Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”? • Hacker News Board

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

#671

Post by vikingcaffiene » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 2:38 AM UTC

justinlloyd wrote: post #658

vikingcaffiene wrote: post #346

Hiring manager here. IMO the current tech hiring norms are gross and not sustainable. It feels like a weird hazing ritual and with the current market, is the single biggest reason you can't hire. Why on earth would someone burn a weekend on a take-home test for your startup when they have 15 other irons in the fire? At my current employer we got rid of all that ridiculousness. No take home test. No live coding. We've…

We don't do take home, leetcode, live coding either. We walk through past projects and ask very pointed questions. We ask about difficult problems we've faced in the past and how you might solve it. I role play a junior programmer describing a situation I have and then ask junior programmer level questions of how to solve the problem. You get to talk to two very senior software developers, and two very senior enginee…

This is the right way to go. If I were looking for a job right now I'd be hitting you up. I've said as much in a few other threads but it's not only the right thing to do, its a competitive advantage.

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

#672

Post by jnwatson » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 2:39 AM UTC

tartoran wrote: post #297

novok wrote: post #191

Earlier 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.

It doesn’t externalize costs at all. We’re talking easily 20 developer hours per candidate. That’s real money.

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

#673

Post by NikolaNovak » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 2:41 AM UTC

I love reading Hacker News for many reasons, but one of them is to see just HOW different "Silicon Valley/FAANG" mentality is from virtually everywhere else. Where 7 interviews and a full day on-site are seen as normal, productive, and fair to all involved.

FWIW, Where I'm at:

* Right now it's employee's market. I am pushing to have two short interviews with candidates, recruiting is pushing to minimize it to ONE. Otherwise we lose the candidates we most want to get - the highly qualified, ambitious ones who don't have time to waste and have opportunities and options

* We hire to keep. We are not hiring for somebody to do boilerplate for 12 months, stack their resume, and keep going. We are hiring to invest into them - ensure they learn about the business, the functionality, the processes, the system, the stakeholders, the clients, the team members; and perform well and smoothly and for a long time. As such, we find that technical skillset is important, but some of the non-technical skillsets much more so - sense of ownership and commitment, communication and soft skills, etc. So the 3 or 6 or 12 hours of coding problems really don't meet our needs.

I thought Google after a decade basically said - data doesn't support some of these crazy interviewing styles we have become known for. Did industry miss/ignore the data and decided to double down on making interviews more and more onerous, and more and more filtering out brilliant candidates who don't happen to be able to dedicate days of their lives (or weeks, for the inane interviews which require you to re-memorize your ComSci undergrad) PER OPPORTUNITY which may never hash out?

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

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Post by jnwatson » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 2:42 AM UTC

I’ve been interviewing since 1996. Out of 7 companies I worked for, two I got from knowing the owner/founder, 1 was short, and 4 were >4 hours. This is not new.

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

#675

Post by Oras » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 2:45 AM UTC

bobabob wrote: post #447

vikingcaffiene wrote: post #346

Hiring manager here. IMO the current tech hiring norms are gross and not sustainable. It feels like a weird hazing ritual and with the current market, is the single biggest reason you can't hire. Why on earth would someone burn a weekend on a take-home test for your startup when they have 15 other irons in the fire? At my current employer we got rid of all that ridiculousness. No take home test. No live coding. We've…

> I think it's time we accept that the person we are talking to is who they say they are on their resume. 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. IMO, it doesn't work. Talk is cheap. I wouldn't have a job if I had to talk my way into any company, I'm an introvert, I suck at communicating orally. But I can solve problems a…

Writing code is not everything. You're going to work with a team, deal with managers, go to meetings, discuss and brainstorm ideas.

Lack of communication skills is a bug not a feature.

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

#676

Post by vikingcaffiene » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 2:45 AM UTC

gorbachev wrote: post #645

ceeplusplus wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's not my experience. 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 hiri…

Yeah you have to use the appropriate strategy for the interviewee. In the case of a junior, you are looking for potential and teachability as you said. You tailor your questions towards that angle. I've yet to see any take home or live coding challenge that answered those type of questions for me. All it told me is what I already knew: they were more junior and needed mentoring.

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

#677

Post by mattkrause » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 2:55 AM UTC

dmoy wrote: post #644

jugg1es wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> ANY feedback to interviewees when they were rejected 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.

I got some from IBM, of all places, so it's not impossible.

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

#678

Post by sgtnoodle » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 2:59 AM UTC

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?

Re: experience and working hard vs. working on what the project needs, that's definitely a trait of more seasoned engineers. I'd say it's a matter of learning strategy over tactics. I've gotten pretty good at that balance over the years. When I came into my current project I focused on aspects of the software that had been sorely neglected before me, and plenty of folk where skeptical for the first year or so. Now in hindsight the results speak for themselves, and it's apparently become a story of legend that my coworkers tell new hires.

Last week I had fully intended to spend at least 20 hours heads down coding, but instead I spent the entire work week writing and updating an architecture document. It was the best use of my time, though, as it allowed two other people to be heads down coding instead. Now this week it's three of us frantically writing code instead of just me, and we all know the final result will work and be boring. We're replacing a 7 year old piece of critical infrastructure.

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

#679

Post by jboggan » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 3:00 AM UTC

lukeschlather wrote: post #255

boisenberrier wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you’ve been close to one person getting fired? How do you have an opinion on the PIP process or firing at all if you have next to no experience with it? I knew a guy at a FAANG who earned himself and his report a PIP for the grave sin of choosing the wrong deputy to send upstairs while he was on vacation. The deputized person went to one meeting and ran his mouth (arguably, told the truth). Both are no longer at t…

I worked at a FAANG for 3 years and I'm pretty sure no one I worked with was on a PIP. A PIP is extreme. It's sufficient to simply not give people raises, most people can and will easily find another job earning 10% more.

The smartest person I ever met at Google got PIP'ed, and a few of the engineers from my vintage did as well.

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

#680

Post by graderjs » Sun, Apr 03, 2022, 3:03 AM UTC

benreesman wrote: post #301

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,…

> 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…

That does sound ideal but it's not really something that scales with enormous companies or a globalized economy. You can always allocate the best people to the top roles in the hierarchy. The reason is not only because you don't have the right people to fill those roles who also have the skills for leadership, the reason is sometimes because you have so many of them you can't allocate them because they're aren't enough spots at the top in the hierarchy.