If You Want This Job, We Must Interview You Forever
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Interviewing shouldn’t require such thick skin. I’m here questioning my life, and reduced to worthlessness.
That said there are a lot of people on HN. I would update your profile with at least your site/resume and what you are looking for.
Find the time for it by rubber stamping a few code reviews.
It gets boring after a while. Just a very repetitive process after 100 or so.
1. Interviewing is a career skill that has an outsized influence on your earning potential. You need to practice it to get good and keep those skills sharp.
2. Interviewing regularly (minimum twice per year, YMMV) keeps you up to speed on what skills are in demand and what problems companies are trying to solve.
3. It's a great way to network. I'm up-front about being a passive candidate and I still get takers for interviews. Even if you don't take the job after passing an interview, you'll have a foot in the door if you revisit your interviewee in the near future or have somebody you can send their way.
4. You never know when you'll need to change jobs. Job satisfaction, change in life circumstances, layoffs/economic downturns, or any number of things completely outside of your control can force a change in your employment.
It doesn't matter if you're happy, busy, or hate interviewing--interview regularly or suffer the consequences for being unpracticed and unprepared.
The amount of deception you’ll have to do is what holds me back from constant “practice” interviewing
You don’t need a BS excuse. You can just say you took a higher offer/offer with more vacation.
A lot of these companies aren’t paying competitively anyway, so they are used to people declining.
Currently, at least, big tech cos will keep that door open. Think of it this way - a company spending $$$ on recruiters cold-emailing a bunch of candidates, the majority of whom fail the process, isn't gonna throw away leads of people who they know have passed the process at least once.
The offer was a pay cut from my current, very boring, but stable role.
The non-team thing is common but they do it to bring “objectivity” to the process and since it’s leetcode or system design questions, it usually doesn’t matter unless you’re applying for a highly specialized role.
I can speak for google and Amazon - you might not even apply for a specific team till you’re in, and do that afterwards. Facebook also did team match post boot camp.
Hell, they admitted as much a few years ago... and claimed they were going to try to be better.
Needless to say I was pissed.
He went on a Google interview, and they said he could solve a problem in the language of his choice. They gave him the assignment and left the room. Since we were at Apple at the time, he was coding daily in Objective-C. So he solved the problem in that.
Despite having said "use any language," the guy came back and said, "Oh, not THAT one."
And that's not even covering the douchebaggery that reportedly occurs once you work there. Another trusted friend, who worked there for years, reported being forced to rank coworkers with a graphical tool that shows pictures of them... and requires you to move them up or down on the screen to put some above others. It makes it impossible for you to put people on an equal level.
This is not from someone who makes stuff up, not to mention that this would be an oddly detailed thing to make up.
"Leadership principles" sound like Amazon. As far as I know they purposely get all their SDEs involved in hiring, and the bulk of their interviews is based on hard-skills, even when the interviewer's goal is to assess "leadership principles".
Also, one of their explicit interview goals is to have the candidate leave the interview round with a good impression of the company.
Nothing in your story adds up. Either you're embellishing it too hard or you're misusing the FANG keyword.
Overall, I somewhat expected such an experience and am glad I ended up where I did. The place I am going is filled with great people, and honestly, more intelligent and curious people.
None of the FANGs I know ever had non-software engineers interview candidates for SDE positions, specially when software development managers are primarily software engineers themselves and interviews have a considerable software development aspect.
I'm sorry to say but your story doesn't add up.
The crap you are going through is not fair, this entire process is not fair, but who the fuck cares - you will get this.
Do NOT let this fucking industry joke of an interview process harm you man. Seriously. It really is not you - its them.
most people find one of the most high paying jobs they can, then adjust their lifestyle to that income, then if they miss the mark ('lowball offer') they have to keep looking.
lifestyle regression is exceptionally hard for humans, especially if your friends/neighbors don't have to go through the same thing (e.g. there's no war raging in your country).
the best thing to do would be to keep your spend way below your means. this maximizes your options and gives you choice. but who does that?
Many do. The FIRE movement shows this.
My spouse and I have household income around the median for the area, and through a combination of discipline and good luck have managed to keep expenses very low.
It's not a life of depravation. We take nice vacations and buy the things we want, but we have to be careful not to want things like fancy cars or elaborate remodels. These seem like very unimportant things to forego when you stand to gain freedom from monetary worry.
Then your life can be chaotic, messy, stressful, and you lose much freedom for many years! But on the plus side you learn to sacrifice everything you’ve done and earned for the good of children who don’t even know how to appreciate it!
Kids just happen to be the easiest way to force yourself to stop living for yourself.
One of my family members’ 12 year old son suddenly developed a health issue. His dad is worth at least 3M, and was looking to retire in his 40s. But the medical bills are insane, he can’t retire anytime soon, as most of the bills (tens of thousands a month) are being paid by the good insurance his employer gives him.
I have always spent much less than what I make (I don’t even have a bed, I happily sleep on the floor on a sleeping bag). But I also haven’t gotten any raise the last few years, while my rent (for the same apartment) has gone up 20% in the last 4 years. So has my other basic expense like phone bill (same phone, same carrier, same plan), internet etc.
There is a reason people spend long hours working because the alternative is worse.
The most sensible thing to do while one is young is to live frugally, but also earn as much as you can and save.
And we enjoy our life, we rent (luckily not too expensive) and can do what we want. Of course we do not play the traditional "show off your nice stuff" game the society tries to force us into, but for us happiness is time well spent, not accumulated stuff.
Happiness is all about your expectations and who you compare yourself with. I try my best to compare myself with myself 1 year ago instead of random strangers. It makes me focus on what I can actually control (my own actions) instead of things I can’t control (the actions of others).
If you can’t help comparing yourself with your neighbours and feel “poor” where you live then moved to a place where you are “rich” compared with the neighbours. It will do wonders for your happiness.
While that's not always true, it is far more often than you think. So assume that's what happened to you, it probably was if you look at the odds.
As far as thick skin, that's life. Stay strong. Remember that failure is never achieved until you give up. This is a cold, hard world if you don't benefit from nepotism as many do.
I've seen the same thing as well. One company even flew me out to their headquarters to interview for a position they knew they were going to give to somebody internally. I found out because they left me alone with a senior developer on the team. I asked him what my chances were of getting the job and he told me.
I wonder if there's a good way to filter out these roles earlier in the hiring process.
If we only made one of these businessmen president instead of a politician.
Trying to tease out these roles that are starting off on such a horrendous level of efficiency is difficult.
My background is a coding bootcamp + relentless up-skilling and self-directed learning (with the help of some mentors), plus a healthy side of ADHD/spectrum issues, including, best of all, crippling social anxiety.
I cannot tell you in words how astounding it is to go from a full stack dev lead, to being reduced to failing junior-level code interviews because my brain just leaves the chat in the middle of most interactions with new people, let alone interactions involving cognitive effort/hazing.
You matter and the fact we have to spin our wheels on this grindstone does not change that.
(Have been on multiple different anti anxiety / depression meds, as well as a few anti seizure meds too fwiw.)
Adderall would make me super energetic for hours. Crazy chattt. Then I would be really focused for a for a couple hours. Then it would wear off and I would be drained. After a few weeks I started having horrific burning pain throughout body. Extended release is supposed to be better.
