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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”?

#441

Post by igetspam »

ethanwillis wrote: post #436
igetspam wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it is. If a company's hiring process for a single candidate takes multiple months, that's bad. The candidate experience is critically important. We have five stages of our interview process, two of them involve speaking with multiple engineers. The whole process takes less than a month, as long as the candidate has time. In general, it's 2-2.5 weeks and that involves coordinating calls with engineers in the Amer…

No it sure isn't because I never said months or multiple months.

Fine. I'm mixing replies. A single month is still unreasonable. That's a bad candidate experience. That changes nothing about the number of people who interview you though, just how quickly.

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

#442

Post by vikingcaffiene »

anderber wrote: post #406
vikingcaffiene wrote: post #346

Hiring manager here. IMO the current tech hiring norms are gross and not sustainable. It feels like a weird hazing ritual and with the current market, is the single biggest reason you can't hire. Why on earth would someone burn a weekend on a take-home test for your startup when they have 15 other irons in the fire? At my current employer we got rid of all that ridiculousness. No take home test. No live coding. We've…

This sounds very forward thinking and I like it. Would you be willing to share a bit more on the process? What does it entail? In the past I was hired on just 2 interviews, and all we did was talk as peers. It felt comfortable and honest. It's the reason I said yes to switching positions.

Thanks! So, I'll say that we are still tweaking and trying to get things just right but, as of the time of me writing this, here is the process:

- HR call 30 min.

- Talk to hiring manager (me) 30 min. Get to know each other and feel out if there is a mutual fit.

- Technical panel 1hr. Speak with several engineers on the team who share your discipline (front end or back end for example). Again no live coding. We just talk through stuff.

- Talk to the team PM. 30 min. Get a sense of how you collaborate with our product team partners to build new features in our application.

After that it's the usual comp negotiations, background, and reference checks. Assuming all that works out then hired!

We're hiring so, if anyone is interested in finding out more, contact info is in my bio.

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

#443

Post by Tao331 »

spoonjim wrote: post #414
rhexs wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, and then this test will closely correlate with IQ, strongly select for you-know-who, and we’ll be right back where we started.

Hopefully it would correlate with programming ability and not general IQ.

IQ tests tend to cluster around a pretty specific kind of thinking. Pattern matching. Logic. Math. Sometimes vocabulary.

This doesn't correlate with programming ability: it is indistinguishable from programming ability.

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

#444

Post by rincebrain »

cookiecaper wrote: post #350
arroz wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is PIP?

"(Personal|Professional|Performance) Improvement Plan". It's the first formal stage in the firing process at most companies with HR depts, which would almost certainly include any publicly-listed company. If you're at the PIP stage, it generally means your boss and your superboss have decided that it's time for you to go, but for legal purposes, they need to look like they tried to give you a chance, so they work wit…

I once was told by an HR person at a prior job, who almost certainly shouldn't have said it, regarding my PIP (I had extremely pathological sleep outcomes sometimes, unpredictably, but my boss and boss's boss etc loved my work), "It's really neat to see - usually when we get people on PIPs, it's because their bosses want them gone, but your boss really really wants to keep you. "

It rather stuck in my mind.

(I also did not, ultimately, end up exiting the company as a result of the PIP, just for completeness given the context of the thread.)

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

#445

Post by dolni »

dlevine wrote: post #267
Ozzie_osman wrote: post #156

Google had looked at some internal data and decided that after four interviews, you don't really get any increase in signal: https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/google-rule-of-four/

I worked at Google from 2004 - 2007, and I remember hearing this towards the end of the time I was there in a presentation shared by the people ops team. It's possible that this wasn't really followed in the hiring process - doesn't mean that the conclusion isn't true. I guess it seems counterintuitive on some level that more interviews wouldn't yield more signal.

I interviewed at Google around 2012 and I definitely went through more than four interviews. It was seven or eight in total, if memory serves.

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

#446

Post by nickjj »

paxys wrote: post #219
nickjj wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody with options is going to accept multiple weeks of limbo in exchange for maybe having a job. Let's say it does take 2 weeks to do 20 hours (2 hours a day), you would be compensated $4,000 for working 2 hours a day. Or if you're in between jobs you would have the time to do 20-30 hours in about 1 week and get paid $200 / hour. I guess I'm just picky. I did freelance work for ~20 years and worked on 1 contract…

If you post a job and get 600 applicants, are you going to offer all 600 of them this gig? If not, how do you filter that down to a more reasonable number (say 3-5)? Whatever you do, that is your interview process.

The initial pre-contract ~2 hour call would filter people out.

You can learn a ton about someone after generally chatting with them for 2 hours while staying decently focused on tech. People who are good at only talking can't bs their way through a type of call that's similar to how 2 folks might talk shop in a private conversation or a podcast. You can also get a good sense of how they think, how they act, how they think of others, etc.. In my opinion this is a much better initial filter than the usual interview questions.

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

#447

Post by bobabob »

vikingcaffiene wrote: post #346

Hiring manager here. IMO the current tech hiring norms are gross and not sustainable. It feels like a weird hazing ritual and with the current market, is the single biggest reason you can't hire. Why on earth would someone burn a weekend on a take-home test for your startup when they have 15 other irons in the fire? At my current employer we got rid of all that ridiculousness. No take home test. No live coding. We've…

> I think it's time we accept that the person we are talking to is who they say they are on their resume.

Yea because we live in a place where everyone is super honest and no one is going to try and take advantage of that to make 500k a year.

IMO, it doesn't work. Talk is cheap.

I wouldn't have a job if I had to talk my way into any company, I'm an introvert, I suck at communicating orally. But I can solve problems and write really good code. You throw problems at me during an interview and I'll solve them. Ultimately your company's code is not going to write itself.

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

#448

Post by bcantrill »

soared wrote: post #327
bcantrill wrote: post #286

I need to write a longer piece on our approach at Oxide, but for us it takes effort (not always successful!) to hold ourselves to 9 conversations. This may (or perhaps does?) sound obscene, but (1) these are conversations not oral exams (we don't do red-black-trees-on-whiteboards), hopefully making them less stressful for the candidate (2) we take hiring really, really seriously and (3) I have learned from mistakes a…

If a recruiter told me there would be 8 additional interviews, I would definitely not move forward unless the pay was ridiculously good. At least when amazon does the loop its 6 hours in a single day, and their pay is very good.

Totally understood and appreciated. We also don't use recruiters -- and we ask a lot of applicants up front. We know we're not a fit for everyone, and that's okay.

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

#449

Post by hvaoc »

To save everyone’s time, I would have just two interviews progressively. First one explain in detail something that you have been part of building. Second pick and solve a problem from a list of problems that we face, use all the tools you need from the internet book etc but solve along with interviewers as if they need to do this but you need to convince them why it should be done this way.

Put as many engineers as I need to be on these two calls.

That’s it. Anything else is an overkill.

I am looking for someone who given time can play exactly shades of these two kind of roles in my team.

Let rest of the engineers witness as you perform.

Will have prep interview to help you understand the format and not to be intimidated by the number of interviewers or the format.

I have hired in big tech, people who will not pass these two tests get hired.

I don’t care if you remember an algorithm. I need to know that you would be able to research and get to know such algorithm and know why to use that.

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