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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”?

#421

Post by jrockway »

benreesman wrote: post #379
polio wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people call it a diff in the rest of AANG?

I think it's called "changeset" at Google, or at least was, and "PR" is becoming pretty common everywhere because of GitHub. But "diff" seems to be gaining some ground as a general term in the monorepo/unified-build/trunk-only world. Uber uses/used Phabricator and I think there are some other high-profile shops as well. I don't know that there's like one leading term, but I think everyone knows what "diff" means both…

It was "CL".

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

#422

Post by sgustard »

UnpossibleJim wrote: post #247
novok wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High stakes means high investment. You can’t just hire a dev and have them running in a week, their bad work could cost the company multi-millions in obvious and non obvious ways and proper onboarding takes months at minimum. On the other hand, a cashier can be replaced in a week, and they don’t effect the entire future of the company as SOP.

Ok, for the record, I haven't worked at a FAANG company so the stakes weren't as high. Just video game studios, so million dollar companies not billion. Even on our systems, we had so many redundancies and test servers run, that even when a mistake did run through (which was exceedingly rare, given the testing), the roll back was quick. A single dev, especially a new hire, was unable to make multi-million dollar mist…

> we had so many redundancies and test servers run

How did you hire the developers who built those systems? Was the bar higher then?

Lots of companies have institutional memory of how their first few hires were crucial to make the company successful. It's a tough decision whether to keep standards high, or risk losing the skills that got you this far. Eventually the early people leave. Where I work, the stuff they built is viewed as some kind of godlike crystalline shrine that you dare not touch.

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

#423

Post by KerrAvon »

jreese wrote: post #376
cookiecaper wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"(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 wit…

PIPs are not exclusively foregone conclusion/CYA before firing. I've personally been on a PIP while in the "red zone" before an expected promotion, and came out the other side with an "exceeds" rating and said promotion during the next cycle. Sometimes, it's legitimately just a formal way of stating "this is what we expect from you if you want to stay here"; if you can meet those expectations, then great!

Are you sure that was a PIP? That’s really not what a PIP is used for.

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

#424

Post by dleslie »

sahila wrote: post #253
dleslie wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it takes months to determine that someone is a bad fit for a team then the team has internal issues that need to be resolved. Moreover, if someone has the skills on paper, and the references to support that, then any tech screening is unnecessary. It just tests for ability to pass tech screens.

The problem is "skill on paper" is just that, words. There's tons of java developers but not all the same. References too are pretty easy to game. Alternatively if by skills on paper you mean open source projects, that's fair but most developers (and certainly most new grads) won't have anything worthwhile to show. The tech screens can show a person's skill. Sure, lots of people are gaming that too and memorize solut…

There's a difference between:

    Foo Corp
      - Wrote Java on Bar project
And:

    Foo Corp
       - Designed and developed infrastructure for Baz for Bar project (Java)
A resume that doesn't give an idea of what someone did, beyond the tech they used to accomplish their goals, isn't likely to pass my interest test.

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

#425

Post by TulliusCicero »

ipaddr wrote: post #100
orzig wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't calculate the optimal design (for hiring, in this case) from first principles, what option do you have but empirical observation? And when steady-state performance takes at least 2 years to obtain, is it unreasonable to have fads at roughly that frequency? Resumes suck, take-homes suck, interviews suck, nepotism sucks; yet people still need to invest $x00,000 based on something. I don't have the answer,…

If you are hiring someone with 10 years experience it becomes a lot easier. Just try them out, 9/10 will succeed.

This simply isn't true. Some people can coast/hide within big companies, especially non-tech companies, with mediocre or poor skills. Some people can lie; they can be very good at storytelling.

Hell, even for the interviews, some people cheat one way or another. But it's at least harder to do that than to make up stuff on your resume.

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

#426

Post by igetspam »

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…

I used "misalignment" as a kind way to say "because we realized we don't want to work with you." But you're chasing a different thread anyway. We're talking about quick hiring and firing being better than thoroughly vetting a candidate. If we want to talk about how to hire junior engineering talents specifical, we can do that.

I definitely spend less time per person, trying to find juniors. You have to because t What you're looking for is different. My only goal for hiring junior engineers is to find out if they know enough to not drown and if I think they're willing and able to learn fast. That takes less time and the risk is generally less because my expectations are lower and so is the compensation.

It's been a while since I hired junior people though. The roles I take are always in early phase startups and I don't have budget for people who need on-the-job training.

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

#427

Post by dleslie »

StupidUser123 wrote: post #268
dleslie wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it takes months to determine that someone is a bad fit for a team then the team has internal issues that need to be resolved. Moreover, if someone has the skills on paper, and the references to support that, then any tech screening is unnecessary. It just tests for ability to pass tech screens.

I think we should agree to disagree. We both seem to like our own process and see major flaws with the other’s. The best solution is to work at different companies.

FWIW, I was introduced to this method by others, and have used/been a part of this method at several companies now; and I find that each company where I have seen it employed has had remarkably low turn-over and high team morale. Much lower turn over, and higher morale, than the companies I've been at that have done otherwise. Also anecdotally, the companies that employ this method have been the same companies that seemed most willing to train and aid an under-performing employee, rather than simply let them go.

I think it's because the awareness of the need to ensure performance is baked-in to the process; rather than having an assumption that the hire should have a high level of performance. Employees aren't like other physical assets, like computers and other hardware, they're malleable human beings that are accepting of improvement.

But I don't know of any large studies on the merits of this approach, so perhaps I've simply been lucky to have had positive experiences.

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

#428

Post by igetspam »

ethanwillis wrote: post #366
randmeerkat wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You've had some bad jobs, haven't you? Want to talk about it? We don't abuse anyone on a visa because we're fully remote and don't do visas. We target the high side of comp in the person's country. We specifically hire senior people because we're small and building. Developing talent is great but the time to do that is expensive and until you've hit a certain scale, it's detrimental to launching a startup. Look around the industry and look at the success stories. Then look at what their early hiring looks like. If you can find a startup that succeeded by hiring new grads and junior engineering first, I'd love to read about it.

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

#429

Post by jeffybefffy519 »

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,…

Why not just do 1-2 interviews with all relevant parties.

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

#430

Post by dleslie »

kyawzazaw wrote: post #251
dleslie wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it takes months to determine that someone is a bad fit for a team then the team has internal issues that need to be resolved. Moreover, if someone has the skills on paper, and the references to support that, then any tech screening is unnecessary. It just tests for ability to pass tech screens.

That's what internships are in a way. Do you think that's a bad idea?

In my point of view, most hiring requires a form of internship. No one drops on to an established team with full knowledge and experience with the internal tools, procedures and products.

And yes, I lament that internships are so maligned. It shouldn't be that interns are poorly paid; we should be able to hire someone with decades of experience in a tangentially-related field at a competitive salary, and consider them to be interning on an unfamiliar field.

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