikolaNovak 5y ago
      I think that works great for 1st job. Once you are in your... 30s 40s 50s etc, maybe family and mortgage... You're not going in for a two week trial hire. ANd it may not make sense for companies either. A lot of positions I hire for need 3 months to be productive. The level of business and client knowledge, as well as prices and policy understanding required for tech positions is high. That may not be the vocal HN experience which is a lot about interchangeable tech on modern frameworks but I think actually comprises a lot of enterprise IT. Basically we need to invest a lot in you before you are productive and we can truly judge fairly your actual on the job performance. Heck if you work for public sector, you may not get your laptop and Id in first two weeks at all :-)
      - BlargMcLarg 5y ago
        >The level of business and client knowledge, as well as prices and policy understanding required for tech positions is high. Whenever I read this advice, I get "indie game developer" vibes. Indie game developers wear many hats and need a lot of breadth for obvious reasons: they don't have a lot of funds, they don't have a lot of people, they don't have a lot of specialist work you'd need someone for full time, but they do have a lot of different things that need to be done. Then I compare it to your regular corporate job, and it's the opposite in many ways. Tons of people. Tons of funds. Some people very specialized, some people somewhat generic for flexibility purposes. It makes me question why a developer in a corporate setting would need high levels of "business and client knowledge", or even "prices and policy understanding". Not because they aren't useful in theory, but because there's almost always someone with far more knowledge and decision-making power pulling the strings, to the point having such dedicated knowledge is more a waste than anything. The developer can't get to their level without sacrificing development time, or being with that company for a ridiculous number of years. And we already know companies in general aren't optimizing around long tenures.
  - dotBen 5y ago
    I’ve found that the more people you throw at a candidate the higher the chances that _someone_ is going to find _something_ they don’t like about him/her and burn them in the end I can't emphasize this enough. Successful interviewing is about pattern matching and what this really speaks to is more people means greater risk someone isn't properly calibrated on their pattern matching and their feedback negates someone else who's pattern matching is spot on.
  - dangoor 5y ago
    A counterpoint to this is that our process generally looks for at least one "Strong Yes" among the interviewers. While they do come up, there aren't _that_ many "No"s in the results, but there are a lot of just "Yes" results. Not saying it's a perfect process, but just providing a counterpoint that our process actually seems more likely to help someone with the rounded set of interviews we have than we would with fewer.
Ozzie_osman 5y ago
Depends on the company, but they should. This is a big decision for both the company and the candidate. Both should put a little effort into it to avoid a situation where someone who is hired is unhappy or not a fit for whatever reason. The secret is to make sure the time invested on both sides is actually increasing signal, and to make it symmetric (ie at any point in the interview process both sides should have invested roughly the same amount of time).

Doesn't the company invest significant amount of money in the process too?

diatone 5y ago

Does “the company” need to sleep?

golergka 5y ago
The company is built by investment from VCs from hedge funds from 401k or pensions of real people who not only need to sleep, but on average make less then senior software engineers.

BlargMcLarg 5y ago

Wouldn't that be more reason to push back against this? There's an implicit assumption that more sessions -> more security. I've yet to find evidence this session inflation is doing anything beyond making companies feel more secure. Same goes for a lot of other things related to interviewing. If there's no clear evidence, it should be treated as the bread and circuses it is.

spyspy 5y ago
I’ve found that the more people you throw at a candidate the higher the chances that _someone_ is going to find _something_ they don’t like about him/her and burn them in the end, especially when approvals have to be unanimous. I’ve seen engineers give glowing praise for one particular candidate but they got passed on because they made some comment about disliking scrum/agile/jira and that just rubbed the 2nd project manager they interviewed with the wrong way.
- tough 5y ago
  Right on. Never say anything you've not been asked for. You don't need to create traps for yourself. Interviewing sucks... The best jobs I had I just started on -trial- or whatever doing good work on their GH and from then i'ts pretty easy to know if we're a match or not. (Paid) Trialhires should be a more common thing. Companies should hire and fire more easily. I just don't understand I work mostly as a contractor so they really can fire me with 1, 10, or whatever days in advance... It's not like I'm an employee with protection to being fired or compensation or whatever... Why so much hassle?
  - pph 5y ago
    It's not reasonable to expect a candidate to give up their secure job / salary for a two week trial. It gets more complicated as within the first weeks you're probably mostly ramping up and not very productive yet, so it's both a cost-sink for the company and difficult to judge anyhow. For fresh graduates this might be more viable, but internships are already a thing.
    - vsareto 5y ago
      Trials should be an option but not the only route. Multiple interview formats would be good too.
  - NikolaNovak 5y ago
    I think that works great for 1st job. Once you are in your... 30s 40s 50s etc, maybe family and mortgage... You're not going in for a two week trial hire. ANd it may not make sense for companies either. A lot of positions I hire for need 3 months to be productive. The level of business and client knowledge, as well as prices and policy understanding required for tech positions is high. That may not be the vocal HN experience which is a lot about interchangeable tech on modern frameworks but I think actually comprises a lot of enterprise IT. Basically we need to invest a lot in you before you are productive and we can truly judge fairly your actual on the job performance. Heck if you work for public sector, you may not get your laptop and Id in first two weeks at all :-)
    - BlargMcLarg 5y ago
      >The level of business and client knowledge, as well as prices and policy understanding required for tech positions is high. Whenever I read this advice, I get "indie game developer" vibes. Indie game developers wear many hats and need a lot of breadth for obvious reasons: they don't have a lot of funds, they don't have a lot of people, they don't have a lot of specialist work you'd need someone for full time, but they do have a lot of different things that need to be done. Then I compare it to your regular corporate job, and it's the opposite in many ways. Tons of people. Tons of funds. Some people very specialized, some people somewhat generic for flexibility purposes. It makes me question why a developer in a corporate setting would need high levels of "business and client knowledge", or even "prices and policy understanding". Not because they aren't useful in theory, but because there's almost always someone with far more knowledge and decision-making power pulling the strings, to the point having such dedicated knowledge is more a waste than anything. The developer can't get to their level without sacrificing development time, or being with that company for a ridiculous number of years. And we already know companies in general aren't optimizing around long tenures.
- dotBen 5y ago
  I’ve found that the more people you throw at a candidate the higher the chances that _someone_ is going to find _something_ they don’t like about him/her and burn them in the end I can't emphasize this enough. Successful interviewing is about pattern matching and what this really speaks to is more people means greater risk someone isn't properly calibrated on their pattern matching and their feedback negates someone else who's pattern matching is spot on.
- dangoor 5y ago
  A counterpoint to this is that our process generally looks for at least one "Strong Yes" among the interviewers. While they do come up, there aren't _that_ many "No"s in the results, but there are a lot of just "Yes" results. Not saying it's a perfect process, but just providing a counterpoint that our process actually seems more likely to help someone with the rounded set of interviews we have than we would with fewer.

Ozzie_osman 5y ago

Depends on the company, but they should. This is a big decision for both the company and the candidate. Both should put a little effort into it to avoid a situation where someone who is hired is unhappy or not a fit for whatever reason. The secret is to make sure the time invested on both sides is actually increasing signal, and to make it symmetric (ie at any point in the interview process both sides should have invested roughly the same amount of time).