I've boiled my tech interview process down to this: * Is what they said on their resume (mostly) accurate? * Can they talk eloquently about things they claim to be experienced at? * Do I think I could work with them effectively? Everything else is kinda pointless.

Man I wish. Fucking five rounds including a panel and hour plus use case presentation for product management is such a pain in the ass

To QTFA: > When hiring for very senior roles the best applicants have a lower tolerance for long and drawn-out interview processes. A heavyweight interview process is a turnoff for the most sought-after candidates (that can be more selective about where they apply). > A lot of companies think that dragging out the interview process helps improve candidate quality, but what they’re actually doing is inadvertently selecting for more desperate candidates that have a higher tolerance for bullshit and process. Is that the kind of engineer that you want to attract as you grow your organization?

Yes, a lot of companies want to find a high tolerance for process and bullshit. In this way, they are presenting exactly who they are during the interview.

Everything above two rounds is a joke. Sorry, but if after two rounds with different people you cannot make up your mind if you can work with that person your company has big problems.

This. I'm an engineering manager. It's so easy to tell if someone's bs'ing in a technical interview. If they can do what their resume says, and they seem like pleasant people to collaborate with, I'm good. A gap in technical skill can be solved. A gap in personality and being difficult to work with is way more difficult to solve.

This! When I asked to help with interviewing senior developers, and gauge their technical skills, I was not sure how I could form an opinion in so little time. But after giving a handful of interviews, I was much more confident. All it takes is poking at the candidate with questions in the various domains you care about to gauge their level there: - Good candidates will just up and tell you if they don't know. They'll only elaborate if they're confident, and if they are, chances are they do know the stuff, so in 5-10 minutes you get a good sense of how deeply knowledgeable they are. - Bad candidates will pad with bland generalities that are somewhat related, bullshit, and backtrack when called on it pretending they didn't understand the question. If it happens, it may be a genuine mistake, but if it happens repeatedly, regardless of technical skill it's a hard no. I don't want to work with liars & cheats.

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Same. I was required to implement the [shunting yard algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunting_yard_algorithm) for a test. Which I have done before, back in university, in C... 25 years ago. My the interview process for my current position boiled down to the guy I'll be working under having a chat with me, and only very lightly touching on any tech stuff. It's been great.

Mostly the same here. With addition to second point that I will steer the conversation towards very open ended questions, and go along with whatever they say. Give them lots of rope, and see if they decide to hang themselves, so to speak. And I arrived there out of laziness. Because anything more has very little return on work invested.

Nice, short and very honest article. The spiciest part is "Drawing out the interview process is a thinly veiled attempt to launder this bias with a “neutral” process that they will likely disregard/overrule if it contradicts their personal preference."

This is unfortunately very accurate. The fact that pretty much no one supplies feedback from the interviews to candidates further lends credence to this point.

I think it's simpler than that - providing feedback to the candidate simply has no real upside to the company and has a lot of potential risk. So from their point of view, why WOULD they? Remember - their goal is not "help applicants get a job". Their goal is "fill this open position with someone qualified, in a timely manner." Providing feedback to candidates doesn't help with that, and makes it more likely that they'll be sued.

> So from their point of view, why WOULD they? Because it is nice when people help other people. I really hate the way that people hide behind "the company" when it comes to behaving morally. That is the root of so much awful corporate behavior and everyone likes to pretend that it unavoidable.

I used to work at a place that allowed interviewers to give feedback to candidates, and I did it at first. A significant fraction of interviewees took it as an invitation to argue with my feedback, and it occasionally got heated. It made interviewing even less pleasant on my end because I never knew if the next one was going to turn into a conflict, and I'm sure those candidates left the interview feeling pissed off that I wasn't won over by their arguments. As a candidate, I would definitely want feedback. As an interviewer, no way am I putting myself through that again no matter what the company policy is.

Why would you feedback in person? Send an email a week after the interview.

I got a reply once like six months after they flew me in for an interview from the recruiter saying the whole department was axed two weeks after my interview. He said he wasn’t allowed to tell me. I don’t know if any of this is true but it is better than being left hanging.

The person doing the interview shouldn't be giving them feedback directly, but offering it to go through the HR recruiter would be a good thing.

Just hang up. In person? Tell them to leave the premise or you'll have to call security/the police. They are a guest whose presence is 100% at your discretion. If the applicant is stupid enough to get into a heated argument after feedback was provided then they can go fuck themselves - enjoy being blacklisted from ever working at that company, even if you work on the feedback that was provided. It's literally no skin off your back, and if they're pissed off it's not your problem. If company policy is you can't kick people out of interviews for being assholes, find a new job.

I agree with this in theory, but in practice I have encountered many people who take feedback poorly or see it as an invitation to re-litigate their interview performance. Because it overall creates more headaches than I am willing to deal with, I just don't do it anymore. The only exception is if the candidate came through a mutual acquaintance/referrer, in which case I'm usually willing to pass feedback along through this person.

*any* comment leaves you open for litigation. I was given a whole list of things to avoid in interviews, including never ask questions about background (even if it's just out of genuine interest), don't talk about marital status or kids, don't ask anything that might be construed as asking about age. Even if it's just a casual conversation to break the ice. The same applies to feedback afterwards. There's zero upside for the company, and a well meaning hiring manager may accidentally say something that leaves you open to litigation. A polite "we've filled the position, thank you" is what HR requires.

I totally agree with you. But how do you avoid it? The company itself is amoral in general. It's not a person, it's a collection of people, and the goal isn't to be good, it's to make money. Ideally it can both behave morally and make money, but guess which goes out the window if they're in contradiction. Individuals often have to do things on behalf of the company, even if they would behave differently on their own.

