I’ve been interviewing for 8 months. Getting to many final rounds, 1 lowballed offer, 1 rescinded offer, and it’s playing a mental toll. Today, I got a rejection that went along the lines of “everyone loved you and there was absolutely 0 negative feedback, but we just found a better fit.” I almost broke down, but hid behind a facade of positivity because the long weekend was starting and my kids can’t afford a bummed out Friday.<p>Interviewing shouldn’t require such thick skin. I’m here questioning my life, and reduced to worthlessness.
These styles of multi-round interviews inspired by the FAANG collective started picking up in Australia before the pandemic, but it got to a point where most of my more talented colleagues and I all agreed it just wasn’t worth the time for the salaries being offered. 4 round interviews for a ‘senior’ developer position on $120k?<p>When interviewing my own candidates, I use a 1 hour interview mostly focused on approach and personality. We have a probation period to work out if they’ve over-promised, and most of our tech industry is big banks that won’t notice if they waste a few weeks salary trying someone out. Honestly, for the salaries the local market provides, I think 1 interview is fair. Any more and I think we’re wasting peoples time for nothing.<p>Personally, I’ve dropped out of application processes when they’ve indicated there are multiple rounds, and my salary hasn’t suffered for it relative to my friends who put up with them, so I feel like I’m ahead.
My last job search took a toll on my mental health. I felt like a worthless person for 3 months. I could feel (or imagine?) the disdain of the interviewers as I was failing their tests. The fake enthusiasm on their side as they rejected me ("that was great! But we're not going to move forward with you! Good luck!!!") and on my side while pretending I was excited when in fact I was worried about money and the gap on my resume.<p>I dread the next one.
I’ve seen so many of these jokes and complaints about modern SV interviews that I was blown away when I recently interviewed at a FAANG… I was assigned a recruiter who communicated clearly and often with me, told exactly how many interviews I was doing (3), what each was about, and all 3 were scheduled on the same day, and were handled by extremely smart and supportive people. Offer came through by the end of the week.<p>Not at all what I was expecting!
Do you know the meme on Reddit that shows a blob in a square, deciding to give the outside world a try, gets punched and says never again?<p>That’s how I feel when I try to interview for an software engineering role.
Sad someone out there will assume this is for real and plan to change their interviewing to this. I've been in interviews where you had to talk with every single person on the team (8, half of which didn't show); a gang interview with me in the middle for several hours; 4 separate interviews with multiple people who all asked complicated puzzle questions; and a place where every team member talked about how they did a part of every job (architect designed classes, lead designed methods, and programmers filled them out), etc. Insanity in interviews knows no bounds.<p>Two of the best programmers I ever worked with I interviewed over the phone for an hour each and that was it.
- If a job has more than 2 rounds, no thanks.<p>- If they send me a leetcode or test before speaking to me, no thanks.<p>- If the job ad says anything about "culture", no thanks.<p>- If my first interview is with an HR person, no thanks.<p>- If the job ad or email mention anything about making a video of myself, I will delete that mofo with extreme prejudice.<p>- If the job application requires me to sign up to your website, no thanks.<p><i>I have 15 years of commercial experience. When I apply for a job, all I want is to speak to one technical person in the team that has oversight. If that is too much to ask then I'm just not throwing my name in that hat for the inevitable humiliation ritual.</i><p>But the reality is that (web-dev) jobs are over-saturated. There are plenty of people willing to go through this. Which is why I'm looking for a way out.
