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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”?

#91

Post by angarg12 »

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…

Why do people simply assume big tech companies are dumb and they haven't thought their hiring process through?

Amazon literally has a research team focused in hiring, and they run A/B experiments to continually improve the process. The current interview format is not a cargo cult, is a high refine process through the years.

Is it perfect? hell no, but it isn't the mindless copycat people make it to be. They have actual data to back up what works and what doesn't, although it might take several years to happen (like when Google finally dropped brain teasers).

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

#92

Post by in_cahoots »

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…

Most people with jobs probably can’t devote 5-30 hours to contract work during the workday. Plus most employment contracts won’t allow this kind of side gig.

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

#93

Post by frankchn »

KerrickStaley wrote: post #50
monster_group wrote: post #31

Most tech companies now do around 4-5 interviews. It has been like that for at least 7-8 years (probably more) but I just found out that not all companies are like that. After being subjected to these demeaning Leetcoding interviews I went through a refreshingly pleasant experience. It was an interview with just one person. They gave me a technical open-ended problem and two weeks time. After two weeks I had to do a…

I would argue that 30 hours invested in interviewing at a single company is a lot more work than you put in doing a couple phone screens and a one-day onsite. I personally abhor take-home projects because they tend to balloon in scope (I'm a perfectionist and want to put the best foot forward). With an on-site loop, when you're done you're done.

Yeah, a valid philosophy is that a company should have to spend at least as many man-hours interviewing me as I spend interviewing.

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

#94

Post by toast0 »

lupire wrote: post #6

7hrs of interview for $300k+/yr seems fine. The US President interviews for a whole year, for $400k/yr

The President gets that salary for life. A tech job stops paying when it ends; even if there are any jobs with pensions left, you only get them after working a long time.

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

#95

Post by namirez »

monster_group wrote: post #31

Most tech companies now do around 4-5 interviews. It has been like that for at least 7-8 years (probably more) but I just found out that not all companies are like that. After being subjected to these demeaning Leetcoding interviews I went through a refreshingly pleasant experience. It was an interview with just one person. They gave me a technical open-ended problem and two weeks time. After two weeks I had to do a…

I went through a similar experience with a radically different outcome. I was given a coding assignment and one week to finish it. I spent more than 30 hours on it and came up with a solution that was supposedly 500 times faster that what they'd ever seen (they told me this later). But things took a wrong turn at that point. In the followup meeting the interviewer turned out to be rude, disruptive, and combative. He tried to grill me on every little thing I said and finally rejected me. I have no idea how it happened but I suspect they simply thought my solution to the take-home assignment was too good to be mine.

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

#97

Post by neverminder »

monster_group wrote: post #31

Most tech companies now do around 4-5 interviews. It has been like that for at least 7-8 years (probably more) but I just found out that not all companies are like that. After being subjected to these demeaning Leetcoding interviews I went through a refreshingly pleasant experience. It was an interview with just one person. They gave me a technical open-ended problem and two weeks time. After two weeks I had to do a…

I got my last 3 jobs after half an hour conversation with the lead/CTO. I'm not a "rockstar" either, just average dev. When companies are desperate to hire they don't dragg ass with infinite interviews. Of course, SV gravy train doesn't fall in that category.

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

#98

Post by dleslie »

lbotos wrote: post #78
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?

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.

Basically everywhere in NA has allowances for probationary periods with at-will employment. Moreover, prospective hires could start on contract.

Morale is improved when team members feel like they have some control over their membership.

It seems like you're assuming that a great many people would be fired; why so? In my experience, having worked for several such companies, firing is rare because even minimal filters are effective.

Resume check, reference check, and meet the team. Done.

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

#99

Post by bjornlouser »

They are trying to find candidates that won't quit once subjected to micromanagement and a culture of constant fire drills, etc.

A proxy for that kind of tolerance is whether the candidate will jump through an inordinate number of hoops while being hazed by future coworkers.

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

#100

Post by ipaddr »

orzig wrote: post #49
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…

If you can't calculate the optimal design (for hiring, in this case) from first principles, what option do you have but empirical observation? And when steady-state performance takes at least 2 years to obtain, is it unreasonable to have fads at roughly that frequency? Resumes suck, take-homes suck, interviews suck, nepotism sucks; yet people still need to invest $x00,000 based on something. I don't have the answer,…

If you are hiring someone with 10 years experience it becomes a lot easier. Just try them out, 9/10 will succeed.
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