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

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

#321

Post by yes_really » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 6:18 PM UTC

nouveaux wrote: post #292

KerrickStaley wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that 30 hours invested in interviewing at a single company is a lot more work than you put in doing a couple phone screens and a one-day onsite. I personally abhor take-home projects because they tend to balloon in scope (I'm a perfectionist and want to put the best foot forward). With an on-site loop, when you're done you're done.

After going through the process of 5 interviews across multiple companies, I would much rather be given an open ended question and do a 1 hour presentation. I am so tired of going into a technical not knowing which leetcode question I have to memorize. It is absolutely absurd some of the study plans that people go through where they are trying to study over multiple months. In order to truly memorize all the solution…

> I actually got stuck at an interview because I forgot the nlogn solution for two sums. Absurd!

Are you talking about determining a pair of numbers in an array that sum to a given value? That's O(n) and just uses a hashset/hashmap.

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

#322

Post by gwbas1c » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 6:19 PM UTC

It's normal. A company that doesn't do this, unless it's tiny, is a warning sign. Why?

Short answer: It's very difficult to work with incompetent colleagues colleagues.

Long answer: We don't rely on a credentialing process like other fields do. Some people lie on their resumes or embellish their skills. Other people overestimate their skills. As a result, employers have to determine competence in the interview process.

A single coding question is often not enough. At a minimum bias can creep in, but also poor interviewer skill can make a good candidate appear poor, or could allow a poor candidate to pass. Furthermore, often companies need to screen for particular skills that are critical for a given product.

Furthermore, I think it's useful to be exposed to everyone's communication style, and for everyone to be exposed to your communication style. Often that has more to do than just technical competence.

FWIW: My wife is a pediatrician and her job interviews were mostly mutual interest. But, she had to go through a rather intense credentialing process. Our industry doesn't seem to trust credentials for reasons that I never understood, therefore, we tend to rely on employers gauging technical competency instead of a third party gauging technical competency.

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

#323

Post by ltbarcly3 » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 6:20 PM UTC

joshuamorton wrote: post #310

benreesman wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First: we no longer trust the hiring manager alone, because probably they aren't a strong developer This is a huge problem IMHO. I topped out at L7 on the FAANG EM track, but that’s dozens of ICs and a few EMs in your org and I still think you need to be able to build the software and review diffs and write serious ones now and again. Clearly this is now only part of your job, not the focus of it, but it’s very dif…

An L6 manager and an L6 IC do different work though. And it's rarely (read: never) the case that the person in charge is most knowledgeable about all the details. If an L6 manager could keep all of the details of all of the things all their reports are working on organized, they aren't handling enough scope. Imo that's the difference between 5 and 6. You can no longer track all the details in one person's head.

> If an L6 manager could keep all of the details of all of the things all their reports are working...

That's not what they said, is it? There is a huge difference between what they said and how you interpreted it. They said "you need to be able to build the software and review diffs and write serious ones now and again" and "it’s very difficult to manage a process that you don’t understand with some sophistication" (emphasis mine). How do you get 'know every little detail about everything' from that?

It seems obviously true to me that any manager who can't "build the software", "review diffs", and "write serious [diffs] from time to time" is useless. Anyone who disagrees with this is probably dead wood, spends their time fighting political wars about issues they don't understand, and their team is more likely than not constantly fire fighting and in serious trouble (in my opinion).

If I had a dollar for every time some clueless manager lectured me about how to write software, and I rolled my eyes and ignored them, and they never found out (because they had no idea what was going on to begin with, and were just posturing based on something someone said) I would have at least $100. I obviously have a chip on my shoulder here, but managers who barely know what is going on still tend to want to 'contribute', which of course they can't do in reality, so they end up playing keyword matching and 'helping' the team avoid 'duplicate effort'. For example, they will see one team building something, and another team building something, and notice some of the words are the same, and then make a big show of 'avoiding duplicate work', but in reality the use cases are extremely different and nothing was being duplicated. Once they have alienated enough of the team, people just start telling them nonsense and they have no way to know it. Productive, smart people start to leave or lose motivation. A fast pace is replaced with constant excuses and a team that is basically no longer showing up for work. The manager can't tell the difference. This is what managers who aren't in the details are like, pretty much without exception.

