Comment by FlownScepter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FlownScepter | Hacker News Reader

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12 hours of unpaid labor to just get your foot in the door? I'll take the hardest conceivable pass, please.

If a company sees no issue with asking for a TED talk just to consider you for a position, imagine what kind of work/life balance you can expect once hired. What kind of last minute assignments, what kind of weekend calls to wipe some higher up's rear end after they foot-mouthed with a client, and promised the moon, and now you've gotta go to Kroger and find 40 tons of cheese and carve it up so they don't need to look stupid.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: we as software devs/code monkeys/devops/admins have fucking worth. You should not EVER be willing to put yourself through this kind of meat grinder, not just to avoid demeaning yourself, but for demeaning everyone else who practices your craft alongside you. They're not worth so little as to need to do that, and neither are you.

You want me to write code for your company? Awesome, I'd love to do that. Pay me.

Personally, I'd prefer to give a 1 hour presentation of my work over a full day of technical interviews one after the other. I like this presentation idea - I've only ever seen it done when hiring people with PhDs just out of academia, but I'd like to see it as an option for non-PhD positions as well. This way you get all of the interested parties in the room at one time, they hear your presentation and there's some Q&A afterward and you'd be done in like 90 minutes to 2 hours.

If this became standard practice interviewees would create a presentation once and then adapt it for each company. So sure, you'd put in a dozen hours or so the first time but then for future presentations it would take much less time to tweak it for the intended audience.

Job talks would be a great idea, even for, or especially for, senior hires who have a lot of interesting things to talk about.

> Personally, I'd prefer to give a 1 hour presentation of my work over a full day of technical interviews one after the other. I like this presentation idea - I've only ever seen it done when hiring people with PhDs just out of academia, but I'd like to see it as an option for non-PhD positions as well. This way you get all of the interested parties in the room at one time, they hear your presentation and there's some Q&A afterward and you'd be done in like 90 minutes to 2 hours.

Personally, I wouldn't do either one. I'm fine with multi-stage interviews, even multiple drives to a given location, but there are limits. If a company wants me there for an all-day affair, I better have some compensation on the way, either the job itself or just for the time investment. I'm too damn busy to just flush a day down the toilet on a "maybe we'll hire you," not even going into the travel expenses, arranging time off from my current job, etc.

All my career I have watched as stories from fellow tech workers get more and more ridiculous, the lengths they're expected to go to for a freaking interview. It's gotten disgusting. If a company thinks you're a good fit for their position, they should be ready to court you as well. The only context these death march assembly line interviews make sense in, is if you are utterly meaningless to them, just another cog to be placed, and eventually, replaced. And I don't want to work for anyone like that anyway.

Very much agree with the sentiment. Interviewing in tech is so broken that I consider myself fortunate to not have to do it anymore. It's not like I've completely retired, but I've retired from interviewing. If someone wants to hire me for contract work based on past performance or working knowledge or on my github code and if the gig is interesting I'll take it. I had a short gig last Fall like that - former coworker emailed and asked if I was interested in working on a contract project that was in my area of expertise. I did the project - they knew my past work and I knew I liked working with them, no interview dance required.

But if a company wants to play the interview game (phone screen -> coding test -> full day interviews -> followup interview, etc.) then I'm not at all interested. If more of us would refuse to play the game maybe companies would try harder.

Exactly! They have to. If they can't fill positions that must be filled, changes will be made. But we all have to demand that, all the time. And that also means preaching this to everyone here who is just starting out in their careers. Lack of previous work to show is not permission to an interviewer to treat an aspiring developer like garbage. Everyone has to start somewhere.

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