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

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

#271

Post by sahila » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 5:49 PM UTC

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.

Succeed at what though? Yeah most could probably code, but can they all design and run a team? Have they all worked on the same problems, scale, and should be principal engineers? You also interview to level as well as to get them into the door.

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

#272

Post by danielmarkbruce » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 5:50 PM UTC

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…

There is another thing - if you want to work at a FAANG, presumably you want to be there a while. Anyone who can't put up with a little bit of nonsense and headache for something meaningful is likely to struggle with any nonsense and headache generally. Working on any large scale project at a FAANG is going to involve a decent amount of nonsense and headache, and you gotta roll with it.

And then on the flip side - if you are really a star, and you are interviewing at a small company you should want 5-7 interviews to gauge the caliber of people you will work with.

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

#273

Post by hungro » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 5:51 PM UTC

geeky4qwerty wrote: post #227

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

I've thought this same thing. I've done interviewing for a small shop inside a big co., and I managed to have about an 90% hit rate and a strong percentage of excellent talent without doing ANY of this bullshit. No leetcode, no 7 interviews. HR screen, tech discussion, senior manager interview, done. It's not that hard to hire great people if you have the slightest inkling of what you're doing and HR and corporate processes don't dramatically get in your way.

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

#274

Post by ipaddr » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 5:52 PM UTC

hamandcheese wrote: post #215

ipaddr wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the end prioritize for the position.

If you want good coders look for resumes with startup experience. You don't survive as a senior developer at a startup without being being able to write code under pressure.

If you want someone who can glue various systems while cross communicating to various stakeholders look for someone at a larger company.

If you want both, look for both sets of experience on the resume.

People with 10+ will filter out positions that won't succeed at better than you can filter them out.

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

#275

Post by downrightmike » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 5:53 PM UTC

This is largely because companies are no longer vested in growing and maturing talent. Used to be that they hired and trained, now that is all on the employee to skill themselves up for the laundry list of things companies want. So instead of training and learning about people and evaluating them as you go, the interviews have become the surrogate for what used to be done while training. You could take any engineer and make them viable, they used to have to because the market was so small. But now they complain about not being able to find good people, because they don't want to put any effort into someone. If we look at this as a human relationship, like if this were how you looked at your spouse or partner, you'd realize you're being a dick and probably just using the partner. This has become normal, but is toxic in the long run. But hey the only way to get a raise is to leave, which is another data point on toxicity and clearly shows the fundamental switch away from healthy relationships and quality organizational building.

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

#276

Post by Aachen » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 5:53 PM UTC

For my job, this was in 2018, I sent an email with CV, ~90 minutes interview a few days later, had an offer iirc the next day or the one after, then went by once more for negotiating the contract details. Of course I'm skipping the job searching part (that took several weeks and this wasn't my first interview - the area doesn't have that many opportunities for me in the first place and I didn't speak the language), but if you're wondering how many interviews is too many... That's my experience in Germany.

Since then, was approached by and interviewed with another (German) place during the pandemic, had first a video call with the CEO, then a more technical quizzing by three would-be colleagues, then an offer. Seems a little different because they approached me based on online info where they apparently liked what they saw, that might have helped skip a screening step or so.

My girlfriend, also applying for a technical position, had iirc one interview in the German office, then one with the CEO in the headquarters (3h driving; I booked a hotel for us and made it into a weekend trip), then an offer.

Seven seems rather excessive.

There is a trial period here, where you can leave or be fired with like two weeks' notice, for the first three months or so. Unless you're hiring across a border, especially EU borders, that lowers the threshold considerably as you can just "try out" what someone is like without much hassle. Maybe that's different compared to where you live?

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

#277

Post by sokoloff » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 5:53 PM UTC

scarmig wrote: post #259

sokoloff wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe there is at least a factor of 2* in performance among qualified/not-outright-failing software engineers. If that's the case, anything you can spend less than 100 hours on to increase your chance of hiring someone whose performance at your company will be on the right half of that distribution is worth it. * I think the actual factor is higher, but I think most people would agree to a factor of 2 without muc…

There are just different skills, and a balance of different individuals is often the most effective. There are definitely 10x (and even 100x) engineers, but throw five 10x engineers together and you will get substantially less than 50x results. There's always mundane but time consuming shit that can best be handled by a 1x. And a bigger issue is that no company can hire a team of 10x engineers, because it's very expe…

I agree they’re rare, but my experience is they almost never make even 2x the norm for their level, so if you’re able to find them, hiring a small team of them is one of the best financial deals you can get as an employer.

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

#278

Post by sahila » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 5:54 PM UTC

gcheong wrote: post #196

kjeetgill wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lean towards the status quo of one day interviews. But I liked how you considered probably of success as a consideration. 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…

I got the 2% from a presentation by a company in the business of prepping people for FAANG interviews, the actual number could be higher but I was just trying to make a point about relative probabilities.

It might be 2% or even lower hire-rate-to-applications, but your set isn't all applications but those who put in a 100 hours of leetcode prep; that I bet is much higher than 2% into faangs.

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

#279

Post by bobsomers » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 5:54 PM UTC

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…

> 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?

Way off base, in my experience. The vast majority of highly talented developers are rarely, if ever, actually on the market. They have multiple competing offers before ever walking out the door of their previous employer. There is no way they’re going to spend 30 hours of their time on maybe getting an offer from you. It doesn’t even matter if you pay them for it. Why would I take $4000 for maybe getting an offer, when I’m already deciding between multiple guaranteed offers? It’s just a huge waste of my time.

More importantly though, this process is strongly biased towards young, single people with no hobbies. You’ll likely never get a parent to commit to this kind of interview, because when I’m not working I’d much rather be spending that time with my family. Additionally, as a parent I’m concerned about stability because other people depending on me for food and shelter. Yanking me around for several weeks or months on a probationary period after which you can fire me even if I was doing everything great just screams amateurish to me. You’re not taking my employment seriously, so I’d rather go with one of the four offers already in hand.

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

#280

Post by danielmarkbruce » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 5:55 PM UTC

pqwEfkvjs wrote: post #233

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,…

It is somewhat easy to cheat through these N+1 interviews by grinding tons of practice problems before. At least that was my strategy. Sure I can implement DFS or a linked list, but I am a pretty suboptimal developer, especially when working with huuge codebases. Maybe they should ask to implement a feature or fix a bug in some huge OSS project. That would evaluate skills relevant for a job in FAANG more closely imho…

Everyone I've ever met who said this was a better engineer than they thought. They seemed to look at the very best engineers, see a difference between themself and that person, and think they weren't that good.

I think there is also some kind of survivorship bias - you don't hear from the people who tried it and failed.