Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 833 posts

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

#111

Post by py_or_dy »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #3

Tech companies are extremely risk adverse when it comes to hiring the "wrong" person. More interviews means more people to spread to blame over if a wrong hire happens. At seven interviews, if everyone signed off on the bad hire, that wasn't anyone's fault, it must have been that the hire was skilled at deception or some other deflection.

Curious, what is the "wrong" person? I've worked with some co-workers before that were clearly not a fit, but it was so obvious. One time I was asked to help a new hire with a project that was falling behind. He had spent 2 months trying to get some javascript (that he copied from a project I had done) working. He didn't even know what the web console was. As soon as I opened it and saw the javascript errors the fix was simple. But he spent 2 months just smearing random javascript around... Surely it would be easy to filter that person out during interviewing.

But on the other end... I've worked with some people that are pretty good at leetcode and very fast coders. But even though they write many pages of code every day and tons of commits, their code is absolutely horrible, full of bugs, impossible to read. They got stuff done, but it was at great cost in the future. That was mostly why I left my original job in the first place (looking for work now for 18+ months). We hired a couple of new people and they were pumping out so much code I couldn't keep up with all their commits. Bugs started rolling in and they were too busy working on the new projects to fix their old crap. Boss had me hunting down and digging through their garbage code while my projects were getting behind and I was the one "under-preforming". I started going insane, unable to get out of bed, staring out the window for 12+ hours a day unable to look at their code. Mostly walked out. Those new people all quit after I left as well but the company's market crashed due to covid so we would have all be laid off anyway.

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

#112

Post by mabbo »

angarg12 wrote: post #74
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,…

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.

Yeah this also is a big issue. It was nice having the "debrief" meeting afterwards. This meant that people had to back up what they had written.

"Why do you think this person 'isnt a good culture fit'? Oh because the team you run are all 20-something male brogrammers and this candidate is a 38 year old woman with kids? Hey cool, that's illegal discrimination."

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

#113

Post by daviddever23box »

KerrickStaley wrote: post #38

I've worked as a software engineer in the US since 2013 and have gone through 12 interview loops in my career. At a typical tech firm, the SWE interview loop consists of: 1 recruiter screen: discussing background with recruiter to make sure your experience is relevant 1-2 phone screens: technical interviews with a SWE to see if it's worthwhile to bring you on site 4-6 on-site interviews: combination of technical and…

Hiring managers lose their authority when they cease to ask meaningful questions about the existence of and rationale for each requirement that is listed on the job description, and its relevance to the overall outcome.

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

#114

Post by ipaddr »

jclulow wrote: post #39

The predictive power of a single interview with a single person is just not that high. For one thing, the company is not the only one doing the interviewing; the candidate is also interviewing the company. Before making a commitment to join a team, I think it's valuable to speak to a number of members of that team to get a sense of what they're like. On the company side, I have also witnessed several people who might…

With people leaving in 2 years or 1 year at Amazon on average do you really need to talk to employees? Take a chance and make the best of it.

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

#115

Post by prewett »

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…

It might be low risk for the company, but it’s not low risk for anyone who already has a job that they want to keep until they find a new one. You can’t take a week of vacation for a bunch of companies.

It would work for people without a job or contractors, but in the latter case, they probably are looking for contract work not W2 employment, so you’d be better off with contract-to-hire.

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

#116

Post by hiyer »

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…

Well, it's not only big SV corporates that are doing 5-7 rounds of interviews. In my experience even 3-4 year old startups with under 100 employees do at least 5 rounds - 2 coding, 2 system design and one hiring manager. The most common 6th round is either "culture fit" or "bar-raiser" but small startups usually don't do this.

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

#117

Post by mnd999 »

angarg12 wrote: post #74
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,…

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.

No post body was provided.

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

#118

Post by alexashka »

StupidUser123 wrote: post #106
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,…

I’m a HM at a big tech company with this format as well. Honestly, I really like it. I don’t want to hire the wrong person, it’s expensive and it makes my job awful for a while. It’s great getting data points on several programming interviews, system design, etc. That makes my sell interview so much easier because I can trust the process to assess their technical skills. You need multiple people because you’re consta…

> Is it perfect? No, but it does work.

How do you know it works?

> I don’t want to hire the wrong person, it’s expensive and it makes my job awful for a while.

There we are. It is all about you.

No need to say anything else - your life is all about you, so of course if it works for you, 'it works'.

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

#119

Post by sokoloff »

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?

To be honest, it sounds like "the format with only 3-4 interviews wasn't effective and equitable, so we adjusted it to make it more so, resulting in the current 5-7 format..."

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

#120

Post by QuarterReptile »

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…

You're describing an internship, but one where (a) the intern gets that much attention than normal, and (b) someone experienced is doing an internship.
Post reply on HN