8 ms·

Why tech job interviews became such a nightmare

74 points by namanyayg 3y ago

lunaticlabs 3y ago
I've been a manager in software development on and off for the last 20 years now, and to echo what many of the more experienced managers here say, interviews at best give you some negative signals, but very rarely anything that I would consider a hugely positive signal. At best, I've quite gotten along with a charismatic candidate, but in my own career, even this has little correlation to people that I liked actually working with. That being said, I think that a candidate's work history and general questions is good enough. In my experience, it's been painfully obvious everytime someone is bullshitting (or at least I think so, I never hired those people), and I haven't had any experiences where I've hired anyone directly that was a true disaster. Of all the people I've managed, I've had to fire very few, and in the cases that I did it was entirely unacceptable office behavior that led to the dismissal, and it also should not have been a surprise to anyone involved. That isn't to say everyone worked out perfectly every time, but as a manager, I've been able to address most of those situations (and in the cases where I couldn't, it ended up being some of the very few dismissals). Approaching people who work with me with the benefit of the doubt has broadly been more successful. I address problems as something I want to help people fix, and not as something to be punished. Of the 50 or so people I've directly managed at this point, there's only a handful I wouldn't work with again.
TimPC 3y ago
Are tech job interviews really such a nightmare? Compared to other professions with similar pay? Leetcode can be a bit annoying and unrealistic, but it's not the end of the world, it just means putting in some study time before interviews. Jobs are also becoming better and lower risk. Many companies have gotten rid of the one year cliff on RSUs so you can potentially take a job that doesn't work, leave after 10 months and get 9 months of equity. That's a huge win when a lot of these roles have been half equity and you used to get zero.
- reedf1 3y ago
  Entry-level and non-senior positions have truly hellish interview processes. Five-six interview stages, week+ take-home projects, ghosting, zero-feedback. Large number of companies interviewing with no intention of hiring. This is absolutely worse than other professions, I've recently made a bit of a career change and the interview involved one informal conversation, and my past experience/education was actually taken at face value.
  - kstrauser 3y ago
    That mirrors my experience. Recent interviews have been mentally challenging because the other person was poking hard at the limits of my knowledge, but the process itself was easy. Example question we spent half an hour on: Tell me a decision you made at your last job that you would do differently now. That opened the door to a million roads. Is candidate self-reflective? Can they admit mistakes? Was the mistake a reasonable idea given limited knowledge? How deep can they go with their explanation? Can they explain their work to others? That was fun because it let me show what I can do, and it would be damn near impossible to bluff one’s way through. It beats the hell outta take-home exercises or “let’s say you’re writing a program to calculate the volume of a lake…”-type coding tests.
    - whstl 3y ago
      I always ask those kinds of questions. I also ask what people are proud about. But I rarely get good answers, it's always some generic answers like "I built software for the company". Some people even fail to remember anything. Interviewing is hard :/
      - kstrauser 3y ago
        I’ve been on the other side of the table my share of times, and it’s so hard. I think that style has lots of signal, though. I don’t really wanna work with someone who can’t describe something they spent the last 2 years working on. Cheers for Team Grown-Up Conversation!
gargs 3y ago
Gatekeeping also has something to do with this.
argiopetech 3y ago
https://archive.is/TrQPt https://archive.is/TrQPt
baggachipz 3y ago
The article didn't really address why the interviews are "such a nightmare", other than insinuating that the balance of power has shifted to employers.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Worse still, it pretends that interviews only became nightmarish last year, and everything was great up to 2022.
  - CuriouslyC 3y ago
    I will say that brutal, annoying many stage interviews used to be more common at FAANGS, with your average shop usually just having a whiteboard interview and 1-2 phone screens. I think the thing that's changed is that with the influx of all the laid off FAANG engineers, non-FAANG shops have started being more picky/asky.
hprotagonist 3y ago
My perspective has long been -- since well before the free money printer stopped going brr -- that the reason tech interviews are insane has little to do with rising interest rates or monetary factors per se. It's because tech dev / coding jobs are one of the few white collar fields that, historically, have not de-facto required a pile of advanced degrees. Maybe i'm getting old, but "you don't need a degree if you're hot shit" has long been part of the atmosphere: from old school hackers to the long history of founders who drop out of school to work on their startup, etc. This directly leads to interviews being the gate: if we can't know what you are by what degrees you have / what papers you published / what lab you did your dissertation in / what bar exam you passed / what hospital you did your residency in / who you clerked for / etc. ... then we're going to have to do all 4-8 years of post-undergrad pain and suffering all at once, during the interview, so grab a whiteboard and buckle up! It's ... less than ideal. edit: what's less than ideal is the perverse incentive force that creates bad interviews. The recognition that a degree doesn't guarantee job fit is not a bad one, though; you really can be more successful in software dev if you're self-taught / uncredentialed than you can in many other disciplines.
- goalieca 3y ago
  I would like to say that I’ve known and worked with PhDs that were good and some that were totally useless. I wouldn’t trust it as a very useful signal for a job interview. Programming is more of a trade and academic institutions barely teach the craft.
  - jebarker 3y ago
    In my experience the ones to avoid (at work and in life generally) are the folks with PhDs that bring it up all the time as if it's important and bestows upon them some special power.
