Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#111

Post by AtlasBarfed » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 6:39 PM UTC

twic wrote: post #20

denzil_correa wrote: post #9

> We will do our best to provide a 15 minute break and/or lunch/coffee break during your interviews, especially if you'll be interviewing for more than 3 hours. That said, we are happy to accommodate additional breaks or fewer breaks, depending on your preferences, just let your recruiter or recruiting coordinator know! I have seen this w/o breaks 5-7 interviews a day, too often. Some candidates suffer from low energ…

When Amazon interviewed me, it was something like 10:00 - 17:00 with no breaks. They didn't tell me that in advance, so i hadn't had a big breakfast. I actually don't think they did this on purpose. When i mentioned to someone at the end of the day that there was no lunch break, they were surprised. I think it's just that they're such a constitutionally incompetent organisation that things like this will just happen…

Amazon just showed you it doesn't care about its people in the least.

That is accurate based on the 10 people I've known that have worked there.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#112

Post by AtlasBarfed » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 6:40 PM UTC

brailsafe wrote: post #27

barbegal wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any evidence to suggest that more than 3 hours of interviews is actually beneficial? 7 hours of interview seems like overkill. I've never had more than a couple of hours of interview: an hour with the department head and another hour with my future line manager and/or another senior employee.

Afaik, research suggests that interviewers know after 20 seconds whether they'll hire someone. I don't have references and don't know if this would translate well to tech interviewing, but I'd wager that the vast majority of a 7h interview day is totally pointless.

Yeeeahhhhh...

Which shows that bias is 99% of that thought process.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#113

Post by artfulhippo » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 6:42 PM UTC

Dayshine wrote: post #65

axegon_ wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've heard people say this, but i don't see why it would be true. Is there reasoning behind this, or does it just feel smart? Not at all. The lack of questions shows a lack of interest. In every test I've ever prepared I've deliberately left one or two questions which are near impossible to answer and no one has ever been able to correctly answer them so far. The least you can do is ask about those. Or what does th…

> Or what does the release cycle look like or how is the development being tracked - literally anything, just to indicate that you genuinely are interested and not "I simply want this job". What if I'm so interested in the job that I simply don't care about those things? If you're doing amazing work, who gives a crap about the small details!

If you're maximally interested in doing the job, you would ask questions to learn details that will accelerate your onboarding into your productive role and culture of the firm.

Also, if you are unaware of the norm that asking questions indicates interest, you are likely to have social/cultural deficits relative to an ideal employee; the likelihood of you being unaware of other workplace norms is increased.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#114

Post by lmilcin » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 6:50 PM UTC

pdimitar wrote: post #59

jrockway wrote: post #24

My general thought is that your compensation scale should be proportional to the complexity of the interview process. If you're going to be copying the FAANG interview process, then the candidate should expect an offer similar to what they'd get from FAANG. In general, I haven't been disappointed on this front, but I fear that many people are. If you want to be super transparent about the interview process, you shoul…

This is strongly misaligned with many companies' incentives so it will never happen, I am afraid. A lot of interviewing processes are kind of like fishing. They hope that if they wasted you 6-10 hours of your time before an actual offer then you'd make a decision based on the sunk cost fallacy ("not sure how much time the other companies will waste me, let's take this one on their offer, it's not so bad"). I am glad…

I conduct interviews with candidates almost every other day.

Believe me, interviewing is a huge cost for the company and nobody wants to organize interview to "fish" for the candidates.

We have screening process to remove candidates that don't have chance passing next stage so that we can spend more time with candidates that pass screening.

It is really difficult to figure out if you want to work with somebody after 1.5-2h discussion.

For 2 hour interview I must fit following things:

* Spend 5 minutes getting everything to order, bringing water, solving connection problems etc.

* Spend couple minutes introducing myself, who we are and what we are doing

* Spend couple more minutes trying to calm the candidate, break the tension. People react very differently to stressful situation and we would really want to get the candidate little bit more calm to level the field (we don't want just the people that deal well with stress).

* Ask couple technical questions from various areas. I can understate how difficult is to gauge candidates knowledge and experience from 30m of technical questions

* Give a coding task. I can't tell how many time we had a candidate that was able to answer questions quite well but was unable to organize process to write simple piece of code. It is when the candidate is solving the task when we learn for example if the candidate can react to hints or how it feels to have a discussion on a technical problem. This typically takes 0,5h to 1h

* Have a discussion on the candidate experience, past projects, what was his/her involvement, etc.

* Let the candidate ask his/her own question about our project.

* Spend couple of minutes to close the discussion on a good tone regardless of how the candidate fared.

Our HR does not like us to extend the discussion over 2h supposedly because it "scares" candidates but you have to understand, it is very difficult to do all of this and get to know the candidate in such a short time. I can totally understand somebody wanting to spend couple more hours with a candidate that shows really good promise.

Hiring a bad employee is a huge cost and totally worth spending couple more hours trying to ensure this person does not have "dealbreaking" faults.

You would not believe what kind of things I met in my past. Candidates who passed technical questions really well just to start googling solution to our coding task? Candidates we give the same critical hint 5 times and each time he/she tells me that's not right and dismissed to go continue with his/her faulty line of reasoning?

