Hacker News Reader

Comment by arter4 | Hacker News Reader

>For a typical job there were four or five interviews: an initial interview with a recruiter, an interview with a hiring manager, one or two technical interviews (either live coding, or going through a take-home assignment). There could also be an interview with a product manager, and/or one with a CTO or founder. All in all, quite a time commitment.

This is not news at this point, but it is pretty crazy.

View on HN

We have lost candidates at my company which we had pretty much already decided were a fit after 1-2 interviews but we're still forced to go through the rigmarole of these extra interviews over several weeks. It's not just crazy it's also a waste of time and resources.

I've lost out on numerous jobs after the 5 interview mark, often only receiving an automated "thanks for your interest". In one case it was multiple consecutive shorter interviews with random people on the team, after a take home assignment, etc.. it's incredibly defeating.

I was interviewing with a company a year back. I had gone through 3 interviews and there were 2 more left of various song and dance required. The process was going well and I liked the company, but I was getting burnt out with the process across all my other interviews and I had received 2 other job offers that were good, so I just sent an email to the company that I was going to withdraw myself from consideration.

I ended up getting an email from the team within minutes asking for a zoom where they literally begged me to keep going because they liked me the best of all the other candidates but are forced to have me go through the other interviews. They tried to get an exception for not doing the other interviews. They ended up being allowed to have only one more interview and they said that they could have an offer letter together within 24 hours of that interview. So I knew they were serious, but I was too tired and didnt love the bureaucracy of that place, so I just moved on.

Ouch.

I'm sure leadership and HR think they're dodging bullets too...

(P.S. I think they're likely shooting themselves in the foot.)

And how many of these company's core source of value is "we have a web page". I hope that having a bunch of unemployed developers out there will disrupt things. I suppose either way wages are going down though.

It's a long day for sure, but honestly I don't really mind it as a candidate, and that boils down to a few reasons

(1) The time cost isn't as high as it seems. If I get as far as a phone screen I'm getting an offer, nearly guaranteed. The flow chart then looks like (a) if I don't get a phone screen, that awful process is no worse than the status quo, (b) if I do, I just find out in the phone screen if the battery of interviews has high latency (an 8hr day is fine, 8hrs over 2 months greatly complicates a job search) and drop out early the 20% of the time that happens, and (c) from there I have an 8hr day to a guaranteed job. Each offer then costs roughly 0.95/0.8~1.2 full interview processes, or 1.2x 4-8 hours.

(2) That time cost is a bit annoying when it comes to competing offers (a single solid day isn't crazily expensive when you're about to get a 40% pay boost, but 5 solid days for a job search is ... 5x as expensive ... fine, but not ideal, and hard when you have finite vacation days). Somewhere around 1/2 of employers don't actually seem to care about producing proof of competing offers though. If they make an offer, you counter that you're worth some fixed XYZ instead (ideally doing enough research to choose the levers they're most likely to accommodate) and will sign immediately if they can make that happen, they'll go above and beyond to agree to your counter-offer. It's a waste of time for the whole industry to require counter-offers in the cases where everyone knows what you're worth (admittedly, when that's not the case, counter-offers are an unfortunate necessity to prove your worth).

(3) The average tech interview is 10-20min solving the techno-babble and 30-50 probing what they know about the company and the team. New companies are very risky, and they work fairly hard to keep damning evidence out of the face of the public. You can mitigate a lot of risk by background-checking the executive team, but a present-day boots-on-the-ground view of things, ideally with the several overlapping/competing views you get from multiple team members, allows you to bounce out of problem situations early.

Seems like a very personal and fortunate take depending on what you do or when in time that experience is based on, not that it's irrelevant, just far from generalizable, especially right now.

Companies are looking for almost any reason to turn someone away, so a guaranteed offer coming from a phone screen, or for that matter even getting a phone screen, is either exaggerated, you're consistently incredible, or/and you're consistently incredible and in a niche with very little competition and big names on the CV.

Even the author of the article admits they got quite lucky with the low numbers they experienced before getting an offer. I don't mean to be dismissive, but the markets are quite varying and intensely either saturated, competitive, or/and sparse right now, depnding on which market you're in and what your CV or skills look like, to the point where as a frontend dev I'm considering just switching to knitting or something more lucrative

Fwiw our hiring pipeline has 30%-70% of candidates make it to the next stage once past the phone screen (it has varied somewhat as we re-ordered or changed process). Assuming 3 stages until offer (e.g. HM interview, tech screen, full-day interviews), and offer-acceptance, with 50% success rate at each stage, 1/8 get an offer and 1/16 accept it. At 60% it's 1/4.6 and 1/7.8, so the exact rate makes a huge difference.

