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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”?

#311

Post by frankchn »

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.

Then there isn’t a problem — at least for FAANG. People are willing to jump through more hoops for more rewards in all aspects of life.

If a less prestigious company with worse compensation tries the same thing, then they will quickly discover they can’t hire anyone. It will be self-correcting.

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

#312

Post by Aachen »

paxys wrote: post #217
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?

Those are some high standards, you value your time at 250×8×5×52= half a million a year?

I don't disagree that 30 hours is way over the top for an interview question unless you happen to find it as much fun as , or if it's somehow usefully spent time for other reasons, but your response seems to be at an equally extreme end of the spectrum.

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

#314

Post by tartoran »

mylons wrote: post #183
azinman2 wrote: post #162

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…

I think this would be the most fair to the candidates, especially ones with prior experience who don’t want to spend time on useless leetcode questions that have zero to do with the job itself. I can’t help but feel this is just gate keeping.

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

#315

Post by blub »

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…

You pay them a lot of money if they pass, but the others get zero. You’re basically annoying lots of people to make that one person happy.

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

#317

Post by sahila »

nouveaux wrote: post #270
monster_group wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this approach is that any real task requires a lot of internal knowledge (functional and technical) of the system which an outside candidate will not have. The pairing employee will have lots of it though and it is likely the candidate will appear inadequate even if the employee is aware of the internal knowledge difference. It is not straightforward to be productive on an alien code base from the ge…

I can't imagine this to be true for the vast majority of web/sass companies. Even if there is a lot of knowledge, there are so many areas of the code with technical debt that could just be "How would you refactor this code. Here is how it works." or "This is a small error that needs to be handled. Here is how it works. How would you handle it?"

> I can't imagine this to be true for the vast majority of web/sass companies

I entirely disagree with this except for the most trivial things you describe. And for those trivial things, does your company just have a never ending list of these things which are not fixed. Feels like you go through 2 candidates (60 hours) and that backlog is now cleared.

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

#318

Post by oaiey »

Because we do silly testing, social tests, and many more test instead of trusting the good old "hire a smart guy by gut feeling + probe (not test) the extend of his knowledge" method.

I am a person who does interviews and I always use this method. Never betrayed me.

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

#319

Post by yes_really »

monster_group wrote: post #31

Most 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…

> Most tech companies now do around 4-5 interviews. [...] 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. [...] I did have to spend around 30 hours researching that problem as it was an unfamiliar problem space for me.

For me it's the complete opposite. What I would consider demeaning is to spend 30 hours across two weeks interviewing for just one company while they don't even bother to send more than one interviewer.

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

#320

Post by dsugarman »

StupidUser123 wrote: post #124
dleslie wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not so much effort or commitment if the team is fully remote.

You’re asking someone to quit their job to maybe get this new job. And you won’t know for months so all your other offers are gone. So if it doesn’t work out, you’re unemployed with no prospects. Sounds terrible. I’d take 15 interviews before taking that risk.

I assume there is some level of exaggeration here?

If not, it might help to actually try this. Take an aggregate of 15 interviews in the next couple of months and you're bound to learn something. My hypothesis would be some new empathy for interviewees but maybe you find a better role at a better company in the process. If the worst case is that it is a colossal waste of time, then you again have found empathy for the interviewee.

Ultimately, you might be narrowing your pool of applicants to only those willing or unwitting to go through that process.

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