Why the Job Search Sucks (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Why the Job Search Sucks (2018)

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80 pointsNetOpWibby164 comments

I went to a similar process to work in the company that I always dreamed to work on:

- First interview, HR: 30 minutes

- Second round, Code test: 3 hours, I passed

- Third round: Interview with my possible manager (30 minutes), I passed. Then I was informed there were 2 more rounds (a system engineer interview, and a diversity manager). 1 hour each, fine. We can do it.

Then out of the blue, I get an email from another HR employee saying that they are testing a new hiring process and now I would have to go through a 2 x 90 minutes pair programming session, with two different engineers, then talk with one engineering manager, then the diversity one, then if everything went well, I would get a job offer (until this point, we didn't even talk about money).. So, basically I'm just giving up on that. It makes me actually sad, because I invested so much energy in the code test, understanding the product, reading actually part of the source code of the product, to come to the meeting with my possible manager as well prepared as possible.. In the end I had the impression that the hiring manager wanted me in the team, but the second HR person didn't really care about it. I was just one more task in his TODO list.

EDIT:

And actually my question to HN would be: Should I inform the hiring manager why I'm giving up on that?

Yes please inform the hiring manager.

Depends how generous you're feeling, but it might give the hiring manager ammunition to try to get the process changed.

IMHO That third round should have been rolled into one longer session (no more than 2 hours). Anything any more convoluted than that is just eating the candidate's time because your processes are bad. Then adding more hurdles... nah.

Companies so often miss that you can have a probation period, try someone out in the role, which will give you a much better idea of how it's going to work than selecting for people who will tolerate your byzantine hiring oddyssey

Very much inform him, because probably he's the one receiving the drawbacks of an arcane hiring system out of HR's dream... even 5 interviews sounded a lot to me but maybe that's just my experience.

On a different topic: what's the diversity manager interview for? And what's the point of a diversity manager?

Our company just got one and I am honestly unsure what is its purpose beyond being able to say 'see, we are doing stuff'. I am not sure I am even being cynical here. I am relatively certain it is basically a business need now to appear like you are doing something.

That said, I have zero idea why diversity manager would interview anyone.. it is not like I am going to change my demographic based on it..

I went through a process in my actual job and it was similar. 30 minutes video, some questions and you get a certificate to hang on your wall, if you do well. If you are emphatic and know what is wrong and right, you will pass. The certificate ironically didn't handle UTF-8 well and names other than Bob, James, Suzy were displayed wrongly , which isn't that great for belonging, diversity and etc.. I think we are all constant learning on that areas.. even the experts.

thats a rather large oversight. makes me doubt their expertise.

Promoting diversity is more than just counting the blue people and then the orange people and making sure the numbers are the same. It also involves making an environment that's inviting to different groups of people. They want you play a role in that even – and perhaps especially – if you're part of the majority group.

I suppose you could reasonably argue that there is value to that approach, if you are optimizing for it. That said, anecdote incoming, I have this one buddy, who is not very welcoming, but is very good at what he does. Frankly, I think the company would be in a much worse position were it not for him. As a manager.. what do I want more of?

I guess they would look whether he's a jerk to everyone equally hehe. Of course there are limits of this, and at some point no amount of genius can compensate lack of teamwork.

And what if people want to work at a job focused on their technical field, and not on diversity? If the mission of the company is some diversity thing than it's their prerogative to test whatever views they want to test about it. But for anyone who actually wants to spend their time doing developer work, it's a big red flag that you might not want to work there.

All companies do more than just a single thing. People work there, which makes a healthy work environment automatically important to any non-psychopathic company.

> And what if people want to work at a job focused on their technical field, and not on diversity?

Then companies that care about diversity would be right not to hire them.

I looked again in their initial email. I was expecting more a presentation about their view on that, but reading again, it's written something like: "in that part, there is no right answer, we are going to talk about what diversity, inclusion, and belonging mean to you.".. so sounds like people are evaluated on that. Probably there is no right answer, but there are definitely wrong answer. Now I'm curious myself.

> we are going to talk about what diversity, inclusion, and belonging mean to you.

Genuinely curious. Do others see this as a red flag? That would be an immediate deal breaker to me, as it suggests the company is dominated by political obsessions. I know this sort of this has become more common, but having it in the hiring pipeline seems quite extreme.

Ya this is a huge red flag. And concerning if this becomes a norm. Interviewees and employees need to push back on this nonsense

but I imagine that it is standard in any FAANG? The company that I work now, got the IPO and a diversity department, with mandatory course with test, at the same time.

Yes, I would never consider a place that had this. Assessing the overall level of politics vs work in a company is important to me (am I going to have to introduce my "pronouns", nod and agree to all the right kind of slacktivist stuff the company posts on social media, participate in ongoing political activities as part of work, while being unable to have any unorthodox opinions of my own). There are a lot more subtle signs to look out for, but the presence of an actual diversity officer that tests your orthodoxy is about the same in my mind as the USSR having political officers present in the workplace to make sure people were good Soviets.

Maybe they just don't want to hire overtly racist or sexist people who might threaten their diversity? It doesn't have to be political obsessions. How many stories have we had here about companies that had a toxic culture with overt sexism? If you want to prevent that sort of thing, having someone who's job it is to prevent that sort of thing might help.

I honestly don't know what the reason for it is, but I do tend to give people the benefit of the doubt. I suppose it could also just be meaningless theatre. If people have real-life experience with diversity managers, I'd love to hear them.

> Maybe they just don't want to hire overtly racist or sexist people who might threaten their diversity?

No. And even if this were true, having some kind of diversity specialist quiz people to see if they are racist (for what definition?) would still be ridiculous.

Companies have policies for employees about workplace behavior like racism, harassment, safety, whatever. If they are concerned about workplace discrimination, there are normal corporate ways of dealing with this. Having a diversity interview is something entirely different, and seems much closer to being asked if you're a communist or a christian. It's patently absurd, and a sign of a company that has lost all focus on actually building something.

Dang, this has some "Political Officer" vibes from Soviet times. So they are gonna do thought filtering too now

Haha, yes I commented exactly the same thing above before reading your comment. This is screwed up, and I hope it's an isolated thing that causes them to lose good people.

> And actually my question to HN would be: Should I inform the hiring manager why I'm giving up on that?

Ignore their calls and emails for 90 days, then after 6 months email them and CC everyone you got an email from during the first three rounds telling them that you have decided solely based on their hiring process that tech corporations are bad and you are starting a wood chipping business instead.

That would be funny, and it would certainly feel good, but if you want to actually convey feedbback it's counterproductive

>Then out of the blue, I get an email from another HR employee saying that they are testing a new hiring process and now I would have to go through a 2 x 90 minutes pair programming session, with two different engineers, then talk with one engineering manager, then the diversity one, then if everything went well, I would get a job offer ...

Wouldn't it make sense to talk with the diversity officer at the very first? I am assuming if you don't tick some diversity checkbox, you'll have much lower change to get hired regardless.