The corollary to this sensitivity is that if you are just slightly better or worse at interviewing, you can see a huge difference in the number of companies you need to pass screening at to get a job. In practice, companies get more people into the pipeline than necessary to reduce the chance that it dries up without making the hires, so as a candidate, you will also have to take that into account.

You can play around with the variables on this graph to see number of phone-screen-passes: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=y%3D1%2F%28x%5E4%29+whe...

> If I get as far as a phone screen I'm getting an offer

Wow, I didn't observe this myself even back when the market was "hot". I had a _lot_ of phone screens that didn't lead to offers.

Now think about being the people doing the recruiting, offering to 1% of the candidates they interview and still failing 30% of them during their trial period.

Hiring is a huge time sink for all people involved. The best people are hard to find and the best jobs are hard to get.

Sure but do you actually need the absolute best people around? An average company probably doesn't need exceptional developers. If you're not a tech company and you don't have an extremely challenging setup, your survival as a company doesn't rely on exceptional IT skills. You can do a lot with less than 10 virtual machines, any decent web app framework (Spring? Laravel?), and a version control system. Even apparently insane requirements are entirely reasonable: 100 thousands transactions per day is... 1 TPS. Make that 10 TPS to adjust for peaks. Unless you're doing extremely complex queries, you can definitely handle 10 TPS with reasonably limited resources.

Meanwhile, cargo culting and FOMO leads companies to adopt tech stacks, interview styles,... that make sense for FAANGs and other unicorns, but not for your average setup.

A business only makes sense if they're aiming to be better than others at a specific angle.

They need to get the very best for their particular thing that makes them different.

Other roles obviously don't matter as much.

Indeed. For tech companies and a few non-tech companies but with a strong tech environment (think HFT), IT is where you gain an edge on your competitors. Everywhere else, you win customers because of better prices, negotiating nice deals with suppliers, great salespeople and a good SEO presence, and so on, not because you use the latest Kubernetes version that finally introduces support for that sweet annotation you were looking for, or because you use Quarkus instead of Spring (or whatever).

This being HackerNews, I would have expected most people here work for a company that is aiming to disrupt the status quo through technology.

> Sure but do you actually need the absolute best people around?

No. You need a great _combination_ of people. Over my career I have seen teams assembled with “the best” folks to great fanfare an expense. Then, over and over they are schooled by a team that works great together. If there is one lesson for companies to learn in hiring/staffing/team building it’s this - focus on the team and the team’s results.

Yes, there are exceptions.

How do you hire for team fit when people leave, or change teams voluntarily or through reorgs?

I would put a slightly different twist on that. A team with diverse skills and a lot of mutual trust and respect will work wonders. My current group is what you might call "debug fire jumpers" (not 100% of the role, but a significant fraction of it). Knowing I can call in an expert in an area that I am fuzzy, and there is no judgement, and we can collaboratively solve the problem, is what enables the team to deliver. So I fully agree, building a team with mutual trust and respect is the first order of business.

All I can think of is the recruiters who cannot have the courtesy to tell the other 99% they are no longer under consideration.

Recruiters aren't paid to not recruit. Courtesy doesn't enter into it.

They get paid 30% of the salary of whoever they secure an offer for.

They act according to whatever they think befits their interests.

That's not crazy. Some of these are probably what 30 minutes? Tech interviews 60 mins? So what, five hours?

Remember when on-site interviews meant an hour total commute plus say six hours of total interview plus lunch event. Some high demand companies put candidates through more than one round of that. Not to mention if you were flying from out of town... I remember a friend who interviewed with Google and got stuck in SF for three weeks due to snow storms on the east coast and got fired from Accenture as a result.

Compared to this four-six hours scheduled at your leisure seems great, even if fragmented over a few days

Hope they got the Google job then??

He did not.

I remember when on-site interviews were an hour and that was it. All this stuff companies do now is insane. If a person isn't performant, you'll know within 30 days, but you'll never know by interviewing them.

I haven't had to cold interview in 20+ years. I hope I never have to based on how it works now. I get all my jobs from previous colleagues. Companies are closing the door to a lot of great talent based on this silliness, but they'll never learn.

