Hacker News Reader

Comment by yrgulation | Hacker News Reader

> but at least I don't have to go through yet another life draining and de-humanizing interviewing process.

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.

View on HN

I've never even interviewed at a FAANG. I've interviewed at like a dozen companies throughout my career, across all sorts of different businesses. All of the interview processes I've been through were awful.

How come? Genuine question. I interviewed at a company once. They asked me to do some funky stuff with some hex css colours, many many years ago. After i proudly failed they said thats what their buddy was tested about at google. Company went under and didnt shed a tear over not joining. Truly a waste of time. Later found a similar “test” in a high school cs “olympiad” book under a different name and context.

How come I went through those interviews? Because I needed a job, and almost every company is horrible at interviewing, so you just kind of have to deal with the hazing ritual. Unless you manage to get really lucky.

Sorry, i meant how come they all had horrible interviews. Silly phrasing and anecdoting on my part. You indicated “hazing”. What happened? Anyway no need to answer. I’ll do an instagram reply on you: the ocean is deep. There’s room for everyone. Learn anything you can from failure and move on.

Admittedly, I'm doing devops/sre interviews, but I just changed jobs for the first time in 5 years.

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.

I've been doing the look for work grind off and on for a few months. I've had one okay, one great (Render), a couple comically bad, and then a bunch of leetcode type places… for an SRE role. The best of the leetcode fans actually had the self-awareness to ask why I declined the interview request. One recruiter begged me to go through with it because they were working hard on getting an exemption for SRE hires so it wouldn't matter if I passed. One of the worst was a company that's been posting on HN for nearly a year looking to fill a bunch of spots, I can't imagine why they've been looking for so long…

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.

> I've been doing the look for work grind off and on for a few months.

ok i may be living in a bubble or something. where in the world is looking for work in tech a grind?

I probably have a lower tolerance for bullshit both compared to my younger self and compared to most other people. So it's not just the effort of filtering out ridiculous job postings – I'm not going to work for a blockchain equipped, NFT based dog therapy app company, nor do I share your passion in bringing social media to defecation tracking, etc. Now I'm spending some time and landing right into the leetcode queue. Or going through a decent interview process only to get met with a hiring freeze. The whole process is just tedious.

Nuance is everywhere. We all have filters and goals and its important to apply them. If the leetcode queue will get you where you want then thats best. As a matter of principle i dont like it, because i think its too junior - no insult intended. Usually the types of companies that employ this interview technique also suffer from hiring freezes now and then. I skipped all that and went for the go getters. Can you do it? Sure if you pay enough.

The first time I looked for a job, it took about 11 months. 11 months of learning about companies that I'm not interested in just so that I can pretend to be excited to join them, pretending to be interested in the field they're in, of practicing leet code questions, of being asked to redo my resume in a specific way, of being asked to build web apps and do code challenges before being able to have a discussion with someone in their IT team, of showing up at interviews where a recruiter oversold my profile, and so on...

Is there some magical keyword or ‘tell’ that you’ve zeroed in on and want to share with the rest of us when looking at a job ad to tell if it’s a “code assembly line” or not before applying?

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.

I don’t have magic to share and certainly have taken on bad jobs I regretted signing on to, but for one, I always look for some degree of humanized speech in the job listings. So what I mean by that is not so much fluff about how great the company is and how big the mission is, and more about “we’re looking to add X people who are good at Y”. But most of all, just simply job descriptions that feel like they weren’t churned out by a machine trained to hunt for “3 years of python”.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com