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The rise of never-ending job interviews

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Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#111

Post by thaumasiotes »

dredmorbius wrote: post #46

In domains in which the underlying domain is complex, with an irreducible informational complexity, as well as rich and frequently highly significant interactions, there's a frequent emergence of faddish, or ritual-driven, behaviours. Both seek to reduce risks and accountability, as well as to increase credible signalling of traits. Both sides of the technical recruiting transaction (job-seeking and recruiting) exhib…

> I've speculated that one of the justifications for the ancient Egyptians to build pyramids was as a combination of a skills-development, skills-retention, skills-demonstration, and brain-drain-mitigation programme. From what I've read there's at least some independent informed speculation along similar lines.

Brain drain mitigation? Brain drain just wasn't a possibility 4400 years ago.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#112

Post by ironman1478 »

I don't mind going through a single day with many rounds, but when it's spread out it's super frustrating. It feels really disrespectful of my time. I interviewed at Apple and had like 3 onsites with different teams all in one week and got the results quite quickly. It was such a good experience compared to some companies where it's such a chore.

I also think the attitude of companies during interviews really sucks. Many feel like they're doing you a favor or you're wasting their time. That was a distinct feeling I got when interviewing at Google, but not at Apple and I really think it's why I passed those and not google. They were collaborative and fun at Apple. I put a lot of effort into making candidates at my company feel welcomed and like they are already part of the team and IMO it really helps them succeed.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#113

Post by robertwt7 »

Aren't FAANG companies doing at least 4-5 interviews now?

More and more companies are doing this now in tech space (AU) as well. My last 4-5 job app contains 5 interviews, even the medium sized one.

It is super annoying for me, but I'm not sure what to do about it, some of my dream big tech companies are like that so I have to go through that. I'm pretty sure a lot of people go through with that because that's their dream job too, not because they liked it

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#114

Post by kxrm »

I am actually going through the hiring process now. I was a hiring manager at my last shop and I tried to be very respectful of the candidates time.

The process was first interview was 30 mins and basically a getting to know you and us session. Second interview was a two hour technical interview with debugging/fix this function type question and a single from scratch example question in the candidates language of choice. The final round was purely optional if the CTO or CEO wanted to meet the candidate (they rarely did).

If you made it through all that you got an offer. Of all the candidates I hired only 1 didn't work out long term.

Now that I am on the other end, I don't understand the need for this overly complex and generally noncommittal (on the employer side) process. If it's FAANG I am lucky if I can even get a fucking job description these days. They want to interview me for jobs I can't know about and best fit me for their needs. What about my needs? What about my time? If I can't even get a job description, why do you think I want to waste 3 hours doing "homework" before I can even talk to anyone for more than 10 minutes about what possible job I could be actually doing for you?

Hiring in Tech is broken and I don't know what we can do to fix it.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#115

Post by dcolkitt »

MattGaiser wrote: post #63
LAC-Tech wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This a hundred times over. I still remember in 2020 multiple places asking me "I see you've used .NET core, what *version* have you used?". I had a kind of career crisis/breakdown, where I realised no one gave a shit about anything except my utility as a walking set of tech keywords. Accepting that it wasn't working for me was one of the best things I've done for my career.

> where I realised no one gave a shit about anything except my utility as a walking set of tech keywords. I am genuinely asking. Why is this objectionable? Why do people find it so horrible that their labour is a commodity? To me that just tells me I should treat my labour like a merchant treats his goods. Always be checking the market to ensure you have something worth selling and while you might sign long term deal…

Because selecting candidates based on tech stack is almost universally the sign of incompetent tech management. Anybody who understands software, knows that intelligence and master of fundamentals trumps tech stack experience without exception. Linus Torvalds would unquestionably become a better Ruby on Rails developer within four weeks than 90% of people with 10 YoE in it.

