10 ms·

I think a more important point that should be added: don't have 500 interviews. Have at most 2 or 3 which altogether should not take more than 2 to 3 hours of s

I think a more important point that should be added: don't have 500 interviews. Have at most 2 or 3 which altogether should not take more than 2 to 3 hours of somebodys time. I've been to 8 hour all day interviews with a new person every hour 1-on-1. It was demoralizing and exhausting. I've been in interview cycles where I keep "moving up" to meet the next higher up person and the next higher up person to the tune of 3-5 interviews. Stop! You can have a meaningful conversation in 2-3 hours over a couple days. Don't burn peoples time to find a unicorn. Most people are pretty competent and will rise to q challenge. I wish a company would run an experiment where they just higher at random from a stack of team vetted resumes. I think the results would almost be the same as being super picky.

Ancalagon 4y ago
Totally Agree. The endless interviews are the worst ones, and I've dropped out of cycles before because they were too long. And I like the experiment idea, although I don't think anyone will ever do it without a boatload of cash to risk for no reason.
- polalavik 4y ago
  True. it just grinds my gears - whats the point of a degree if at the end of the day almost 100% of companies assume I know absolutely nothing and will completely flounder in their company if I cannot jump through their little algorithmic brain-trivia hoops? People talk a lot about the price of college not being worth it and that enrollment is declining because of the price + salaries. I think thats one part. but I'm not sure I've seen a discussion about how nearly every company out there has no confidence in a college degree.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    > nearly every company out there has no confidence in a college degree Or in job experience, for that matter. "You need to have 10 years experience in a technology that has only existed for 5 years, and also we assume you're a liar and discount all experience anyway."
    - polalavik 4y ago
      I was about to tack that on. Not only the badly worded job descriptions, but zero trust that you actually worked at $COMPANY and did some $JOB. You can verify that pretty anonymously/easily (with the interviewees permission, of course) by acting like a landlord or something, calling the previous employer and asking if $PERSON works/worked for your company and had $TITLE and did they work there $YEARS. That should almost be the first step imo after the quick "are you a person / do you have these skills" interview which is normally reserved for an HR person who doesn't know a bit from a byte. If they picked up the phone, claimed to have some skills, a company they work/worked for genuinely seems to exist and employed them, heck hire them - I bet 9/10 it would work out just fine.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - lesuorac 4y ago
        Well if you have 100,000 employees then 9/10 means you have 10,000 "bad" employees and certainly means that everybody in the company is going to be interacting with "bad" employees which I can't imagine will be great for a company that claims only to hire the best and brightest. (F has ~70k employees, G has ~164k employees) The other issue is that if we look at something likes levels.fyi [1] the roles don't always line up. Ex. Capital One's SE/Senior Associate is a similar role to both Amazon's SDE I & II. While Capital One's pay is ~137k and SDE I is ~165k / SDE II is ~237k so which do you hire the candidate at? Although it will sometimes be an "easy" choice as say Microsoft's 62 is completely within SDE II's bucket. IMO, the probation period idea is probably the better one I've seen although it does really take people time to ramp up to all the legacy code. [1]: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Capital%20One,Amazon,Microsoft&track=Software%20Engineer#negotiation-promo-home https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Capital%20One,Amazon,Microso...
        lapcat 4y ago
        > a company that claims only to hire the best and brightest That's what they claim. It seems unlikely, especially seeing some of the things they produce. ;-) A less sarcastic point is that a company with a uniform hiring process tends to get a uniform workforce. What this means is that all employees tend to have the same strengths, and also the same weaknesses, because the hiring process is always looking for the same exact things. The result is that the team ends up not being more than the sum of all the parts but rather less than the sum of all the parts. The same strengths added together are redundant, and the same weaknesses added together create giant corporate blind spots. When you go about trying to "minimize the bad hire", what you're really minimizing is any sort of difference or diversity among the workforce, thereby missing the forest for the trees. We always talk about the so-called "10x engineer", but it's not clear that 2 10x engineers with the exact same skills would be better than 2 other engineers with different but complementary skills. Maybe 10x + 10x effectively adds up to much less than 20x.
nscalf 4y ago