    - datadrivenangel 3y ago
      What's the point of getting a PhD if people don't call you DR?
ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
Leetcode interviews are actually very similar to asian country style college entrance exams. Foreign engineers (> 75% of engineers at FAANG are foreign), will spend months studying. Turns out people willing to study like that also make reliable employees that proved they can learn computer science. This to the detriment of regular americans that dont want to prove themselves every time they switch jobs.
- devoutsalsa 3y ago
  As an American, I'd much rather someone else prove myself for me when I switch jobs. I'm willing to be a convenience charge for the huge salary I take home if someone is willing to get it for me.
  - ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
    General opinion I see is that its fine when youre young, but when you get experienced with kids, solving leetcode hards/mediums in 30 minutes becomes a nightmare.
- jon-wood 3y ago
  In my experience though being able to learn computer science isn't actually a very useful indicator of your ability to deliver the sort of software most companies are developing. I'd be willing to bet that even within Google or Microsoft there's far more software which just queries a database and displays some results than that which requires actual computer science to develop. The hard bit of most development jobs is the fuzzy stuff. Working out what it is you're building in the first place. Negotiating on which of those requirements can be dropped to massively reduce complexity. Trying to avoid being talked into building a simple piece of software as eighteen intertangled microservices each with a dedicated team. Once you've dealt with those bits the actual software development is usually easy.
- danpalmer 3y ago
  Having done many interviews, I can say that studying that much often doesn't help as much as one might think. Yes, I think someone in industry for 10 years will need to brush up with a few days of revision, and I think that's a bit of a pain, but I've had many candidates who have spent months of free time doing leetcode who can't actually think about an abstract problem, or who can't code their way out of a paper bag when it gets to a more real world example. My previous place used to have a 3 hour (capped) take home assignment. Most candidates who progressed claimed to have taken ~90-120 mins and finished comfortably (although they were not judged based on this). Over the years a number of candidates went "above and beyond", without asking, and submitted an "even better" solution after 8+ hours. None of them passed, even based on their final submission. More does not equal better. I think at most FAANG places you need a baseline knowledge, but many people go overboard, and over-fit, possibly because they don't have the baseline ability and are trying to make up for it. There are a bunch of issues with FAANG style hiring, I'm not a huge fan, but I don't think what you've described is the problem.
Y_Y 3y ago
> Richardson also encourages hiring and engineering managers to test candidates on collaborative problems during live-coding tests, instead of simply observing how an engineer is working alone. This can be just as terrible as a twelvw-hour take home. Having a stranger state at you while you're trying to code under pressure can make some fantastic programmers into deer in the headlights. Unless your company only works that way you should have this kind of test only as an option.
- _0ffh 3y ago
  I think one of the most trying things that ever happened to me was when I was working on a time critical task and my manager suggested I switch to the desk besides his for the time. It was really distracting to have someone checking my screen all of the time, which is why I remember this episode right now. Even worse, no 15 minutes went by without him breaking my concentration by asking a question or making some vague suggestion until I politely but firmly told him that I really need to be able to concentrate if he wants the job to get done on time, and that he isn't helping.
- stetrain 3y ago
  Collaboration doesn't have to mean staring at someone while they're trying to code. Collaboration in actual programming work tends to be up front in figuring out together how a problem will be solved, as needed while working through the problem, and then review at the end. A coding interview can be structured in a similar way.
a_gnostic 3y ago
Isn't this just people complaining that learning to code will not bring those desired easy replacement jobs they immagined?
5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
it was google that started the leet code 100 stage interview trend. cargo culting. coupled with saturation from learn2code and rise of the recruiter and hiring manager stacking layers of bullshit on top of each other.
29athrowaway 3y ago
Because they can.
francisofascii 3y ago
I wonder if articles like this and the candidates they interview are simply focusing on the top tier FAANG level companies, which are going to always be nightmarish. And so we are not getting an accurate picture. From what I know, smaller engineering firms or software shops, maybe in smaller cities, and lower pay, have 2 round interviews and don't always even require coding during the interview.
nemo44x 3y ago
In general places are hiring but so many people were put into the market at the same time causing a lot of competition presently. A very different dynamic to previous years to be sure. There’s also a lot of roles that rely on technical skill sets like sales engineering, consulting/services, product management, support, etc. Sometimes broadening your horizons can lead to great things too. I’d rather have a non-ideal or different role at a great company than what I’d consider ideal at a mediocre one. Remember, once you’re in you can build a reputation and move to other parts of the organization if the role you took isn’t going it for you.
paxys 3y ago
Is it really a “nightmare” to have to endure a take home test and 5 hours of interviews for a job that will pay you like $250K/yr to start? Guess what, plenty of people want to do that job, and people aren’t going to hire you just by looking at your resume and having a quick conversation. If you don’t like it, great, less competition for the rest of us.
- pdimitar 3y ago
