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The rise of never-ending job interviews

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Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#151

Post by stadium »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #33
sp332 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies don't want to do job training anymore. Instead of a general background and attitude check, they need to know if the candidate has all of the individual skills that will be used on the job.

This a hundred times over. I still remember in 2020 multiple places asking me "I see you've used .NET core, what *version* have you used?". I had a kind of career crisis/breakdown, where I realised no one gave a shit about anything except my utility as a walking set of tech keywords. Accepting that it wasn't working for me was one of the best things I've done for my career.

> Accepting that it wasn't working for me was one of the best things I've done for my career.

How did you pivot after this?

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#152

Post by danbmil99 »

sp332 wrote: post #18
vegetablepotpie wrote: post #2

What’s happening is that companies want to completely remove risk from the hiring process. In the real world, you cannot remove risk. You can manage it, but you cannot remove it. Asking candidates to go through 6 interviews before making a decision and not telling them when a decision will be made signals a risk adverse culture that cannot make decisions.

Companies don't want to do job training anymore. Instead of a general background and attitude check, they need to know if the candidate has all of the individual skills that will be used on the job.

If that's true, then the interview process would focus more on skills. From what I hear, faang companies are all about the leetcode on the Whiteboard oh, and they don't seem to ask specific questions about domain knowledge. In fact, you often don't know which department or project you're going to be put on when you get hired by one of those companies. And apparently the interviewers don't know either.

At least a few years ago, Google made it a point that the interview process was generic, not specific to any position or team. More like an undergraduate admissions process.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#153

Post by vishnugupta »

echelon wrote: post #94
andrew_ wrote: post #66

I recently agreed to go through a 5-round process which totaled to about 6 hours. I'm the first person to bitch about the ineffectiveness of leetcode/hackerrank bullshit for people with 10+ of verifiable experience, but I went through this one because it was a field I had never worked in before, and the personnel I was speaking with were truly interesting. Sans all of those qualifiers, anything more than 3 rounds is…

Devil's advocate. Every bad hire costs the company $50,000 - 200,000. Sometimes more. They can also sink or demoralize teams. Many of the people conducting interviews are new to the process and don't know how to extract signal. Sometimes scales don't line up. When you have a revolving door of employees (because that's the way things are these days), have trouble scheduling interviews (busy engineers trying to get the…

+1 to everything you said.

I’d like to add time aspect as well. If selected, candidate will spend next 12-18 months with the team, 5 days a week. I look at those 5-6 hrs as worth an upfront investment from both the sides just ensure those days months aren’t miserable and you don’t end up parting ways on bad terms.

I’m saying this as an interviewee as well as hiring manager who has conducted more than a thousand interviews.

Nothing frustrates a team and hiring manager more than a mishire. It’s the same for candidate, they have to go through the charade of interviewing at tens of places again.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#154

Post by yarky »

mitsuchen wrote: post #118
yarky wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would really like to know what risks (other than useless non-technical HR keeping their jobs) there are after candidates have past a certain threshold for quality, particularly for junior positions. It's harder to deal with emotional kids than it is to deal with incompetent engineers. Maybe that's why those non-technical HRs might not be as useless as you think.

You made the mistake to assume that we are idiotic enough to be emotional for job interviews. It's harder to deal with people who think they are competent and know it all than emotional kids.

> You made the mistake to assume that we are idiotic enough to be emotional for job interviews.

And that's a risk that could potentially be spotted by a competent HR.

> It's harder to deal with people who think they are competent and know it all than emotional kids.

Maybe, but juniors are (unfortunately) seen as a commodity by the market. Commodities are about uniformity and adherence to some standard, rather than uniqueness.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#155

Post by wwweston »

devnull3 wrote: post #141
Analemma_ wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is infamous for jerking people around in the interview process. I had a very similar experience, as did several people I know. They do it because they know they can get away with it, but I do wonder if they have a backup plan if the lustre of working for Google ever fades, because it's an open secret that their interview process is a fucking nightmare for no reason.

