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Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

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Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

#241

Post by sjg007 »

novok wrote: post #197
alexashka wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> these roles are usually high stakes and the cost of a bad hire is too high Really? High stakes? This fucking site. Have you ever worked as a software developer at a corporation? Nothing about it is high stakes. You spend most of your time dealing with useless idiots who report to other useless idiots, who report to other useless idiots, about a useless product they think is a great idea that every non-idiot knows i…

High stakes means high investment. You can’t just hire a dev and have them running in a week, their bad work could cost the company multi-millions in obvious and non obvious ways and proper onboarding takes months at minimum. On the other hand, a cashier can be replaced in a week, and they don’t effect the entire future of the company as SOP.

Eh I don't believe it is a million dollar hit. If it is then you have bad controls and bad process.

Google is optimizing for the wrong things. The reason Google has hard interviews is to minimize attrition and make everyone who passes the interview feel smart.

Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

#242

Post by david-gpu »

alexashka wrote: post #118
StupidUser123 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a HM at a big tech company with this format as well. Honestly, I really like it. I don’t want to hire the wrong person, it’s expensive and it makes my job awful for a while. It’s great getting data points on several programming interviews, system design, etc. That makes my sell interview so much easier because I can trust the process to assess their technical skills. You need multiple people because you’re consta…

> Is it perfect? No, but it does work. How do you know it works? > I don’t want to hire the wrong person, it’s expensive and it makes my job awful for a while. There we are. It is all about you. No need to say anything else - your life is all about you, so of course if it works for you, 'it works'.

> How do you know it works?

If the company in question is growing its business and the employees and customers are happy, then whatever they are doing is working, at least for now. I'm not sure there is a much better way to measure it.

When I joined NVidia they had me through two phone screens (although they originally planned for three), followed by an onsite with seven different interviewers back to back on the same day. It wasn't fun, but it wasn't the end of the world either.

When I was a hiring manager at Qualcomm we would typically do a phone screen followed by an onsite with maybe four one-hour interviews back to back and there was rarely any disagreement on whether the candidate made the cut or not, so I would argue that it was sufficient.

Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

#244

Post by csa »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #7

> How is a process like this in any way shape or form efficient or productive? Because hiring the wrong person becomes a colossal waste of time and money.

As mentioned above, does 5 or 7 produce a significantly better result than 3 (or 2 or 1)?

I’m guessing not.

Two or maybe three interviews should be adequate for most positions.

I think the reality is that most people are pretty bad at selection, no one wants to shoulder the blame when things go sideways, so the solution is just to create a system where everyone (and therefore no one) is to blame. In reality, this creates an environment that is default No instead of default Yes. Whether that’s good or not for a specific company at a specific instant of time is really something only they can decide.

Fwiw, pro-tip, eliciting work samples that are close to the actual job are the best predictors of success. This may create some burden on the hiring org to create a good process, but it reaps huge dividends.

Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

#245

Post by shp0ngle »

grapeskin wrote: post #28
5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #9

Yeah I have 16 years experience and was asked to take an aptitude (IQ) test. I find it personally insulting. I think it all emerged from the recruiting/HR market. They started as middlemen but found a way to take on more of the "gatekeeping" role in hiring. This then lead to recruiters using more and more technical jargon and then we saw the emergence of leetcode interviews trend from faang, and multiple stupid inter…

IQ-style tests are the norm in parts of Asia. Straight up 200 arithmetic problems in 10 minutes, draw as many perfect squares as possible in 30 seconds, “what’s the best synonym for this word” type of stuff preceding a tech interview. Plus some old sweaty guy in a suit to berate you for not doing something perfectly and question why your 32nd square is slightly tilted to the left while the others are to the right, an…

Huh. I am working in IT in Southeast Asia (Indonesia and Vietnam mostly) and I have never heard about this.

Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

#246

Post by kyawzazaw »

Aeolun wrote: post #203
angarg12 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say this. To add more: a single person (HM) might have biases for or against certain candidates. More people in the loop brings in diversity and helps to keep interviewers honest and consistent. Also these roles are usually high stakes and the cost of a bad hire is too high.

