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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

#201

Post by JauntyHatAngle »

Trasmatta wrote: post #28
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 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.

Admittedly, I'm doing devops/sre interviews, but I just changed jobs for the first time in 5 years.

4 different jobs I interviewed for. All of them were reasonable, the one I accepted had 3, 1 hour interviews, the questions asked were very reasonable, friendly, etc.

I dunno, maybe I'm lucky but I've avoided FAANG my whole career and only had good experiences in interviews.

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

#202

Post by freddie_mercury »

nuclearnice1 wrote: post #127
PebblesHD wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For us, it’s a tiny fraction. I’ve hired around 30 engineers over 5 years and we’ve let go of 2 during probation, both for dramatically overstating their capabilities compared to their actual experience, to such a degree that it was clear it was done intentionally and with no effort to try and bridge the gap with learning during the period. Others who may have slightly embellished their skills but could learn as they…

That number might be low enough that there is no need to emphasize the probation period to candidates. If 20% of candidates are getting cut after the probation, I’m very hesitant. Losing 5% quickly is only slightly above normal and may, in fact, be a positive sign of quality control.

The poster is in Australia which has a different set of employment practices than America. Every company in Australia talks about the probation period. During probation it is basically like America at-will employment. After probation it is harder to get rid of staff with legal standards on dismissal periods, redundancy pay, and so on.

They can take you the Fair Work Commission for an unfair dismissal claim so companies have have processes in place to make sure they don't face that risk, which includes things like written warnings for underperformance, setting clear expectations, and giving the employee a chance to correct underperformance.

Managers in Australia much prefer to rid of underperformers during probation.

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

#203

Post by cjohnson318 »

treyfitty wrote: post #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…

Dumb question, have you tried shorter term contracts? Have you tried networking with your peers from your bootcamp? I get that it's better to have Big Stable Names on your resume, but there's a lot of places that just need things done, and any experience is better than nothing.

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

#204

Post by throwaway74829 »

dfee wrote: post #113
citizenkeen wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they said in the interview they’re very comfortable with Vue.js and Postgres, and then you find out after a few weeks that actually they barely know Vue or Postgres, they actually come from a React/SQLite background, they’ve overpromised. Rather than ensuring every bullet point on their resume is factual through six interviews I’ve found it’s better to assume they’re honest and as capable as advertised, interview…

Find me an engineer who knows both vue.js and Postgres and they’re worth their pound of salt. And, if you’re differentiating against React and SQLite - e.g. they’re not familiar with JSONB style queries or CTEs, but instead have some alternative, par familiarity with another db… and the same level of sophistication with an FE stack - e.g usage of useRef vs forwardRef… and you cut them loose… well, they’ll probably be…

Vue / C# / Postgres / AWS / Linux Sysadminery here.

Glad to see there’s still some love for DB knowledge. Seems like everyday someone is coming to me with an issue that could be quickly solved by leaning on a mature RDBMS, instead of an ORM/NoSQL/flavor of the year tool.

Too bad most roles in this industry (that pay well and don’t work you to premature balding) need niche specialists, instead of deep generalists.

And all the faddery (see: MongoDB, MySQL, DocumentDB). “We don’t need a full-fledged RDBMS. We’ll ride this malnourished pony all the way past the finish line. We gotta stay lean; we gotta stay hungry. There’s no ‘OLTP’ in first to market.”

t. TC 75k 7yoe

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

#205

Post by freddie_mercury »

cgio wrote: post #157
HomeDeLaPot wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it seems simpler to just let someone go if they're not working out after 90 days; no need to tell every new hire that they're "on probation".

To be fair to the original poster, in Australia, whether you tell every new hire or not, they are still on probation legally in terms of employer obligations, so it is good to tell if you want to establish clarity, and follow appropriate procedures in terms of setting goals and keeping them up to date as end of probation nears to avoid vagueness and stress. Depending on size of hiring organisation, probation is 6 mon…

Yeah clearly there are a ton of Americans responding to that point.

It is funny they don't want to call it "probation" because Australian probation is just every job in America.

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

#207

Post by barry-cotter »

jackblemming wrote: post #63
Retric wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Most MBAs didn’t graduate from Harvard or Wharton or equivalent schools. They’re people who believed that there were high returns to the valuable skills they were going to learn instead of realising it’s a finishing school where you network. Graduates of the University of Northeastern Illinois’s business school are not going to do much better than FAANG software engineers. This holds more, not less for the members of the professions. The super rich people with JDs aren’t practicing lawyers.

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

#208

Post by hisnameisjimmy »

cloverich wrote: post #42
stackbutterflow wrote: post #17

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…

This was my exact experience. But I scheduled so many interviews I didn't have time to dwell. Which is great, because I am good at dwelling. I bombed many interviews in an embarrassing fashion. After about 10 or so, I started to improve. And as the questions on each successive interview began to rhyme with previous ones, I got faster and better. You know your comfort zone best, but just as a data point, consider whet…

I did this same thing at one point.

> But I scheduled so many interviews I didn't have time to dwell

If you are sensitive to failure, a trick to overcoming it is to overwhelm your ability to dwell through sheer volume of experiences. Usually the anticipation of the next experience makes dwelling on the last one difficult to impossible. This works for dating, interviewing, presenting, and probably myriad other things that I haven't had to get better at.

Does this make it so your body thrums with cortisol nearly 24/7? Yes! But do you improve quickly? Also yes! How long do you want to spend getting better? There's both a time cost and emotional cost to improving slowly. Conversely, improving quickly is exciting and motivating.

I went through period where I was not only bad at interviewing, but so nervous that I couldn't control my palms sweating so profusely that it was embarrassing to shake hands with my interviewer (and probably gross for them!). Once I realized I had to go for volume to get over my nerves, things changed dramatically for the better.

Try it!

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

#209

Post by KerrAvon »

bmitc wrote: post #189
sahila wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds unlike faang interviews (the only one person being a swe part). Which one was it and what were the interviews like? The non-team thing is common but they do it to bring “objectivity” to the process and since it’s leetcode or system design questions, it usually doesn’t matter unless you’re applying for a highly specialized role. I can speak for google and Amazon - you might not even apply for a specific te…

The interview revolved almost 100% around their leadership principles, of which humility is not one, so that should pinpoint it. And I said no one was a software engineer. All six were management.

Leadership principles means Amazon? Humility is not exactly in great supply at any of the FAANGs

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

#210

Post by cauefcr »

antiterra wrote: post #150

Hits close to home. I did an interview with a static analysis company and everything went well until the “People Gardeners” interview. It was a relatively short meeting that was mostly taken up by them asking basic career history questions, but part of it supposedly had some kind of personality fit methodology. I was told matter-of-factly that I was out of touch with my emotions and therefore couldn’t fit the team. T…

Could be one of those ~stress interviews~ to ~see if you'll break or harden~ under adversity, I love arguing, so i got the job after one of those, and had the owner explain it to me exactly like that. It was the worst job I have ever held, you dodged a bullet on that one, as bad as it was.
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