22 ms·

If You Want This Job, We Must Interview You Forever

• nunez 4y ago
  amazing that the email chain was the entire article.
• noncoml 4y ago
  Do you know the meme on Reddit that shows a blob in a square, deciding to give the outside world a try, gets punched and says never again? That’s how I feel when I try to interview for an software engineering role.
  • pvillano 4y ago
    for those who haven't seen it https://webtoons.com/en/slice-of-life/bluechair/owlturd-69-vulnerable/viewer?title_no=199&episode_no=442 https://webtoons.com/en/slice-of-life/bluechair/owlturd-69-v...
  • Ancalagon 4y ago
    There’s enough competition for good software engineers you don’t really need to do this to yourself. You won’t get in a FAANG but if a process is getting really annoying like this just withdraw.
  • Trasmatta 4y ago
    This is the major reason I haven't been looking for a new job. I haven't been super happy at my current place, but at least I don't have to go through yet another life draining and de-humanizing interviewing process. Not to mention the first 6 months or so at a new job trying to figure out how the internal politics work. "Better the devil you know" and all that.
    • yrgulation 4y ago
      > but at least I don't have to go through yet another life draining and de-humanizing interviewing process. Stop interviewing at code assembly lines? There are loads of sane places to work at with sane interviews and great tech and pay. FAANG and similar are undergoing a slow rot. You’ll do fine.
      • Trasmatta 4y ago
        I've never even interviewed at a FAANG. I've interviewed at like a dozen companies throughout my career, across all sorts of different businesses. All of the interview processes I've been through were awful.
        • yrgulation 4y ago
          How come? Genuine question. I interviewed at a company once. They asked me to do some funky stuff with some hex css colours, many many years ago. After i proudly failed they said thats what their buddy was tested about at google. Company went under and didnt shed a tear over not joining. Truly a waste of time. Later found a similar “test” in a high school cs “olympiad” book under a different name and context.
          • Trasmatta 4y ago
            How come I went through those interviews? Because I needed a job, and almost every company is horrible at interviewing, so you just kind of have to deal with the hazing ritual. Unless you manage to get really lucky.
            • yrgulation 4y ago
              Sorry, i meant how come they all had horrible interviews. Silly phrasing and anecdoting on my part. You indicated “hazing”. What happened? Anyway no need to answer. I’ll do an instagram reply on you: the ocean is deep. There’s room for everyone. Learn anything you can from failure and move on.
        • JauntyHatAngle 4y ago
          Admittedly, I'm doing devops/sre interviews, but I just changed jobs for the first time in 5 years. 4 different jobs I interviewed for. All of them were reasonable, the one I accepted had 3, 1 hour interviews, the questions asked were very reasonable, friendly, etc. I dunno, maybe I'm lucky but I've avoided FAANG my whole career and only had good experiences in interviews.
  • yrgulation 4y ago
    > That’s how I feel when I try to interview for an software engineering role. You meant to say when you interview for the wrong companies? Google’s (and other leetcode nurseries) been steadily regressing. Not sure you want to be a part of it. Only idiots build sorting algos in 2022 let alone ask highschool questions about them. Keep hunting and grab some popcorn - it will be fun to watch.
    • Buttons840 4y ago
      > Only [well-paid] idiots Working at Google may be going down with the ship, but at least in the end you get to sail away on your golden life boat.
      • yrgulation 4y ago
        Nothing wrong in playing the game. But believe me there’s better pay out there.
        • Retric 4y ago
          You’re selling your life, focusing on chasing ever more money is a poor trade IMO. Not saying you have to join a non profit, just consider what you want to work on, who you want to work with, and the kind of hours you want to put in.
          • yrgulation 4y ago
            Yeah sure i should chase making a boss happy instead “for stuff that matters”. No thanks. I’ll work my butt off instead for the right people and pay. It’s a win win situation.
            • Retric 4y ago
              Working your butt off is one option, working significantly less than full time is another. However, if you only focus on pay you drastically diminish your search space. No SV company is actually pushing the bounds of AGI research for example.
  • throwawaygram 4y ago
    Grammar nit pick, "a" if the first letter of the following word starts with a consonant sound else "an". A ball. An echo.
    • noncoml 4y ago
      I started writing “an SDE”, then replaced the SDE with software engineering, but didn’t bother proof reading..
    • rendall 4y ago
      Give typos a pass, and if it can be explained as a typo, then it is a typo. That includes errant apostrophe's.
      • throwawaygram 4y ago
• insightcheck 4y ago
  > "Phase three starts at 8 a.m. sharp, next Monday, and lasts for fourteen Pomodoro-timer cycles, concluding at 5:38 p.m." Unfortunately, this sounds dreadful and yet completely plausible. Pomodoros, or taking short breaks every once in a while, really are useful for avoiding stretching out tasks, though.
  • atdrummond 4y ago
    Funnily enough, the end time doesn’t work for the standard “25 minutes on, 5-10 minutes off” Pomodoro standard. Even with the max 10 minutes off, that’s only 5:10 PM. Maybe I’m not keyed in but is a 28 minute lunch normal? I guess 25 on and 12 off gives 5:38 precisely. Interesting.
  • As_You_Wish 4y ago
    Oh, Pomodoros is a thing? I thought a Pomodoros was one of those little dogs, I guess that is Pomoranian, but that's what my mind went to. So I thought that was some kind of cynical remark like dog years, but short Pomorian dog cycles that dogs have during the day that I didn't know about. Just some throw-away remark by the author that it was measured by some dog cycle that I didn't know about. Arf.
  • vario 4y ago
    i already shrunk back inwards at the mention of 14 pomodoros.
• gabereiser 4y ago
  Satire but rings true a bit about the current interview/hiring climate.
