22 ms·

I have a doozy but I'm not comfortable sharing it without blanking the name of the company. The short version is I went through a ridiculous 7-stage interview p

by mvdtnz 3y ago

I have a doozy but I'm not comfortable sharing it without blanking the name of the company. The short version is I went through a ridiculous 7-stage interview process only to be told at the end (the night before my 8th and final interview) that they really liked me, got excellent feedback but were no longer hiring for that position.

ok_dad 3y ago
For that reason, and others, I tell recruiters I’ll do a max of three interviews before I expect an offer or rejection, not counting the initial discussion for fit with the recruiter. That’s a few hours of my time, and they shouldn’t expect any more than that. I had one company scoff at that, but I explained to them that they probably wouldn’t dedicate a single person to interview me eight times, because that would be a waste of time for that one person, and conversely individuals don’t have time to talk to eight or ten people over a month just for a single job these days either. By three times I know if I’m a fit for the job and as a hiring manager previously I never did more than three: myself and one person up and down from me in the org structure.
- ushakov 3y ago
  Best interview experience I had was a 3 hour after-work meetup with 3 people from the company. No coding challenges, but nice and insightful engineering chat. I got to meet the team and had an offer ready within week Worst was when a company told me they used my open-source project and wanted me to do 5 interview rounds, two of them being whiteboard-style. I didn’t expect that
  - ok_dad 3y ago
    My favorite interview involve no code. If you can only tell if someone is proficient at coding from a coding quiz, you’re a bad software dev manager.
    - blauditore 3y ago
      I very much disagree with this. There are bad engineers good at "sounding good", as long as it never gets too deep. Interviewed many people myself where they only started showing their real face while actually coding.
    - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
      Any SWE should already have a professional portfolio ready to share with employers. Even an entry-level coder should have some class projects and hobbies to show at that point. If you don't go around with a portfolio, then yeah, you can expect employers to be skeptical, and subject you to coding on the whiteboard, or leetcode or something, which isn't really going to reflect your actual coding ability, but it's more geared toward weeding out fakers in interviews. On the other hand, if you have a portfolio, especially a public one shared on GitHub or such, then you can directly point to it and take credit for a good, hopefully working project, and you can explain it at length, and your prospective employer should hopefully take this as a strong signal that your skills are commensurate with your CV.
      - josephg 3y ago
        If you run an opensource project on github, it’s remarkable how many times your repository will be forked into weird github accounts - that on closer inspection are just big lists of forked projects with nary an original patch to be found. I have no idea why people do this; but I suspect it might be to look good in interviews. No idea if it works - it’s pretty obvious if you look closer that they didn’t author any of the commits. But I wonder how many people are out there claiming credit for other people’s work to get hired.
        sokoloff 3y ago
        I do a fair amount of that in my own github account. If I have no commits in a forked repo, it was probably just a form of "bookmarking".
        StreetChief 3y ago
        You can also fork to preserve a repo, although apparently GitHub can removed forked repos alongside the original during takedown action. (To avoid, do the fork manually).
ska 3y ago
Sometimes that is just bad internal communication. I once had something similar happen, but I'd been flown across country for a couple days of interviews. Day 1 morning someone met me and said "this is awkward, but...". I couldn't be too mad, it was in an interesting city and I effectively got a short paid for vacation.
- jijji 3y ago
  I had one interview one time in around 1999 with Merrill Lynch in Princeton NJ that I got flown out to and then I show up and get signed in, then I am meeting with some guy who tells me that I was never scheduled to be interviewed.... I told the guy I literally flew out here from 2000 miles away to do this interview and had emails and plane tickets to prove it, and they just told me like that and I left without the interview.... I didn't have to pay for the plane tickets, but that was probably the most ridiculous one I ever went to.
at-fates-hands 3y ago
Something similar happened to me. The crazy thing is like 10 months later I got hired as a contractor at that same company and asked one of the devs what happened to the manager I interviewed with last year. They told me the woman was a bit of a firebrand and after several years at the company was fired because she was trying to hire more developers and upper management didn't have the money or resources to do so - but she went ahead anyways and tried to do it. I was one of the casualties who didn't get hired because of her stunt.
- Beldin 3y ago
  But then the company hired you as an external contractor? Maybe that manager had more of a point than the higher-ups realised.
foobazzy 3y ago
That happened to me, but slightly different: The 8th guy looked at my resume and, without talking to me, decided I'm under-qualified. He cancelled the call 1 hour before it was scheduled. Qualifying 7 rounds before that, and getting positive reviews from 7 of his peers wasn't enough to instill confidence over my resume. Now I thank my lucky stars. Because that's a representation of the minuscule level of trust and team cohesion that these people have in their peers. Good riddance.

