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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”?

#211

Post by educaysean »

rdiddly wrote: post #172
jjmorrison wrote: post #15

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.

Paradoxically enough, that sounds like a warning against hiring anyone but white males, the only group that can't credibly claim discrimination.

Protected groups in the US extend beyond just sex and race. There's age, religion, national origin, sexual preference, and disability status just off my head.

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

#212

Post by prepend »

nickjj wrote: post #126
whimsicalism wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My employer requires approval for any outside work. Every prior company except for a few early stage startups did as well.

I would not be able to moonlight to interview contract. I wouldn’t quit my current job for this.

This is great for unemployed people who don’t have offers from companies that hire without this process. It’s fantastic for people who suck and can’t find work and would love to futz around in these paid interviews for a few thousand.

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

#213

Post by zahllos »

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…

Not in my opinion no, and I don't mind people asking me simple questions either. There are quite a few people who simply don't understand basic concepts and cannot actually write code. Higher qualifications are usually weakly positively correlated with competence, but there are plenty of outliers and exceptions.

I do generally agree with the cargo cult sentiment, but not in this case.

The main thing I dislike about the 7+ interviews is that I dislike interviews and there are 7 of them to get through. I once did four in one day, back to back, and I was extremely tired afterwards. So my big fear as a candidate is that either 7 interviews will happen over 1-2 days and I'll be absolutely fried after the first 2, or they'll be so hard to schedule it'll take 6 months just to have them all. I'm also a bit afraid they'll cargo cult some of the interview questions and I get a bit sick of "please recite 1st year CS algorithm" questions (I never ask these personally) but otherwise 7 interviews is fine, if they accept I am a human candidate and I'm not really comfortable in the process anyway.

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

#214

Post by rr808 »

One reason is its easier to apply for jobs. Previously applying for a job took a lot of time and effort, screening rounds were done on phone so not a good signal. Now you can apply for dozens of jobs quite easily and do interviews while you're "working from home". Which means more applicants for each role.

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

#215

Post by hamandcheese »

ipaddr wrote: post #100
orzig wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve seen way too many “experienced devs” who are terrible coders.

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

#216

Post by 0des »

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…

Its always a Jayden.

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

#217

Post by paxys »

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…

Are you going to pay me $250/hr for that time? If not, why would I spend 30 hours of my life vying for a chance for a full time job with your company? And what about my current job?

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

#219

Post by paxys »

nickjj wrote: post #126
whimsicalism wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you post a job and get 600 applicants, are you going to offer all 600 of them this gig? If not, how do you filter that down to a more reasonable number (say 3-5)? Whatever you do, that is your interview process.

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

#220

Post by ballenf »

Aeolun wrote: post #203
angarg12 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A determined senior engineer could destroy a company in a day. At large companies they could cost the company millions.

While we like to pretend there are technical controls to prevent this, actually effective measures would come at a high cost to productivity.

And at huge FAANG companies replace "department or team" for company above. A bad hire can destroy a team or product or the team's reputation in the company.

Brain surgeons are not high stakes hires because they're not operating on their employer's brain and there are inherent barriers to entry in that field. The "brain surgeon" license actually means a lot.

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