Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

Instead of worrying about base salary vs. equity, I'd rather know roughly how much "guaranteed" compensation to expect. Guaranteed would include cash salary, immediately-sellable stock, and the amount of bonus that is not contingent on personal or company performance. The rest is "speculative" compensation: stock options, potential gains from holding stock, illiquid stock, and bonuses that might not materialize for various reasons.

I'd love that but I am pretty sure it won't ever happen.

A compromising variant I found is to make public the GitHub repos where I did homework assignments, with the company name removed and with the README enriched to clearly explain what was the task and how was it successfully done (although I do that preliminarily regardless).

At one point 4 companies told me that they actually went through my accumulated interview assignments in GitHub and liked them and wanted a HR/manager interview without the tech interview before, which was a pleasant surprise.

I presume it's a liability thing. It only takes one candidate to "spin" an otherwise valid reason into something they can sue for. Same reason why companies don't tell employees what they're being let go for in at-will states.

I disagree. I've interviewed an abnormal amount: roughly every 8 months since getting my first job, and for more than one job at a time.[0]

Based on my experience, the best interviews have been the ones with the most detail shared up-front. When I say best, I don't just mean my own performance has been best, but I also feel that the interviewer has been most satisfied and that they have learned what they meant to learn.

The reasons for this are several-fold. In order to prepare a candidate well, there must be a well-structured interview process. This means that each interview should have some explicit goals - information about the candidate which the interviewer intends to elicit.

It is painful for everyone and a waste of time for the goal of an interview to be unclear to one party (and many times so if the goal is unclear to both). My favorite interviews have been at several FAANGs, which were highly structured. I knew up front what the interviewers would be looking for in broad strokes, and how the interviews would be structured to elicit that information. I knew how technical acumen would be ascertained.

I much prefer this over walking into a room with no idea what will happen. I do very well in those interviews as well, as I have spent much of my career in professional services, where part of my job description is to be always ready to project competence and to rapidly build rapport with new clients and potential clients. I also have much experience in interviewing to lean upon. Nevertheless, this is still a worse interview process, as I have to spend time figuring out what the interviewer needs to learn.

You may object that a good interviewer should be able to guide the interviewee. This is correct on the face of things. However, any people are bad interviewers, because there is rarely much training or prep for them. I have had plenty of successful interviews where I have had to lead the interviewer, rather than the other way around.

Additionally, there are very few jobs where job requirements include being quick on your feet and being able to rapidly (aka within an hour or so) ascertain what someone needs and how to give it to them. If you are looking to fill such a position, no-prep "genuine reaction" interviews might be a good fit. If, on the other hand, the position requires analytical thought and deliberation over periods of time greater than an hour (or whatever the length of your interview is), then such a no-prep interview seems a poor method to learn whether the interviewee has the skills you are looking for.

All this said, I do not like interview processes that have large homework requirements. It is one thing to inform the candidate of the structure and broad content of the interview, but another thing entirely to request that they do extensive work. My most extensive interview prep (excluding homework assignments) has never been more than a few hours, even for FAANG interviews with much structure and lots of prep materials shared by the company. If you can't find a few hours to prep for interviews, you're probably not taking them very seriously. And if you can't fit two or three hours of prep into a period of one to two weeks, then you've got bigger problems in your life.

[0] Note I haven't changed jobs this frequently, but I've always kept an eye out for interesting opportunities. I would interview companies to see if I like them or their job offer. I would frequently bail out early if it didn't seem like a good fit. Some I went for offers and used that to negotiate. Some I went for offers just to learn what comp packages look like. Some I went for offers to get the job.

I 100% agree. I used to be in the boat of "I shouldn't have to study to pass a job interview" when I was younger.

Now that I'm older and I've interviewed a lot of people too, I realize sometimes life is un-fun and kinda sucks but you gotta do what you gotta do. There's a strong co-relation between people who spend two hours a night for three months studying algorithm questions and people who are willing to spend 8 hours a day debugging un-fun code. Which, more often than not, is what I need my team mates to do.

I work in AdTech. It's not particularly sexy. We don't have particularly sexy projects but we do have a large (millions of users per day) scale. A lot of our projects just require a engineer who has base level of experience plus a positive attitude and a slightly above average level of responsibility because we have to avoid outages. I need people to do work that is oftentimes not particularly fun but particularly important and revenue driving. My best filter, apart from actually having worked with the person for years beforehand, is asking a low-ball JavaScript "can you debug this asynchronous JavaScript" question.

So while the current system is frustrating, until we can figure out a best solution, unfortunately you just gotta play the game how the rules are laid out now.