Good organizations hire talented and bright people with mastery of CS and SWE fundamentals. Bad organizations think "oh we use Java, better hire Java programmers". Really bad organizations think "oh we use JUnit, Spring Boot and IntelliJ, better hire people with experience in JUnit, Spring Boot and IntelliJ"

One of the strongest signals of how good an engineering organization or a tech team is how few specific technologies they list in their job ads.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#116

Post by echelon »

kxrm wrote: post #114

I am actually going through the hiring process now. I was a hiring manager at my last shop and I tried to be very respectful of the candidates time. The process was first interview was 30 mins and basically a getting to know you and us session. Second interview was a two hour technical interview with debugging/fix this function type question and a single from scratch example question in the candidates language of cho…

> If it's FAANG I am lucky if I can even get a fucking job description these days. They want to interview me for jobs and best fit me for their needs. What about my needs? What about my time? If I can't even get a job description, why do you think I want to waste 3 hours doing "homework" before I can even talk to anyone for more than 10 minutes?

Why don't you find people working on a problem you like, then ask them if they have open positions?

Working though engineers is almost always better than filtering though company recruiters. You'll wind up with a role you like rather than being stuffed into open head count.

I've done this. It works.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#117

Post by MisterBastahrd »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #23
sp332 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies don't want to do job training anymore. Instead of a general background and attitude check, they need to know if the candidate has all of the individual skills that will be used on the job.

Job training is not as much worth it for companies when employees can switch jobs at the drop of a hat.

That works when you're employing a bunch of Wordpress monkeys who do nothing all day but mess with CSS and install plugins. Not so much when you've got a mature SAAS product, parts of the system are tricky to work with, and stakeholders are breathing down your neck to implement new features so you don't have time to cross-train your teams.

Losing people who are experts within the domain of the software they're maintaining because you refuse to invest in them is going to cost you thousands of dollars... the only question is whether that's tens or hundreds times that amount... and in some cases it can cause you to lose your entire business.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#118

Post by mitsuchen »

yarky wrote: post #99
mitsuchen wrote: post #90

For everyone saying that it's risk mitigation, I recently asked about something similar[0] for a junior position, and the process still hasn't finished. For context, the company is a medium-size tech company with presence mostly in Europe and Asia. I don't know these things well enough but it makes no sense to me. For starters, in the tech sector in my country the salary for fresh grads like me actually come mostly f…

> I would really like to know what risks (other than useless non-technical HR keeping their jobs) there are after candidates have past a certain threshold for quality, particularly for junior positions. It's harder to deal with emotional kids than it is to deal with incompetent engineers. Maybe that's why those non-technical HRs might not be as useless as you think.

You made the mistake to assume that we are idiotic enough to be emotional for job interviews.

It's harder to deal with people who think they are competent and know it all than emotional kids.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#119

Post by silisili »

My one and only Google interview went this way years ago. Each round they'd send me more books to study, which frankly I couldn't be bothered to read given the circumstances.

My experience ended when an interviewer in round 3 or 4 asked me an obviously scripted question. I answered sarcastically, he got peeved, and I never heard from them again.

I'm not claiming I'm Google caliber, whatever that means. Obviously I'm not because I don't have the patience for their interview questions.

To be clear, the entire question was: What's not in a Linux inode?

My answer was: Lots of things...dinosaurs, the moon...

The interviewer told me very matter of factly that it was in fact, the filename.

I honestly lost all respect for the process, sorry Googlers.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#120

Post by mettamage »

MattGaiser wrote: post #63
LAC-Tech wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This a hundred times over. I still remember in 2020 multiple places asking me "I see you've used .NET core, what *version* have you used?". I had a kind of career crisis/breakdown, where I realised no one gave a shit about anything except my utility as a walking set of tech keywords. Accepting that it wasn't working for me was one of the best things I've done for my career.

> where I realised no one gave a shit about anything except my utility as a walking set of tech keywords. I am genuinely asking. Why is this objectionable? Why do people find it so horrible that their labour is a commodity? To me that just tells me I should treat my labour like a merchant treats his goods. Always be checking the market to ensure you have something worth selling and while you might sign long term deal…

IMO, because the different .NET Core versions the commenter talks about aren’t that different and one can easily learn another version if they are already well-versed in one if them.

Learnability is totally ignored.

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