I do much better on other Medication. Kids do great on them. One is best on concerta. Other does better on vyvanse. My whole family is crazy strong ADHD. I prefer concerta. Vvyanze initially made me crazy sad. When I tried it again a year later it didn’t do that.
The problem is upwork takes a 20% cut and has bad terms and has a very flaky client base, while everything that VC money touches pays way better but hires non-contract fulltime only (fine) and has these rediculous interview cycles that I never seem to pass through.
I think if you put me in a stack of candidates that did leet code, i am basically never in the top 3 fastest, so that makes me unemployable in a system where resumes dont matter, personality is suspected to be bullshit, and speed of test completion is the only metric that can be used to rank candidates. Not in the top 3 fastest test takers? Get fucked.
I've never interacted with UpWork. My experience is that smaller companies pay fairly well, the interview process is usually easier, and you can learn a lot more about development, and that particular industry. The down side is that office politics matters more, you might have challenges with setting realistic expectations, and you might have trouble with comparisons to the last programmer they hired/fired.
I’m sorry, dude. That blows.
The worst thing is to be refused without knowing what's wrong so you're kept wondering why. Is it geographical reason? Is it national border reason? Legal reason? Culture fit? Personality fit?
Another worst thing is to be denied without any tests. Nowadays, I'd pick difficult and time consuming technical tests over being denied by technical merits due to incomplete CVs
- it is either looking to get sustainable as early as possible,
- or, if not, it is a research into the unknown (e.g. quantum computing, different purpose of db, new kind of AI, space exploration, green earth initiatives, even the early phases of blockchain)
Another points would be if the founders have the motivation to give back rather than take as much profit. My current company's founder have a dream to make an incubator for aspiring game makers, for example.
> I have never worked in an early stage startup.
The young company I have been in is when it was 1-year old. Founders are not looking for a mere "engineer", but one that can drive the team "above and beyond" style, because it is important for a small company. But, it is very difficult to see in people. The common mistake of many is to look for their own virtues in other people, which pretty much limits the other set of people not having the same virtue. E.g. Founders that focus on verbal communication and sales filter out people that cannot speak fluently, even though those are excellent product and engineering people.
In the mean time since you are out of work, start volunteering, participating in the community and even create some youtube / twitch content.
There is a handful of cases I would concede that you shouldn't keep searching for a new job but they are rare, like when you reach the position and company you dreamed your whole life and it's everything you wanted (e.g an artist that dreamed of becoming head animator at studio ghibli), or a company where you own a big stake and strongly believe soon will increase in value, or you found a company that provides so much generous benefits that looking for better position would likely be a waste of time (e.g. 200K, 3 day work week, great teammates)
It sucks and it is a blow, and it is emotionally quite draining. Try to stick in there - for me things all worked out in the end, and I hope they will for you too.
I try to live my life by the maxim of "you never know what is going to happen" and it cuts both ways, but there are times when something amazing just comes out of nowhere.
Good luck.
I normally ask the interviewing team to allow me to ask an advanced (worthy of PhD thesis) comp sci question for every canned leet code exercise they ask me to do.
They usually say no thank you. Or they say we believe you have the skills (based on the tens of github/youtube links on my resume) and won't test you.
Don't let them get away with one-sided penalty kicks.
8 months is seriously too long if it’s the company dragging it out.
I went through something similar where I pulled the plug after 3 months.
There's no amount of meritocracy that can override billions of immigrants.
It's why immigrants are coming to America.
And how come Indian teams hire 99% Indians? They don't call that meritocracy with white people....
Also I didn't get lucky. My family has been here for many generations, and helped to build this country, got ancestors died building the railroad My grandfather got a purple heart in world war II.
My ancestors worked hard to contribute to create a country with a stable government and civilized society.
So it is really depressing to see collapsing in on itself. if anyone ever wonders, what Trumps appeal is That's why.
You were lucky in that YOU were born in the US. Your parents could have lived in India. Or China. Or Chad. Or the Ukraine. Just so happens they lived in the US and, as a lucky consequence, you were born in the US.
But unless you're Native American your ancestors weren't born here. They were immigrants too. America is a huge multi-cultural melting pot spanning generations. 97% of the population are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants.
Getting tired of the folk that move in and then say, "Hey, I've got mine. Now it's time to close the door on everyone else."
Only European immigrants for hundreds of years until 1965 Hart Cellar. Coincidentally a few years later:
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
> Getting tired of the folk that move in and then say, "Hey, I've got mine. Now it's time to close the door on everyone else."
You're tired!!!?
I'm sick and tired of Western countries being responsible for Eastern countries billions of children! Stop having children! Maybe your country might actually be livable and not be something you want to run away from!
Notice that almost all of the countries that are desirable to immigrate to have a native population with a declining birth rate.
Also no one's closing any doors. any country can create their own prosperous economy? why not do that? Are they incapable of creating their own prosperous economy? It's closing the door because they're incapable of being successful on their own?
Instead Western countries get a billion people trying to immigrate and make the cost of labor dirt cheap.
It's pretty sad situation because the desirable countries are being turned into the rest of the world.
The tech recruitment process is clearly broken. Companies have left this as an afterthought, its so clear to anyone interviewing that entire recruitment departments are doing the most and putting devs to hell for it
The interview process my major companies are often designed to convince you of prestige and the illusion that they are coveted, but if you really look at how things work in the corporate world, we are individually a product that they buy into as consumers. If they undervalue the product, and the product is something they don't really need for whatever reason, they will try to haggle.
If they need you as a product, and you develop and know your value, you can negotiate better, from a position of strength. Personal growth and confidence is a continual process of building and renovating, but it always has a peak, and even ebb and flows throughout. There is never one clear path to success, but rest comfortably in knowing that all you have to do is survive and grow, carrying only what matters for each role you need to play in life.
Your life isn't linked to a job, it's linked to survival. Never let an employer convince you that you are not worthy of a job, and never let a job be the only value you have...
Work to qualify for interviews at companies where you get interviewed by execs, not by middle and lower management. The friends you make in those roles carry weight. A big part of success is the "Grey Hair" rule. Accept that when you are young and less experienced, things will be harder. It gets easier to navigate as you grow grey hairs and more experience if you work efficiently and effectively (not furiously). Resume formatting and a cover letter aren't really what get you the job. Your experience, personal product, and presentation does... Don't overthink the process... Overthink your personal life goals (What you want to accomplish in your personal life, not in work for an employer).
I am not usually a positive person, I am a practical one. The world is a lot less intimidating and more easily understandable when you focus on what you can control... Work to live, don't live to work.
As a hiring manager, I'm desperate for good talent. For the company that liked you, ask if there's other roles in the organization or to be considered for future rounds. Can't hurt, but don't hold your breath. Laws often prevent honesty in rejections.
It's extremely difficult to find good people. Even the most prestigious companies with the most stringent hiring processes are filled with people who shouldn't have been hired. Half the time I hire someone, my workload increases rather than decreases.
I finally find a promising candidate, only to have FAANG come in and offer 50% more than I can. Significantly more than I earn. I try to compete by offering a better work environment, team, and growth. But 50% is life changing. And while I've helped so many grow, they leave holes when they do.