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#115

Post by gozzoo » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 7:06 PM UTC

jeff_jefferson wrote: post #67

gozzoo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the company failed to attract the most suitable people for the job. As I said - I don't see a reason for multiple commits for a few hours project. It is not how people start a new project. This is an exploratory phase, you check this, test that. Very often it becomes a mess. Eventually your idea of the project gets clearer, then you clean the code, or start again from scratch. I don't see why these steps need to b…

By specifically mentioning this, I would imagine it is something that is important to them. Therefore, somebody who doesn't agree with this way of working is not "suitable". In my experience, hiring people (however good) who do not agree with the company's core practices doesn't end well for either of them. Unless it is something completely new to me and I am basically "playing with the tech" (which this does not see…

> Therefore, somebody who doesn't agree with this way of working is not "suitable"

Agreeing with how one should work when employed is very different from agreeing with some nonsense during the application process. And in my opinion test assignment which take days to be done is definitely nonsense.

Expecting applicants to follow a process that has been adopted in a company, which took possibly years to get established is very naive. Of course if they get hired they should comply with the company policies and make their best to fit in with the culture, but how can some arbitrary requirement help evaluate their abilities.

People involved in hiring sometimes forget that this process is a two-way street. Applicants can also have expectations, requirements and questions. They are also entitled to disagree. Being themselves in a process of selecting the best company to work for, they can have their own opinion about how this should happen. I'm not sure if is a good policy for a company to hire the most agreeable candidates, willing to follow without objection any rule or order.

Most good engineers I've worked with are not like that at all.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#116

Post by slg » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 7:06 PM UTC

pdimitar wrote: post #106

slg wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They hope that if they wasted you 6-10 hours of your time before an actual offer then you'd make a decision based on the sunk cost fallacy You might be overthinking this. I doubt many companies really have this viewpoint for the simple fact that falling for this is a trait of a bad employee. You don't want to actively select your employees based on their flawed decision making process.

I definitely could be overthinking it and I said the part you quoted kind of out of spite as well. But there are bad employers out there, be sure of it. Some of them definitely do employ that tactic. Might be unconsciously but they do. They definitely lack the self-awareness to know what does it mean to hire a bad employee. They kind of just go through the motions. One skill I never wanted to have but gradually devel…

I totally agree with you that some employers are downright bad and that how a company runs an interview process is indicative of how they run everything. I have turned down multiple interviews and a job offer before because I was soured by how a company operated that process. I just don't think the reason for those bad processes is necessarily nefarious. Hanlon's razor and all.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#117

Post by coredog64 » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 7:37 PM UTC

csunbird wrote: post #39

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"If you can't go without breaks in a 7h day, you are not good enough to work here" even worse when you think it's really saying "if you can't go without breaks in a 7h day of meetings"

It is even worse when it is legally required for employer to allow for an hour break after every 4 working hours. Edit: It is at least where I live. (EU)

Typical US state laws are 15 minute paid break for every 4 hours and an unpaid 30 minute meal break for every 8 hours. The assumption is that these breaks must be scheduled for hourly workers but that “white collar, non-overtime” workers have enough flexibility to self schedule.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#118

Post by bootlooped » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 7:38 PM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #24

My general thought is that your compensation scale should be proportional to the complexity of the interview process. If you're going to be copying the FAANG interview process, then the candidate should expect an offer similar to what they'd get from FAANG. In general, I haven't been disappointed on this front, but I fear that many people are. If you want to be super transparent about the interview process, you shoul…

I don't think many companies will be able to come to terms with not being able to hire FAANG-level engineers if they can't offer FAANG-level compensation. I can't remember where I once read the quip, "we only hire the best, and so does everybody else".

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#119

Post by coredog64 » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 7:43 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #101

jrockway wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Startups are going to be like that, but you said you were interviewing at AWS. You can buy and sell their equity on the open market, so it's not really a mystery what you're getting. If they say they give you 50 shares a year, that's $137,941 a year in cash money. Probably more next year. You can sell it or hold it, but turning it into cash is very easy. Sure, Amazon could go out of business while you're holding stoc…

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 v…

This. Bonuses based on company performance are going to be extremely rare this year. My employer was up front about it, telling me in April that bonuses were suspended. That’s fine, because I treat it as a bonus, but if one was counting on it to make mortgage or student loan payments...

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#120

Post by _hardwaregeek » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 7:48 PM UTC

renewiltord wrote: post #6

hardwaregeek wrote: post #4

Also get feedback from candidates, especially rejected ones. The people who get offers will assume that the process works, since it validates their self-worth. Even if the process is very stupid. I've had processes that were so so bad from top companies. Like "here's a repo, clone it, write a program that will be judged by automated tests that you can't see". I had to basically guess what the tests were going to do,…

It would feel a little awkward for me to ask for someone to do work for me after I've determined that they're not a good fit for the company. And if it's post-interview pre-result then the problem is that they'll feel pressured to be positive. Perhaps if it were a third party.

Agreed that it's tricky, but there needs to be some feedback loop. Otherwise you end up with seriously broken processes that never get fixed. Companies tend to care about false positives more than false negatives, but there's a decent possibility that some companies have an extremely high false negative rate.