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Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

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Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#71

Post by waiseristy »

Tallain wrote: post #24
majormajor wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've anecdotally heard from former colleagues that it's gotten tougher to find entry-level or mid-level positions, not sure how broadly that applies, though.

I will add my anecdote to the pile. It seems like there are a good number of positions out there, but it also seems like most of them are asking for senior level folks. Then, the ones I interview stall out because I either have too much experience, or not enough experience - I'm square in the middle ground where it seems nothing is quite right for me.

Same experience. Low level warm-body work is plentiful, but pays poorly and doesn't give good experience. Senior level work is in extremely high demand, but employers aren't willing to bring on engineers who only have experience with the latter. I've started shopping around for (and have had limited success with) 100-500 headcount companies who are willing to hire seniors on the greener side.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#72

Post by irishloop »

neilv wrote: post #68

If someone is doing 60 technical interviews in 30 days: 1. When I'm hiring, I wish the resume sites have an indicator when a person is interviewing excessively or indiscriminately, so that my company doesn't waste our time. 2. In the rare situation that I've been interested in working at a particular company, I wish I knew better ways for my interest to stand out from the "shotgun approach" applicants. I did see one…

Yeah I think your last sentence nails the reverse issue here: The expectation from companies to put in excessive amounts of work which from all candidates when most all of them will get no return on that effort (other than Experience™).

My hope is that most of us are somewhere in the middle: Neither excessively applying to 60+ companies, nor being asked to do several days' worth of labor for a limited opportunity.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#73

Post by trilinearnz »

Have had good and bad interviews. The good ones are where the team is friendly and polite, and ask reasonable questions (if you don't get them right, then it's objectively on you due to lack of preparation or knowledge, no harm done).

I had one bad one where the CTO was a straight-up ass. Very critical attitude, and didn't hesitate to disparage the architectural techniques that I professed aptitude in. To his partial credit, he warmed to me as the interview went on, but it was quite unprofessional and gave off a sense of superiority.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#74

Post by majormajor »

david38 wrote: post #41
sethhochberg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the hiring side, a (reasonable) expiration on the offer helps be fair to the other people who are interviewing, too. If I have a single position open and multiple people interviewing, as a hiring manager I really need to know whether my top choice is serious once we're having a discussion about signing a contract - because if they aren't, or are still trying to land better offers from other places because they h…

The hypocrisy is that to even get to the point where you have a 24 / 48 hour exploding offer, you (the candidate) had to often wait weeks to get a response to the application, phone screen, on-site, decision. So I don’t buy this fairness argument. If we’re talking about fairness, the process would be super quick, and then I would get a week to think about a decision that will affect YEARS of my life. To say nothing o…

One thing I am very careful about now is to try to keep offer terms from being a surprise.

If I know what to expect comp- and offer-wise earlier, then an exploding offer is just the culmination of the weeks of lead-up and thinking on it.

But sometimes recruiters don't want to give you that until offer stage. Other times, it's not so hard to get.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#75

Post by MattGaiser »

ziddoap wrote: post #2

Interesting read but I (and I think many others) would be more interested in reading about how one manages to land 60 interviews, at all, in the current job market. You must have either a stellar resume, incredible experience, access to a huge network, or a combination of the above.

I have 1 year of experience (not at a FAANG) and I get 3 recruiters a week through LinkedIn. And beyond a casual resume screening, they are direct to interview.

Where are you? The market is roaring here in Canada.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#76

Post by ram_rar »

I have never found interview process to be reflective of the company.

> Lack of a clear direction on where the company is headed

Unless you're joining as an exec or a high level architect position, you are just a mere rank and file pleb in the company. At that point, its important to know if your manager has enough social capital to get you the right opportunities to grow, rather than looking for companies "vision" and all the buzz words they throw at you.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#77

Post by irrational »

neilv wrote: post #33
vmception wrote: post #21

>I turned down the [exploding] offer because the experience got me thinking about the company’s work culture. Were the methods employed by the company to get me to accept the offer indicative of their work culture? I've never found the interview process to be reflective of the company. I find the interview process to be a random hodgepodge across the entire industry because nobody knows what they are doing. Small/not…

> I've never found the interview process to be reflective of the company. I find the interview process to be a random hodgepodge across the entire industry because nobody knows what they are doing. If people in a company don't know what they're doing, yet (it appears) have a deathgrip belief in the equivalent of something they found on StackOverflow or in a blog post... doesn't that reflect something about the compan…

I've been working in the industry for 25 years. I've never received even 5 minutes of training on how to interview people, yet I've been asked to interview people dozens of times. This is everywhere from small companies up to huge Fortune 100 companies. The skill set to be an effective programmer and to be an effective interviewer are not the same. But, I don't do interviewing often enough that I've felt the need to seek out specific training on how to do it. So I basically end up winging it when I'm asked to participate in another interview.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#78

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

arenaninja wrote: post #48
devoutsalsa wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I liked to ask the question, "If I extended an offer you like, would you accept it?" It helps facilitate a regular conversation about if & when someone would accept an offer, and if any steps can be taken to make an offer happen.

I was asked this question point blank and it took me by surprise. Then they asked me to name the comp for me to accept their offer and when I did they still exceeded it

It's good that they exceeded it. IIUC, generally accepted negotiation theory says that the first person to name a number loses.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#79

Post by anon4984 »

I wonder - if you got an unfair[1] exploding offer, why not just accept it and keep shopping quietly?

[1] A small company may have only one spot open and another candidate lined up, so that's fair enough. But larger companies likely have more than one position open so they are just bossing you around. Nothing fair about that, and you don't have to make it easy for them.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#80

Post by leikmi »

rsj_hn wrote: post #9

This is at least the third time this thing has been posted to hacker news. Previous dupes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24482119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24017555

Funny how doing an Internet search engine search for the topic or any of the red flags yields many articles from different domains which are all basically the same article. I bet we will see this same post again in the future.
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