I turn down interviews that end up being >4 hours. When you get to a senior engineer level, these interviews cost hundreds to thousands of dollars of our time. Often times technical performance doesn't get you a job, it just keeps your from losing the job. The decision is heavily dependent on how well you got along with the hiring manager and what type of mood they're in when they meet you. If you're unlucky, you'll flounder on one of the esoteric algorithm questions that have little to no correlation to your performance at the job. In this case, you've entirely wasted your time.
returningfory2 4y ago
> I wish a company would run an experiment where they just higher at random from a stack of team vetted resumes. I think the results would almost be the same as being super picky. Have you ever interviewed someone whose resume looked good but who couldn't code basic things? The kind of candidate FizzBuzz was invented for? I interview at a FAANG and encounter these candidates all the time. I feel the approach of "if their resume looks good they must be fine technically" makes sense until precisely the point when you interview one of these candidates.
- polalavik 4y ago
  I agree that incompetent people are out there, but I also think the interview setup is completely unnatural and nerve-racking. I've been working 10 years, can get things up and running pretty fast, learn fast, but I'm super anxious in interview (and I've done hundreds). I'm just an anxious person, so most of the time I completely freeze up. Perhaps finding a better way to interview is a better way to hire for diversity. I think there are two camps of people: truly incompetent liars that look good on paper and people just straight up bad at interviewing who are perfectly qualified. So how do you give the latter a fighting chance?
  - MontyCarloHall 4y ago
    In my experience, the latter can pass the interview with some coaxing. Someone who knows the right answer but who's frozen due to anxiety can often complete a thought that's already in their head if someone else starts verbalizing it. On the other hand, no amount of hints can help the truly incompetent liar, since they can't produce any thoughts on how to solve the problem in the first place. The problem is that many (most?) interviewers have no idea how to effectively coax a candidate along. They usually sit there in silence for an awkwardly long period of time and then fail the candidate, or offer totally irrelevant hints that don't reflect how someone would actually think about the problem.
  - throwawayboise 4y ago
    Honestly, most companies will prefer the candidate who projects poise and confidence rather than anxiety, all else being equal. Sorry but that's life. Work on overcoming that.
mbesto 4y ago
> Most people are pretty competent and will rise to q challenge. My experience is exactly the opposite. Most people are actually incompetent.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  I think the applicant pool might be mostly incompetent. I don’t think the employed programmer pool is mostly incompetent. When a competent applicant goes through interviews with 3 companies, they probably get hired. When an incompetent applicant goes through interviews with 3 companies and doesn’t get an offer, they don’t de-materialize but instead keep applying, adding to the adversity in the pool of applicants.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    Are these wealthy applicants who don't need a job? If you're applying for jobs, then you either get a job, in which case you become an employed programmer, and thus competent in your eyes, or you eventually run out of money. Difficult to remain unemployed for a long period of time.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      Whether they’re working through their previous severance package or waiting tables, anyone who takes more interviews than average to be hired will be over-represented in the application pool, for the exact reason you describe [they need money] plus they are more likely to be involuntarily termed and put back into the pool. It’s not that being employed makes them competent in my eyes, but rather that being competent makes them more likely to be employed.
      - lapcat 4y ago
        > anyone who takes more interviews than average to be hired What is the average? My impression is that even "top" candidates take a lot of interviews, which gives them a lot of options and possibly multiple job offers that they can use to drive up the price in negotiations.
bspear 4y ago
The first product every candidate experiences is the interview loop. If they have a sloppy and redundant loop, it directly impacts the quality of talent they get. People who have lots of options aren't going to put up with BS. Usually also shows they have no idea what they're looking for. Another challenge with hiring, esp. at a startup is that many candidates who "qualify" will not be comfortable joining a startup, so you have to find both high quality and high intent people. There are some solutions that address this like https://topstartups.io/ https://topstartups.io/ and https://angel.co/ https://angel.co/ to some extent. In general, there needs to be clearer signaling of preferences. Too much time wasted.
rahimnathwani 4y ago
"Most people are pretty competent and will rise to q challenge." Most people cannot code. "higher at random from a stack of team vetted resumes" Because many offers would be declined, you would end up with mostly lemons. And the non-lemons would leave due to being surrounded by lemons.