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

#324

Post by dave333 » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 6:20 PM UTC

My best and it turned out my worst hiring experience as the hiree was when I was reentering the workforce as a dot-com-bust refugee after a few years of self-(un)employment. I was switching to the new language javascript from Java and didn't know much yet. After a nominal phone interview I was called in for a single in-person interview with the founder of a startup and was hired on a probationary basis. After a week I was fired for incompetence in javascript which was quite true however I increased my javascript knowledge that week by an order of magnitude. The cost to the startup was a lot less than disrupting their overburdened devs work to interview me.

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

#325

Post by nouveaux » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 6:22 PM UTC

sahila wrote: post #317

nouveaux wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I find it hard to believe that most web/sass companies are not doing the same kinds of queries to the database, consuming stripe APIs the same way, or adding a job to a queue in similar fashion. I think this is true even in the open source world. Any senior dev should be able to pair with someone knowledgeable and provide value, with the exception of very technical code bases. Most web/sass companies do not have very technical code bases.

I would give the same bug to all the candidates for baseline purposes.

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

#326

Post by thrtythreeforty » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 6:23 PM UTC

b20000 wrote: post #304

lbotos wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Often, legally, firing people is harder than hiring. 2. Hire more, fire fast sounds good on paper but will destroy morale as the team identity will be constantly influx. 3. Engineers will spend less time onboarding newer engineers to the detriment of everyone because well, they might not just last.

in the US employment is at will or whatever it's called so they can fire you on the spot for no reason at all.

This is true but if it's well known that you fire, say, 30% of your hires after 6 months then you'll have a much harder time attracting the kind of candidates you want to be attracting. You can compensate for the devs' opportunity cost with, well, compensation, but you'll be competing with FAANG, whose high-turn reputation isn't even 30% bad (with the possible exception of Netflix)

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

#327

Post by soared » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 6:23 PM UTC

bcantrill wrote: post #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 a…

If a recruiter told me there would be 8 additional interviews, I would definitely not move forward unless the pay was ridiculously good. At least when amazon does the loop its 6 hours in a single day, and their pay is very good.

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

#328

Post by arroz » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 6:23 PM UTC

mylons wrote: post #129

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…

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.

What is PIP?

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

#329

Post by nouveaux » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 6:25 PM UTC

yes_really wrote: post #321

nouveaux wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After going through the process of 5 interviews across multiple companies, I would much rather be given an open ended question and do a 1 hour presentation. I am so tired of going into a technical not knowing which leetcode question I have to memorize. It is absolutely absurd some of the study plans that people go through where they are trying to study over multiple months. In order to truly memorize all the solution…

> I actually got stuck at an interview because I forgot the nlogn solution for two sums. Absurd! Are you talking about determining a pair of numbers in an array that sum to a given value? That's O(n) and just uses a hashset/hashmap.

No. Sort the array. Then use two indexes, one on each side of the array. Increment indexes to meet in the middle.

This is one of those tricks you just have to memorize and it's very hard to come up with the solution in 30 min.

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

#330

Post by Aachen » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 6:27 PM UTC

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.

> I've seen a bit more than half of fired employees come back with some form of discrimination lawsuit threat

That's crazy. I have literally never heard of anyone actually doing that irl, only ever in the media (and then mostly English-speaking media at that). Half of them? Do they ever win those? Don't they need to pay for the company's lawyer costs if you can convincingly argue this claim is entirely baseless opportunism? Is there ever even a slight basis for this, any colleagues that treat them just a little bit less nicely or anything?

Edit: upon re-reading to add the citation I noticed the word "threat". Additional question: anyone ever follow through on that, or were the threats ever credible?