Correct if I'm wrong, but I think it's really hard to evaluate it through a zoom talk, unless a candidate comes to a job interview wanting to make a clear point about his/her views. I was expecting more of a presentation about the company's views in that matter.

Thinking on the hiring process as a CI pipeline, I think filtering out people that cannot code is easier and less time consuming, than going through some 1:1 call with their diversity manager.

Tell them you were tested once and don't care to be tested again. They can make a decision based on the information they already have.

please inform the hiring manager, for the sake of others

...and then they are surprised with "The Great Resignation" and that people don't want to get hired anymore and that they gave up.

I remember a time when I would go to an interview and be asked the following questions:

   Interviewer: Do you want to work?
   Me: Yes, of course!
   Interviewer: You like learning new things?
   Me: Always.
   Interviewer: Is it OK to start on Monday?
   Me: Sure thing (!), why not?
   Interviewer: Welcome to FooExample.
   Me: Thank you very much; see you on Monday.

Honestly that was it, nothing complicated, nothing fancy.

If a candidate didn't seem competent or effective for a position, by the end of the week warning signs were given to them and if they weren't honest with their management, by the end of the month they were let go; as simple as that.

The total number of employees used for the interview cost more than hiring one candidate for one month, don't they understand nor see that?

I think this is kind of related to that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28031782

Now that you said it, I remember my first job interview as well. 1999, Linux administrator in an ISP.

- Can you setup a ppp connection on Linux via terminal (I did it, using minicom)

- My future manager and partner (I ended up becoming a partner in the ISP, and technical director, some years later), gave me a sendmail book, and asked me to restrict the relay on sendmail using the book. I did it.

I was hired, and spent the next years of my life, setting routes on cisco routers and managing some linux and freebsds in a small ISP. It was a great school.

So here's the difference now. Back in the 90s, absolutely no one went into computing for the money, or the job prospects.

Only people deeply interested in computing did. They gravitated toward it, it was fun, they had an aptitude for it.

These days, people enter the field for cash, or because they are mildly interested and it is the best option, out of other mildly interesting things.

There is a vast difference between these two classes of candidates. Note, I am not saying that there are no younger employees that fit #1, but merely that they are far outnumbered by those barely able to perform the job.

Everyone was self taught in the day, when I started there was no internet to help me, and places like stack overflow came much, much later.

If something didn't work, I had to figure it out, no one could help. I had to look at sources, read entire books, learn how to debug, learn debugging tools, etc, etc.

Meanwhile, most modern candidates want cash cash cash, and if you ask them use your tool chain, they're pissed.

On top of that, I have seen endless candidates come out of College with zero ability for analytical thinking. It's only rote work for them.

Without frameworks, sql abstraction, and 100 other crutches, a rote worker cannot do this work.

This, I think, is why modern interview processes are so absurd. There's good money now, so naturally everyone wants the job.

This leads to the follow up, which is that rote workers are now looking to hire other rote workers. And thus, a rote workers do, they ape other company's processes.

They try to hire like google, even thought they are tiny in size, or, even though the type of work is different.

Exactly. In 1999, I just wanted to experiment. My first salary was like 500 bucks. The IT/software development world was boring. I remember telling my father, territory manager at IBM, that I would never be like him and he telling me that I should invest my time on Windows NT and Visual Basic because Linux would never get anywhere.. we were both totally wrong.

Interestingly, in 1999 my father worked at Microsoft on the Windows NT kernel but at home he had a Linux server and taught me to install Debian from floppy disks.

The irony to me is it seems the current interview process stands to filter out the people who are genuinely interested in tech and learning and caters to people who google "tech interview questions for X."

FWIW I would never sit for any interview that was multi-tier over several hours. I'm fortunate in that I have a pretty good network and everyone in my network would hire me if they had a spot open. I haven't cold-interviewed since probably 2012 and that was on a whim for iPhone dev work (I had released 3 fairly successful but not life changing apps already). I ended the process when they wanted me to write code over Thanksgiving because I hadn't already written enough code to their satisfaction. That company is now out of business.

I do remember a take home project given to me over Christmas, with a serious expectation that I not take more than 48 hours.

Oh, and my favorite one, a ‘pop-quiz’ take home test. They wouldn’t tell me what time they were sending it, and just suddenly sent it. I mean they told me what day, but they wouldn’t say what time. So I had to sit around and just wait for hours and ‘bam’ there was the email with a time limit given.

Can’t make this shit up. There’s truly something uniquely douchey about tech hiring that I can’t exactly put my finger on. It’s either some tacky attempt by startups, or in a similar vein, a tacky attempt by larger orgs. Douchey is the only word that comes to mind.

i have a good network too and they all now work at FAANG like companies, and want to hire me, to do domain specific work. But have no power to do direct hiring. So it varies really.

A lot of companies lack confidence and experience, so they cargo-cult processes from companies they view as big+successful. In the tech world, it's FAANG or MAANG or whatever the acronym is these days.

It's a bit like shops adopting Kubernetes for their tiny startup with 100 max concurrent users when Heroku would do the job just fine.

or some years ago, when people were forcing hadoop to biggy data easily queryable with traditional SQL.

Or people forcing SQL when CGI endpoints executing bat files querying Excel documents on a network drive is fine.

Somehow cheap hacks is frowned apon but if you use stupidly complex systems then, ye, you have to be competent and doing best practice or something. Just spread the mess out over multiple layers of abstraction and no-one will realize it is bad ...

> Or people forcing SQL when CGI endpoints executing bat files querying Excel documents on a network drive is fine.

I'm not sure if you are trolling or not, but I can imagine that some power plants around the world do it :)

Heh ye well I am exaggerating alot.

My point is KISS in the amount of knowledge required to do something, not just the implementation complexity.

E.g. on my last job we were really machine engineers doing some c programming. Good luck establishing fancy pancy workflows. Instead of trying to use relative paths and setup env variables for dependencies we just all had the same version controlled folder on c:\ with everything in it. And it is fine.

Querying Excel files doesn't sound easy, though. SQL is not that hard. Though easiest would probably be a Ruby-on-Rails-like framework that just sets up your basic CRUD-stuff for you.

Sure. It was meant as an exaggerated joke, but I mean the point (with a bad example). You would probably need to write some VBA to query the excel doc, which is not easier then using SQL.

Companies are being picky that shouldn't be picky.

I think the shortest interview I ever had was:

    Interviewer: Hi there. Wait. I was just called for an emergency. I am really sorry, but I have to go.
    Me: Oh dear. I hope everything is okay.
    Interviewer: Thanks. Again, sorry. Talk soon. Bye.

The next day by e-mail:

    Interviewer: When can you start?

That lead to a great working relationship. The current age is indeed ridiculous.

Is this only the case in the US, or also in other countries? I live in Netherland, and haven't seen anything like those neverending interviews. Then again, I work as freelancer[0], and most projects just take one or two interviews, and they're mostly about what the project is about and what kind of developer I am.