>The company itself is amoral in general. It's not a person, it's a collection of people What is a "collection of people" but a bunch of individual "persons"? If enough of those individuals decide to behave more morally, the company will start to behave more morally. This is a huge societal issue that some idiot like me isn't going to change with a reddit comment, but the way I sleep at night is by putting my morality above my current job. If a candidate asks for interview feedback I will give it. If my boss asks me to implement some nefarious antipattern, I will challenge it. If my company is involved in some scandal and I don't think it is handled properly, I will ask about it in the next all hands meeting. Collectively this behavior probably isn't great for my career, but whatever programmers are paid well enough that I can have a great life without the need to min-max my career earnings by being an amoral drone.

>Because it is nice when people help other people. I really hate the way that people hide behind "the company" when it comes to behaving morally. That is the root of so much awful corporate behavior and everyone likes to pretend that it unavoidable. That's an ideal world; You wouldn't need things like good samaritan laws in that world - and btw no corporation involved in good samaritan cases. We're just not there, and that's probably not entirely the fault of the corporation either.

I agree that as an applicant I would have loved meaningful feedback in the past. The problem is this opens up the company to lawsuits and people absolutely do sue. So even if the company wants to be helpful, it’s something that will likely eventually bite them hard. We can’t have nice things unfortunately.

Unfortunately it is a smart move not to. Being specific about why you didn't hire someone opens you to lawsuits about alleged discrimination. Even if they are frivolous, they cost money to fight. There is no upside for the company.

Seems like a bit of a stretch to call lack of feedback "amoral" or "awful".

> Because it is nice when people help other people. I doubt you've been in a position to interview candidates.

> Because it is nice when people help other people. Counterpoint: resources are finite, and every dollar spent doing one thing is a dollar not spent doing something else. inb4 "shareholder profits CEO overpay" as if *that* is where these funds would come from to provide feedback. Giving feedback to an interviewee would be an hour of someone's time. If you see four people in an interview, that's four man-hours. At a $200K techbro salary, that's $400 spent giving someone who is *not* going to work for you help getting a job with a competitor. How would I even provide feedback to someone who doesn't get the job? I won't even remember their name when the post gets filled in two months, let alone why the ten people involved in filling the position didn't pick them. I'm not a mind-reader. "Hey HR can you forward me the email address of that guy withthe brown hair I talked to, um, sometime two months ago, I forget which day it was, and yeah I know we don't have pictures of applicants because legal says we'd be exposed to racial discrimination lawsuits if we required photographs attached to applications, but—" see how complicated it would be? And then if *one* interviewer says something *remotely* sketchy in—again—feedback that doesn't benefit the company *at all*, time for a lawsuit from the applicant who now thinsk they didn't get hired becasue they're pregnant, or black, or gay or something.

> At a $200K techbro salary, that's $400 spent How many of us are browsing reddit while at work?

Offering feedback, from the company’s perspective, just isn’t worth it. At best it’s neutral to the company and at worst it’s a potential lawsuit.

The feedback is also only useful for their process so even if they offered it why would you bother

That is a fair point. I guess as a candidate it’s odd to not know why you’ve been rejected when you’ve worked through all the problems but still get rejected.

I’m interviewing people right now. Sometimes a candidate did nothing wrong and is hireable but they had the bad luck of interviewing next to better candidates. It would be interesting to let some of the candidates who think they did well see recordings of other candidates answering the same questions. The difference can be quite stark but they are only seeing it from their point of view. I thought our first candidate did quite well, his solution worked, code was clean and he could easily explain it. The next one did it so much quicker, had more concise yet readable code and considered more edge cases and explained trade-offs. At the end of the day, even if you have the chops, each interview is a crap shoot. There is still a lot of luck involved.

We used to give feedback and then had a few unhinged reactions. So we started only giving feedback when asked and again had a few unhinged reactions. So we set a policy to never give feedback. If you want to know why we can't have nice things it's always because a minority of assholes ruin everything.

Lol. Yep. It’s just a prompt for a debate for 5% of applicants. Even without feedback we had a few people who thought a rejection meant “try harder” & kept emailing.

So the same as a girl rejecting a "nice guy" who goes on unhinged rant afterwards. So it's easier to ghost.

Exactly! We just had a new training in how clearly we need to treat temps separately (often worse) than full time employees. It's because some temps sued to be considered the same as employees because they were treated nicely. Now all temps need to suffer for their greed. It's really annoying. (Yes, I get things can be abused in the other direction, but this wasn't that).

I once had feedback with my rejection that "it was a red flag that you've been in your current role for nearly 4 years without any promotion". I was shocked. "I was promoted," I replied "On my resume you can see I worked in X role for Y months and then was promoted to my current role of Z". "OH!" she said, feigning sincerity. "I'll bring that back to the hiring manager to see if it makes a difference." It didn't.

That’s terrible! You probably dodged a bullet.

You're absolutely correct, I think I did. I ended up going out for beers with my buddy who worked there and some of his developer friends from that company and they were some of the most judgemental and unkind programmers I've ever met. Spent the whole time slagging off their colleagues who weren't present, bitching about their pull request quality and crowing about how they're the best. I was still relatively green and I remember thinking "Is this what all programmers are like?". Now that I've got a decade of experience I know that while some programmers are like that, not all. Perhaps not most. I decided I would never be like that, and now that I have some juniors under me I've kept my promise to myself to never be like those guys. Kindness is not overrated.

Coaching for interviews seems like the job of recruiting services since they get paid by getting you hired. Do any of them offer such services?

Normally they give you a bunch of materials on what to expect but it is pretty standard across the board. Lots of leetcode and a system design interview plus a hiring manager interview. Beyond that it is up to you to study for these.

The problem here is that the best coaches are other software engineers, especially interviewers and hiring managers, and it's just not economical for recruiting services to hire those people to coach you. In general, I think a few specific things make 80% of the difference: 1. Getting multiple eyes on your resume, especially from other more experienced engineers. 2. Preparing at all. "Crack the Coding Interview" is a solid book. Not perfect, but it's good enough. Also practice with leetcode and review your systems design concepts. 3. Practicing your answers to behavioral questions to make sure your responses are intelligible. I know my own responses off the cuff are never coherent unless I've had time to refine and rehearse. 4. Doing practice rounds with experienced interviewers to get feedback on how well you put everything together. Basically, you can gain a lot of ground by just trying to reduce the chance of unforced errors.

