5 ms·

> * They had a _full_ pipeline, interviewing every day for three weeks straight. It's a grind, but you definitely get "in the zone". Additionally, setting this

> * They had a _full_ pipeline, interviewing every day for three weeks straight. It's a grind, but you definitely get "in the zone". Additionally, setting this goal ensures that you are being properly proactive/aggressive in pursuing opportunities. As a married man nearing his 40s I can't imagine doing this. I need to keep my full time job to support my family, so just quit and focus 100% on prepping is not an option. Assuming a 5 1-hour round interview, I would need to take PTO or somehow juggle my calendar to take interviews. I'm horrified at the thought of taking one week off and doing interviews for 5 days straight. I guess I'll cross that bridge when I get there.

zdragnar 4y ago
I've done a 5 1-hour round interview once, and have refused to do them since- including actively turning down a second interview when the process wasn't clear prior to the initial screener call. I've the good fortune of pretty much being able to pick and choose between jobs, but I also essentially have written off working at a FAANG and at companies run by former or wannabe FAANG engineers. Fortunately, there are still lots of good startups, small and medium sized companies that pay well and actually respect your time.
- ramraj07 4y ago
  What was your ideal interview experience that you also considered to be very effective?
  - ornornor 4y ago
    Personally, 30–60 min HR screen/people stuff and 1h tech interview, with maybe an other hour or two of paid take home assignment. Along with past experience on CV this should be enough to assess whether a candidate is suitable for the 3 or 6 months probation employment. If after all this you still can’t decide whether the candidate is a match and worth keeping permanently post probation, your hiring and working processes are seriously broken. I don’t understand then need for multiple, hours long, dozen interviewers processes.
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    To respond to both you and the sibling comment, a short take home assignment which is used to guide a final interview is fine for junior positions. For senior positions, I would rather spend an hour or two talking through hypothetical scenarios, including design decisions and teamwork. I want to hear deeper knowledge from a candidate, not "do they know valid syntax and are they able to solve trivial problems". As in all things, it depends on the company that is doing the hiring and the role they are being hired for. In some cases, "senior" roles are basically individual contributors with a few years of experience. In others, a senior should be able to translate business requirements into a big picture technical solution, break down the portions of the stack they are familiar with, and explain what assumptions are made and what unknown factors need to be sussed out in order to plan a proper implementation. The latter portion is difficult to do with a take home assignment without careful planning for the follow-up interviews. 5 hour round-robin interviews typically (in my experience) end up being "live leet code" sessions that don't represent day-to-day work at all.
turing_complete 4y ago
You can take vacation or save some money before quitting. Or just do a few interviews per week while working like most people.
- listenallyall 4y ago
  sorry kids, no Disneyland this year, I used up my vacation days back in Feb when I interviewed for a week straight
  - dan-robertson 4y ago
    “Thanks for accepting our offer. When would you like to start?” “Well my notice expires at my current job in two weeks but I’d like to take a short break in between to decompress / spend time with my family.” “Obviously we’d like to have you as soon as possible but we don’t want to keep you from your family. How about six weeks from now?” “Works for me.” Obviously different companies/roles will be differently flexible and bigger companies will be more tolerant of delaying start by longer. And you can only do that if you get a job offer somewhere. But the parent comment wasn’t even suggesting taking holiday to interview for a week straight right?
  - osigurdson 4y ago
    >> sorry kids, no Disneyland this year, I used up my vacation days back in Feb when I interviewed for a week straight As a kid, I went to Disneyland exactly zero times. There are hasher realities for many.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Given the choice of being able to take little Timmy to Disney world and providing him food and shelter and being able to cash flow him through college, he will get over it. Before you respond that I don’t know what it’s like juggling a family and I must be a fresh college grad, the 74 in my username has significance
    - Haegin 4y ago
      Woah! 74 kids. That's crazy!
dan-robertson 4y ago
Note that the person in this article (a) wasn’t working at the time and (b) deliberately wanted a lot of interviews to explore their options. I think it pretty obviously isn’t the only way to do things. One needn’t interview at so many companies. If one is in no rush to quit then just spread interviews out over a much longer time.
turdprincess 4y ago