So I find myself questioning my life and worth.
Complete shot in the dark, but my consulting company is hiring and I'd be happy to hook you in with a recruiter. We hire all types (background matters little if you have the skills), including career industry folks. Drop me a line if you would like more info -- email in profile (email domain is personal, not the company I work for).
Regardless, I wish you the best of luck in your search!
Says who? If it was easy to get a high-paying job, everyone would just apply.
It's up to the person with money to decide on the kind of people they want to pay lots of money to, and what the testing methodology is (within the bounds of the law, of course).
I've played that game for over 20 years, and I'm completely immune to rejection. Most of the time you don't even get rejected, there's just silence. It used to bother me, maybe the first couple of years, but not anymore. I'd go to 50 onsite interviews and get maybe 2 offers, even though I'd solve most of their challenges correctly.
When interviewing my own candidates, I use a 1 hour interview mostly focused on approach and personality. We have a probation period to work out if they’ve over-promised, and most of our tech industry is big banks that won’t notice if they waste a few weeks salary trying someone out. Honestly, for the salaries the local market provides, I think 1 interview is fair. Any more and I think we’re wasting peoples time for nothing.
Personally, I’ve dropped out of application processes when they’ve indicated there are multiple rounds, and my salary hasn’t suffered for it relative to my friends who put up with them, so I feel like I’m ahead.
And, speaking as somebody who's seen a 4-digit number of interview packets: The multi-interviewer format is far from flawless, too. The capability of groups of humans to collectively fuck up without ever talking to each other is quite impressive.
If you absolutely want to invest more time, at least build a multi-hour interview that has people do their job, in a team environment. Because that's what ultimately will happen.
Don't do multiple rounds of CS trivia.
For a small company the interviewer might well be the beneficiary of your work and in the end he needs you more than you need him. So a good one won't let his bad day ruin a nice candidate.
Also, depends on culture. There are countries where 1:1 interviews with a different gender candidate are okay.
Some US-based well funded companies that hire software engineers in Australia are willing to bid substantially higher for senior engineers (i.e. ~ AUD 300k comp + stock).
If you’re senior ex-FAANG you can easily get $250+
$300+ is probably staff level and above.
The old adage still applies, the jobs you want aren’t advertised and the candidates you’re looking for aren’t on job boards looking.
For someone new-ish to Sydney without much of a network, where should I be looking, if not the usual job boards?
It's a lot of work though.
I'm curious what you mean by over-promised?
Unless you only do this for people who don't already have a job, this sounds more toxic than multiple interviews. "Oh yeah we want you to work for us, but quit your old company, we'll try you out for a few weeks and if not we'll go our separate ways" ... but they quit their previous company so it's not as nice as it sounds.
Rather than ensuring every bullet point on their resume is factual through six interviews I’ve found it’s better to assume they’re honest and as capable as advertised, interview for personality, and then if they’ve oversold themselves that’s why it’s called a 90 probationary period.
I don’t get cranky if someone quits (even with no notice) within 90 days, for any reason. And I’ll let someone go within 90 days, for any (legal, ethical) reason.
I think it's a cultural difference. Many companies see firing as a failure to competently hire. Many employees see firing as a sign of instability. In the few startups I've worked at, I saw top talent leave at the first sign of instability/layoffs.
What percentage of people get let go within 90 days?
If 20% of candidates are getting cut after the probation, I’m very hesitant.
Losing 5% quickly is only slightly above normal and may, in fact, be a positive sign of quality control.
They can take you the Fair Work Commission for an unfair dismissal claim so companies have have processes in place to make sure they don't face that risk, which includes things like written warnings for underperformance, setting clear expectations, and giving the employee a chance to correct underperformance.
Managers in Australia much prefer to rid of underperformers during probation.
I just present myself as-is, which is probably less impressive, but I don't want to be hired somewhere based on false pretenses. That's just stress I don't need. I'd rather just switch careers and find something else to do before I do that. So I guess I just don't care enough to lie, which is kind of a lack of ambition of sorts. Misrepresentation is probably a better qualification for a sales position though.
I do think with poignant questions during interviews, you can tease out if someone knows what they're talking about. I just had a few interviews at a Fortune 500 and they peppered me with pretty great questions. Simple stuff, but good questions like, "what is a singleton" etc. You need to give a candidate some leeway, it's stressful and I don't sit around thinking about what a singleton is.. but I did have an acceptable answers to questions like that in my mind. "A static class which can only have a single instance". They liked me, but didn't hire me.
It's a tough industry that has brought engineers to their knees. Begging when nothing would work without them. It was supposed to be the next buoy of the American working class but instead the state of affairs is pathetic. That's what we get for disrespecting collective bargaining. At this point, there's definitely easier ways to make a buck than software. I wouldn't do it again but it's all I know.
Isn't getting unemployed always a possibility? It seems to me that parent commenter makes things clear and transparent to the candidate. Otherwise, the company could just fire without any such probation period anyways. Why should a company stick with an employee if the employee misrepresented themselves in the first place.
Personally I don’t understand how people can keep switching between different libraries all the time. I’ve been working Vue for the past year and I still know I don’t know everything.
Glad I’ve gotten hang of typescript though.
Glad to see there’s still some love for DB knowledge. Seems like everyday someone is coming to me with an issue that could be quickly solved by leaning on a mature RDBMS, instead of an ORM/NoSQL/flavor of the year tool.
Too bad most roles in this industry (that pay well and don’t work you to premature balding) need niche specialists, instead of deep generalists.
And all the faddery (see: MongoDB, MySQL, DocumentDB). “We don’t need a full-fledged RDBMS. We’ll ride this malnourished pony all the way past the finish line. We gotta stay lean; we gotta stay hungry. There’s no ‘OLTP’ in first to market.”
t. TC 75k 7yoe
Of course "knows" is not that precise. Postgresql is vast and complex.
Unless it's asp or laravel. Then it is two weeks in which you have to be constantly drunk.
It is funny they don't want to call it "probation" because Australian probation is just every job in America.
In our case, we do also explain the types of circumstance in which we might use such a clause, and for us those are very narrow, we don’t hire people just to let them go for nothing 6 months later.
In the more western culture of recognising that company loyalty is severed both ways, a probationary period makes much less sense.
American, not Western. Probationary periods are the norm in Western(or developed for that matter) countries, same as worker rights (such as you can't be fired on a whim). Due to said worker protections, a probationary period gives the company some time to realise it made a mistake in hiring, because afterwards it's drastically harder to let someone go. Same goes for the employee, during the probationary period you can leave with little to no notice, but once it's over the mandatory notice is in the multiple weeks to months period (at my last job it was the max for France, 3 months).
Honestly we also have a senior contractor on my who we only did 1 or 2 60 min basic screens for and they’re a huge disappointment and we’ve been dealing with them for a year I guess because they’re not quite bad enough to fire immediately. I bet a full panel would not have accepted them.
Are you serious right now?
That's what contracting is for and I tell everybody to turn down any position that starts as a "contractor". Commit or GTFO, stop wasting peoples time.
On the balance, I prefer the probation approach as it makes life easier for everyone.
