I had 6 interviews with Amazon only to be told NO at the end. And I thought I got the jab lol. Then just recently, I was looking to jump to smaller organization. After 5 interviews they told me no. Again I really thought I got the job. So now I am just wondering wtf happened. I got no feedback. They should be paying us for all the wasted time and energy.
Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
741–750 of 833 posts
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#742Having 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,…
I’m a HM at a big tech company with this format as well. Honestly, I really like it. I don’t want to hire the wrong person, it’s expensive and it makes my job awful for a while. It’s great getting data points on several programming interviews, system design, etc. That makes my sell interview so much easier because I can trust the process to assess their technical skills. You need multiple people because you’re consta…
However what does a hiring process like this communicate to those being hired?
I had more than one interview, where the things I discovered during the interview made me reconsider my options and go for another company. Not because I wouldn't have fit with the team or my skills were not there, but because this kind of thing tells me how processes are organized or not organized within your company, how people treat each other etc.
What candidates does a hiring process like this drive away? Are it specific character traits that pass through the sieve? If yes, how will that shape your corp and the culture in it in the long term?
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#743I think that interviewing is a continuation of office politics with other means (to misquote Clausewitz). An interviewer who will not get along with you is bound to reject you as a candidate (that's what i understood during the last interviewing season)
Shops with very tight hiring processes are in all likelihood bad places to work for, with lots of office politics. A very elaborate hiring process may well be an indication for a general level of mistrust and to some extent an indication for a dysfunctional workplace. I once worked for Amazon, was very happy that they hired me with all their interviews, however the job was a shitthole.
This observation was of great benefit to me, now I don't fret over a rejection. Believe me, it's just not worth the worry.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#744Earlier quoted context omitted.
> All of the people involved in the interview process are still getting paid Except the interviewee.
There's often a signing bonus. If there's a 10% chance of getting the job and a $50k signing bonus is common, then your EV is $5000 per interview. Even if there weren't, then 10% of the extra compensation vs. an easier-to-hire company with your discount horizon applied would also count as payment.
> $50k signing bonus is common
I clearly live in a different labour market to this conversation. How many places in the world is this common?
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#745Earlier 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.
YMMV, but it's actually quite difficult to get a PIP in many tech companies, and it's rarely if ever for lack of tech skills. The ones I've seen usually involve either motivation, output, or both plummeting to zero for extended periods of time due to burnout or a similar extended personal crisis.
I think this is highly dependent on your company. People talk about FANG/SiValley companies like they're all the same but that is completely untrue. There are orders of magnitude difference in culture between companies and even within companies. I guess when you're on the outside looking in it all seems the same. It also changes depending on how the business is doing. I suspect, for instance, things are about to seriously go downhill at Netflix. That may cause the culture to become even more cutthroat.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#7465-7 interviews became normal around the time $400k+ salaries became normal.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#747Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me add my experience. I've never had the FKANG experience but for a number of startups that I've contracted for I've had a chance to observe if not participate in the hiring process. They were US startups and they've all tried to emulate what I think of as the FAANK process: so you have an initial call, a technical screen a couple of other rounds of technical screens, that maybe include system design, and fit/beh…
this is the in-depth reply that illustrates my flippant comment. there can be an inherent competitiveness in white-boarding interviews. the interviewer can implicitly want to show their superiority over the candidate. i think that's the core reason behind a lot of overly difficult problems being offered that have no analogous presence in the day to day work. how many times have you written a graph traversal algorithm…
>>> there can be an inherent competitiveness in white-boarding interviews. the interviewer can implicitly want to show their superiority over the candidate
This can be present even in non-FAANG interviews. Early in my career, I had an interview at a financial company and for a question about how do you style html pages, my answer was CSS and the interviewer expected something about ASP.NET webstyles. He was't ready to accept my answer saying you are a dotnet dev and should use ASP.NET functionality since it was more superior rather than CSS. I was like CSS is a web standard and anyone even designers can modify CSS.
So yeah, it depends on the maturity of the interviewer.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#748Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been approached by a couple of FAANG and told them to stuff it because of the recruitment processes. I'm in London, and here at least they're extreme outliers. If you're early in your career, they probably matter and it might be worth it, but for me it's not. Maybe it'd be different in Silicon Valley, but in London they just aren't willing to offer enough over and above the kind of jobs I've had elsewhere to be…
You're being kind. "Extreme" doesn't describe it from my experience. For me it was 1 phone call/online meeting and 2 face 2 face. That is about it in terms of interviews. And that is a Fortune Global 500 company that I'm still working for. I was put on a 6 months contract and after 3 they switched to perm. Other interviews back then and more recent were pretty much the same. Max. 3 x 1h-ish meetings. I do have a bad…
The part about expecting them to sell the job is a good point, and important. Don't think that's a bad habit at all.
I also tend to make it clear from the outset I will not come cheap, in a "are you sure you can afford me?" kind of way. Not mentioning specifics, but making it clear I know my market value and won't consider low offers.
Some get very taken back, but it sets a tone. I think you're absolutely right you need to make sure they know it's two way, and to give a clear impression they're chasing someone high value, and that they're not the prize, you are.
But if their pitch is all about "changing the world" but they're not willing to share the upside, I know I'm wasting my time, so I want to make sure they know that I expect my share too, not just fuzzy feelings.
E.g. I a while back came across a company that was very proud of how rapidly they were growing, but somehow thought that mattered to me when they were not willing to offer any shares or options. I was meant to be excited about making other people rich...
I pointed out to them I've not once taken a job on terms like that in the last 25 years and called off the process after the first interview. I also explained to the recruiter just how far off market they were for someone at my experience level.
If that had happened after 5-6 interviews I'd have been incensed...
FAANG recruiters in particular also seem to get confused when I insist on getting an indication of salary range and option/rsu amounts before being willing to agree to an interview. Several times I've had recruiters come back to me days later after digging up the information, as their first line seem to not even know, just expecting people to be all excited they're even calling. For my part I'm shocked more people aren't having that conversation. But that does explain leaked info some time back about how Facebook is dealing with high rejection rates once they actually give offers.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#749Earlier quoted context omitted.
"(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 d…
It might be true where you are, but that's not strictly correct everywhere. Here in Australia, if a company wanted to fire an employee, the employee has a chance to sue on an "unfair dismissal" grounds. One of the ways a company can protect against allegations of unfair dismissals is to demonstrate that a) there are genuine performance issues, and b) the company has made good-faith efforts to improve the employee's performance, and that's where the PIP cones in.
This means if an employee here were put on a PIP, it's usually (but not always) the first step towards them being fired.
Re: Ask HN: When did 7 interviews become “normal”?
#750Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't this seem like the (hopefully inadvertent) perfectly structured model for hiring sociopaths? I'm speaking semi-hyperbolic but seriously... An employee isn't a romantic partner or social club member. Some (most?) of the most brilliant and hyper-productive people I've hired and worked with were socially inept. In fact I once hired a guy whose resume was -barely- legible and horribly structured who turned out to…
Why did you hire him?
Funny enough it was actually my wife who suggested him. I had a large stack of resumes I had gone through and was complaining to her that I couldn't find a suitable candidate to even call in for an interview. She looked through the resumes and asked about him. His resume was so bad I hadn't even read it, I had glanced over it and just assumed it was someone on UI just making their weekly allotted resume drops. She had worked in retail management for years and horrifically written resumes are apparently pretty common in retail. Turned out he had the experience I was looking for.