I think the problem these days is that it’s so hard to fire someone. I’m not sure if it’s legal, cultural or otherwise, but I constantly see coworkers who are at best useless and often detrimental being kept on and on and on. So the game becomes to avoid hiring someone like that at all costs, because once they are hired they are impossible to get rid of. I wish employment was more like contracting - you give someone a trial for a few weeks and then end it it’s not a mutual fit. No long interview necessary - the job is the interview.
- shagie 4y ago
  Unless the person is truly a net negative producing programmer - firing, hiring (1-2 month process), onboarding, and then hoping they don't job hop tends to be even more expensive for an organization than having them plod away slowly. If they are a NNPP, gathering the necessary documentation and putting them on a PIP or shuffling them to another team is likely an easier path.
  - turdprincess 4y ago
    That’s a fair point. I think it’s interesting that the bar for getting a job is so high, while the bar for keeping your job is so low. I think what might be happening is a vicious feedback loop of * companies hiring too many smart engineers * those engineers are in turn very bored and don’t have much to do so they check out * not much gets done so more people get hired to do more stuff.
    - shagie 4y ago
      The high bar is a combination of several factors. First, many more applicants than positions. If you've got 100 for a single position, then selecting the best 10 out of that set will look like a high hiring bar when it is 'just' a "we don't have time to interview everyone." And many positions get many more than 100 applicants per position. Next, the aspect of job hoping that has become fairly common in the past decade. If the average tenure of the person hired in the last 10 years is decreasing because the person can get paid more by switching companies then the other side of the push will be to raise the bar so that the new hire will require less onboarding and be able to be productive faster. If the company is using Kafka in house, and it takes two months to really get to the point of understanding it and the person leaves after a year, that's two months lost. So, instead hire someone who understands it and only requires a week to pick up the peculiarities here so that when they leave in a year you haven't lost a portion of the time getting them familiar with the tech stack. Lastly, it is a pain to fire someone. You need documentation about their issues and that it is performance related and that its not done during a 30 day window where they've fired 49 other people and that HR is ensuring that they've got the CYA on a wrongful dismissal documented. And then, even when you do fire someone, you've got to go back and reopen the position and hire again and that takes two months from the time you submit the job description to HR to starting a new person along with at least a week of manager and interviewer time in the process. The safest thing for a company to do is move them over to a team that does low priority, low impact things and never promote them in an engineering capacity. Note that sometimes when you move a person from a dev job to a QA or operations job you'll get the person coming back with constructive dismissal which takes time to handle.
fma 4y ago
As an engineering manager on multiple projects, my calendar is jam packed. My developers who are on one, or at most two projects have their calendars fairly empty (which is a good thing). I had folks who took many interviews within a short time span and I had no clue at all. I barely have time to take a lunch break. Yes - I can manage my calendar better, but then people would get suspicious, or I'd be worried some emergency comes up. When I used to interview, I'd just start having more "doctor appointments" or what not and block off a few hours. Also, these were back in the days of going on-site for interviews. My engineers who quit did it all remotely, even the final round (covid times...) so it's more manageable.
- sumanthvepa 4y ago
  You need to actively prune your calendar. Regardless of whether or not you want to interview for a job. If you entire working day is filled with meetings, you will not have the time to actually do good work as manager that only you can do. It's probably worth your while to block off 2-3 hours of your work day for individual contributor work (say thinking/working about strategy or product or engineering roadmap.) Just go out to the local coffeeshop. Invite other mangers occasionally to join you. You just use that time to become strategic about your work. When the the time comes to interview, nobody will notice that you've not been around for a few hours. CEOs routinely do this when they have to take sensitive meetings. They are not usually in their offices most of the day.
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  "doctor appointments" are also great for refusing full day of interviews. I have used that technique before. Or "I need to visit a friend/relative in hospital". They back-off immediately.
ornornor 4y ago
> As a married man nearing his 40s I can't imagine doing this. I need to keep my full time job to support my family, so just quit and focus 100% on prepping is not an option. That’s by design. Most places don’t want people like you. They want pliable, naive employees who will kill themselves for the company and not count their hours.

