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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”?

#121

Post by dleslie »

kjeetgill wrote: post #102
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?

I never understand answers of this format: "status quo has flaw of some known, finite impact" time to "completely ridiculously overcompensate, overreact, and make arbitrary move?" I can't even fathom in what ways you think "time to hire more, and fire fast?" is more "effective and equitable"? You just shove even more risk onto individuals who might be getting their footing still. You're just turning a 8-9 hours commi…

The response is to the needless growth in complexity of the hiring process; advocating for reducing that complexity is appropriate.

You're tacitly expressing a concern that a fast hiring commitment would be riskier; but that's not necessarily so. A minimal set of filters are meaningfully effective: resume, references, and meet the team. Anything beyond that doesn't have just diminishing returns, it can negatively impact the company by narrowing the field of viable candidates too far.

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

#122

Post by after_care »

nicoburns wrote: post #20

> "5 to 7 interviews is normal" Yeah, it's definitely not. I've never done more than 3 interviews, and that was the exceptional case. Vast majority have been either one interview with the hiring manager or two interviews where one is with the immediate hiring manager and the other was with someone more senior within the company.

Typical fang interview.

—- prescreen over the phone with recruiter

—- 1 hour prescreen with one or two devs

—- 3-5 one hour interviews given within 1 or two days (previously called an onsight)

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

#123

Post by 8ytecoder »

angarg12 wrote: post #91
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 actu…

How many formats have they tested? For AB testing to work, A and B should be at least distinguishable. Every single tech company has the exact same process. Sometimes even the same questions. And that applies even to any point in the ladder. And to every single role as well. (Only PM interviews are slightly different but in tech companies even they have to go through the same process until that differentiating round)

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

#124

Post by StupidUser123 »

dleslie wrote: post #87
edmundsauto wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You’re asking someone to quit their job to maybe get this new job. And you won’t know for months so all your other offers are gone. So if it doesn’t work out, you’re unemployed with no prospects. Sounds terrible.

I’d take 15 interviews before taking that risk.

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

#125

Post by tarkin2 »

I generally get about five interviews when I look for new jobs.

There’s a recruiter/hr phase, a project manager interview, a lead dev interview, engineering lead interview and often a coding challenge.

You’re talking about 6 hours per position. That’s basically a full time job looking for a new job, and if you already have a job to do this is ridiculous.

I generally always go for companies that 1) merge these interviews into three maximum 2) concentrate on the single most important thing: whether we can communicate well while solving a problem.

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

#126

Post by nickjj »

whimsicalism wrote: post #63
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.

> Nobody with options is going to accept multiple weeks of limbo in exchange for maybe having a job.

Let's say it does take 2 weeks to do 20 hours (2 hours a day), you would be compensated $4,000 for working 2 hours a day. Or if you're in between jobs you would have the time to do 20-30 hours in about 1 week and get paid $200 / hour.

I guess I'm just picky. I did freelance work for ~20 years and worked on 1 contract very part time for 2 years before deciding I wanted to try something new and work there full time. There was no interview process, I just signed a document and that was it.

I couldn't ever in a million years think about joining up at a place based on a few short interviews where 90% of the time is answering their interview questions. As someone who would be hired I really care about what I would be doing most days and what it's like to work there. Of course salary, benefits, TC, etc. is all important too but those are only numbers in the end.

I think this short contracting approach looks out more so for the interviewee. This "talented developer" can now pick and choose based on really knowing what it'll be like instead of hoping it's decent based on a couple of interviews.

I would have thought a highly talented person isn't concerned about jumping between interviews, getting hired, quitting after 3 weeks because it's not a good fit and repeating the process until they find a good match. Am I just way off base here? Do most folks bounce between jobs every few weeks (going through 5-7 interviews per job) until they find something they like?

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

#128

Post by UncleOxidant »

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…

> 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.

I remember about a dozen years ago taking one of these tests at an interview. Interviewer takes me to a room and says "We've got this little test, I'll be back in 2 hours.". I take the test. Guy comes back in and says ok, we'll look this over and let you know... Crickets. Didn't hear back so I figure I must've bombed the test. 2 years later that guy calls me up and asks if I want to come in for an interview. I say "I never heard back so I figured I bombed your test" He says "No, you did great, we just got kind of busy". I politely declined to interview with them again.

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

#129

Post by mylons »

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…

People get PIP’ed and fired routinely that make it through this process. I think there’s a lot of bias in your response. The process worked for you, you work at a large tech company and it gives you validation. It also makes you feel good to lord over the process and boosts your ego, reinforcing your priors.

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

#130

Post by yodsanklai »

imtakmo wrote: post #12

I entered the software industry as a developer about 4 years ago, and I have been running interviews for the past 2 years or so. Interview hell is all I have ever known. Could you elaborate on how things worked differently in the past? I legitimately have no idea what a developer interview "loop" would look like without 5 to 7 interviews, but I desperately hope it can exist.

> Could you elaborate on how things worked differently in the past?

Here's how it worked for me 25 years ago (in France).

Two-three informal interviews to make sure I wasn't too weird, and got offers purely based on my resume. I remember some companies had personality tests but never got any technical questions.

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