61–70 of 394 posts
How did they get 60 interviews? Do I really need to join LinkedIn?
"Not Enough Clarity about your Role" - Like the author mentions, this can definitely signify that the role is not important. The other thing I've noticed over my career is that it could be that the role involves "grunge" work (awful oncall shifts, doing backend work when you want to do only frontend, etc). Companies hide behind cool titles/department names/etc, promising whatever you want to hear to get you in.
IMO it's not really 'not important' as much as 'not honest'. Someone, somewhere at that company chose to hire someone... and they know what they want them to do. Why aren't they telling me? Here I am sitting down expecting to divulge all sorts of things / do a dance, but they can't tell me what they want... There's all sorts of reasons to not tell anyone / corporate circumstances, but it's a really bad foot to start…
This isn't necessarily true. As a counter example, I've seen team leads who claim they need to hire more engineers in order to keep up with workload. In reality, it's a process issue, but why put in the hard work of streamlining company operations, when they can just request more people underneath them. Not only is it less effort, but they also get to say "I grew the team 2x and now manage y people" which in turn increases their compensation.
It's a case of poorly aligned incentives: managers are supposed to do more with less, but their compensation structure rewards the opposite.
I can identify with the red flag where they try to pressure you to accept the offer in a short period. This is also called an exploding offer. I had a place do that to me and I ended up turning the opportunity down.
The "Not Enough Clarity about your Role" issue has killed Google with so many potentially outstanding employees. For years and years you wouldn't interview with your team, or even be told what team you would be joining. It is slightly better now, but you still don't interview with your specific team until very, very late in the process, if you even do. One of the worst things about interviewing at the big G.
Google and many other tech companies optimize for a low false positive rate vs a low false negative rate. They would rather miss out on good talent than hire someone who doesn't fit their mould of what an engineer should be. This can work for Google since most people want to work at Google and they have a steady stream of applicants.
I can identify with the red flag where they try to pressure you to accept the offer in a short period. This is also called an exploding offer. I had a place do that to me and I ended up turning the opportunity down.
I know a lot of people who have “accepted” exploding offers but then just keep interviewing and will try to renegotiate or just reneg if they get a better one.
Exploding offers are the least of the problems as a candidate.
I've seen this many times and I find it baffling: I already have a very high paying high quality job, I want you to sell _me_ on the position before demanding I do stressful work to prove myself to you.
The vibe I get from that is: they're not interested in senior or experienced talent. What they want is new grads. So I just tell them I am not interested. Either that or the hiring market isn't nearly as tight as people claim. There must be a surplus of talent if companies can get away with this.
I don't like whiteboard coding exercises, but would be willing to do them for the right position. We need to see if this is the right position for me/them before we proceed to that phase. That means that that process comes as one of the last steps, before an offer. If they're not willing to do that, I just politely decline.
A couple of thoughts on two points raised here:
1) Pressure to accept an offer. I may have lost out on an offer from a promising company by asking for a decision too quickly, and I did this because I was under pressure to accept a different offer. I believe the company's policy is that 1) they'll never rush their own decision to make an offer and 2) they'll never rush a candidate to accept. They figure that if they want to hire you, that won't change a month from now.
This position has a lot of integrity, but it does come from a position of great stability. Small companies may have only enough funding for one position, and they're terrified that by waiting for a strong candidate who is unlikely to accept, they'll lose out on another excellent candidate. The company I applied to was well established and well funded enough that they could hire anyone they felt was an excellent candidate. They were, in short, always recruiting, never desperately. The scenario I can't really respect is the company that takes weeks or longer about getting to an offer and then wants an answer in 3 days. I suspect that it's always usually best to pass on a company that is so desperate it needs to do this.
2) Not enough clarity about your role, and underprepared interviewers.
I think this can result from the "always recruiting" mentality. When it's tough to hire, and you have the money to hire, it really becomes about finding people when you find them. Companies are less concerned about exactly how to use a new hire, they're more concerned about finding someone they believe can make a strong contribution. As a result, they don't really hire for a specific role. Now, this is understandable as a motivation, but it leads to interview that are bewildering to a candidate. I've had full day whiteboard interviews covering data structures, SQL, and math, but without having read the company's website in advance, I'd be damned if I knew what they did, at all. That just can't happen. It shouldn't be possible for a candidate to go through an entire day of draining exam style interviews and not have the faintest idea what the company does. Even my interview at Google, which was very whiteboard-examish, the interviewers still took the time to explain what they work on before saying "so, suppose the search space were no longer rectangular or convex, how would you modify your code to find all matrices with positive determinants".
They aren't thinking about a role, they're thinking that if you can solve difficult code/math problems at the whiteboard, present and explain your ideas clearly, and seem professional in your interactions with people, they'll find something worthwhile for you to do (or, perhaps, they have confidence you'll find something worthwhile to do). It does make a certain amount of sense, but it leaves the candidate in the dark, and I don't want to join a company where my only interactions have been algorithm and data science questions at a whiteboard.
I was hoping this was red flags from the interviewer side. Yeah I'm hoping a blog will give me some feedback.
Aren't "red flags" from the interviewer side pretty obvious? Most interviews are just noise with very little signal. Some basic red flags: * Poor ability to self-reflect or demonstrate that they've learned things from their experiences * Lack of or otherwise poor critical thinking * Inability to communicate * Inability to display core competency in the skills required for the job, especially when challenged (I don't…
Role clarity is a huge one in my book. I've turned down numerous offers because when I asked what the specifics of my day to day job were going to be, the answers weren't clear. From the secret FAANG that likes to pretend what they are doing is defense contractor level top secret, and even after your hired you might not know what your actually working on, to the big companies where its clear the hiring manager only h…
Of the big tech companies, I've worked at Facebook, Google, & Apple. I've still not quite cracked what's different about Apple culturally that they seem to be more immune to this problem. The only main difference I can spot is I don't recall ever encountering a PM at Apple. To do planning engineers would propose improvements, new features, etc. These were bubbled up. Then executives would be responsible for building…
Apple definitely has PMs but they work differently than they do at most other companies.
Role clarity is a huge one in my book. I've turned down numerous offers because when I asked what the specifics of my day to day job were going to be, the answers weren't clear. From the secret FAANG that likes to pretend what they are doing is defense contractor level top secret, and even after your hired you might not know what your actually working on, to the big companies where its clear the hiring manager only h…
Of the big tech companies, I've worked at Facebook, Google, & Apple. I've still not quite cracked what's different about Apple culturally that they seem to be more immune to this problem. The only main difference I can spot is I don't recall ever encountering a PM at Apple. To do planning engineers would propose improvements, new features, etc. These were bubbled up. Then executives would be responsible for building…