Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

Assuming that the support experience for the customers is actually good, I'm amazed they've managed to scale their support efforts that far. I work on a similar type of product, except in-house in an organization with around 2000-2500 engineers, and handling support has by far been the hardest thing to scale as we've grown. Even with documentation available, internal Stack Overflow with plenty of common questions answered, unified search, Slack integrations, error messages linking directly to documentation, pre-defined observability dashboards and monitors, we still get so many questions that it's a full time job staying on top of it. Can't imagine having 100x that amount of users.

I've been job hunting for the last six months.

I usually spend around 20hr on the test task they give me. On top of this there are at least 3/4 rounds of interview (spanning from half an hour to two hours).

I tend to make sure that the job actually exists though and I'm wary of small companies. I'm particularly avoiding the ones where I would be the only developer working on my domain/stack.

A reasonably-scoped take-home project is fine in isolation.

The problem is the sheer number of steps required, of which the project is just one step. For example for a recent position I looked at:

1. Initial interview with some HR person: 1 hour

2. Interview with a tech person and review some code sample (spot security issues, bugs etc): 1.5 hours

3. Take home project (supposed to take 2 hours, but you'll want to make it look good so you'll probably spend twice that): 4 hours

4. Another in-depth interview with a couple other tech people: 2 hours

5. Another interview with the CTO: 30 mins

6. References & background check.

That's not atypical. Round after round of interviews. It becomes an endurance test, where only the most dedicated will stay the distance. While the 8-10 hours might not seem much stretched out over several days, you want to add some prep, keep your calendar clear so it does eat up your spare time, especially if you are already working.

And that's just one job. What if you are interviewing at multiple companies?

Note the take-home is at the start of the process, not the end: so you can end up putting a lot of effort in before you have even cleared four or five other hurdles. Oh, and I don't even have an offer yet. It could well be the offer on the table isn't worth my time.

Now you could say "well, we only want dedicated people". Fine, but I'm dedicated in so far as I get paid to be working for you. I don't get paid to run your interview gauntlet. Maybe you want people willing to do free overtime?

And this is way more than it used to be maybe 10 years ago, and it's for small to medium sized companies, not FAANG or other big corps. Nor is it a feature of recent layoffs and resulting increase in the talent pool: this has been the case for a few years now.

I think there's a few factors at work:

- Endurance test

- Risk aversion culture in management

- Copypasta whatever Google or Apple do

Just how many companies are you putting that far down your funnel‽ I mean, that's a bunch of time, yes, but you should start filtering out companies at step 1. If you're trying to collect a dozen offers before jumping ship then yeah, sure, but that's quite a lot of offers! The other question is how many of those result in an offer? Because I can see the frustration of there being no payoff at the end if you're not getting an offer most times after step 6.

FWIW, last time I interviewed at Google, there was no take home test, so I don't know where people are copying that from but I don't think it's Google.

> I am convinced that Software Engineering is more of an art than an engineering practice.

Back in 2010, Monash University’s Bachelor of Software Engineering had a unit ENG1061 Engineering Profession mandatory for the degree (for a terrible reason: Engineers Australia accreditation of the degree, which no one that I ever talked to cared about in the slightest). The first lecture listed The 17 Branches of Engineering. Guess what wasn’t one of them. It went downhill from there.