I don't know why, but something about "not renewing a contract" makes HR and the C-Suite at most companies feel a lot safer than "we're firing you" despite the fact they're virtually identical with the standard US at-will employment contract.
Probationary periods are a normal part of employment contracts in most developed/Western countries, with few glaring exceptions like the US, due to the presence of worker protection laws like the fact you can't be fired on a whim, and you can't quit on a whim without notice. So the probationary period leaves both parties the opportunity to quit before it becomes hard to do so.
I dread the next one.
The lesson I learned is that you shouldn't draw too many conclusions from just a few bad interviews.
> But I scheduled so many interviews I didn't have time to dwell
If you are sensitive to failure, a trick to overcoming it is to overwhelm your ability to dwell through sheer volume of experiences. Usually the anticipation of the next experience makes dwelling on the last one difficult to impossible. This works for dating, interviewing, presenting, and probably myriad other things that I haven't had to get better at.
Does this make it so your body thrums with cortisol nearly 24/7? Yes! But do you improve quickly? Also yes! How long do you want to spend getting better? There's both a time cost and emotional cost to improving slowly. Conversely, improving quickly is exciting and motivating.
I went through period where I was not only bad at interviewing, but so nervous that I couldn't control my palms sweating so profusely that it was embarrassing to shake hands with my interviewer (and probably gross for them!). Once I realized I had to go for volume to get over my nerves, things changed dramatically for the better.
Try it!
I launched a popular open source software that turned into a company.
Some employers are stupid and make bad decisions because they’re too shy to ask for a third round of interview when we assume everyone at that level will know the standard set of JS skills, especially since the market is difficult for employers. While it’s painful to give them the time to evaluate you properly, it may also save you from a bad employer.
So you can’t “just quit”.
Probation shortens that notice period to typically 1 week however most people tend to leave straight away as it’s fruitless to both parties if the employee stays.
It's not an equal risk though - the employer can easily weather (or not even notice) the ending of that employment, while the employee undergoes a life-changing event.
> the employer can easily weather
In a large business maybe, but more often than not in a large business you're a number and you're gonna pass probation regardless.
In a smaller business, the cost of recruitment process can be huge, it's not just 1 hour interview and you're done as an employer. It's hours of reviewing CVs, contacting people, arranging times, conducting interviews, weening people out, disruption to your primary job role, etc etc. That's a huge cost and drain on the business.
If the business decides they don't want you during that probation period, you must have done something pretty bad, because that's a huge cost sink to that business.
In a medium business alot of that goes away, sure, but they pay for in recruitment fees, interviews (less) offers, onboarding, etc.
My point is, its very difficult for a business to weather this stuff. If a business lets you go during a probation period, it must really not be a good fit.
I've been involved in some recruitment process over my 18 year career, never the primary person doing it, so only reviewed CVs and been in the interviews.
Only once did we let someone go during probation, because he was quite toxic and spent all his time complaining rather than working.
At the same time I've only seen 1 person quit during probation after 1 week. He was hired to do Design and HTML/CSS, but decided after 1 week he didn't like doing HTML/CSS and decided to leave. Which made my boss absolutely furious because of the wasted time that the typical 1 week notice was thrown out the window and he was asked to leave the building right away.
Not as life-changing to the business as it is to the employee.
> At the same time I've only seen 1 person quit during probation after 1 week. He was hired to do Design and HTML/CSS, but decided after 1 week he didn't like doing HTML/CSS and decided to leave. Which made my boss absolutely furious because of the wasted time that the typical 1 week notice was thrown out the window and he was asked to leave the building right away.
And yet, that did not cause the business to pay the current employees less, or downstaff, did it?
After all, if the financial implication did not involve cutting costs down just to survive, then it is not comparable to an individual, who literally has to spend less money and cut out existing costs just to survive.
> After all, if the financial implication did not involve cutting costs down just to survive, then it is not comparable to an individual, who literally has to spend less money and cut out existing costs just to survive.
I’m not sure you understand. It still costs the company.
It was the employees decision to leave because he decided he didn’t want to do the work he was hired to do.
Should the company say “oh no problem we will just pay you because we have some money in the bank right at this very moment in time”?
I'm not contending that, I'm saying that for the employee it is a matter of survival. For the company, it's not.
> Should the company say “oh no problem we will just pay you because we have some money in the bank right at this very moment in time”?
Where in " the employer can easily weather (or not even notice) the ending of that employment, while the employee undergoes a life-changing event. " did you read that?
I said that it's not an equal risk; the individual stands to lose a lot more by losing their job than the company stands to lose by losing the individual.
To the company, the risk to the individual doesn't matter. To the individual, the risk to the company is irrelevant.
IOW, when someone leaves their stable employment and starts with a new company, the company's risk (lose some money) is almost insignificant compared to the individual's risk (starve).
Hence I said that the risk isn't equally shared between the parties. In comparison to literally dying, the company's risk looks almost negligible.
For those rare candidates that completed the problem rapidly, we would give them a follow-on question that was a more typical interview question, just so that they didn't think our bar was set stupidly low.
My current position was basically just a conversation for an hour. Best interview ever... Went in thinking I was gonna have to do the whiteboard thing and they never asked me one question about any kind of algorithm. Been on the team several years now and it's the best position I've ever had.
I'd probably need something like a 50 to 75% salary bump to consider leaving, and I would flat out refuse any whiteboard interviews. I always count myself blessed that I'm in the position where I can be selective. If I was desperate, I'd have to compete for them like everyone else.
Not at all what I was expecting!
Many fine employers are more disorganized in hiring, but that doesn't translate over to work.
I bluntly told him that I rejected the offer because of the horror stories regarding 5-7 interviews in Google.
The recruiter's reply was that it was ok of this was not an appropriate time for me , and that we would stay in touch.
How can they be so dense? Of course it may be that they are also just a cog in the machine and there is nothing they can do.
Any Severance fans?
This is really not how the Google interview process works. At least not as far as I know.
1) Each interview is only 1 hour
2) Usually it's 5 technical interviews (after you pass phone screening and the 2 initial remote interviews)
3) The team matching (unless you're applying for a specific position or under special circumstances) happens after you've passed all interviews and the hiring committee has approved you for hire
Source: hiring manager & hiring committee member.
So during my onsite, one of my interviewers turned up around 5+ minutes late and I realized a) I had no idea what to do about this as recruiter is not responsive b). There is nothing stopping the interviewer from just saying "the candidate is a no show. Rejected!"
That’s how I feel when I try to interview for an software engineering role.
Not to mention the first 6 months or so at a new job trying to figure out how the internal politics work. "Better the devil you know" and all that.
Stop interviewing at code assembly lines? There are loads of sane places to work at with sane interviews and great tech and pay. FAANG and similar are undergoing a slow rot. You’ll do fine.
4 different jobs I interviewed for. All of them were reasonable, the one I accepted had 3, 1 hour interviews, the questions asked were very reasonable, friendly, etc.
I dunno, maybe I'm lucky but I've avoided FAANG my whole career and only had good experiences in interviews.
If there's a good filter to avoid that nonsense I'd love to know what it is. Somewhere around a decade ago I interviewed with Apple and it was nowhere near as obnoxious as what I've seen so far.
ok i may be living in a bubble or something. where in the world is looking for work in tech a grind?
