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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”?

#191

Post by novok »

mylons wrote: post #138
prepend wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People get PIP’ed and fired routinely that make it through this process. Compared to what? I don’t think anyone is claiming this process is perfect. Just that it’s better than alternatives. People will always get PIP’d and fired. But the goal is to reduce that as low as possible.

how is it better than alternatives? this seems like a huge straw-man given almost every company that hires developers thinks they’re a large tech company and mimics their hiring process. it doesn’t seem like serious alternatives have been explored.

PIPing and firing is a huge time and emotional energy suck, and it sucks for people on both sides. To reduce the amount it happens is worthy. You can’t in practice just say, “this guy sucks, lets fire him next week”

And it shows, barely anyone in my entire career has ever been fired. I only personally have been close to one.

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

#192

Post by gcheong »

kxrm wrote: post #143
monster_group wrote: post #31

Most tech companies now do around 4-5 interviews. It has been like that for at least 7-8 years (probably more) but I just found out that not all companies are like that. After being subjected to these demeaning Leetcoding interviews I went through a refreshingly pleasant experience. It was an interview with just one person. They gave me a technical open-ended problem and two weeks time. After two weeks I had to do a…

I was interviewing with companies last Fall and got a homework assignment project where I could pick from 3 different problems. I am not big on companies giving me 30 minutes and expecting hours of investment in return but I figured I would look into these problems to see if they were worth solving. I literally copied the questions verbatim into a search and found the solution to all 3 all over GitHub in multiple lan…

My cynical take is that this company views development as a combination of basic coding skills plus the ability to find solutions on stack overflow. Maybe it’s exactly what they were evaluating.

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

#193

Post by dclowd9901 »

dleslie wrote: post #58
mabbo wrote: post #44

Having been an interviewer at a FAANG for many years, I can explain some of the logic behind it. I'm not saying this logic is valid , but it's how we got here, imho. First: we no longer trust the hiring manager alone, because probably they aren't a strong developer. We instead trust strong developers that are well trained at evaluating good devs. At the same time, we don't want to thrust a dev onto a hiring manager,…

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?

I’m not sure that’s feasible. Not sure what the roadblocks are, but every company I’ve ever worked for seems to have real reservations, usually at the HR level, with simply getting rid of bad eggs.

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

#194

Post by laurent92 »

namirez wrote: post #95
monster_group wrote: post #31

Most tech companies now do around 4-5 interviews. It has been like that for at least 7-8 years (probably more) but I just found out that not all companies are like that. After being subjected to these demeaning Leetcoding interviews I went through a refreshingly pleasant experience. It was an interview with just one person. They gave me a technical open-ended problem and two weeks time. After two weeks I had to do a…

I went through a similar experience with a radically different outcome. I was given a coding assignment and one week to finish it. I spent more than 30 hours on it and came up with a solution that was supposedly 500 times faster that what they'd ever seen (they told me this later). But things took a wrong turn at that point. In the followup meeting the interviewer turned out to be rude, disruptive, and combative. He…

Or discrimination. You never know, maybe you worked with his former boss, it could be anything.

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

#195

Post by jl2718 »

Because they can. There’s way too many of us, so the expectation has changed from ‘trainable’ to ‘pre-trained’. It keeps changing too. Just 5 years ago, hiring was mostly leetcode from junior to principal. Now I think it’s changing again, but I don’t know what to. I’ve found that developer productivity is mostly determined by facility with the DevOps tools and frameworks. I hate to say that because it turns hiring into buzzword bingo, and this has become impossibly complex.

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

#196

Post by gcheong »

kjeetgill wrote: post #179
gcheong wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30 might be too much but it also depends somewhat on the probability of success. 100 hrs practicing leetcode + systems design for a 2% chance at a FAANG seems a worse trade off than 30hrs researching an interesting subject for a presentation with an 80% chance of success. Problem is you don’t know what your chances are with the latter going in but I think it would be a fair question to ask.

I lean towards the status quo of one day interviews. But I liked how you considered probably of success as a consideration. Consider also that: 1-((1-.7)*3) = .97 3 interviews with a 70% chance give you a 97% chance of landing atleast one job. More interviews improve your situation rapidly. Job hunting is better seen as a campaign than individual battles. But I also think maybe in my estimation you FAANG chances aren…

I got the 2% from a presentation by a company in the business of prepping people for FAANG interviews, the actual number could be higher but I was just trying to make a point about relative probabilities.

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

#197

Post by novok »

alexashka wrote: post #146
angarg12 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say this. To add more: a single person (HM) might have biases for or against certain candidates. More people in the loop brings in diversity and helps to keep interviewers honest and consistent. Also these roles are usually high stakes and the cost of a bad hire is too high.

> these roles are usually high stakes and the cost of a bad hire is too high Really? High stakes? This fucking site. Have you ever worked as a software developer at a corporation? Nothing about it is high stakes. You spend most of your time dealing with useless idiots who report to other useless idiots, who report to other useless idiots, about a useless product they think is a great idea that every non-idiot knows i…

High stakes means high investment. You can’t just hire a dev and have them running in a week, their bad work could cost the company multi-millions in obvious and non obvious ways and proper onboarding takes months at minimum.

On the other hand, a cashier can be replaced in a week, and they don’t effect the entire future of the company as SOP.

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

#198

Post by igetspam »

mabbo wrote: post #44

Having been an interviewer at a FAANG for many years, I can explain some of the logic behind it. I'm not saying this logic is valid , but it's how we got here, imho. First: we no longer trust the hiring manager alone, because probably they aren't a strong developer. We instead trust strong developers that are well trained at evaluating good devs. At the same time, we don't want to thrust a dev onto a hiring manager,…

Don't forget the need to filter for bias. Many many moons ago, when Google's ATS was young, they didn't weight scores based on the interviewer. After some incredibly confusing low scores and some obviously bad hires, it was determined that there was a need to account for internal bias. That lead to applying weights to the interviewer's score because you still needed them to interview but you also knew that you couldn't trust them outright. More interviewers, more data points and better selection even with accounting for bias.

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

#200

Post by geeky4qwerty »

imtakmo wrote: post #12

I entered the software industry as a developer about 4 years ago, and I have been running interviews for the past 2 years or so. Interview hell is all I have ever known. Could you elaborate on how things worked differently in the past? I legitimately have no idea what a developer interview "loop" would look like without 5 to 7 interviews, but I desperately hope it can exist.

Sure. Usually contacted by internal HR or a recruiting firm (depending on the position, recruiting firms use to be -almost- exclusively c-suite or very, very specific specialty niche positions. Internal HR would just setup the HM call, maybe ask some clarifying questions (education, certs, etc) to make sure it all adds up.

First interview was with the hiring manager, sometimes in person sometimes over the phone. In person was a good sign because if it was a technical position you'd usually have the senior join the meeting. Goes well, job offer within 2 business days.

Second interview was generally exclusively for highly technical OR executive leadership (depending on position). Again, it goes well, job offer within 2 business days.

If there was another stronger candidate and the prospect was side-lined but later reconsidered there might be one last interview if enough time had gone by to put a face to the name again.

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