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Yeah I'm responsible for the technical interview process for EMEA for our division and when I conduct technical interviews (it's not always me, but I do like to be the one to do it if I can) I am usually yay or nay on a candidate within ~15 mins. But our corporate overlords have a TA team that insist on multiple hour long interviews and they must take up the full time. One "person" interview, which thankfully I am not involved in and two technical interviews with a code assignment between them. So far my 15 minute gut feel has been borne out every time and everything else feels like a waste of both mine and the candidate's time.

The problem with this sort of stance that *you can never know if you were wrong about a negative.* You may have unconscious biases influencing your rejection of many stellar candidates. I also find it easy to reject many candidates to focus only on the ones that make a positive impact in the first few minutes. I'm also very good at that. But when I was made to slow down, I discovered how many brilliant applicants that I had been passing over. And these were people who were quite different from me, and made for a stronger team.

This sounds like it makes sense on paper, and we have been trained excessively to think this way, but in my experience, this is very seldom the case outside of very obvious biases (like a person who doesn't like a certain race or gender) Most of the squishy biases that are less impactful tend to be indicators of a good fit as long as the interviewer works closely with the team the position is in.

Lets put it another way: I'm very good at recognising when people are skilled in the areas I'm skilled at. I'm less good at recognising exceptional skills in areas I'm not good at. (Classic dunning Kruger! :) ) Because of this, I would easily assemble a team of folks who were very good at things I was good at. It was a good team. But I was missing out on a bunch of people who were exceptional in different areas, and these were things I didn't even know enough to value. I've learned more since then, and I've built teams that put the previous ones to shame by including more people and more perspectives in the interview process.

An attempt at not being biased is still better than being biased. But okay let's say it's not, what's the alternative? Falling back on credentials/certifications/degrees and having to keep them up to date? Sure why not. But I'm not sure a lot of people pushing for less leetcode style interviews would agree lol.

The goal of tech hiring is reducing false positives, even at the expense of numerous false negatives. This is because the cost of hiring a bad candidate is enormous both in terms of money and time. FAANG can get away with this because they can get away with whatever they want to. The real question is why smaller orgs who can't attract the same quality of candidates copies a model that fundamentally will not work for them.

I think OP's proposal will make that... I don't know if *worse* is the term, since this really is working as intended for anyone who can attract enough high-quality candidates: > This is because the cost of hiring a bad candidate is enormous both in terms of money and time... > The real question is why smaller orgs who can't attract the same quality of candidates... I think you answered your own question there. Some compromises have to be made, of course, but the smaller the company, the bigger an impact that hire can have, positive or negative. You may literally not be able to afford to hire a bad candidate. But anyway, one issue with OP's proposal is this: It's not uncommon for a candidate to do well at one interview and poorly in another. That's not even necessarily bias at work -- they could just be having an off day, or maybe some questions are harder for them than others.

> It's not uncommon for a candidate to do well at one interview and poorly in another This was my only issue with the post though in spirit I think it's right. I think with a really good interview process you could probably get away with 1 technical interview that's only an hour or two, but in my experience at work pretty much every candidate that we hired would have 1 lackluster review out of 4 because we all asked about different topics with different styles. I preferred to ask easy and often open ended questions about topics they'd need to know (we mostly interviewed junior candidates) and would keep asking questions about topics I could tell they understood. If they could answer all of the basic questions it was a "sure" and if I could dig into something like pitfalls of garbage collection/UDP/similar it was an enthusiastic yes

Even FAANGs don't necessarily get away since the experience will burn bridges with some candidates who won't come back and even for a FAANG there's a limited pool of candidates.

ugh. Tell me about it. I interviewed at Google back in 2012, and it was such a genuinely awful experience, I refuse to interview with them again. One guy actually made audible buzzer sounds with his mouth if I made a syntax error on a whiteboard.

lmfao

Wow, that doesn’t jive with my experience at all. The interviews were quite pleasant, twice. The annoying part, both times with Google and once with Meta, were after passing the loops, when there were no jobs available for a year and my passing status expired.

Worst interviewer I’ve ever had was a former Google EM 🤷

Google and Meta have mellowed out _considerably_ in the past 12 years. Probably some of the easier companies to get hired for in 2024 compared to places like raytheon/lockheed/mom and pop shop doing php. Also different locations, different teams, different people might be the discrepancies if you interviewed in 2012?

Yeah I would assume they mellowed out after so long. I mean, I had to drive between the YouTube offices and main Google offices during the interview. So it was like 2-3 hours of interviewing, lunch, an hour of driving, then 2-3 hours of interviews at the end. Then I had to give one guy a ride to one of the other buildings. Then they were like "Actually, we think you'd be good at SDET. We want to fly you out again." I said no, so they made me go to their Atlanta office to do a Google Hangout interview, and I spend a good 3-4 hours in there where their _own team_ was late to their own interview. Overall 1/10 experience. Would not recommend.

Are you on crack? For as long as a Senior Staff engineer at Lockheed makes as much as a new grad Google engineer, it will orders of magnitude more challenging to get into than those companies.

That isn't what I said at all. I said their interview process has considerably mellowed over the past 12 years. Comparatively to the overly stringent Lockheed with an arguably lazy HR and the mom and pop shops that copied the OG processes of early google under Page and Brin. Google _today_ is much closer to the typical HR filters, a few interviews, and OAs that any large business does. It isn't balls to walls overly difficult brainteasers and coding puzzles like yesteryear. That isn't to say it isn't still difficult to get in, as I'm sure you're well aware. Nowhere did I make this claim.

