641–650 of 833 posts
I have a similar experience level to your own, and I am equally horrified by today's interview gauntlet. This, coupled with exploding team sizes and heavy-handed process fads, have left me to consider entrepreneurship as the only viable option from here on out.
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> To add more: a single person (HM) might have biases for or against certain candidates. That would be true for all organisations. You could do 6x more interviews if they were all a single round. > Also these roles are usually high stakes and the cost of a bad hire is too high. Hiring a brain surgeon is high stakes. I don’t know a lot of software positions where it is true.
> Hiring a brain surgeon is high stakes. I don’t know a lot of software positions where it is true. Arguably it's not. But if I think I'm doing a guy a favour by 'giving them a chance' and hiring them when they're marginal, and they quit a stable job and move across the country, then I fire them? In that case I didn't do them a favour by giving them a chance.
Especially when you know they’re going to need to move all across the country.
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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?
It’s very difficult to quantify individual performance, and even harder to put a dollar figure on it.
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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 i…
This is a lawyer thing
Without large societal changes to no longer have the US be crazy litigious, no big company will ever give you actionable feedback about your interview.
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Thanks! So, I'll say that we are still tweaking and trying to get things just right but, as of the time of me writing this, here is the process: - HR call 30 min. - Talk to hiring manager (me) 30 min. Get to know each other and feel out if there is a mutual fit. - Technical panel 1hr. Speak with several engineers on the team who share your discipline (front end or back end for example). Again no live coding. We just…
Sorry, but this just sounds very easy to bullshit. Unless you're doing real in depth quizzing of stuff people wouldn't know if they didn't work with it (e.g. in HFT, explaining what a potential implementation of std::string could be and what the tradeoffs of each design choice would be), generic backend principles are very easy to spew correct answers for without actually knowing how to code. How are you going to fil…
It's almost always obvious whether the candidate really knows their stuff. They go into details, when you ask probing questions they don't revert back to generalities or repeat what they already said.
Where this does not work, however, is interviewing junior developers. They don't really know anything at all yet (well, some do, but again, that's almost always quickly obvious), so you're hiring for potential rather than actual skills.
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>Yea because we live in a place where everyone is super honest and no one is going to try and take advantage of that to make 500k a year. I would be THRILLED if I was put into some kind of a short probationary period, with limited access (and potentially restricted salary, with retroactive reimbursement) while I showed what I was worth. I personally have a hard time demonstrating that in short interviews, and it's on…
That can work for some, but imagine you already have a job, and time commitments, and it takes 5-10 companies to find a fit. Spending ~1-2 months is expensive.
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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 sli…
> For $200/hr I’d rather spend the time on my own life. The alternative is spending 7-12 hours doing 5-7 technical interviews for $0.
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Alternative hypothesis: they did hire the correct people, but working there is so unpleasant that very few people decide to stick around.
Which means their hiring practices are flawed.
They burn up engineers. What good to them is a burnt out engineer?
Who cares, hire another one?
It's eerily like the military using up soldiers, and I doubt it's an accident. They're maximizing output for their money and they don't care if it makes the engineers suicidal or quit. They can always get more.