• toddm 4y ago
  Going through this right now, not for the first time. I always wonder if they ever actually fill the position for which I was a candidate.
  • hotpotamus 4y ago
    Others in this thread are asking why companies do this, and I can't help but wonder - perhaps they've mostly completed their software projects, so this is make-work for them? Think about how many person hours go into interviewing one person if each interview is a several person panel. And then they'll have hours of internal feedback meetings to review the interviews.
• coldcode 4y ago
  Sad someone out there will assume this is for real and plan to change their interviewing to this. I've been in interviews where you had to talk with every single person on the team (8, half of which didn't show); a gang interview with me in the middle for several hours; 4 separate interviews with multiple people who all asked complicated puzzle questions; and a place where every team member talked about how they did a part of every job (architect designed classes, lead designed methods, and programmers filled them out), etc. Insanity in interviews knows no bounds. Two of the best programmers I ever worked with I interviewed over the phone for an hour each and that was it.
  • piinecone 4y ago
    > architect designed classes, lead designed methods, and programmers filled them out Incredible. So they all have to take vacation at the same time (and stick together too — the architect lays out the suitcase, the lead gathers the clothes, etc.)
  • bombcar 4y ago
    There’s a form of dysfunction if a team can’t trust a subset of the team to make a decision on a new team member. Likely it’s an attempt to avoid all possible blame.
    • bazmattaz 4y ago
      Maybe, I worked at a company where it was done in the name of of inclusion. The company wanted the whole team to be involved so that each team member could feel included in the process and have a say. Bit overkill if you ask me
  • quickthrower2 4y ago
    Charge then $10k/y/interview on top of ideal rate.
  • swader999 4y ago
    Do companies really code like that? I find it both. interesting and horrifying.
• pcthrowaway 4y ago
  FROM: jobs@bubbleapp.com DATE: October 5, 2022 Dear Applicant, As you may be aware, the past three weeks have been a test. You have been “working” at a facsimile of our HQ staffed by trained actors. Finally, an explanation for all the software devs who can't fizzbuzz!
  • pram 4y ago
    Dear Applicant, As you may be aware, you have been drugged and transported to southern Mexico. Both of your kidneys have been removed. Now begins the practical portion of the interviewing process where we analyze your problem solving skills.
    • pluc 4y ago
      Each of your kidneys are on a train, one going 88 mph heading from east to west and another going 103 mph heading west to east
  • stevenwoo 4y ago
    This sounds a bit like The Rehearsal semi-reality show hosted by Nathan Fielder.
• revlolz 4y ago
  If a company sets expectations accordingly I don't mind having several rounds. It gives me time to interview them too. I just think we all need to agree on which poison to fight and that's Taleo.
  • thayne 4y ago
    But many companies don't set any expectations. You typically have no idea how many rounds of interviews there are, or how quickly you will hear back. And there is a pretty good chance that if you don't get the job, you will never hear back either way.
    • revlolz 4y ago
      I agree with you, I just hate Taleo with a passion because on top of likely having to deal with some form of ambigious process.... You are expected to regurgitate your resume wasting a ton of time to an archaic enterprise dB with disastrous ux constraints. I at least have more control with setting expectations if I hold recruiters/hm's accountable.
• 752963e64 4y ago
• jimbob45 4y ago
  What’s the ideal interview? HR screen, tech interview, and team lead interview? I don’t know that you can reasonably compress things down to less than three interviews without relying on individuals to be better at interviewing than they might actually be.
  • denimnerd42 4y ago
    people aren't complaining about 3. but it's commonly not 3. it's 5, 6 or 7. Or 3 and one is 4 hours.
    • bitwize 4y ago
      Ugh, the 4 hour one. I once interviewed at a small AI company. The CTO had a Ph.D. (from MIT!) in Really Tough AI Stuff. He was supported by some of the best programmers in Really Tough AI Stuff. The last round was the multi-hour one. I had to do a couple of different programming challenges, which I think I did all right in. Then I was subjected to multiple rounds, by the CTO and his supporting developers, of Really Tough AI questions. I wasn't trained for this, plus I was nervous and worn out and really off my game, so I tended to open my answers with "I know I'm probably getting this wrong, but..." and then pretty much spitball a guess. They were kind enough to provide feedback! They said "We really liked your answers and we think you have all the right skills, but you didn't seem very confident, so we're going to have to pass." I probably had to be a psychopath in order to get that job, at least without a postgrad degree in Really Tough AI Stuff.
  • healsdata 4y ago
    Honestly, I don't think it's the number of interviews but the number of rounds. Each round takes about a week to schedule and coordinate, requires you to wait to hear if you're moving forward, etc.
  • swader999 4y ago
    An hour talk, they usually have a person on the team that vouches for you that you've worked with. Then the first couple of months are a trial period that you are paid for.
• deeptote 4y ago
  So basically every software engineer interview... ever.
• stackbutterflow 4y ago
  My last job search took a toll on my mental health. I felt like a worthless person for 3 months. I could feel (or imagine?) the disdain of the interviewers as I was failing their tests. The fake enthusiasm on their side as they rejected me ("that was great! But we're not going to move forward with you! Good luck!!!") and on my side while pretending I was excited when in fact I was worried about money and the gap on my resume. I dread the next one.