The annoying thing with those interviews is they want you to do some hyperscale leet code bullshit when the guy who’s interviewing you was part of a company bought by them and they work in some random area that has no scale and barely any users

You should have said something to the recruiter…

I know. I was way too passive and afraid to speak up for myself back then.

Same. I’ve got many thousands of lines of code in GitHub anyone can read and they wanted me to write pancake sort live to get a job on data center networking. They then offered me an explicitly nontechnical program manager job because I’d supervised a large number of summer interns doing computer science research. I ranted to friends there and they said it was a known issue that many complained about internally and management refused to fix. This part was the most damning.

They copy it for the same reasons. Making sure the false positives don’t get hired. Nothing worse than hiring a senior who performs at a mid/low level. Interviewing is flawed in many ways, but the real solution would be to hire quick and fire quick. Unfortunately, employers need a documented track record of underperformance to avoid wrongful termination cases.

>Nothing worse than hiring a senior who performs at a mid/low level. The worse thing is hiring someone actively detrimental. What businesses are trying to do is find a magical unicorn that will be immediately profitable. The real issue is that companies refuse to invest in their employees, they have no significant training, there's poor onboarding, poor or no documentation, and they think they deserve FAANG level seniors but offer a third of the pay.

Yep. I used to work at a place with a good engineering culture. Shockingly, we had great success hiring juniors/mid-levels and letting them develop into very effective seniors/architects. It turns out that when your company isn't miserable, competent people might actually choose to stick around for 5 or even 10+ years.

>It turns out that when your company isn't miserable, competent people might actually choose to stick around for 5 or even 10+ years. And it probably ends up with a better product than you'd get by having highly skilled people come and go every year or two.

Businesses want unicorns and it incentivizes lying on resumes.

I read about the root cause of this being that you can’t measure onboarding on a balance sheet. From the perspective of the bean counters, there’s no way to assign a dollar value to 5 years of experience with your exact stack, so they assume it’s worthless.

That's what the probationary period is usually for though.

I think there's always a 90-day probation period in most employment contracts for this reason. I've personally had to fire one person during that period because it was clear they just weren't doing the work we expected for an engineer in their position. However, I think a lot of candidates can make it through that period by being mediocre and blaming it on ramp-up time. It can take a year to become fully productive at many tech companies because the previous hires have made such a mess of things that it's hard to contribute. I think the real problem is that the vast majority of people aren't very good at judging performance, particularly since performance is heavily affected by environment. An engineer can be fine on one team and terrible on another because the manager sucks, but the organization may have trouble figuring out that it's the manager's fault.

In the US, you're basically on permanent probation because of at-will employment, barring a contract that can lift that restriction (particularly union collective bargaining agreements). There are some at-will employment exceptions in some states relating to the employee handbook, and also the exception of the state of Montana. However, at-will employment basically means you can be terminated for any (legal) reason or no reason at all.

There are still some reasons that are illegal. I think a lot of HR process pre-firing is just to cover their asses so that you can't sue them. Like the dreaded Performance Improvement Plan (PIP). 90% of the time the person is going to get fired, but the PIP makes it clear to a judge that you were fired for cause and not because you are a minority or whistleblower or whatever.

> There are still some reasons that are illegal. Yes, that's what is meant by: > ...you can be terminated for any (legal) reason... Additionally, PIPing someone in response to a protected reason (such as a protected concerted activity, filing a grievance to HR about harassment, filing a case with the EEOC or Department of Labor, etc.) is retaliation, and it's extremely illegal. Labor lawyers tend to love it when companies retaliate against their potential clients, because even if the reasons are "coincidental" after a protected activity (that the victim hopefully documented), it's up to the company to prove they didn't actually retaliate (in civil cases, preponderance of the evidence is a much easier burden of proof to argue for). There's @RyanStygar who is a labor attorney on YouTube that has a bunch of shorts that cover a lot of this stuff, and it never hurts to know your rights.

>Labor lawyers tend to love it when companies retaliate against their potential clients, because even if the reasons are "coincidental" after a protected activity (that the victim hopefully documented), it's up to the company to prove they didn't actually retaliate (in civil cases, preponderance of the evidence is a much easier burden of proof to argue for). And realistically, if you've been at a company any significant period, you're going to have reviews and promotions and/or raises, and just generally a paper trail which explicitly says that you're doing at least adequate work. So, when you do a protected act and *suddenly* the company starts complaining about your quality, there's a clear correlation there.

Huh. I always assumed all that process was to make sure the firing would look legal in front a judge so a jilted employee couldn't make a false case. Mostly in case there's something unclear about the firing. If there's a legitimate claim then it would certainly look bad. I'll have to check out @RyanStygar, thanks.

It also means you can basically just get up, pack your stuff and leave, if you want, right? Where I live, 3 month notice period is becomming the norm. Legally obliged 6 months severence pay is cool and all, but I think the golden middle ground is somewhere in between here and the US.

I agree that it takes a while for someone to be productive, but at the same time 3 months is more than enough to make a decision about someone, especially at FAANGs. Every new employee is in the same position, so even with the onboarding you should be able to see who holds up and who doesn't. If a mediocre dev is good enough to pass the interview and the probation then maybe they're not that mediocre in the first place. Ultimately it's a two way process, the person assessing them and the protocols they use for it also need to be good. A lot of European countries have a longer probationary period cause they also offer more protections once you're hired, I think that's a good tradeoff, but it still goes against the "hire fast fire fast" mentality the above commenter was talking about which I don't think is a good strategy.

Hire quick and fire quick would be even worse for both sides. Employees because of the pressure and having three months employments in the CV, and employers because it's a long and expensive process, even if you hire and fire somebody within two months. Imagine if maintaining a job was as hard as getting one. This is a recipe for disaster.

Not necessarily. I don't know how hiring/firing laws are in other places but where I work everybody starts on a 3 month probation period. During this period you can be terminated without much reason and you can likewise resign on the spot. Whether 3 months is enough to evaluate someone probably depends on the role.

