College is slowly become a worse conscientiousness/agreeableness filter since it is now the default.
Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
201–210 of 833 posts
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#202I 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.
From 1983 to 2008 my interviews were basically, talk to some one who's doing the hiring. No testing. Get hired. Most of those companies were relatively small. All but 2 were under 50 people. Only 1 of the 12 or so even asked any technical questions to see if I knew anything. Also, none of them were specialized. No one asked are you a Front End Programmer? Back End Programmer? UI Programmer? Graphics Programmer? etc..…
Funny enough the last job I applied for was in 2006
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#203Having 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.
> To add more: a single person (HM) might have biases for or against certain candidates.
That would be true for all organisations. You could do 6x more interviews if they were all a single round.
> Also these roles are usually high stakes and the cost of a bad hire is too high.
Hiring a brain surgeon is high stakes. I don’t know a lot of software positions where it is true.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I had a similar experience in the late 90s. We had people who couldn’t program but represented that they could. We would give them a quick screen of “write in one of the languages this position requires a program that takes in a string, reverses it and prints it out.” And we changed it to any language once we started working with novel stuff like JavaScript that any programmer could pick up. It was so weird how many…
People who complain about software interviews being a high barrier to entry have never dealt with any other high-skilled high-paying profession.
Want to become a doctor? Study for 12-15 years. Lawyers, accountants, pilots, actuaries all have similar multi-year licensing requirements. Places like investment banks and consulting firms will put candidates through a multi-week interview process involving stuff like case studies which make a 1 hour technical interview seem like a joke. And on top of it all you still have to "make an impression" which involves networking and ass kissing the right people in the chain.
Being able to walk into any company with just a 4-5 hour mostly objective interview is one of the best parts of the software industry.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#205I'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…
People have jobs and lives. The only people this gets are unemployed and self employed people who have nothing to lose or the time to spare. This strategy poaches nobody of worth with an ounce of self respect.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#206I'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…
Its a good idea but the thing about big orgs is you aren’t paying the big bucks for 99% of the labor, you’re paying because the one day the developer has to make a decision that does impact something at scale or in the hot path they don’t fuck up.
The differentiation between good and great doesn’t come into play on the average workday.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People get PIP’ed and fired routinely that make it through this process. Compared to what? I don’t think anyone is claiming this process is perfect. Just that it’s better than alternatives. People will always get PIP’d and fired. But the goal is to reduce that as low as possible.
how is it better than alternatives? this seems like a huge straw-man given almost every company that hires developers thinks they’re a large tech company and mimics their hiring process. it doesn’t seem like serious alternatives have been explored.
I've worked and interviewed at dozens of companies and literally never experienced a company that had more than 2 interviews plus a discussion with a hiring manager or HR.
I make half-ish of a FAANG salary, but it's enough to comfortably support a family and I'm generally pretty happy and get to work on cool stuff. The only challenge I never get at work are problems that have huge scale components.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is my answer as well. The two rational pairings are: hire fast, fire fast and hire slow, fire slow If for legal or cultural reasons you can’t fire fast, that leaves you with only one choice.
Managers should be honing the hiring process. If your team is clear about what they're looking for and thoughtful about how to get at it, you should be able to figure out if a candidate is a good team and technical fit in a couple of hours.
Perhaps. But even with the current 6+ hours everyone medium size or larger still makes a fair number of bad hires. Between driving the false positive rate down and driving the time to decision down the value maximizing next move seems to be spending even more effort on the false positive rate.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#209>I was told "5 to 7 interviews is normal" Be suspicious when anyone says something is normal in tech that tries to speak about the operations and culture of a vast array of companies, especially recruiters and very especially recruiters who work for recruiting companies. Tech is a massive industry, and there's enough companies that don't do the normal thing that you can spend only a year at those companies and still…
What I'm wondering is whether people are including phone screens and introductions as interview rounds. I'm going through the process now and with those I'll probably have 7 if I get an offer, but without it's more like 4 (online assessment, in person whiteboard, system design, behavioral). I haven't interviewed in 7 years prior to this, so I'm out of the loop with what's standard.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#210Most 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…
Definitely longer than 7-8 years. The current process has been in place at least 20 years, and maybe longer (but my memory only goes that far).