  • Shocka1 4y ago
    I had the same experience. I've bombed a lot of CS interviews - a lot more than I've done well on, hah! I'm a couple classes away from a Master's in CS and would still have to study my butt off to be successful in a whiteboard interview. The first few rejections hurt a little, but once I started taking the interviews for what they were it all became a big joke to me. And the recruiter process may be even worse than the interviews. At this point I'm of the opinion that I'm not gonna waste one more minute on Leetcode or any "kata" a recruiter sends me. I've got much better things to do with my time. My current position was basically just a conversation for an hour. Best interview ever... Went in thinking I was gonna have to do the whiteboard thing and they never asked me one question about any kind of algorithm. Been on the team several years now and it's the best position I've ever had. I'd probably need something like a 50 to 75% salary bump to consider leaving, and I would flat out refuse any whiteboard interviews. I always count myself blessed that I'm in the position where I can be selective. If I was desperate, I'd have to compete for them like everyone else.
  • vorpalhex 4y ago
    Interviewing is a skill. Practice it. Learn the stupid code challenges. Learn the corpo talk.
  • CoastalCoder 4y ago
    You might be comforted to know that I was once in a similar situation, but I eventually found a great job and things worked out. The lesson I learned is that you shouldn't draw too many conclusions from just a few bad interviews.
  • 4y ago
• duxup 4y ago
  A relative recently got an email to a second round of interviews. They were instructed to schedule 12 different meetings. They declined assuming that they could probably get in interviews for several jobs in that amount of time / just didn’t want to deal with how much bureaucracy that seemed to indicate.
• krnlpnc 4y ago
  What do you mean? My daily code editor is notepad via a shared screen. It’s the best!
  • telman17 4y ago
    In this interview you’ll be expected to program your own editor and then complete the assessment in it. Good luck!!!!!
    • bitwize 4y ago
      Write down the source code for your editor in a notebook, and then read it back to me over the phone.
      • telman17 4y ago
        Back in 2013 I had an interview with a large company whose game consoles are very rare to find in stores currently where the guy wanted me to recite JS syntax over the phone. He'd tell me I was incorrect if I didn't say "semi-colon". I wish I was making this up. Hoping they've modified their process a bit. :)
        • bitwize 4y ago
          Hey, these semicolons are my light inside the dark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M94ii6MVilw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M94ii6MVilw This very large e-commerce and cloud services company did the same to me in 2007, except it was C syntax.
    • yaur 4y ago
      If you attempt to copy or paste anything during the interview process you will be immediately disqualified from this and all future employment opportunities.
    • emptyparadise 4y ago
      You send them a full on mini-vim implementation in Rust that uses ropes and then they just look at you disapprovingly because you didn't just tie together a dozen npm packages.
• maitkin 4y ago
  Brilliant and sad
• lovich 4y ago
  I don't disagree with this articles satire, as it lines up with my experience if you remove a bit of the hyperbole. I am however curious as to why companies continue to do this and seem to be increasing their interview requirements in the face of an inability to hire. The most reasonable sounding answer I can come up with is that executives are balking at engineering pay and rationalizing it to themselves by demanding ever more from engineers even though the number of people who can pass all these hoops is not increasing. That's based on gut instinct however, so if anyone has some actual insight they could share it would be appreciated.
  • izend 4y ago
    Makes you wonder if it is some sort of collusion to make it more difficult for current employees to jump ship if they know it will be painful ordeal.
  • sulam 4y ago
    Not really. It comes down to the asymmetry in hiring outcomes. It is much more expensive to hire a bad employee than it is to hire a good employee. It’s gotten exceptionally hard to just fire people in corporate America, at-will employment notwithstanding.
    • atomicnumber3 4y ago
      Is it really that hard, though? I mean, you say at-will employment notwithstanding, but like, that's not my experience at all. Companies are free to hold you to whatever absurd metersticks they want, and even if they fire you for-cause, it's not like they a) even need a cause or b) will ever properly share that cause with you or c) share it externally at all. Mind you - not that I actually want them to do C) - but my point is that the law provides zero protection, the culture provides zero protection/accountability, and the only thing that provides anything is whatever weird bureaucratic nonsense the company has imposed upon itself. My point being, companies have only themselves to blame for making it hard to fire people. Both companies I've worked for have fired really high-performing people for (these are my interpretations, but I do honestly believe they're the "real" reason all these folks were fired, and I was closely familiar with the details in all the situations I mention here): Chronological order of my witnessing them over the years. Several different companies. 1. My boss didn't like how the guy thought. Literally, the guy got good results and wasn't weird or crazy or anything, but him and my boss always had kind of weirdly unproductive conversations. I liked the guy, personally. 2. He very loosely implied the owner of the company didn't know or like statistics. (Which was correct). This is while the owner of the company was trying to shove his nose way to deep into a system he had designed 20 years ago but had been away from, and in his absence the code and the industry had moved on. He got fired and a complicated statistical modelling system was replaced with one a high-schooler would've built. 3. He was a good performer but a bit brusque, but our newest boss was kind of lukewarm for him, so when my boss's boss's boss's boss decided he was the reason some project failed, he eye-of-sauron'd him and had him fired, and my manager didn't really step up to defend him. These just off the top of my head. I've also seen droves of people fired essentially because the owner would hired 20-ish new-grad-type folks/early career, then over about a year fire all but 3-5 of them, and those who survived were then kept on for a more normal period of time. The de-facto 1-year trial period wasn't ever explicitly described to them (just a 60-day review that was just a rubber-stamp) or formal. People literally moved hours away (this job was unusually high-paying for our locale) and bought new houses and in some cases moved families (not all were early-career, that was just most of our funnel), only to be fired 1 month later for no (to them) apparent reason other than that they weren't in the small handful the owner decided to keep that year. Really hard to feel sympathetic towards corporations of any size when being absolutely evil to common folk seems to just be how the game is played.
• telman17 4y ago
  As someone who just went through the interview epic-quest-with-many-sidequests-and-bonus-missions at a few companies, this hit close to home. I’m happy where I ended up though and it wound up being one of the more reasonable interview processes of the bunch.
