The return of never-ending job interviews: 'It can go beyond the pale'
bbc.com
bbc.com
They had a policy that forced every new hire to go through a temp hire process and work for at least 3 months before being hired on with the company and receiving benefits and decent pay.
There was no way I was going to allow myself to do the same work for less pay and no benefits for 3 entire months or more.
So after my first week I told the materials engineer that I would need to leave early on a Friday because I had a job interview.
I told him that at 9:30am and by 1pm he offered me a full time position. I was the only person who had ever skirted around the temp hire process and it upset quite a few people. But I knew what I was worth.
I honestly think amazons stack ranking is less humiliating and skeezy
What is the idea? They just have it up to find that one 0.1% developer that happens to walk through the door?
I can't imagine companies simply want to wait to roll out features they are planning to build in such a dynamic market. Something you think of today is launched by your competitor tomorrow. If you have an unfilled vacancy for two months more stuff will be rolled out two months later.
> I did well enough in my honest opinion
At a previous employer, I helped design the developer hiring process. The first step in the process was to ask candidates to pass a "do you even know C?" test. Simple stuff like writing a little string handling program from scratch and identifying coding errors in an existing file. It wasn't a lot of candidates, but a significant minority would actually argue with us when they failed these super basic tests, even after we pointed out their errors. I'm definitely not saying you are doing this, but it was not at all uncommon to have applicants that way overestimated their own skill.
Hiring is just hard, from both sides. There's a lot on the line for all involved, and a wrong decision, in either direction, is costly for everyone.
At one company they gave me a "PR from a junior member" to review. I thought it was great. You were challenged to both find issues but also how to communicate them in a constructive way.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240315-ghost-jobs-dig...
I think that often it actually is about the 0.1%, it's the simplest explanation (but the ghost jobs article gives a few other explanations that are also good). Software development does not have a minimum headcount, everything you can build with four you might also be able to build with three, it's not like you need a well defined number of chairs to be occupied.
And it's actually worse than a naive look at the numbers suggests. Some of those forever openings aren't just listed by the would-be hiring company, but also by a happy flock of companies from that cottage industry of recruiting middle men, some disguised a little through different wording, others not disguised at all. Five companies looking for skill xy, and they are all the for same position that is only ever filled if the 0.1% happens to pass by.
I was only hired after I got an offer from a competitor (following about ~6 interviews there, most of which were over the phone) and forced my top choice's hand
Fast forward 18 months and I was laid off along with hundreds more. As it turns out, my two superiors weren't liked at all, so when the market slowed, their peers took the opportunity to get rid of them... and I became irrelevant as I had nobody to work for.
In hindsight, it's somewhat obvious that it took them this many rounds because they were not certain they needed someone to work for the guys everyone disliked. I got a couple of deals done, had a couple more lined up, generated millions of dollars of revenue to the bank, clients liked me... but it wasn't the right place or the right time.
If I could do it all over again, I would have been more upfront and a tougher negotiator with them from the outset. I either want full commitment or it's not worth it. Tell me upfront how many rounds of interviews you need and I'll tell you if it's worth my time and the brain damage.
During my initial training/orientation period as a new analyst at Goldman Sachs in 1999, the person conducting the meeting asked people to stand up if they had had 5, 10, 20, etc. interviews for their job offer. One person stood up when the group was asked who had had more than 40 interviews.
I was very unusual in only having four interviews before my GS offer. For that job, I'm pretty sure the person looking to fill the role personally contacted my college's recruiting service (because she had received her MBA from there). For the second job, at Citigroup, I saw a Craigslist listing either by the person himself or his assistant, talked to someone I knew at the firm who worked near him, then reached out to the person directly. In both cases the person hiring did my first (and, in the second case, the only) interview, and I never talked to a true HR person, let alone recruiter, before receiving the offer.
I've been told that this sort of hiring does happen in tech, but it sure seems rare compared to all the stories I read here.
Like I'm not the equivalent of a one night stand job seeker. You need to wine and dine me with multiple phone calls, technical interviews, all-day in-person interviews, and interrogating all of my references before I'll even think of playing hard to get by threatening to leave the negotiating table in order to get my fair share of TC and ultimately agree to join your company and stay overnight on a major production screw(up).
That seems like a waste of everybody's time.
I don't study for their stupid whiteboards and I don't study their stupid leadership principals. I on purpose refuse to use them during behavioral interviews (also refuse use the STAR method). I've had at least 5 full onsites like this. By my calculations, the wasted time and effort from amazon on myself was worth at least 100K given the number of highly paid engineers/managers who wasted their time interviewing me.
This is basically public service work.
But those emotions are dwarfed by Amazon-directed Schadenfreude. Well done, sir/madame.
When I was not employed, I paid for the gas to drive 90 minutes each way and spent an entire day not looking at other opportunities to be hired or other ways to improve my resume, only to be told by the director that although I did very well in the interviews, they would be getting back to me in 3 months when they found out if their hiring freeze was over then, because at the present time the opening was not yet truly open.
Have some respect for human beings, regardless of their employment status.
I understand that hiring is hard and I've had bad hires before, so I know it's definitely costly. I've had candidates with years of experience that couldn't code, so I get some of it.
But at the same time it's almost insulting to have to prove that I know how to code 6 times over, with 15+ years of experience.
I don't know what the solution is, but it's definitely not to steal even more free time from interviewees.
I guess one aspect is that on other interviews they at the very least pay for all the work you end up doing.
You're normally sacrificing your leisure time which, under normal circumstances, is worth even more than your normal rate. But because of the power imbalance involved, you're expected to do it for free. It just leaves a sour taste in your mouth.