Interviewing is hard, requires skills precisely zero people are trained to do, and has huge long-term upsides and downsides to a business.<p>I'm a programmer. I trained for years to do that. Then I'm asked to hire someone. A task I have zero experience or training at. Spoiler alert - any actual competence is a fluke.<p>At my peak I was hiring maybe 2 or 3 people in a year. Mostly I hired people I'd heard about who came with a recommendation. Results varied. Most were OK, some were exceptional, some didn't last long.<p>Some companies are hiring tens, hundreds or thousands of people a week. Presumably they have full-time interviewers. But "good judgement" isn't a scaleable property, so you end up with filters and processes to try and narrow the field to "good candidates". Maybe thats "must have degree", maybe that's leetcode problems.<p>Hiring into a big company is painful. They have a process which probably makes no sense, adds little value, and appears to be arbitrary and doesn't lead to significantly different outcomes. But how else could it look? It's a sausage factory churning out sausages.<p>Hiring into a small company can be turgid - they're a small company but it seems like everyone there has to sign off on the interview first. They're scared of making a mistake, so they never seem to get to a decision.<p>Or it can be simple. There's one guy. He either likes you or not. He either thinks you can do the job or not. Takes an hour, and there's an offer on the table. But this guy hires 1 person every now and then, not 100 per week.<p>Hiring us hard [1]. It should be done by professionals. There should be degree programs training people how to do it. But even then, companies growing at severe pace may as well just pick every 3rd CV and save themselves, and applicants, a lot of time and effort. Yes it would be random, but you shouldn't hire unlucky people anyway.<p>[1] hiring for skilled people, where actual skills are hard to measure, to work in a team environment, where their output is disproportional to their rank, status of pay.
The beginning of wisdom is to understand that nobody knows everything. I regularly interview candidates for my team and other teams. I can pretty much determine in about an hour if a candidate is a good fit or not. But one thing I have noticed lately is that some of them try to cheat (only possible with remote interviews of course). Basically they google answers as we are talking, or they have someone else do it in the background. It’s pretty obvious because there are long pauses, attempts to delay, indications that they’re reading something, and then they suddenly know the answers. They never say “I don’t know.” My “gotcha” technique is to ask a really esoteric question that I am certain the candidate would not know, and somehow, miracle of miracles, they suddenly know the answer after “thinking” about it for a minute. I actually don’t really care how much you know, rather, I care that you are honest, confident, resourceful, passionate, and that you communicate clearly. Obviously intelligence matters as well, and I’d take an intelligent person with the above-mentioned qualities who lacks knowledge in a particular technology than a “qualified” candidate who pretends to know everything and is a liar.
And hey, I’ll be the first to admit that I live on stack overflow.
<p><pre><code> FROM: jobs@bubbleapp.com
DATE: October 5, 2022
Dear Applicant,
As you may be aware, the past three weeks have been a test. You have been “working” at a facsimile of our HQ staffed by trained actors.
</code></pre>
Finally, an explanation for all the software devs who can't fizzbuzz!
I don't disagree with this articles satire, as it lines up with my experience if you remove a bit of the hyperbole. I am however curious as to why companies continue to do this and seem to be increasing their interview requirements in the face of an inability to hire.<p>The most reasonable sounding answer I can come up with is that executives are balking at engineering pay and rationalizing it to themselves by demanding ever more from engineers even though the number of people who can pass all these hoops is not increasing. That's based on gut instinct however, so if anyone has some actual insight they could share it would be appreciated.
And you are now hired! Note that there will be daily metrics collected on your keystroke rate, github contributions, slack response times, monthly managerial review and quarterly peer rankings. We also track your extra curricular internet and social media activity to ensure our members contribute to the greater good.
A relative recently got an email to a second round of interviews.<p>They were instructed to schedule 12 different meetings.<p>They declined assuming that they could probably get in interviews for several jobs in that amount of time / just didn’t want to deal with how much bureaucracy that seemed to indicate.
Code interview practical exercises. Ive been asked to do them maybe 6-10 times. Each time I completed the test to a high standard and got rejected for other random reasons. Once I spend a day writing a PostgreSQL extension in C to shuttle data between tables, at the request of a company, and I didn’t even get an interview.<p>Once I interviewed for a company and everything was great but they said my rate was too high even though I had told them up front.<p>Once I showed up and the interviewer wasn’t even there and they hadn’t bothered to let me know.<p>Once a dude got me to propose and diagram an architecture for their actual system during the interview and I didn’t hear from them again. Swindled.<p>Then there’s having recruiters breathing down your neck and asking invasive questions while protecting all the details about the client and the job…<p>Yea. Done with it
Hits close to home. I did an interview with a static analysis company and everything went well until the “People Gardeners” interview. It was a relatively short meeting that was mostly taken up by them asking basic career history questions, but part of it supposedly had some kind of personality fit methodology.<p>I was told matter-of-factly that I was out of touch with my emotions and therefore couldn’t fit the team. To anyone who knows me, that’s basically the polar opposite of how I am. But, the ‘what if you’re wrong and are just oblivious?’ self-doubt circled for weeks. I can’t imagine what this sick joke of a psychology test would feel like for someone on the spectrum.<p>I definitely got the vibe from the recruiter that this step was maddening and unpredictable.
