Hacker News Reader

I seriously don't get how slow firms hire anyone. Surely the people you want will vanish quickly?

I recently found a new job, had a backup offer after a week, and the job I actually wanted 4 weeks later, after about 7 working days post contact.

After I signed, several of the firms I'd interviewed with got back to me with interest. This is weeks after initial contact, and weeks after the last interview, so if course I thought they weren't interested.

I'm happy with with long thread time, but not long wall time. I don't mind people bringing me into 6 or 7 hours of interviews over a day or two, what I mind is doing those calls over the course of several weeks. It really bothers me to do an interview every week with a firm for a month.

For people who go for firms that are known for long processes, how do you do this? Just hang in there with your old job? What if something better turns up faster?

small anecdote but the small startup i work for has been having a really hard time with candidates accepting other offers part way through our hiring process. We took some steps to make our entire hiring loop 2-3 days total and it has had a great improvement.

Depends on the company. I took three months with current company which took a month for a background check. I gave notice before getting this position as I was done and wanted time off.

It depends entirely on priorities and circumstance. Some folks are willing and able to wait to work somewhere they feel is a perfect fit for them, or special in some other way; others may be interested in transitioning to new work ASAP (or need to, for financial reasons).

When I left my last job, I quit without having anything lined up, and was fortunate enough to have a bit of buffer to take some time off to recuperate and search for new work. I got some promising interviews, but none were like my interviews with the company I work for now. I rejected a number of offers while still in the process with my current company (with the full understanding that there was no guarantee of anything waiting for me). My priority at the time was finding somewhere where I knew I would love to work, and not getting back to work as soon as I could. For me, it paid off to wait.

Our interview process is pretty involved, and not for nothing — we get a lot of applicants, screen heavily, and put in a lot of time and effort into each individual candidate at every stage. We don't have dedicated recruiters, and besides our ops team, we've got individual developers, designers, product managers, support folks, etc. involved in hiring for their respective domains. Our interviews are humane, first and foremost, and a good number of candidates I've gotten to speak to have described the process as refreshing (well, relative to the general hell that is interviewing). The general process is: written questionnaire, two interviews (one technical/skill-focused, one non-technical), and a chat with execs.

It's completely understandable if this process doesn't work for all candidates; we've made great progress tightening up the process, shortening it without compromising on quality, and have invested a lot of time in tooling to help us out to speed things up. But it also works exceptionally well for us and the folks we're lucky to work with (~0.1–1% hire rate depending on position) — since I started a few years ago, the company has more than doubled in size (from a small to a medium company), and in that time, we've had a total of 2 individuals decide it wasn't a good fit for them. The company culture is like nothing else, and it's an amazing place to work.

0.1-1% hire rate based on applicants, or based on candidates interviewed? 0.1% hire rate of candidates interviewed doesn't seem compatible with your described growth rate, even if you very conservatively assumes you spend 1 hour interviewing each candidate, thats 25 weeks of straight interviewing per candidate hired. And thats 1 hour of time across the whole company, if you have 2 interviewers spend an hour each, thats now 50 employee-weeks, or an entire year. To double the company size in 5 years, you would have needed to spend 1/5th of your entire tenure interviewing. If you go up to 10 total hours spent per candidate (including all interviewers, recruiters, and time spend in discussion and negotiation) it becomes straight up impossible.

Surely it's not based on interviews. You'll lose the will to live if one in a thousand interviewees gets the job.

Based on applicants it's ok, went all seen how any job ad attracts piles and piles of spam applications.

Oh, for sure, that would be nuts. 0.1–1% of applicants.

So to be clear for a given position you get 100 to 1000 resumes, then interview how many of those before deciding on 1 person? I am curious what the funnel looks like.

It depends entirely on the size and quality of the candidate pool, but I'd say very roughly:

* Initial candidate screening reduces the pool by 85–95% (leaving 5–15% of the initial pool) * Interview #1 reduces the pool further by 50–66% (leaving ~3–4% of the initial pool) * Interview #2 reduces the pool further by another 66–75% (leaving ~1–2% of the initial pool) * Final chat usually doesn't reduce the pool, but it's one last pass for additional signal * We choose a single candidate of whoever remains

For a position with 400 applicants, it could look like

* Initial screening leaves 40 candidates for interview #1 * Interview #1 leaves 15 candidates for interview #2 * Interview #2 leaves 4 candidates for final chat * We pick from those final 4

I'd like to know what company this is. There's an email in profile if you like.

Thinking motivated by self-preservation, plus overweighting the “we want people who WANT to work here.”

