6 ms·

>For a typical job there were four or five interviews: an initial interview with a recruiter, an interview with a hiring manager, one or two technical interview

by arter4 3y ago

>For a typical job there were four or five interviews: an initial interview with a recruiter, an interview with a hiring manager, one or two technical interviews (either live coding, or going through a take-home assignment). There could also be an interview with a product manager, and/or one with a CTO or founder. All in all, quite a time commitment. This is not news at this point, but it is pretty crazy.

hansvm 3y ago
It's a long day for sure, but honestly I don't really mind it as a candidate, and that boils down to a few reasons (1) The time cost isn't as high as it seems. If I get as far as a phone screen I'm getting an offer, nearly guaranteed. The flow chart then looks like (a) if I don't get a phone screen, that awful process is no worse than the status quo, (b) if I do, I just find out in the phone screen if the battery of interviews has high latency (an 8hr day is fine, 8hrs over 2 months greatly complicates a job search) and drop out early the 20% of the time that happens, and (c) from there I have an 8hr day to a guaranteed job. Each offer then costs roughly 0.95/0.8~1.2 full interview processes, or 1.2x 4-8 hours. (2) That time cost is a bit annoying when it comes to competing offers (a single solid day isn't crazily expensive when you're about to get a 40% pay boost, but 5 solid days for a job search is ... 5x as expensive ... fine, but not ideal, and hard when you have finite vacation days). Somewhere around 1/2 of employers don't actually seem to care about producing proof of competing offers though. If they make an offer, you counter that you're worth some fixed XYZ instead (ideally doing enough research to choose the levers they're most likely to accommodate) and will sign immediately if they can make that happen, they'll go above and beyond to agree to your counter-offer. It's a waste of time for the whole industry to require counter-offers in the cases where everyone knows what you're worth (admittedly, when that's not the case, counter-offers are an unfortunate necessity to prove your worth). (3) The average tech interview is 10-20min solving the techno-babble and 30-50 probing what they know about the company and the team. New companies are very risky, and they work fairly hard to keep damning evidence out of the face of the public. You can mitigate a lot of risk by background-checking the executive team, but a present-day boots-on-the-ground view of things, ideally with the several overlapping/competing views you get from multiple team members, allows you to bounce out of problem situations early.
- brailsafe 3y ago
  Seems like a very personal and fortunate take depending on what you do or when in time that experience is based on, not that it's irrelevant, just far from generalizable, especially right now. Companies are looking for almost any reason to turn someone away, so a guaranteed offer coming from a phone screen, or for that matter even getting a phone screen, is either exaggerated, you're consistently incredible, or/and you're consistently incredible and in a niche with very little competition and big names on the CV. Even the author of the article admits they got quite lucky with the low numbers they experienced before getting an offer. I don't mean to be dismissive, but the markets are quite varying and intensely either saturated, competitive, or/and sparse right now, depnding on which market you're in and what your CV or skills look like, to the point where as a frontend dev I'm considering just switching to knitting or something more lucrative
- singron 3y ago
  Fwiw our hiring pipeline has 30%-70% of candidates make it to the next stage once past the phone screen (it has varied somewhat as we re-ordered or changed process). Assuming 3 stages until offer (e.g. HM interview, tech screen, full-day interviews), and offer-acceptance, with 50% success rate at each stage, 1/8 get an offer and 1/16 accept it. At 60% it's 1/4.6 and 1/7.8, so the exact rate makes a huge difference. The corollary to this sensitivity is that if you are just slightly better or worse at interviewing, you can see a huge difference in the number of companies you need to pass screening at to get a job. In practice, companies get more people into the pipeline than necessary to reduce the chance that it dries up without making the hires, so as a candidate, you will also have to take that into account. You can play around with the variables on this graph to see number of phone-screen-passes: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=y%3D1%2F%28x%5E4%29+where+x+in+%5B0.3%2C0.7%5D https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=y%3D1%2F%28x%5E4%29+whe...
- commandlinefan 3y ago
  > If I get as far as a phone screen I'm getting an offer Wow, I didn't observe this myself even back when the market was "hot". I had a _lot_ of phone screens that didn't lead to offers.
leosanchez 3y ago
At this point he might as well have an interview with the Janitor the too
- doubloon 3y ago
  i could learn more about a person by how they interact with the janitor than in hours of interviews and tests.
  - geodel 3y ago
    Indeed. This nauseating arrogance of software devs being not getting their due for value they deliver despite high 6 figure salaries is infuriating. As per them MBAs are chump, finance are bean counters, CEO moron, managers useless and janitor's job is to be done by robots anyway.
- who-shot-jr 3y ago
  [flagged]
sunsunsunsun 3y ago
We have lost candidates at my company which we had pretty much already decided were a fit after 1-2 interviews but we're still forced to go through the rigmarole of these extra interviews over several weeks. It's not just crazy it's also a waste of time and resources.
