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The rise of never-ending job interviews

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Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#771

Post by mox1 »

endtime wrote: post #760
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…

Standard disclaimer: everything below is my own opinion based on my personal experience, and I'm not speaking on behalf of my employer. > I thought I was done, then the interviewer said she would go go copy my code and compile it after the interview to see if I was right, which blew my mind. I've been interviewing at Google for nine years and have never done this. I generally don't think it's fair to ding a candidate…

How would you feel if you were going to a job as a writer, and the interviewee asked you to put a story, poem, etc. down on a napkin, with a crayon?

Like thats how I would feel writing code into freakin google docs during a job interview...with Google.

Tie 1 arm behind by back as the synax goes wonky, I'm fighting the spacing, etc. etc.

Or put mario Andretti into a ford focus, then test his lap times, with 0 warning.

Yuck.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#772

Post by finolex1 »

caoilte wrote: post #358
DSingularity wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The difficulty isn't with regards to the process/legality. It's more behavioral/organizational

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#773

Post by deedubaya »

In-house recruiting have few incentives to provide a fast and efficient hiring pipeline.

Slow pipelines mean low conversion rates (survival of the most pain tolerant), generating more internal demand. Natural reaction to to widen the pipe (more recruiters) not speed it up.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#774

Post by nobleach »

throwaway9191aa wrote: post #601
lordnacho wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At this point I'm pretty sure FAANG hiring is just a random walk. Every now again someone happens to have looked at all the questions they ask recently for that particular interview cycle (or avoid the trap ones like that) and that person gets hired (and then put on the ad targeting team or whatever). This might actually be part of the retention strategy. If everyone who works at FAANG knows that they're somewhat l…

I'll just +1 this as a datapoint. I am not looking externally until I'm sure I'm done at AWS. I've done 80+ interviews here, and I'm consistently amazed by what drives people to say "The candidate wasn't up to the coding bar". As far as I can tell, you are almost never up to the coding bar. I think we interview so many people just to remind ourselves that if we leave, we aren't getting back in. Just to head off the "…

That culture is so foreign to me. Each place I've left in the past 10 years, I'm pretty sure I could go back. I know enough folks or at least have been told by C-Suite that "the door is always open, just give me a call". I went through a few rounds of Amazon interviews in 2020... I don't think I'd ever way to experience that again.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#775

Post by actually_a_dog »

crispyambulance wrote: post #628
XorNot wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point I'm pretty sure FAANG hiring is just a random walk. Every now again someone happens to have looked at all the questions they ask recently for that particular interview cycle (or avoid the trap ones like that) and that person gets hired (and then put on the ad targeting team or whatever).

The experiences that people describe here just confirm something that many of us has learned a long time ago: NOBODY HAS "FIGURED OUT" HIRING ! Not Google, not Apple, no one. Sure, some places (and individual interviewers) are better at it than others. But at the end of the day, hiring is a deeply subjective process with lots of error and uncertainty built into it's nature. The subjectivity is intrinsic. Places like…

> Sure, some places (and individual interviewers) are better at it than others.

In my, admittedly not super extensive experience, I tend to believe that about 1 in 10 companies actually knows how to run a hiring process. I'm not sure precisely what kind of error bounds I'd put on that, but I doubt I'm off by more than a factor of 2 either way.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#776

Post by moistoreos »

discmonkey wrote: post #727

Having recently won the google hiring lottery, I wanted to add my experience total length of time ~ 7 months emails sent/received ~ 50 phone calls ~ 20 technical interviews: 7 (1 with screen with recruiter, 6 with engineers) team match interviews: 3 (for me at least these were real interviews, in that I "flunked" the first 2, and decided to take the 3rd one very seriously before getting an offer) Before getting hirin…

I agree w/ the sentiment of your last statement.

However, I wholeheartedly could not disagree more w/ "having won the hiring lottery". 80+ hours of interviewing? No offense, that doesn't sound like winning the lottery. That sounds like you don't value your time. Unless you're getting paid for that many hours of interviewing or receive a signing bonus to make up for it, any company that does 10+ hours of interviewing can take a rusted iron rod and shove it up their own arse.

In a market where software engineers are in super high demand, if a company cannot refine the technical interview(s) down to a max of 3 hours for any specific role, then why waste your time? I understand wanting to gauge a candidate's technical abilities. But there's a balance between understanding the candidate's technical abilities, the technical knowledge required for the job, and (the most important bit) what can be learned on the job for the role.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#777

Post by dr_orpheus »

gorpomon wrote: post #608

On my team, I inherited an interview process with 7 steps. It's a long one for sure, and it's not a process I can change. But as a hiring manager I mitigate issues brought up in this article by doing a few really easy things: 1. On my first chat with a candidate, I layout the entire interview process. I acknowledge that it is long and I preemptively thank them for going through the process and say that we value their…

Any response is better than nothing and it is sad that is the line to be above. But I know I appreciate letters actually explaining why I was declined, if they are informative it can actually be helpful for me to improve.

Especially if there is an assignment with the interviews I really think that feedback should be required. I spent about a week on an assignment like this with 3 interviews and just got back a "nope, sorry". And it wasn't even from anyone I had interviewed with, just the original recruiter.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#778

Post by missingrib »

sdevonoes wrote: post #568
AJRF wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Geohotz had a good rant about this once - the kind of people who need to cram leetcodes and memorize algorithms are not the kinds of people who Google wants to pass these interviews. Makes a lot of sense, you could solve all these questions without knowing specific algorithms as long as you are good at problem solving - which is, I assume, the intent of the process. Obviously it doesn't always work like that.

> the kind of people who need to cram leetcodes and memorize algorithms are not the kinds of people who Google wants to pass these interviews. I thought it was exactly those who Google wants to pass. Anecdote: ex-colleague of mine who is not specially bright studied 3 months how to "crack the coding interview" and got a job at Google. His knowledge about algorithms and data structures was like mine: I know what a tre…

>ex-colleague of mine who is not specially bright studied 3 months how to "crack the coding interview" and got a job at Google.

Sounds bright to me.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#779

Post by coldpie »

pjmlp wrote: post #430
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…

After failing two Google interviews both triggered by being reached directly by Google HR, telling me how my public information and CV was impressive and I should be really at Google, I told them to never ever contact me again. My feedback was that, if the CV is so impressive, according to them, why do I have to endure such interview processes? Anyway I never bought into the whole do no evil marketing, nor bothered t…

I had the same experience, some internal recruiter reaching out that they were super impressed and wanted me for some special group, then a phone call where they never bothered to show up(!) so we rescheduled, then some stupid interview where they asked me to estimate the value of 2^10 or something and then told me they didn't want me for the special group after all. Complete waste of time, especially given I didn't really even want the job, they reached out to me. Taught me a lesson, at least: I'll never work at a big company, no salary is worth that kind of treatment of other people.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#780

Post by theyellowkid »

bississippi wrote: post #6

> That’s a question Mike Conley, 49, grappled with earlier this year. The software engineer, based in Indiana, US, had been seeking a new role after losing his job during the pandemic This is ageism. I hope he realized this after 10 6 rounds of interviews. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19507732

It seems to me that ageism actually has some value.

People never got any smarter, but the nature and details of group activity have changed over time.

After a career of delivering products for boutique manufacturing companies, I'd say that my ability to pass a modern interview suite is essentially nil. My last gig for a company with modern practices taught me that it's no fun in any case as design devolves into manufacturing (perhaps for good reason).

Give me a young body, and I'd look into purposefully arcane careers with little remuneration. Blacksmithing perhaps.

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