When the quality of a hire isn’t easy to determine, this enables nearly every company (especially those where people are collegial) to think their people are the best.

This is exactly why.

Interviewing can easily eat up 2-3 days of your life.

You only get 15-30 days of vacation per year.

Theoretically, you are working to have free time.

This is maybe 1/5th of your free time per year. You can't waste this on unknowns.

Give me the salary up front or p#$$ off.

>Give me the salary up front or p#$$ off.

Good to see someone do this. I do this.

> You only get 15-30 days of vacation per year.

This is why I'm glad to have "unlimited" PTO (subject to manager approval + must be requested at least the duration in advance, e.g. 2 weeks notice for 2 weeks off), along with a few annual company-wide breaks and an earned month-long break every 3 years.

I am opposite, I like limited PTO, because in my state your employer has to pay you for the unused time when you leave..

Unlimited PTO is often abused as way to prevent workers from feeling like they have the ability to take vacations when they need them.

Other benefits for the company (not the worker):

- don't have to pay out employees who didn't take their vacation - nobody taking vacation to use expiring vacation days - employees take less vacation in general

So really your PTO is subject to the discretion of your manager. Unlimited sounds good, but in practice, I think it is better to have ownership of your time off. I remember like 20 years ago having unlimited sick time, which in reality just meant your manager was rated on how much sick time their team burned through.

I'm a manager at a place that has "unlimited PTO"- and I've never rejected anyone's request for time off, and the only reason I do keep track of it is to encourage people to take time off. I need my developers to be at the top of their game, and that requires them to take a mental break so they don't get burned out.

That said, I need to take more PTO so I don't burn out...

That’s refreshing to hear. Good on you!

If that's the way a company wants to have unlimitedly PTO, then they should be clear that there is a minimum amount of time that everyone must take off each year

If you're taking time off for interviews, you're doing it wrong. Everyone I know either 1) calls out sick, or 2) if remote, just does it during their work day.

My "never again" story was around a decade ago. Thoughtworks had me interview with roughly a dozen people over half a dozen or more interviews, lasting ~20 hours (if you include the proctored Wunderlic test they administered to me on premises). At the end of that lengthy process, they said they would have loved to bring me on but "didn't have any open positions that fit my set of skills". You know, that set of skills I listed next to my work experience on my 2-page resume.

I no longer submit applications to any job until I've spoken to someone who works there to ask hard questions of them before I interview. I also no longer consider any job that lacks clear articulation of the platonic ideal of a candidate.

I hadn't heard of the Wonderlic test before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderlic_test

Interesting and a bit creepy.

I think here in California for nerds who have been around for a while, companies have at least some concept of what competitive rates are, so I hadn't worried about posted salary ranges. If they waste your time leading up to a lowball offer, they at least have wasted their own time as well, so they have an incentive to not do that. That of course assumes you didn't do a take home assignment ;).

It’s famously administered to all nfl quarterbacks. Tom Brady got a 33.

All NFL players, not just quarterbacks, right?

Yes, all positions, there's a little more info about it in the linked Wikipedia article.

Apparently Frank Gore had one of the all time lowest scores with a 6. He is a borderline Hall of Fame caliber running back.

Pretty sure I got made to do this one when I got my first job in the UK (at a sports betting company, that turned out to be a pretty terrible job overall - I misinterpreted "gaming company" to mean video games...)

One of their investors came in to run the test, it was his thing, apparently. Weird industry full of weird and corrupt people.

I passed a Nearform interview years back when they didn't have employees, just contractors.

They said "Good, you passed the assignment, we'll call you when we have clients for your range". I kept my old job and I'm still waiting for a client from them.

Thoughtworks also screwed me like that. They gave me a take-home assignment which took few hours. At the end, their feedback was - my code is not cloud scalable and their were some values that I used directly and not from a configuration :-).

How can those people claim to be interviewers?

My team has thoughtwork contractors in it and I'm not surprised by your comments. Their actual ability to get things done is pretty bad

By mistake - I used the wrong 'their'. Apologies

My (albeit limited) experience with companies like this is that their interview process is far more hurtful than helpful. The processes are so long and so narrow that I can't see how it wouldn't be more effective to just say "come work on this thing for a day with me" and we'll see how it goes?

They must be leaking so many great makers arbitrarily. I assume that this helps the kind of work they do in some mysterious way?

It's foolish for the founders' part as well. They were wasting their programmers' time and effort as well. When I'm interviewing candidates, it's time that I'm losing. Why waste it on candidates who won't work for the salary?

If they don't respect candidates, maybe they don't respect their employees either.