> fucking nightmare for no reason Absolutely! To add, the amount of nit-picking that happens is staggering. I was downgraded from strong-hire to lean-hire because: 1. I did not use classes in Python. That problem could easily be solved using simple functions. The feedback I got was "candidate does not know idiomatic use of modules & classes" 2. I did not use one of python's standard lib functions and instead I coded…

> 1. I did not use classes in Python. That problem could easily be solved using simple functions. The feedback I got was "candidate does not know idiomatic use of modules & classes"

Apparently they missed this classic HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3717715

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#156

Post by gentleman11 »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #117
kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Job training is not as much worth it for companies when employees can switch jobs at the drop of a hat.

That works when you're employing a bunch of Wordpress monkeys who do nothing all day but mess with CSS and install plugins. Not so much when you've got a mature SAAS product, parts of the system are tricky to work with, and stakeholders are breathing down your neck to implement new features so you don't have time to cross-train your teams. Losing people who are experts within the domain of the software they're mainta…

I’m friends with a few “Wordpress monkeys,” as well as some people who “do nothing but mess with css all day.” That was extremely condescending and dismissive

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#157

Post by bsder »

kxrm wrote: post #114

I am actually going through the hiring process now. I was a hiring manager at my last shop and I tried to be very respectful of the candidates time. The process was first interview was 30 mins and basically a getting to know you and us session. Second interview was a two hour technical interview with debugging/fix this function type question and a single from scratch example question in the candidates language of cho…

> If it's FAANG

And that's really the issue.

The FAANG's are throwing around so much money that people are willing to put up with almost any amount of abuse to be on the other side of the line. The FAANGs can deal out any amount of abuse and they will still have a line of applicants around the block--there is no negative feedback in the interview process no matter how bad they make it.

> Hiring in Tech is broken and I don't know what we can do to fix it.

Software hiring in the Valley is broken--possibly.

Hardware folks I know still go through the same old, same old. Single phone call with an engineer to make sure you're not simply a waste of oxygen. One on-site with 4-6 people (and 6 would be an unusually long day--generally that would mean you're doing well and some extra people want to talk to you). One week to response--two weeks MAX.

WTF are you software people doing?

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#158

Post by kxrm »

vmception wrote: post #78
bississippi wrote: post #6

> That’s a question Mike Conley, 49, grappled with earlier this year. The software engineer, based in Indiana, US, had been seeking a new role after losing his job during the pandemic This is ageism. I hope he realized this after 10 6 rounds of interviews. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19507732

Not to invalidate ageism, there are many threads about younger people's interviewing experience that match this. The competition (other candidates) are doing much more than that, and also studying and practicing leetcode much longer than I am willing to.

Perhaps, but I can say that I am over 40 and I can tell when the enthusiasm for my candidacy dies after they see my face that it's not due to anything but ageism.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#160

Post by Gauge_Irrahphe »

echelon wrote: post #94
andrew_ wrote: post #66

I recently agreed to go through a 5-round process which totaled to about 6 hours. I'm the first person to bitch about the ineffectiveness of leetcode/hackerrank bullshit for people with 10+ of verifiable experience, but I went through this one because it was a field I had never worked in before, and the personnel I was speaking with were truly interesting. Sans all of those qualifiers, anything more than 3 rounds is…

Devil's advocate. Every bad hire costs the company $50,000 - 200,000. Sometimes more. They can also sink or demoralize teams. Many of the people conducting interviews are new to the process and don't know how to extract signal. Sometimes scales don't line up. When you have a revolving door of employees (because that's the way things are these days), have trouble scheduling interviews (busy engineers trying to get the…

When you have a revolving door of employees, the job sucks in some way and people leave for places that suck less.

You have two ways to solve this problem:

1. Figure out what makes your employees keep leaving.

2. Hire people who are not good enough to work elsewhere.

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