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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”?

#611

Post by djbusby »

sgtnoodle wrote: post #584
hinkley wrote: post #386

Earlier 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.

Or it selects for easy going people with patience, grit or humility, which seem like positive traits. It is true that companies tend to only hire the suckers that complete their full interview process. My current company ambushed me with a full interview panel, Gilligan's Island style, when a former coworker invited me to come in for a 3 hour tour. I took it in stride and had fun, and it gave me some additional lever…

What's with the skillet?

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

#612

Post by rockemsockem »

dleslie wrote: post #563
rockemsockem wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Resumes aren't really credentials. They're lists of things provided by the individual themselves and are almost always inflated in some way. Reference checks are just "I got someone you don't know (and shouldn't trust) to say good things about me", and meet the team is just "I can talk to people and sound smart for about an hour or two". There are a very large number of idiots who can do those things. I strongly disa…

Those who lie on their resume in a harmful way are immediately apparent upon hiring, and so are quick to fire. Those who do not, are not, and aren't fired. It's really not the risk folks seem to think it is.

I think that's probably right, although not always, and there are other problems associated with firing these people as others have pointed out.

What you said is that those three things, including the resume, are significant filters. I am saying they are not and you seem to not have a rebuttal on my point about the resume.

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

#613

Post by seanmcdirmid »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #610
StupidUser123 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Is it annoying for candidates? Yeah, but we pay you a lot of money I had to go through 8 interviews for a senior position at Facebook and ended up not getting the offer. I wasn't paid a dime and had to use a few vacation days at the job I had at the time in order to take the interviews. Technically I lost money interviewing at FB.

I went through the same interview for senior at Facebook and failed. Thankfully I got a Google offer a couple of hours after I got my Facebook rejection.

What pushed me over the bar for Google was probably making fewer mistakes on the technical loops but also having more people vouch for me on the inside (they like refs that work at Google).

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

#614

Post by sgtnoodle »

thirdwhrldPzz wrote: post #582
sgtnoodle wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you mean? Are you suggesting that companies shouldn't avoid hiring unqualified people that generate less value than their cost on average?

Research into who brings value, what technologies improve efficiency, has been inconclusive. The models end up with so many variables the conclusions are meaningless; any one parameter is insufficient, all the parameters needed mean no one parameter is greater than another. How can a value assessment being useful given all the required context that also has to exist? Is it a measure of value or traditional human bias…

I think there's a bit of a misunderstanding in what interviewers are testing for. Interviewers at most companies aren't trying to evaluate or quantify a candidate's inherent value or general technical prowess. They're trying to determine whether or not the candidate can help solve immediate and real problems that the company has, while also trying to get a sense of whether the candidate has the potential to grow with the company long term.

There's very little science in interviewing, and it is indeed heavily based on heuristics. The whole point of lots of interviews is to reduce bias. Unfortunately, it's possible for candidates to mistakenly think an interview went poorly because they didn't get the answer right away, when from the interviewer's point of view it was one of the best answers they've heard because of the process by which the candidate arrived on the answer.

A popular metric for whether a candidate is likely to be able to solve practical problems is whether or not they've shipped products before. A lot of people pad out their resume with collective achievements, though, and so it's something that needs to be dug into. It's unfortunately not uncommon for folk to not understand the stuff on their own resume.

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

#615

Post by rockemsockem »

dleslie wrote: post #604
prepend wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think it’s easy to find who has lied on their resume? It can take weeks for someone to orient, and as mentioned all over this thread it’s hard to fire people. I’d rather use a system that avoids hiring people that will need to be fired. Blindly trusting resumes is silly since resumes are hard to verify.

It's not easy to find liars. It's easy to find who are underperforming. There's a difference between the two. Resume, references, and team meeting filters out almost everyone who needs to be fired. Folks who lie on their resume, who arrange dishonest references and who defraud their way through a meet and greet are _exceedingly rare_. It's such a vanishingly small segment of possibility that it's not worth troubling…

I don't think folks are saying that outright lies are happening very often. What is happening is resumes being written to sound impressive (obviously) and perhaps inflating the difficulty/contribution/impact of past work. Exact same thing with referrals and meet and greets.

