Making it in the Mecca of Tech
desmondw.com
desmondw.com
I think it's batsh!t insane that (apparently) so many people are so willing to go through this type of process, and to go through it n times until they land a job.
In the context of making a hiring decision, I would be skeptical of anybody who would subject himself or herself to this insanity. Then again, I'm not looking to hire people who are willing to chain themselves to a workstation and code 12 hours a day in exchange for access to a foosball table and catered meals.
I always interview with multiple companies in parallel, though, so if it takes you too long to make a decision some other company will snap me up. "Breadth-first search, weighted by expected value."
Of course, if the market is tight because everyone is picky...
Your time doesn't become any less valuable because you're unemployed. Engaging in an employer's insane and inefficient three-ring circus seems like an awfully bad use of one's time. That time should be invested in pursuing opportunities that don't ask candidates to indulge a company's dysfunction.
Ok, they're going into crazyville here.
> If you’ve managed to impress them so far, and the company has a particularly thorough interview process, they might invite you back for a fifth interview to finally make a determination.
No thanks, please don't waste more of my time.
> During which you’ll spend no less than five hours making an attempt to solve a practical problem the company has faced recently. If you’re the right man (or woman) for the job, your references check out, and you can pass a background check, you’ll be made an offer and given two days to make a decision. This is the San Francisco startup interview process.
I've already accepted a better offer already.
As someone going through interviews in a tech city for a buzzword job, I am definitely going through this, and my family and friends are aghast at how many days worth of effort I end up putting in for each rejection letter... Or, worse, to finally get to the in-person interview only to find out that it's a brogrammer culture and I don't want to work there in the first place.
The "talent shortage" term that is so frequently used is misleading. Companies like Google and Facebook, as well as high-profile startups, can see hundreds of applications for every open position. Most of the candidates might not be as talented as these employers would like, but that doesn't mean they don't have a lot of warm bodies willing to subject themselves to a recruiting process that resembles a meat grinder.
My theory is that some companies want to be google-like and hope that by trying to apply the same interview practices they might be successful in finding and attracting the same top talent as Google attracted/attracts.
[1] I interviewed with them a while back.
Smaller companies either copy directly, or have alumni from larger corporations that are used to this process.
1) credentials (degree, class rank, past work experience, etc) are seen as better indicators of future performance in law than in programming
2) less effort is put into training in programming so more effort must be put into screening
But then I've never worked in the Bay Area.
For the most part it's usually a phone call with a recruiter or HR type.. then a technical screen and/or an informal phone call.. followed by an in-person 1-2 hour interview. Usually half of the face to face interview is just chit-chatting.
At this point, I've been in three jobs since I last updated my resume.. which I should probably do eventually. I'm not sure how much it matters... I'm less concerned about what comes next, than finishing what I am working on now. I'm also up-front about my faults and in what ways I don't fit into a typical corporate culture.
The stats are about software developers at large, but a company does not hire a developer at large - there's usually a very specific stack of technologies it uses, and once you've decided that yours is going to be, let's say, Node + Angular + Go, you're not exactly on the market for Java + Scala or Ruby + Rails guys even though you might get hundreds of their resumes.
I did a lot of phone screening and in-person interviewing at Amazon and the experience was nothing short of shocking. Applicants with 5+ years of professional experience who couldn't solve Fizzbuzz or reverse a string. People who didn't know what a set was - I had one guy who claimed to have done a decade of GIS development state that "he never uses sets - he just uses maps for everything." I would not let the vast majority of them anywhere near a codebase that I even somewhat cared about.
The filters are there for a very good reason. I think once a candidate meet a certain bar, the the process becomes somewhat arbitrary, but most applicants I've seen - where by "most" I mean 95/100 phone screens - don't come anywhere NEAR that bar.
I think it's insane that some companies hire people after only a single cursory interview. In a startup, a new hire is one of your biggest expenses and has a tremendous impact on the company. Not to mention that you're probably going to spend more time with this person than with you're significant other. Plus, it's a lot harder to break up with an employee than with a girlfriend.
