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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

#91

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…

Back when I was a regular employee I would take 2-3 interviews every 6 months. I found many benefits to doing this: interviewing skills, salaries in my market, skills people are hiring for. I definitely recommend it to anyone, especially if you are the type of person who is anxious about interviews.

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

#92

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…

I feel your pain! I had an initial phone interview with Yahoo in mid 2000 or so and my anxiety got the best of me on "hello". I went blank! Forgot how to talk - so I hanged up and DECIDED that very minute that I would start my own company and never interview again!

So did you end up founding your own company? Was that your last interview ever? Don't leave us hanging!

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

#94
I’ve been interviewing for 8 months. Getting to many final rounds, 1 lowballed offer, 1 rescinded offer, and it’s playing a mental toll. Today, I got a rejection that went along the lines of “everyone loved you and there was absolutely 0 negative feedback, but we just found a better fit.” I almost broke down, but hid behind a facade of positivity because the long weekend was starting and my kids can’t afford a bummed out Friday.

Interviewing shouldn’t require such thick skin. I’m here questioning my life, and reduced to worthlessness.

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

#95
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…

Do companies really code like that? I find it both. interesting and horrifying.

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

#96
I wonder how much the difficulty/pain of interviewing is a joint effort by big tech to make it annoying to switch jobs once you get in? I have met numerous FAANG engineers who say they would never want to do the process again and, despite [insert a normal work gripe], interviewing at another well paid company is too much work.

Certainly before big tech agreed not to poach from each other once upon a rime, but now I wonder if this is a lower grade version of this?

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

#98

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…

I’ve just hired a wrong person. I’m extremely worried how I should manage an exit plan with her, I don’t see a good way of minimizing the impact. Some employers are stupid and make bad decisions because they’re too shy to ask for a third round of interview when we assume everyone at that level will know the standard set of JS skills, especially since the market is difficult for employers. While it’s painful to give t…

It happens. It's awkward because not only does it obviously suck for the employee but it means there's a big problem with the interview process. When I worked for a company that encountered the same problem we corrected for it by adding a screening call, after CTO chat and before an on-site. We used that call with a senior engineer to perform a trivial live-coding problem in Code Sandbox. Every candidate got the same problem, so it became our benchmark. It was a 5 minute problem, 10-15 if you're nervous in an interview. We were able to weed out not only all the candidates who couldn't solve it, but those that took 40 minutes, those that could barely find their way around a text editor, those who struggled to write syntacticly correct JS, and those who had to rely on Google to write a for loop.

For those rare candidates that completed the problem rapidly, we would give them a follow-on question that was a more typical interview question, just so that they didn't think our bar was set stupidly low.

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

#99
I just recently went through this. Seven interviews over a period of nearly a month. I didn't get the position. The most frustrating thing was that there was so much repetition.

Each round had one or more interviewers and I never met the same people twice. I can only assume none of them had context from the previous rounds because so many of the situational and culture type questions were basically identical. I couldn't even fake enthusiasm after the third round.

Moving forward I will kindly be declining participating in any interview process that has more than three rounds. Besides being draining, it's a pretty good indicator of bigger problems in the company itself.

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