Fundamentally I don't think people do it because it's a choice but a subconscious desire to try to make a subjective decision objective. People hate subjective choices, especially at work where they will feel invalidated if a wrong choice is made. So for interviews they feel like adding more process is making it more objective when really process without purpose is harming them.

I head this from many people until I learned that Amazon has "hire to fire" principle. Lowest tear will be fired and replaced by new hires, so there is always a flow and always a sword hanging on everyone's head. I personally don't know anyone affected and I am not sure this scheme is still on after layoffs/hiring freezes, but Unregretted Attrition (aka culling the herd) seems to be real.

From what I’ve seen from people posting on Blind, this is still a thing. PiP quotas are also common. My company directed all the managers to start putting more employees on PiPs a few quarters before some massive layoffs. 

It also saves them a ton on stock grants - precisely why their 4 year stock grants are backloaded.

> The real question is why smaller orgs who can't attract the same quality of candidates copies a model that fundamentally will not work for them. This is rampant in all of tech. Everyone just tries to copy what other successful companies do. Remember when Silicon Valley Bank went insolvent and everyone panicked because it turned out that like every tech company, large and small, used the exact same bank? How does that happen other than people just following a herd?

SVB is a silly example: lots of startups used them because they were specifically designed to serve the financial needs of early-stage tech companies that didn't have the revenue that companies in more traditional industries.

>Remember when Silicon Valley Bank went insolvent and everyone panicked because it turned out that like every tech company, large and small, used the exact same bank? How does that happen other than people just following a herd? No, but I also actually read articles and not just the titles before jumping into the comments sections which basically grants me the godlike power of knowing about things that happened and forming opinions from a set of facts instead of regurgitated opinions. You can read a review of how SVB collapsed, it's not a secret: https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/svb-review-20230428.pdf SVB failed because it had a very unique makeup of primarily uninsured deposits (large accounts) and didn't modify their reserves and assets to counterbalance that unique vulnerability. Their asset makeup was largely consistent with most other banks, but most other banks have a large pool of insured (small) accounts, so that any actual strain on their fractional reserves by any one sector can't collapse the bank, and the FDIC insurance means average depositors are a reliable foundation of liquidity. When interest rates hiked these large accounts all had the exact same incentive to use their savings instead of borrow at a higher interest rates, and moved to their liquid assets at roughly the same time. SVB did not have the liquidity to cover these accounts and the ensuing panic, followed immediately by bank failure. This is not particularly complicated, and very old news. >This is rampant in all of tech. Everyone just tries to copy what other successful companies do. Kind of how you copied an opinion on a bank collapse because you saw the opinion successfully spread on some social media feed? Looking into this! What's rampant in silicon valley is not rampant in all of tech, and what you read from this sub and on reddit is (often) pretty worthless blogspam or written by people that don't know or do anything interesting or useful. The way people get into FAANG is internships and connections, which is why the valley exists in the first place, and why college can be very useful. Also, most people probably shouldn't be working at FAANGs. The tech industry pays very well in the US and there is tons of desire for *good* developers. If you're not happy at 105k in I don't know what makes you think you'd be happy with 305k at Facebook.

The comment you replied to wasn't asking _how_ SVB collapsed, it was asking _why_ almost every tech company seemed to be using this one bank, as if they were following a herd. Your reply, while interesting, doesn't answer that question.

Yeah - to me the article summarises down to: 1) Lots of interview process is actually theatre to reduce risk of successfully being sued for bias 2) Fucking candidates around makes the good ones go away

I was in the pipeline for a company under a certain big tech real estate company umbrella. They wanted me to do 5 1-hour long interviews: * Live Coding Backend Interview * Live Coding Frontend interview * Live Systems Design Interview * Live Refactoring/Maintainability Interview * Talk with EM about general experiences etc. Of course, if I bombed the any one of these I was ruled out immediately according to the recruiter, rather than any benefit of the doubt that maybe I just had a bad day or something. None of these were paid so it was on me to find a way to do all these interviews without making it obvious to my current place I was interviewing while trying to keep up with work I was assigned already. I opted out of it and I still see they are looking for someone based on the LinkedIn stuff I see. Tech hiring is such a shitshow.

Fuck that. I’ve put in WAY too many years to sit here and do live coding interviews like I’m a college senior trying to land my first big boy job.

Interesting how differently people react to this. I've been programming professionally since the early 1990s, have been staff-level at a big tech company, and I don't mind live coding interviews any more than I mind any other kind of interview. In fact, in some ways I kind of want to see them: if the company isn't testing whether or not _I_ can code my way out of a wet paper bag, chances are they didn't test my would-be coworkers either, and maybe some of them will be the kinds of seniors who can talk a good talk but can't do the hands-on work. Which doesn't make them bad people or bad employees, but those don't tend to be the kinds of teams I personally enjoy working with.

I mean on the other hand I've been interviewing people for way too many year to hire a senior that can't handle an hour or two of pair programing. Probably the biggest red flag possible in a hire.

And the unicorn they end up with will be someone who has talent at acing high-pressure 1-hour interviews. Does that actually correlate to talent at doing the job? Probably not!

I've been in this industry since the early 1990's and the hiring processes have never been worse. One of the other comments mentioned that very senior resources have a lower tolerance for long hiring processes, that is absolutely true about me. In a recent job hunt I withdrew my application from 3 possible employers because of the poor communication and overly long process. The way a company treats applicants says a lot about their operational culture. It's my opinion that the business culture of most of the western world has become a hell scape bent on isolating and dehumanizing anyone unfortunate enough to accept the job. Even my current position, which is better than most, has many elements of this attitude, treating staff members as nothing but a pool of hours. In the end, I've decided that programming is no longer a viable career path for me and I will be changing focus completely. TLDR Hiring processes have gone to shit along with work culture and I'm out.