Even the typical "gauntlet" seems like too little to me. I'd rather spend several weeks working with someone before hiring them, but unfortunately that's not possible.
For all the short comings of this process, I can say without a doubt that the quality of fellow interviewees I met at onsite interviews with the top companies was _significantly_ higher than those I met at companies with a shortened interview process. Sure that's likely obvious and anecdotal, but it gives me some peace of mind.
OK, you want me to do a full-day onsite interview? And you only hire 10% (or less) of the people you interview? That means that I'll pretty rapidly use up my annual vacation allotment on interviews.
Some people say that you're supposed to "disappear" for a couple hours in the middle of the day to interview. That's dishonest to your current employer. In an "open office" environment it's very hard to disappear without being noticed.
Taking a full day (or half day) for an interview doesn't scale for a candidate that already has a job.
They're more worried about hiring a single bad employee than rejecting many well-qualified employees. And I grudgingly understand that and the effect it has on company culture, but it's disappointing how arbitrary some of the "might be a bad employee" signals are, and how inept HR and recruiters are at giving you feedback about what you could have done better.
Shameless plug: I'm a sysadmin trying to turn into a devops guy in Austin, and I'm looking for a devops job. Ruby, Chef, and Ansible, but a but weak in the coding area.
HN very much likes to poo-poo the value of a CS degree. There is value in it. It proves you can master a variety of topics in 16 weeks, 8 times. (Or part-time while working/spouse/parent/whatever) It proves you can follow through with something over the course of years. It proves you can either work your way through college, are financially mature enough to take out and manage loans, or privileged enough to not need to worry about money.
All these things say a lot about a person.
I worked through college. Took me 7 years. I was a whiz-bang programmer before I started. I did it for the opportunities it would afford me down the road. I did it to prove to myself I could. College isn't always about the piece of paper. I didn't walk for graduation. My diploma is still in the envelope they mailed it in over a decade ago. I'm not proud of graduating, I'm proud I could persevere.
There is value in having a degree. There is a lot of value in having a technical degree. It isn't always about 'having' the degree, its about what it represents.
Was it listed as required? I don't know. Lots of jobs put that down, but usually they don't really mean it. It's just another part of the unicorn job description. The same people who want 10 years of experience in a 5 year old technology are the ones who put down CS degree requirements for every software development job.
But, actually, my beef isn't with the requirements. I know there ARE jobs where I'd be out of my depth because I haven't had the formal training and that education has value. I take issue with the fact that they let me get through the whole process before applying the degree filter. If you're going to filter on easily measured boolean signals like the presence or absence of a CS degree, you should do it at the beginning of the process and save everyone a lot of time.
I would never consider a candidate for a software engineering role that didn't have at least a CS degree. Possibly, EE, but nothing else. I have learned this the hard way, while others have learned to code they very often do so with little regard for design abstractions that are taught in school. Another reason for this requirement is the prescreening that comes with the CS degree. For example, an MIT CS grad has gone through rigorous testing for four plus years, far more than any two hour interview process ever could. I've never hired an MIT grad that didn't work out great. Ditto for some other schools, but especially so for MIT.
It's actually ept and clueful; it's just not on your side. The easiest way to prevent them from giving you a reason to sue them is to give you nothing at all. They are deliberately not giving you any feedback.
Consider that it is repeated over and over like Mantra that a single bad employee in a start-up can be devastating.
But even that can't be the greatest way to screen these people, you often have to work with them for a few weeks or months to see their good and bad sides. Once they are established in the company it can be definitely be harder to get them removed.
That is a management problem, not a hiring problem.
A couple weeks ago I asked for specific examples in a similar discussion[1]. Most of the responses I got were partially or totally management problems that companies were trying to fix by modifying the hiring process. If your management processes are shit, then you do need to be extremely careful about who you hire, because one bad one can ruin your company. The root cause, though, is management, and the proper solution is to fix your management processes, not hire unicorns.
But that is only one possibility for the cause of the trend at a company.
