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The rise of never-ending job interviews

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Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#991

Post by Cheezemansam »

musingsole wrote: post #724
zschuessler wrote: post #709

I was semi-actively hunting for a role a year ago. The worst offender was a company I had five meetings with, 3 of which were identical code reviews for the same code test. None of the reviewers realized I already had the code review with their peers. None knew what the next step was. Most companies just didn't have an organized funnel for candidates. The one that did I quickly took the job offer at. Here's what they…

> select few even seemed to crave that I've seen the same thing. It makes no sense. I keep telling myself the incentives can't really be such that your hiring process be actively antagonistic...not if we want anything good right? But perhaps the market can stay irrational longer than I can go without income. Hold strong to the companies that bother to acknowledge you're a person.

>I've seen the same thing. It makes no sense. I keep telling myself the incentives can't really be such that your hiring process be actively antagonistic...not if we want anything good right?

See, if your test is so difficult that people are failing, then it must mean that you are being selective and only hiring the best!!!!!

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#992

Post by CRConrad »

missingrib wrote: post #778
sdevonoes wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the kind of people who need to cram leetcodes and memorize algorithms are not the kinds of people who Google wants to pass these interviews. I thought it was exactly those who Google wants to pass. Anecdote: ex-colleague of mine who is not specially bright studied 3 months how to "crack the coding interview" and got a job at Google. His knowledge about algorithms and data structures was like mine: I know what a tre…

>ex-colleague of mine who is not specially bright studied 3 months how to "crack the coding interview" and got a job at Google. Sounds bright to me.

So how they did in one job interview says more about their intelligence, to you, than GP's witness from knowing them for possibly years?

I think your weights are way off.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#993

Post by postalrat »

DSingularity wrote: post #5
vegetablepotpie wrote: post #2

What’s happening is that companies want to completely remove risk from the hiring process. In the real world, you cannot remove risk. You can manage it, but you cannot remove it. Asking candidates to go through 6 interviews before making a decision and not telling them when a decision will be made signals a risk adverse culture that cannot make decisions.

The reason they want to remove the risk is because it takes years to prune bad talent.

They could prune that talent overnight if they wanted.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#994

Post by raffraffraff »

konschubert wrote: post #325
raffraffraff wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Help the person you're interviewing. You'll both get more out of it, you'll both enjoy it. If you're in a company that is expanding, you'll be interviewing a lot, so it's really important that it doesn't depress the shit out of you.

There is a risk that you accidentally do the thinking for them and give the answers for them without noticing. Doing a collaborative interview requires careful attention by the interviewer, but I agree it’s worth it.

What happens in the real world when a colleague has a mental block? They Google it. If that doesn't help, they slack the team: "Hey guys, this is something stupid-simple that I can't bring to mind right now, but... ".

Why should their interview be a stressful stone-walling event when life as an employee is not?

Maybe an interview should have "Who wants to be a millionaire" lifelines. Two "Googgle"s, and an "ok, I give up - give me a hint".

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#995

Post by cutemonster »

akamia wrote: post #97
2001lodyssee wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my long and storied career, well long at least, every single truly heinous, project-killin', crazy person actually interviewed pretty well. Honestly, I don't have a good solution to the problem.

I have experienced the exact same thing. In fact, the worst person I have ever worked with consistently aced interviews wherever he went.

What questions did they ask in the interviews? (Or didn't ask?)

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#996

Post by krab »

gorpomon wrote: post #972
krab wrote: post #762

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your approach and I think it really makes the process much better. However, this one thing stands out to me: > I acknowledge that it is long [...] and say that we value their time. I dislike this communication style. Maybe it's a cultural difference. I've heard several times from an American speaker that they "value my time/comfort/satisfaction". At the same time their act clearly showed that they valued somet…

I'll keep that in mind. My original comment didn't quite clarify, but when I say those things I make an effort to not come across as insincere or like I'm reading a canned statement. Also, I try and clearly say what I value-- which is both of us learning more about each other and figuring out if them joining us is a good fit. And I encourage them to assess if we're a good fit for them too. I often talk to candidates…

Nice, I like the way you think about it. And take my comment with a grain of salt, please. It's impossible to judge the full context over an internet discussion with a stranger. :-)

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#997

Post by whoknew1122 »

the_only_law wrote: post #647
throwaway9191aa wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll just +1 this as a datapoint. I am not looking externally until I'm sure I'm done at AWS. I've done 80+ interviews here, and I'm consistently amazed by what drives people to say "The candidate wasn't up to the coding bar". As far as I can tell, you are almost never up to the coding bar. I think we interview so many people just to remind ourselves that if we leave, we aren't getting back in. Just to head off the "…

I remember seeing a comment about Amazon once claiming in order to be seriously considered for a role, you have to be better than 50% of the existing team you’d be coming onto.

Candidates should be better than 50% of the people currently in the role. So if you're interviewing for an SDE1 position, you're expected to be better than half of the current SDE1s.

You're evaluated against people in the same role, not the entire team. But, yeah, the idea is that the hiring standard (the 'bar' in Amazon terms) is always getting higher.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#998

Post by tornato7 »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #634
Waterluvian wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be a random walk but I think the goal is to convince whoever gets hired that they’re special and talented and elite members of their discipline.

Oh you mean a real rockstar? a code ninja?

A real bitlicker

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#999

Post by Too »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #33
sp332 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies don't want to do job training anymore. Instead of a general background and attitude check, they need to know if the candidate has all of the individual skills that will be used on the job.

This a hundred times over. I still remember in 2020 multiple places asking me "I see you've used .NET core, what *version* have you used?". I had a kind of career crisis/breakdown, where I realised no one gave a shit about anything except my utility as a walking set of tech keywords. Accepting that it wasn't working for me was one of the best things I've done for my career.

Asking what version of a tool was used, actually reveals a lot about the candidate. It's not about knowing if you know the exact same version as the company.

First probe is if the candidate doesn't have slightest clue what version they were using, that's a big red flag. This is more common than you would believe.

Second probe, candidate knows, but they only used a 25 year old version (also more common than you would believe when it comes to c++), this can be a warning flag that they are not interested in learning new things. But doesn't have to be if it was company policy, which is also interesting if they were in position to change this.

Third probe, ask follow up questions on differences since version N-1, this shows if candidate is staying up to date with latest trends or not.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#1000

Post by fridif »

bombadilo wrote: post #916
quietbritishjim wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's GP? Gaussian process? General practitioner? Or, most commonly on HN, grandparent [post]? Or maybe the whole point of using that abbreviation is to exclude those outside Amazon?

This is one thing that really pisses me off about hacker news. The excessive use of abbreviations only hinders communication, it doesn't improve it.

LMGTFY (which you can Google if you don't know what it maps to) exists for a reason
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