Hacker News Reader

Comment by PebblesHD | Hacker News Reader

These styles of multi-round interviews inspired by the FAANG collective started picking up in Australia before the pandemic, but it got to a point where most of my more talented colleagues and I all agreed it just wasn’t worth the time for the salaries being offered. 4 round interviews for a ‘senior’ developer position on $120k?

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.

View on HN

> We have a probation period to work out if they’ve over-promised

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.

Valid question. By that I mean if were looking for someone with experience in X, Y, and Z, we’ve had situations where applicants have done enough research to have a conversation about X but not have any practical or troubleshooting experience with it, which we needed. The probation period means we don’t need to grill someone on every aspect of the role, instead we can focus on the absolute core of what we need and specify the rest in the JD, and if someone claims to know it we can safely take their word with minimal risk of committing ourselves if they can’t then pick it up in a few weeks.

If they said in the interview they’re very comfortable with Vue.js and Postgres, and then you find out after a few weeks that actually they barely know Vue or Postgres, they actually come from a React/SQLite background, they’ve overpromised.

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.

> 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.

I agree with the other poster. The possibility of ending up unemployed is a bit stressful here.

What percentage of people get let go within 90 days?

For us, it’s a tiny fraction. I’ve hired around 30 engineers over 5 years and we’ve let go of 2 during probation, both for dramatically overstating their capabilities compared to their actual experience, to such a degree that it was clear it was done intentionally and with no effort to try and bridge the gap with learning during the period. Others who may have slightly embellished their skills but could learn as they went turned out fantastically, and I feel like those sorts of hires would not make it through the multi-round grillings satirised in the article.

That number might be low enough that there is no need to emphasize the probation period to candidates.

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.

The poster is in Australia which has a different set of employment practices than America. Every company in Australia talks about the probation period. During probation it is basically like America at-will employment. After probation it is harder to get rid of staff with legal standards on dismissal periods, redundancy pay, and so on.

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 like that approach now more that you said that. It's very true, many will surprise you for various ways, and would never survive the absurd interview gauntlet and tests.

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.

> The possibility of ending up unemployed is a bit stressful here.

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.

Find me an engineer who knows both vue.js and Postgres and they’re worth their pound of salt. And, if you’re differentiating against React and SQLite - e.g. they’re not familiar with JSONB style queries or CTEs, but instead have some alternative, par familiarity with another db… and the same level of sophistication with an FE stack - e.g usage of useRef vs forwardRef… and you cut them loose… well, they’ll probably be going on to a better position at another company.

Vue / Vuetify / Nuxt dev here, and a pinch of php. I used to work with some Postgres in a previous job.

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.

Vue / C# / Postgres / AWS / Linux Sysadminery here.

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

Hello, please deliver the salt.

Of course "knows" is not that precise. Postgresql is vast and complex.

And anyone should be able to learn a new framework/tech stack in a week anyway.

Unless it's asp or laravel. Then it is two weeks in which you have to be constantly drunk.

Wow, that is...really sane

I would expect any halfway decent hire with real React and SQLite experience to be able to pick up survival level Vue and PG within those 90 days though? At the end of the day JS is JS and SQL is SQL, particularly if you're a dev and not a DBA. You'd have a problem if they (say) have never touched a database before.

I’ll side with you. I lead a big team, but also an employee myself, I find probation period a very uncomfortable concept. There is no promises in interviews. You ask your questions, you get your answers, you make your decisions. If your questions ask for promises to make your decision easier, you are doing it wrong. From my perspective, any hire that ends up with negative probation outcome should be marked against interviewers performance. We are people, working with people with families, obligations, dreams. We have to let that sink in our thinking rather than take cover behind corporate policies, procedures, legislation etc.

I can absolutely see this position, for me it’s more a case of protecting ourselves against the rare but increasing occasions of candidates actually making misleading claims. As I’ve said in a sibling comment, for me I like to be able to take basic skills at face value, and focus on core competencies. If someone can learn the skill during probation, that’s totally fine.

To me it seems simpler to just let someone go if they're not working out after 90 days; no need to tell every new hire that they're "on probation".