I don't know how efficient it is, but from my point of view it is the most stupid one that I have encoutented:
Imagine that they tell you to take "weeks" to train specifically for their 5 leetcode interviews process. And still, at this point, it is just to "determine your level". Will it be done then? no, you will still need to do more interviews with a few different teams to see which one can be a mutual fit between you and them.
And I guess that you will still have management/HR interviews to complete that.
I’m also pretty certain they learned more about me through that than through leetcode-style problems that are in ChatGPT’s training set.
It makes sense that the larger and mid-sized players are indecisive and taking things slow, the status quo is working out great for them. Why change it up? You're not innovating anymore, that was long ago extinguished by the bureaucracy that inevitably comes with a large organization. The easiest way to increase profits is to reduce payroll.
However, there is going to be a lot of smaller companies that will quickly start eating the lunch of the larger companies in terms of hiring. They're going to be able to move fast and hire quick while the labor pool is oversaturated. This is a growing pain that happens during these times of reshuffling. We'll see amazing new companies that will make FAANG orgs look like Sears Holdings. This cycle has happened since before you entered the labor market and will continue long after you retire.
Nvidia is a wonderful case study in management doing leaps and bounds without being "busy", because like Valve, their winning move was to let everyone else make unforced blunders. CUDA isn't exceptional. It's OK, it's alright, - but it's certainly better than the broken mess ROCm is. Intel said "meh" and left the entire market open, despite tailored compilers being their strong suit. Now Intel is getting pounded by AMD and ARM, and AMD GPUs are a laughing stock in the fastest growing market space at the moment: AI and Machine Learning. The companies that capitalize effectively on AI/ML now will be winners in tomorrow's market.
I've worked in startups long enough to know what the end of ZIRP will do to a company.
Four months to receive an offer? Come on. You get the vast majority of the signal for a candidate in the interview process itself. All of the backoffice deliberations don't require months of meetings. It's just more okay that it gets dragged out because the market is lousy.
Call it what it is: indecision and inefficiency.
I get that a business may always want to be open to hiring an exceptional person if one becomes available, but that's very often based on an internal recommendation/reference not a response to a job posting. Execptional people generally don't apply to posted jobs, they work their network.
It's definitely not going to get you the best candidate, but it might get you the cheapest one.
(In retrospect I should have followed up with them, as the new place was throwing red flags).
they either needed the exact, perfect candidate, or else they wasted a lot of time
I must be doing something right because I don't even have to wait for the first interview!
Sorry something is really fucked up in HR.
Require a very large number of hoops to be jumped through and every single hire will be of the kind who would have zero qualms to sell your company internals to the highest bidder if given the chance.
Require a very large number of hoops to be jumped through and every single hire will be of the kind who would have zero qualms to sell your company internals to the highest bidder if given the chance.
What are you even talking about. What are you basing this on?
If it's the latter, I certainly agree that it's an area where opinions can legitimately vary a lot and I would not pick "it happens very often!" as a hill to die on. If it's the former, I vehemently disagree. At some point, everybody leaves except the terminally greedy. Perhaps that point is never reached (I doubt it, but I respect options to the opposite), but the point exists.
I have absolute no idea what you're talking about now.
everybody leaves except the terminally greedy
People that stay at their jobs are "terminally greedy"? They are going to die from greed?
Or perhaps a desire to, say, eat or live under a roof?
A job is pretty much required for living nowadays in much of the world. A good job (one that requires jumping through such hoops) makes living much easier.
https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2012/12/beyond-the-pale.h...
From https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2012/12/beyond-the-pale.h...
As for the relationship between the two expressions, the OED has this to say:
“The theory that the origin of the phrase [‘beyond the pale’] relates to any of several specific regions, such as the area of Ireland formerly called the Pale … or the Pale of Settlement in Russia … is not supported by the early historical evidence and is likely to be a later rationalization.”
So is claiming someone didn't read a source when you disagree with their interpretation.
I don't know why you're still typing, you're not convincing anybody, you're not getting any karma, and nobody is gonna respect you more for refusing to acknowledge how blatantly wrong you are. The best you can do here is admit (to yourself) you screwed up and that you have a lot of trouble admitting when you're wrong, and then working on that character flaw -- your life will go a lot smoother.
"The theory that the origin of the phrase [‘beyond the pale’] relates to any of several specific regions, such as the area of Ireland formerly called the Pale … or the Pale of Settlement in Russia … is not supported by the early historical evidence and is likely to be a later rationalization.”
Throughout, your source draws a distinction between the histories of the separate phrases "beyond the pale" and "pale of settlement".
So I guess your statement might be true in the narrow sense that "many believe" the false etymology, just as you can find many who believe that the earth is flat. But that's not a good reason to go around chiding people for using a common expression.
The etymology is in doubt for any particular area, not the concept of what a pale was and how it was used to colonize.
That is the point of "many believe."
Also keep in mind that the major doubter is the Oxford English Dictionary...
You're the one whose source was quoting from OED, so you tell me. It'll be easier if we're starting from a shared ground truth.
Many people believe that specifically the Irish Pale popularized the statement, but the OED aren't among them.
What are we disagreeing about?
"Many people believe..."
Name one. Have a free do-over: pick a source you actually agree with this time. Make sure it doesn't quote any reference books that you distrust.
> Also keep in mind that the major doubter is the Oxford English Dictionary
So we are to disregard English opinion on the English language?..
It doesn't necessarily have bearing, but you cannot generalize the way you are doing.
Then no word would mean anything.
I made no call to action.
I guess I should have known any time the information is something certain people would consider 'woke' it elicits a strong emotional reaction beyond the information itself.
My bad.
And your implicit call to action was crystal clear. Don't be coy.
It appears I was mistaken, and I apologise.