  Almost nobody gets $250K annually even if senior, and 5 hours is a gross underestimate of the total time spent per interview process. With such a wrong premise your argument does not hold weight.
- ravenstine 3y ago
  How many of us do you think are actually starting with $250k and land the job with just 5 hours of interviews? You are also excluding the amount of time it takes merely job hunting and jumping on call screenings before even getting to an interview.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  Here's the thing about take-home tests. Let's say I put 5 hours into it. That's all right, if I get the job. But let's say I don't. I don't get the next one, either. Let's say it takes me 20 tries to land a job. Well, that's 100 hours just on take-home exams. That's 2.5 full-time weeks on take-home exams. So, no. It's a nightmare, and it's one I won't subject myself to. I mean, for one job, I might if I really wanted that particular job. In general, though, no. Just no. See, with an interview, if you waste my time, you also waste your own - you have skin in the game too. But if you give me a take-home exam, and I spend 5 hours on it, and you never look at it, it costs you zero. Or you give it to 30 people and spend two minutes looking at each persons' results. You can waste my time without wasting your own. And I have a strong suspicion that interviewers do in fact waste applicants' time with take-homes. They don't bother to be efficient with the interviewers' time.
ubermonkey 3y ago
I have a theory. 1. Interviews are hard. Hiring is hard. 2. The best hires I've personally been involved in have been personal references, not blind hires. 3. The need of FAANG-class firms to scale, and to churn (rank-and-yank), means they have to hire a LOT -- far more than personal references can supply. 4. But they still don't want to hire duds (except, of course, in the case of the egregious unethical and cruel "hire to fire" brought on b/c of rank-and-yank). 5. So they create a Process -- an Algorithm, if you will! -- and then keep adding steps and attributes and whatnot over time. 6. Eventually this Process resembles any other long-running, poorly-expanded codebase. And here we are.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
boomka 3y ago
I am suprised anyone still gives out take-home coding assignments as part of the interview process. I have been hiring for 15+ years and have tried this approach many times. While long time ago maybe it did help a bit even then its usefulness was questionable. But last few years I am quite convinced it's the worst thing you can do as part of your hiring process, as it dramatically worsens your candidate pool and makes it harder to sift through. The basic premise of take-home test is that it is meant to entirely eliminate the bottom percentile of your candidate pool at the cost of also eliminating a chunk of the top percentile (which is supposed to be an acceptable trade off, especially if you are hiring for junior to mid roles). But I found it does not eliminate bad programmers at all. In fact, after we did some in-person interviewing we discovered a negative correlation between take-home test score and actual coding ability. Most likely explanation is that those with really good scores are the ones who paid 50 bucks to some comp-sci prodigy from <random_country> to sit with them in screen share session for an hour. In contrast, those with poor scores are the ones who actually tried to do the test honestly. Another unintended consequence here is that your candidate pool now has a higher percentage of unscupulous people than it did before the test. Our conclusion in the end was that we still have to test the coding ability in person, which means take-home test does not really eliminate any work for us as part of the interview process, but imposes additional costs as per above.
lvl102 3y ago
HR is the problem especially as organizations grow. People in HR are some of the worst. I equate them to used-car sales. They end up hiring mediocre brown-nosers because they tend to have longer tenures and this gives HR better performance metrics. And that also works out for mediocre staff because they don’t want to be exposed. This dynamic creates a long-term loop within the organization: mediocrity hell.
em500 3y ago
I know of no other fields (correct me if I'm wrong) with multiple employers hiring many people at > $150K/year less than 5 years out of college. That leads to an enormous number of applicants (Google gets > 3 million per year), and the necessity of stringent gatekeeping. Any hiring process in big tech will by design drop at least 95% of applicants.
- game_the0ry 3y ago
  This is a valid problem to point out, but white board does not solve this problem. In fact it may be causing more noise than signal, resulting in candidates passing hiring committee + receiving offer, then spending many months in the team matching phase, bc no candidates don't meet skill + exp fit with teams that have openings. [1] That plus high short term attrition makes for a busted hiring process. [1] https://www.teamblind.com/post/Google-just-got-easier-no-more-team-matching-HdQW00nw https://www.teamblind.com/post/Google-just-got-easier-no-mor...
octobus2021 3y ago
I don't know why you need an article to explain that. Sh@tton of people in IT were let go in the last 1.5-2 years, so every job posting gets a huge number of responses, including from people who are not a good match and in some cases will not even qualify but they apply anyway because they're desperate. So it became incredibly difficult to find qualified people among those hundreds and hundreds of applicants.
hermitdev 3y ago
> Broadly, the US job market is still strong, with the unemployment rate at a low 3.7 percent. No, it's not. Unemployment rate is a bullshit metric and people need to stop relying on it. It measures the number of people collecting unemployment benefits, not people who are unemployed. Labor Force Participation[0] is a better metric. Since Jan 2000, the US is still down nearly 5% participation. And since COVID, we're still down nearly 1%. [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1hY50 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1hY50
EchoChamberMan 3y ago
Risking a visible failure hiring a bad candidate, with no reward for hiring a good one, managers defer hiring as long as possible, preferring candidates with credentials or people they know. "It's not what you know, it's who you know."
tennisflyi 3y ago
All jobs have most been like this. Y’all had it right but just had to make it more draconian.
linda4151 3y ago
[flagged]
syngrog66 3y ago
[flagged]

