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Comment by TimPC | Hacker News Reader

Are tech job interviews really such a nightmare? Compared to other professions with similar pay? Leetcode can be a bit annoying and unrealistic, but it's not the end of the world, it just means putting in some study time before interviews.

Jobs are also becoming better and lower risk. Many companies have gotten rid of the one year cliff on RSUs so you can potentially take a job that doesn't work, leave after 10 months and get 9 months of equity. That's a huge win when a lot of these roles have been half equity and you used to get zero.

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"Are tech job interviews really such a nightmare?"

Yes. It's not just about the leetcode questions - the entire process of interviewing in tech these days is Kafkaesque. Interviews with half a dozen people or more, take-home assignments, radio silence for weeks... and then it's not uncommon for them to pull the req and have to start over with another company.

Last year I did a rush of interviews with a company, kept being told I was a top candidate, etc., "we should have a decision next week" every week for five weeks, another interview, a "we should have a decision next week" again, and then... the req got dropped. About six weeks later they opened up a different role that was also in my wheelhouse with a different manager, but... they wanted me to do a homework assignment that meant spinning up AWS resources to try out their thing and write about it, which required a demo signup (which went into /dev/null because they gave me the wrong link), etc. Finally I decided "eff this" and dropped out of the process.

"Jobs are also becoming better and lower risk"

I guess that depends on what you consider risk. I consider having to switch jobs frequently a risk in and of itself, because I have a family and need the insurance. When you switch insurance frequently, expect pain. "Oh, we're just going to deny your claim because we 'think' you have other insurance, we see here you used to be insured by..." (Not to mention starting from zero with deductibles.)

To sum up, yes. Absolute bloody nightmare.

Entry-level and non-senior positions have truly hellish interview processes. Five-six interview stages, week+ take-home projects, ghosting, zero-feedback. Large number of companies interviewing with no intention of hiring. This is absolutely worse than other professions, I've recently made a bit of a career change and the interview involved one informal conversation, and my past experience/education was actually taken at face value.

That mirrors my experience. Recent interviews have been mentally challenging because the other person was poking hard at the limits of my knowledge, but the process itself was easy.

Example question we spent half an hour on: Tell me a decision you made at your last job that you would do differently now. That opened the door to a million roads. Is candidate self-reflective? Can they admit mistakes? Was the mistake a reasonable idea given limited knowledge? How deep can they go with their explanation? Can they explain their work to others?

That was fun because it let me show what I can do, and it would be damn near impossible to bluff one’s way through. It beats the hell outta take-home exercises or “let’s say you’re writing a program to calculate the volume of a lake…”-type coding tests.

I always ask those kinds of questions. I also ask what people are proud about.

But I rarely get good answers, it's always some generic answers like "I built software for the company". Some people even fail to remember anything.

Interviewing is hard :/

I’ve been on the other side of the table my share of times, and it’s so hard. I think that style has lots of signal, though. I don’t really wanna work with someone who can’t describe something they spent the last 2 years working on.

Cheers for Team Grown-Up Conversation!

Yep, totally agree. I feel the same as you.

The problem I see is that the things that I'm most proud of (that had the most value for the company) aren't necessarily the things that are likely to get me a job. E.g. by far the biggest impact that I've had at my current company is not any of the code that I've written; it's having interviewed and recommended for hiring several developers who have become top performers. The second biggest impact has been reforming processes that didn't bring value and killed moral. In fact, actually coding has been one of the smallest areas where I've contributed to my company.

However, saying all that isn't going to get me a coding job. It's all about how many tickets you completed or at best features you implemented.

No, that’s exactly the kind of thing I’d like to hear about! Show me that you can think about those million things beside writing code that make you great to have around!

Exactly.

It's great knowing those extra talents beforehand.

One developer I hired also does Figma designs. Since I also do, I decided to hire them and we now do the designs ourselves.

> it's having interviewed and recommended for hiring several developers who have become top performers

That's actually a great answer.

> Some people even fail to remember anything.

This is me. Part of the reason is that there is a never-ending torrent of problems that need to be solved. You've got this really tricky issue sorted out? Great, there is more stuff waiting down the line. This doesn't leave room for remembering and acknowledging the significance of things.

However, there are some things that I actually am proud of, now that I think about it. But these are the moments, when I'm able to help a coworker with some technical obstacle and I've solved the issue within a few minutes because it's easy for me to see what's wrong. It's the exact opposite of a herculean effort but it causes a huge relief for my coworkers. But is this something that a recruiter would want to hear? I doubt it. They are more interested in me taking care of my tasks instead of the tasks of other people.

If I suspected I could hire someone that would never write a line of feature code but could make everyone else on the team 20% more productive, I’d hand-walk their application through HR.

