Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#51

Post by Dayshine » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 10:31 AM UTC

twic wrote: post #44

vinaysshenoy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The exercise itself is a simple note-taking app with a couple of screens. We don't impose a time limit on candidates interviewing to complete this stage. > For a new project there aren't any well defined states of the code that make sense to be persisted. This means the commits will be arbitrary and their messeages not very meaningful. I didn't understand this? The problem is well scoped and defined. Regardless of wh…

There are two ways of working in programming. One is to make disciplined incremental progress: write a test, make the test pass, do minimal cleanup, commit, see a refactoring opportunity, do it, commit, write another test, see a related bug, write the bug down but don't fix it, make the test pass, clean up, commit, tackle the bug, commit, etc. The other is to flail about wildly until you have something which more or…

Sure, but I'm not sure how much progress you're going to make in the 2-3 hours one would spend on a speculative take-home task (they've stated there is no guaranteed interview).

You're going to be judged on how well the end product works, so if we start with the following tasks, and you have 180 minutes.

1. 20 minutes: their stack's boilerplate/tooling

2. 10 minutes: unit testing boilerplate

3. 20 minutes: integrated testing boilerplate (browser automation is a fickle beast)

4. 20 minutes: basic database entity + database setup

5. 20 minutes: basic UI page + frontend setup

6. 20 minutes: replace default styling (their guide talks about UI "polish")

That's 110 minutes and nothing more than a pretty display from the database.

The task will almost certainly ask for more than one user action. I might be able to write an action in 20 minutes, but there is no way I can write good tests, seed test data for integrated testing, and keep each commit atomic and green.

So, do you choose to have a tidy commit history and complete test coverage, or do you choose to complete the task?

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#52

Post by collyw » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 10:37 AM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #34

incognito_limey wrote: post #14

I think an additional piece to this, is to tell candidates what level they are interviewing for and the possible salary ranges, not total package, but actual base salary ranges. I just went through an interview process with AWS that wasted a lot of time for both sides due to them not being up front about the potential package. I had to push a fair bit to get any info, and finally had to politely tell them if the it's…

A lot of people say "never be the first to give a number" (which might be wise if you aren't confident you have a good idea of your market value) but I've always found it useful to just give recruiters a salary requirement figure upfront. After all, I know $X is what it will take for me to move enthusiastically and see it as good for my career trajectory, so if $X is over their salary range being coy about what I wan…

I agree. I am at the higher end of the payscale where I live (Spain so overall pretty poor salaries). Most jobs will be offering around average salaries, so it's saves me time to state up front what i expect.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#53

Post by sokoloff » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 10:40 AM UTC

brailsafe wrote: post #27

barbegal wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any evidence to suggest that more than 3 hours of interviews is actually beneficial? 7 hours of interview seems like overkill. I've never had more than a couple of hours of interview: an hour with the department head and another hour with my future line manager and/or another senior employee.

Afaik, research suggests that interviewers know after 20 seconds whether they'll hire someone. I don't have references and don't know if this would translate well to tech interviewing, but I'd wager that the vast majority of a 7h interview day is totally pointless.

I wonder how much of that is like-me bias with the risk that 3 short interviews might get us (even) more homogenous employee populations?

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#54

Post by sokoloff » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 10:41 AM UTC

fogetti wrote: post #47

jrockway wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's instructive to look at this from the other side to see why these processes exist. At my last job, I wanted to hire a frontend engineer with some experience beyond tweaking HTML and CSS (we used gRPC/Web and Typescript, so some actual programming experience was going to make them pretty productive, and that's what I was looking for). Anyway, I wrote up a req and posted it to the usual career sites, and wi…

I am sorry but this tells me exactly one thing: that you don't know how to write a job description. If you have written your job description tailored to the ideal candidate you would have had a smaller candidate pool and a better match to the actual job.