[0] Except for the past year, when I took a pay cut to continue working on a project I loved as an employee after starting that project as freelancer. That didn't really require an interview, just stiff negotiations (which got me nowhere, hence the pay cut).

One big company I interviewed with really annoyed me in the interview process, despite not being quite as many stages as this, and I told them I was done when they asked for me to do the next stage.

Years later, some recruiter I talked to said, "I know we passed on you a few years ago". I guess it's good that they were taking responsibility?

Sometimes I have the impression that even if the job position is already closed, they keep doing the hiring process, because the HR team is there, being paid, so why not just keep people busy, right? What do you think?

I would have a much more charitable interpretation. At its heart, most organizations are always on the lookout for great people. It's a really bad sign if you don't have room to hire someone great if you find them.

TBH, "diversity manager" was already a red flag, confirmed later on. IMHO it tells me that HR, with the backing of senior management has gone off track.

I see it as "we'll be judging you basing on your skin color rather than your knowledge and skills".

Maybe. Or maybe the interview is to weed out candidates who exhibit wrongthink. Neither option is appealing.

That's actually very typical on site interview for a non-faang North American company right now. You spend a whole day with them and then get a no... And actually they didnt hire anyone for months (based on linkedin insights)

I’ve seen this several times now: “everyone loved you and we just decided that now is not the right time to hire for this role” then for the next three months the same exact job is a promoted listing floating on my LinkedIn home page right margin.

Yeah and also a couple of startups continue posting for months in the Who Hiring thread but checking their profile on LinkedIn they are not growing. I understand that there is a need to show outward success but just post the positions on your careers page and simply don't interview people. Or they simply looking for core Rails contributor who is ok with 50,000USD/year

"Pay is bad but we'll make you jump extra hoops to get it"

I wonder if this isn't to document the requirement for H-1B visas that they tried to find a local candidate but were unable.

https://nearshoreamericas.com/us-makes-h1b-visa-harder-obtai...

Wouldn't it be hysterical if the hiring process all these companies are cargo-culting was actually designed to not hire people so H-1Bs could be used.

Email the hiring manager, tell him you have a number of other firms who are ready to go, but you thought there was some good chemistry between you, and that he needs to act immediately if he wants you. When he throws an offer at you ask for 20% extra and see if you meet him at 10%.

If he can't swing HR or the salary, you don't want to work for a wet noodle and you've now dodged a bullet.

> you've now dodged a bullet.

This is a key point that too many of us lose sight of. Getting into a bad relationship is never a positive. When you're (semi) stuck in a bad relationship you'll struggle to find the time and energy to pursue a better relationship.

great answer! I had to check your profile to be sure that you weren't my dad (that's the kind of answer he would give me) :)

Haha thanks.

But seriously, when you get an offer, test it. If it falls apart as soon as you try to negotiate anything, run away. This is even if it's your dream job that you think you'll never need to change and pays you way more than you wanted, because if you do like I say and you lose it, you don't lose anything.

Porcelain jobs are the worst.

I'd have pulled out as soon as I understood they had a diversity manager

diversity manager - wtf??

Do you mind if I ask so that I understand - would the total number of rounds have added up to seven or nine (i.e. had you finished round four and five before you heard from the second HR person, or only the third)?

Is it your understanding that the new hiring process includes all of these steps, or that you ended up in the middle of both the old and the new one and that there was some overlap?

Anyway, judging from your story it seems to me like they’ve been very disrespectful of your time. I always ask up front what exactly the process will be, and I would’ve taken it as a bad sign if in the middle of it they had come and told me ”oh by the way we’re experimenting with how we’re doing this, we’ll need you to do a few more interviews than we told you earlier”. I don’t have unlimited time on my hands.

So, without disclosing which FAANG company was, that is an extract from the e-mail that I received, after I've got a green from the hiring manager and after code review:

"Hi $MYNAME,

I know that you have already sent over your interview availability but we are in the process of moving to a new interview process so wondered whether you..."

Thanks, I think I understand. You had completed three steps, thought there were two left, but out of the blue you were told that there were actually four more, because that's the new process they're moving to.

I've never interviewed for a FAANG, but I understand that they can and need to be very picky, and can typically get away with things like seven round hiring processes. I still think it's disrespectful of your time not to let you know the whole process up front, and then sticking to it.

Best of luck to you!

Yes, you should inform them.

> Should I inform the hiring manager why I'm giving up on that?

I would. I've gone to battle with HR over candidates that I've felt strongly about, and I've always won. In my experience, you're dead-on about the TODO list.

Well, they assume you are a lemon. This is why the job market has basically collapsed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

"until this point, we didn't even talk about money"

Big mistake. For years I was desperate for a job (STEM PhD). Now it would be my first question to ask. And I ask this on the phone before I would even bother to go for an interview. But again, now I don't need your shitty job. Chances are, you need me more than I need you.

I remember when I talk to a company once on the phone. Besides that I did not really like the salary, I realized I would not be able to do the job since it was basically two jobs and their chances of success were much slimmer then they were assuming. Didn't bother to go on. But the HR guy said, please apply, worst thing that can happen is that we don't hire you. WRONG. Worst thing that can happen is that I get treated disrespectful in an interview and that I waste time. Most companies value your time with zero.

And if you applied already you ask in the first phone interview why they think you are suited for the job. You would be surprised how many people have you come in without ever having looked at your resume and then tell you that you are not a good fit based on your resume in the interview. It is basically the first time they look at it.

> WRONG. Worst thing that can happen is that I get treated disrespectful in an interview and that I waste time. Most companies value your time with zero.

which can hurt your self-esteem / motivation for the next interview.

Worst thing that can happen is that you get hired by a terrible company with a toxic work environment that doesn't respect its employees. That's wasting way more time and energy than any wasted interview.

So if you see red flags and have other options that look more promising, walk away.

I find the market for lemons analogy to be unconvincing.

It makes sense if employers sold employees to other employers, but it falls apart in the standard labor market.

If I am currently employed and job searching, it is because my current employer is a lemon, not me. The prospective employer should be focused on determining my value to them. Everyone has some value (possibly negative, in extreme cases) and if we both agree then we should both be happy.

In this context, an employer could be a lemon for a million different reasons.

No, it does not. It is information asymmetry.

A good employer assumes that only bad employees are left in the market. As do good employees think that only bad employers are looking via job ads.

Hence more and more god jobs are filled via referrals from fiends etc. I basically think the same about job ads. Why bother applying?

Yes, there is information asymmetry. For sure.

But the market for lemons does not describe the labor market. Good companies grow and need more employees. Good employees do not get market-competitive salary adjustments and thus look for different jobs. It's the complete opposite!

There are exceptions, without a doubt.

EDIT - and let me also say that if the market for lemons accurately describes the labor market, why is it that tech is the only industry with such broken hiring practices?

" Good companies grow and need more employees."

Yes. But it is incredibly hard to get into a good company.

"and let me also say that if the market for lemons accurately describes the labor market, why is it that tech is the only industry with such broken hiring practices? "

In other "tech" industries it is the same. How do you get into a blue chip company?

