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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”?

#281
post #76
post #56

There needs to be something like the SAT for computer programming. Getting a 1500 won't mean you're a genius but it will mean you can do the job, and then there can be 1-2 interviews for domain-specific skills and culture fit. I know many have tried this, some have built great businesses, but nobody has yet become "The Credential" but I do believe this will eventually exist.

You just have leetcode their next product idea. They'll rent some office space, put you in a room for 2 hours on a computer with no internet, and see how well you can grind through their problems. Your score will arrive via the Blockchain to save on physical trees and allow for ready verification by future employers.

Generate an NFT with a user's score on it, and you've got VC money all over it.

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

#282
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,…

Why not extend this same criterion to the work itself? I mean you can’t really trust that any developer is writing the best code at any given point in time so it would seem at least a minimum of 5 or 6 developers should weigh in on any given pull request. Maybe that is the way it works there idk and probably never will.

It's extremely common to have that many +1's required for a PR that touches several parts of the codebase.

And fixing a bad commit doesn't require 6 months of emotionally draining work.

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

#283
post #84

> How is a process like this in any way shape or form efficient or productive? Because hiring the wrong person becomes a colossal waste of time and money.

If the hiring process is faster, then the time wasted bringing in the wrong person is decreased significantly.

Definitely not, the hiring process is just a tiny part of "the time wasted bringing in the wrong person" - onboarding and training take far more of company time than that.

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

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yep. IMO the largest part of the complexity today is caused by the things you mention in your post: trend-chasing among engineers, especially inexperienced ones, and non-engineers constantly bending the process, trying to make themselves useful and pushing too hard for useless micro-features and nice-to-haves, to the point the architecture of applications is compromised.

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

#285
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

I’ve worked in tech for decades and I’ve never experienced a process with “7 straight white guys” much less every time. First, how do you know the sexual orientation of interviewers? Next, tech is like 50-70% Asian so it would be so weird to only have white guys doing programming interviews. The guy pet is spot on as programming is way heavy in guys. But I’m not sure why you would think that 7 interviews = 7 straight…

I joined a subsidiary of a large company. I was the second non white guy at the company. Never knew a tech company could be so white.

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

#286
I need to write a longer piece on our approach at Oxide, but for us it takes effort (not always successful!) to hold ourselves to 9 conversations. This may (or perhaps does?) sound obscene, but (1) these are conversations not oral exams (we don't do red-black-trees-on-whiteboards), hopefully making them less stressful for the candidate (2) we take hiring really, really seriously and (3) I have learned from mistakes at past companies with grievous mishires, for which the downside is essentially unlimited. We have a front-loaded, writing-heavy process (we don't schedule conversations with anyone about whom we are less than enthusiastic), so for us, the conversations are an opportunity to really begin to explore what the dynamic with our potentially future colleague will look like. And time and time again, I have been appreciative of this broad approach: because different folks take such different paths in their conversations, it is not unusual for one person to see something that others either missed or didn't dig into -- and that becomes a serious concern. Of course, it also happens that one person has a concern that others have also looked at and feel has been addressed; we aren't necessarily seeking to build absolute consensus all of the time, but it's essential that we ferret out those concerns.

tl;dr: I think you have every right to ask a company what their process is, and when they can expect to be at a decision point -- but I think there are reasons (good reasons!) why companies may wish you to have many conversations before making a hiring decision.

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

#287

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 annoying for candidates?” Not just annoying, it can be downright demoralizing going through the interview process when the standard is “reject for any one reason, only accept if all agree.” and no feedback whatsoever is given.

That is a fair point, thank you for commenting.

Discussing how many no’s it should take to reject a candidate is a worthwhile discussion. I can override specific no’s with good reason at my company, but not all companies have that.

My broader point is that this is a specific issue with the process we can iterate on. We don’t need to throw out the whole process.

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

#288
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People get PIP’ed and fired routinely that make it through this process. I think there’s a lot of bias in your response. The process worked for you, you work at a large tech company and it gives you validation. It also makes you feel good to lord over the process and boosts your ego, reinforcing your priors.

YMMV, but it's actually quite difficult to get a PIP in many tech companies, and it's rarely if ever for lack of tech skills. The ones I've seen usually involve either motivation, output, or both plummeting to zero for extended periods of time due to burnout or a similar extended personal crisis.

From what I’ve seen it’s almost always as you describe or something political like a manager taking over a group and wanting to make room for their friends. But if employees are burning out and then being PIPed instead of getting support I think that is a rather sad indictment of our industry in an of itself.

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

#289
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that’s routine. While I know it happens, certainly I’ve personally never worked with someone who this has happened to. There will always be burning mistakes, or people who lie or are otherwise hard to predict will be a disaster. What else would you propose?

making the interview process similar to the job is a good first step. when I worked at Invitae this was my proudest achievement from my time there. I suggested that we change the interview process to a paired programming session that were situations from our day to day work. the candidate brought in their own laptop or was provided one (their choice). the session was 90-120 minutes and didn’t involve leetcode hard pr…

The problem with this is that many jobs require weeks worth of on ramping into internal systems, code bases, etc, not to mention many aspects of the job would be working on otherwise secretive stuff. I don’t think this would work at a FAANG, and many bigger companies.

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

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Unless they’re old or gay

Good call! (Edit: or young!)
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