Comment by sbuccini | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sbuccini | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks to the author for taking the time to write this up. I think it is a fairly realistic description of what the process is like for an engineer who has spent several years working in Silicon Valley at a well-known company.

The key takeaways, coming from someone with a similar background:

* Rely heavily on your personal network to both identify worthwhile opportunities and for referrals which, in the Before Times, pretty much guaranteed an interview

* It's worth thinking through what type of job would make you happy _before_ you get an exploding offer

* They had a _full_ pipeline, interviewing every day for three weeks straight. It's a grind, but you definitely get "in the zone". Additionally, setting this goal ensures that you are being properly proactive/aggressive in pursuing opportunities.

* You will probably see a design interview at any FAANG or hot startup. The classic one I've seen like 5 times is "how would you design a social media feed?" I still do not know the "correct" answer to this question.

I don't have hard evidence for this but it seems that the demand is still very strong for experienced engineering managers. I am curious to hear if the author interviewed for SWE positions or engineering manager positions have they have filled both roles in the past.

> * They had a _full_ pipeline, interviewing every day for three weeks straight. It's a grind, but you definitely get "in the zone". Additionally, setting this goal ensures that you are being properly proactive/aggressive in pursuing opportunities.

As a married man nearing his 40s I can't imagine doing this. I need to keep my full time job to support my family, so just quit and focus 100% on prepping is not an option. Assuming a 5 1-hour round interview, I would need to take PTO or somehow juggle my calendar to take interviews. I'm horrified at the thought of taking one week off and doing interviews for 5 days straight. I guess I'll cross that bridge when I get there.

> As a married man nearing his 40s I can't imagine doing this. I need to keep my full time job to support my family, so just quit and focus 100% on prepping is not an option.

That’s by design. Most places don’t want people like you. They want pliable, naive employees who will kill themselves for the company and not count their hours.

I've done a 5 1-hour round interview once, and have refused to do them since- including actively turning down a second interview when the process wasn't clear prior to the initial screener call. I've the good fortune of pretty much being able to pick and choose between jobs, but I also essentially have written off working at a FAANG and at companies run by former or wannabe FAANG engineers.

Fortunately, there are still lots of good startups, small and medium sized companies that pay well and actually respect your time.

What was your ideal interview experience that you also considered to be very effective?

Personally, 30–60 min HR screen/people stuff and 1h tech interview, with maybe an other hour or two of paid take home assignment.

Along with past experience on CV this should be enough to assess whether a candidate is suitable for the 3 or 6 months probation employment.

If after all this you still can’t decide whether the candidate is a match and worth keeping permanently post probation, your hiring and working processes are seriously broken. I don’t understand then need for multiple, hours long, dozen interviewers processes.

To respond to both you and the sibling comment, a short take home assignment which is used to guide a final interview is fine for junior positions.

For senior positions, I would rather spend an hour or two talking through hypothetical scenarios, including design decisions and teamwork. I want to hear deeper knowledge from a candidate, not "do they know valid syntax and are they able to solve trivial problems".

As in all things, it depends on the company that is doing the hiring and the role they are being hired for. In some cases, "senior" roles are basically individual contributors with a few years of experience. In others, a senior should be able to translate business requirements into a big picture technical solution, break down the portions of the stack they are familiar with, and explain what assumptions are made and what unknown factors need to be sussed out in order to plan a proper implementation.

The latter portion is difficult to do with a take home assignment without careful planning for the follow-up interviews. 5 hour round-robin interviews typically (in my experience) end up being "live leet code" sessions that don't represent day-to-day work at all.

I think the problem these days is that it’s so hard to fire someone. I’m not sure if it’s legal, cultural or otherwise, but I constantly see coworkers who are at best useless and often detrimental being kept on and on and on.

So the game becomes to avoid hiring someone like that at all costs, because once they are hired they are impossible to get rid of.

I wish employment was more like contracting - you give someone a trial for a few weeks and then end it it’s not a mutual fit. No long interview necessary - the job is the interview.

Maybe a little more tricky in Europe, but in US and Canada, all you have to do is pretty much “this isn’t working, you failed your (unachievable as needed) PIP, you’re out in two weeks”. In some states you apparently don’t even have to pay accrued but unused vacation..!

Unless the person is truly a net negative producing programmer - firing, hiring (1-2 month process), onboarding, and then hoping they don't job hop tends to be even more expensive for an organization than having them plod away slowly.

If they are a NNPP, gathering the necessary documentation and putting them on a PIP or shuffling them to another team is likely an easier path.

That’s a fair point. I think it’s interesting that the bar for getting a job is so high, while the bar for keeping your job is so low.

