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Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?

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Re: Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?

#101

Post by karaterobot »

kelnos wrote: post #80
karaterobot wrote: post #30

The ones that come to mind: * If they are a small company who outsources any step of their interview process to another company. If you're only interviewing for a couple positions—people you will work with every single day—take the time to do it yourself. * If they are a startup that says they are looking for people who are interested in solving exciting problems . For some people, this is going to be an enticement,…

> If they are a small company who outsources any step of their interview process to another company. I'm torn on this. Having dedicated recruiting staff isn't cheap, and I'm not sure a small company could justify this unless they're constantly hiring. But I've gotten soooo much low-effort, generic recruiting spam from third-party recruiters that, were I running a company, I'd only resort to those sorts of recruiters…

Oh, I wasn't even thinking about recruiting staff, I was specifically thinking about outsourcing technical screening to a third-party company.

I'm specifically thinking of the time I was asked to do a karat technical screen when applying for a position with a small company, and it was a big red flag for me. This is a service that does a remote, screen-share-based technical screening. My view is, you're only going to get a worse outcome with this approach compared to doing the screening yourself: either you're spending a lot of time going through the recording afterward, in which case you might as well have just done it yourself in the first place, or else you are just looking at the feedback by the third party company and deciding based on what they tell you. Since the third-party screener doesn't know you business, product, culture, or tech stack, that seems like a terrible idea.

People will often acknowledge that hiring (or not hiring) is the riskiest thing a company can do, and yet take stupid shortcuts to save a little time on it. That's the mentality of companies I want to avoid.

Re: Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?

#102

Post by drewcoo »

madjam002 wrote: post #37
Tainnor wrote: post #23

All of these have happened to me: - The interviewer is wearing a suit. - The interviewer asks "you've worked with [person who now works at our company] before, what do you think about them?". Bonus points if they insist after I give a diplomatic answer. - "Why are you using microservices?" "Because everyone is doing it" - Not following up. For weeks. - "Can you send us your high school diploma?" - Take home assignmen…

What's wrong with the interviewer wearing a suit?

If they're wearing a suit, why aren't you?

Re: Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?

#103

Post by 000ooo000 »

I'm adding to my list "using ancient tech". Not because I think that orgs should always be on the new shiny, but to me using old tech is a yard stick for uninteresting and low-growth culture WRT software engineering; is there an interest in technology? Do the people there like to code for fun? Are they open to improvements in the way things are done? If I know that you're happy still using TFS, jQuery, ASP.NET Razor, etc, I can probably guess the answers to a lot of those kinds of questions.

Re: Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?

#104

Post by drewcoo »

- "Bring your whole self to work" . . . when the interviewers all seem like cloned/pod people under the skin.

- Any job ad for a FOO Dev, where FOO is a language. They're hiring code monkeys.

- A panel of interviewers suggests the company doesn't know how to interview.

- "Gotcha" trivia questions.

- Giving me a take-home assignment that takes much longer than their estimated time to complete . . . then asking me how long it took.

- Telling me what IDE to use (even if it's one I would prefer).

- Interviewer is another dev and is unwilling to tell me what they wish were different.

- Whiteboard coding where interviewer says nothing. Maybe they stare at me. Maybe they do work. Either way . . . no.

- Any question where the goal is guessing "the correct way to answer."

- Hiring managers who clearly want to hand off responsibilities instead of just delegate. Seems more common in small startups.

- Interviewers are late to call or join the video conference. Especially if they're at least 5 minutes late.

Re: Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?

#105

Post by karaterobot »

ghaff wrote: post #82
karaterobot wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I meant one or two interviews of an hour each. I've since edited my comment to gaslight you. Err, I mean to clarify the language.

I honestly think 30 minutes is a pretty good length as an average. Get much longer than that and it's really easy to get into filling in conversation holes. I've even interviewed people where 10 minutes in it's pretty obviously not going to work out and now where are you? Maybe it's modern attention spans but I generally push back on analyst briefings/presentations/etc. that get much beyond the 30 minute mark.

I recently interviewed people for a couple positions where I work. We had to ask questions that got at a bunch of different skills, and at the end we were supposed to score their responses in a spreadsheet.