• happyopossum 4y ago
  I’ve seen so many of these jokes and complaints about modern SV interviews that I was blown away when I recently interviewed at a FAANG… I was assigned a recruiter who communicated clearly and often with me, told exactly how many interviews I was doing (3), what each was about, and all 3 were scheduled on the same day, and were handled by extremely smart and supportive people. Offer came through by the end of the week. Not at all what I was expecting!
  • blagie 4y ago
    One of the differences is resources. FAANG can effort recruiting departments which treat candidates as customers whom they're trying to sell a job to. Many fine employers are more disorganized in hiring, but that doesn't translate over to work.
  • soared 4y ago
    Meanwhile my 3rd round at amazon was like a 7 hour virtual loop.
  • xtracto 4y ago
    I found it funny that a week ago I got an email from a Google recruiter, offering me to enter their interviewing machinery. I bluntly told him that I rejected the offer because of the horror stories regarding 5-7 interviews in Google. The recruiter's reply was that it was ok of this was not an appropriate time for me , and that we would stay in touch. How can they be so dense? Of course it may be that they are also just a cog in the machine and there is nothing they can do.
    • Salgat 4y ago
      Google is one of the few companies that has enough talent applying to be able to turn away perfectly good candidates. All those hoops you jump through ensure you're willing to go above and beyond a healthy level to "serve" the company.
      • emadabdulrahim 4y ago
• bruce511 4y ago
  Interviewing is hard, requires skills precisely zero people are trained to do, and has huge long-term upsides and downsides to a business. I'm a programmer. I trained for years to do that. Then I'm asked to hire someone. A task I have zero experience or training at. Spoiler alert - any actual competence is a fluke. At my peak I was hiring maybe 2 or 3 people in a year. Mostly I hired people I'd heard about who came with a recommendation. Results varied. Most were OK, some were exceptional, some didn't last long. Some companies are hiring tens, hundreds or thousands of people a week. Presumably they have full-time interviewers. But "good judgement" isn't a scaleable property, so you end up with filters and processes to try and narrow the field to "good candidates". Maybe thats "must have degree", maybe that's leetcode problems. Hiring into a big company is painful. They have a process which probably makes no sense, adds little value, and appears to be arbitrary and doesn't lead to significantly different outcomes. But how else could it look? It's a sausage factory churning out sausages. Hiring into a small company can be turgid - they're a small company but it seems like everyone there has to sign off on the interview first. They're scared of making a mistake, so they never seem to get to a decision. Or it can be simple. There's one guy. He either likes you or not. He either thinks you can do the job or not. Takes an hour, and there's an offer on the table. But this guy hires 1 person every now and then, not 100 per week. Hiring us hard [1]. It should be done by professionals. There should be degree programs training people how to do it. But even then, companies growing at severe pace may as well just pick every 3rd CV and save themselves, and applicants, a lot of time and effort. Yes it would be random, but you shouldn't hire unlucky people anyway. [1] hiring for skilled people, where actual skills are hard to measure, to work in a team environment, where their output is disproportional to their rank, status of pay.
  • djmips 4y ago
    Maybe I'm accidentally good at interviewing and hiring. At least, all my hires have worked out well. I've never hired anyone who didn't last long and all ended up being great. I don't trust 'professionals' to do that hiring. Maybe what I'm trying to say is we should train the people on the team on whatever it is they are missing in order to hire people better. The people on the team know best what they are looking for and what they need. It's not much different than being a GM at a pro sports team and drafting and getting free agents.
• PebblesHD 4y ago
  These styles of multi-round interviews inspired by the FAANG collective started picking up in Australia before the pandemic, but it got to a point where most of my more talented colleagues and I all agreed it just wasn’t worth the time for the salaries being offered. 4 round interviews for a ‘senior’ developer position on $120k? When interviewing my own candidates, I use a 1 hour interview mostly focused on approach and personality. We have a probation period to work out if they’ve over-promised, and most of our tech industry is big banks that won’t notice if they waste a few weeks salary trying someone out. Honestly, for the salaries the local market provides, I think 1 interview is fair. Any more and I think we’re wasting peoples time for nothing. Personally, I’ve dropped out of application processes when they’ve indicated there are multiple rounds, and my salary hasn’t suffered for it relative to my friends who put up with them, so I feel like I’m ahead.
  • PretzelPirate 4y ago
    I don't like having one interview with one interviewer. That can easily result in that interviewer having a bad day or simply being biased and costing someone a job.
    • PebblesHD 4y ago
      Agreed, it can also be uncomfortable for persons not of the same gender as the interviewer, so I always take a second person and try to ensure we always have a mix of men and women scheduled as that other person depending on who we’re interviewing to minimise the single point of me/another manager having a bad day.
    • profile53 4y ago
      Even in a panel or multiple round interview, it usually only takes one no to end the process for the candidate. So I don’t see how this is any worse.
      • PebblesHD 4y ago
        For one, this one only requires the candidate to provide an hour of their time, which for me is the main reason I personally avoid multi-round interviews.
• ineedasername 4y ago
  The VR role play interview with historical figures actually sounded kind of fun.
  • sys_64738 4y ago
    It's these types of games I just cannot put up with.
    • ineedasername 4y ago
      Well, certainly not in an interview. If I showed up and the interviewers sprung some sort of role play scenario or cheesy improv on me I'd be politely thanking them as I quickly shut the door on my way out. Actually it reminds me of an experience I haven't thought about in years, though not quite the same thing: Fresh out of college I was in a job I hated and desperate to find anything else. I found something advertised as, I think, a marketing job and got called in for an interview. When I arrived there were a dozen other people in the parking lot and the recruiters were ushering us all into a large passenger van where they said we'd split up along the way to some big box stores an hour or two away and be doing some type of soliciting. Donations? Selling crap? I don't know. I'd signed up for an interview, not whatever the hell this was supposed to be. I noped out of that real fast, just turned around and walked away. Wow, I don't think I've remembered that for 20 years. Anyway yeah, there are definitely some interview practices that should send a up visions of a truck full of red flags crashing into a truck full of "Warning!" signs as they explode outwards from the collision. And then you only walk towards the flaming wreck if you're a dozen kinds of desperate and the drivers crawling out of the debris are waiving paychecks.