I interviewed at Google nearly 15 years ago and it was already phone screen + a marathon of on-site interviews. Maybe 4 in a row.

The problem is companies are having people run the gauntlet -- or in any case displaying a cavalier attitude about milking folks for their time and patience -- despite not offering anything comparable (in terms of intrinsic attractiveness of the role or compensation) to what FAANG-tier companies do. On top of flaky (or flakier than the used to be), sometimes weird even, communications, etc.

Most companies are not Google however. ~10 years ago when I applied for jobs in small-to-medium non-FAANG companies it was really just a 1hr onsite at most.

Ya Google kinda pioneered that. It helps that Google makes millionaires out of many of its employees over 15 years. Would you go through that process for say Baskin and Robbins corporate?

Sometimes you’ll know during interviews. A long time ago, I interviewed someone who claimed something like 5+ years of Java development, and literally couldn’t write:

class Foo {

}

On the whiteboard.

In any context.

That one saved us a lot of time.

It wasn’t some weird out of context thing either, he just literally didn’t know how to write Java at all. Even approximately.

Yes, but you knew that within 1 hour. It (hopefully) didn't take you 6 hours to realize this person was a dud.

Of course. I apologized for wasting their time and walked them out within 30 minutes. They had clearly flat out lied about their qualifications.

I also got lectured by senior management for exposing them to liability since I didn’t ’go through the whole process’.

And this was a middle aged white dude candidate, a small company, and about 20 years ago.

The risk tolerance has only decreased since then.

>I also got lectured by senior management for exposing them to liability since I didn’t ’go through the whole process’.

I work in an "at will" state. Our 3 people are usually on teams chatting about the interview going on and will decide to end it early and not waste everyone's time if it's not going well. We've never had anyone tell us they were concerned about that. What liability was senior management at your company concerned about?

The same one FAANG used to tell us that we couldn't do it either.

To paraphase "We want to give the candidate every chance to prove themselves, and cutting the interview short gives them a bad impression of the company (and it would make it easier to sue us for unfair discrimination)."

Since it was just a few (or in this case 1) interviews, and that makes it easier to claim that I cut it short because queue whatever protected class. Which, if someone was going to be that kind of jerk to a candidate, I guess doing it on the first interview WOULD be the one, eh? It would just be my word against theirs, instead of x interviewers vs theirs.

And I guess the riskiest type of candidate for that kind of crazy behavior WOULD be the person who felt okay blatantly lying on their resume about such a fundamental fact AND EVEN SHOWING UP FOR THE INTERVIEW, come to think about it.

We didn't get sued in this case though. I think the interviewee was just surprised someone was interviewing him who actually knew how to code.

God I couldn't imagine conducting 6+ hours of interviews for a candidate I knew failed it within the first 30 minutes. Ain't nobody got time for that.

I literally couldn’t let it happen. The thought was roughly as palatable as intentionally ‘groining’ a coworker on a guardrail or letting a kid walk into traffic.

After getting chewed out, I never walked them out early though.

I guess that is why FAANG told us to not talk between ourselves and put everything into the system for the HC independently - so we wouldn’t know what we were in for, and would give each individual interview a fresh shot without all the anticipated pain and suffering. Makes it easier when you can’t see the nut shot coming I guess?

Makes sense, but yeah - terrible.

To be fair though, out of hundreds of interviews I’ve done, that was top 5ish for bad. Most were much better.

In the late 90s, I worked at a place that would walk people out as soon as we'd reached a hard-no decision. As the first tech interviewer left the room, in the hallway, the second would ask some innocuous yes/no question. ("Hey, my car's at the shop; can you give me a ride over there later?") The answer to that question was whether or not to continue the interview slate [and was almost always "yeah, sure, no problem"]. If it was yes, go into the room and introduce yourself. If it was no, they'd walk off together to find the recruiter who would walk the candidate out.

That place never stopped doing the practice, but other places I've worked (including the current) have decided against that pretty brutal candidate experience. (And, as you say, have also had a policy not to share any information about the candidate's performance until after submitting the write-up and recommendation from the interview.)

I hate the modern interview loop as much as the next person, but from a business perspective why would you want to risk 30 days of nothing vs a few extra hours to verify?

We should fix the modern interview loop (very hard) but the idea we’d ever go back to one hour is kind of out there.

That is making the assumption that any time spent over the traditional 1 hour helps you confirm whether the candidate is performant or not. I dispute that assumption and figure any time outside of that initial hour makes a hiring mistake that much more expensive.