To be fair to the original poster, in Australia, whether you tell every new hire or not, they are still on probation legally in terms of employer obligations, so it is good to tell if you want to establish clarity, and follow appropriate procedures in terms of setting goals and keeping them up to date as end of probation nears to avoid vagueness and stress. Depending on size of hiring organisation, probation is 6 months for big organisations and 12 months for smaller ones.

Yeah clearly there are a ton of Americans responding to that point.

It is funny they don't want to call it "probation" because Australian probation is just every job in America.

Probation is a legal term that has implications like you can let someone go for no reason. Most places don't have zero worker rights like the US does.

Where I live there is almost always 30-180 days probation period and then the contract turns into permanent. Usually not a big deal.

Leaving a fulltime position becomes a gamble.

It's always a gamble to some degree.

Not when you are not working.

Usually during this period you can also leave at will. I think it is in law that the contract should be symmetrical for both sides. The system seems to be working ok-ish.

And that is why you actually need a decent reason to leave. Be it money, seemingly better culture or more interesting work.

In our case, we try and be very upfront about the nature of the process and that it works both ways, i.e. if they find the workplace isn’t for them, then theres no hard feelings either. It’s part of Australian workplace law so whether we mention it or not it is going to apply, so we make sure its not something hidden that might surprise someone.

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.

But is it better than the alternative, that’s the current system of multi-round interview that takes months because companies try to avoid a wrong decision?

If I was unemployed yes but if employed you are taking a big risk.

I’ve hired developers who ended up lacking experience in something that they claimed they had experience in, but they hunkered down and quickly learned the technology. That’s fine. honestly, I’d say that if you don’t slightly exaggerate experience in interviews you’re doing them wrong. It’s when someone outright lies and then fails to actually learn what they’ve said they know that’s the problem.

As another datapoint, this is also pretty standard in Japan. However Japan's school-to-salaryman hiring pipeline is built around the idea that you're not changing jobs, and after the 3-month probationary period (though it can vary by company) you basically become unfireable and are expected to be at that company for life.

In the more western culture of recognising that company loyalty is severed both ways, a probationary period makes much less sense.

> 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).

I don't like having one interview with one interviewer. That can easily result in that interviewer having a bad day or simply being biased and costing someone a job.

Even in a panel or multiple round interview, it usually only takes one no to end the process for the candidate. So I don’t see how this is any worse.

For one, this one only requires the candidate to provide an hour of their time, which for me is the main reason I personally avoid multi-round interviews.

Agreed, it can also be uncomfortable for persons not of the same gender as the interviewer, so I always take a second person and try to ensure we always have a mix of men and women scheduled as that other person depending on who we’re interviewing to minimise the single point of me/another manager having a bad day.

That'd be a problem if there'd be a shortage of interesting jobs.

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.

Depends.

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.

I’m all for probation periods. I think this is where the industry should go. Before I got hired at my current job, I think I went through around 20 hours of total interviews at several companies. I got to the final round three times for three separate companies, but they always found a reason to say no at the end. At my current company, I’m thriving and people constantly tell me so. It really makes me wonder if those other companies had just given me a chance, how much I would’ve thrived there. Really just a waste of time for everyone in the end.

The industry is trying to optimize for avoiding opposite. How many more hours wasted for a candidate that is sub-par? 20 hours? That’s not even a single probation period. Must be hundreds of hours spent per candidate, and I can easily imagine 5 subpar candidates in a row. A colossal waste of time.

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.

Wait, you say waste everyone’s time and advocate for probation period?

Are you serious right now?

In the old day, salary may be increased after probation if the performance is better than expected. I don't know why this practice fades out in my country.

> We have a probation period to work out if they’ve over-promised

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.

That’s just not the case in the Australian market. Contractors generally receive a higher rate of pay in exchange for an ongoing risk that they won’t be renewed, and are generally used to fill temporary skills gaps for projects and such. Permanent roles are expected to be for ongoing work, but that still leaves a risk of a bad hire as our labour laws are quite strict in terms of how you can terminate a permanent employee, which is what our probation laws cover, as it encourages employers to take risks with potentially under qualified candidates or be less prone to these sorts of 20 hour long 10 stage interviews to eliminate the possibility of a bad hire at the expense of wasting countless hours for even a good hire.