I think there is like a skull and bones conspiracy that every founder who gets venture capital and every other mega company agrees to make interviews awful.<p>That way employees don’t want to go through the trouble and would rather just stay where they are, and will accept less pay than they could get.<p>It’s like a cartel and it works as long as everyone involved keeps up the gig.<p>It’s either that or interviews just suck and no matter what you do they will suck.<p>Or maybe interviews are just fine and people just need to accept they are stressful. If you can’t handle the stress, then build a good network with friends and relatives, and let a little nepotism make it easier. If you can’t do that then just accept you won’t get paid as much and your job might not be perfect.
I just recently went through this. Seven interviews over a period of nearly a month. I didn't get the position. The most frustrating thing was that there was so much repetition.<p>Each round had one or more interviewers and I never met the same people twice. I can only assume none of them had context from the previous rounds because so many of the situational and culture type questions were basically identical. I couldn't even fake enthusiasm after the third round.<p>Moving forward I will kindly be declining participating in any interview process that has more than three rounds. Besides being draining, it's a pretty good indicator of bigger problems in the company itself.
My longest interview process lasted around 7 weeks. During this time I basically met all my bosses, from my direct manager to C-level. I was going to do some formal engineering challenges initially, but they were eventually removed from the process.<p>A few days after I joined the company an engineer at my level was fired, allegedly due to his performance. His manager said that the hiring process had been improved to prevent that from happening again.<p>I instantly knew he was lying. The hiring process had actually been made more stupid because the company was struggling to attract engineers. I was actually the only candidate during the last few rounds of interviews.
As someone who just went through the interview epic-quest-with-many-sidequests-and-bonus-missions at a few companies, this hit close to home. I’m happy where I ended up though and it wound up being one of the more reasonable interview processes of the bunch.
Interviewing processes have really gotten out of hand as of lately.
I've recently witnessed the new practice of having candidates take online personality tests which claim to be able to determine my personality by having me answer to multiple choice questions like: 'I like arts' or 'I trust my parents' (ref.: <a href="https://www.hoganassessments.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.hoganassessments.com/</a>). I've had a hard laugh at this, while talking about it with a psychiatrist friend: how are you able to give value to said answers without any clue of context? I've spent most of my life dealing with my parents' alcohol abuse and suicidal tendencies, how am I gonna get judged by how much I trust them? How does it take my therapist so long to delve into such delicate topics, while HR can have me take a 10 minutes online test and get my life sorted out? I swear, I respect all crafts, but I swear HR is always the scummiest department wherever I go. It's basically -with due exceptions, like always in life- unskilled people lobbying to make each other look professional, while assuming they're CEOs, psychiatrists and technical leads, despite having chosen the HR career path on the sole basis of not having any expendable professional competence to apply in any field. And I don't say this with resentment, I've <i>aced</i> the hogan tests for all my interviews.
> "Phase three starts at 8 a.m. sharp, next Monday, and lasts for fourteen Pomodoro-timer cycles, concluding at 5:38 p.m."<p>Unfortunately, this sounds dreadful and yet completely plausible. Pomodoros, or taking short breaks every once in a while, really are useful for avoiding stretching out tasks, though.
My best interview experiences were with companies that either documented their full interview process on their website or told me beforehand how many rounds there are going to be and what to expect during each round.
This includes sending me a onepager about each interview partner, so I could get to know something about them before meeting them.<p>In the end there was one extra interview (after the three they told me about beforehand), but that was because my requested salary was higher than the company expected, so they wanted to make sure I was a good fit.<p>EDIT: Those companies also scheduled all interviews for the same day. This way I could receive the offer/rejection within less than one week.
