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?
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Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
331–340 of 833 posts
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
> these roles are usually high stakes and the cost of a bad hire is too high Really? High stakes? This fucking site. Have you ever worked as a software developer at a corporation? Nothing about it is high stakes. You spend most of your time dealing with useless idiots who report to other useless idiots, who report to other useless idiots, about a useless product they think is a great idea that every non-idiot knows i…
Hey stop stepping on fragile egos. We gave out participation trophies to a whole generation. Hiring one wrong dev will end google!
I have to agree with you. So many people try justify the interview process with their intelligence or "costing the company multi-millions". It's all tied to their ego. I wonder how much of it is stockholm syndrome.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#333For people complaining about 4-6 interviews in tech companies, remember that in a lot of other industries (e.g. finance, consultancy, law) they take into account much more information about you. For example: the school you went to, your GPA, and the company you are currently working at. If these are not what they expected, they won't even interview you. So that's how they can save 1 or 2 interviews: by transferring the filter to your university and companies that hired you.
And I personally think that's bad. I'd rather have to do 2 hours more of interview when I'm changing jobs than have to worry for years during high school and university on a ton of metrics that I'm being evaluated on (the vast majority of which are useless for the job).
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#334Having 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,…
What do you think about missing on people who are not desperate enough to go through such processes?
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
I worked at a FAANG for 3 years and I'm pretty sure no one I worked with was on a PIP. A PIP is extreme. It's sufficient to simply not give people raises, most people can and will easily find another job earning 10% more.
How would you really know? People don't usually talk publicly about their PIP.
I went from long time IC to manager at a faang adjacent company. It was eye opening to see who was on a PIP and go through calibrations.
There were well liked, competent people who others on the team got along with but they just were not delivering at the expected level. Sometimes the problem was lack of motivation or bad role fit.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 experienc…
> Would you rather be hired and then fired quickly because we didn't realize there was a misalignment? I wouldn't.
The fact that your knee jerk reaction to a misalignment is firing someone rather than mentoring them and aligning them with the org speaks volumes about your management style… And managers wonder why they have such a hard time hiring or retaining people right now…
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
But why didn't you use the O(n) solution instead of the O(n log n) solution?
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#338Most 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 oppo…
The company said you can spend as much time as you'd like. So if you're ok with two rounds of leet code for two hours, why not just do one hour and the one hour presentation?
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#339This is unrelated to your question. But, as another degree-less father in tech, I was wondering why you wanted to show your children the importance of a degree. You yourself didn't have one through all of your success. I would argue you wouldn't have been nearly as successful either if you had chosen from the get-go to go the BSBA route. The average BSBA salary seems to hover around 51k, with the top earners making about as much as an entry level dev.
I don't want to be mean, and it's not all about money, I just don't see what value a degree adds for the most part. On the other hand, my son is growing up quickly, and sometimes I wonder if I should teach him that going to college can be worth it. So I really do want to hear it from your perspective.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
> usually high stakes You obviously haven't worked in finance. Google is as far from high stakes as you can get.
Exactly. The Knight Capital incident springs to mind.
> Exactly. The Knight Capital incident springs to mind.
Sure, but was that the engineering team’s fault or the fault of bad management culture? I suspect it was management that failed to adequately support their engineers and ensure they were well staffed, compensated, and didn’t have to work extraordinary hours to meet absurd “deadlines” that resulted in that fiasco.