1. contacts of your parents

2. contacts of your professor at University

3. you work for a start-up that they buy

In my experience this is true for 9/10 people I know.

I did my PhD in NYC and I once was asked in an interview for a med-sized medical company what the street name in Brooklyn is with all the hipsters. Think deeply what could be the reason for such a question.

I get what you're saying, I just don't agree. Fair enough.

Did you answer "all of them"?

I don't understand the question. But regarding the street in Brooklyn (this interview as in Europe), obviously they did not believe I really got a PhD there and lived there. Totally insane. Today I would walk out in such a situation. At that time I answered like a diligent student.

"until this point, we didn't even talk about money" I wont even go in for an interview unless I know the salary. It's a waste of time otherwise as you and the business may be miles apart. Almost all my jobs are through recruiters. My process is recruiter sends me an email (I get ~15 a week currently) and if the job looks interesting, I respond, say it looks interesting and ask the salary. If they don't give it on the reply I am done. If the salary is too low, I thank them and wish them well. I work for money and nothing else and don't want to waste anyone's time including my own. If this is your first job, still entry level or out of work, I completely understand not asking as you are just looking for a gig.

100% Agree. I'll take the initial phone screening, learn more about the role and the team, but the last question I always have is something along the lines of: "I know you're extremely so in an attempt to not waste anyones time whats the salary range? This way we're all on the same page before moving forwards"

I have never gotten a recruiter that doesn't tell me the salary when I do this.

> Then I was informed there were 2 more rounds (a system engineer interview, and a diversity manager)

A Diversity Manager? Is that a joke?

What would that interview even look like?

To me, the fact that this company is paying staff to conduct these non-technical interviews for technical staff would be a red flag that they clearly can't allocate resources adequately.

That’s absolutely ridiculous. I would absolutely inform the hiring manager. It’s important to be polite/sympathetic since it’s probable the folk on the other hand don’t know exactly what happened and how you got ground between the process transition gears by being there at exactly the wrong time.

It’s also a good sign the company might be in disarray and every day might feel like that there.

Anyways, sorry, from the profession as a whole. A lot of us are doing the best we can (even these individuals might be), but hiring generally sucks at the lower levels and gets easier as you become more senior (that’s been my experience).

Good luck!

I recently had an interview where I had about 40 minutes to implement a particular data structure. This was after completing an intial take-home of significantly more complexity (think, reading and implementing published specifications), for which I waited a month before I followed up and found they simply hadn't reviewed my application yet.

I thought I had a good rapport with the interviewer; I explained my thought processes in real-time, identified domain considerations I'd want to explore, and highlighted places where I was doing something less efficient for the sake of getting something working first. I left the interview feeling pretty good that I'd represented myself well.

I followed up a week later and learned they had rejected me; apparently I wasn't focused on the problem (??), and I used the wrong data structures. Okay. 40 minutes is too short to expect a perfect solution -- unless you're hiring for memorization, in which case yeah, I'm not going to be a good fit, your pipeline did its job.

(I went back, looked up what they were ostensibly looking for, and built it up from scratch. It took twice as long as I was given to implement to my satisfaction, and it was only a couple of transformations away from where I had originally left it to go from correct to correct-and-efficient.)

I won't name the company (I still think they're pretty great overall), but this was a pretty sour and confusing experience. (If anyone there reads this: hi, no hard feelings, we've all got to rant sometimes.)

When you have a large enough number of qualified candidates, you look for any reason you can to justify why you picked one person over everyone else.

Assuming that the hire wasn't already pre-selected (which is very possible), you were likely given the quickest answer the interviewer could come up with that sounded reasonable.

Friends have suggested much the same, yeah. It feels unlikely due to a few factors, but I'm very willing to chalk that up to naivete on my part.

(If nothing else, it's a convenient fiction that allows one to move on.)

    When you have a large enough number of qualified 
    candidates, you look for any reason you can to 
    justify why you picked one person over everyone else.

Yes. Also, a lot of companies operate under the principle of, "It's better to turn away ten good engineers than hire one bad one."

That only makes sense if you have more than enough engineers already. If not, it would be better to hire 10 good engineers and the 1 bad one, and fire the bad or or at least not extend their contract. Then you'll still have the 10 good ones.

And doing actual work is a much better test of an engineer's abilities than any interview process is capable of.

> Yes. Also, a lot of companies operate under the principle of, "It's better to turn away ten good engineers than hire one bad one."

I wonder how successful they are at this. There is no way to have a 100% hiring success rate, and the benefits from hiring ten good engineers should strongly outweigh the impact of hiring one bad one.

    I followed up a week later and learned they had 
    rejected me; apparently I wasn't focused on the 
    problem (??), and I used the wrong data structures.

Damn. I'm sorry. To me this represents a very poor interview process.

I just received two senior engineer job offers from companies with whom I actually ran into some roadblocks during the whiteboard/CoderPad sessions.

Before the sessions, both companies stressed that the exercises were about my thought/communication processes more than the code itself.

During the coding exercises I aced some things, and when I had some roadblocks I explained my thought processes and they nudged me in the right directions -- in both cases they were actually pretty fun and collaborative processes. That's really what they were testing for.

Sounds like your interview was more like, "complete this fairly challenging coding assignment in silence while somebody looks over your shoulder," which is just not good interviewing. That's not a good simulation of an actual work environment.

I had some total BS interviews too, at other companies. Some people/companies just suck at it.

I think people need to be down with how to actually get a job. It varies across industries so I can't speak generally, but I can say how my view has changed over the years, from being naive and a bit bitter to being quite happy with my most recent search.

When I was young there wasn't much choice. I had no network, I didn't know anything about my industry, and I didn't know anything about how hiring was done.

First of all, network 1. A huge number of jobs are not actually open to anyone other than a specific person who is known to the hiring manager already. Someone they've worked with or a second level connection. I refer people all the time to jobs now, and the hit rate is way higher than the anon rate.

Network 2. Recruiters. The good ones will meet up with you, ask you for advice, and generally tend to a huge number of connections. Your main thing to do here is to play the long game. Demonstrate that you're a person who is of interest, if you're lucky as both the product and the customer. Then keep in touch, ping them now and again on LinkedIn. You will get some calls and the hit rate is higher than anon, lower than network 1 but with way more volume.

As for the interview process itself, it helps you a lot to have a lot of leads. You feel bad if you have one lead and you blow it. If you have two or three you'll be more relaxed, plus you can negotiate with ease. You can take a bigger view of processes that you don't like, eg whiteboarding is more of a lottery when you have a whole bunch to do, and you don't take it as personally. People who don't get back to you, oh well, would you want to work there?

I guess a fair bit of it is psychological management, but that's important to make a good impression and to be able to judge the jobs better.

> You feel bad if you have one lead and you blow it.

This one hits pretty hard for me; I have a hard time maintaining multiple leads at once. I think it's more psychological than actual, but it feels a bit unnatural to put myself out there, as such -- I feel better (on the one hand at least) when I only have to worry about one interaction at a time.