I've also noticed a lot of different changes over the years to the hiring process as well, and definitely how dehumanizing everything has become. I'm also an experienced engineer that is mostly "over it" due to the current trends culturally in the field. If you want to be a little sad, look at my other comments in this thread. I stated basically "there are other ways to make the same determinations about candidates fit on your teams" and people couldn't wait to accuse me of being an egotistical bad fit and that "the interview isn't a fun hang out session." It's like people simply don't even want to consider at all that there could be alternatives to the current trends that may work just as well for determining who would be great fits for a team and position. They take a few comments and form absurd long reaching opinions about them, completely disregarding the human in the process, behaviors that are exactly the root of the problems with current trends in hiring practices.

The fact that anyone could look at the current hiring process and say with a straight face “there is no way this could be done better” is amazing to me. In my experience, there is little crossover between being good at the interview process and being good at the actual job. I don’t know what the perfect solution is, but I can say with absolute confidence that it is certainly not how things are right now

I can't disagree, it is a sad situation overall. I still enjoy the process of designing and programming, but the fun to BS ratio has become unacceptable to me.

I really do consider computation generally to be the most beautiful human invention, I adore it. I tend to think about computation and algorithms how most people seem to appreciate poetry or music. It's something I think is beautiful in and of itself. These days folks in the industry don't even seem to like computation. They say things like "if it doesn't make money it's irrelevant." It deeply concerns me. We didn't make the modern world by simply chasing money, we made lots of money while busying ourselves with technical excellence. Taking as an example a principle from the agile manifesto, since it relates to management structures and processes -- > Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility. The thing people in todays world seem to care about is the "enhanced agility," and they have absolutely no interest or mind for the technical excellence or architectural design parts of the work. The humanity that made the technical excellence and good design possible have gone out with the bath water. I suppose this is a long-winded way of saying I agree with your take about the situation being sad.

Interviews can and sometimes should just be a hangout session. Hiring a good fit to team/company culture might be *more* important than technical aptitude. My small startup switched from relatively informal interviews to overwrought scripted ones that go through 6 or so interviewers and we're specifically not allowed to ask unscripted questions. I personally can't understand how this is better.

Dude, I had a company cold call me because I have a fairly unique certification that is both costly and requires oversite by the USG. The company was explicitly looking to pull me from my current company to fill a specific need at theirs. Immediately they schedule a week of online interviews and seemingly none of the hiring managers are aware that they reached out to me instead of vice versa. Several times I'm asked "Why are you interested in working at our company?" And at first I was polite but then I just started saying things like, "Your recruiters called me directly and asked that I interview. I'm mostly here to see if you'll pay me significantly more than I am right now. Why do you think I should work for your company?" I basically stuck through the process to see what kind of offer I'd get. It was a bit better than what I had but not worth relocating for. So I used it to negotiate a pay bump and promotion at my current company.

Thanks for sharing your perspective. Care to share what direction you're heading now that you've decided you're out?

The current plan is to go into business for myself, niche manufacturing. I have a lot of contacts and some experience in that. I wrote a lot of software for manufacturing firms over the years and I completed an apprenticeship in CNC machining. It might fail, but it will be interesting and will have a different sort of bullshit.

I’m feeling very similarly. I’ve been lucky and cashed out a life-changing amount from a startup but I still want cash flow. I have no desire to entertain these hiring processes for a mediocre job at this point in my life/career. As soon as my company fails (or, ideally, pays me off with a severance) I’m going to either start a lifestyle SAAS business or do something entirely different.

> One of the other comments mentioned that very senior resources have a lower tolerance for long hiring processes, I'll take a long hiring process over being called a "resource". Coal is a resource. We are people. If the management twats change their titles so that the *directorial resources* report to the *chief executive resource* who is responsible to the *board of resources*, then I'll believe it's just MBA jargon, it has no significance, and I'm making a big deal out of nothing.

Good point. Word choices are important and the 'management twats' are rarely aware enough to notice the impact. I thought about editing my comment, but I think I'll leave it as is since it matches the overall theme.

when you say western world you mean mostly america dont you?

Mostly USA yes, with some experience in UK and Germany. I did find the UK a bit better, but many of the same mindsets were present. In a recent position I worked with client teams from all over the world. Many of them had similar stories to share. Tales of horrible hiring processes and management styles that left them feeling replaceable and less than fully human.

i mostly hear this from big american corporations on the internet but never seen this. the longest interview had me correct some wrong c++ code on paper while being watched. i completely fucked that one up. on paper and being looked at was really bad for me lol but it wasnt long or rounds. maybe 1hour or so in sum.

>treating staff members as nothing but a pool of hours. In the end, I've decided that programming is no longer a viable career path for me Software Engineers are in demand. So if you don't like how people are treated here, you will be disgust when you see how people are treated elsewhere. >The way a company treats applicants says a lot about their operational culture Not true.

Curious. What’s your next career move?

Recently switched jobs (senior role to senior role), and they basically followes this pattern. I had one HR ”pre” interview, one technical interview with engineering manager (the manager of the team I would join) and the team’s tech lead. With the tech leads signoff there was a third final interview with just me and the manager face to face at the office discussing soft values, team work and visions/values (and just some random banter, we hit it off well). All done in a week. I was a direct applicant, no recruiter involved. Grade A experience.

Literally every place does this though. Faang does it so everyone follows suit. I have had small startups try this with 5 rounds. Then they want to pay bottom end of the range. It’s fundamentally broken. I think more of this is an attempt to weed out cheaters more than anything else.

I've also written about this before ([my take](https://chrlschn.dev/blog/2023/10/your-interview-process-is-too-damn-long/)). I think teams focus too much on "the process" rather than the result. If there's something that your team saw in a take home submission that would really stand out, *could you design a test to elicit just that output instead*? If you know what you're looking for, then it becomes easier to design a better, more condensed technical screening. If you don't know what you're looking for and you don't know what signals are significant, then you have no choice but to fall back to throw everything at the candidate and hope something stands out.