You don't have full visibility into his decision-making process. He was obviously briefed on the candidate prior to taking this meeting, previous interviewers could've expressed concerns or divided over hire/no-hire decision, etc.
To everybody here who's surprised by the gauntlet he had to run: the old saying hire hard fire easy comes to mind. I grew up in Ohio and started my career there. There are great and awful engineers everywhere, but certainly on average the level of skill and talent is much higher here in the bay area than anywhere else I've worked. Once you're initiated into that, if you do good work, you have a level of mobility here that can only be dreamed of elsewhere. There are just so many startups and tech companies, even compared to other meccas like NYC.
Exactly. Once you run the gauntlet once you generally don't have to do it again...at least not to the same extent.
And the '2 day' rule won't apply either.
I don't know why. Probably some combination of education, better management, longer and harder working conditions/hours, more selective interviewing, and more general hustle and motivation being around the best.
The more successful people who admit their past weaknesses, the less shameful it becomes. Having 150+ rejections shouldn't be a problem. The problem is the person (who? me) too scared to do those 15 or 150 applications in the first place.
[1] Application but no offer
You have to approach your job search as if it were a sales funnel, focusing on optimizing those things within your control. Those factors are number of applications, quality of your application materials and portfolio, and actual interviewing skill. You can't easily influence whether somebody takes the time to read your resume, which is why I don't think it's a bad sign that he had to send out 150 apps as a person without a strong professional network in the area. As far as I'm concerned, the real process begins when a recruiter sets up the first informational phone call. I'd be much more concerned if I found myself frequently flaming out at various levels of the process after I actually have a company's attention. Converting those warm leads into job offers is where raw interviewing skill comes into play. Some people, like the OP, just need a little practice to get good and comfortable at it.
No shame in needing some practice at those things that frequently come up in interviews but actually have very little to do with the day-to-day working life of a software engineer.
From personal experience applying to jobs as a soon to be graduate, I know many of my friends with similar qualifications didn't even receive an interview at certain companies, even though I know they would do well in them from work we've done together previously. It's also interesting that I received interviews with all of the top companies I was interested in, but I didn't even hear back from several that I would consider the next tier down.
Even better, when I was applying for internships last year, some companies sent me rejection emails in the middle of the summer, seemingly indicating my application was unearthed in the abyss of the job portal by some random happenstance.
As I said, fickle.
This is all too true. I am grappling with the possibility that I could never return to the East Coast near the rest of my family or my wife's family.
But really, I do want to know in exactly what way California is everything it’s made out to be?
PS: Above are not my personal opinions, it's just second hand information that has often came up in conversations.
"People waste enormous hours in traffic every day." Not unique to here. Experienced the same in South Florida growing up and Chicago for the brief period where I didn't work close to where I lived.
"State is in huge debt and public school system is one of the worse." Not really on my radar as I am in my mid twenties. Also, plenty of places where this is the norm anyhow.
"Govt is not able to develop infrastructure with growth. And you still pay everything through nose added with state and city taxes." Infrastructure hasn't really been an issue. Taxes are high no doubt. So is tech income.
"The place is enormously overcrowded to be pleasant." Not sure how you define this, SF proper is full but would prefer that to Detroit without a second thought.
"Significant portion of population is possibly undocumented exploited immigrants who don't even speak english." I hate the idea of exploiting people regardless of well, anything. I love the idea of immigrants and I am not worried about the population not speaking English. Any urban area is going to have multiple languages and immigrants. It means interesting culture and experiences. Most places I have been where its ~100% English speaking have been rather depressing.
"People who often feel its nice out there are usually coming from mid west small town with nothing to do or super-crowded places like NJ/NY. People from places like Seattle, Florida, Portland or New England might not feel they have ended up at better place." I grew up in a beautiful area of South Florida, went to school in Chicago and lived in the hippest of hip areas in Chicago. It simply depends on what you are into. I wanted to go outside and recreate all 12 months of the year the midwest is rather lame. Too cold and not much of interest ecologically/geographically. There are many great places to live, but not that many at the epicenter of the tech universe.