I think what might be happening is a vicious feedback loop of

* companies hiring too many smart engineers

* those engineers are in turn very bored and don’t have much to do so they check out

* not much gets done so more people get hired to do more stuff.

The high bar is a combination of several factors.

First, many more applicants than positions. If you've got 100 for a single position, then selecting the best 10 out of that set will look like a high hiring bar when it is 'just' a "we don't have time to interview everyone." And many positions get many more than 100 applicants per position.

Next, the aspect of job hoping that has become fairly common in the past decade. If the average tenure of the person hired in the last 10 years is decreasing because the person can get paid more by switching companies then the other side of the push will be to raise the bar so that the new hire will require less onboarding and be able to be productive faster. If the company is using Kafka in house, and it takes two months to really get to the point of understanding it and the person leaves after a year, that's two months lost. So, instead hire someone who understands it and only requires a week to pick up the peculiarities here so that when they leave in a year you haven't lost a portion of the time getting them familiar with the tech stack.

Lastly, it is a pain to fire someone. You need documentation about their issues and that it is performance related and that its not done during a 30 day window where they've fired 49 other people and that HR is ensuring that they've got the CYA on a wrongful dismissal documented. And then, even when you do fire someone, you've got to go back and reopen the position and hire again and that takes two months from the time you submit the job description to HR to starting a new person along with at least a week of manager and interviewer time in the process.

The safest thing for a company to do is move them over to a team that does low priority, low impact things and never promote them in an engineering capacity. Note that sometimes when you move a person from a dev job to a QA or operations job you'll get the person coming back with constructive dismissal which takes time to handle.

Isn't the USA (including California) entirely at-will employment, so it's not hard to fire anybody at all?

Theoretically yes. In practice every big company has a large amount of self-imposed process around firing to minimise the risk of lawsuits.

As an engineering manager on multiple projects, my calendar is jam packed. My developers who are on one, or at most two projects have their calendars fairly empty (which is a good thing). I had folks who took many interviews within a short time span and I had no clue at all. I barely have time to take a lunch break.

Yes - I can manage my calendar better, but then people would get suspicious, or I'd be worried some emergency comes up.

When I used to interview, I'd just start having more "doctor appointments" or what not and block off a few hours. Also, these were back in the days of going on-site for interviews. My engineers who quit did it all remotely, even the final round (covid times...) so it's more manageable.

You need to actively prune your calendar. Regardless of whether or not you want to interview for a job. If you entire working day is filled with meetings, you will not have the time to actually do good work as manager that only you can do. It's probably worth your while to block off 2-3 hours of your work day for individual contributor work (say thinking/working about strategy or product or engineering roadmap.) Just go out to the local coffeeshop. Invite other mangers occasionally to join you. You just use that time to become strategic about your work. When the the time comes to interview, nobody will notice that you've not been around for a few hours. CEOs routinely do this when they have to take sensitive meetings. They are not usually in their offices most of the day.

"doctor appointments" are also great for refusing full day of interviews. I have used that technique before. Or "I need to visit a friend/relative in hospital". They back-off immediately.

Note that the person in this article (a) wasn’t working at the time and (b) deliberately wanted a lot of interviews to explore their options. I think it pretty obviously isn’t the only way to do things.

One needn’t interview at so many companies. If one is in no rush to quit then just spread interviews out over a much longer time.

You can take vacation or save some money before quitting.

Or just do a few interviews per week while working like most people.

Quitting your job to focus full time on prepping for the tech interview had a good ROI during the fever dream market of 2021 and 2022. I'm not so sure that's true anymore. At the very least it has an inherent risk (dwindling savings and not getting a good offer). Right now I'm more risk averse so I'd follow the tortoise approach by interviewing little by little overtime.

A pity since the TC game is played by pitting companies against each other in a bidding war. I guess I'll have to figure out my strategy when the time comes.

sorry kids, no Disneyland this year, I used up my vacation days back in Feb when I interviewed for a week straight

>> sorry kids, no Disneyland this year, I used up my vacation days back in Feb when I interviewed for a week straight

As a kid, I went to Disneyland exactly zero times. There are hasher realities for many.

“Thanks for accepting our offer. When would you like to start?”

“Well my notice expires at my current job in two weeks but I’d like to take a short break in between to decompress / spend time with my family.”

“Obviously we’d like to have you as soon as possible but we don’t want to keep you from your family. How about six weeks from now?”

“Works for me.”

Obviously different companies/roles will be differently flexible and bigger companies will be more tolerant of delaying start by longer. And you can only do that if you get a job offer somewhere. But the parent comment wasn’t even suggesting taking holiday to interview for a week straight right?

