171–180 of 833 posts
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
By symmetry, I mean that at any point in the process, you and the company have invested the same amount and learned the same amount. If you're going to give me 5 interviews where I'm answering 90% or 100% of the questions, go away. If you're going to give me 5 interviews, where the first one is the hiring manager mostly telling me about the company and the role, the middle two or three are about 75% me answering, and the last one or two are mostly me getting to know some people I'm going to work with, that does seem long, but at least it's balanced. This is a big decision for the candidate as well, so presumably if the process is fair both the candidate and the company should want a process of the same length
Google had looked at some internal data and decided that after four interviews, you don't really get any increase in signal: https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/google-rule-of-four/
The article you linked ins from 2017.
I interviewed for an are position in 2019, and I still had to go through 7 interviews: hr screening with dumb trivia questions, phone screen with coding questions and then five (!!!) more interviews in a single day on-site.
(For the record, I didn’t pass something on the in-site interviews, in my opinion nothing I couldn’t have learned)
TL;DR - you can say no to the people who have normalized that, and still be highly successful With the emergence of Google, et al, and the image of being elite, so came the emergence of nonsense like this: https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/here-are-all-the-docume... . Getting butts in seats and long processes have replaced getting to know people before hiring them. The burden has been put on the candidate by the p…
100%. I changed roles recently. If a recruiter described such a lengthy process, I simply told them I neither had the time nor the desire to take part. The worst interview process I actually went through with was originally supposed to be 4 1-hour sessions across multiple days, which the recruiter arranged to have compressed to 4 30-minute sessions back to back. I agreed and ended up accepting an offer.
More of us need to push back on the inconsiderate demands on our time. There's a shortage of developers and we have plenty of other options if they want to make the hiring process so unpleasant.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I’m not saying you’re categorically wrong, but this doesn’t match with my experience, at all. If you’re an HM and this works for you and your company, great, but the HMs responding here don’t agree. The processes you are questioning scale to thousands of people with varying backgrounds. It’s not an accident all of these companies do this. Your process places extreme trust in one group of people. It’s just so risky. A…
Truly bullshit credentialing is immediately apparent to teams that receive new hires. In some places, it's fraud and actionable by the company as fraud.
I don't think companies with billions in revenue really have a budget constraint on hiring; it's structural constraints that are holding them back. They can, and do, engage in mass hiring and construction of whole new departments when it suits their strategy.
That said, further constraints can happen at the credentialling level; I'm not advocating hiring literally anyone.
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.
You obviously haven't worked in finance. Google is as far from high stakes as you can get.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
30 might be too much but it also depends somewhat on the probability of success. 100 hrs practicing leetcode + systems design for a 2% chance at a FAANG seems a worse trade off than 30hrs researching an interesting subject for a presentation with an 80% chance of success. Problem is you don’t know what your chances are with the latter going in but I think it would be a fair question to ask.
Consider also that: 1-((1-.7)*3) = .97
3 interviews with a 70% chance give you a 97% chance of landing atleast one job. More interviews improve your situation rapidly. Job hunting is better seen as a campaign than individual battles.
But I also think maybe in my estimation you FAANG chances aren't that low as your 2%. They hire tons of people, ALL THE TIME.
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…
It pains me so much that we've gone from hiring a couple of supersmart ubernerds over a cool demo and setting them loose to... this. Now, everything sucks. People who only know the tech they trained for. Tools are written for idiots, and the only thing even more written for idiots than that is the code we're supposed to be producing. Teams believing whatever stupid fad some trendy consultant prepared for them. Way to…
Similar stuff happened with other technology too. A couple people could build an early airplane but a modern jetliner is so tremendously complex that you need years and a full company to get one out the door.