I think it's still something I'll have to learn how to do, unfortunately. Thanks for outlining it so clearly.

I felt the same way as you. I like to focus on one thing.

    I think it's more psychological than actual

Amen. Absolutely 100% this for me. I just completed an engineering job search that took about four weeks.

I did ~40 phone/video calls for ~10 companies. Admittedly ~10 of those calls were simple screener calls which basically just check to see if you have a pulse and can speak in complete sentences. If those two things are true the recruiter shifts into "salesperson mode" and tells you how great the company is and gets you scheduled for the "real" interview(s). So let's call it ~30 "real" calls.

Emotionally this was extremely exhausting for me. I'm the type of person that is very sociable but needs time to recharge afterward because I put a lot of energy into each interaction.

But, I'm typing this to perhaps give you some hope!

The process was very difficult for me in the beginning but it did get easier in the end. With each call I could feel myself getting a little better at it and I felt a little more relaxed.

I think these sorts of numbers are just the reality now. Even though the current market is GREAT for software engineers, the remote-only shift means that there are a LOT of candidates for every job.

It feels like there are 1,000,000 jobs and 500,000 candidates which is theoretically good for us except that we're competing against all 499,999 of the other candidates for every single job hahaha

I tend to focus on 3. More than that and I lose track of who's who and what's what, but 3 seems to be manageable, and provides some choice for me.

That's viable advice for navigating a system built on nepotism and over-supply of STEM workers. Just saying. Doctors don't struggle finding a qualified job.

Doctors don't change their ideas about what competent doctoring is every five years - and medical schools know better than to hand out degrees to people who lack basic skills.

The number of residencies was capped in the 1980s, so of course doctors don't struggle to find a job. Residents do that.

This.

Normal disclaimers apply as it is bound to vary between industries, but in my little corner ( banking ), people that can recommend you and recruiters will bring you in faster than just about any other way. Apart from everything else, hiring manager will already be aware of you. My last job I basically got based on interview with recruiter and three person interview with my soon to be boss and his bosses.

The one before that I got based on interview with hiring manager after recommendation from mutual friend, which bypassed HR almost completely ( which is funny, because a year before, I applied there the regular way with zero feedback ).

Point is.. as much as I dislike saying it, play the game; be nice and helpful; people will remember you.

Agreed on the networking.

In terms of recruiters, I've only ever met a single good one, and I'd say generally recruiters, especially the third-party kind, are pretty useless and should be avoided at all costs. The only exception may be if the recruiter owns their own recruiting business as this is a sign they may know what they're talking about.

Recruiters can be pretty easily bypassed by either contacting the hiring manager directly or through networking. I don't plan on ever dealing with recruiters again.

I would generally agree with everything you said. These steps will get you job offers and employment.

But based on personal experience in Europe I do find that networking with recruiters is a complete waste of time. Networking with past colleagues and popping into the local meetup scene plus targeted talks with recruiters at industry conferences such as oscon (rip!) are going to give you way better returns.

I've got 20+ years experience in the industry, I've worked at some well-known shops and I have a decent looking CV with some financial sector experience. I do get the regular Google and Facebook recruiters on LinkedIn but would probably not pass their interview because I am already gainfully employed and do not have the time to cram computing trivia to pass their screen. Due to the financial sector experience I seem to get a ton of recruiters from the UK (and now NL), plus an incredible large number of invites to talk about a "devops engineer position" from German recruiters.

Especially the German recruiters are a complete waste of time. They are so terrible, they keep offering junior to mid-level positions to someone with 20yoe and a tech-lead/staff title to match. Their base comp is usually below 50% of my current base, sometimes barely a third. The UK and NL offers are better financially but still not reaching current TC levels. At this point, it's not even worth replying to their LinkedIn or Xing messages.

If you're at the bottom of the market or just starting out, recruiters or headhunters can be helpful to get an in at a company. But once you have a few years experience, their value rapidly declines, especially if you're aiming at the top of the market comp wise. With experience and a network, you know where your friends are working, if they like the places and you have an easy way to get referrals.

My experience is somewhat the opposite. I work as a freelancer, and I've gotten practically all my projects through recruiters. I've heard of a few other freelancers doing their own networking directly with hiring managers, and if that works, that's absolutely great, because you cut out the middleman who takes a piece out of your rate.

Maybe I'm really bad at networking. I've spoken to plenty of colleagues, go to conferences and meetups, etc, but none of that has ever resulted in an interesting position for me.

Even so, I'm not unhappy with my compensation at all. As a freelancer, at least. Employed programmers seem to be severely underpaid. A year ago, during Covid, a freelance contract ended, and couldn't be extended because of rules, but I didn't want to leave that project yet, so I joined the client as an employee. I had to accept a serious pay cut for that, though, and no matter how much I argued that I had proven I was worth a lot more than that, I couldn't get them to budge at all. I'm currently back to freelancing again. At a very interesting project, at a higher rate than before, again through an intermediary recruiter. I can't seem to get rid of them.

> What's wrong with your process that you need more than three steps?

Thank you. This needs to be said louder, and repeated more.

A phone screen, a tech screen, and a brief in-person interview is enough to hire someone.

If your interview process requires someone already working to take a whole day off of work, then you aren't going to get the top-tier candidates you say you want.

The sad truth is that lots of companies claiming on paper to be "hiring" aren't actually trying to hire anyone. The job opening either exists to satisfy some corporate compliance checklist, or to convince some executive-level person demanding higher productivity that they're "working on it".

    A phone screen, a tech screen, and a brief 
    in-person interview is enough to hire someone.

I'm torn on this. I just went through a long job search process. Multistep interview processes are grueling and they impose a particular burden on folks who already have jobs, folks with anxiety disorders or other factors that make interviews even more grueling, etc.

HOWEVER.

The most valuable interviews of my career were those "extra" ones where I chatted with actual team members I'd be working alongside.

I asked them about strengths and pain points of working at Company XYZ on a daily basis and got some great insights. Those kinds of interviews are the ones where you can find out if their build pipeline sucks, get a sense of the level of technical debt they're carrying, etc.

Absolutely priceless in my decision process. I feel confident about the company I selected vs. feeling like I'm just rolling the dice.

To stay sane in the interview process you must apply "mental" automation.

The goal is to reduce emotional pressure. Treat interview process with balanced emotion. Write down responses that you will repeat. Make a bullet list.

Don't expect response or some communication etiquette. Make your rules and stick with them.

If you have a company in mind, and HR process is not adequate, don't work with this company. Companies who are treating the interview process with HR hostility are not ones that you want to work for.

If you don't have network in place and your work is under NDA, create a project which will represent your skillset.

Put your current skils infront, your experience and accomplishments behind.

Companies search for the best "deal", not the best possible candidate.

HR is broken by design. It will not be in your interest. It always will be driven by employer requirements and HR mallice.

    "mental" automation

    [...]

    Write down responses that you will repeat.

Just completed a long job search and this is spot-on. I wish I could go back in time and show this to myself.