Calculate it this way. I can spend 3x 1 hour (3 people interviewing a candidate for 1 hour) and have a 60% chance of hiring a performant person. I could also spend 3x 6 hours and have about the same chance. When that 40% non-performant candidate shows up and I have to repeat the hiring cycle, It's significantly less expensive in both labor costs and opportunity costs for the 3x1 interview style than the 3x6 interview style.

This doesn't take into account all the talent that has no need or interest to go through a 3x6 interview process (I am one of them).

>the idea we’d ever go back to one hour is kind of out there.

Ya like I said, the industry just kinda does what it does, complains about not being able to find talent, and will never learn.

> I dispute that assumption and figure any time outside of that initial hour makes a hiring mistake that much more expensive.

Okay, sure - dispute it if you want. It doesn't change the fact that the industry seemingly collectively decided that 1 hour isn't a sufficient amount of time to gauge fit/effectiveness/etc.

My point to you is that given the above, you have to make a choice. Spending the extra few hours gives you some hopeful assurance of what you're getting.

I once again will note it's not a good system, but there is to date seemingly no widely agreed upon good system.

Microsoft in the early 90s was a half day of onsite interviews with 5 or 6 people, plus lunch. And this was for a summer internship.

In the late eighties I got an internship at IBM with no interview at all. Just sent in my university papers via a student organization.

It is crazy because it dilutes the interview experience and you never know when it's going to end and when they're going to decide (and actually tell you).

And why should you talk to all those people? Talk to the tech folks, then to the CTO, then the founder, then what, the VC investors, the whole board? Can the CTO not describe the company vision and how IT fits in that picture? It does smell of a lack of vision or an inability to delegate.

It's largely a way to dilute responsibility and spread blame. If a new hire turns out to be a failure then it's tough to point the finger at any one interviewer since they were all fooled. This type of diffused decision making process is typically instituted by the careerists at large organizations where being held accountable for any major failure will derail your chances of promotion.

Most interview loops aren't just 4-6 hours, though. A lot of times the virtual on-sites are 5+ hours alone, and then you still usually have 2-4 stages of scattered interviews before you even get there. It's also not an efficient way to figure out if both sides are a "good fit" because you're basically doing a whirlwind tour of video chats with people you most likely won't work with. Even worse, the entire interview process itself can take over a month or two depending on the company, making it hard to stay engaged the entire period, especially if you're interviewing for more than one place (which I assume most job-seekers are).

5-6 hours is about right on the low end, but on the high end you double the hours interviewing and add up to 30-40 hours of work for the take homework. It varies a lot. The average seem to be around the 12-20 hours with homework or 5-10 without.

Personally I still prefer the version with a take home project, even if longer, as I don't like performative programming.

> I remember a friend who interviewed with Google and got stuck in SF for three weeks due to snow storms on the east coast

This is literally unbelievable. I cannot remember a time when the east coast was inaccessible for three weeks…

It probably wouldn’t have saved his job to reach any random spot on the east coast, so you don’t have to think of a time when it was all inaccessible.

Do you think that the parent I was responding to didn’t understand my intent? Did you really think I meant any random location on the east coast?

Yes, because otherwise it doesn’t seem like an outlandish enough scenario to justify literally saying you don’t believe him. Hurricane Sandy was the first thing that sprang to my mind, but there have been plenty of major travel disruptions over the years, and I wouldn’t expect to hear every time some smaller city was unreachable from California.

Given their response above, they figured out my intention even without being super pedantic.

There was a year (maybe 2012? I was in Philadelphia at the time) where we had back to back snow storms of more than 12" accumulation, about a week and a half apart. It came at a bad time of poor investment in snow clearing equipment and services, so many places had done no cleanup of the first storm before the second one hit. I don't know how the airports faired, but the roads were a deathtrap for weeks.

I was in NJ during that time, and it was really bad. One meter of snow accumulation everywhere was normal, roads were unsafe for days.

I remember dragging my desktop to a friend's house to prep for getting snowed in by the storm because I had just moved to the area and was living alone and didn't have much food at the time.

Snowpocalypse/snowmageddon. 2010

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_5%E2%80%936,_2010_N...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_25%E2%80%9327,_2010...

Two back to back storms, there was about 12 hour window where you could get in or out. This poor guy was supposed to fly back during the first, got pushed to a flight during the second, and then the pile-on of rebookings pushed him further. I don't remember if he got trapped due to the third storm too.

