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Comment by keiran01 | Hacker News Reader

How has hiring become such a wandering maze of errands?

That wandering maze of errands is only if you're applying to FAANGs and top companies paying top of the market compensation, which the author is.

If you apply at average European companies for example, paying average EU wages, you don't get any of that, but you'll have to be OK with earning very avenge wages in line or sometimes below most other skilled white collar professions (in Western EU at least, in the East devs still earn higher then everyone else).

It's kind of like dating, the less attractive a company is to potential candidates, the easier it is to get in, the more attractive it is, the harder it is. Supply and demand.

i disagree, i had to do quite a song and dance and nearly every dev job i applied to in the US. mid range noname companies and all

Yeah no. Plenty of companies do this in the EU as well. It's exactly that difference between the hiring process and the rewards which upsets people.

Ironically that is still in line with your dating analogy.

>Yeah no. Plenty of companies do this in the EU as well

True, but it really depends on the region and local market. If you go to an over-hyped place like Berlin for example, where there's tons of low quality start-ups claiming they're the next Google, and tons of both ambitious and low-quality candidates pouring in from abroad with inflated resumes trying to break into the market, then yeah, the hiring process will be broken from all the effort needed to filter out the posers and chancers from the candidates who can actually deliver results, especially if you don't have a strong network of contacts you can leverage.

But in my small city that nobody from abroad has heard of, hiring is much more sane, since there's much less noise you need to filter out. Granted, the number of opportunities and the pay is also much lower than in places like Berlin so that's the trade-off for sane interviews since the small market attracts less posers and chancers.

Incorrect. Even for unknown small companies, 7-8 rounds is pretty standard now.

It was standard when I entered the market in ‘99.

Occasionally you’ll get a set of rounds that last 3-4 hours, but it was just as rare back then.

The main difference between big tech companies is the reliance on LC type algo/ds, and the insistence on getting to the optimal solution for anything but the hardest questions. Also 'normal' companies are more likely to ask more domain specific questions... for instance, you might get pairing sessions that stress knowledge of language/framework, SQL query building, etc, and are going to be a bit more permissible of mistakes.

It's been a while since I've interviewed but what can they possibly be asking over 7-8 rounds?

From what I recall, most companies did 3-5 rounds with escalating time commitment from both sides as the rounds progressed. A typical process would be:

* short 15-20 minute phone call with a recruiter to discuss your experience and gauge your interest.

* take home coding test. I consider this step to be a low pass filter to weed out candidates who can't code at all.

* phone interview. This would take about 1 hour with 1-2 engineers on the other end, possibly including the hiring manager. Technical questions would get asked here.

* in person interviews. Usually a full day with the company flying you out to their location. This would be a mix of culture fit, tech questions, meeting the team, etc.

That's four rounds. What would you cover in the other 3-4?

well 7-8 rounds is what used to be a full day before, now it's 1 hour zoom calls each. So:

1 Online assessment/coding round

2-4 coding calls each 1 hour

1 System design

1 Behavior

1-2 Another bullshit meet the managers call

That actually sounds like an improvement overall. It would be easier for me to schedule an hour a day, at the start or end of my day, every day for a week than to take a full day off to go interview somewhere.

1 online test An interview to discuss my approach to that test Then a full day onsite of 4 technical interviews, mix of algorithms and systems design. Final round with CTO, culture fit etc.

> in person interviews. Usually a full day with the company flying you out to their location. This would be a mix of culture fit, tech questions, meeting the team, etc.

Why would you count that as 1 interview? It's always an exhausting 4 hour marathon of algorithms, data structures and systems design rounds with 4 different people, frequently split over a couple of days.

I'd count it as 1 step in a multistep process. Each step of the process gives more info, but is also more investment from each side.

I've also never seen it split over multiple days. Often, pre covid, the company is flying people out and paying for hotel rooms and food at this stage and the interviewee is taking time off from their current job. An extra day adds unnecessary costs to both sides. If I was interviewing somewhere and they tried to split up this step I'd probably get annoyed and potentially cancel the interviewing process.

Counting it as 1 step doesn't communicate what it's like.

You could theoretically have ten 1 hour interviews, back to back in 1 day, and call it 1 step in a multistep process, but most people would call it excessive.

Last time I looked (a couple years ago) the market was so hot that any company taking longer than a week to decide and more than maybe two interviews, counting an initial phone interview, was gonna lose the candidate.

They might not be "average" companies, but OP is based in London, and the company he went with (Monzo) is a darling of the London tech scene. We get plenty of interview errands here.

Absolutely all the companies are doing it right now (in Canada/US) from small 10 person startups to FAANGs. The frustrating thing is that some smaller companies put your through these 5 hours of leetcode/system design but they never hire anyone and stay with the same number of employees. I see them posting over and over on HackerNews hiring threads but their head count never grows(by looking at LinkedIn)

Most of the time these companies do hire people...they just generally lose people at almost the same rate. It's usually a sign of something negative, though

(note - staying the same size is fine if that's your desire, but it's a problem when you're aiming for aggressive growth and can't)

Yup. Churn is so high in dev roles.

You see the one or two leads who stay while a never ending list of mid to senior folks trickle in and out of companies.

Well, yeah that might be a case for some. But the companies I was complaining about don't have a dev churn, it's the same people based on their work history.

Right on. There are many companies who interview candidates, but have little to no intention to hire. They are very difficult to recognize, as their job adverts and websites look exactly like all the others.

Posts like these nudge me back to keep going with my own potentially-lucrative-in-the-distant-future project. It's a lot of work, and my savings are monotonically decreasing, but I read this post and it's internally exasperating. I just think to myself, oh geez, if I have a hard time reading about it, I'll surely have trouble actually playing the stupid game. Been programming for about 30 years now, about 15 on-and-off professionally. I quit my latest job like 3 years ago, and haven't been looking for another. Probably won't pass a resume phase nowadays. I'm writing code (algorithmic, optimizations, even UI, ugh) every day.

The progressions all seemed rather linear, and mostly similar

- Apply for job or follow up with recruiter

- Prepare for interviews

- Complete phone screen so you don't waste each other's time

- Possible programming assignment for the same reason

- Onsite interview for both sides to collect more data points

- Negotiate terms of employment

I've had to sequence rollouts more complex than this.

As I was reading this it reminded me of a playthrough of Ultima IV. Grind a bit in the Swamps of Leetcode so you're high level enough to get past the Dungeon of Algorithms.

What I'm hoping folks get from the post is that not that many companies conduct algorithm interviews. If you're fine skipping FAANG, you can probably avoid them altogether.

Don't get me wrong, it was an excellent write up! Maybe my comment reads snarkier than I meant it :) My personal take away would be update my resume even if I'm not looking for a job. I've not interviewed for so long that my resume is written on papyrus and has qualifications like "knows how to tie his own shoes".

For what it’s worth, I didn’t get any snark from your comment at all.

I share your takeaway about keeping the resume updated. It’s the single biggest, low effort improvement I can make.

lack of accreditation. Actual Engineers, Accountants and Lawyers don't have this nonsense.

Basically no-one else hires like this, outside of tech. If you describe what our interviews—even relatively light ones, not FAANG—look like to people outside our industry, reactions tend to be of the "what the actual fuck?" variety.

Author here. I made it harder for myself by applying to several companies at the same time. I could have kept it simple by applying to a few at a time, perhaps only targeting companies with processes that suited me. For example, if I had applied only to my eventual employer, it would have required minimal preparation.

And is it a wandering maze of errands in other industries?

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