Have you ever considered specializing in platform and tooling work? Become the office hero!

Not your parent commenter. I considered it many times and with time became a tooling expert in many, many CLI areas. It's rare for me to be asked "do you know of a CLI tool that does X and Y?" and for me to be unable to answer. 1 out of 20 times, probably.

Problem is that nobody wants to pay only for that, or I had a really shitty luck and didn't make a special effort to find better companies (reflecting back, sadly both are true).

So wherever I worked, I was the senior dev + the tooling expert everyone was asking advice from. The latter part became like a hobby that I never managed to monetize.

Minor things are better than the super popular "I helped create a blockchain app that served 2 billion users and moved 5 trillion dollars per day". Those I legitimately don't care for, and the other answers must be good to make up for it.

Disorganized answers are fine. Technical interviews are a place to talk shop. Run away from interviewers looking for perfection.

Recruiters forward the answer to us, so at least in my case the more techy the better.

Come to think of it, the best intern I ever worked with was hired after an informal "talk shop" chat with the CTO.

On the other hand, the worst I had was hired after going through a convoluted process.

Problem is, informal chat makes it difficult for certain candidates that lack people skills.

> informal chat makes it difficult for certain candidates that lack people skills.

I think that's nearly right. If it were just a people skills issue, then a "failed" informal chat would be a valid reason not to continue with a lot of candidates--people skills are much more important than widely thought in programming, and doubly so for entry-level engineers whose early work is largely going to be learning/pairing/correcting.

However, informal-chat-with-the-CTO filters are made unfairly difficult for the kinds of people who would not find themselves with quality face time with the CTO, which is a much bigger problem: remote candidates, non-native language speaker candidates, disabled candidates, and candidates at the "far end" of the funnel--people graduating from no-name colleges distant from the employer with no network connection that they could parlay into an informal chat.

And that is a problem for informal face-time as an interviewing practice.

Also, "informal chat" style interviews (at least those without quantifiable scoring) can be fraught with bias. Did the CTO "like" the chat with the candidate because he was measurably technically qualified, or was it because he was a lot like the CTO in many ways, and their personalities gelled?

Good points.

But on the other hand, I enjoy working more with people whose personalities and style also gel with me. So I don't really know if this is that big of a problem.

Communication is very important, and this is half the battle.

EDIT: But to answer your question: it was for an internship position, so an informal "talk shop" chat was more than enough to measure what we wanted.

Normally it takes a few rounds of technical interviews to get actual information from people who are less, let's say, "passionate". What would be better was if everyone could be as open as this person, so we would be able to just have the chat, instead of having technical questions and long interviews.

In this case it was someone who applied for a position and then asked to come to the office for a visit.

But you're right that it excludes people working remotely.

The two people who made us end our internship program actually aced all the technical tests. But they were so terrible at communicating that we decided that it wasn't worth it having interns.

> Are tech job interviews really such a nightmare? Compared to other professions with similar pay?

Yes, much worse. The main problem in software is that companies don't value experience at all, you're always interviewed as a fresh grad with endless leetcoding.

Compare that to say an experienced surgeon. From some I know, interviews are about cultural fit and trying to convince them to join. Their career experience is already proof they know how to do the job.

If doctors had to interview like software engineers, a heart surgeon with 20 years experience would be told to do a hip replacement (you should remember how hips work from medical school!) with one hand tied behind their back and only allowed to use a scalpel. And then mocked for clearly not knowing anything about medicine.

If software engineers had to train like a surgeon, they would have an additional 4 years of school, then 5 years of on the job training where they frequently work 80+ hours a week (for less pay than new grads get today). They would also have to apply for the training and the vast majority would not be accepted.

Tech interviewing really sucks, but it is still far easier than anything a physician goes through.

> Tech interviewing really sucks, but it is still far easier than anything a physician goes through.

Except doctors can go through that once, when they are still young and then they're done with that part.

Software engineers need to do the leetcode dance every single time for their entire life. Which gets harder and harder when you have a family and then kids.

Its 7-11 years of additional school, exams, training, and internships. You often work 60-80 hours a week. Most have to move across the country more than once, and apply at every level to work in the field they want -- most are rejected outright at the start, and many won't get into the specific field they want -- ever. I graduated medical school. It is incomparably more challenging than software engineering interviewing. I get it and agree, it really sucks, especially once you have kids. But trust me, people that struggle to survive the leet code grind are most likely the people that would not get into something akin medical school to begin with.

The other thing is most employers of surgeon's are highly reputable and held to regulatory standards. You kind of know what the minimum quality bar is for someone's employment. Compare that to a random tech company and realize there are people out there who have the same one year of experience twenty times and you start to realize why we have more rigorous interview vetting.