Honestly all three of those things test the exact same thing, the person's ability to sell themselves. Which is why I would not work anywhere with such lax interviews. I don't want to work somewhere that only values likability and talking oneself up.

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

#617

Post by rockemsockem »

dleslie wrote: post #569
rockemsockem wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's only a very, very small difference between those two things though. I'm not hiring anyone based on either of those bulletpoints or similar ones; no matter how many there are. It's so easy to inflate your role on a project and what you contributed and the people who are best at it are usually also able to talk, talk, talk. The first interview question I ask is so easy that I don't think anyone should be paid t…

Ah, you've got a gotcha bullet point question that you think is a killer technical ability question. But you're asking it in a completely abnormal situation, an interview. All you're testing for is the candidate's ability to answer your clever question in a scenario where their ability and personal value is actively being judged; which is wholly unlike any day-to-day challenge they are to encounter.

The question is not a gotcha. It is not trivia. It is not even a "killer technical ability" question. It's a question I considered not including because I thought it was too easy. Folks I've interviewed proved me wrong and I've come to realize that when I get any signal from it, it's the best question I ask.

If you know what a hash map or dictionary is then you can solve it. If you can't answer a problem because you're under pressure then that's a no hire signal on its own.

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

#618

Post by cortesoft »

mattnewton wrote: post #506
cortesoft wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it annoying for candidates? Yeah, but we pay you a lot of money, and it does actually work for us The best candidates can get jobs paying the same or more money with fewer interviews, so the very best aren’t going to pick you.

I'd be very suprised if this is the case, I just finished a few months of interviewing and very few places outside very small startups deviate from this format. Not saying I am the very best, but I just didn't find opportunities for anyone to out earn by skipping the FAANG style loop. Unless you mean getting lots of equity and riding it to an outsized liquidity event, these places just tend to be not competitive to t…

Top engineers are often recruited by people they worked with before, and aren’t going through the normal interview process.

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

#619

Post by White_Wolf »

vidarh wrote: post #561
sgerenser wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I’ve interviewed at all of the FAANGs other than Netflix, plus maybe 10 or so much smaller companies. In general the smaller companies all seemed to want to emulate the FAANG hiring process with 4-6 rounds of interviews with engineers after an initial phone screen. I think only 1 or 2 of them limited their interview to just 2 rounds.

I've been approached by a couple of FAANG and told them to stuff it because of the recruitment processes. I'm in London, and here at least they're extreme outliers. If you're early in your career, they probably matter and it might be worth it, but for me it's not. Maybe it'd be different in Silicon Valley, but in London they just aren't willing to offer enough over and above the kind of jobs I've had elsewhere to be…

You're being kind. "Extreme" doesn't describe it from my experience. For me it was 1 phone call/online meeting and 2 face 2 face. That is about it in terms of interviews. And that is a Fortune Global 500 company that I'm still working for. I was put on a 6 months contract and after 3 they switched to perm.

Other interviews back then and more recent were pretty much the same. Max. 3 x 1h-ish meetings. I do have a bad habit of asking the interviewer to sell me the job on the first face 2 face meeting though. This does offend some of them and we drop it there. No point beating around the bush and wasting time if they think the interview is a one way street.

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

#620

Post by sgtnoodle »

google234123 wrote: post #597
mr_toad wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m dubious that companies can accurately measure ability or performance, either in the interview process or on the job.

Have you ever been in a job or taken a class with other people and not been able to see the different between the more competent and more incompetent people?

Indeed. Experienced interviewers can size up a candidate in the first 10 minutes and fairly accurately predict how their debrief will go. The rest of the interviews are just building up confidence, and making sure there's enough redundancy to tolerate the occasional bungle or accidental awkwardness. Folk get hired all the time despite getting imperfect interviewer feedback. I've had interviews where the first 45 minutes were painful but then the candidate blew me away in the last 15 minutes.
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