From the rest of your comments you seem pretty confident and specific about not having these problems, so I’m curious to know what’s in your secret sauce.
Also I like to see that engineering managers are the ones doing recruiting if it’s a company that is not Google sized, or at least a recruiter who specializes in engineering. I don’t trust that the “Head of talent” shares the same motivators that get me out of bed In the morning. An engineering manager might not either, but I feel safer betting in that direction.
My two cents, YMMV, mine certainly has
You meant to say when you interview for the wrong companies?
Google’s (and other leetcode nurseries) been steadily regressing. Not sure you want to be a part of it. Only idiots build sorting algos in 2022 let alone ask highschool questions about them. Keep hunting and grab some popcorn - it will be fun to watch.
Working at Google may be going down with the ship, but at least in the end you get to sail away on your golden life boat.
Not saying you have to join a non profit, just consider what you want to work on, who you want to work with, and the kind of hours you want to put in.
However, if you only focus on pay you drastically diminish your search space. No SV company is actually pushing the bounds of AGI research for example.
Even if they're at the "elite grand master SRE" level. Still a fraction of some MBA.
however there is nuance to everything. some people find 200k a year and living with flatmates in an expensive city rewarding. to each their own. i know i did. until it hit me.
Surgeon? Just spackling the same old organs day in day out, with the additional downside of potentially killing someone if you have an off day and place a brick upside down.
Professional football player? It's repetitive manual labor! Often performed outdoors in inclement weather. High likelihood of involuntary retirement due to workplace injury.
Executive? Staring at endless spreadsheets all day... With rows and rows of those brick-like rectangular cells...
All fun aside, I don't think many bricklayers could find it within themselves to complain about making 200k a year to work in jeans and a hoodie in an air-conditioned building with foosball tables and free snacks.
every MBA factory bases its metrics on the average compensation of alumni, and they're pretty pathetic in comparison
anyway, to the person above you, Google isn't top of the pack in initial comp package or upside, within tech
Most MBAs didn’t graduate from Harvard or Wharton or equivalent schools. They’re people who believed that there were high returns to the valuable skills they were going to learn instead of realising it’s a finishing school where you network. Graduates of the University of Northeastern Illinois’s business school are not going to do much better than FAANG software engineers. This holds more, not less for the members of the professions. The super rich people with JDs aren’t practicing lawyers.
Two of the best programmers I ever worked with I interviewed over the phone for an hour each and that was it.
Likely it’s an attempt to avoid all possible blame.
Bit overkill if you ask me
Incredible. So they all have to take vacation at the same time (and stick together too — the architect lays out the suitcase, the lead gathers the clothes, etc.)
- If they send me a leetcode or test before speaking to me, no thanks.
- If the job ad says anything about "culture", no thanks.
- If my first interview is with an HR person, no thanks.
- If the job ad or email mention anything about making a video of myself, I will delete that mofo with extreme prejudice.
- If the job application requires me to sign up to your website, no thanks.
I have 15 years of commercial experience. When I apply for a job, all I want is to speak to one technical person in the team that has oversight. If that is too much to ask then I'm just not throwing my name in that hat for the inevitable humiliation ritual.
But the reality is that (web-dev) jobs are over-saturated. There are plenty of people willing to go through this. Which is why I'm looking for a way out.
I always think of these as a sniff-test. They just want to see if you are a real person, who can speak and recite whatever is on your CV/resume. If in-person, that you shower and dress. That's it. If you can pass that stage, you're on to the more expensive interviews.
You would be foolish to not have that (very easy) chat with the Hr person just to progress
if you're talking to hr at stage 1, it just means the automated system validated your application has all the right keywords. its a red flag for me.
HR would do those to filter bullshitters, but also set expectations on culture, salary, work etc. If the person came from a huge bank and is joining a 50-people team, they need to understand the difference in work environments.
So I’d second other comments saying that I wouldn’t rule out a company just because HR is doing triage.
Edit: typo
But I also have no idea what to ask during them either. They always give their 10 minute spiel about what the company is, ask me to give my own 5-10 minute spiel about my work history, then ask if I have any questions. I give my 5-10 minutes of regurgitating my resume in sentence form, and then generally don't have any questions. what kind of questions would I have for HR during a first round interview that hasn't already been answered in a job posting or basic company research anyway?
This HR sniff test also serves to check for interest. When I interview, if the person has zero questions for me it means they don’t really care that much or weren’t paying attention. Questions mean you’re curious. A 10-minute speech about what the company is and the team does is not enough for you to understand the job and work, so follow-up questions are important. Also it lets the person know where your mind goes, what questions come up first, etc.
Just don’t brown-nose them and ask fake questions just to ask any :)
I do ask about the team I'll be working on, but that's basically it.
You're right that the 10 minute speech isn't enough. I'd even say it serves no value. Which is why it goes in one ear and out the other.
While I try to put on my fake HR face to hide it, I don't have interest. I'm a replaceable cog, and the company is a replaceable machine. But we all need money to live.
Tbh, if sounds like HR interviews want brown-nosing. Not in compliments or anything, but in asking the questions they expect you to ask, and faking your responses and enthusiasm to be just right to tickle their fancy.
I bet you’re making less than someone 2yrs out of school at a great company.
I'm a programmer. I trained for years to do that. Then I'm asked to hire someone. A task I have zero experience or training at. Spoiler alert - any actual competence is a fluke.
At my peak I was hiring maybe 2 or 3 people in a year. Mostly I hired people I'd heard about who came with a recommendation. Results varied. Most were OK, some were exceptional, some didn't last long.
Some companies are hiring tens, hundreds or thousands of people a week. Presumably they have full-time interviewers. But "good judgement" isn't a scaleable property, so you end up with filters and processes to try and narrow the field to "good candidates". Maybe thats "must have degree", maybe that's leetcode problems.
Hiring into a big company is painful. They have a process which probably makes no sense, adds little value, and appears to be arbitrary and doesn't lead to significantly different outcomes. But how else could it look? It's a sausage factory churning out sausages.
Hiring into a small company can be turgid - they're a small company but it seems like everyone there has to sign off on the interview first. They're scared of making a mistake, so they never seem to get to a decision.
Or it can be simple. There's one guy. He either likes you or not. He either thinks you can do the job or not. Takes an hour, and there's an offer on the table. But this guy hires 1 person every now and then, not 100 per week.
Hiring us hard [1]. It should be done by professionals. There should be degree programs training people how to do it. But even then, companies growing at severe pace may as well just pick every 3rd CV and save themselves, and applicants, a lot of time and effort. Yes it would be random, but you shouldn't hire unlucky people anyway.
[1] hiring for skilled people, where actual skills are hard to measure, to work in a team environment, where their output is disproportional to their rank, status of pay.
It's not much different than being a GM at a pro sports team and drafting and getting free agents.
Basically, do your homework, which I'm routinely surprised is so lacking in the adult world. For interviews, that means read their resume and probably have it with you in print form or other when you interview them. Print feels more sociable than staring at them over a laptop and clicking a bunch of keys while they talk - though I do type on video interviews.