zdragnar 4y ago

I've done a 5 1-hour round interview once, and have refused to do them since- including actively turning down a second interview when the process wasn't clear prior to the initial screener call. I've the good fortune of pretty much being able to pick and choose between jobs, but I also essentially have written off working at a FAANG and at companies run by former or wannabe FAANG engineers. Fortunately, there are still lots of good startups, small and medium sized companies that pay well and actually respect your time.

ramraj07 4y ago
What was your ideal interview experience that you also considered to be very effective?
- ornornor 4y ago
  Personally, 30–60 min HR screen/people stuff and 1h tech interview, with maybe an other hour or two of paid take home assignment. Along with past experience on CV this should be enough to assess whether a candidate is suitable for the 3 or 6 months probation employment. If after all this you still can’t decide whether the candidate is a match and worth keeping permanently post probation, your hiring and working processes are seriously broken. I don’t understand then need for multiple, hours long, dozen interviewers processes.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  To respond to both you and the sibling comment, a short take home assignment which is used to guide a final interview is fine for junior positions. For senior positions, I would rather spend an hour or two talking through hypothetical scenarios, including design decisions and teamwork. I want to hear deeper knowledge from a candidate, not "do they know valid syntax and are they able to solve trivial problems". As in all things, it depends on the company that is doing the hiring and the role they are being hired for. In some cases, "senior" roles are basically individual contributors with a few years of experience. In others, a senior should be able to translate business requirements into a big picture technical solution, break down the portions of the stack they are familiar with, and explain what assumptions are made and what unknown factors need to be sussed out in order to plan a proper implementation. The latter portion is difficult to do with a take home assignment without careful planning for the follow-up interviews. 5 hour round-robin interviews typically (in my experience) end up being "live leet code" sessions that don't represent day-to-day work at all.

turing_complete 4y ago

You can take vacation or save some money before quitting. Or just do a few interviews per week while working like most people.

listenallyall 4y ago
sorry kids, no Disneyland this year, I used up my vacation days back in Feb when I interviewed for a week straight
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  “Thanks for accepting our offer. When would you like to start?” “Well my notice expires at my current job in two weeks but I’d like to take a short break in between to decompress / spend time with my family.” “Obviously we’d like to have you as soon as possible but we don’t want to keep you from your family. How about six weeks from now?” “Works for me.” Obviously different companies/roles will be differently flexible and bigger companies will be more tolerant of delaying start by longer. And you can only do that if you get a job offer somewhere. But the parent comment wasn’t even suggesting taking holiday to interview for a week straight right?
- osigurdson 4y ago
  >> sorry kids, no Disneyland this year, I used up my vacation days back in Feb when I interviewed for a week straight As a kid, I went to Disneyland exactly zero times. There are hasher realities for many.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Given the choice of being able to take little Timmy to Disney world and providing him food and shelter and being able to cash flow him through college, he will get over it. Before you respond that I don’t know what it’s like juggling a family and I must be a fresh college grad, the 74 in my username has significance
  - Haegin 4y ago
    Woah! 74 kids. That's crazy!

dan-robertson 4y ago

Note that the person in this article (a) wasn’t working at the time and (b) deliberately wanted a lot of interviews to explore their options. I think it pretty obviously isn’t the only way to do things. One needn’t interview at so many companies. If one is in no rush to quit then just spread interviews out over a much longer time.