Ancalagon 4y ago

Totally Agree. The endless interviews are the worst ones, and I've dropped out of cycles before because they were too long. And I like the experiment idea, although I don't think anyone will ever do it without a boatload of cash to risk for no reason.

polalavik 4y ago
True. it just grinds my gears - whats the point of a degree if at the end of the day almost 100% of companies assume I know absolutely nothing and will completely flounder in their company if I cannot jump through their little algorithmic brain-trivia hoops? People talk a lot about the price of college not being worth it and that enrollment is declining because of the price + salaries. I think thats one part. but I'm not sure I've seen a discussion about how nearly every company out there has no confidence in a college degree.
- lapcat 4y ago
  > nearly every company out there has no confidence in a college degree Or in job experience, for that matter. "You need to have 10 years experience in a technology that has only existed for 5 years, and also we assume you're a liar and discount all experience anyway."
  - polalavik 4y ago
    I was about to tack that on. Not only the badly worded job descriptions, but zero trust that you actually worked at $COMPANY and did some $JOB. You can verify that pretty anonymously/easily (with the interviewees permission, of course) by acting like a landlord or something, calling the previous employer and asking if $PERSON works/worked for your company and had $TITLE and did they work there $YEARS. That should almost be the first step imo after the quick "are you a person / do you have these skills" interview which is normally reserved for an HR person who doesn't know a bit from a byte. If they picked up the phone, claimed to have some skills, a company they work/worked for genuinely seems to exist and employed them, heck hire them - I bet 9/10 it would work out just fine.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - lesuorac 4y ago
      Well if you have 100,000 employees then 9/10 means you have 10,000 "bad" employees and certainly means that everybody in the company is going to be interacting with "bad" employees which I can't imagine will be great for a company that claims only to hire the best and brightest. (F has ~70k employees, G has ~164k employees) The other issue is that if we look at something likes levels.fyi [1] the roles don't always line up. Ex. Capital One's SE/Senior Associate is a similar role to both Amazon's SDE I & II. While Capital One's pay is ~137k and SDE I is ~165k / SDE II is ~237k so which do you hire the candidate at? Although it will sometimes be an "easy" choice as say Microsoft's 62 is completely within SDE II's bucket. IMO, the probation period idea is probably the better one I've seen although it does really take people time to ramp up to all the legacy code. [1]: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Capital%20One,Amazon,Microsoft&track=Software%20Engineer#negotiation-promo-home https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Capital%20One,Amazon,Microso...
      - lapcat 4y ago
        > a company that claims only to hire the best and brightest That's what they claim. It seems unlikely, especially seeing some of the things they produce. ;-) A less sarcastic point is that a company with a uniform hiring process tends to get a uniform workforce. What this means is that all employees tend to have the same strengths, and also the same weaknesses, because the hiring process is always looking for the same exact things. The result is that the team ends up not being more than the sum of all the parts but rather less than the sum of all the parts. The same strengths added together are redundant, and the same weaknesses added together create giant corporate blind spots. When you go about trying to "minimize the bad hire", what you're really minimizing is any sort of difference or diversity among the workforce, thereby missing the forest for the trees. We always talk about the so-called "10x engineer", but it's not clear that 2 10x engineers with the exact same skills would be better than 2 other engineers with different but complementary skills. Maybe 10x + 10x effectively adds up to much less than 20x.

nscalf 4y ago

I turn down interviews that end up being >4 hours. When you get to a senior engineer level, these interviews cost hundreds to thousands of dollars of our time. Often times technical performance doesn't get you a job, it just keeps your from losing the job. The decision is heavily dependent on how well you got along with the hiring manager and what type of mood they're in when they meet you. If you're unlucky, you'll flounder on one of the esoteric algorithm questions that have little to no correlation to your performance at the job. In this case, you've entirely wasted your time.

