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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”?

#811

Post by rednerrus »

bradleyjg wrote: post #208
rednerrus wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Managers should be honing the hiring process. If your team is clear about what they're looking for and thoughtful about how to get at it, you should be able to figure out if a candidate is a good team and technical fit in a couple of hours.

Perhaps. But even with the current 6+ hours everyone medium size or larger still makes a fair number of bad hires. Between driving the false positive rate down and driving the time to decision down the value maximizing next move seems to be spending even more effort on the false positive rate.

It's a false assumption to assume that more interviews is going to drive the false positive rate down. Increased volume or difficulty are not the keys to driving the false positive rate down. Better preparation is the key to driving the false positive rate down. Your team has to be crystal clear about what they are looking for in a candidate. That will allow you to create better job descriptions and create better interview questions and processes.

Increasing the difficulty and frequency of interviews is a bandage for bad processes. It's also going to increase your false negative rate. In a job market like this, you just can't afford to do that.

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

#812

Post by whimsicalism »

polio wrote: post #353
benreesman wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

I call it a diff and work at an almost-FAANG, I think it has to do with trunk-based development.

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

#813

Post by graderjs »

graderjs wrote: post #680
benreesman wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 enou…

*you can't always allocate the best people to the top roles in the hierarchy

Omg when a typo or voice typing completely inverts the intended meaning raaa

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

#814

Post by xyzzy21 »

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,…

Sounds like an organizational flaw is behind all of this.

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

#816

Post by Siira »

kube-system wrote: post #550
vikingcaffiene wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Accountants have occupational licensing. Forgive my ignorance, but is this during every interview? If I am reading this right this is a certification they'd need to get which would be on their resume. Do they need to re-prove those skills every time?

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…

> continuing education

I have seen examples of this for teachers, doctors, and bankers. It usually did not add any useful skills to the trainee.

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

#817

Post by joshuamorton »

benreesman wrote: post #802
joshuamorton wrote: post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An air force officer may have to qualify on their aircraft each year, but they're unlikely to be "the most experienced" fighter pilot, and it's common in the military for enlisted people to make fun of officers for being too abstracted away from the life of a soldier. > The head of surgery in a hospital still operate just as the junior surgeon. Why does tech have to be different? Because the load we put on medical pe…

You've got some reasonable points and I don't just want to completely gang-tackle you here, but there is a part of your argument that I think is sufficiently incorrect in a sufficiently harmful way that I'm going to sort of keep at you about it, in what I hope is an open-minded or at least respectful way. Some people like the book "Coders at Work" (I do), some do not, but almost anyone would agree that the people int…

> I don't dispute that plenty of successful leaders in technical organizations have become rusty as hackers when they hit the mega-seniority, but the idea that some L6/L7 manager shouldn't be able to lift some of their team's serious code off the ground, let alone some undergraduate dynamic-programming interview question as was the original point of my original post is simply contradicted by a mountain of evidence both generally-available and anecdotal to numerous people in this thread.

I think this is the root of the disagreement. I want my managers to be technically capable with an engineering background. As far as I know, my entire leadership chain, arguably excepting my SVP and CEO (at Google) have such a background. Yes they should be able to pass a tech screening and certainly system design.

They should have enough knowlege to know why you're making certain technical decisions and be able to see that you're justifying them well. That's all true. What I'm saying is that a manager who is staying so deeply aware of the details of all of their reports work that they can drop in and take over in a pinch probably has too much context. I'm not making an argument on abstract technical ability or knowhow.

Like in the same way that my entire management chain has technical knowlege and background, practically none of them have submitted code at work in the last 3-4 years at minimum, for some that's their entire career at Google. I expect that, with enough effort they could all work on the projects I work on and make contributions, but they'd need to learn all of {language and codestyle, libraries and relevant tactical design patterns and norms, various technical constraints to the design that are important but nonobvious}, so in most cases it would be similar to onboarding someone who was a technical contributor from another team or an experienced new hire. I don't really consider some random employee of Facebook to be someone who could "do my job in a pinch" either, even if they're more technically competent than I am.

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

#818

Post by bobabob »

Oras wrote: post #675
bobabob wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Do all that without writing decent code and you still have nothing to show.

> Lack of communication skills is a bug not a feature.

A bug I'm willing to take in exchange of producing high quality code. Besides, we live in 2022 now, we can type. I just said I suck at talking not at communicating. There are multiples forms of communication which don't involve opening your mouth.

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

#819

Post by thirdwhrldPzz »

sgtnoodle wrote: post #779
thirdwhrldPzz wrote: post #771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no misunderstanding on my part. I never consented to this culture. I see little different here than a church, meat based tape recorders thinking the noises they emit are “the way” with little proof except “feudal capitalism” continues to “work”. We don’t owe deference and agency to CEOs, VCs, and founders. The syntax is different but the LARP of being sheep for “wise men” is the same. Only 13% of the country…

You seem extremely jaded, and the way you speak about religion is rather boorish in my opinion. I enjoy living in and participating in a society. Thanks to the productivity gains of specialization and free trade, technology has been developed to the point that I spend my days designing embedded software to fly autonomous aircraft. Those aircraft deliver medical supplies, primarily in developing countries with poor ro…

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