by mvdtnz 3y ago

ok_dad 3y ago

For that reason, and others, I tell recruiters I’ll do a max of three interviews before I expect an offer or rejection, not counting the initial discussion for fit with the recruiter. That’s a few hours of my time, and they shouldn’t expect any more than that. I had one company scoff at that, but I explained to them that they probably wouldn’t dedicate a single person to interview me eight times, because that would be a waste of time for that one person, and conversely individuals don’t have time to talk to eight or ten people over a month just for a single job these days either. By three times I know if I’m a fit for the job and as a hiring manager previously I never did more than three: myself and one person up and down from me in the org structure.

ushakov 3y ago
Best interview experience I had was a 3 hour after-work meetup with 3 people from the company. No coding challenges, but nice and insightful engineering chat. I got to meet the team and had an offer ready within week Worst was when a company told me they used my open-source project and wanted me to do 5 interview rounds, two of them being whiteboard-style. I didn’t expect that
- ok_dad 3y ago
  My favorite interview involve no code. If you can only tell if someone is proficient at coding from a coding quiz, you’re a bad software dev manager.
  - blauditore 3y ago
    I very much disagree with this. There are bad engineers good at "sounding good", as long as it never gets too deep. Interviewed many people myself where they only started showing their real face while actually coding.
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    Any SWE should already have a professional portfolio ready to share with employers. Even an entry-level coder should have some class projects and hobbies to show at that point. If you don't go around with a portfolio, then yeah, you can expect employers to be skeptical, and subject you to coding on the whiteboard, or leetcode or something, which isn't really going to reflect your actual coding ability, but it's more geared toward weeding out fakers in interviews. On the other hand, if you have a portfolio, especially a public one shared on GitHub or such, then you can directly point to it and take credit for a good, hopefully working project, and you can explain it at length, and your prospective employer should hopefully take this as a strong signal that your skills are commensurate with your CV.
    - josephg 3y ago
      If you run an opensource project on github, it’s remarkable how many times your repository will be forked into weird github accounts - that on closer inspection are just big lists of forked projects with nary an original patch to be found. I have no idea why people do this; but I suspect it might be to look good in interviews. No idea if it works - it’s pretty obvious if you look closer that they didn’t author any of the commits. But I wonder how many people are out there claiming credit for other people’s work to get hired.
      - sokoloff 3y ago
        I do a fair amount of that in my own github account. If I have no commits in a forked repo, it was probably just a form of "bookmarking".
      - StreetChief 3y ago
        You can also fork to preserve a repo, although apparently GitHub can removed forked repos alongside the original during takedown action. (To avoid, do the fork manually).

ska 3y ago

Sometimes that is just bad internal communication. I once had something similar happen, but I'd been flown across country for a couple days of interviews. Day 1 morning someone met me and said "this is awkward, but...". I couldn't be too mad, it was in an interesting city and I effectively got a short paid for vacation.

jijji 3y ago
I had one interview one time in around 1999 with Merrill Lynch in Princeton NJ that I got flown out to and then I show up and get signed in, then I am meeting with some guy who tells me that I was never scheduled to be interviewed.... I told the guy I literally flew out here from 2000 miles away to do this interview and had emails and plane tickets to prove it, and they just told me like that and I left without the interview.... I didn't have to pay for the plane tickets, but that was probably the most ridiculous one I ever went to.

at-fates-hands 3y ago

Something similar happened to me. The crazy thing is like 10 months later I got hired as a contractor at that same company and asked one of the devs what happened to the manager I interviewed with last year. They told me the woman was a bit of a firebrand and after several years at the company was fired because she was trying to hire more developers and upper management didn't have the money or resources to do so - but she went ahead anyways and tried to do it. I was one of the casualties who didn't get hired because of her stunt.

Beldin 3y ago
But then the company hired you as an external contractor? Maybe that manager had more of a point than the higher-ups realised.

foobazzy 3y ago

That happened to me, but slightly different: The 8th guy looked at my resume and, without talking to me, decided I'm under-qualified. He cancelled the call 1 hour before it was scheduled. Qualifying 7 rounds before that, and getting positive reviews from 7 of his peers wasn't enough to instill confidence over my resume. Now I thank my lucky stars. Because that's a representation of the minuscule level of trust and team cohesion that these people have in their peers. Good riddance.