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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

#91

Post by mjevans »

jnwatson wrote: post #43
LaserToy wrote: post #20

Had similar marathon 8 years ago and it is draining. Now, being on the other side (hiring folks for a startup), I would argue that some of flags are a bit misleading. Examples: “Undue pressure to accept an offer letter” - interviews are not free, companies are investing eng time into evaluating each candidate and once they find great one, they really want them to join. They also do not want to be part of a bidding wa…

Especially for a small company, the biggest reason for an exploding offer is there might be a second-best candidate in the wings. The longer it takes the first candidate to make up their mind, the longer the company has to hold off the second candidate.

A fair wrinkle; I want there to be some way for all sides involved to have a fair and equitable process.

As I see it there are three stages of truth that might exist. I am not a lawyer, what's a good way for the company to signal during these contexts?

After a candidate passed the final interview:

# other interviews still ongoing

# others passed too

# all parties waiting

As a pre-requisite, an active communication feedback loop is a base requirement, even for rejected resumes at the filter stage.

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

#92

Post by beforeolives »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #85
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 have personally given up on "whiteboarding people"... reminds me of waterboarding. I skim the resume, underline anything we use internally and talk to them about experiences. We've done over 300 interviews in the last expansion year (2017) because we had to build a brand new development office (+50 devs). After hiring all of these people, we've quantified this as three things: Curiosity, Ability to Learn and Abilit…

You can't really quantify attributes like curiosity, ability to learn and ability to listen so it's difficult to interview for them without having all kinds of biases sneak in.

How do you deal with this in your process?

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

#93

Post by Dystopian »

> 1. Your interviewer is only open to solving the problem ONE way

This may have also been the interviewer wanting to guage how the candidate would react to being asked to do a task in another method which was dictated vs. their preferred method.

A lot of development is a team sport, and quite a bit of it is subjective and opinionated - you're not always going to get to do it your way all the time.

I don't actually see this one as a red-flag right awya.

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

#94

Post by dangoor »

aerovistae wrote: post #87

I'm a little unclear how you could possibly get that many interviews in such a short time unless you're a famous "rockstar" coder. I'm not familiar with the blog author, is he a very well known person?

I have no idea what this person's resume looks like, but I believe there are a lot of jobs out there for people with certain skillsets right now, _especially_ given the massive shift to remote work. It's likely impossible to find & attend 60 interviews in a month _locally_, but when they're all remote it seems challenging but not impossible.

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

#95

Post by kmonsen »

duxup wrote: post #65
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…

At a previous large company more than once I had to explain that the interview process 'is HR's show'...but once the job starts it is now 'our show' and they don't have to worry about that song and dance anymore. It's frustrating that it is that way, but the hiring at that company was a whole other song and dance that took very little input from anyone about the hiring process.

That’s not how it works at all.

First of all interviews are a two way interview. Your company will be judged based on it.

Also people come in touch with hr later, and usually in high pressure situations. If HR was difficult during the interview that’s a big red flag for later on in case you have to deal with them.

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

#96

Post by mytailorisrich »

LaserToy wrote: post #20

Had similar marathon 8 years ago and it is draining. Now, being on the other side (hiring folks for a startup), I would argue that some of flags are a bit misleading. Examples: “Undue pressure to accept an offer letter” - interviews are not free, companies are investing eng time into evaluating each candidate and once they find great one, they really want them to join. They also do not want to be part of a bidding wa…

It's perfectly normal and reasonable to put a reasonable deadline on getting a response to an offer because the company must indeed fill the role, ideally this should be communicated when the offer is made. But putting pressure or having an "exploding offers" really is a trick to create urgency exactly in the same way time-limited sales work and the aim is the same: Making people buy things without shopping around.

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

#97

Post by yellowstuff »

vmception wrote: post #32
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…

Exploding offers are bluffs. We all know the team wanted someone that could hit the ground running yesterday for the last 6 months.

That is certainly not true in all cases. It's possible that there's a second choice candidate, and the hiring manager wants to extend an offer to them as soon as the other candidate declines.

Probably more common is an experience I was in- we found a good candidate, he wanted to finish other interviews before making a decision and I gave him a few weeks to decide, then later I regretted giving him so much time. It meant I had to either pause the candidate search for a few weeks or potentially waste my time and candidates' time interviewing people when there may not be an opening.

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

#98

Post by yourapostasy »

nullserver wrote: post #11
jtsiskin wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The current job market” - tech stocks and revenue is exploding, is the job market difficult currently?

I got an offer from a place (hot startup)that I wasn’t really interested in. Had a call to talk about it, see if I might be into. Oh can you talk to so and so, hey can we do a coding exercises really quick, hey can you chat with founder really quick. 3 days from hearing about company, I had an offer. Then was being pestered about background check. Wait, how did I get to this point? I wasn’t even really interested. Fe…

> Few days later offer was withdrawn since I hadn’t completed paperwork.

Saw the not-filling paperwork/red tape in a timely manner used as a signal first-hand to screen out a perfectly-acceptable (technical-wise) candidate. Combined with a perceived lack of enthusiasm in personality for the role (which I could easily put down to a manager who has a specific idea in mind of "enthusiasm", and doesn't mesh well with a wider variance of personality types), it was a one-two punch the candidate could not recover from, and lost out to a slightly more junior tech.

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

#99

Post by marecile »

In the last interviews I had, I saw at least one of these red flags in each interview with some big companies. The article gives a good insight into what is probably going on behind the scenes. We should pay more attention to this since our work and workplace are essential parts of our lives and waking hours. It is wise to use this advice to understand how the company is like for its workers before committing. Thanks for posting.

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

#100

Post by mkl95 »

aerovistae wrote: post #87

I'm a little unclear how you could possibly get that many interviews in such a short time unless you're a famous "rockstar" coder. I'm not familiar with the blog author, is he a very well known person?

My experience is similar to the author's, and I live in a not so well off area of Europe. I'd expect to receive dozens of offers per month if I lived in the US.

Most recruiters are just chasing quantitative metrics and don't really care about candidates being a good fit. If you have certain keywords in your resume, you are going to get bombarded with offers. One of the few negative aspects of the rise of remote working is that it has exacerbated this.

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