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If You Want This Job, We Must Interview You Forever

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Re: If You Want This Job, We Must Interview You Forever

#31

My last job search took a toll on my mental health. I felt like a worthless person for 3 months. I could feel (or imagine?) the disdain of the interviewers as I was failing their tests. The fake enthusiasm on their side as they rejected me ("that was great! But we're not going to move forward with you! Good luck!!!") and on my side while pretending I was excited when in fact I was worried about money and the gap on m…

You might be comforted to know that I was once in a similar situation, but I eventually found a great job and things worked out.

The lesson I learned is that you shouldn't draw too many conclusions from just a few bad interviews.

Re: If You Want This Job, We Must Interview You Forever

#33
post #25

I don't disagree with this articles satire, as it lines up with my experience if you remove a bit of the hyperbole. I am however curious as to why companies continue to do this and seem to be increasing their interview requirements in the face of an inability to hire. The most reasonable sounding answer I can come up with is that executives are balking at engineering pay and rationalizing it to themselves by demandin…

Makes you wonder if it is some sort of collusion to make it more difficult for current employees to jump ship if they know it will be painful ordeal.

Re: If You Want This Job, We Must Interview You Forever

#34
post #6

Going through this right now, not for the first time. I always wonder if they ever actually fill the position for which I was a candidate.

Others in this thread are asking why companies do this, and I can't help but wonder - perhaps they've mostly completed their software projects, so this is make-work for them? Think about how many person hours go into interviewing one person if each interview is a several person panel. And then they'll have hours of internal feedback meetings to review the interviews.

Re: If You Want This Job, We Must Interview You Forever

#35
post #25

I don't disagree with this articles satire, as it lines up with my experience if you remove a bit of the hyperbole. I am however curious as to why companies continue to do this and seem to be increasing their interview requirements in the face of an inability to hire. The most reasonable sounding answer I can come up with is that executives are balking at engineering pay and rationalizing it to themselves by demandin…

Not really. It comes down to the asymmetry in hiring outcomes. It is much more expensive to hire a bad employee than it is to hire a good employee. It’s gotten exceptionally hard to just fire people in corporate America, at-will employment notwithstanding.

Re: If You Want This Job, We Must Interview You Forever

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but at least I don't have to go through yet another life draining and de-humanizing interviewing process. Stop interviewing at code assembly lines? There are loads of sane places to work at with sane interviews and great tech and pay. FAANG and similar are undergoing a slow rot. You’ll do fine.

I've never even interviewed at a FAANG. I've interviewed at like a dozen companies throughout my career, across all sorts of different businesses. All of the interview processes I've been through were awful.

How come? Genuine question. I interviewed at a company once. They asked me to do some funky stuff with some hex css colours, many many years ago. After i proudly failed they said thats what their buddy was tested about at google. Company went under and didnt shed a tear over not joining. Truly a waste of time. Later found a similar “test” in a high school cs “olympiad” book under a different name and context.

Re: If You Want This Job, We Must Interview You Forever

#37
Interviewing is hard, requires skills precisely zero people are trained to do, and has huge long-term upsides and downsides to a business.

I'm a programmer. I trained for years to do that. Then I'm asked to hire someone. A task I have zero experience or training at. Spoiler alert - any actual competence is a fluke.

At my peak I was hiring maybe 2 or 3 people in a year. Mostly I hired people I'd heard about who came with a recommendation. Results varied. Most were OK, some were exceptional, some didn't last long.

Some companies are hiring tens, hundreds or thousands of people a week. Presumably they have full-time interviewers. But "good judgement" isn't a scaleable property, so you end up with filters and processes to try and narrow the field to "good candidates". Maybe thats "must have degree", maybe that's leetcode problems.

Hiring into a big company is painful. They have a process which probably makes no sense, adds little value, and appears to be arbitrary and doesn't lead to significantly different outcomes. But how else could it look? It's a sausage factory churning out sausages.

Hiring into a small company can be turgid - they're a small company but it seems like everyone there has to sign off on the interview first. They're scared of making a mistake, so they never seem to get to a decision.

Or it can be simple. There's one guy. He either likes you or not. He either thinks you can do the job or not. Takes an hour, and there's an offer on the table. But this guy hires 1 person every now and then, not 100 per week.

Hiring us hard [1]. It should be done by professionals. There should be degree programs training people how to do it. But even then, companies growing at severe pace may as well just pick every 3rd CV and save themselves, and applicants, a lot of time and effort. Yes it would be random, but you shouldn't hire unlucky people anyway.

[1] hiring for skilled people, where actual skills are hard to measure, to work in a team environment, where their output is disproportional to their rank, status of pay.

Re: If You Want This Job, We Must Interview You Forever

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the major reason I haven't been looking for a new job. I haven't been super happy at my current place, but at least I don't have to go through yet another life draining and de-humanizing interviewing process. Not to mention the first 6 months or so at a new job trying to figure out how the internal politics work. "Better the devil you know" and all that.

> but at least I don't have to go through yet another life draining and de-humanizing interviewing process. Stop interviewing at code assembly lines? There are loads of sane places to work at with sane interviews and great tech and pay. FAANG and similar are undergoing a slow rot. You’ll do fine.

I've been doing the look for work grind off and on for a few months. I've had one okay, one great (Render), a couple comically bad, and then a bunch of leetcode type places… for an SRE role. The best of the leetcode fans actually had the self-awareness to ask why I declined the interview request. One recruiter begged me to go through with it because they were working hard on getting an exemption for SRE hires so it wouldn't matter if I passed. One of the worst was a company that's been posting on HN for nearly a year looking to fill a bunch of spots, I can't imagine why they've been looking for so long…

If there's a good filter to avoid that nonsense I'd love to know what it is. Somewhere around a decade ago I interviewed with Apple and it was nowhere near as obnoxious as what I've seen so far.

Re: If You Want This Job, We Must Interview You Forever

#39
post #7

Sad someone out there will assume this is for real and plan to change their interviewing to this. I've been in interviews where you had to talk with every single person on the team (8, half of which didn't show); a gang interview with me in the middle for several hours; 4 separate interviews with multiple people who all asked complicated puzzle questions; and a place where every team member talked about how they did…

Charge then $10k/y/interview on top of ideal rate.

Re: If You Want This Job, We Must Interview You Forever

#40

> "Phase three starts at 8 a.m. sharp, next Monday, and lasts for fourteen Pomodoro-timer cycles, concluding at 5:38 p.m." Unfortunately, this sounds dreadful and yet completely plausible. Pomodoros, or taking short breaks every once in a while, really are useful for avoiding stretching out tasks, though.

Funnily enough, the end time doesn’t work for the standard “25 minutes on, 5-10 minutes off” Pomodoro standard. Even with the max 10 minutes off, that’s only 5:10 PM.

Maybe I’m not keyed in but is a 28 minute lunch normal?

I guess 25 on and 12 off gives 5:38 precisely. Interesting.

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