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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”?

#81

Post by marssaxman »

dleslie wrote: post #58
mabbo wrote: post #44

Having 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 more, fire fast" does not sound like a company I'd want to work for.

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

#83

Post by autarch »

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…

> I would hire you to do 30 hours of contract work where we pair program on real life things.

You say this as if most (or any) candidates could do this.

If you currently have a job, then you almost certainly won't have time for this, unless you're single with no hobbies. If you do have time, you may not be allowed to moonlight under your current employment contract.

And if you don't have a job, you _still_ may not have the time or desire to do this!

I'm currently jobless (by choice - I wanted a break) and I started interviewing a few weeks ago. It's exhausting! Even if I could squeeze in 30 hours of work over a couple of weeks, I wouldn't want to. I had 11.5 hours of interviews this past week, and now you want me to spend another 10-15 hours pair programming with you? Absolutely not.

If you spread those hours out over many weeks (6 weeks at 5 hours per week) the candidate will be done with the process everywhere else much sooner and they'll just accept an offer before this process finishes.

If you want a trial period, make an offer and have a 3-month probation period during which you will give the new hire regular feedback (at least once a month but more often is better). Doesn't every company do this already, at least implicitly?

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

#84

Post by Apreche »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #7

> How is a process like this in any way shape or form efficient or productive? Because hiring the wrong person becomes a colossal waste of time and money.

If the hiring process is faster, then the time wasted bringing in the wrong person is decreased significantly.

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

#85

Post by monster_group »

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…

The problem with this approach is that any real task requires a lot of internal knowledge (functional and technical) of the system which an outside candidate will not have. The pairing employee will have lots of it though and it is likely the candidate will appear inadequate even if the employee is aware of the internal knowledge difference. It is not straightforward to be productive on an alien code base from the get go.

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

#86

Post by rhexs »

qq66 wrote: post #56

There 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.

Sure, and then this test will closely correlate with IQ, strongly select for you-know-who, and we’ll be right back where we started.

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

#87

Post by dleslie »

edmundsauto wrote: post #80
dleslie wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not so much effort or commitment if the team is fully remote.

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

#88

Post by dharmab »

greggman3 wrote: post #65
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…

Agreed, a team I worked with added a very short (few minutes) screener quiz because we had about 10-20% of candidates make it past phone screen who struggled to write a simple function.

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

#89

Post by orzig »

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.

Can't comment on the lawsuit part, but of the handful of people who were "it's an open secret you need to work around them" bad, only 1 was fired. Even if they can be convinced to leave, they'll usually stay through their next annual bonus (which I don't fault them for, even if I fault them for other things). So, starting from the point where it's obvious they need to go, everyone who depends on their role needs to wait at least half a year before they can start looking for a replacement. It's a ton of damage, especially on smaller teams.
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