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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”?

#361

Post by auntienomen »

0des wrote: post #222
paxys wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who complain about software interviews being a high barrier to entry have never dealt with any other high-skilled high-paying profession. Want to become a doctor? Study for 12-15 years. Lawyers, accountants, pilots, actuaries all have similar multi-year licensing requirements. Places like investment banks and consulting firms will put candidates through a multi-week interview process involving stuff like case…

Investment banks might not have been the greatest example here, many of them hire whoever under the auspices that while during incodtrination they work a play portfolio for free and those in the cohort who profit above a certain deviation and who can justify the strategy behind it get hired, the rest don't.

Investment bankers don't manage portfolios. They do paperwork for companies which want to sell stocks and bonds. What you're describing is a trading operation and a crappy one at that.

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

#362

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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,…

Ok well, that makes sense on the other hand I went through a 7 interview round and I ended up taking another job before the last call to tell me you got the job!

That said it was mainly because they said after several interviews oh you just have one more to go but then the next interview said you have one more to go and they would also say you will be hearing from us in a week but it turned out I heard from them in two weeks.

But in the end, actually, both jobs paid the same, but one of them seemed to me to value my time more.

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

#363

Post by ergonaught »

I've built international teams, technical and otherwise, for 20 years and the reality is that unless you are hiring for an extremely specific role with extremely specific requirements, which is almost never the case in reality, any more than 3 interviews is a waste of time. Two within the same team, if relevant, one outside the team.

Furthermore, evaluating anything other than "Do you want to work with this person?" (on a scale of "I'll quit if you hire them" to "I'll quit if you don't hire them") is a waste of time.

But, as you see, people absolutely adore wasting their time and yours, as if no one has anything better to do.

Hire people that your people want to work with. Put them to work and see how it goes. Let go of people that didn't work out. There is no further secret sauce for hiring in nearly every ordinary circumstance.

IMO.

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

#364

Post by ethanwillis »

igetspam wrote: post #224
alexashka wrote: post #118

Earlier 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…

It's not "best for everyone."

Hired and fired quickly is better because when I have to dedicate weeks or a month of unpaid, uncompensated time to your process then I'm the one losing. You are already getting paid for putting in the work of interviewing me. If your team is stretched so thin that you need to put your time at a premium, that's a problem with your process not having enough throughput.

How many people do you reject to fill one position? How many are "filtered" at later stages to fill one position?

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

#365

Post by nouveaux »

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #174

As someone who's played all roles in this story (candidate, interviewer, hiring manager, person designing the process) I'm going to argue that symmetry is more important than length. By symmetry, I mean that at any point in the process, you and the company have invested the same amount and learned the same amount. If you're going to give me 5 interviews where I'm answering 90% or 100% of the questions, go away. If yo…

I am so tired of recruiters and hiring managers spending time telling me about the company. It's all the same BS. Everything I want to know about the company I can usually learn from the website.

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

#366

Post by ethanwillis »

randmeerkat wrote: post #336
igetspam wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They want to outsource the costs of developing talent. To their own detriment, then they want to blame everyone else.

This is of course when they're not busy abusing someone on a visa to make them do more work than a human should have to do.

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

#367

Post by moron4hire »

whimsicalism wrote: post #63
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…

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.

This answer lacks a lot of imagination.

I have successfully used this hiring method. To say "nobody with options would do this" is patently false. In fact, it can be a great way to get in with people who have a LOT of options, but they aren't sure they want to work for YOU.

Every single time I've used this hiring method, I've gotten some of the best developers I've known. They weren't even looking for a job at the time. They just wanted to hustle a few extra hours to make some play money. I'd give them as much work as they wanted. Some of them stuck to just a few hours a week. Some decided they liked the project enough they wanted to do more.

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

#368

Post by jollybean »

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…

It's been like that since the 1990's.

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

#369

Post by datavirtue »

Our senior-only contracting firm does five interviews but they aren't formal and do not have any gotchas. We mostly look for integrity (is your resume true) and the ability to be trusted with clients. Any of the five can veto and many do get vetoed for not being technical enough or getting a bad reference from anyone in the group. Getting fired is very rare...almost unheard of. No one has ever been laid off in twenty years.

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

#370

Post by _0ffh »

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?

I was wondering the same thing! After a bit of searching, my best guess is "Performance Improvement Plan".
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