74 points by namanyayg 3y ago

I've been a manager in software development on and off for the last 20 years now, and to echo what many of the more experienced managers here say, interviews at best give you some negative signals, but very rarely anything that I would consider a hugely positive signal. At best, I've quite gotten along with a charismatic candidate, but in my own career, even this has little correlation to people that I liked actually working with. That being said, I think that a candidate's work history and general questions is good enough. In my experience, it's been painfully obvious everytime someone is bullshitting (or at least I think so, I never hired those people), and I haven't had any experiences where I've hired anyone directly that was a true disaster. Of all the people I've managed, I've had to fire very few, and in the cases that I did it was entirely unacceptable office behavior that led to the dismissal, and it also should not have been a surprise to anyone involved. That isn't to say everyone worked out perfectly every time, but as a manager, I've been able to address most of those situations (and in the cases where I couldn't, it ended up being some of the very few dismissals). Approaching people who work with me with the benefit of the doubt has broadly been more successful. I address problems as something I want to help people fix, and not as something to be punished. Of the 50 or so people I've directly managed at this point, there's only a handful I wouldn't work with again.

TimPC 3y ago

Are tech job interviews really such a nightmare? Compared to other professions with similar pay? Leetcode can be a bit annoying and unrealistic, but it's not the end of the world, it just means putting in some study time before interviews. Jobs are also becoming better and lower risk. Many companies have gotten rid of the one year cliff on RSUs so you can potentially take a job that doesn't work, leave after 10 months and get 9 months of equity. That's a huge win when a lot of these roles have been half equity and you used to get zero.