I interviewed with quite a few companies. There is a pool of about 20 stock questions that interviewers ask. Each interviewer will ask maybe 5-10 stock questions and a few you haven't heard before, whose responses typically be cobbled together from other things you've mentally rehearsed.

Give yourself some sample interviews. Write down your responses or rehearse them verbally, whatever works for you.

By the end of my job search, one of my challenges was actually forcing myself to take a pause for "thought" before answering one of these stock questions. So that the interviewer hopefully wouldn't know I was repeating something I'd "rehearsed."

It's important to note that while I was "rehearsing" things, my answers were always 100% genuine. They were my feelings and experiences.

In other words, I wasn't rehearsing the act of simply telling the interviewers what they wanted to hear. I was rehearsing the act of digging through 20+ years of engineering experience to think of good examples and stories with which to answer common questions like "tell me about a project where you overcame adversity."

Because the only real way you can say if someone is fit for a job, is to work alongside them for about 1-6 months.

The interview system is just there to avoid as many mishires and time wasting as possible

Exactly. So many people complain about how bad interviews are but if you have ever had to risk $10Ks of money on a hire, especially since you might stop looking after employing someone, you employ the best things you can like whiteboard interviews and tech tests.

Like most people, I am not looking for perfection, I am looking for a basic level of competence (I've had people who took 10 minutes to split a string in C# by a delimiter) and also to see how they think, how they work under pressure, whether they ask good questions instead of assuming things.

At the moment, these are mostly the best ways to tell if someone is a good fit.

> I've had people who took 10 minutes to split a string in C# by a delimiter

Is that bad?

well, it's pretty common operation, so kinda weird.

It might just tell you that the person being tested hasn't spent a lot of time with C# recently. Which says little about their competency in general.

Looking at String documentation takes a few seconds. If the developer can't look at the documentation in the interview, the developer is not the problem.

This comment applies to more of my real-life interviews than any other.

So many ask, "How do you do X?" and the correct answer in a real job situation is always either "Look up the documentation for X, and do it that way.", or "There is a 20-year-old open-source library for doing X, so I'd use that."

I am not a walking catalog of esoteric programming knowledge. When working, I have 24-hour access to all official documentation, as well as all blogs, projects, and message boards on the Internet. The first step in solving any problem is checking to see if someone else already solved it.

The same goes for the brain teasers. If you can look up the problem on the Internet, I probably saw it first. Your original, non-plagiarized riddles, please, or don't bring it in to the interview.

I agree, but where's boundary?

Are there any languages other than C and assembler that don't have a function to split a string on delimiters as part of their standard library?

C has one, strtok().

Everybody knows that the amount of time one should spend "splitting a string in C# by a delimiter" is 2 minutes 16 seconds. More than that and it's a "red flag".

I'm tired of all this BS really.

A good question would be, "Can I use the Split method or do you mean, implement the Split method?"

I don't know c# at all, but it just took me 47 seconds.

I did know that a language like that must have a string function for it, the first result of my search was a docs.microsoft.com page with the syntax and examples.

Yea, we don't know the circumstances of the question. Were they asked to implement string splitting from scratch to demonstrate their ability to do so, or was it just something they needed to use as a part of something else? Did they have access to docs or were they supposed to do it without any help? Something tells me the problem wasn't phrased as "google how to split a string in c#" so I assume there must've been more to it.

I don't know C# very well either. Taking 10 minutes to research the possible solutions and their pitfalls doesn't sound like a bad thing. What's the idiomatic way, and is there more than one commonly used way? What are the performance characteristics of each way? Are there any pitfalls and caveats (as e.g. strtok in C has when it comes threads or to strings that may have empty fields)? Do these ways modify the original string or do they produce copies? Is the delimiter a single character, a string, a regex?

This should indeed be simple and quick if all you need is to speedrun to an answer through Google. If you need to be thorough and understand the ins and outs of what you're doing, 10 minutes doesn't look like much at all for someone who doesn't have extensive & recent experience with the given language.

Yes, asking simple questions like this takes about 15 minutes and will weed out 98% of bad hires. I wish more companies would do this. Years ago when I would interview people for Delphi positions, the first question would be:

"What's the difference between a procedure and a function?"

Instantly weeded out 98%. Really what you are looking for is work ethic. If I pay you will you work hard. That can't really be determined in an interview.

I think most people are well aware the risk a company take for a hire, and therefore is a weird min-max process of increasing the minimum qualification of the applicant and then select on maximum.

People are just frustrated how that is implemented, how asymmetric the time-effort is, and how some of these practices are unjustified(incompetent). And because it's futile to actually complain about this to the company (or often, even while in the company) most people can only vent about it.

Sure, if a FAANG level company start the process by asking applicant to do a >hour test I think people would understand. But a Startup, mid-sized company who offer below-medium compensation ask you to solve a business/toy problem that takes more than a half-day in the first/early stage of hiring process there's actually some self-reflection to be done by the company too.

> I think most people are well aware the risk a company take for a hire

There is no way the risk is as high as hiring managers estimates, so no, I don't think people are aware of them. They seem aware of some phantom risks communicated by the people hired to reduce them.

How much time and effort do you put in before you buy a new home? Similar amounts of money involved, so similar amounts of considerations before choosing. Doesn't matter that it is a company spending the money, if the company spends a lot of money on the new hire then it is reasonable to spend a lot of money vetting the hire.

That's either a very cheap home or a very expensive hire.

Yes, they can reach similar levels. Large companies are a bit more relaxed about spending that amount of money than individuals, but yeah, on those cases where there is a large hiring bonus (or rather don't, increase the salary instead) or the person can make an exorbitant amount of damage on the first month, it's worth investing a lot more on the hiring process.

That analogy would be apt if there was some sort of "at-will" home return law. You can fire people who don't work out with very little friction up to 90 days I believe. You can contract them first for years really. I think companies spend way to much money on the interview process to not spend money on a bad hire. Take the example above, hours and hours of dev time over countless candidates. That's just asinine.

> How much time and effort do you put in before you buy a new home?

Plenty of people these days buy a home without even seeing it in person, because demand is so high. Even if you go see it, you can't dawdle for too long or you're going to miss out. Most houses around here are sold for way above asking price.

>There is no way the risk is as high as hiring managers estimates

For programmers? A programmer who is irresponsible and isn't tightly bound by process or peer review can absolutely wreck your small/medium sized business.

Have you seen the sheer amount of companies that don't have backups or aren't sure if their backups work? Additionally, consider how the community considers killing production a "tee hee we all make mistakes" thing

The problem here is that the company is using bad practices. That's just asking for trouble, no matter how good or bad your new hire is. Start using code review, 4 eyes to deploy to production, and you're fine.

A bad hiring manager is a far bigger risk to any company. And yet many companies seem completely unaware of it, considering the number of bad hiring managers.

it's broken.

- FAANG makes you jump through hoops because they are screening people out.

