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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

#61

Post by eastbound »

PebblesHD wrote: post #44

These styles of multi-round interviews inspired by the FAANG collective started picking up in Australia before the pandemic, but it got to a point where most of my more talented colleagues and I all agreed it just wasn’t worth the time for the salaries being offered. 4 round interviews for a ‘senior’ developer position on $120k? When interviewing my own candidates, I use a 1 hour interview mostly focused on approach…

I’m sorry, what are typical pays for a junior engineer (Say, JS and Java?), a medium and a senior?

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

#62

Post by atomicnumber3 »

sulam wrote: post #35
lovich wrote: 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.

Is it really that hard, though? I mean, you say at-will employment notwithstanding, but like, that's not my experience at all. Companies are free to hold you to whatever absurd metersticks they want, and even if they fire you for-cause, it's not like they a) even need a cause or b) will ever properly share that cause with you or c) share it externally at all.

Mind you - not that I actually want them to do C) - but my point is that the law provides zero protection, the culture provides zero protection/accountability, and the only thing that provides anything is whatever weird bureaucratic nonsense the company has imposed upon itself.

My point being, companies have only themselves to blame for making it hard to fire people. Both companies I've worked for have fired really high-performing people for (these are my interpretations, but I do honestly believe they're the "real" reason all these folks were fired, and I was closely familiar with the details in all the situations I mention here):

Chronological order of my witnessing them over the years. Several different companies.

1. My boss didn't like how the guy thought. Literally, the guy got good results and wasn't weird or crazy or anything, but him and my boss always had kind of weirdly unproductive conversations. I liked the guy, personally.

2. He very loosely implied the owner of the company didn't know or like statistics. (Which was correct). This is while the owner of the company was trying to shove his nose way to deep into a system he had designed 20 years ago but had been away from, and in his absence the code and the industry had moved on. He got fired and a complicated statistical modelling system was replaced with one a high-schooler would've built.

3. He was a good performer but a bit brusque, but our newest boss was kind of lukewarm for him, so when my boss's boss's boss's boss decided he was the reason some project failed, he eye-of-sauron'd him and had him fired, and my manager didn't really step up to defend him.

These just off the top of my head. I've also seen droves of people fired essentially because the owner would hired 20-ish new-grad-type folks/early career, then over about a year fire all but 3-5 of them, and those who survived were then kept on for a more normal period of time. The de-facto 1-year trial period wasn't ever explicitly described to them (just a 60-day review that was just a rubber-stamp) or formal. People literally moved hours away (this job was unusually high-paying for our locale) and bought new houses and in some cases moved families (not all were early-career, that was just most of our funnel), only to be fired 1 month later for no (to them) apparent reason other than that they weren't in the small handful the owner decided to keep that year.

Really hard to feel sympathetic towards corporations of any size when being absolutely evil to common folk seems to just be how the game is played.

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

#63

Post by jackblemming »

Retric wrote: post #47
yrgulation wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing wrong in playing the game. But believe me there’s better pay out there.

You’re selling your life, focusing on chasing ever more money is a poor trade IMO. Not saying you have to join a non profit, just consider what you want to work on, who you want to work with, and the kind of hours you want to put in.

It always amuses me seeing programmers chasing as much money as possible when they make a fraction of executives or many other professions.

Even if they're at the "elite grand master SRE" level. Still a fraction of some MBA.

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

#64

Post by healsdata »

jimbob45 wrote: post #15

What’s the ideal interview? HR screen, tech interview, and team lead interview? I don’t know that you can reasonably compress things down to less than three interviews without relying on individuals to be better at interviewing than they might actually be.

Honestly, I don't think it's the number of interviews but the number of rounds. Each round takes about a week to schedule and coordinate, requires you to wait to hear if you're moving forward, etc.

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

#65

Post by gabeio »

PebblesHD wrote: post #44

These styles of multi-round interviews inspired by the FAANG collective started picking up in Australia before the pandemic, but it got to a point where most of my more talented colleagues and I all agreed it just wasn’t worth the time for the salaries being offered. 4 round interviews for a ‘senior’ developer position on $120k? When interviewing my own candidates, I use a 1 hour interview mostly focused on approach…

> We have a probation period to work out if they’ve over-promised

I'm curious what you mean by over-promised?

Unless you only do this for people who don't already have a job, this sounds more toxic than multiple interviews. "Oh yeah we want you to work for us, but quit your old company, we'll try you out for a few weeks and if not we'll go our separate ways" ... but they quit their previous company so it's not as nice as it sounds.

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

#66

Post by yrgulation »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #38
yrgulation wrote: post #24

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 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 w…

> I've been doing the look for work grind off and on for a few months.

ok i may be living in a bubble or something. where in the world is looking for work in tech a grind?

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

#67

Post by profile53 »

PretzelPirate wrote: post #60
PebblesHD wrote: post #44

These styles of multi-round interviews inspired by the FAANG collective started picking up in Australia before the pandemic, but it got to a point where most of my more talented colleagues and I all agreed it just wasn’t worth the time for the salaries being offered. 4 round interviews for a ‘senior’ developer position on $120k? When interviewing my own candidates, I use a 1 hour interview mostly focused on approach…

I don't like having one interview with one interviewer. That can easily result in that interviewer having a bad day or simply being biased and costing someone a job.

Even in a panel or multiple round interview, it usually only takes one no to end the process for the candidate. So I don’t see how this is any worse.

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

#68

Post by bitwize »

telman17 wrote: post #32
krnlpnc wrote: post #20

What do you mean? My daily code editor is notepad via a shared screen. It’s the best!

In this interview you’ll be expected to program your own editor and then complete the assessment in it. Good luck!!!!!

Write down the source code for your editor in a notebook, and then read it back to me over the phone.

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

#69

Post by xtracto »

happyopossum wrote: post #27

I’ve seen so many of these jokes and complaints about modern SV interviews that I was blown away when I recently interviewed at a FAANG… I was assigned a recruiter who communicated clearly and often with me, told exactly how many interviews I was doing (3), what each was about, and all 3 were scheduled on the same day, and were handled by extremely smart and supportive people. Offer came through by the end of the wee…

I found it funny that a week ago I got an email from a Google recruiter, offering me to enter their interviewing machinery.

I bluntly told him that I rejected the offer because of the horror stories regarding 5-7 interviews in Google.

The recruiter's reply was that it was ok of this was not an appropriate time for me , and that we would stay in touch.

How can they be so dense? Of course it may be that they are also just a cog in the machine and there is nothing they can do.

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