It quickly became obvious to me that there was a flaw in the method: If the candidate didn't get a chance to answer all the questions, their score would be really low. This is through no fault of their own: they don't know they're on question 4 of 12, and there's only 15 minutes left in the interview. They think they're just answering the question thoroughly and thoughtfully. So, it left me in the position of having to do a "lightning round" style assault at the end of the interview, to make sure they at least got a chance to answer everything, and not be torpedoed by the scoring system.

The solution to this is likely one of:

* ask everyone different questions, or different numbers of questions

* ask fewer questions to everyone, and potentially not cover some areas.

* timebox each response, and cut them off to say "time's up, let's move on".

* ignore questions they didn't answer, which means deciding on a candidate you know less about.

* increase the length of the interview.

I think I'd be happy asking everyone a different set of questions, but companies are apparently scared about the bias that could introduce (at any rate, we were instructed not to do that). Of the remaining options, the best one seems to be to increase the length of the meeting.

Re: Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?

#106

Post by mrj »

codr7 wrote: post #100
mrj wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If somebody has a problem with it, they can always choose the live coding. I try to find ways to make the process more equitable.

So it's either or, and you are most likely losing the best people by insisting. Maybe that's fine for you, but maybe not.

Yeah I mean.. I have nearly hired people before who turned out to be scammers, no coding skills at all. I need some kind of signal before turning off the recruiting pipeline, emailing a bunch of people "no thanks," and making a commitment. Sometimes strong referrals work but that might unfairly advantage some, can be gamed, and doesn't work at all for most junior devs without a work history. Shoot, even a strong history elsewhere doesn't mean they will be successful on a different product/platform/team/etc.

Both interviews (live and homework) have downsides, referrals don't work for all and hiring blindly isn't an option. I need some kind of signal, some way to choose one of hundreds. I have successfully used contract to hire before, and while that does lower the anxiety on the interview track, many can't consider that option. And that (again) unfairly advantages some.

I.. don't really know. Just over here trying my best. The market is broken in many ways.

Re: Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?

#107

Post by geoblack »

cryptoz wrote: post #19

Making fun of my side project. An interviewer looked at me with this vicious, incredulous look when I described my side project in ~2019, which was a weather network built on the sensors inside phones. Guy said, “a weather app, really?! You think that’s a good use of your time in 2019? What makes you think a weather app is useful to make today?” MFer, it was a good idea in 2011 and it’s a good idea today and it’ll be…

Imagine how handy it would be to read temperatures at 1000 phones if you were an HVAC engineer trying to optimize AC in a 50 story building on a 100 degree day in San Francisco.

A heat map heat map, so to speak.

Forest fires? Outdoor events on hot days? This is a good idea.

And yes, I am a marketing guy.

Re: Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?

#108

Post by woleium »

karaterobot wrote: post #105
ghaff wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly think 30 minutes is a pretty good length as an average. Get much longer than that and it's really easy to get into filling in conversation holes. I've even interviewed people where 10 minutes in it's pretty obviously not going to work out and now where are you? Maybe it's modern attention spans but I generally push back on analyst briefings/presentations/etc. that get much beyond the 30 minute mark.

I recently interviewed people for a couple positions where I work. We had to ask questions that got at a bunch of different skills, and at the end we were supposed to score their responses in a spreadsheet. It quickly became obvious to me that there was a flaw in the method: If the candidate didn't get a chance to answer all the questions, their score would be really low. This is through no fault of their own: they d…

or, you know, just explain there are 12 questions at the start, and each one gets a couple of minutes only

Re: Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?

#109

Post by noashavit »

- Dinner at the office - No remote or by hybrid options - Team is fresh out of college. If no one has more than 2 years of professional experience except for the founder/s, they are looking for followers. - Multiple case studies / take home exercises (difficultly making decisions / moving quickly) - If you have an interview scheduled with multiple ppl and one of them is a no show more than once. - If you’re interviewing for team lead / head of position and the team/part of it isn’t part of the interview process. - If there are co CEOs that disagree on the vision or mission

Re: Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?

#110

Post by deterministic »

codr7 wrote: post #71
giantg2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I've ever seen a job that doesn't have one or more of these.

I don't think it exists. But too much of that and I'm out.

It does exist. I experienced it interviewing for my current job and a previous job. But I do agree that it is probably rare.
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