Unless you somehow require proof that the applicant meets the requirements, I don’t see how that prevents the spray-and-pray applications.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#55

Post by collyw » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 10:42 AM UTC

axegon_ wrote: post #10

Perhaps a bit of an unpopular opinion but as far as interviews go, I think that seeing how someone reacts unprepared is a lot more valuable then seeing their work with them knowing what to expect. You see their ability to adapt and improvise, which is far more valuable then being picky about a particular library or technology. Yes, the quality of their tests will be lower, but that's fine and you can take that into a…

I am not sure I agree on the have you got any questions for us. Interviewing is a strange process. I find it quite difficult from being sociable friendly, coming up with decent answers then jumping into some kind of coding question, as it engages different parts of your brain. After you have done that coming up with questions for the interviewers is something different again. I can see why many people wouldn't have anything unless it was prepared. The interview process should be fairly two way anyway, so I ask as I am being interviewed, so often any questions I have are answered already.

If other people find thay have this problem have a couple of canned questions ready. Ask how much of a mess their code base is on a scale of 1 - 10.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#56

Post by collyw » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 10:43 AM UTC

brailsafe wrote: post #29

ConsiderCrying wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that seeing how someone reacts unprepared is a lot more valuable then seeing their work with them knowing what to expect But why? The odds of them facing unexpected tasks on the job aren't that high, they have their job description, they have their set of skills, you delegate tasks based on that. It's not like there are curveballs coming every week where they have to upend their knowledge and strategies. It…

Imo, most of most jobs come down to how well you can tolerate doing what is basically intellectual grunt work while people interrupt your attention. As an IC, things are much more boring than ridiculous interview processes would have you believe.

> most of most jobs come down to how well you can tolerate doing what is basically intellectual grunt work while people interrupt your attention

I have never heard a better description of the majority of jobs out there.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#57

Post by collyw » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 10:45 AM UTC

robjan wrote: post #43

andrewstuart wrote: post #41

It's a pity job interviews aren't generally better run. I'm tempted to run the job interview myself and instruct them on how to properly assess and interview developers, and then go ahead and interview myself for the role with them watching on. But of course the outcome of that would be a rejection for insubordination - "not a team player". You can't win so you just have to shut up and hope that some random series of…

I usually ask for feedback on the interview process from the candidate. Not sure how common this is.

You are more likely to get ghosted after wasting hours on a technical "challenge" than asked for feedback in my experience.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#58

Post by incognito_limey » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 10:48 AM UTC

twic wrote: post #37

incognito_limey wrote: post #14

I think an additional piece to this, is to tell candidates what level they are interviewing for and the possible salary ranges, not total package, but actual base salary ranges. I just went through an interview process with AWS that wasted a lot of time for both sides due to them not being up front about the potential package. I had to push a fair bit to get any info, and finally had to politely tell them if the it's…

> not total package, but actual base salary ranges Why base salary rather than total comp?

Because I've experienced a lot of number fiddling to describe total comp. For example we offer you X equity at Y valuation, when the valuation is something they have made up internally etc. I want to know how much cash in hand I can expect. Also, offering private health insurance, when you live in a country with a decent public health care system is not much of benefit and generally not worth what the company says its worth. If it was the US, I could see how that would be valuable, but in most of Europe, it is not.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#59

Post by pdimitar » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 10:50 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #24

My general thought is that your compensation scale should be proportional to the complexity of the interview process. If you're going to be copying the FAANG interview process, then the candidate should expect an offer similar to what they'd get from FAANG. In general, I haven't been disappointed on this front, but I fear that many people are. If you want to be super transparent about the interview process, you shoul…

This is strongly misaligned with many companies' incentives so it will never happen, I am afraid.

A lot of interviewing processes are kind of like fishing. They hope that if they wasted you 6-10 hours of your time before an actual offer then you'd make a decision based on the sunk cost fallacy ("not sure how much time the other companies will waste me, let's take this one on their offer, it's not so bad").

I am glad that your experience has been positive but as you correctly intuited yourself, many others' experiences are very far from it.

(To clarify, the employer I started onboarding with is nothing like that; I am talking about all the others that I talked with before I stumbled upon them.)

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#60

Post by sokoloff » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 10:51 AM UTC

swarnie_ wrote: post #31

I've just finished this maddening process for the 4th time in my "career" and it was as frustrating as i remember. To all potential employers and recruiters: When a candidate asks you for the agenda or some indication to the structure a meeting will take its because they want to be prepared. They aren't trying to "cheat", they want to be as productive as possible. Unless your company operates some insane work methodo…

My experience is that when obvious experts in niches are added late to an interview loop, that’s almost always a positive sign for the candidate. Those people are generally busy and aren’t on the “everyday candidate” loop typically.