returningfory2 4y ago

> I wish a company would run an experiment where they just higher at random from a stack of team vetted resumes. I think the results would almost be the same as being super picky. Have you ever interviewed someone whose resume looked good but who couldn't code basic things? The kind of candidate FizzBuzz was invented for? I interview at a FAANG and encounter these candidates all the time. I feel the approach of "if their resume looks good they must be fine technically" makes sense until precisely the point when you interview one of these candidates.

polalavik 4y ago
I agree that incompetent people are out there, but I also think the interview setup is completely unnatural and nerve-racking. I've been working 10 years, can get things up and running pretty fast, learn fast, but I'm super anxious in interview (and I've done hundreds). I'm just an anxious person, so most of the time I completely freeze up. Perhaps finding a better way to interview is a better way to hire for diversity. I think there are two camps of people: truly incompetent liars that look good on paper and people just straight up bad at interviewing who are perfectly qualified. So how do you give the latter a fighting chance?
- MontyCarloHall 4y ago
  In my experience, the latter can pass the interview with some coaxing. Someone who knows the right answer but who's frozen due to anxiety can often complete a thought that's already in their head if someone else starts verbalizing it. On the other hand, no amount of hints can help the truly incompetent liar, since they can't produce any thoughts on how to solve the problem in the first place. The problem is that many (most?) interviewers have no idea how to effectively coax a candidate along. They usually sit there in silence for an awkwardly long period of time and then fail the candidate, or offer totally irrelevant hints that don't reflect how someone would actually think about the problem.
- throwawayboise 4y ago
  Honestly, most companies will prefer the candidate who projects poise and confidence rather than anxiety, all else being equal. Sorry but that's life. Work on overcoming that.

mbesto 4y ago

> Most people are pretty competent and will rise to q challenge. My experience is exactly the opposite. Most people are actually incompetent.

sokoloff 4y ago
I think the applicant pool might be mostly incompetent. I don’t think the employed programmer pool is mostly incompetent. When a competent applicant goes through interviews with 3 companies, they probably get hired. When an incompetent applicant goes through interviews with 3 companies and doesn’t get an offer, they don’t de-materialize but instead keep applying, adding to the adversity in the pool of applicants.
- lapcat 4y ago
  Are these wealthy applicants who don't need a job? If you're applying for jobs, then you either get a job, in which case you become an employed programmer, and thus competent in your eyes, or you eventually run out of money. Difficult to remain unemployed for a long period of time.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    Whether they’re working through their previous severance package or waiting tables, anyone who takes more interviews than average to be hired will be over-represented in the application pool, for the exact reason you describe [they need money] plus they are more likely to be involuntarily termed and put back into the pool. It’s not that being employed makes them competent in my eyes, but rather that being competent makes them more likely to be employed.
    - lapcat 4y ago
      > anyone who takes more interviews than average to be hired What is the average? My impression is that even "top" candidates take a lot of interviews, which gives them a lot of options and possibly multiple job offers that they can use to drive up the price in negotiations.

bspear 4y ago

The first product every candidate experiences is the interview loop. If they have a sloppy and redundant loop, it directly impacts the quality of talent they get. People who have lots of options aren't going to put up with BS. Usually also shows they have no idea what they're looking for. Another challenge with hiring, esp. at a startup is that many candidates who "qualify" will not be comfortable joining a startup, so you have to find both high quality and high intent people. There are some solutions that address this like https://topstartups.io/ https://topstartups.io/ and https://angel.co/ https://angel.co/ to some extent. In general, there needs to be clearer signaling of preferences. Too much time wasted.

rahimnathwani 4y ago

"Most people are pretty competent and will rise to q challenge." Most people cannot code. "higher at random from a stack of team vetted resumes" Because many offers would be declined, you would end up with mostly lemons. And the non-lemons would leave due to being surrounded by lemons.