• xivzgrev 4y ago
  this was pure gold "An Enneagram test and one-on-ones with nineteen different people in H.R. A fajita lunch, some improv games, and a Ping-Pong tournament, after which you will be evaluated on our five-dimensional Work Hard, Play Harder assessment matrix. A ninety-minute walk-and-chat around our man-made lagoon with our C.E.O., Benji, and Benji’s dog, Mr. Rex. (Mr. Rex will “interview” you with his barks!)" everything was pretty believable except 19 different people in HR. Would've been better just saying "19 different people". Because sometimes it feels like that!
• Kon-Peki 4y ago
  Our most recent hire just quit - after 2.5 months. Because the interview process at a “better” company finally ended with an offer. So you might get screwed even if you don’t play these games.
  • rfrey 4y ago
    Rather than being annoyed, maybe you should ask why the other offer was "better".
• swader999 4y ago
  And you are now hired! Note that there will be daily metrics collected on your keystroke rate, github contributions, slack response times, monthly managerial review and quarterly peer rankings. We also track your extra curricular internet and social media activity to ensure our members contribute to the greater good.
  • jdmg94 4y ago
    I had a job like that, every 10 mins: webcam shot, screenshot, average keystrokes
    • swader999 4y ago
      Did it work for the company? Did they ship quality features faster?
• mevorah 4y ago
  Shameless plug for my site chronicling the horrors of interview prep - https://interhaik.us https://interhaik.us
• treyfitty 4y ago
  I’ve been interviewing for 8 months. Getting to many final rounds, 1 lowballed offer, 1 rescinded offer, and it’s playing a mental toll. Today, I got a rejection that went along the lines of “everyone loved you and there was absolutely 0 negative feedback, but we just found a better fit.” I almost broke down, but hid behind a facade of positivity because the long weekend was starting and my kids can’t afford a bummed out Friday. Interviewing shouldn’t require such thick skin. I’m here questioning my life, and reduced to worthlessness.
  • heyitsguay 4y ago
    My partner just got off the tech job hunt roller coaster last week - signed a solid offer at a great company with a team she's excited to join. It took months, she encountered some similar disappointments, felt the same doubts and fears, and I know how awfully hard it can be. Keep rolling the dice though! It's hard but it will pay off.
  • jtchang 4y ago
    Interviewing is terrible. I'll just say keep your head up and don't let it get to you. It definitely does not have anything to do with your worth. That said there are a lot of people on HN. I would update your profile with at least your site/resume and what you are looking for.
  • throwawaysleep 4y ago
    This is why I just interview endlessly. At least one a week. You need to develop a callus to interviewing. Find the time for it by rubber stamping a few code reviews. It gets boring after a while. Just a very repetitive process after 100 or so.
    • d4mi3n 4y ago
      I do similar, though only a few times per year. I also advise all my colleagues (and sometimes managers!) to do likewise. My rationale: 1. Interviewing is a career skill that has an outsized influence on your earning potential. You need to practice it to get good and keep those skills sharp. 2. Interviewing regularly (minimum twice per year, YMMV) keeps you up to speed on what skills are in demand and what problems companies are trying to solve. 3. It's a great way to network. I'm up-front about being a passive candidate and I still get takers for interviews. Even if you don't take the job after passing an interview, you'll have a foot in the door if you revisit your interviewee in the near future or have somebody you can send their way. 4. You never know when you'll need to change jobs. Job satisfaction, change in life circumstances, layoffs/economic downturns, or any number of things completely outside of your control can force a change in your employment. It doesn't matter if you're happy, busy, or hate interviewing--interview regularly or suffer the consequences for being unpracticed and unprepared.
• VirusNewbie 4y ago
  I wonder how much the difficulty/pain of interviewing is a joint effort by big tech to make it annoying to switch jobs once you get in? I have met numerous FAANG engineers who say they would never want to do the process again and, despite [insert a normal work gripe], interviewing at another well paid company is too much work. Certainly before big tech agreed not to poach from each other once upon a rime, but now I wonder if this is a lower grade version of this?
  • WalterSear 4y ago
    Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice. Occam's razor.
• paulpauper 4y ago
  more money =longer interview seems to be the general rule of thumb.
• system16 4y ago
  I just recently went through this. Seven interviews over a period of nearly a month. I didn't get the position. The most frustrating thing was that there was so much repetition. Each round had one or more interviewers and I never met the same people twice. I can only assume none of them had context from the previous rounds because so many of the situational and culture type questions were basically identical. I couldn't even fake enthusiasm after the third round. Moving forward I will kindly be declining participating in any interview process that has more than three rounds. Besides being draining, it's a pretty good indicator of bigger problems in the company itself.
• thomasjudge 4y ago
  This is excellent
• antiterra 4y ago
  Hits close to home. I did an interview with a static analysis company and everything went well until the “People Gardeners” interview. It was a relatively short meeting that was mostly taken up by them asking basic career history questions, but part of it supposedly had some kind of personality fit methodology. I was told matter-of-factly that I was out of touch with my emotions and therefore couldn’t fit the team. To anyone who knows me, that’s basically the polar opposite of how I am. But, the ‘what if you’re wrong and are just oblivious?’ self-doubt circled for weeks. I can’t imagine what this sick joke of a psychology test would feel like for someone on the spectrum. I definitely got the vibe from the recruiter that this step was maddening and unpredictable.