Based on my experience, I'd say what happened here wasn't a deliberate decision on the part of the founders but rather a product of disorganization / disfunction in the company - probably recruiting has no incentive to avoid this type of thing, the engineers actually doing the interviewing don't have clear authority, and the higher ups don't want to take ownership.

Sometimes I wonder if the long interview process isn't a psychological game. Maybe they think they can leverage sunk cost fallacy against you just so they can low-ball you. Yeah, the pay might not be great, but if you walk away now, you'll have wasted 9 weeks of effort! You can't give up now. You're invested. ;-)

I had similar experience, which ended up working well for me. I interviewed for a job that I wanted and after they liked me they offered me something that wasn't up to my expectation. I rejected the offer and kept my current job. Two months later they reached out to me again, saying they have another exciting project for me and whether I would like to be interviewed. I was like, I don't even want to talk to you if we aren't talking salary first, it will just waste your time and my time. So we agreed on the salary first and then I had couple of interviews before they hired me.

Any company with a competitive salary is willing to talk money anyway. If they don't, they don't have the budget

As a manager, I have the salary conversation in the first call. Not specifics, but make sure we're in the same range. The last thing I want is to burn hours of my team's time evaluating someone only to find out a candidate we're all sold on wants 50% more than I can offer. I'm always confused by these stories - the hours and hours of wasted company time can add up to tens of thousands of dollars of effort, opportunity cost, etc. Figure it out ASAP so you're only spending time on people you can actually hire.

This is also why you should not agree to do coding interviews.

Or, you simply ensure you get salary bands relayed up front before continuing.

I've found there's zero correlation between interview difficulty and compensation.

that is because most positions in our industry underpay anyways

Does this work at any of the big companies? I'm coming up on something like 15 years of experience. I have a leetcode account and I've dabbled, but to be honest I'm just not that interested in playing that game, even for difference in comp it would likely bring.

That said, I am not all that averse to a respectful-of-my-time take home or having a discussion about a particular piece of code with a bit of prep, etc.

I've seen programmers far better than me get chewed up and spit out by the FAANG interview process because they hadn't prepped their leetcode skills enough. Anyway, I'm sure we could debate the interview process to death, but my original question stands: Can you just straight up say no to a coding interview at any FAANG or FAANG-like companies and actually get to an offer without having massive online reputation points?

Only if you know a VP or above. This isn’t a hurdle that can easily be overcome.

> Does this work at any of the big companies?

I've had coding interviews at big companies but always on their premises, with the interviewer there talking to me while I code. So I'm ok with that. They've never asked me to do a take home. I did a few of those for smaller companies before realizing that it's better to refuse.

Personally, I refuse to work for companies that don't explicitly evaluate programming ability when interviewing engineers.

I want to know that the people I'll be working with are at least baseline competent in that regard.

That’s OK if you’re a junior engineer with less than ten years experience but I would feel insulted if you question my credibility.

I’ve interviewed more than a few 10+ years of claimed experience engineers who couldn’t write a function to sum a list/array of integers.

There are incompetent charlatans that you’re competing against and if you’re not willing to engage to demonstrate that you’re not, some will (not entirely unreasonably) assume that you might be one.

This 100%. Some years back I joined a company with a significant amount of low-quality engineers. In hindsight, the interview process was a breeze.

That's when I realized what should have been obvious: the less rigorous the interview, the less effective it is at keeping out unqualified folks.

coding interviews do not test what matters.

I feel like in the last years the level of arrogance of developers has reached a peak - somehow the market being full of opportunities, people seem to forget that there are others out there getting paid way less, doing critical things for society and going through way more stressful situations than the pain of not knowing what new shiny language to chose for your next microservice.

As having a developer background that switched more towards management now, how do you expect companies to hire? From what I see take at home tasks are not ok, making everyone loose their minds, technical interviews are also not ok, then what? The attitude of developers now is: 30 minute interview in which the company needs to offer 100% salary increase compared to previous job, pay the developer a full day as he took 30 minutes for you and then just hire him based on his CV in which he lists all possible technologies in the world that he read about once in an article or wrote a to-do app 3 years ago.

I don't have a general solution, but one thing this industry may consider is licensing. If we are going to be job hopping every couple years due to the way raises are done now, we should at least make it more efficient.

> how do you expect companies to hire?

At least in my case, if I have 25+ years of employment history on my resume doing the same thing that I'm interviewing for (and this can be verified), the interview process should be a lot simpler.

Respect. Any time burned is more valuable than anything, and that's what they deliberately tried to do.

I had a similiar experience. After what felt like a long journey, and then receiving an offer that was less than my then base pay, I refuse to talk to companies that won't give me a pay range.