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The rise of never-ending job interviews

bbc.com

161–170 of 1001 posts

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#161

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.…

Part of the problem is that Manton the interview panel do feel like they're wasting their time. It is valuable to the company but for the engineers, they want to get back to coding or whatever else they are working on. It isn't fair to the person applying because they didn't pick the people on the panel, but if the one doing the interviewing doesn't hide their feeling it's obviously not great.

That's true. I want to say that that's Google's fault right? Because not everybody is on the team you're interviewing for (I might be wrong)? At Apple you are interviewed by the team, who presumably needs another person to assist them.

Also, regardless of whether or not they want to be there, it's a bad look for the company. Somebody took a day off to talk to you, it's only fair that an interviewer reciprocates

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#163

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…

I remember getting one like that - Googler demanded some random value from a system .h file. Easy enough to grep if necessary, but _no_ it had to be from memory to make one Googley.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then give them a reason to stay (note: it's also not all about money)

Whatever you offer, including non-monetary, someone else can offer and then also spend their training budget on higher comp.

Not necessarily. It's not easy to find a boss who you genuinely trust to consider your best interests, for example.

Out of curiosity, what sort of "non-monetary" benefits were you thinking about? There's usually not a reliable way to turn (small amounts of) money into the sorts of things that really build loyalty.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#165

If your application process starts with a human being—even better a technical human being—reaching out to me, followed by 2-3 interviews, followed by an offer, I am already on your side. If your application process starts with a HackerRank, followed by 2 phone interviews followed by on-site, followed by team matching, I will not be on your side. Oh and if there's random month long gaps in between stages, I will espec…

I don’t think there is such a thing as a junior compiler job?

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#166

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…

I remember getting one like that - Googler demanded some random value from a system .h file. Easy enough to grep if necessary, but _no_ it had to be from memory to make one Googley.

If the meta-interview system has even a modicum of sanity in its design, that question will be discounted when none of the candidates get it.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#167
post #150

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…

And yet if they ask you for an answer to a quirky question like "why are manhole covers round?", they expect a clever answer like "they can't fall in", rather than a pedestrian answer like "well, probably they just started making them that shape for some simple production reason, and then everyone else just kinda of did the same thing because it worked."

Manhole covers are round because they minimize the circumference per area that must be cut to make the cover fall in.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#169

What’s happening is that companies want to completely remove risk from the hiring process. In the real world, you cannot remove risk. You can manage it, but you cannot remove it. Asking candidates to go through 6 interviews before making a decision and not telling them when a decision will be made signals a risk adverse culture that cannot make decisions.

I was going to say that there are tons of parallels with how some fund managers approach investment. I have met lots of people who have this trait for over-analysis, not one has ever made consistently profitable investments. Over-analysis is a failure to understand what information is important. This is going to become more and more common though. In fund management, there has been a huge move towards "professionalis…

Does any fund manager make consistently profitable investments? Most don’t even seem to make sporadic profitable investments.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#170
post #94
post #66

I recently agreed to go through a 5-round process which totaled to about 6 hours. I'm the first person to bitch about the ineffectiveness of leetcode/hackerrank bullshit for people with 10+ of verifiable experience, but I went through this one because it was a field I had never worked in before, and the personnel I was speaking with were truly interesting. Sans all of those qualifiers, anything more than 3 rounds is…

Devil's advocate. Every bad hire costs the company $50,000 - 200,000. Sometimes more. They can also sink or demoralize teams. Many of the people conducting interviews are new to the process and don't know how to extract signal. Sometimes scales don't line up. When you have a revolving door of employees (because that's the way things are these days), have trouble scheduling interviews (busy engineers trying to get the…

"revolving door of employees (because that's the way things are these days)"

2 things that line hits me.

1. Remuneration. If I can jump ship and come back later to much more money, why not?

2. I work to make myself replaceable. This is what good documentation, code comments, architecture is for!

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