It wasn't completely cut off. During the first storm, I got head notice of the next one and rebooked my flight out of the east coast to be one day earlier, and threaded the needle by politely asking customer service. I was in and out of the east coast for a week.

Anyways, Some cities on the east coast are less prepared than others for this sort of thing.

I’m familiar with travel in that storm. It sounds like they didn’t really make an effort. They _didn’t_ get back, which is different from they _couldn’t_ get back. Which is probably why they got fired.

Overall, though, it doesn’t change your original point about interviews, and I didn’t really need to take us on this tangent.

When flights get cancelled, if you really need to get back, you can book your own flight and hope for reimbursement. Getting rebooked through an airline is usually a horrible process in my experience.

> I remember a friend who interviewed with Google and got stuck in SF for three weeks due to snow storms on the east coast and got fired from Accenture as a result.

It takes less than one week to travel across the country by road. There's a whole system of Greyhound buses that serve exactly this purpose. How is it possible to get stuck for three weeks?

https://www.greyhound.com/bus-routes/san-francisco-ca-new-yo... notes that it takes 76 hours and costs $300.

You probably don't know it's going take more than a week right away. You hope you can fly the next day, then the next, etc...

As someone who had this happen to them but in London: yeah, this is how it goes.

Once flights resume it’s a thundering herd problem of annoying proportions too.

So what, five hours?

Add in the 6-hour take home (which companies delusionally believe will take 2 hours, despite being often inadequately scoped or otherwise poorly presented; while quite often expecting a nitpick-proof solution); and all the random delays, and other hoops - and the none-too-occasional ghosting (even at the very end of the process) -

Yup, it adds up.

> which companies delusionally believe will take 2 hours, despite being often inadequately scoped or otherwise poorly presented; while quite often expecting a nitpick-proof solution

I have to go on a rant about this one cause it happened to me recently.

I applied for a Sr. Frontend position, and they have me do a takehome where I recreate some small component with some time-travelling functionality. It was actually quite fun to do and I enjoyed building it, but the feedback afterwards was maddening.

One of the points of feedback they gave me was that what I implemented wasn't 1:1 aligned with the design they gave me... The design they gave me was a blurry JPG with compression artifacts that was maybe 300x300 embedded into a random Notion document they sent me with an extremely vague list of requirements. I even explicitly asked them if they could give me a higher quality version of it so I could match it more closely, but they said that was the only document they could give me.

When I tried to somewhat align the picture to the actual design I was implementing, the border-radii of the elements was so blurry from the compression that it was literally impossible to know whether I got it exactly right or not. They also gave me no notes on specific fonts used (the one on their marketing site was a licensed font that cost money), specific brand colors (I had to go to their marketing website and hope the green I saw on the buttons there was the one they were expecting) or anything else of the sort.

It was obvious they expected me to spend at least 6 hours on it considering the feedback, but they explicitly said 2 hours and didn't give nearly enough reference for me to go off of to know what they truly expected from me. Absolutely ridiculous process

I'm kind of an old guy but I remember having interviews, just shooting the shit with the hiring manager and maybe a team lead present. Whole thing would last about 30 minutes and end with a handshake and an offer in 24-48 hours or a call to let me know I wasn't chosen. Between 1999 and 2019 I worked for 5 different companies and the interview process was basically the same. These were not small companies either. If someone told me today I'd have 6 interviews with homework, I'd tell them to fuck off. Thank goodness I retired......

last time I interviewed for a job (and I am a sr developer with lengthy resume and all the 'right' skills for the job I was applying), after initial interview with recruiter and then hiring manager the recruiter said I had to take a coding test like I was some entry level programmer - I said no way, and thanks for your time - they made me an offer a few days later anyway.

Sometimes you just need to push back - won't always work - but at least you can have some control over the process.

At this point he might as well have an interview with the Janitor the too

i could learn more about a person by how they interact with the janitor than in hours of interviews and tests.

Indeed. This nauseating arrogance of software devs being not getting their due for value they deliver despite high 6 figure salaries is infuriating. As per them MBAs are chump, finance are bean counters, CEO moron, managers useless and janitor's job is to be done by robots anyway.

In my experience they could reliably cut out the recruiter and hiring manager interviews.

The hiring manager is for you, not them. It’s to make sure you actually want to work for that person.

And usually HR is the one who is getting your comp and other requirements so again mostly for you.

You don't want to interview your hiring manager??

How has that worked out for you not knowing anything about the manager you'll report to?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com