  • skhameneh 4y ago
    What an asshole interviewer. I look back and think about a time I was asked what city I lived in and how big my house was (actually asked square footage...wtf) during a post-interview, but part of the interview, lunch. The more I look back and think about it, the more I question why I didn't just walk out then and there. It's so easy to slip into trying to fit bizarre culture interviews that one may not realize what's highly unethical in the moment.
  • cauefcr 4y ago
    Could be one of those ~stress interviews~ to ~see if you'll break or harden~ under adversity, I love arguing, so i got the job after one of those, and had the owner explain it to me exactly like that. It was the worst job I have ever held, you dodged a bullet on that one, as bad as it was.
    • antiterra 4y ago
      My best guess is they were looking for me to admit some negative emotion that I had when receiving criticism— but without being asked to describe negative feelings directly. In one example, I genuinely considered the criticism of a project helpful and unrelated to me as a person. In another I was far more concerned with my report’s experience than my own, so I didn’t bother mentioning it.
  • 4y ago
• temporallobe 4y ago
  The beginning of wisdom is to understand that nobody knows everything. I regularly interview candidates for my team and other teams. I can pretty much determine in about an hour if a candidate is a good fit or not. But one thing I have noticed lately is that some of them try to cheat (only possible with remote interviews of course). Basically they google answers as we are talking, or they have someone else do it in the background. It’s pretty obvious because there are long pauses, attempts to delay, indications that they’re reading something, and then they suddenly know the answers. They never say “I don’t know.” My “gotcha” technique is to ask a really esoteric question that I am certain the candidate would not know, and somehow, miracle of miracles, they suddenly know the answer after “thinking” about it for a minute. I actually don’t really care how much you know, rather, I care that you are honest, confident, resourceful, passionate, and that you communicate clearly. Obviously intelligence matters as well, and I’d take an intelligent person with the above-mentioned qualities who lacks knowledge in a particular technology than a “qualified” candidate who pretends to know everything and is a liar. And hey, I’ll be the first to admit that I live on stack overflow.
  • htrp 4y ago
    so basically the kobayashi maru? i like the approach, do you just outright ding someone due to the googling of answers offscreen?
  • Ologn 4y ago
    > I can pretty much determine in about an hour if a candidate is a good fit or not I have interviewed a lot of people. Most of the time I can determine three questions in if someone is not a good fit. This is on a technical interview. I have never done an interview where someone blew, or gave middling answers to the first three questions, and then recovered. Also, I never gave an interview where the person hit the first three questions out of the park and then started flagging, in terms of technical answers any how. In terms of people who did well on the first three questions but who did not get an offer, it was always due to "cultural" issues, and it was someone else (often the manager) who raised those cultural issues, with me sometimes disagreeing (for instance, my old manager thought someone was too arrogant, whereas I didn't mind).
• didip 4y ago
  I used to do interviews like a competitive sports. From there I got exposed to so many different (often ridiculous) styles of interviews. It used to be kind of entertaining to play those games. I cannot do that anymore because I have a kid.
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• _8j50 4y ago
  Fajita lunch and midnight skinny-dip? Worth it! Is there really such a high supply of startup workers?
  • sage76 4y ago
    Yes. With all these idiotic ideas of "everyone should code". I never saw a lawyer saying "everyone should become a lawyer".
• alfiedotwtf 4y ago
  ... At least they got a reply rather than being ghosted at the last stage
• stretchwithme 4y ago
  I thought for sure Mr. Rex was going to end up being the actual CEO.
• deleted 4y ago
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• Justsignedup 4y ago
  Okay to be frank, I enjoy interviews. And interviewing for 7 hours isn't a big deal for me with a company at all. However it just gets tiring. I'm actually going to be at a 7 hours total of interviewing with one company. 5 hours total with another (in addition to recruiter calls) and possibly even more. The thing is I know my worth, and this is actually a feeling the market round for me, so I'm not stressed at all. But I have done interviews where I spent 4 hrs writing some mock react app as a take-home, then another 4 hours of interviews, and those really get to me, they killed an evening for me. Those are the worst. Point is... Interviewing suuuucks when you're some of the highest paid employees in the company. Some hints I want to give for people interviewing: 1) Start the convo with salary expectations. Otherwise you spend 6 hours and find out its too low. I made this mistake. Don't be me. 2) Level set on seniority level and what would it take for you to leave your current job. If you despise your job, okay I can see this being quick, if you do not you're gonna be looking for potential negotiating power. 3) Enjoy the interview. Literally people want you to blabber on about yourself for 4 hours. Shit I could not think of a better way to get my cabin fever out of the way. Make this A LOT EASIER ON YOURSELF: make sure you know your talking points. Know your core stories you fall back to for all sort of behavioral questions. I'd say do 10 trial interviews, after about 10 you get REALLY good at this, then interview for the jobs you really really actually care about. If you can, conduct as many interviews as possible at work. Sit in them. Lead them. The more you conduct the easier you can interview for someone else. Its like free practice!!!! Best part, the thing you look for... the other side looks for when they interview you!!! 4) Brush up on a little bit of leet code, but also know how to take your time. Being able to ace the technical interview is a great way to go. Startups tend not to offer leet code because they can't be that picky. The best interviews are things like "did you read the code?!?!?!" "did you read the data structure?" "can you approach a technical problem well or do you get lost?" "can you debug?" How to ace technical interviews: interview a friend. What would YOU look for from a technical person? What helps you decide "wow this person really knows how to code" from "this person has memorized leet code questions". Then do that exact thing. Show them you understand trade-offs, you don't have to implement them but show you know about them, talk about ways your code could have been better if you had more time, learn to structure / attack problems in a modular way. All that makes you look GOOOOOOOD. 5) Make it a fun convo. Think of the interview as a date. Both of you want different things, but ultimately both of you want to show eachother a good time. So show them a good time, and let them show you a good time. You get people talking about their projects and fun technical challenges (if you ever interview with an architect). Remember, people LOVE TO TALK ABOUT THEMSELVES. If they do, they feel good. Make sure to answer what they need to make a decision and then throw in some happy they talk about their stuff into the mix. In any case. Make the interview fun, and long interviews turn out to be a fun time to hang out with new people and get cool short conversations going. And make a fuckton of money from it :)
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• aborsy 4y ago
  What are resources for such interviews? How many rounds should I expect, and for how long?