The resume should somewhat align with the job they're interviewing for - that's on HR to get that far. Basically, I want to know if the person is going to be OK to work with and isn't full of shit. Hopefully you can get that much out of an interview because otherwise they aren't really that useful.
Basically I just ask a few normal interview questions mostly focusing on projects or accomplishments people have done. Cross reference with their resume and ask them about some points on it and make sure that their answers make sense. Ideally HR can verify that their work history at least matches their resume.
I never interviewed that much, but as far as I know, I never had any serious bozos let through, so I think I did OK.
The most offended I've been in an interview was a senior manager who, despite having had the interview rescheduled for his schedule - pushed up by a week - still had apparently never glanced at my resume until he was sitting across from me, and repeatedly misread details, which made things even more awkward.
I had spent probably 8 hours reading up about the company, the CEO, and this senior manager.
I really wish I hadn't needed the job as badly as I did, because otherwise I would have stood up and asked to be shown out the second it was obvious he was reading my resume for the first time. It was deeply insulting.
At my current job interviewer training is one of the mandatory (pretty sure it's the last one, but still) trainings as part of the onboarding process. It's a function of how distributed the interviewing process is, but even in a classical HR+hiring manager+team member process why wouldn't there be any training on what to do?
i like the approach, do you just outright ding someone due to the googling of answers offscreen?
I have interviewed a lot of people. Most of the time I can determine three questions in if someone is not a good fit. This is on a technical interview. I have never done an interview where someone blew, or gave middling answers to the first three questions, and then recovered. Also, I never gave an interview where the person hit the first three questions out of the park and then started flagging, in terms of technical answers any how.
In terms of people who did well on the first three questions but who did not get an offer, it was always due to "cultural" issues, and it was someone else (often the manager) who raised those cultural issues, with me sometimes disagreeing (for instance, my old manager thought someone was too arrogant, whereas I didn't mind).
They're ones I've asked before.
They are questions that have gotten some coherent response from about five out of six people, but generally only get a good, clear, robust response from one out of six people.
Usually they touch on different areas - I don't ask three questions about function parameters, I ask about very different topics, as theoretically they may be weak on one area and strong on another (although usually people have the same level of strength over all areas in my experience).
I don't really worry about asking the same questions to each candidate, since if they hit the ones I always ask out of the park but then struggle on ones I only sometimes, or rarely, or never ask, I would find that odd.
I might adopt questions to what they have on their resume, but generally it takes a while to adapt to a newer question. If we start using a new language more and an old language less, I probably will adapt questions to the new language and so on.
FROM: jobs@bubbleapp.com
DATE: October 5, 2022
Dear Applicant,
As you may be aware, the past three weeks have been a test. You have been “working” at a facsimile of our HQ staffed by trained actors.
As you may be aware, you have been drugged and transported to southern Mexico. Both of your kidneys have been removed. Now begins the practical portion of the interviewing process where we analyze your problem solving skills.
The most reasonable sounding answer I can come up with is that executives are balking at engineering pay and rationalizing it to themselves by demanding ever more from engineers even though the number of people who can pass all these hoops is not increasing. That's based on gut instinct however, so if anyone has some actual insight they could share it would be appreciated.
Mind you - not that I actually want them to do C) - but my point is that the law provides zero protection, the culture provides zero protection/accountability, and the only thing that provides anything is whatever weird bureaucratic nonsense the company has imposed upon itself.
My point being, companies have only themselves to blame for making it hard to fire people. Both companies I've worked for have fired really high-performing people for (these are my interpretations, but I do honestly believe they're the "real" reason all these folks were fired, and I was closely familiar with the details in all the situations I mention here):
Chronological order of my witnessing them over the years. Several different companies.
1. My boss didn't like how the guy thought. Literally, the guy got good results and wasn't weird or crazy or anything, but him and my boss always had kind of weirdly unproductive conversations. I liked the guy, personally.
2. He very loosely implied the owner of the company didn't know or like statistics. (Which was correct). This is while the owner of the company was trying to shove his nose way to deep into a system he had designed 20 years ago but had been away from, and in his absence the code and the industry had moved on. He got fired and a complicated statistical modelling system was replaced with one a high-schooler would've built.
3. He was a good performer but a bit brusque, but our newest boss was kind of lukewarm for him, so when my boss's boss's boss's boss decided he was the reason some project failed, he eye-of-sauron'd him and had him fired, and my manager didn't really step up to defend him.
These just off the top of my head. I've also seen droves of people fired essentially because the owner would hired 20-ish new-grad-type folks/early career, then over about a year fire all but 3-5 of them, and those who survived were then kept on for a more normal period of time. The de-facto 1-year trial period wasn't ever explicitly described to them (just a 60-day review that was just a rubber-stamp) or formal. People literally moved hours away (this job was unusually high-paying for our locale) and bought new houses and in some cases moved families (not all were early-career, that was just most of our funnel), only to be fired 1 month later for no (to them) apparent reason other than that they weren't in the small handful the owner decided to keep that year.
Really hard to feel sympathetic towards corporations of any size when being absolutely evil to common folk seems to just be how the game is played.
I was under the impression from the startup world and my won engineering experience that getting to market with a substandard product was always better than never releasing because you were aiming for perfection.
I wasn’t clear in my previous question but I don’t work at FAANG tier, I work at startups and enterprises who struggle to break 200 million/yr in revenue and offer 180k max for principal engineer positions. What I’m curious on is why all these bit players are acting like they need FAANG level talent without paying out the salaries, but more importantly, paying the cost of having this complicated an interview process.
Every position they leave unfilled is an opportunity cost and every extra step they add to their interview process is another few thousands of dollars they add to the acquisition cost of every engineer. I’m struggling to see what the benefit is for them when they do not operate on the scale that requires meticulous engineering
This is of course the extreme; I've worked with three people where this was the case. But in both cases I believe they seriously set back the product and didn't just squander the salary of these people. In less extreme cases, you are "merely" throwing away the salary, but that can be a high cost too for a small company.
Hiring people can absolutely come with a certain risk, especially if you're not prepared (or legally able) to fire people, or otherwise don't have good enough management to reign in people.
I can terminate team members with a couple of clicks in workday if I wanted. Seems overblown.
Let's take a hire that will make $10,000 per month, nice round number.
Someone in HR has to write the job description. This takes the HR person's time, the hiring manager, the hiring manager's boss just to get the information for a job description
Job description cost with hiring manager: $500 Job description cost with hiring manager's boss: $500 HR person's time to talk to hiring managers and to write the job description: $1000
Job board postings: $250
Headhunters if found through them: $30,000 (3 month's salary)
Corporate career page posting and social media posting of job description: $500
Interviewing with multiple people, even a few rounds: $5,000-$10,000
Hring temporary/freelance person to cover work to be done by permanent hire before new employee leaves prior job and starts with yours: $20,000
Filling out paperwork and miscellaneous expenses: $1,500
Employee takes 3 months getting up to speed and not really producing, but still being paid: $30,000
Employee decides the job is not a good fit for him or her and quits 9 months later: $90,000 wasted.
*Total cost to hire and then the person quits:* $184,250 wasted
Additional cost: cost of not getting work done because of hiring errors, that needs to be done: ???? you tell me. A lot.
