Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”? • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by throwaway743 » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 5:26 PM UTC

justjico wrote: post #152

frankchn wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, a valid philosophy is that a company should have to spend at least as many man-hours interviewing me as I spend interviewing.

How would you feel if they offered compensation, say for your 30 hrs?

If compensation was offered for an interview process, then it's worth the time spent going through the interviews.

Otherwise, it feels like a gamble of a huge time sink that could have gone towards something actually beneficial/profitable.

Having had too much of my time and energy drained in the past with the run around, I said fuck it the last time when facing the option to interview or go my own way, started my own thing and haven't looked back since.

Even when you do get an offer, it's a gamble on whether or not you're dealing with toxic management or not. Which only reinforces the idea of compensation for interviewing in case someone needs to jump that ship and start interviewing again.

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

#222

Post by 0des » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 5:26 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #204

prepend wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Investment banks might not have been the greatest example here, many of them hire whoever under the auspices that while during incodtrination they work a play portfolio for free and those in the cohort who profit above a certain deviation and who can justify the strategy behind it get hired, the rest don't.

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

#223

Post by dwater » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 5:27 PM UTC

mylons wrote: post #170

JohnHaugeland wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you know it works? Because the hallways aren't empty.

the hallways aren’t empty due to the total compensation and perceived prestige working at a FAANG or similar company offers.

I had a startup give me 2 interviews and a paid coding exercise before making an offer, but the compensation was below market with some long shot equity comp. I had a large consulting company give me one recruiter screen and a series of 3 20 minute interviews, one tech one manager and one in between before making an offer at market rate. Sounds like generally interview time scales with total compensation, which seems fine to me. I’m a data scientist and I’ve never had a live coding interview but I also have no desire to apply to a top tier tech co.

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

#224

Post by igetspam » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 5:28 PM UTC

alexashka wrote: post #118

StupidUser123 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

No, it's all about everyone. If I hire a person and fire them in less than a year, that's almost always because of a performance problem that's impacting the team or the org. If you're the one being fired, you probably left a job or didn't take some other job to work with us and now you're going to be unemployed. Additionally, as a hiring manager, I too am a human who wants to enjoy my job and have positive experiences and firing people sucks. It always sucks. It takes a toll on you.

Filtering early is best for everyone. If that means more rounds of interviews to be sure, that's what I'm going to do. I do my best to schedule around candidates and I'm forthcoming about the process during the first call but we try hard to be thorough because we want this to work well for everyone. Would you rather be hired and then fired quickly because we didn't realize there was a misalignment? I wouldn't.

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

#225

Post by boisenberrier » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 5:28 PM UTC

novok wrote: post #191

mylons wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

PIPing and firing is a huge time and emotional energy suck, and it sucks for people on both sides. To reduce the amount it happens is worthy. You can’t in practice just say, “this guy sucks, lets fire him next week” And it shows, barely anyone in my entire career has ever been fired. I only personally have been close to one.

So you’ve been close to one person getting fired? How do you have an opinion on the PIP process or firing at all if you have next to no experience with it?

I knew a guy at a FAANG who earned himself and his report a PIP for the grave sin of choosing the wrong deputy to send upstairs while he was on vacation. The deputized person went to one meeting and ran his mouth (arguably, told the truth). Both are no longer at the company.

PIP politics are absolutely routine in FAANG and if you’re arguing the other side you don’t know. FAANG is actively trying to fire or replace you at all times. I’ve worked at two so I can’t speak for three, but I’ve also worked for the two in that older acronym that you’d think of as the “nicest”. People read that that and probably hear me saying “giant evil entity is out to get you”, but it’s really middle managers cosplaying Kings Landing in the office, mostly unchecked, that does it.

Seriously; people want to work at a FAANG/MAMAA or whatever so they often assume it’s good. I had someone ask me if I noticed how light my calendar was now that the org considered me irrelevant. There’s an idea that FAANG is a bunch of nerds with glasses cooking up cool shit in a Zen commune with ambient drone music but it’s honestly some of the worst office politics I’ve ever seen across what is now two careers, and the PIP process is a big tool in that kit.

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

#226

Post by tomc1985 » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 5:28 PM UTC

nharada wrote: post #180

tomc1985 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think part of the reason is also that tech has matured to the point where it's so complex that nobody can handle it alone or even in a small group. A couple of people (no matter how supersmart) simply could not build and maintain even a single product of a large tech company. Similar stuff happened with other technology too. A couple people could build an early airplane but a modern jetliner is so tremendously comp…

And how much of that complexity is truly needed? Or is that another one of the lies proferred by its financiers?

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

#227

Post by geeky4qwerty » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 5:29 PM UTC

py_or_dy wrote: post #77

Best of luck. I have no idea how to get hired. I jumped shipped from my last employer in May of 2020 thinking I'd take a 2 month break and then start interviewing. Over 18 months I submitted over 80 applications, and got interviews at 40-50 different companies. Total phone and video interviews ended up being over 110 before I basically gave up. I was trying to transition from a full stack dev mostly with perl backend…

Thanks, and best of luck to you as well. Based on all these nightmare stories I'm hearing I'm half tempted to start a "island of misfit toys" consulting company. Seems like a lot of amazing talent going to waste in the pursuit of being trendy or feigning sophistication

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

#228

Post by nicoburns » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 5:29 PM UTC

after_care wrote: post #122

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)

Maybe it's normal for FAANG companies, but FAANG companies aren't normal!

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

#229

Post by throwaway743 » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 5:30 PM UTC

laurent92 wrote: post #194

namirez wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went through a similar experience with a radically different outcome. I was given a coding assignment and one week to finish it. I spent more than 30 hours on it and came up with a solution that was supposedly 500 times faster that what they'd ever seen (they told me this later). But things took a wrong turn at that point. In the followup meeting the interviewer turned out to be rude, disruptive, and combative. He…

Or discrimination. You never know, maybe you worked with his former boss, it could be anything.

Totally.

Or the interviewer felt insecure and threatened by their competence. If that's the case, they dodged a bullet.

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

#230

Post by 0des » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 5:30 PM UTC

autarch wrote: post #83

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…

> I would hire you to do 30 hours of contract work where we pair program on real life things. You say this as if most (or any) candidates could do this. If you currently have a job, then you almost certainly won't have time for this, unless you're single with no hobbies. If you do have time, you may not be allowed to moonlight under your current employment contract. And if you don't have a job, you _still_ may not ha…

Do you generally have this mindset because you are very successful or is there another track record element I'm missing? I don't recognize the username and wanted to understand your response better.