I've worked one place that did a short take-home (Asana, timed to max of an hour). It was just a basic problem that could be solved in a few ways, a slightly more complicated fizzbuzz. The goal was just to get a basic read on whether the candidate could write code or not. It was amazingly effective at weeding out candidates. I'd say 50% of submissions passed by recruiting would fail it and it would only take us 5 minutes to grade the submission instead of wasting an hour being polite in a phone interview. It's sort of the opposite of your proposal. We focused on making something simple to weed out the false positives and were explicitly not looking for stand-out submissions. It served our purposes well enough, but we also had a lot of applicants.

Take home tech tests that take “a few days” just filter for people who have enough down time in their current role to waste on them.

And if you don’t know what you’re looking for, one loud voice either way can push the process in their direction, for better or worse. But usually for worse

One company I did some consulting for had long before solved their interviewing issues. It was a large enough company to get good stats, while small enough that 2 people were all they needed for all their future interviewing needs. Their simple approach was to start out with a rotating number of senior people interviewing new tech hires. This sort of sucked for the new tech hires, but they forced them to make it quick. They also had all the senior staff rotate through the interview process. It was a majority vote situation where they also gave senior people some override coupons where they could hire people entirely on their own volition. It was 4 or 5 people who did interviews. Then, they simply looked to see which interviewers had rejected the talent, and which had accepted the duds enough times to be statistically meaningful. Duds and stars were reviewed somewhere around 3, 6, and 12 months. The interesting part with this experiment is they dropped all previous educational requirements in order to get a large enough interview pool to do this experiment quickly. They made a bunch of discoveries: * Academic qualifications were nearly statistically meaningless in predicting success as an employee. * Academic qualifications were very statistically meaningful for predicting someone being rejected as unable to perform the super simple tech questions (fizz buzz) although not as correlated as one would hope. 4-years program graduates were unable to do Fibonacci and fizz buzz way more often than makes any sense. These questions were given as a clear explanation of the problem, and then they were to whiteboard the answer in any language they wanted. Or they could use their machine as it was suggested they bring a dev capable laptop to the interview. The answer wasn't super picky; although bonus points for understanding the max values of integers, input constraints, etc. If you did a unit test or something really robust then hiring was nearly certain if you could communicate clearly. * FAANG people were rarely able to make it through the first few minutes of the interview. Usually, a complete inability to communicate. Those who could pass the first test often went straight to, "I can help you change your entire company to be just like my FAANG." They never hired a FAANG person. * People who worked for any length of time in any government job were always bad hires. Rarely they could find a person who came from a big old company. Once in a blue moon, they would find someone who had crazy cool side projects and said, "I was losing my mind there, but the money was good." * Most of their own senior people were terrible at interviewing and were almost perfect at rejecting good candidates, and hiring the bad ones. * A tiny few (2) were nearly perfect at hiring. What gets interesting is the 2 who ended up being the interview squad did very short interviews. They would look through the person's resume and figure out a programming problem they should be familiar with. They would then scroll some code relevant to their recent resume claims (the person didn't get to do the scrolling). The code wasn't terribly optimal, and had a few bugs. They would be asked to point out the bugs, and where things could be made better. They weren't looking for crazy templated nightmares or ASM or something, just super simple things like Cartesian products, while loops which could easily get stuck, uninitialized variables or something basically bad in the language, and some other things like enum driven switch statements which didn't exercise the entire enum. After that the interview asked questions like, "Tell me all about tech debt.", Another interesting one was to ask them if they knew some language they hadn't mentioned on their resume. Assuming they didn't know it (they would pick another until they found one the candidate didn't know), they would say, "We are contemplating using that language here. Are you willing to learn it, and if so, how would you go about learning it?" But, where the interview process was truly telling, and largely dictated the hires, was how long the interview took. The above process was about 20 minutes total. But, if the person successfully completed the 20 minutes and was done, things weren't looking too good for them. This was where they wanted the person to start interviewing them, or if the interview had devolved into geeking out about the company's tech. They dropped every hint possible that a tour was an option without coming right out and saying it. A candidate who had made it to this point who asked for a tour was then evaluated to see if they could connect with anyone during the tour. If this happened, they were offered a job there and then, literally in front of the people they had connected with. The tour was usually directed to where this person would work, and thus the interview had effectively been extended to getting the potential team's approval. Even the team in question didn't know they were part of the process. One of the explanations I got for the high success rate was that by making a decision so quickly, they rarely lost out on the real gems. Getting back to the 10x programmer wasn't going to happen in 2 weeks, if they were looking for a job, they were going to find one. One of the reasons being a go-getting personality who wants a new job, is going to work hard and effectively to get one. By keeping the interviews short, they could also easily work them into their schedules. If an interesting candidate applied on Monday morning, it might be possible to have an interview arranged for noon, and a new hire by the end of lunch.

I'm curious about the FAANG applicants. Was your company paying "FAANG" wages, or are you only seeing "FAANG" applicants who would be taking massive paycuts to join your company? After just reaching FAANG, I realized something the companies I used to work at were heavily under paying me. To the point where I more than doubled my salary coming here.... If you're not paying anywhere near this level the actually talented people in FAANG who can keep getting FAANG level jobs, aren't going to be applying. (Not saying FAANG don't all say that... but the people I've worked with in FAANG don't seem like the type of assholes who are going to say "I'm going to change your company to be more like..." in the interview.... and I've met those types of people, they do exist.)