I used to do interviews like a competitive sports. From there I got exposed to so many different (often ridiculous) styles of interviews. It used to be kind of entertaining to play those games.<p>I cannot do that anymore because I have a kid.
Can something be done that changes the dynamics in the job market? The underlying problem is that companies don't trust the existing available information.<p>E.g. if individuals cannot be judged, could it be easier to hire entire teams? This would reduce the control that a company has over their software because the knowledge is gone if the team abandons the contract. So, could software be structured and documented to the extend that leaving teams are not a problem? And if so, would it be feasible to create enough software teams and software managed by teams that there is a working market?
A little, less-known hack is to be hired as a freelancer/contractor, from there you just prove your worth and ask for a long time position.
It allows you to bypass the multi-round interviews, have a greater negotiation power (cause they know what you're worth) and just stop loosing crap on bs tests for X and Y.<p>This is what I did and it worked well for me. Before doing that I never went through interviews that had more than 3 rounds.
I have noticed more companies trying to schedule a whole day of interviews instead of spreading a lot of interviews out. It is only slightly better, as all of the stress and mental cost is fit into one day.
I wonder how much the difficulty/pain of interviewing is a joint effort by big tech to make it annoying to switch jobs once you get in? I have met numerous FAANG engineers who say they would never want to do the process again and, despite [insert a normal work gripe], interviewing at another well paid company is too much work.<p>Certainly before big tech agreed not to poach from each other once upon a rime, but now I wonder if this is a lower grade version of this?
I thought I would laugh after this article, but in reality I could cry. My current new job, I had seriously a total of 9 interviews!
And guess what - I thought it was kind of a red flag but still continued just to realize how much of a control freak top down management is in this company.<p>My take-away: After 3 interviews start to ask yourself if maybe decision making is broken in this company. After 5 its a red flag.
Honestly such a job would not worth it.<p>The company seems utterly without process or clear understanding of what/who they are trying to hire - basically incompetent. Why work for an incompetent company?<p>I'd rather start my own company and take the risks and rewards of that instead.
Whenever these posts come up, there's a certain amount of hubris to be found. For those programmers who didn't jump through the hoops for a good gpa and now refuse to jump through hoops for a job, what exactly are you willing to do?
this was pure gold<p>"An Enneagram test and one-on-ones with nineteen different people in H.R.
A fajita lunch, some improv games, and a Ping-Pong tournament, after which you will be evaluated on our five-dimensional Work Hard, Play Harder assessment matrix.
A ninety-minute walk-and-chat around our man-made lagoon with our C.E.O., Benji, and Benji’s dog, Mr. Rex. (Mr. Rex will “interview” you with his barks!)"<p>everything was pretty believable except 19 different people in HR. Would've been better just saying "19 different people". Because sometimes it feels like that!
I found my last job by targeting a company I found fascinating and then finding a way to make myself useful to the CEO. It took 4 or 5 interactions with him over 6 months, and the last one was a formal "pair programming" session.<p>I am not saying this would work for everyone, just noticing the interesting symmetry that when you find a job by networking instead of applying directly through the front door, the interview cycle is also long, but it is more about learning and adapting to the other than a high stakes set of judgements.
What industry is this? For front-end developers, if you're not fast enough as a company, the best candidates are already gone. Talking about Europe here, not sure how it is in US.
Our most recent hire just quit - after 2.5 months. Because the interview process at a “better” company finally ended with an offer.<p>So you might get screwed even if you don’t play these games.
It's very refreshing to hear others complain about the interview culture at these companies. In the last year I've interviewed at Apple, Amazon, Meta, IBM and a couple others and failed <i>every</i> interview.<p>I've only recently finished my undergrad in CS and am still working on my CS masters but despite doing well in school I felt like an absolute failure after every interview.<p>It's somewhat comforting to hear this is a common occurrence.
Shameless plug for my site chronicling the horrors of interview prep - <a href="https://interhaik.us" rel="nofollow">https://interhaik.us</a>
The thing I hate about interviewing is how aberrant it is -- companies ghosting as a common occurrence, the power-dynamics of an interviewer vs. an interviewee, the feeling of being evaluated constantly. It also can be an arms race of "how well can you find out the exact questions they will ask and prepare for it" sometimes because if you don't, many other can and will.