reedf1 3y ago
Entry-level and non-senior positions have truly hellish interview processes. Five-six interview stages, week+ take-home projects, ghosting, zero-feedback. Large number of companies interviewing with no intention of hiring. This is absolutely worse than other professions, I've recently made a bit of a career change and the interview involved one informal conversation, and my past experience/education was actually taken at face value.
- kstrauser 3y ago
  That mirrors my experience. Recent interviews have been mentally challenging because the other person was poking hard at the limits of my knowledge, but the process itself was easy. Example question we spent half an hour on: Tell me a decision you made at your last job that you would do differently now. That opened the door to a million roads. Is candidate self-reflective? Can they admit mistakes? Was the mistake a reasonable idea given limited knowledge? How deep can they go with their explanation? Can they explain their work to others? That was fun because it let me show what I can do, and it would be damn near impossible to bluff one’s way through. It beats the hell outta take-home exercises or “let’s say you’re writing a program to calculate the volume of a lake…”-type coding tests.
  - whstl 3y ago
    I always ask those kinds of questions. I also ask what people are proud about. But I rarely get good answers, it's always some generic answers like "I built software for the company". Some people even fail to remember anything. Interviewing is hard :/
    - kstrauser 3y ago
      I’ve been on the other side of the table my share of times, and it’s so hard. I think that style has lots of signal, though. I don’t really wanna work with someone who can’t describe something they spent the last 2 years working on. Cheers for Team Grown-Up Conversation!

gargs 3y ago

Gatekeeping also has something to do with this.

argiopetech 3y ago

https://archive.is/TrQPt https://archive.is/TrQPt

baggachipz 3y ago

The article didn't really address why the interviews are "such a nightmare", other than insinuating that the balance of power has shifted to employers.

marcosdumay 3y ago
Worse still, it pretends that interviews only became nightmarish last year, and everything was great up to 2022.
- CuriouslyC 3y ago
  I will say that brutal, annoying many stage interviews used to be more common at FAANGS, with your average shop usually just having a whiteboard interview and 1-2 phone screens. I think the thing that's changed is that with the influx of all the laid off FAANG engineers, non-FAANG shops have started being more picky/asky.

hprotagonist 3y ago

My perspective has long been -- since well before the free money printer stopped going brr -- that the reason tech interviews are insane has little to do with rising interest rates or monetary factors per se. It's because tech dev / coding jobs are one of the few white collar fields that, historically, have not de-facto required a pile of advanced degrees. Maybe i'm getting old, but "you don't need a degree if you're hot shit" has long been part of the atmosphere: from old school hackers to the long history of founders who drop out of school to work on their startup, etc. This directly leads to interviews being the gate: if we can't know what you are by what degrees you have / what papers you published / what lab you did your dissertation in / what bar exam you passed / what hospital you did your residency in / who you clerked for / etc. ... then we're going to have to do all 4-8 years of post-undergrad pain and suffering all at once, during the interview, so grab a whiteboard and buckle up! It's ... less than ideal. edit: what's less than ideal is the perverse incentive force that creates bad interviews. The recognition that a degree doesn't guarantee job fit is not a bad one, though; you really can be more successful in software dev if you're self-taught / uncredentialed than you can in many other disciplines.

goalieca 3y ago
I would like to say that I’ve known and worked with PhDs that were good and some that were totally useless. I wouldn’t trust it as a very useful signal for a job interview. Programming is more of a trade and academic institutions barely teach the craft.
- jebarker 3y ago
  In my experience the ones to avoid (at work and in life generally) are the folks with PhDs that bring it up all the time as if it's important and bestows upon them some special power.
  - datadrivenangel 3y ago
    What's the point of getting a PhD if people don't call you DR?

ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago

Leetcode interviews are actually very similar to asian country style college entrance exams. Foreign engineers (> 75% of engineers at FAANG are foreign), will spend months studying. Turns out people willing to study like that also make reliable employees that proved they can learn computer science. This to the detriment of regular americans that dont want to prove themselves every time they switch jobs.

devoutsalsa 3y ago
As an American, I'd much rather someone else prove myself for me when I switch jobs. I'm willing to be a convenience charge for the huge salary I take home if someone is willing to get it for me.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
  General opinion I see is that its fine when youre young, but when you get experienced with kids, solving leetcode hards/mediums in 30 minutes becomes a nightmare.
jon-wood 3y ago
In my experience though being able to learn computer science isn't actually a very useful indicator of your ability to deliver the sort of software most companies are developing. I'd be willing to bet that even within Google or Microsoft there's far more software which just queries a database and displays some results than that which requires actual computer science to develop. The hard bit of most development jobs is the fuzzy stuff. Working out what it is you're building in the first place. Negotiating on which of those requirements can be dropped to massively reduce complexity. Trying to avoid being talked into building a simple piece of software as eighteen intertangled microservices each with a dedicated team. Once you've dealt with those bits the actual software development is usually easy.
danpalmer 3y ago
Having done many interviews, I can say that studying that much often doesn't help as much as one might think. Yes, I think someone in industry for 10 years will need to brush up with a few days of revision, and I think that's a bit of a pain, but I've had many candidates who have spent months of free time doing leetcode who can't actually think about an abstract problem, or who can't code their way out of a paper bag when it gets to a more real world example. My previous place used to have a 3 hour (capped) take home assignment. Most candidates who progressed claimed to have taken ~90-120 mins and finished comfortably (although they were not judged based on this). Over the years a number of candidates went "above and beyond", without asking, and submitted an "even better" solution after 8+ hours. None of them passed, even based on their final submission. More does not equal better. I think at most FAANG places you need a baseline knowledge, but many people go overboard, and over-fit, possibly because they don't have the baseline ability and are trying to make up for it. There are a bunch of issues with FAANG style hiring, I'm not a huge fan, but I don't think what you've described is the problem.