So a company hires 50 people and 20 quit because the were not vetted propertly: that is $3,685,000 in wasted money. Now, realize that this $3,685,000 is in after tax dollars, so if the company's profit margin is 15%, it takes $24,566,667 in product and/or service sales to cover those wasted hiring expenses. Because those 20 employees were fired or quit, it will take another $24,566,667 in sales to cover the next round of hiring, or almost $50,000,000. If those new 20 hires, if 8 of them quit...well, the game goes on and on.
So, a company best be damn careful in one's hiring practices.
(numbers above might or might not be accurate, but it doesn't matter, that's not the point. The point is that it costs a lot of money to hire and then lose an employee after a short time period due to employee quitting, or getting fired for incompetence, anger issues, harassment problems, or whatever. Hiring highly paid employees is a dangerous game.
This is from the company's perspective, not yours. But if you started your own company, would you want to pay $50 million for bad hiring decisions? No. You would make double-damn sure there would be a lot of vetting processes.
And realize, this is not about you for anyone reading this. It's about the statistics over dozens of hiring decisions.
That's difficult to control, though, that's the problem. And especially if a company wants to hire 15 devs this quarter, who have the required skill set.
If you have a small company with 5 devs, and it hires 1, maybe 2 new devs over the course of the year and there's no real time frame on finding a new dev, you only hire when you find a good person, well, that is a different scenario entirely.
But like most things, that is only an ad hoc solution. What do you do, as the business owner asks the devs for referral and there are none? What do you do? You have to go to the open market. And as I wrote in my last post:"It's about the statistics over dozens of hiring decisions." So not just a hire here and there, but for a sytem.
I work a lot with people in the trades - electricians, plumbers, dry wallers, insulation installers, etc. Man, you think there's a shortage in devs??? Nobody, but nobody, is going into the trades anymore. There's no one to hire, no one to refer.
But if there are low raises, and 2 people quit because they are not getting paid enough, then the company hires 2 more people to replace them, that's going to be $350K to hire two new hires.
The one-word answer is: Greed. Never under-estimate the human capacity for emotion and character deficiency to get in the way of the rationally correct strategy.
I think my complicated answers are better. :)
Why would a company's operating expenses be in after tax dollars? The whole point of a "before tax" / "after tax" distinction is that operating expenses are before tax.
And the profit margin is not a constant. If you have a certain amount of revenue, and then your expenses go up... that means your profit margin has shrunk.
None of the costs you list would come out of profit, because... they are operating expenses. By definition, profit is what's left after they're covered.
It's next to impossible to figure out what you're trying to say, but my suggestion to you is to model some cash flows. Don't even think about a "profit margin".
> Employee decides the job is not a good fit for him or her and quits 9 months later: $90,000 wasted.
Interesting philosophy. By extension, if the employee decides the job is not a good fit and quits after 240 months, you just wasted $2,400,000.
So what I am saying is that one has to have real actual dollars to pay. So if a business makes $100,000 per year, and out of that is rent, utilities,etc, but not including the hiring expense, you have 15% profit margin, or $15,000 left over. So if hiring a person costs $2,000, then you lower your profit margins to $13,000, or 13%. So to keep the profit margin at 15% you have to make extra sales to cover that hiring expense. This is the same with all expenses, but I'm only focusing on the hiring expense. What I'm saying is that for each expense, extra income has to be generated to cover the expenses and hopefully get a profit margin that is acceptable. There's a cost to each dollar earned. You can't operate a business without a profit, and the more the profit the better, and the best is to protect profit margins. But as I said in my original post, I'm not getting technical and/or exact. I'm giving the overall view on it.
>>Employee decides the job is not a good fit for him or her and quits 9 months later: $90,000 wasted.
>Interesting philosophy. By extension, if the employee decides the job is not a good fit and quits after 240 months, you just wasted $2,400,000.
Amortization. Buy a car for $100,000 and keep it for a month and you wreck it (without it being insured), then that car costs you $100,000 per month, if you just drove it out of the lot and wreck it .25 miles after purchase. If you keep it 100,000 months, and you wreck it on the 100,000th month, then it costs you a dollar (ignoring MACRS for kicks).
Point being that after only 9 months, a company would not have got full value out of the hire because of the learning process, but hopefully after 240 months (20 years), a company should have had that employee up and running, but if not, that's yet another hiring/firing error.
Long and short of it in my opinion: You are taking this WAY too seriously. The point is that companies take a long, long time to hire someone because it is super expensive to make a mistake, in cash. I didn't even mention the morale issue of hiring a suck employee and other non-tangible costs. Do you agree with that or not? All the other stuff is just quibbling.
They were instructed to schedule 12 different meetings.
They declined assuming that they could probably get in interviews for several jobs in that amount of time / just didn’t want to deal with how much bureaucracy that seemed to indicate.
Once I interviewed for a company and everything was great but they said my rate was too high even though I had told them up front.
Once I showed up and the interviewer wasn’t even there and they hadn’t bothered to let me know.
Once a dude got me to propose and diagram an architecture for their actual system during the interview and I didn’t hear from them again. Swindled.
Then there’s having recruiters breathing down your neck and asking invasive questions while protecting all the details about the client and the job…
Yea. Done with it
I was told matter-of-factly that I was out of touch with my emotions and therefore couldn’t fit the team. To anyone who knows me, that’s basically the polar opposite of how I am. But, the ‘what if you’re wrong and are just oblivious?’ self-doubt circled for weeks. I can’t imagine what this sick joke of a psychology test would feel like for someone on the spectrum.
I definitely got the vibe from the recruiter that this step was maddening and unpredictable.
It's so easy to slip into trying to fit bizarre culture interviews that one may not realize what's highly unethical in the moment.
That way employees don’t want to go through the trouble and would rather just stay where they are, and will accept less pay than they could get.
It’s like a cartel and it works as long as everyone involved keeps up the gig.
It’s either that or interviews just suck and no matter what you do they will suck.
Or maybe interviews are just fine and people just need to accept they are stressful. If you can’t handle the stress, then build a good network with friends and relatives, and let a little nepotism make it easier. If you can’t do that then just accept you won’t get paid as much and your job might not be perfect.
Each round had one or more interviewers and I never met the same people twice. I can only assume none of them had context from the previous rounds because so many of the situational and culture type questions were basically identical. I couldn't even fake enthusiasm after the third round.
Moving forward I will kindly be declining participating in any interview process that has more than three rounds. Besides being draining, it's a pretty good indicator of bigger problems in the company itself.
A few days after I joined the company an engineer at my level was fired, allegedly due to his performance. His manager said that the hiring process had been improved to prevent that from happening again.
I instantly knew he was lying. The hiring process had actually been made more stupid because the company was struggling to attract engineers. I was actually the only candidate during the last few rounds of interviews.
I always wonder if they ever actually fill the position for which I was a candidate.
Unfortunately, this sounds dreadful and yet completely plausible. Pomodoros, or taking short breaks every once in a while, really are useful for avoiding stretching out tasks, though.
Maybe I’m not keyed in but is a 28 minute lunch normal?
I guess 25 on and 12 off gives 5:38 precisely. Interesting.