- 30 engineer companies adopt it. Then complain they can't hire, or can't hire Sr. Engineers. They should be screening in.

- "bad hires cost too much". What does it cost to have 15 hours of interview time, multiple times a week, for your engineers doing the interviews? Learn to hire cheaper and fire faster.

- All new grads post 2010(or whatever) spent the last 2 years of their degree doing the rote problem memorization and continue it throughout their career as they job hop every 1.5 years leaving a pile of tech debt behind them. its normalized. you see it in these comments here.

- its just 2 leetcode medium questions. THERE ARE 2000+ LEET CODE MEDIUM QUESTIONS. What are you really trying to gauge here? You want me to recurse a tree? Tell me ahead of time? Oh, that would be memorizing? So the solution is...go memorize a lot more? What happens to anyone with anxiety or OCD when they run into that?

- just a saw a job for a "CI/CD Engineer" first requirement? Full stack distributed systems engineer. Job? Write jenkins pipelines

- just as a job for a "QE Automation Architect" first requirement? Debug distributed systems in production. Manage AWS. "What you'll do? Write test frameworks". Uh...right.

- Why are we hiring house painters to do plumbing, and vice verse. Different jobs actually require different skills.

it's broken and i'm salty

A lot of companies are dysfunctional and their hiring managers are incompetent. Never take it personally or let it affect your self esteem. I witnessed this first hand in 2018 when doing rounds via Triplebyte. A good proportion of those companies who rejected me either went under or are about to go under. Luckily for me I landed at a publicly traded employer and my former employer had their liquidity event. I don't plan to interview ever again if not absolutely necessary.

I hope the author found gainful employment, but this post seems self-unaware which may part of be why he gets rejected. He concludes the interviewers/process are bad, because he thinks he "aced it". There's no consideration that he may not have done as well as he thought.

People like that are hard to work with, because they react this way to everything. Bad feedback on code review? "I thought my code was great, it's the reviewer that sucks." Nobody wants to work with people like this and they are almost never as good technically as they think. They work hard to not see their own shortcomings so they don't fix them.

I don't know the poster, he may not be the type I describe, just how the post vibes with me.

Hi, poster here!

I wrote this post when I was super salty about the situation. Obviously I found gainful employment but that still is the worst interview experience I ever had.

I'm forever nervous with coding challenges, I'm definitely not super confident with anything I write in less than 30 minutes to never see again.

When your blog looks like this:

My kid brought home a kitten [KITTEN.JPG]

entire blog post

[1] http://something.com/image/KITTEN.JPG

[2] http://elsehwhere.net/another/image.jpg

...where none of that has an actual clickable link

...it is not even remotely obvious that you found gainful employment

I meant to put "in the time since this post." I've never heard of three-year unemployment in the tech field but I suppose anything is possible.

I converted my blog from HTML to just TXT. The references still work, even though no hyperlinking exists.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16127697

Decided to repost this since the URL changed and we cannot edit old submissions.

Employers can't give you feedback because the people before you have responded by crying, arguing, threatening discrimination, you name it. Most people don't seem able to take constructive feedback.

Here in New zealand. The person who does the hiring is usually not the business owner... The money doesnt come out of his/her pocket... so they interview people when they need someone just to have fun honestly lol. I currently work in a factory because i couldnt find a job in IT and i got this job in 1 fucking interview lol..and i love it

and i am going for further studies.. I think spending 5 years as a web developer is enough here in auckland .. I need to study more and specialize in a computer science area. Someone correct me if i am wrong .

I highly recommend having small/side projects. They don't even need to be super complex but they'll better help you learn faster.

I have a saying:

"How you hire, is who you hire."

It starts with the opportunity's description and it goes forward from there. The emails, the calls, etc. If you pick up a "smell", keep it in mind.

What annoys me most is the presumption most outfits seems to have that they hold all the cards. That they are The Only option. If they don't yet understand - i.e., it's 2022 - it's a relationship that a red flag. Those are difficult to ignore.

In a proper adult relationship the karma, the comms, the love, etc. must flow both ways. Or else, sooner rather than later, one side will be looking for a break up / divorce.

Other than that, be mindful of your CV. If your "profile" has a look & feel like most others then you will naturally struggle to stand out (read: get interviews). It takes effort, but the wisest thing you can do is try to nudge the balance of power back in your favor.

Anyone had a "bait & switch"? In essence: You applied for job X but "Yeah that job has been filled, but maybe you're interested in Y?" (X can be Haskell, CTO, .... and Y can be Php, architect, ....)

Sure. On both sides. It's just a thing that happens?

You've made a hiring decision, but you still have 2 strong candidates from the process that you know are good hires for other positions so why not ask what they feel about it?

Well, what happened was that they let me come over (I took the bait), and 15 minutes into the first interview, they performed the magic switch.

This happens ever now and then in the company I work for. Sometimes we have a good candidate who doesn't make it for the position they initially apply for, so our hiring managers offer them a similar position that might be a good fit as well (after talking to the manager of the other team).

But this is not intentional bait, rather offering more opportunities for both sides and totally legit in my eyes. And it worked out well - at least for the company I work at...

I once went to an interview and was told that the job had been taken but that they "still wanted to have a chat with me".

You just can't steal people's time like that.

I don't think that's a bait and switch. It's totally possible that the position got filled, and they are still interested in hiring you.

I can see how that would be frustrating on your end, but I wouldn't immediately attribute it to malice.

I've interviewed someone for my team, and when he was hired, he was added to a different team. He didn't really fit in there and was soon fired, but I still wonder how he would have done in my team.

In my country we have a website where many employers are anonymously rated by employees. There are also details about salary by position, how interviews are done and a forum for questions.

It is a life saver since seeing company X has poor ratings and reading trough reviews and seeing why employees dislike working for it will allow you to not wasted time.

Also, you can see what are top rated companies and why people like to work for them so you can try to find open positions at those companies.

This might also have the effect that "bad" companies will find new employees harder, so they might have an incentive to improve their situation.

The author and I seem to have a lot in common, in terms of what the interviewing experience has been like. They go on to say in this thread that they "Obviously" found gainful employment, and I'm happy they did, because it's only gotten worse. I was struggling with the exact same thing between 2016 and 2018, then gave up and eventually found something in late 2019, only to lose it again at the beginning of the pandemic. Since then, I haven't found something. It's just been an endless series of this kind of garbage. Reading this post reminds me of this current fucking week. The closest I've come so far is actually getting an offer from a company who contacted me through the Who's hiring thread. It was something like 5 interviews, and in retrospect they really didn't have their shit together, but they pulled out and cancelled their offer after I asked about how we should handle billing for any time I take off for any reason (so much for their liberal time-off policy), citing that they thought hiring a contractor in Canada was a liability (known up front). Still super salty, and fuck interviewing, god damn.

Had an experience like this recently with a certain media streaming hardware company that starts with an "R". Their process had six points of contact, starting with an initial technical phone screen (with a language feature quiz), an hour long algorithm session (actually surprisingly fair), and then four more 45 minute interviews after that. They'd made a point of saying how good they were at getting back to people in 24 hours, and then they ghosted me. As far as I could tell, it was going alright, too.

