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Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

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Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

#61

Post by claytonjy »

Veelox wrote: post #5

It depends on what you are counting as interviews. Normally there is 1 recruiter/hiring manager initial call. Then there is 1 phone screen of some sort. If you pass that it's normal to have 4 onsite interviews in a day. That gets to 6. Sometimes there is a follow up interview and sometimes you skip the phone screen. I feel like 5-7 is the normal routine. Is there something else you expect?

This has been my experience, but what used to be 4 interviews during the onsite is now 4 remote interviews, sequential, each one dependent on passing the previous. Thus the process takes longer overall, and has twice the periods to stress about "did I do well enough".

Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

#63

Post by whimsicalism »

nickjj wrote: post #43

I'm not sure why part time contract style "interviews" aren't more common. If I ever got into a situation where I was hiring, it would start with a 2 hour conversation. No coding questions. I want to get to know you and also talk shop about applicable technologies. Then after that is simple. I would hire you to do 5-30 hours of contract work where we pair program on real life things. The interviewer would do the driv…

This comes up routinely. The answer that continues to be true is that if you want to hire talented developers, nobody would agree to this process.

You have to understand that, as an employer in the current market, you do not really hold any of the cards if you want to hire talented developers.

It's not a win/win. Nobody with options is going to accept multiple weeks of limbo in exchange for maybe having a job.

Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

#65

Post by greggman3 »

kstenerud wrote: post #4

Tech is very cargo cultish, which comes from having a young average age, and a strong survivorship bias in the media. Remember the Google brainteasers? Fizzbuzz? "Culture fit"? Tech companies have the lowest infrastructure costs of any industry, and so they have no place to hang their risk aversive paranoia except on personnel (the safer you are, the more trivial the things you fear). There's nothing logical about it…

Is FizzBuzz cargo cult? I had my own company in 1995. We tried to hire programmers. The candidate would come in and we'd spend an hour interviewing. 9 out of 10 could not program at all and effectively wasted our time.

So, we switched to "here's a short test, go in this room and do the test". Then we'd look at their answers. If the answers were wrong/poor we'd thank them for their time and excuse them. This way, less of our time was wasted. That test included an extremely small task like FizzBuzz. If you can't answer it you can't program, period! It filtered out the 9 out of 10 applicants who should never have applied in the first place and saved us a bunch of time.

At a big company the phone screen is supposed to do that but phone screens still take a hour or more of some engineer's time.

Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

#66

Post by nopenopenopeno »

bradleyjg wrote: post #19
jjmorrison wrote: post #15

Well I can say in my experience firing people is such a pain nowadays that I feel a need to be a lot more careful in hiring. I've seen a bit more than half of fired employees come back with some form of discrimination lawsuit threat after being fired.

This is my answer as well. The two rational pairings are: hire fast, fire fast and hire slow, fire slow If for legal or cultural reasons you can’t fire fast, that leaves you with only one choice.

Choice two: get a job

Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

#67

Post by that_guy_iain »

grapeskin wrote: post #17
kstenerud wrote: post #4

Tech is very cargo cultish, which comes from having a young average age, and a strong survivorship bias in the media. Remember the Google brainteasers? Fizzbuzz? "Culture fit"? Tech companies have the lowest infrastructure costs of any industry, and so they have no place to hang their risk aversive paranoia except on personnel (the safer you are, the more trivial the things you fear). There's nothing logical about it…

All we need is a “3+ interviews considered harmful” post to hit HN a few months in a row and we can finally solve this problem. That, or we’ll have some representative from the big 5 saying “Hey guys, Jayden from (x soulless Silicon Valley company) here. Not speaking on behalf of my employer but actually at X Corp(tm) we’ve found that anything less than 37 interviews (+tip) isn’t enough to let the real stars shine th…

> All we need is a “3+ interviews considered harmful” post to hit HN a few months in a row and we can finally solve this problem.

I'll get cracking on it. It'll be my next hit after my last blog post about tech hiring "Hiring Developers: How to avoid the best" - https://www.getparthenon.com/blog/how-to-avoid-hiring-the-be...

Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

#69

Post by tomc1985 »

kstenerud wrote: post #4

Tech is very cargo cultish, which comes from having a young average age, and a strong survivorship bias in the media. Remember the Google brainteasers? Fizzbuzz? "Culture fit"? Tech companies have the lowest infrastructure costs of any industry, and so they have no place to hang their risk aversive paranoia except on personnel (the safer you are, the more trivial the things you fear). There's nothing logical about it…

It pains me so much that we've gone from hiring a couple of supersmart ubernerds over a cool demo and setting them loose to... this.

Now, everything sucks. People who only know the tech they trained for. Tools are written for idiots, and the only thing even more written for idiots than that is the code we're supposed to be producing. Teams believing whatever stupid fad some trendy consultant prepared for them. Way too much support staff when I used to be able to call the stakeholder up directly and square any issues, now I have to go through like 4 idiot nontechnical PMs.

One of my previous managers compared us to a basketball team. Ew ew ew ew ew ew EW!

Tech sucks now. Get the business and nontechnical people out! All they contribute is bloat and mediocrity. The only people who should be in charge are those that have been at this for life.

Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

#70

Post by Apreche »

I don't know, but it's a huge problem, and it makes no sense.

Companies are desperate to hire, all they do is complain they can't find anyone. Yet, when it comes to actually hiring they are so afraid of hiring the wrong person, or someone who is faking it, that they put up a huge barrier to entry. Beggars can't be choosers!

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