On the balance, I prefer the probation approach as it makes life easier for everyone.

I disagree. Some of my best jobs were contract to hire positions. The interviews are much more humane because the company isn't so worried about making a hiring mistake.

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.

Read OPs comment again, they're in Australia, so you should not apply out of place American logic and labour "laws".

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’m sorry, what are typical pays for a junior engineer (Say, JS and Java?), a medium and a senior?

Depends which section of the industry you end up in, but in the big banks which are some of the largest java shops, a cadet/intern will end up around $45k, a junior around $55-65k, an ordinary dev around $80-90k, and a senior anywhere from $115-$150k but weighted toward the lower end. Then of course there’s the rest of the buzzword fleet, DevOps engineers are a bit of a premium on those figures, architects the same.

I am seeing interns joining at 90k+ atm and you can extrapolate but on a <45deg angle from there. I even know a junior (<2yr experience) at 140k, not any kind of superstar but lucky I guess. Are you talking Aussie market? Maybe for entrenched big java teams that are reluctant to restructure their compensation for the whole team. I’d advise anyone to look at newer teams that can accommodate market rates easier.

I ran a bunch of interviews over the last couple of years, in some (reasonably rare) cases I saw quite junior candidates with only a year or two experience who scored very strongly on our technical interviews -- not at a senior level but as a solid intermediate level hire. I suspect if that candidate gets a junior or intermediate grade offer for salary may depend quite a bit on how strong their negotiating position is.

Yep Australian market. The numbers I’ve talked about above are what I’d classify as ‘normal’, there are of course always exceptions, and I’ve been fortunate enough to exist outside these ranges for most of my career, but ultimately I left the banks a few years ago for better prospects.

Just to be clear, are we talking about AUD$ or USD$? (Asking as an ex-FAANG who is preparing for job hunting in Sydney)

$AUD. These numbers are your run of the mill salaries seen around the industry, someone with specialised experience such as an ex-FAANG engineer might be more likely to end up at the higher end, but in general outside of a few local unicorns the salaries aren’t that impressive save for a few exceptions for top talent. It’s a real shame since everything else in Sydney is so expensive…

You can certainly hit AUD 200k (including superannuation) as a senior software engineer at one of the big australian banks. To go much higher you probably have to stop being an IC and start being an engineering manager. Or stop being a permie and start being a contractor.

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).

Can you say any company names? I’m an ex-FAANG eng in Sydney currently considering options.

Canva, Square, AWS, Atlassian, Palantir, Google.

If you’re senior ex-FAANG you can easily get $250+

$300+ is probably staff level and above.

Surprised to see Square and Canva in the list there. I’m currently staff level elsewhere but semi-regularly get approached by them with offers lower than $200k for senior roles. Would you say the salaries mentioned are fairly common there or fairly niche?

They would be very rare unless he’s talking total compensation (inc. super, stocks, bonuses) at the larger companies. Even then I’d expect the average to be low $200k for a senior depending on how they define senior.

What does super mean in this context? Thanks

In Australia, we have compulsory employer contributions to a retirement account called superannuation. Similar to the American concept of a 401k but mandatory.

Day-rate contracting can get you very close if the last minute renewals are something you can deal with. The telcos are currently going through a hiring period and I’ve seen 1250/day plus super offered a few times recently. For perm roles, it’s certainly much harder, and I’ve only seen one IC role offered in market at over $220k at the firms I’ve worked at, but the flip side is I’ve seen a few higher ones offered to recommended candidates off market.

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.

> 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?

If it's anything like Europe, presenting at meetups and contributing to industry-relevant open source software opens doors both for hiring and being hired.

It's a lot of work though.

As sibling comment says, meetups and conferences are a great way to get your name out there. Working closely with vendors when the opportunity comes up in your organisation can also help build a relationship and reputation if managed properly. Anything to establish yourself as a person of some authority in the area such that when a need is identified, your name comes up as a ‘we should see if x is looking around’

Job boards can still give decent results? They just don't give you the best possible results and have a lot of real trash (sorry, employers, but offering 70k for someone with 4 YOE in software is a not-so-amusing joke and I shudder to think of what working for you is like).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com