Given the choice of being able to take little Timmy to Disney world and providing him food and shelter and being able to cash flow him through college, he will get over it.

Before you respond that I don’t know what it’s like juggling a family and I must be a fresh college grad, the 74 in my username has significance

Woah! 74 kids. That's crazy!

As someone that comes from humble backgrounds from a third world country, i went on 0 vacations. All the money was put in for education, food , clothing and shelter.

Okay but what did you spend your other 5 weeks of vacation on?

> The classic one I've seen like 5 times is "how would you design a social media feed?" I still do not know the "correct" answer to this question.

There is no "correct" answer to it. It is an investigation into how you break the problem down and approach it. When presented with a challenge to it, how do you then look at it and consider how to solve it.

The Codeless Code - Case 83 Consequences http://thecodelesscode.com/case/83?topic=interviews

There sort of is though, right? At a meta level, making sure you touch on the points they want you to touch on ("is this workload read heavy or write heavy?", "fan out vs fan in", "eventual consistency") is a right answer that you phrase in the form of a series of questions designed to look as if you've never been asked the question before, yeah?

I'd the interviewers are competent (rare), then there are a dozen or more right answers, and getting 2 or 3 of them is passing.

> They had a _full_ pipeline, interviewing every day for three weeks straight.

I honestly think I'd be physically incapable of doing this. I'm on the HSP side and even a single set of interviews is enough to drive me into an insomnia/anxiety cycle for weeks. I can't even imagine what this would be like for me. Albeit I admit it's the best way to get the job you want. Maybe I'm in the wrong industry...

This is incredibly common. I hate running interviews - we do the leetcode whiteboard pressure cooker crap - it's a policy I have no say in unfortunately. I've had candidates with strong backgrounds go to pieces right in front of me - it's awful to watch and I hate that I had anything to do with making someone experience that.

More people than you might imagine take Xanax to get through interviews.

I don’t know whether it’s more disturbing that our interview process is structured so that Xanax is necessary in the first place, or that so many people in the comments jump in to say what a great idea it is…

I had the same thoughts. Some people need various kinds of medication, and that's fine.

But if a normally functioning person needs to start Xanax for the purpose of getting through (let's admit it) a power-play hazing ritual that has little to do with the job, then maybe that person and the rest of us should go tell those companies to take a hike. The EEOC should, as well.

Someone posted on HN recently that they slowly drink wine from a mug during remote interviews to calm themselves. People also recommended a light beta-blockers (which are incidentally used to cheat in some concentration sports like bow+arrow shooting). It sounds like a good strategy.

Don't do it, unless you are also under surveillance? Say yes and then run your block more humanely.

Or if there is some freedom around questions pick something that can be worked through. The worst are questions where if you don't know the algorithm or data structure there is no way to work it out from first principles.

> More people than you might imagine take Xanax to get through interviews.

You know, that's actually a great idea I never thought about. I'll see if I can get a script next time I go through interview loops. Might make the process less hellish for me, I hope.

Hmm Xanny… that’s not a bad idea.

Propranolol can work equally or better without the reduction in mental performance benzos and benzolike drugs bring.

Shit I'm brain-dead by about 3 hours into an interview or set of interviews, even if it's not the leetcode type. It's draining in a way that no actual work, even hair-on-fire emergency work, is (except maybe sitting in very-tense meetings—that's got a similar effect on me). Doing that more than once or twice in a single week might make me consider applying to clerk at a gas station instead.

Haha, I feel the same. Luckily it’s not everywhere like that and you could do much better than a gas station clerk, the biggest hurdle is to find the best place where you’d be the best fit at, the interview would likely run well and everything fall into place after that

It could take a lot of harrowing interviews before you find the peaceful place that doesn't basically haze interviewees. I think probably you've gotta be willing to just walk out of a bad interview situation. Maybe even having that mindset (that there's a way out) would help with the nerves?

Yeah, I've had the bad kind that's long enough in a day to totally wreck me, like... twice. Failed one of those two hard, too, LOL. Rest of my experiences have been way more chill in my ~23 years in the industry. I can't imagine targeting a segment where such processes are the norm—which is why, even if I have the talent to work there (and, who knows, maybe I don't) I'd never even try to apply to FAANG and friends, since there's a 0% chance I'd make it through one of their about-a-whole-day processes without bombing the entire back half, no matter how much I prepped.

Same here. I've been known to have panic attacks during interviews where I have to excuse myself and get out of the room ASAP.

> Maybe I'm in the wrong industry...