• SxC97 4y ago
  It's very refreshing to hear others complain about the interview culture at these companies. In the last year I've interviewed at Apple, Amazon, Meta, IBM and a couple others and failed every interview. I've only recently finished my undergrad in CS and am still working on my CS masters but despite doing well in school I felt like an absolute failure after every interview. It's somewhat comforting to hear this is a common occurrence.
  • KennyBlanken 4y ago
    Some of the most interesting and friendly places to work at, where I learned the most, were small companies. I strongly recommend you consider looking around for any small, cool tech companies in your area. Ask among your professors, look for local slack/discord groups, etc.
    • jeffrallen 4y ago
      Or watch for small, neat signs in low rent business parks. Someone who cares enough to present a tidy and professional image while economising on rent is going to make a good boss.
• 5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
  - If a job has more than 2 rounds, no thanks. - If they send me a leetcode or test before speaking to me, no thanks. - If the job ad says anything about "culture", no thanks. - If my first interview is with an HR person, no thanks. - If the job ad or email mention anything about making a video of myself, I will delete that mofo with extreme prejudice. - If the job application requires me to sign up to your website, no thanks. I have 15 years of commercial experience. When I apply for a job, all I want is to speak to one technical person in the team that has oversight. If that is too much to ask then I'm just not throwing my name in that hat for the inevitable humiliation ritual. But the reality is that (web-dev) jobs are over-saturated. There are plenty of people willing to go through this. Which is why I'm looking for a way out.
  • rendall 4y ago
    > If my first interview is with an HR person, no thanks I always think of these as a sniff-test. They just want to see if you are a real person, who can speak and recite whatever is on your CV/resume. If in-person, that you shower and dress. That's it. If you can pass that stage, you're on to the more expensive interviews.
    • bazmattaz 4y ago
      This is exactly what they are. The HR person just needs to rule out the weirdos and North Korean hackers! You would be foolish to not have that (very easy) chat with the Hr person just to progress
      • 5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
        you have to ask, why are they getting weirdos and north korean hackers. that's the reason i dont want to engage with these kind of companies. if you're talking to hr at stage 1, it just means the automated system validated your application has all the right keywords. its a red flag for me.
        • tmcz26 4y ago
• runeblaze 4y ago
  The thing I hate about interviewing is how aberrant it is -- companies ghosting as a common occurrence, the power-dynamics of an interviewer vs. an interviewee, the feeling of being evaluated constantly. It also can be an arms race of "how well can you find out the exact questions they will ask and prepare for it" sometimes because if you don't, many other can and will.
• samuell 4y ago
  Leads you to think they are just trying to see who wants the job the most.
• euroderf 4y ago
  So these companies are selecting for aptitude for repetitive, pointless, soul-crushing processes ?
• mostertoaster 4y ago
  I think there is like a skull and bones conspiracy that every founder who gets venture capital and every other mega company agrees to make interviews awful. That way employees don’t want to go through the trouble and would rather just stay where they are, and will accept less pay than they could get. It’s like a cartel and it works as long as everyone involved keeps up the gig. It’s either that or interviews just suck and no matter what you do they will suck. Or maybe interviews are just fine and people just need to accept they are stressful. If you can’t handle the stress, then build a good network with friends and relatives, and let a little nepotism make it easier. If you can’t do that then just accept you won’t get paid as much and your job might not be perfect.
  • htrp 4y ago
    I think the term you are looking for is cargo cult.
• rendall 4y ago
  I like especially the jump from May 5, 2022 "...we will follow up in two hours to two months" to the next letter dated September 10, 2022, over 4 months later.
  • maxk42 4y ago
    Went through a series of interviews back in March - May. Got several rejections recently, 4 - 5 months after my last communication from these companies. Yeah, it's okay. I got the message already.
• metters 4y ago
  My best interview experiences were with companies that either documented their full interview process on their website or told me beforehand how many rounds there are going to be and what to expect during each round. This includes sending me a onepager about each interview partner, so I could get to know something about them before meeting them. In the end there was one extra interview (after the three they told me about beforehand), but that was because my requested salary was higher than the company expected, so they wanted to make sure I was a good fit. EDIT: Those companies also scheduled all interviews for the same day. This way I could receive the offer/rejection within less than one week.
• mproud 4y ago
  In comparison, I got pretty damn lucky. I had only one interview. I showed up unscheduled, and uninvited. And I immediately got an offer at the end of it (pending background check). I’ve been there for over 16 years now.
  • r0b05 4y ago
    Sounds amazing. Please tell us the full story.
• smeagull 4y ago
  This is what Kafka would be writing about were he still alive
• koonsolo 4y ago
  What industry is this? For front-end developers, if you're not fast enough as a company, the best candidates are already gone. Talking about Europe here, not sure how it is in US.
  • rentfree-media 4y ago
    The US predominantly posts job openings for which no one will be hired for compliance. They actually hire H1B visa workers or contractors to churn out the code solely based on cost.