I like zero-bullshit, engineer-targeting We're hiring pages like this one: https://texts.com/jobs

> We don't do whiteboard/algorithm interviews. We'll talk about things you've previously worked on and then do a work trial for a week – you'll be paid as a contractor for this.

This is nice.

Yes but a little risky for the engineer if they are currently gainfully employed.

You don't have to divulge company secrets, talk about public knowledge from the company, ie frontend design (React, Angular, whatever), any outer facing APIs (REST, SOAP, RabbitMQ, whatever) and stuff that is public knowledge, ie. stuff from blog posts or general knowledge (like GCP/AWS/...).

Besides that, you can always just not say what company something occurred at or be vague enough.

More the part where you're contracted on trial for a week. How do you do that will a fulltime job?

You have to quit and start the job at some point. You might also hate it after a week. The trial at least gives both sides a lower risk way to test each other out. You could take a weeks vacation, or surely would be able to negotiate a week to do real trial work before you are forced to quit your job.

This is actually common in some trades, for example cooking / baking, and makes way more sense than interviews for both sides to decide if they want to continue working together.

Are you hiring interns?

Technical interviews are only good at indicating whether or not someone is good at Technical interviews.

The best way to figure out if someone is a culture fit? Ship code with them.

If you can start off on a contract, do that. It is the best way to even out the power dynamic of the interview process.

If you are not in a place where you can do that, check out what we are building at www.commit.dev to Re-build career transitions around the engineer.

When I'm the interviewer, I don't do whiteboard/CoderPad exercises. As a candidate, they make me nervous.

But, I do think they can be a decent part of a larger interview process.

I've had some very reasonable whiteboard exercises where the interviewers were very clear that the problem was tricky and I wasn't necessarily expected to solve it - the emphasis was on conversation and hearing my thought process. I actually enjoyed some of them.

     If you can start off on a contract, do that. It is 
     the best way to even out the power dynamic of the 
     interview process.

I agree in principle but in practicality, there are some difficulties such as needing healthcare coverage for my family. (Yes, the US system of employer-subsidized healthcare is utterly broken, but that's what I'm dealing with)

Counterpoint: why not just just take a fulltime job and quit / move on if it's not a good fit?

>Counterpoint: why not just just take a fulltime job and quit / move on if it's not a good fit?

The company doesn't want to be on the hook for unemployment or wrongful termination I think.

> I agree in principle but in practicality, there are some difficulties such as needing healthcare coverage for my family. (Yes, the US system of employer-subsidized healthcare is utterly broken, but that's what I'm dealing with)

I actually did this for my last job, because I'm terrible at interviewing (I both hate practicing leetcode, and have fairly bad anxiety). I had the same concern as you, and the way I got around it was to ask for them to pay me on contract an amount equivalent to what my salary would be AND benefits. I guess if you're employed then that doesn't work so well, but as an unemployed (at the time) person it worked out great.

The other fun development is take-home Data Science problems, where you have to spend a weekend, you're never quite sure if your results are good enough (you can always improve a model), and then they want the regular panel of interviews on top of that as well.

Most of my interviews are just very general tech questions, what is a class, what is an object, etc. I have had one where I had to implement a take home project once in react. I had never used react before so it was a challenge coming from vanilla JS but I did it in about 4 hours (it was a pretty easy project) and got the job. I have never had an interview of more than 3 steps. 1. Speak to the recruiter 2. Speak to the hiring manager. 3. speak to the team.

I have never done one but I have to imagine a white board, FAANG style interview would be incredibly stressful and time consuming.

I had a job I was interviewing for once where I went in for the interview, everything went well and they asked me to come in for a second round which would consist of a paid full day of work in their office. I declined. I appreciate that they would have paid me, but I just could not see investing an entire day into an awkward shadowing process. Company seemed good though, I wish them well.

Current job was speaking with a recruiter (who was very hard to understand), speaking with the vp, and then speaking with the owner. Each step of the process I raised my asking rate. Got the offer for what I wanted the day after the interview with the owner.

I have worked on a team trying to improve our hiring process before and there are lots of things we tried to balance such as the candidate's time, our interviewing engineers time, and trying to be thorough and fair. We obviously want to hire capable engineers but need to be mindful that senior engineers understandably don't want to have to jump through lots of hoops!

We found that doing a simple coding exercise (not leetcode) together is one of the best stages we have. It gives us a great insight into how they approach a problem, if they think about things before jumping in, and how they communicate. All those things are missed for a take home assignment.

I genuinely believe that an experienced engineer can accurately gauge a candidate's ability in just 15 minutes one-on-one, talking through a programming/real-world problem, and far more information gathered during that time than any of these 2-3 hour processes involving Leetcode or similar.

I was more or less unemployed during the last financial year due to a variety of reason including burnout.

I work in computational biology and mostly self-learned at that, so I've been trying to brush up on programming and such.

One of the "memorable" interviews that I had included:

1. HR Round over phone

2. Programming test: I'm mostly an R guy, but the test involved python a ton. So had to learn that

3. Meeting with a Team-manager

4. Meeting with the Team

5. Live programming test

6. Diversity meet

7. Another HR meet

8. Interview with their Tech. officer etc

A total of 4 days, between the assignments and such stuff. Of course I'd openly told that I was under-qualified for the round 5 and I'd already expended 3 days for the interview.

Still had to proceed with round 5 and I just laughed at their faces when they couldn't understand why my domain knowledge didn't give what they wanted. Or why I didn't care to learn XYZ when I never heard/use it before.

Not everyone needs a CS guy and at the end of the day, nobody's reinventing the wheel over and over again that justifies interviews being 10s of hours long.

Probably the best interviews that I've given are just face to face and doesn't waste too much time for all the people involved. My current job had just two meetings, one with the team-manager and the other one was to introduce the person that I'd be working with.

No pair-programming, no fluff. Got the offer within the month and its probably the least stressful job with ample time to work on my hobbies and spend time with others.

Also, a few things that I've noticed/done since then:

1. Use linkedin/indeed or job listings as exactly that. Just notify if the jobs are available. I tend to contact the people hiring directly and explain what I do in an email. This surprisingly works a lot of time.

2. For cold-calls/spam-calls etc, I ask them to check my CV and decide if I'm a fit worth pursuing. I'm not going to spend more than a set number of hours depending on the position the interview is for.

3. Yes, this results in a lower number of interviews. But the ones that I got were significantly of a better quality, both in terms of money, projects and respect.

4. Regarding not everyone needs a CS guy: Most of my field is built by these folks, no disrespect. I'd rather interface with them and get things worked on or make things easier for me than to rub my 2 brain cells that decide when to use a for loop or lapply.

5. Follow-up for the pointer 4 above: I hate programming, but I love documenting stuff. My current job allows me to do that, I'd rather leave programming things to professionals, and rather explain my issues, nuances or thought-processes to them and get things sorted out.

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