With regards to short term work; It does seem like the barrier of entry for shorter term contract work can be dramatically lower than with full-time "join our cult" scenarios. My personal pet peave is when smaller companies seem to go broke in the middle of an interview process, I guess it's for the best lol.
What’s the ideal interview? HR screen, tech interview, and team lead interview? I don’t know that you can reasonably compress things down to less than three interviews without relying on individuals to be better at interviewing than they might actually be.
I have a theory about survivor bias and all the VC money raining down on every start up under the sun. Maybe there’s no feedback loop on hiring proper value adding employees because there doesn’t have to be.
If a company sets expectations accordingly I don't mind having several rounds. It gives me time to interview them too. I just think we all need to agree on which poison to fight and that's Taleo.
I like especially the jump from <i>May 5, 2022</i> "...we will follow up in two hours to two months" to the next letter dated <i>September 10, 2022</i>, over 4 months later.
In comparison, I got pretty damn lucky.<p>I had only one interview.<p>I showed up unscheduled, and uninvited. And I immediately got an offer at the end of it (pending background check).<p>I’ve been there for over 16 years now.
HR finally got smart and found something to do.<p>At some point in the future there'll be a turn and we'll go back to an hour with the hiring manager.
Okay to be frank, I enjoy interviews. And interviewing for 7 hours isn't a big deal for me with a company at all.<p>However it just gets tiring.<p>I'm actually going to be at a 7 hours total of interviewing with one company. 5 hours total with another (in addition to recruiter calls) and possibly even more.<p>The thing is I know my worth, and this is actually a feeling the market round for me, so I'm not stressed at all. But I have done interviews where I spent 4 hrs writing some mock react app as a take-home, then another 4 hours of interviews, and those really get to me, they killed an evening for me. Those are the worst.<p>Point is... Interviewing suuuucks when you're some of the highest paid employees in the company.<p>Some hints I want to give for people interviewing:<p>1) Start the convo with salary expectations. Otherwise you spend 6 hours and find out its too low. I made this mistake. Don't be me.<p>2) Level set on seniority level and what would it take for you to leave your current job. If you despise your job, okay I can see this being quick, if you do not you're gonna be looking for potential negotiating power.<p>3) Enjoy the interview. Literally people want you to blabber on about yourself for 4 hours. Shit I could not think of a better way to get my cabin fever out of the way.<p>Make this A LOT EASIER ON YOURSELF: make sure you know your talking points. Know your core stories you fall back to for all sort of behavioral questions. I'd say do 10 trial interviews, after about 10 you get REALLY good at this, then interview for the jobs you really really actually care about. If you can, conduct as many interviews as possible at work. Sit in them. Lead them. The more you conduct the easier you can interview for someone else. Its like free practice!!!! Best part, the thing you look for... the other side looks for when they interview you!!!<p>4) Brush up on a little bit of leet code, but also know how to take your time. Being able to ace the technical interview is a great way to go. Startups tend not to offer leet code because they can't be that picky. The best interviews are things like "did you read the code?!?!?!" "did you read the data structure?" "can you approach a technical problem well or do you get lost?" "can you debug?"<p>How to ace technical interviews: interview a friend. What would YOU look for from a technical person? What helps you decide "wow this person really knows how to code" from "this person has memorized leet code questions". Then do that exact thing. Show them you understand trade-offs, you don't have to implement them but show you know about them, talk about ways your code could have been better if you had more time, learn to structure / attack problems in a modular way. All that makes you look GOOOOOOOD.<p>5) Make it a fun convo. Think of the interview as a date. Both of you want different things, but ultimately both of you want to show eachother a good time. So show them a good time, and let them show you a good time. You get people talking about their projects and fun technical challenges (if you ever interview with an architect). Remember, people LOVE TO TALK ABOUT THEMSELVES. If they do, they feel good. Make sure to answer what they need to make a decision and then throw in some happy they talk about their stuff into the mix.<p>In any case. Make the interview fun, and long interviews turn out to be a fun time to hang out with new people and get cool short conversations going. And make a fuckton of money from it :)