> To add more: a single person (HM) might have biases for or against certain candidates. That would be true for all organisations. You could do 6x more interviews if they were all a single round. > Also these roles are usually high stakes and the cost of a bad hire is too high. Hiring a brain surgeon is high stakes. I don’t know a lot of software positions where it is true.

I mean brain surgeons tend to be board certified. Don't really have that process for SWE, do we?

Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

#247

Post by UnpossibleJim »

novok wrote: post #197
alexashka wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> these roles are usually high stakes and the cost of a bad hire is too high Really? High stakes? This fucking site. Have you ever worked as a software developer at a corporation? Nothing about it is high stakes. You spend most of your time dealing with useless idiots who report to other useless idiots, who report to other useless idiots, about a useless product they think is a great idea that every non-idiot knows i…

High stakes means high investment. You can’t just hire a dev and have them running in a week, their bad work could cost the company multi-millions in obvious and non obvious ways and proper onboarding takes months at minimum. On the other hand, a cashier can be replaced in a week, and they don’t effect the entire future of the company as SOP.

Ok, for the record, I haven't worked at a FAANG company so the stakes weren't as high. Just video game studios, so million dollar companies not billion.

Even on our systems, we had so many redundancies and test servers run, that even when a mistake did run through (which was exceedingly rare, given the testing), the roll back was quick. A single dev, especially a new hire, was unable to make multi-million dollar mistakes. It had to be several systems to fail, in order to be released to the wild. I can't believe any of the FAANG companies got to where they are with such a "cowboy" attitude as to say, "it's your third day, push that untested code straight to prod".

Edit: autocorrect hates me

Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

#248

Post by emerged »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #3

Tech companies are extremely risk adverse when it comes to hiring the "wrong" person. More interviews means more people to spread to blame over if a wrong hire happens. At seven interviews, if everyone signed off on the bad hire, that wasn't anyone's fault, it must have been that the hire was skilled at deception or some other deflection.

Where “wrong” person means “doesn’t want to subject themselves to a ridiculous amount of submissive hoop jumping” — which excludes a tremendous amount of the best possible hires.

They want cogs for the machine.

Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

#249

Post by gcheong »

StupidUser123 wrote: post #106
mabbo wrote: post #44

Having been an interviewer at a FAANG for many years, I can explain some of the logic behind it. I'm not saying this logic is valid , but it's how we got here, imho. First: we no longer trust the hiring manager alone, because probably they aren't a strong developer. We instead trust strong developers that are well trained at evaluating good devs. At the same time, we don't want to thrust a dev onto a hiring manager,…

I’m a HM at a big tech company with this format as well. Honestly, I really like it. I don’t want to hire the wrong person, it’s expensive and it makes my job awful for a while. It’s great getting data points on several programming interviews, system design, etc. That makes my sell interview so much easier because I can trust the process to assess their technical skills. You need multiple people because you’re consta…

“Is it annoying for candidates?” Not just annoying, it can be downright demoralizing going through the interview process when the standard is “reject for any one reason, only accept if all agree.” and no feedback whatsoever is given.

Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

#250

Post by haspok »

kxrm wrote: post #143
monster_group wrote: post #31

Most tech companies now do around 4-5 interviews. It has been like that for at least 7-8 years (probably more) but I just found out that not all companies are like that. After being subjected to these demeaning Leetcoding interviews I went through a refreshingly pleasant experience. It was an interview with just one person. They gave me a technical open-ended problem and two weeks time. After two weeks I had to do a…

I was interviewing with companies last Fall and got a homework assignment project where I could pick from 3 different problems. I am not big on companies giving me 30 minutes and expecting hours of investment in return but I figured I would look into these problems to see if they were worth solving. I literally copied the questions verbatim into a search and found the solution to all 3 all over GitHub in multiple lan…

> I literally copied the questions verbatim into a search and found the solution to all 3 all over GitHub in multiple languages.

So what?

Let's say you know nothing and just copy somebody else's code. Good for you. The next step in the interview process is that you have to do a code walkthrough explaining what you did and why. Do you really think someone can get past this stage with a code they just copied from github?

I can even imagine that someone finds this existing code, and then they copy it, then they improve upon it, and present it as such. If they are open about it, I'd have no problems from the interviewing side. In fact, it could even be better, because the more complex the code is, the easier it is to talk about it (and gather information about the candidate).

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