Y_Y 3y ago

> Richardson also encourages hiring and engineering managers to test candidates on collaborative problems during live-coding tests, instead of simply observing how an engineer is working alone. This can be just as terrible as a twelvw-hour take home. Having a stranger state at you while you're trying to code under pressure can make some fantastic programmers into deer in the headlights. Unless your company only works that way you should have this kind of test only as an option.

_0ffh 3y ago
I think one of the most trying things that ever happened to me was when I was working on a time critical task and my manager suggested I switch to the desk besides his for the time. It was really distracting to have someone checking my screen all of the time, which is why I remember this episode right now. Even worse, no 15 minutes went by without him breaking my concentration by asking a question or making some vague suggestion until I politely but firmly told him that I really need to be able to concentrate if he wants the job to get done on time, and that he isn't helping.
stetrain 3y ago
Collaboration doesn't have to mean staring at someone while they're trying to code. Collaboration in actual programming work tends to be up front in figuring out together how a problem will be solved, as needed while working through the problem, and then review at the end. A coding interview can be structured in a similar way.

a_gnostic 3y ago

Isn't this just people complaining that learning to code will not bring those desired easy replacement jobs they immagined?

5350-uiop-1130 3y ago

it was google that started the leet code 100 stage interview trend. cargo culting. coupled with saturation from learn2code and rise of the recruiter and hiring manager stacking layers of bullshit on top of each other.

29athrowaway 3y ago

Because they can.

francisofascii 3y ago

I wonder if articles like this and the candidates they interview are simply focusing on the top tier FAANG level companies, which are going to always be nightmarish. And so we are not getting an accurate picture. From what I know, smaller engineering firms or software shops, maybe in smaller cities, and lower pay, have 2 round interviews and don't always even require coding during the interview.

nemo44x 3y ago

In general places are hiring but so many people were put into the market at the same time causing a lot of competition presently. A very different dynamic to previous years to be sure. There’s also a lot of roles that rely on technical skill sets like sales engineering, consulting/services, product management, support, etc. Sometimes broadening your horizons can lead to great things too. I’d rather have a non-ideal or different role at a great company than what I’d consider ideal at a mediocre one. Remember, once you’re in you can build a reputation and move to other parts of the organization if the role you took isn’t going it for you.

paxys 3y ago

Is it really a “nightmare” to have to endure a take home test and 5 hours of interviews for a job that will pay you like $250K/yr to start? Guess what, plenty of people want to do that job, and people aren’t going to hire you just by looking at your resume and having a quick conversation. If you don’t like it, great, less competition for the rest of us.

pdimitar 3y ago
Almost nobody gets $250K annually even if senior, and 5 hours is a gross underestimate of the total time spent per interview process. With such a wrong premise your argument does not hold weight.
ravenstine 3y ago
How many of us do you think are actually starting with $250k and land the job with just 5 hours of interviews? You are also excluding the amount of time it takes merely job hunting and jumping on call screenings before even getting to an interview.
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
Here's the thing about take-home tests. Let's say I put 5 hours into it. That's all right, if I get the job. But let's say I don't. I don't get the next one, either. Let's say it takes me 20 tries to land a job. Well, that's 100 hours just on take-home exams. That's 2.5 full-time weeks on take-home exams. So, no. It's a nightmare, and it's one I won't subject myself to. I mean, for one job, I might if I really wanted that particular job. In general, though, no. Just no. See, with an interview, if you waste my time, you also waste your own - you have skin in the game too. But if you give me a take-home exam, and I spend 5 hours on it, and you never look at it, it costs you zero. Or you give it to 30 people and spend two minutes looking at each persons' results. You can waste my time without wasting your own. And I have a strong suspicion that interviewers do in fact waste applicants' time with take-homes. They don't bother to be efficient with the interviewers' time.

