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The rise of never-ending job interviews

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Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#351

Post by sokoloff »

danjac wrote: post #196
jimbob45 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that and I’ve seen several companies in practice echo what you’re saying. However, I fail to understand why they don’t simply make better use of contracts and probationary periods to solve that specific problem.

The problem of a probationary period is that it pushes all the risk to the employee. While I agree interviewing has gotten ridiculous with all the leetcoding and ten rounds of interviews and FAANG cargo-culting and whatnot, one small advantage - assuming I'm not desperate for a paycheck - is that it gives me, as a prospective employee, time to consider and withdraw my application if I see too many red flags or I just…

In a world where short, high-risk interviews dominated, you could just go roll the dice again. It would be a negative signal (why is @foo interviewing after only 60 days?), but nowhere near as bad as “why is @foo still interviewing after 6 months in this job market?!”.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#352

Post by bostik »

devnull3 wrote: post #141
Analemma_ wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is infamous for jerking people around in the interview process. I had a very similar experience, as did several people I know. They do it because they know they can get away with it, but I do wonder if they have a backup plan if the lustre of working for Google ever fades, because it's an open secret that their interview process is a fucking nightmare for no reason.

> fucking nightmare for no reason Absolutely! To add, the amount of nit-picking that happens is staggering. I was downgraded from strong-hire to lean-hire because: 1. I did not use classes in Python. That problem could easily be solved using simple functions. The feedback I got was "candidate does not know idiomatic use of modules & classes" 2. I did not use one of python's standard lib functions and instead I coded…

> I could not spot a scenario in the first 5-7 min of interview.

This is endemic and part of a much wider malignancy in the tech interviews. Cram two medium-to-high difficulty questions in the span of 45 minutes and require the candidates to solve them both on the spot. In other words, you have at most 20 minutes to work out a complete solution to any given problem.

In practice that means that you need to come up with the correct base solution in the first 2-3 minutes, because there is no time to actually work through the problem.

I call these types of interviews Epiphany Lottery.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#353

Post by kamaal »

yobbo wrote: post #338
trinovantes wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once had an in-person interview where they gave me a sheet of printed code and asked me to point out the syntax errors. Some interviewers are absolutely insane.

It is disrespectful, but it is a proxy test for how many hours you have spent reading and writing code in that language.

A while back Indian companies were notoriously famous for giving questions from Let us C, from Yashwant Kanitkar.

The questions go like,

What is the output of the expression below?

    int i = 10;
    ****++&&*+p;
Followed by a myriad of options. Including things like Syntax error.

Not sure how this measures language proficiency.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#354

Post by epicureanideal »

elmolino89 wrote: post #333

I am fine that up to the ~3 interviews covering the different aspects (say HR person checking the general personality, IT guy for i.e. Linux sysadmin knowledge mini-test, the team manager). In 2020 after the Covid started, I got into the endless spiral of I believe 6 interviews spaced over a month or so, then the long wait and getting shorter contract with same salary but different from the advert job title. With the…

> HR person checking the general personality

I would say that's the worst person to do the personality check. Instead, engineers the hire would actually work with should probably do the personality check.

Often HR is either a bureaucrat with a non-technical degree, or an inexperienced young "internal recruiter" with a non-technical degree and a pleasant appearance meant to attract responses on LinkedIn. Neither of those are uniquely well suited to judging personalities. (Unless this is another case of, #wontfix, we want to screen out engineers who have personality characteristics that random 24 year old sociology students don't like.)

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#355

Post by ImaCake »

stevekemp wrote: post #178
andrew_ wrote: 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…

It's interesting to hear of these experiences because my own job applications have usually taken four steps: * See the advert online, and send an email/fill out a form to apply. * Have a quick phone-chat with a HR-person, where they ask about salary, history, and try to decide if I'm a chancer, or I have some somewhat useful skills. * Have a 30-60 minute interview with some technical people, in-person. * Optionally h…

I do research assistant work in biology. The best way to get one of these rare jobs is to email the professor directly. They then have a "chat" with you (don't be fooled, this is the formal interview!) and then several weeks later they get around to bypassing the Uni's hiring process and you get a job.

I really am not looking forward to going through a formal interview process, because it will be so jarring compared to what I am used to!

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#356

Post by sokoloff »

hiyer wrote: post #343
worker767424 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interviews or rounds? Phone screen and 4-5 on-site is pretty reasonable, but that's only two rounds.

I'm not sure where the distinction lies - both seem same to me :-)

To me, rounds imply a decision point (and delay) in between.

If I talk to HR on Monday, take a phone screen with an engineer on Wednesday, and come on-site (or Zoom now) with 4 engineers next Monday, that’s 2 rounds and 5 interviews (or 3 and 6 if you count HR)

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#357

Post by ellenhp »

biztos wrote: post #340
ladberg wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similarly bad Google experience that I've talked about before[0] but will copy here: I was asked to do a task that eventually boiled down to a topological sort, and I thought the question consisted of recognizing that the answer was a topological sort and moving on because it was over the phone. However, that was not the case. The interviewer wanted me to code it all out over Google Docs, but I didn't remembe…

I find it… troubling? That a technical interviewer can’t tell for herself whether your code will work. Wouldn’t you ideally want people who actually understand code to be giving the coding questions?

Are you saying that because this interviewer needs to run code to find logic errors, she's somehow not a competent engineer? Because I usually need to run code to find logic errors. Sometimes I use formal verification instead but that's pretty rare. Am I also not a competent engineer?

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#358

Post by caoilte »

DSingularity wrote: post #5
vegetablepotpie wrote: post #2

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.

The reason they want to remove the risk is because it takes years to prune bad talent.

I don't think it's that at all. It's very easy to fire people in US. I think they are trying to hire cultists. The harder it is to get in the more people think they're special once they do and the less likely they are to leave.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#359

Post by [deleted] »

silisili wrote: post #119

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…

[deleted]

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#360

Post by AlexAltea »

silisili wrote: post #119

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…

Years ago, while applying to some security engineer position at Google, they were testing low-level skills focusing on vulnerability research, C/C++ and x86. At that point having spent 10+ intense years on that arch: having written binary translators for it, reversing/exploiting software and writing a micro-kernel. After rejection, they recommended me to read a "x86 assembly 101" book which was truly infuriating at that point.

Granted, it was an automated email, but an automated "No" would have been more appropriate. Is it so hard to offer different standard responses? Why does the company consistently fail at human interaction, be it candidates or customers?

From my circles, most share the feeling that FAANG/MSFT are insulting for candidates (I can only speak for Google/Microsoft).

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