I kind of feel like the alternative to interview processes that evaluate in depth is top employers only hiring people with extremely reputable companies on their career trajectory and I feel that would be a loss for many people in tech.

> the same one year of experience twenty times

I dislike this meme and how it's supposed to be bad somehow.

That heart surgeon with 20 years experience? Yes, been doing heart surgeries for 20 years. That's a good thing.

We don't ask surgeons to switch to a different body part every year so that they can avoid having multiple years of experience in the same thing!

What would you call someone with 20 years experience in 20 different things? A rank beginner in all of them. That's not a good thing.

If I need someone with experience in something, I want the person with the 20 years doing that thing.

> Are tech job interviews really such a nightmare?

They're awful and I avoid interviewing at all costs these days. My current employer is going to have to fire me to get rid of me because I'm not willingly putting myself back into that meat grinder.

10 years ago it was usually 1 hour discussion with a hiring manager and the team. Worst case a FizBaz question. Now it's 5-6 interviews that involve leetcode or fairly long/complicated programming tasks (and sometimes take home test). I think it's just ageism, we have too many developers with family obligations and they are pushed out of the market because they can't spend doing 6 hours of leetcode preparations after 9 hours of day job.

I think it's unintentional ageism, but that's definitely what it becomes. The fear is that people had gotten pretty good at one-hour discussions and FizzBuzz that a lot of inexperience was getting through the funnel. But the current state of things is absurd; grinding leetcode at 45 for an engineering manager position had me questioning my life choices.

That’s not historically true. Last time I was heavily interviewing was around nine years ago in the Boston area, for principal-level engineering roles. Standard procedure then after passing a technical phone screen was three or four hours of onsite interviews with various peers/managers - usually two whiteboard coding exercises, one system design, one to talk about my background and past work. That was common across public companies, pre-IPO startups, and even small consulting shops.

I don’t think it was a new practice at the time.

> 6 hours of leetcode preparations

Anyone who needs that much 'preparation' is likely not a target candidate for the job.

It is either unintentionally/intentionally designed to be left unfilled or only meant for recruiting literal geniuses.

If it's being awhile since graduation that is about an average time people spend on leetcode from me talking and reading about it. But again some people spend 10 hours for a month and some 2 hours per day for two years.

Non-target candidates can still get recruited via chance and happenstance but that doesn't negate the principle, it's not meant for cramming.

It's like cramming for an IQ test.

Let’s compare. I’ve interviewed for and been offered both high paying tech jobs and investment banking jobs. My interviews for tech really required me to have a deep understanding of the technology and how to solve problems with it. They tested my critical thinking skills. For banking, sure there were some technical questions but a lot of it came down to what school I went to, how I acted, who I knew. I suppose either one could be a “nightmare” depending on who you are. I do think the tech interview process was much better at hiring generally competent people. There’s also consulting which I have not directly interviewed for but the interview style is more similar to tech with more of a focus on mental math, those can be very difficult if you don’t have that skill.

> Are tech job interviews really such a nightmare? Compared to other professions with similar pay?

What other professions have a standard lengthy process with multiple rounds of interviews even for interns?

Most positions with comparable salary to software dev involve interviewing with a hiring manager, a VP/director skip level, and usually a ‘behavioral’ interview which is often with an HR person. Take-home problems like doing a competitive analysis or preparing a presentation are common.

The big difference is, for a position in a softer nontechnical role, there aren’t any remotely objective criteria the interview can possibly assess you on - if you hate being tested on your technical skills, consider the alternative: being asked fuzzy ‘tell me about a time when..’ questions, and weird ‘if you were an animal what would you be?’ popquizzes by an amateur psychoanalyst who thinks they can get deep insight into you by watching your body language.

You also get judged a lot more for your looks in nontechnical roles. For example, if you're doing sales, simply being attractive could be a huge advantage. It makes sense but it also sucks if you aren't in that category.

Part of the issue is that there is no real standard to these interviews and the interviewers can have widely varying expectations at times. I once failed a technical interview on a coding question, not because I did not give them the optimized answer (I did and the interviewer even acknowledged it) but because they wanted a one liner rather than a full explanation of the algorithm. I guess I should have known to ask them about that before diving deep? But to be honest, I have never had an interviewer want the 'one liner' answer to one of these DSA questions before. In the end I was rejected and lost 4 hours of my time to their elongated interview process.

How do you know why you failed an interview? Do recruiters share that detailed from interview feedbacks?

I know I failed the technical interview because the interviewer made it clear during the interview that my approach was not the answer they were looking for.

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