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Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
71–80 of 833 posts
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#72Asking what the full interview process is at first contact can be telling of the culture and can be used to screen companies as much as looking at tech stack, company size/details, comp, etc.
That many interviews for a PM is ridiculous.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#73Well 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.
Managers should be honing the hiring process. If your team is clear about what they're looking for and thoughtful about how to get at it, you should be able to figure out if a candidate is a good team and technical fit in a couple of hours.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#74Having been an interviewer at a FAANG for many years, I can explain some of the logic behind it. I'm not saying this logic is valid , but it's how we got here, imho. First: we no longer trust the hiring manager alone, because probably they aren't a strong developer. We instead trust strong developers that are well trained at evaluating good devs. At the same time, we don't want to thrust a dev onto a hiring manager,…
I was going to say this.
To add more: a single person (HM) might have biases for or against certain candidates. More people in the loop brings in diversity and helps to keep interviewers honest and consistent.
Also these roles are usually high stakes and the cost of a bad hire is too high.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#75Yeah, I had the same Jikes feel when I thought I would try work for a company for once for a bit than start my own; they said ‘we normally conduct 7 interviews over a 3 week period’. So that was it for my experiment working somewhere for now.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#76There needs to be something like the SAT for computer programming. Getting a 1500 won't mean you're a genius but it will mean you can do the job, and then there can be 1-2 interviews for domain-specific skills and culture fit. I know many have tried this, some have built great businesses, but nobody has yet become "The Credential" but I do believe this will eventually exist.
You just have leetcode their next product idea.
They'll rent some office space, put you in a room for 2 hours on a computer with no internet, and see how well you can grind through their problems.
Your score will arrive via the Blockchain to save on physical trees and allow for ready verification by future employers.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#77Best of luck. I have no idea how to get hired. I jumped shipped from my last employer in May of 2020 thinking I'd take a 2 month break and then start interviewing. Over 18 months I submitted over 80 applications, and got interviews at 40-50 different companies. Total phone and video interviews ended up being over 110 before I basically gave up. I was trying to transition from a full stack dev mostly with perl backends into a full stack django dev. But I don't think the fact that most of my experience being in perl was the issue, as in some cases my past experience was not talked about much or not mentioned at all. Plus I've re-written my resume and linkedin to mostly only mentioned python and django projects that I've worked on.
The interviews were all the same mostly. Do a take home project or do leetcode problems while the interviewer stares at you. Sometimes I did bad, sometimes I did alright, and other times I did great. It didn't seem to matter. The funny thing is as I got more desperate, I started applying to crappier companies and more junior positions for lower pay. As I went down the ladder, the interviews got even more complicated and challenging!
A couple of years ago I got interested in HVAC technology after having my HVAC unit replaced and researching options. As I'd mostly depleted my savings, I started debating on jumping ship to be an HVAC tech. I could cram for an EPA certification test over a couple of weeks and get a refrigeration cert and then be nearly guaranteed a position at a couple of local HVAC shops for $15 an hour. The only reason I haven't done that (yet) is like you said because of my kids. My life story would be I went to tech school out of high school and was an avionics tech for 3 years, followed by 5 years to get through university, followed by 10 years of software developer experience and then 2 years of no work followed by becoming an HVAC tech working with high school drop outs as co-workers. There would be no telling my kids to get an education when this (forced) path I'm on shows how worthless it is. I've never felt so lost and useless in my entire life.
The other reason for not jumping ship (yet) is that I feel so qualified on django/python stacks. You could drop me into any dumpster fire of a django project and I'd be fine. It is extremely insane that the only people getting hired in that space are people with under 2 years of experience or people with over 10 years of django only experience. There is absolutely no middle ground (which is where I fall in).
I'm now debating jumping on a difference language with a smaller community (similar to how perl used to be) like golang or elixir. But there is no guarantee there but I feel like hiring in that space would more likely respect past experience or at least know that if you graduated college and have years of experience that you would be able to "mostly learn anything" and be reliable. Dunno...
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#78Having been an interviewer at a FAANG for many years, I can explain some of the logic behind it. I'm not saying this logic is valid , but it's how we got here, imho. First: we no longer trust the hiring manager alone, because probably they aren't a strong developer. We instead trust strong developers that are well trained at evaluating good devs. At the same time, we don't want to thrust a dev onto a hiring manager,…
What I'm reading here is that even as an experienced interviewer you struggle to make the format effective and equitable. Sounds to me like the format isn't worth keeping; time to hire more, and fire fast?
1. Often, legally, firing people is harder than hiring.
2. Hire more, fire fast sounds good on paper but will destroy morale as the team identity will be constantly influx.
3. Engineers will spend less time onboarding newer engineers to the detriment of everyone because well, they might not just last.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#79I'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…
In 2012 a Google recruiter told me the got 1 million applications a year. I'm guessing that number is higher in 2022 and it's similar for other similar companies. You can't give 1 million applicants 5-30 hours of contract work. You still need some process to select a few of them. What would that process be?
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#80Having been an interviewer at a FAANG for many years, I can explain some of the logic behind it. I'm not saying this logic is valid , but it's how we got here, imho. First: we no longer trust the hiring manager alone, because probably they aren't a strong developer. We instead trust strong developers that are well trained at evaluating good devs. At the same time, we don't want to thrust a dev onto a hiring manager,…
What I'm reading here is that even as an experienced interviewer you struggle to make the format effective and equitable. Sounds to me like the format isn't worth keeping; time to hire more, and fire fast?
Hire fast and fire requires even more effort and commitment from a candidate, I’m not sure how that would be an improvement. Firing fast would be like 3 months of interviews!
I’d also like to add that having multiple interviewers, if they have diverse backgrounds, is more likely to be equitable than a single interviewer.