- brailsafe 3y ago
  I've lost out on numerous jobs after the 5 interview mark, often only receiving an automated "thanks for your interest". In one case it was multiple consecutive shorter interviews with random people on the team, after a take home assignment, etc.. it's incredibly defeating.
- jacurtis 3y ago
  I was interviewing with a company a year back. I had gone through 3 interviews and there were 2 more left of various song and dance required. The process was going well and I liked the company, but I was getting burnt out with the process across all my other interviews and I had received 2 other job offers that were good, so I just sent an email to the company that I was going to withdraw myself from consideration. I ended up getting an email from the team within minutes asking for a zoom where they literally begged me to keep going because they liked me the best of all the other candidates but are forced to have me go through the other interviews. They tried to get an exception for not doing the other interviews. They ended up being allowed to have only one more interview and they said that they could have an offer letter together within 24 hours of that interview. So I knew they were serious, but I was too tired and didnt love the bureaucracy of that place, so I just moved on.
  - jrs235 3y ago
    Ouch. I'm sure leadership and HR think they're dodging bullets too... (P.S. I think they're likely shooting themselves in the foot.)
- Buttons840 3y ago
  And how many of these company's core source of value is "we have a web page". I hope that having a bunch of unemployed developers out there will disrupt things. I suppose either way wages are going down though.
mgaunard 3y ago
Now think about being the people doing the recruiting, offering to 1% of the candidates they interview and still failing 30% of them during their trial period. Hiring is a huge time sink for all people involved. The best people are hard to find and the best jobs are hard to get.
- fbdab103 3y ago
  All I can think of is the recruiters who cannot have the courtesy to tell the other 99% they are no longer under consideration.
  - jiveturkey 3y ago
    Recruiters aren't paid to not recruit. Courtesy doesn't enter into it.
  - mgaunard 3y ago
    They get paid 30% of the salary of whoever they secure an offer for. They act according to whatever they think befits their interests.
- arter4 3y ago
  Sure but do you actually need the absolute best people around? An average company probably doesn't need exceptional developers. If you're not a tech company and you don't have an extremely challenging setup, your survival as a company doesn't rely on exceptional IT skills. You can do a lot with less than 10 virtual machines, any decent web app framework (Spring? Laravel?), and a version control system. Even apparently insane requirements are entirely reasonable: 100 thousands transactions per day is... 1 TPS. Make that 10 TPS to adjust for peaks. Unless you're doing extremely complex queries, you can definitely handle 10 TPS with reasonably limited resources. Meanwhile, cargo culting and FOMO leads companies to adopt tech stacks, interview styles,... that make sense for FAANGs and other unicorns, but not for your average setup.
  - sigsegv420 3y ago
    [dead]
stefan_ 3y ago
In my experience they could reliably cut out the recruiter and hiring manager interviews.
- jedberg 3y ago
  The hiring manager is for you, not them. It’s to make sure you actually want to work for that person. And usually HR is the one who is getting your comp and other requirements so again mostly for you.
- esafak 3y ago
  You don't want to interview your hiring manager??
- sys_64738 3y ago
  How has that worked out for you not knowing anything about the manager you'll report to?
  - sigsegv420 3y ago
    [dead]
throwawaymaths 3y ago
That's not crazy. Some of these are probably what 30 minutes? Tech interviews 60 mins? So what, five hours? Remember when on-site interviews meant an hour total commute plus say six hours of total interview plus lunch event. Some high demand companies put candidates through more than one round of that. Not to mention if you were flying from out of town... I remember a friend who interviewed with Google and got stuck in SF for three weeks due to snow storms on the east coast and got fired from Accenture as a result. Compared to this four-six hours scheduled at your leisure seems great, even if fragmented over a few days
- ChumpGPT 3y ago
  I'm kind of an old guy but I remember having interviews, just shooting the shit with the hiring manager and maybe a team lead present. Whole thing would last about 30 minutes and end with a handshake and an offer in 24-48 hours or a call to let me know I wasn't chosen. Between 1999 and 2019 I worked for 5 different companies and the interview process was basically the same. These were not small companies either. If someone told me today I'd have 6 interviews with homework, I'd tell them to fuck off. Thank goodness I retired......
  - ejb999 3y ago
    last time I interviewed for a job (and I am a sr developer with lengthy resume and all the 'right' skills for the job I was applying), after initial interview with recruiter and then hiring manager the recruiter said I had to take a coding test like I was some entry level programmer - I said no way, and thanks for your time - they made me an offer a few days later anyway. Sometimes you just need to push back - won't always work - but at least you can have some control over the process.
- yardstick 3y ago
  Hope they got the Google job then??
  - throwawaymaths 3y ago
    He did not.