I wonder this as well for myself. I really like software development, but the interviewing is just getting to be too much. It would suck to have to change careers away from something you're pretty good at and really like just because of what basically amounts to hazing.

It's more than lame, its an awful bastardization of how our trade should be evolving. The only real accountability that can be made is to become financially independent and just start building your own things. Ship to market and not fret about revenue growth.

Maybe it's just me, but when I have done that, the first one or two are the hardest, then you get in a groove, and become more aware that its just a numbers game.

I think we're all affected to different degrees. I've done a few interview loops in the space of a couple weeks and it never got easier. It just got worse as my insomnia got worse. I feel it's a miracle I can pass interviews at all since I'm operating at like 10%.

I don't understand the numbers game approach. It's like a war of attrition - you're definitely going to suffer if you pick a fight with everyone you see.

I prefer the 'choose your battles' approach. Interviewing at 3-5 places (not 35), and being prepared to 'win' before I start, as well as possible.

I do find the marathon interviews are difficult, but the difficult parts for me are front-loaded - the initial anxiety, gradually building to being desperate for a break (or to escape) around halfway through. But then like a runner in the zone or coasting through the second half of a double shift on sleep deprivation, the latter part is relatively smooth.

What fight? Suffer how?

Interviews are conversations, not fights.

That's actually exactly why I do such a grind when I'm interviewing. The first set of interviews affects me like you said, but if I keep at it, I get used to it. Which means the only way for me to do well is to keep at it until it's routine.

Look into beta blockers. Also used by stage performers for similar reasons.

https://www.goodrx.com/conditions/generalized-anxiety-disord...

Or maybe the hiring process is broken beyond repair when engineers who are perfectly qualified need to inhibit parts of their brain just to 'perform' at an artificially inflated level.

This right here. If there are more and more of us who do just fine in an actual engineering job but need beta-blockers or other anxiolytics just to make it through an intense set of interviews maybe something's broken with the hiring process?

And yet it persists, unfortunately. The amount of signal gleaned from these is very low, and they’re still super common.

Kind of says something about the amount of cultural sway technologists actually have.

Exactly. If there were ever truly a tech talent shortage it wouldn’t be this way.

I feel you - last time I decided to move jobs, back in 2019, I had a week where I had an onsite every day, and by the end I was just done.

The “just done” thing can be kinda dangerous too - I did the same thing, and at the end of my hell week, I was getting close to accepting an offer I knew was subpar, just to be done interviewing.

Hard to find the right balance.

Definitely - in this case though, I didn't make the decision until about a month later as I had a few more final rounds scheduled for the weeks after.

author here - glad to see this post on HN, and glad you liked it!

re: your last question - I interviewed for both SWE and EM positions, depending on what was available at any given company. At companies that had both roles open, I talked to folks to understand what they expected out of EMs vs engineers, as it varied a lot - and then I picked whatever was more appealing to me. In aggregate I went for 70% SWE / 30% EM roles (roughly)

> what they expected out of EMs vs engineers, as it varied a lot

I'm curious about the rough models which exist.

Some models I've seen (I'm sure there are some other ones):

Pure people manager - HR admin (compensation evaluation etc), professional development, project management, team resourcing, etc. Tend to see this less in very small companies.

TLM (Tech Lead / Manager) - Does all of the above, plus also acts as a tech lead for the project - technical design, mentoring, and possibly some coding. Tend to see this less in very big companies. TLM are typically first-line managers, I've not seen a TLM that manages managers (i.e. Director level).

Rarely, hybrid engineer/manager - Does all the above, plus expected to contribute significantly to coding. Honestly it's a red flag for me to see a team hiring for this archetype, in my opinion it's a pragmatic stopgap you might find yourself with as a small company, until you can hire an engineer or manager to split the role; it's not something you should explicitly hire for.

Sometimes, product lead as "mini-CEO" - manages the team/org and owns product direction. Typically will have a tech lead on the team to own that side of things. This can grow into a Director position, managing the team managers and still owning the product function.

Some archetyes for dedicated Staff engineers (typically the equivalent IC-track level to a team manager): https://staffeng.com/guides/staff-archetypes

thanks for hitting the nail on the head - this is what I saw. I was comfortable with TLM/pure people manager, but not the hybrid (been there, done that - it was rough).

One of the most basic is “do your managers write code?”

My first company out of college actually banned it as a practice - EMs were not allowed to be active contributors.

I know at some companies, it’s actually a requirement, or at least heavily encouraged, for a manager to spend at least 20% time writing code.

And then some places are a mixed bag.

I can see both arguments! Just good to know that a company has a coherent philosophy on the issue.

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