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Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

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Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

#181

Post by faangiq »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #9

Yeah I have 16 years experience and was asked to take an aptitude (IQ) test. I find it personally insulting. I think it all emerged from the recruiting/HR market. They started as middlemen but found a way to take on more of the "gatekeeping" role in hiring. This then lead to recruiters using more and more technical jargon and then we saw the emergence of leetcode interviews trend from faang, and multiple stupid inter…

Many years ago I took an IQ type test for a job where I would have failed the practical skills assessment. I passed and it was a very good hire for the company.

Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

#183

Post by mylons »

azinman2 wrote: post #162
mylons wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People get PIP’ed and fired routinely that make it through this process. I think there’s a lot of bias in your response. The process worked for you, you work at a large tech company and it gives you validation. It also makes you feel good to lord over the process and boosts your ego, reinforcing your priors.

I don’t think that’s routine. While I know it happens, certainly I’ve personally never worked with someone who this has happened to. There will always be burning mistakes, or people who lie or are otherwise hard to predict will be a disaster. What else would you propose?

making the interview process similar to the job is a good first step. when I worked at Invitae this was my proudest achievement from my time there. I suggested that we change the interview process to a paired programming session that were situations from our day to day work. the candidate brought in their own laptop or was provided one (their choice). the session was 90-120 minutes and didn’t involve leetcode hard problems, just practical day to day stuff a web developer might run into on the job.

Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

#184

Post by abeppu »

lbotos wrote: post #78
dleslie wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm reading here is that even as an experienced interviewer you struggle to make the format effective and equitable. Sounds to me like the format isn't worth keeping; time to hire more, and fire fast?

1. Often, legally, firing people is harder than hiring. 2. Hire more, fire fast sounds good on paper but will destroy morale as the team identity will be constantly influx. 3. Engineers will spend less time onboarding newer engineers to the detriment of everyone because well, they might not just last.

4. I think there's also a potential cost to your future ability to recruit. Once people know you're quick to fire, candidates will view your offer less favorably if they also have an offer from a company with a longer interview process, but who doesn't have the reputation for firing quickly.

Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

#185

Post by jclulow »

ipaddr wrote: post #114
jclulow wrote: post #39

The predictive power of a single interview with a single person is just not that high. For one thing, the company is not the only one doing the interviewing; the candidate is also interviewing the company. Before making a commitment to join a team, I think it's valuable to speak to a number of members of that team to get a sense of what they're like. On the company side, I have also witnessed several people who might…

With people leaving in 2 years or 1 year at Amazon on average do you really need to talk to employees? Take a chance and make the best of it.

I would generally try to avoid working somewhere so horrendous people don't even last a year. If one somehow did not already know that about Amazon, talking to future team members about the corporate culture seems like a good way to try to find out before making a mistake!

Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

#186

Post by prepend »

greggman3 wrote: post #65
kstenerud wrote: post #4

Tech is very cargo cultish, which comes from having a young average age, and a strong survivorship bias in the media. Remember the Google brainteasers? Fizzbuzz? "Culture fit"? Tech companies have the lowest infrastructure costs of any industry, and so they have no place to hang their risk aversive paranoia except on personnel (the safer you are, the more trivial the things you fear). There's nothing logical about it…

Is FizzBuzz cargo cult? I had my own company in 1995. We tried to hire programmers. The candidate would come in and we'd spend an hour interviewing. 9 out of 10 could not program at all and effectively wasted our time. So, we switched to "here's a short test, go in this room and do the test". Then we'd look at their answers. If the answers were wrong/poor we'd thank them for their time and excuse them. This way, less…

I had a similar experience in the late 90s. We had people who couldn’t program but represented that they could.

We would give them a quick screen of “write in one of the languages this position requires a program that takes in a string, reverses it and prints it out.” And we changed it to any language once we started working with novel stuff like JavaScript that any programmer could pick up.

It was so weird how many people would fail this test.

I always wondered how other industries dealt with people just flat out lying on resumes and applying for positions they shouldn’t. Programming is lucky that we have some litmus tests.

I feel bad for people who freeze up and can’t even write a three line program on paper.

Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

#187

Post by dleslie »

prepend wrote: post #164
dleslie wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The response is to the needless growth in complexity of the hiring process; advocating for reducing that complexity is appropriate. You're tacitly expressing a concern that a fast hiring commitment would be riskier; but that's not necessarily so. A minimal set of filters are meaningfully effective: resume, references, and meet the team. Anything beyond that doesn't have just diminishing returns, it can negatively imp…

> expressing a concern that a fast hiring commitment would be riskier; but that's not necessarily so. I think it is necessarily so. Hiring fast is effectively hiring randomly and that is way riskier. Would you read random books? Watch random movies? Maybe, but probably not. Would you buy a random car? Of course not. Would you buy a random home? Etc etc You can logistically reduce the number of days by maybe doing mul…

I'm not advocating for hiring literally anyone. If they pass your credential requirements, reference checks, and team meet then they're already passing through significant filtering.

Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

#188

Post by bin_bash »

rdiddly wrote: post #172
jjmorrison wrote: post #15

Well I can say in my experience firing people is such a pain nowadays that I feel a need to be a lot more careful in hiring. I've seen a bit more than half of fired employees come back with some form of discrimination lawsuit threat after being fired.

Paradoxically enough, that sounds like a warning against hiring anyone but white males, the only group that can't credibly claim discrimination.

Unless they’re old or gay

Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?

#189

Post by ratww »

dleslie wrote: post #98
lbotos wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Often, legally, firing people is harder than hiring. 2. Hire more, fire fast sounds good on paper but will destroy morale as the team identity will be constantly influx. 3. Engineers will spend less time onboarding newer engineers to the detriment of everyone because well, they might not just last.

Basically everywhere in NA has allowances for probationary periods with at-will employment. Moreover, prospective hires could start on contract. Morale is improved when team members feel like they have some control over their membership. It seems like you're assuming that a great many people would be fired; why so? In my experience, having worked for several such companies, firing is rare because even minimal filters…

> Basically everywhere in NA has allowances for probationary periods with at-will employment.

Yep. Lots of places with even stricter pro-employee laws, including Europe, also have it.

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