turdprincess 4y ago

I think the problem these days is that it’s so hard to fire someone. I’m not sure if it’s legal, cultural or otherwise, but I constantly see coworkers who are at best useless and often detrimental being kept on and on and on. So the game becomes to avoid hiring someone like that at all costs, because once they are hired they are impossible to get rid of. I wish employment was more like contracting - you give someone a trial for a few weeks and then end it it’s not a mutual fit. No long interview necessary - the job is the interview.

shagie 4y ago
Unless the person is truly a net negative producing programmer - firing, hiring (1-2 month process), onboarding, and then hoping they don't job hop tends to be even more expensive for an organization than having them plod away slowly. If they are a NNPP, gathering the necessary documentation and putting them on a PIP or shuffling them to another team is likely an easier path.
- turdprincess 4y ago
  That’s a fair point. I think it’s interesting that the bar for getting a job is so high, while the bar for keeping your job is so low. I think what might be happening is a vicious feedback loop of * companies hiring too many smart engineers * those engineers are in turn very bored and don’t have much to do so they check out * not much gets done so more people get hired to do more stuff.
  - shagie 4y ago
    The high bar is a combination of several factors. First, many more applicants than positions. If you've got 100 for a single position, then selecting the best 10 out of that set will look like a high hiring bar when it is 'just' a "we don't have time to interview everyone." And many positions get many more than 100 applicants per position. Next, the aspect of job hoping that has become fairly common in the past decade. If the average tenure of the person hired in the last 10 years is decreasing because the person can get paid more by switching companies then the other side of the push will be to raise the bar so that the new hire will require less onboarding and be able to be productive faster. If the company is using Kafka in house, and it takes two months to really get to the point of understanding it and the person leaves after a year, that's two months lost. So, instead hire someone who understands it and only requires a week to pick up the peculiarities here so that when they leave in a year you haven't lost a portion of the time getting them familiar with the tech stack. Lastly, it is a pain to fire someone. You need documentation about their issues and that it is performance related and that its not done during a 30 day window where they've fired 49 other people and that HR is ensuring that they've got the CYA on a wrongful dismissal documented. And then, even when you do fire someone, you've got to go back and reopen the position and hire again and that takes two months from the time you submit the job description to HR to starting a new person along with at least a week of manager and interviewer time in the process. The safest thing for a company to do is move them over to a team that does low priority, low impact things and never promote them in an engineering capacity. Note that sometimes when you move a person from a dev job to a QA or operations job you'll get the person coming back with constructive dismissal which takes time to handle.

fma 4y ago

As an engineering manager on multiple projects, my calendar is jam packed. My developers who are on one, or at most two projects have their calendars fairly empty (which is a good thing). I had folks who took many interviews within a short time span and I had no clue at all. I barely have time to take a lunch break. Yes - I can manage my calendar better, but then people would get suspicious, or I'd be worried some emergency comes up. When I used to interview, I'd just start having more "doctor appointments" or what not and block off a few hours. Also, these were back in the days of going on-site for interviews. My engineers who quit did it all remotely, even the final round (covid times...) so it's more manageable.

sumanthvepa 4y ago
You need to actively prune your calendar. Regardless of whether or not you want to interview for a job. If you entire working day is filled with meetings, you will not have the time to actually do good work as manager that only you can do. It's probably worth your while to block off 2-3 hours of your work day for individual contributor work (say thinking/working about strategy or product or engineering roadmap.) Just go out to the local coffeeshop. Invite other mangers occasionally to join you. You just use that time to become strategic about your work. When the the time comes to interview, nobody will notice that you've not been around for a few hours. CEOs routinely do this when they have to take sensitive meetings. They are not usually in their offices most of the day.
throwaway2037 4y ago
"doctor appointments" are also great for refusing full day of interviews. I have used that technique before. Or "I need to visit a friend/relative in hospital". They back-off immediately.

ornornor 4y ago

> As a married man nearing his 40s I can't imagine doing this. I need to keep my full time job to support my family, so just quit and focus 100% on prepping is not an option. That’s by design. Most places don’t want people like you. They want pliable, naive employees who will kill themselves for the company and not count their hours.