by arter4 3y ago

hansvm 3y ago

It's a long day for sure, but honestly I don't really mind it as a candidate, and that boils down to a few reasons (1) The time cost isn't as high as it seems. If I get as far as a phone screen I'm getting an offer, nearly guaranteed. The flow chart then looks like (a) if I don't get a phone screen, that awful process is no worse than the status quo, (b) if I do, I just find out in the phone screen if the battery of interviews has high latency (an 8hr day is fine, 8hrs over 2 months greatly complicates a job search) and drop out early the 20% of the time that happens, and (c) from there I have an 8hr day to a guaranteed job. Each offer then costs roughly 0.95/0.8~1.2 full interview processes, or 1.2x 4-8 hours. (2) That time cost is a bit annoying when it comes to competing offers (a single solid day isn't crazily expensive when you're about to get a 40% pay boost, but 5 solid days for a job search is ... 5x as expensive ... fine, but not ideal, and hard when you have finite vacation days). Somewhere around 1/2 of employers don't actually seem to care about producing proof of competing offers though. If they make an offer, you counter that you're worth some fixed XYZ instead (ideally doing enough research to choose the levers they're most likely to accommodate) and will sign immediately if they can make that happen, they'll go above and beyond to agree to your counter-offer. It's a waste of time for the whole industry to require counter-offers in the cases where everyone knows what you're worth (admittedly, when that's not the case, counter-offers are an unfortunate necessity to prove your worth). (3) The average tech interview is 10-20min solving the techno-babble and 30-50 probing what they know about the company and the team. New companies are very risky, and they work fairly hard to keep damning evidence out of the face of the public. You can mitigate a lot of risk by background-checking the executive team, but a present-day boots-on-the-ground view of things, ideally with the several overlapping/competing views you get from multiple team members, allows you to bounce out of problem situations early.

brailsafe 3y ago
Seems like a very personal and fortunate take depending on what you do or when in time that experience is based on, not that it's irrelevant, just far from generalizable, especially right now. Companies are looking for almost any reason to turn someone away, so a guaranteed offer coming from a phone screen, or for that matter even getting a phone screen, is either exaggerated, you're consistently incredible, or/and you're consistently incredible and in a niche with very little competition and big names on the CV. Even the author of the article admits they got quite lucky with the low numbers they experienced before getting an offer. I don't mean to be dismissive, but the markets are quite varying and intensely either saturated, competitive, or/and sparse right now, depnding on which market you're in and what your CV or skills look like, to the point where as a frontend dev I'm considering just switching to knitting or something more lucrative
singron 3y ago
Fwiw our hiring pipeline has 30%-70% of candidates make it to the next stage once past the phone screen (it has varied somewhat as we re-ordered or changed process). Assuming 3 stages until offer (e.g. HM interview, tech screen, full-day interviews), and offer-acceptance, with 50% success rate at each stage, 1/8 get an offer and 1/16 accept it. At 60% it's 1/4.6 and 1/7.8, so the exact rate makes a huge difference. The corollary to this sensitivity is that if you are just slightly better or worse at interviewing, you can see a huge difference in the number of companies you need to pass screening at to get a job. In practice, companies get more people into the pipeline than necessary to reduce the chance that it dries up without making the hires, so as a candidate, you will also have to take that into account. You can play around with the variables on this graph to see number of phone-screen-passes: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=y%3D1%2F%28x%5E4%29+where+x+in+%5B0.3%2C0.7%5D https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=y%3D1%2F%28x%5E4%29+whe...
commandlinefan 3y ago
> If I get as far as a phone screen I'm getting an offer Wow, I didn't observe this myself even back when the market was "hot". I had a _lot_ of phone screens that didn't lead to offers.

leosanchez 3y ago

At this point he might as well have an interview with the Janitor the too

doubloon 3y ago
i could learn more about a person by how they interact with the janitor than in hours of interviews and tests.
- geodel 3y ago
  Indeed. This nauseating arrogance of software devs being not getting their due for value they deliver despite high 6 figure salaries is infuriating. As per them MBAs are chump, finance are bean counters, CEO moron, managers useless and janitor's job is to be done by robots anyway.
who-shot-jr 3y ago
[flagged]

sunsunsunsun 3y ago

We have lost candidates at my company which we had pretty much already decided were a fit after 1-2 interviews but we're still forced to go through the rigmarole of these extra interviews over several weeks. It's not just crazy it's also a waste of time and resources.

