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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”?

#341

Post by renewiltord »

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…

Dude, no Bay Area engineer will take this deal. $200/hr is $100/hr in real post tax income. This is competitive with bartending on a Friday night.

If you’re not at $500/hr you’re not even competitive. You can be at $300/hr if you’re guaranteeing the job for a year but if it’s a one off you have to start way higher than that.

But free time is more precious. I’d target $1k/hr to play. I think break even is probably slightly less but not much.

For $200/hr I’d rather spend the time on my own life.

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

#342

Post by mandeepj »

thematrixturtle wrote: post #237
mylons wrote: 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.

> it's rarely if ever for lack of tech skills.

isn't output related with lack of tech skills?

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

#343

Post by jugg1es »

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…

I would agree with you if the interview process included ANY feedback to interviewees when they were rejected. Prior to COVID, I got flown to Seattle mid-week for 2 nights and interviewed well (the recruiter told me to start looking for houses). But 20 days later I was basically ghosted by my recruiter and I had to escalate to their manager to get a response that I was rejected. They gave me no feedback at all.

The interview process asks a LOT of the interviewee and then does not provide anything that could help the person improve next time, so the entire process feels like a complete waste of time. In my case, I was also disrespected by the recruiter.

The next time they reached out, I failed the phone screen somehow by someone who sounded 20 years younger than me (which is frustrating when you have already passed these same steps before). I don't respond to Amazon recruiters anymore.

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

#344

Post by autarch »

0des wrote: post #230
autarch wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would hire you to do 30 hours of contract work where we pair program on real life things. You say this as if most (or any) candidates could do this. If you currently have a job, then you almost certainly won't have time for this, unless you're single with no hobbies. If you do have time, you may not be allowed to moonlight under your current employment contract. And if you don't have a job, you _still_ may not ha…

Do you generally have this mindset because you are very successful or is there another track record element I'm missing? I don't recognize the username and wanted to understand your response better.

Yes, to echo the other response, I don't think my mindset is unusual. What you're suggesting is too much for most candidates.

Also, it's a candidate's market right now, at least for experienced devs like myself. I'm getting a good amount of interest in my applications and nowhere I've applied has asked for anything close to 30 hours of my time (5-7 hours total is typical).

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

#345

Post by joshuamorton »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #323
joshuamorton wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

You seemed to skip their second paragraph, which is what I was replying to.

Someone who can review diffs and even write a serious change every now and again isn't the most knowledgeable person on the team. The person who is writing and reviewing all of the serious diffs is. And for many L6 EMs, you'll have three of those people reporting to you, they're all working on different projects, each of which you have partial but imprecise knowledge of (and sometimes, very little because L5s and FAANG are expected to be able to operate mostly independently). So you spend your time ensuring that everyone on the team has career growth opportunities, and that your less experienced people have mentorship, and hiring and arguing about headcount allocation and prioritization, which all matter, but which are all things that most engineers don't want to touch!

Yes, managers should still have engineering experience (at least up to like director/vp levels, where IDK maybe they don't need it) but having a baseline knowledge of how to do a software is not the same as being the most knowledgeable person on the team.

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

#346

Post by vikingcaffiene »

Hiring manager here. IMO the current tech hiring norms are gross and not sustainable. It feels like a weird hazing ritual and with the current market, is the single biggest reason you can't hire. Why on earth would someone burn a weekend on a take-home test for your startup when they have 15 other irons in the fire? At my current employer we got rid of all that ridiculousness. No take home test. No live coding. We've gotten the whole process down to a few hours over a few days. I'd like to think it's a mutually respectful process.

I think it's time we accept that the person we are talking to is who they say they are on their resume. You don't see accountants balancing books before they get hired. Why should this be any different? If you aren't who you say you are, its either blatantly obvious in the interview or we'll find out when you join and we'll try to correct or part ways. This is like pretty much any other job out there.

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

#347

Post by jjcm »

I've ranged in everything from 3 interviews to 20* in my tech career. All interviews suck, but the unifying factor I've found for what makes them good is when the company pays you for your time interviewing. I don't so much care about the money, but it's a positive signal that they're invested in me and they aren't just throwing me through more rounds for the sake of putting me through more rounds.

I understand that a higher risk hire demands more validation. What I want communicated from a company though is expectations going in and what format it will be all the way through. I don't mind more as long as I don't get the "hey we're going to put you through 3 more interviews" email.

* For Microsoft oddly enough, but it was a unique situation where I went through both a full design interview and a full eng interview for a hybrid role.

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

#348

Post by nouveaux »

yes_really wrote: post #337
nouveaux wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

To be honest, I had forgotten the O(n) solution and vaguely remembered the nlogn solution. After that experience, I have both solutions lodged in my brain.

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

#349

Post by rdiddly »

The last two places that offered me jobs interviewed me twice each. The one before that, it was a fairly easy half-hour solo technical test, then an interview. I think that's the sweet spot, frankly - a fizzbuzz-level coding challenge and then a single interview to which all stakeholders show up. Maybe two interviews at most, and that's only if you can't get everybody in a room together at the same time. And when I say "all stakeholders," I really mean no more than about 4 people: a peer, a mentor, a boss, and at most one counterpart from another team that interfaces closely with that team, but I digress.

I've never had to put up with more than 2 interviews, and probably wouldn't. But I'm not in the Valley, and I'm generally not applying to the Big Five as it were. You know it occurs to me there's a possibility your recruiter is just over-preparing every candidate to expect the worst. Or who knows, maybe 5 to 7 interviews is normal for clients of that particular recruiter, because they've got a reputation for shoveling idiots through the door? In other words, it seems like there could theoretically exist a recruiter whose clients take their recommendations so seriously that they don't even interview you once!

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

#350

Post by cookiecaper »

arroz wrote: post #328
mylons wrote: 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.

What is PIP?

"(Personal|Professional|Performance) Improvement Plan". It's the first formal stage in the firing process at most companies with HR depts, which would almost certainly include any publicly-listed company.

If you're at the PIP stage, it generally means your boss and your superboss have decided that it's time for you to go, but for legal purposes, they need to look like they tried to give you a chance, so they work with HR to craft specific-but-typically-unattainable goals which would theoretically allow you to save your job if you hit them all. But with boss+superboss already wanting you gone, the likelihood that they'll agree you've hit an improvement goal that's usually a thinly-veiled form of "stop me from hating you anymore, lol" is pretty low.

If you get a PIP, in nearly 100% of cases, you should just take it as notice that your employment is going to end at the specified review date in the PIP. It's not usually worth trying to hit the goals. Focus on interviewing.

That said, I once managed an individual who had survived 4 PIPs by the time he reported to me. I heard that he was eventually fired about 2 years after I left, but not sure if it was his 6th or 7th PIP. He was a particular discrimination liability at a company that was very sensitive to that type of thing.

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