ubermonkey 3y ago

I have a theory. 1. Interviews are hard. Hiring is hard. 2. The best hires I've personally been involved in have been personal references, not blind hires. 3. The need of FAANG-class firms to scale, and to churn (rank-and-yank), means they have to hire a LOT -- far more than personal references can supply. 4. But they still don't want to hire duds (except, of course, in the case of the egregious unethical and cruel "hire to fire" brought on b/c of rank-and-yank). 5. So they create a Process -- an Algorithm, if you will! -- and then keep adding steps and attributes and whatnot over time. 6. Eventually this Process resembles any other long-running, poorly-expanded codebase. And here we are.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

boomka 3y ago

I am suprised anyone still gives out take-home coding assignments as part of the interview process. I have been hiring for 15+ years and have tried this approach many times. While long time ago maybe it did help a bit even then its usefulness was questionable. But last few years I am quite convinced it's the worst thing you can do as part of your hiring process, as it dramatically worsens your candidate pool and makes it harder to sift through. The basic premise of take-home test is that it is meant to entirely eliminate the bottom percentile of your candidate pool at the cost of also eliminating a chunk of the top percentile (which is supposed to be an acceptable trade off, especially if you are hiring for junior to mid roles). But I found it does not eliminate bad programmers at all. In fact, after we did some in-person interviewing we discovered a negative correlation between take-home test score and actual coding ability. Most likely explanation is that those with really good scores are the ones who paid 50 bucks to some comp-sci prodigy from <random_country> to sit with them in screen share session for an hour. In contrast, those with poor scores are the ones who actually tried to do the test honestly. Another unintended consequence here is that your candidate pool now has a higher percentage of unscupulous people than it did before the test. Our conclusion in the end was that we still have to test the coding ability in person, which means take-home test does not really eliminate any work for us as part of the interview process, but imposes additional costs as per above.

lvl102 3y ago

HR is the problem especially as organizations grow. People in HR are some of the worst. I equate them to used-car sales. They end up hiring mediocre brown-nosers because they tend to have longer tenures and this gives HR better performance metrics. And that also works out for mediocre staff because they don’t want to be exposed. This dynamic creates a long-term loop within the organization: mediocrity hell.

em500 3y ago

I know of no other fields (correct me if I'm wrong) with multiple employers hiring many people at > $150K/year less than 5 years out of college. That leads to an enormous number of applicants (Google gets > 3 million per year), and the necessity of stringent gatekeeping. Any hiring process in big tech will by design drop at least 95% of applicants.

game_the0ry 3y ago
This is a valid problem to point out, but white board does not solve this problem. In fact it may be causing more noise than signal, resulting in candidates passing hiring committee + receiving offer, then spending many months in the team matching phase, bc no candidates don't meet skill + exp fit with teams that have openings. [1] That plus high short term attrition makes for a busted hiring process. [1] https://www.teamblind.com/post/Google-just-got-easier-no-more-team-matching-HdQW00nw https://www.teamblind.com/post/Google-just-got-easier-no-mor...

octobus2021 3y ago

I don't know why you need an article to explain that. Sh@tton of people in IT were let go in the last 1.5-2 years, so every job posting gets a huge number of responses, including from people who are not a good match and in some cases will not even qualify but they apply anyway because they're desperate. So it became incredibly difficult to find qualified people among those hundreds and hundreds of applicants.

hermitdev 3y ago

> Broadly, the US job market is still strong, with the unemployment rate at a low 3.7 percent. No, it's not. Unemployment rate is a bullshit metric and people need to stop relying on it. It measures the number of people collecting unemployment benefits, not people who are unemployed. Labor Force Participation[0] is a better metric. Since Jan 2000, the US is still down nearly 5% participation. And since COVID, we're still down nearly 1%. [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1hY50 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1hY50

EchoChamberMan 3y ago

Risking a visible failure hiring a bad candidate, with no reward for hiring a good one, managers defer hiring as long as possible, preferring candidates with credentials or people they know. "It's not what you know, it's who you know."

tennisflyi 3y ago

All jobs have most been like this. Y’all had it right but just had to make it more draconian.

linda4151 3y ago

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syngrog66 3y ago

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