• jeffrallen 4y ago
  I found my last job by targeting a company I found fascinating and then finding a way to make myself useful to the CEO. It took 4 or 5 interactions with him over 6 months, and the last one was a formal "pair programming" session. I am not saying this would work for everyone, just noticing the interesting symmetry that when you find a job by networking instead of applying directly through the front door, the interview cycle is also long, but it is more about learning and adapting to the other than a high stakes set of judgements.
  • sage76 4y ago
    I think you are trying to make your process sound like a workaround, but it is impossible to scale and sounded painful to me anyways.
• carl_sandland 4y ago
  With regards to short term work; It does seem like the barrier of entry for shorter term contract work can be dramatically lower than with full-time "join our cult" scenarios. My personal pet peave is when smaller companies seem to go broke in the middle of an interview process, I guess it's for the best lol.
• mkl95 4y ago
  My longest interview process lasted around 7 weeks. During this time I basically met all my bosses, from my direct manager to C-level. I was going to do some formal engineering challenges initially, but they were eventually removed from the process. A few days after I joined the company an engineer at my level was fired, allegedly due to his performance. His manager said that the hiring process had been improved to prevent that from happening again. I instantly knew he was lying. The hiring process had actually been made more stupid because the company was struggling to attract engineers. I was actually the only candidate during the last few rounds of interviews.
• closedloop129 4y ago
  Can something be done that changes the dynamics in the job market? The underlying problem is that companies don't trust the existing available information. E.g. if individuals cannot be judged, could it be easier to hire entire teams? This would reduce the control that a company has over their software because the knowledge is gone if the team abandons the contract. So, could software be structured and documented to the extend that leaving teams are not a problem? And if so, would it be feasible to create enough software teams and software managed by teams that there is a working market?
  • jdmg94 4y ago
    Unionizing?
• thebeastie 4y ago
  Code interview practical exercises. Ive been asked to do them maybe 6-10 times. Each time I completed the test to a high standard and got rejected for other random reasons. Once I spend a day writing a PostgreSQL extension in C to shuttle data between tables, at the request of a company, and I didn’t even get an interview. Once I interviewed for a company and everything was great but they said my rate was too high even though I had told them up front. Once I showed up and the interviewer wasn’t even there and they hadn’t bothered to let me know. Once a dude got me to propose and diagram an architecture for their actual system during the interview and I didn’t hear from them again. Swindled. Then there’s having recruiters breathing down your neck and asking invasive questions while protecting all the details about the client and the job… Yea. Done with it
• sgt101 4y ago
  HR finally got smart and found something to do. At some point in the future there'll be a turn and we'll go back to an hour with the hiring manager.
• 3nd0rph1n 4y ago
  Interviewing processes have really gotten out of hand as of lately. I've recently witnessed the new practice of having candidates take online personality tests which claim to be able to determine my personality by having me answer to multiple choice questions like: 'I like arts' or 'I trust my parents' (ref.: https://www.hoganassessments.com/ https://www.hoganassessments.com/). I've had a hard laugh at this, while talking about it with a psychiatrist friend: how are you able to give value to said answers without any clue of context? I've spent most of my life dealing with my parents' alcohol abuse and suicidal tendencies, how am I gonna get judged by how much I trust them? How does it take my therapist so long to delve into such delicate topics, while HR can have me take a 10 minutes online test and get my life sorted out? I swear, I respect all crafts, but I swear HR is always the scummiest department wherever I go. It's basically -with due exceptions, like always in life- unskilled people lobbying to make each other look professional, while assuming they're CEOs, psychiatrists and technical leads, despite having chosen the HR career path on the sole basis of not having any expendable professional competence to apply in any field. And I don't say this with resentment, I've aced the hogan tests for all my interviews.
• russfink 4y ago
  I wonder what shaped the practice to be like this - megalomania, or companies legitimately getting burned?
  • jdmg94 4y ago
    Every recruitment department following the "GoOgLe StYlE iNtErViEwS "
• djenendik 4y ago
  Whenever these posts come up, there's a certain amount of hubris to be found. For those programmers who didn't jump through the hoops for a good gpa and now refuse to jump through hoops for a job, what exactly are you willing to do?
  • yellowapple 4y ago
    ...get actual work done?
• robbywashere_ 4y ago
  I have a theory about survivor bias and all the VC money raining down on every start up under the sun. Maybe there’s no feedback loop on hiring proper value adding employees because there doesn’t have to be.
• FunnyBadger 4y ago
  Honestly such a job would not worth it. The company seems utterly without process or clear understanding of what/who they are trying to hire - basically incompetent. Why work for an incompetent company? I'd rather start my own company and take the risks and rewards of that instead.
• esel2k 4y ago
  I thought I would laugh after this article, but in reality I could cry. My current new job, I had seriously a total of 9 interviews! And guess what - I thought it was kind of a red flag but still continued just to realize how much of a control freak top down management is in this company. My take-away: After 3 interviews start to ask yourself if maybe decision making is broken in this company. After 5 its a red flag.
• maryrose30922 4y ago
• Juliet245 4y ago
• Juliet245 4y ago
• thecolorblue 4y ago
  I have noticed more companies trying to schedule a whole day of interviews instead of spreading a lot of interviews out. It is only slightly better, as all of the stress and mental cost is fit into one day.
• Ekami 4y ago
  A little, less-known hack is to be hired as a freelancer/contractor, from there you just prove your worth and ask for a long time position. It allows you to bypass the multi-round interviews, have a greater negotiation power (cause they know what you're worth) and just stop loosing crap on bs tests for X and Y. This is what I did and it worked well for me. Before doing that I never went through interviews that had more than 3 rounds.