When I arrived in the valley in the 90s it was already common. I'm not sure I ever had 7, but multiple interviews over most of a day, with a break to chat over lunch, was the usual thing there. Couldn't say how much further it goes back.
Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
571–580 of 833 posts
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
how is it better than alternatives? this seems like a huge straw-man given almost every company that hires developers thinks they’re a large tech company and mimics their hiring process. it doesn’t seem like serious alternatives have been explored.
Almost every alternative you can imagine has been tried. Lots of interviews, few interviews, take home projects, pair programming, hire fast fire fast, trial periods and on and on and on.
I personally suck at pairing interviews but I still think they're some of the most relevant & illuminating- if the problem is easy and you're looking for how the candidate works and communicates.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#573Outside the US (and FAANG specifically), many interviews is perhaps unusual. I haven't had more than two interviews (in four countries, DE/US/GB/CH) in any job in two decades, ever.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#574Having 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,…
> 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…
> and I still think you need to be able to build the software and review diffs and write serious ones now and again.
I've had some good managers that could do that. But the people management skill set is so much more important to their job. And it's a very different skill set to being an IC.
I wouldn't argue in favour of engineering managers with no technical skills at all, but I also don't think it's fair to demand they be masters of both the IC skills and the people management skills too. It's very difficult to be good at both.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#575Earlier quoted context omitted.
Basically everywhere in NA has allowances for probationary periods with at-will employment. Moreover, prospective hires could start on contract. Morale is improved when team members feel like they have some control over their membership. It seems like you're assuming that a great many people would be fired; why so? In my experience, having worked for several such companies, firing is rare because even minimal filters…
What's practically possible is always a subset of what's legally possible. I think probationary periods/contract-to-hire situations are extremely unlikely to work for anything beyond absolute entry level, for a number of reasons. For one thing, it's a huge amount of uncertainty to put on the potential hire, which means you'll be strongly biasing your hiring pool towards people who don't have better options. It feels…
The default option is simple: did the hire add meaningful value to the team? Very few people fail that simple test, in my experience; and folks who would have failed technical screenings would have excelled in subsequent performance-enhancing evaluations. Someone who can't balance a binary tree might be the single best technical coordinator you're going to hire, after all.
I've worked at many companies, and those that hire fast, and fire fast, tend to be those that _fire least_. They have _lower expectations_ for performance, and so are more likely to be receptive to _training new hires_, rather than expecting them to hit the ground running as equally effective as their new team mates.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#576Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also selects for people who will put up with anything, which to a cynical manager might sound like a good employee, except that our job is to replace labor with machines. People who put up with anything are expensive. They keep billing you hours for tasks that could have been reduced to minutes by someone with a lower tolerance for BS.
It's probably also selecting for people who are unemployed and therefore much more able to attend the entire gauntlet than those already employed.
I would think the opposite is more likely.If you are employed, there is no pressure. You may go through 12 interviews for a 12 different jobs and be only so slightly offended.
For the unemployed, time is most likely ticking, if not financially, at least emotionally. A relative slowness at any step of the process affects the unemployed mindset. Stress alone lowers interview performance, especially on the soft skills side.
I would guess that more people in the employed pool make it through.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#577Earlier quoted context omitted.
Been at one of FAANG for a few years. Never saw this play out. Sounds like something that is more likely to happen on the management side than it is the IC side…
Most ICs are pretty well insulated from this, because if they understood what went on at calibration a lot of good contributors would become pretty bitter.
I had a lot of managers and higher level ICs explain calibration and rage quit (although it was long overdue) after an unfairly low review. There were extreme politics happening at the time that the current ED laid out to me in an exit conversation, and most of it came into play. I should have made way more money off of my contributions than I did but didn't play politics, and honestly, given my role and position could not. I was a resource and not a player:)
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#578Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes they are even more often, as those licenses often have "continuing education" requirements to keep them active. For example, they expire every two years in California. https://www.calcpa.org/cpa-licensure/renewing-a-cpa-license/... But no, they don't happen "during interviews". My point is that there's less need to test people during their interviews for occupations with licensing, because they've already b…
While I see where you are coming from but respectfully disagree with your conclusions. > My point is that there's less need to test people during their interviews for occupations with licensing, because they've already been tested before they even showed up for the interview. I mean past job experience and education are pretty good indicators? Is there some facet to the accounting certification process I am unaware o…
The problem that I have with judging someone based off job experience (or academic experience) is that I usually have no idea what value that experience is. I am not familiar with most workplaces. When I have an applicant that has "3 years of experience as a senior developer at XYZ Corp", I have no idea how valuable that is. I've never heard of XYZ Corp; I don't know how good their organization's IT department is, nor do I have any idea what would be expected of a senior developer there. For some companies, this might mean 3 years of solving challenging and highly technical engineering problems, leading a team, and functioning as a sales engineer in the field. For others, it might mean they copy and pasted existing legacy code and changed field names for three years while sitting alone in a cube. And depending on how humble the candidate is, and how good their self-marketing skills are, it might be hard to distinguish between the two in an interview. Or, their skills may not be matched to their previous job position.
This is not to say that I think occupational licenses are always an ideal way of handling this: I definitely don't think that. I'm merely using it as an example that testing people's ability in an occupational setting is not uncommon.
> All of that aside, I've not seen any data that suggests the hiring practices common in our field produce better outcomes than that which I am evangelizing for. Furthermore, those practices are common FAANG type companies which can offer much higher compensation packages than a typical startup. I assert that it's not only the right thing to do, it is also a _competitive advantage_ to have a streamlined, humane, hiring process.
I 1000% agree with you here. I think that this can include some coding exercises, but they need to be very limited in time and scope. You are absolutely right that most companies are not FAANG, and should not interview like FAANG. Every coding exercise I give is very limited in scope and is directly relevant to the job position -- never leetcode or other BS.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#579Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve seen way too many “experienced devs” who are terrible coders.
I’ve seen way too many people show up after a 12 week “SWE interview bootcamp”, pass interviews, and not know how to read an API doc and write code against it. I’ll take the experienced dev.
That an interesting experience. I've never seen someone that can take a 12 week bootcamp and pass leetcode style questions. Bootcamps teach short term facts, not problem solving or at least that's my experience. I'm not saying leetcode questions are the best (no idea) but in general, someone who can generally answer them has a higher chance of being a productive developer than someone who can't and bootcamp students rarely can in my experience.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
PIPing and firing is a huge time and emotional energy suck, and it sucks for people on both sides. To reduce the amount it happens is worthy. You can’t in practice just say, “this guy sucks, lets fire him next week” And it shows, barely anyone in my entire career has ever been fired. I only personally have been close to one.
> PIPing and firing is a huge time and emotional energy suck, and it sucks So is the 7 interview gauntlet. But I guess it just shifts the burden on the candidates and externalizes cost.
Well no.
It's expensive for the company too. All of the people involved in the interview process are still getting paid while they are interviewing the candidates. They aren't working on their projects that they have to complete. The company probably has a recruiting or talent acquisition team and the people on that team don't work for free. The company might also work with outside agencies or external recruiters. If you hire one a candidate from one of these sources, you have to pay them too.
It's really expensive in terms of time and money to hire people. It's really hard to build a great team.