Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days • Hacker News Board

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#111

Post by AlwaysRock » Thu, Mar 11, 2021, 8:10 PM UTC

vmception wrote: post #21

>I turned down the [exploding] offer because the experience got me thinking about the company’s work culture. Were the methods employed by the company to get me to accept the offer indicative of their work culture? I've never found the interview process to be reflective of the company. I find the interview process to be a random hodgepodge across the entire industry because nobody knows what they are doing. Small/not…

Yes and no. At a smaller company? Probably. But after a certain point many companies realize their interview process is a mess or sloppy and bring someone in to standardize it/spend time standardizing it.

Will the DevOps team that interviews for 1 role a year working on a very specific platform still have a wonky interview process that might but something the manager put together or just feels like asking? Sure but on average the company will have their shit together.

If they haven't done this then it is reflective of the culture. Why didnt they do this? Do they not really care about recruiting? The experience potential new hires have during the interview process? Do they just not think its important? Those are all things that are reflective of the culture.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#112

Post by vmception » Thu, Mar 11, 2021, 8:11 PM UTC

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #85

vmception wrote: post #21

>I turned down the [exploding] offer because the experience got me thinking about the company’s work culture. Were the methods employed by the company to get me to accept the offer indicative of their work culture? I've never found the interview process to be reflective of the company. I find the interview process to be a random hodgepodge across the entire industry because nobody knows what they are doing. Small/not…

I have personally given up on "whiteboarding people"... reminds me of waterboarding. I skim the resume, underline anything we use internally and talk to them about experiences. We've done over 300 interviews in the last expansion year (2017) because we had to build a brand new development office (+50 devs). After hiring all of these people, we've quantified this as three things: Curiosity, Ability to Learn and Abilit…

same, I stopped doing whiteboarding. I have people solve some domain knowledge exercise (like their specific platform or IDE or package manager, stuff that would actually spend the company time on a day to day basis). Most companies could get away with that, even "big tech" can because their employees leave after 2 years too, before they are even eligible to join some other teams at some companies.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#113

Post by d2ncal » Thu, Mar 11, 2021, 8:14 PM UTC

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #85

vmception wrote: post #21

>I turned down the [exploding] offer because the experience got me thinking about the company’s work culture. Were the methods employed by the company to get me to accept the offer indicative of their work culture? I've never found the interview process to be reflective of the company. I find the interview process to be a random hodgepodge across the entire industry because nobody knows what they are doing. Small/not…

I have personally given up on "whiteboarding people"... reminds me of waterboarding. I skim the resume, underline anything we use internally and talk to them about experiences. We've done over 300 interviews in the last expansion year (2017) because we had to build a brand new development office (+50 devs). After hiring all of these people, we've quantified this as three things: Curiosity, Ability to Learn and Abilit…

How do you probe for these skills? Are there any questions that help you to identify them?

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#114

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 11, 2021, 8:16 PM UTC

planet-and-halo wrote: post #104

dheera wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think part of the problem is interviewers at companies are (a) not properly trained to be interviewers, just pulled from their jobs and asked to interview some candidate on short notice (b) funneled into a certain way of interviewing that isn't optimal. Large companies have almost always given me the traditional "coding a whiteboard" interview and nitpicked for the whole hour at things that would be irrelevant for…

This was basically my experience on both sides of the process (with a major exception when I interviewed for my current job). I learned from both. On the interviewer side, I sat down and wrote out a framework for how to do a good interview since nobody ever gave me one and I was initially flying blind. (What am I looking for in the person who will do the role? How should I break up the time to check and validate thos…

[deleted]

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#115

Post by blablabla123 » Thu, Mar 11, 2021, 8:16 PM UTC

LaserToy wrote: post #20

Had similar marathon 8 years ago and it is draining. Now, being on the other side (hiring folks for a startup), I would argue that some of flags are a bit misleading. Examples: “Undue pressure to accept an offer letter” - interviews are not free, companies are investing eng time into evaluating each candidate and once they find great one, they really want them to join. They also do not want to be part of a bidding wa…

Sure, but the higher the pressure to sign soon, the more urgent it is to hire someone. I once signed a contract where there was even a fine if I wouldn't show up on the first working day. After I started it turned out there were 10 guys before me in the last 12 months ;) Needless to say, the work culture was horrible.

> “ Not enough clarity about your role” - normal for growing startups.