brailsafe 3y ago
I've lost out on numerous jobs after the 5 interview mark, often only receiving an automated "thanks for your interest". In one case it was multiple consecutive shorter interviews with random people on the team, after a take home assignment, etc.. it's incredibly defeating.
jacurtis 3y ago
I was interviewing with a company a year back. I had gone through 3 interviews and there were 2 more left of various song and dance required. The process was going well and I liked the company, but I was getting burnt out with the process across all my other interviews and I had received 2 other job offers that were good, so I just sent an email to the company that I was going to withdraw myself from consideration. I ended up getting an email from the team within minutes asking for a zoom where they literally begged me to keep going because they liked me the best of all the other candidates but are forced to have me go through the other interviews. They tried to get an exception for not doing the other interviews. They ended up being allowed to have only one more interview and they said that they could have an offer letter together within 24 hours of that interview. So I knew they were serious, but I was too tired and didnt love the bureaucracy of that place, so I just moved on.
- jrs235 3y ago
  Ouch. I'm sure leadership and HR think they're dodging bullets too... (P.S. I think they're likely shooting themselves in the foot.)
Buttons840 3y ago
And how many of these company's core source of value is "we have a web page". I hope that having a bunch of unemployed developers out there will disrupt things. I suppose either way wages are going down though.

mgaunard 3y ago

Now think about being the people doing the recruiting, offering to 1% of the candidates they interview and still failing 30% of them during their trial period. Hiring is a huge time sink for all people involved. The best people are hard to find and the best jobs are hard to get.

fbdab103 3y ago
All I can think of is the recruiters who cannot have the courtesy to tell the other 99% they are no longer under consideration.
- jiveturkey 3y ago
  Recruiters aren't paid to not recruit. Courtesy doesn't enter into it.
- mgaunard 3y ago
  They get paid 30% of the salary of whoever they secure an offer for. They act according to whatever they think befits their interests.
arter4 3y ago
Sure but do you actually need the absolute best people around? An average company probably doesn't need exceptional developers. If you're not a tech company and you don't have an extremely challenging setup, your survival as a company doesn't rely on exceptional IT skills. You can do a lot with less than 10 virtual machines, any decent web app framework (Spring? Laravel?), and a version control system. Even apparently insane requirements are entirely reasonable: 100 thousands transactions per day is... 1 TPS. Make that 10 TPS to adjust for peaks. Unless you're doing extremely complex queries, you can definitely handle 10 TPS with reasonably limited resources. Meanwhile, cargo culting and FOMO leads companies to adopt tech stacks, interview styles,... that make sense for FAANGs and other unicorns, but not for your average setup.
- sigsegv420 3y ago
  [dead]

stefan_ 3y ago

In my experience they could reliably cut out the recruiter and hiring manager interviews.

jedberg 3y ago
The hiring manager is for you, not them. It’s to make sure you actually want to work for that person. And usually HR is the one who is getting your comp and other requirements so again mostly for you.
esafak 3y ago
You don't want to interview your hiring manager??
sys_64738 3y ago
How has that worked out for you not knowing anything about the manager you'll report to?
- sigsegv420 3y ago
  [dead]

throwawaymaths 3y ago

That's not crazy. Some of these are probably what 30 minutes? Tech interviews 60 mins? So what, five hours? Remember when on-site interviews meant an hour total commute plus say six hours of total interview plus lunch event. Some high demand companies put candidates through more than one round of that. Not to mention if you were flying from out of town... I remember a friend who interviewed with Google and got stuck in SF for three weeks due to snow storms on the east coast and got fired from Accenture as a result. Compared to this four-six hours scheduled at your leisure seems great, even if fragmented over a few days

ChumpGPT 3y ago
I'm kind of an old guy but I remember having interviews, just shooting the shit with the hiring manager and maybe a team lead present. Whole thing would last about 30 minutes and end with a handshake and an offer in 24-48 hours or a call to let me know I wasn't chosen. Between 1999 and 2019 I worked for 5 different companies and the interview process was basically the same. These were not small companies either. If someone told me today I'd have 6 interviews with homework, I'd tell them to fuck off. Thank goodness I retired......
- ejb999 3y ago
  last time I interviewed for a job (and I am a sr developer with lengthy resume and all the 'right' skills for the job I was applying), after initial interview with recruiter and then hiring manager the recruiter said I had to take a coding test like I was some entry level programmer - I said no way, and thanks for your time - they made me an offer a few days later anyway. Sometimes you just need to push back - won't always work - but at least you can have some control over the process.
yardstick 3y ago
Hope they got the Google job then??
- throwawaymaths 3y ago
  He did not.