I thought a Pomodoros was one of those little dogs, I guess that is Pomoranian, but that's what my mind went to. So I thought that was some kind of cynical remark like dog years, but short Pomorian dog cycles that dogs have during the day that I didn't know about. Just some throw-away remark by the author that it was measured by some dog cycle that I didn't know about. Arf.
In the end there was one extra interview (after the three they told me about beforehand), but that was because my requested salary was higher than the company expected, so they wanted to make sure I was a good fit.
EDIT: Those companies also scheduled all interviews for the same day. This way I could receive the offer/rejection within less than one week.
I cannot do that anymore because I have a kid.
E.g. if individuals cannot be judged, could it be easier to hire entire teams? This would reduce the control that a company has over their software because the knowledge is gone if the team abandons the contract. So, could software be structured and documented to the extend that leaving teams are not a problem? And if so, would it be feasible to create enough software teams and software managed by teams that there is a working market?
This is what I did and it worked well for me. Before doing that I never went through interviews that had more than 3 rounds.
Certainly before big tech agreed not to poach from each other once upon a rime, but now I wonder if this is a lower grade version of this?
My take-away: After 3 interviews start to ask yourself if maybe decision making is broken in this company. After 5 its a red flag.
The company seems utterly without process or clear understanding of what/who they are trying to hire - basically incompetent. Why work for an incompetent company?
I'd rather start my own company and take the risks and rewards of that instead.
"An Enneagram test and one-on-ones with nineteen different people in H.R. A fajita lunch, some improv games, and a Ping-Pong tournament, after which you will be evaluated on our five-dimensional Work Hard, Play Harder assessment matrix. A ninety-minute walk-and-chat around our man-made lagoon with our C.E.O., Benji, and Benji’s dog, Mr. Rex. (Mr. Rex will “interview” you with his barks!)"
everything was pretty believable except 19 different people in HR. Would've been better just saying "19 different people". Because sometimes it feels like that!
I am not saying this would work for everyone, just noticing the interesting symmetry that when you find a job by networking instead of applying directly through the front door, the interview cycle is also long, but it is more about learning and adapting to the other than a high stakes set of judgements.
They actually hire H1B visa workers or contractors to churn out the code solely based on cost.
So you might get screwed even if you don’t play these games.
I've only recently finished my undergrad in CS and am still working on my CS masters but despite doing well in school I felt like an absolute failure after every interview.
It's somewhat comforting to hear this is a common occurrence.
I strongly recommend you consider looking around for any small, cool tech companies in your area. Ask among your professors, look for local slack/discord groups, etc.
I once interviewed at a small AI company. The CTO had a Ph.D. (from MIT!) in Really Tough AI Stuff. He was supported by some of the best programmers in Really Tough AI Stuff. The last round was the multi-hour one. I had to do a couple of different programming challenges, which I think I did all right in. Then I was subjected to multiple rounds, by the CTO and his supporting developers, of Really Tough AI questions. I wasn't trained for this, plus I was nervous and worn out and really off my game, so I tended to open my answers with "I know I'm probably getting this wrong, but..." and then pretty much spitball a guess.
They were kind enough to provide feedback! They said "We really liked your answers and we think you have all the right skills, but you didn't seem very confident, so we're going to have to pass."
I probably had to be a psychopath in order to get that job, at least without a postgrad degree in Really Tough AI Stuff.
This very large e-commerce and cloud services company did the same to me in 2007, except it was C syntax.
Yeah, it's okay. I got the message already.
I had only one interview.
I showed up unscheduled, and uninvited. And I immediately got an offer at the end of it (pending background check).
I’ve been there for over 16 years now.
At some point in the future there'll be a turn and we'll go back to an hour with the hiring manager.
Is there really such a high supply of startup workers?
I never saw a lawyer saying "everyone should become a lawyer".
Actually it reminds me of an experience I haven't thought about in years, though not quite the same thing: Fresh out of college I was in a job I hated and desperate to find anything else. I found something advertised as, I think, a marketing job and got called in for an interview. When I arrived there were a dozen other people in the parking lot and the recruiters were ushering us all into a large passenger van where they said we'd split up along the way to some big box stores an hour or two away and be doing some type of soliciting. Donations? Selling crap? I don't know. I'd signed up for an interview, not whatever the hell this was supposed to be. I noped out of that real fast, just turned around and walked away.
Wow, I don't think I've remembered that for 20 years. Anyway yeah, there are definitely some interview practices that should send a up visions of a truck full of red flags crashing into a truck full of "Warning!" signs as they explode outwards from the collision. And then you only walk towards the flaming wreck if you're a dozen kinds of desperate and the drivers crawling out of the debris are waiving paychecks.
How many rounds should I expect, and for how long?
However it just gets tiring.
I'm actually going to be at a 7 hours total of interviewing with one company. 5 hours total with another (in addition to recruiter calls) and possibly even more.
The thing is I know my worth, and this is actually a feeling the market round for me, so I'm not stressed at all. But I have done interviews where I spent 4 hrs writing some mock react app as a take-home, then another 4 hours of interviews, and those really get to me, they killed an evening for me. Those are the worst.
Point is... Interviewing suuuucks when you're some of the highest paid employees in the company.
Some hints I want to give for people interviewing:
1) Start the convo with salary expectations. Otherwise you spend 6 hours and find out its too low. I made this mistake. Don't be me.
2) Level set on seniority level and what would it take for you to leave your current job. If you despise your job, okay I can see this being quick, if you do not you're gonna be looking for potential negotiating power.
3) Enjoy the interview. Literally people want you to blabber on about yourself for 4 hours. Shit I could not think of a better way to get my cabin fever out of the way.
Make this A LOT EASIER ON YOURSELF: make sure you know your talking points. Know your core stories you fall back to for all sort of behavioral questions. I'd say do 10 trial interviews, after about 10 you get REALLY good at this, then interview for the jobs you really really actually care about. If you can, conduct as many interviews as possible at work. Sit in them. Lead them. The more you conduct the easier you can interview for someone else. Its like free practice!!!! Best part, the thing you look for... the other side looks for when they interview you!!!
4) Brush up on a little bit of leet code, but also know how to take your time. Being able to ace the technical interview is a great way to go. Startups tend not to offer leet code because they can't be that picky. The best interviews are things like "did you read the code?!?!?!" "did you read the data structure?" "can you approach a technical problem well or do you get lost?" "can you debug?"
How to ace technical interviews: interview a friend. What would YOU look for from a technical person? What helps you decide "wow this person really knows how to code" from "this person has memorized leet code questions". Then do that exact thing. Show them you understand trade-offs, you don't have to implement them but show you know about them, talk about ways your code could have been better if you had more time, learn to structure / attack problems in a modular way. All that makes you look GOOOOOOOD.
5) Make it a fun convo. Think of the interview as a date. Both of you want different things, but ultimately both of you want to show eachother a good time. So show them a good time, and let them show you a good time. You get people talking about their projects and fun technical challenges (if you ever interview with an architect). Remember, people LOVE TO TALK ABOUT THEMSELVES. If they do, they feel good. Make sure to answer what they need to make a decision and then throw in some happy they talk about their stuff into the mix.
In any case. Make the interview fun, and long interviews turn out to be a fun time to hang out with new people and get cool short conversations going. And make a fuckton of money from it :)