Everybody claims this, even Bigcorp. I think it's an okay point but the more unclear, the more likely it is that there is a constant pressure about the role.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#116

Post by devmunchies » Thu, Mar 11, 2021, 8:18 PM UTC

bob33212 wrote: post #40

setgree wrote: post #19

I once got stood up for a round of interviews — I showed up, waited, emailed them multiple times to let them know I was there, and then 30 minutes later they wrote to me to ask if I could come in another day (rather than meeting me at the front desk where I was sitting). At the time I was just annoyed that they had wasted my time, but in retrospect, the real red flag there was that no one took responsibility — “there…

I had a second round with the CEO of a small startup on zoom. 5 times in a 45 minute interview he said "Sorry hold that thought, just responding to a customer email real quick" It was tempting to tell him that we should just wrap this up if he had more important things to do.

if he was personally trying to guarantee quick response times to customers, then that sounds like his priorities are right.

Especially at a "small startup", this is a good sign. Makes me think there was more work than employees which is why the CEO was interviewing and doing customer support.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#117

Post by corytheboyd » Thu, Mar 11, 2021, 8:18 PM UTC

> Consistent lack of interest or low morale from interviewers

This one in particular pisses me off, especially if it’s late in the interviewing cycle. I interviewed with a certain YC startup recently and it was a long form programming exercise with two observers watching me work without really interacting much, where one of them was not even paying attention at all for their time (I know because they told me they were “rushing to get code out right now haha”). Come on, seriously? They rejected me because I didn’t do a good enough job I guess, or was deemed a poor culture fit idk, hope they found the “rockstar” they were after!

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#118

Post by vkou » Thu, Mar 11, 2021, 8:19 PM UTC

walshemj wrote: post #107

vkou wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If people in a company don't know what they're doing, yet (it appears) have a deathgrip belief in the equivalent of something they found on StackOverflow or in a blog post... doesn't that reflect something about the company? No, all that it reflects is that the company does not prioritize hiring people who interview well, or training people to interview well. The company also probably does not prioritize hiring peo…

The "deathgrip" is the red flag here

I have doubts that someone stepping in for 2 hours of interviews can consistently and accurately determine whether or not the company in question is in the deathgrip of stack overflow fads and dumb blog posts.

In anything but the most egregious cases, anyone making such an assertion tells me more about themselves, than it does about their interviewers.

In the rest, the correct judgement to make after a bad interview experience is "I don't have enough information to make an accurate judgement about how this company runs."

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#119

Post by bluGill » Thu, Mar 11, 2021, 8:21 PM UTC

david38 wrote: post #41

sethhochberg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the hiring side, a (reasonable) expiration on the offer helps be fair to the other people who are interviewing, too. If I have a single position open and multiple people interviewing, as a hiring manager I really need to know whether my top choice is serious once we're having a discussion about signing a contract - because if they aren't, or are still trying to land better offers from other places because they h…

The hypocrisy is that to even get to the point where you have a 24 / 48 hour exploding offer, you (the candidate) had to often wait weeks to get a response to the application, phone screen, on-site, decision. So I don’t buy this fairness argument. If we’re talking about fairness, the process would be super quick, and then I would get a week to think about a decision that will affect YEARS of my life. To say nothing o…

Quick can be bad - if someone submits a resume on day one that is good should we hire them or wait a week for someone else to discover the position? If you don't know you want to work for the company until by random chance is shows up in one of your searches as hiring your type of person then you need the time to discover us. As a results policy is we can't interview anyone until the position has been posted for a week, or we have at least 7 people who seem worth interviewing. (you want to be in the former - less competition: we will prefer to wait the full week instead of taking all 7 - though do note that week 1 is posted only to internal transfers in some cases)

In most cases people don't actually have two serious leads to a job at the same time. I know it is potentially years of your life that you need to decide on, but for most people there isn't a choice. If you are on unemployment you need to justify not taking a job offer or you lose benefits (this varies by state/country). Even if that isn't a concern, odds are you have one offer in hand and a few leads that probably won't call you in for an interview anytime soon so again there isn't much hope anyway.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#120

Post by flyinglizard » Thu, Mar 11, 2021, 8:22 PM UTC

beforeolives wrote: post #92

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have personally given up on "whiteboarding people"... reminds me of waterboarding. I skim the resume, underline anything we use internally and talk to them about experiences. We've done over 300 interviews in the last expansion year (2017) because we had to build a brand new development office (+50 devs). After hiring all of these people, we've quantified this as three things: Curiosity, Ability to Learn and Abilit…

You can't really quantify attributes like curiosity, ability to learn and ability to listen so it's difficult to interview for them without having all kinds of biases sneak in. How do you deal with this in your process?

You just speak with the person about their interests, hobbies, past projects they’ve done.