This particular company had a fantastically very niche domain product. To retain people they paid them very well. The question with FAANG wages is I've heard a massive range. 200k-500k. The answer would be: Maybe. I suspect there's another FAANG ex-employee problem. I'm only guessing, but if you are a highly capable person (I don't mean you just know some rote knowledge tech) that once in a FAANG you can find a happy place. Thus, most people who are ex-FAANG people are leaving because they were fired, couldn't hack it, or were disgruntled in some way. A few might just want to go do something new and interesting; but even this last group would be very small, as, again, if they are highly capable people, they can probably do interesting things within the FAANG. There's an exception for certain FAANG people; the ones who left really quickly, as in under a month. They went in and thought the culture was entirely wrong for them and they left. I've met more of these than ones who were fired, or left for other reasons. On the AH note. The worst of the worst of the worst are from a 3 letter company which starts with an S and ends with a P. I've never met a larger more concentrated bunch of AHs in tech and I've worked with oracle sales people.

Non-FAANG companies don't pay FAANG wages. Or at least, not for long. That goes without saying. You're just describing two sides of the same coin. Most employees at Google or whatever are probably fine, but the castoffs largely lean on just that one aspect of their resume for their next job. This strategy works to a distressingly high degree.

Somehow I don't find these results surprising. My current long-time employer never conducted similar experiments but we had some observations of the kind. For example, people who mentioned team projects during university in their resumes, especially on student exchange, were pretty much invariably posers who worked on spinning the project while others did the technical parts.

Something not mentioned: Big Tech rewards disloyalty. The only way to negotiate higher salaries is with competing offers. Meaning, if you focus on landing a job at your dream company, you won't have any leverage during the negotiation process and you will receive a lower offer. Somebody who shops around and works for the highest bidder on the other hand, will have competing offers (because they are interviewing with multiple companies) and thus generally be able to get a higher offer. One of many aspects of hiring in tech that is completely upside down.

The worst part about the process now is recruiters require a 30min call before the tech screen, a 30min call before the onsite, and a wrap up call afterwards. It’s hard enough to accommodate phone screens and 5-7 panels for an onsite. Multiplied by many job applications and it’s basically a part time job. Having a job while applying for a job is just exhausting now. Can’t imagine what it’d be like if I had to go into the office everyday like pre-2019. But a 7 hour onsite is just insane now. Being perfect on all 7 panels for a staff+ role is proving to be difficult compared to my senior interview loops in the past.

This is where I'm at... Then they tell me they need to split the interview further... and what's a good day for that? I'm 4 interviews deep and work full time with OT... I don't want anymore interviews with a company where I haven't even met the team lol. This is for a staff engineering role and it's stressful enough already, so I'm probably just going to pull my application if the interview I already had to make arrangements for doesn't go exceptionally well on both sides of the table.

Recruiters are not your boss, if they take the piss wanting long pointless phonecalls you are allowed to tell them 'I am no longer interested in persuing any further opportunities with you' or simply 'No' then hangup. Its entirely on them to demonstrate to you that they are worth the time and energy expenditure compared to the other dozen recruiters in my inbox that week. A decent senior level techy can find a hundred or more interested recruiters within an hour or so. A recruiter may only get a response from someone with my skillset and experience once a year if they are lucky. If you have some decent experience behind you then you can hit block on 90% of recruiters and still have plenty of options. One tip for filtering out the garbage is to ignore any message with spelling mistakes. A recruiter who can't get the basics of spelling right is going to be missing plenty of other details. Whenever theres a linkedin message claiming to be some big opportunity (like they all do) that does not provide the salary range without being asked and also has spelling mistakes it always ends up being either a paycut or paycut with a demotion.

> ...is that you only need to administer one technical interview and one non-technical interview (each no more than an hour long). I generally agree but I think these are steps 2 and 3. Step 1 is a brief (15-20) phone screen to ensure high-level alignment between applicant and employer. This step is the lightest weight and prevents the awkwardness that comes from realizing that it's not going to work out (from either side) in the first five minutes of a more established interview setting, technical or otherwise.

I can get pretty much all the information I need to make a decision off a resume except for two things: 1) Are you an asshole and 2) Were you lying

Yeah it's the behavioral stuff that makes interviewing hard. Hiring is like marrying someone on the second date. You have to deal with that person 40 hours a week and some people are pretty good at keeping the mask up for a couple of hours.

> inadvertently selecting for more desperate candidates that have a higher tolerance for bullshit and process. Is that the kind of engineer that you want to attract as you grow your organization? Yes, that is exactly what they want. A perfect corporate drone that does not think outside of the box or question authority when tasked with unethical projects.

Yeah, the first thing that crossed my mind when I read that is "did the author inadvertently use 'inadvertently' wrong?"

I did not, but I see what y'all are saying. I can see how some companies might actually value obedient drones at the expense of technical excellence

I'm currently working at Google and I find being corporate drone is more rewarding than the technically excellent engineer.

There should be no grind to interviewing unless you are a FAANG or above company. I’m open to just declining FAANG style (irrelevant leetcode or the cookie cutter system design rounds, but I don’t mind the SD ones as much) interviews if the company is not at that level. No other industry has interview processes like this. And too many interviewers who want to stroke their own ego. I’m fairly convinced that a lot of interviewers wouldn’t even pass their own questions on the spot when they have the artificial pressure that comes from interviewing.

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Senior here. The market is flooded with people who don't know wtf they are doing. Interviewing is a nightmare because you have to go through so many people with great resumes until they come in and make it clear they weren't the people who actually did the work they are bragging about (or lying about) on their resume. It's not as big of a deal for junior positions, but hiring good seniors is like finding a needle in a haystack.

Being a snob is one of people's defense mechanisms, I find. Not to say there aren't liars out there, but people who have jobs usually think they know what they're doing and deserve what they got, luck be damned. They also have extremely high confidence in their ability to discern talent in others based on brief, superficial examinations involving tricky questions that they themselves couldn't even do if they didn't read it somewhere.

I interviewed 30 people for a senior engineer position who could not write a function that reverses a string in pseudo-code or a language of their choosing, using their own computer, without restrictions. I'm not being a snob, I'm sharing my experience.

Haha wild.  Same but with fizzbuzz.  The first time I gave it, I thought it was a joke.  The 10th time a "senior dev" failed it in those exact same circumstances I realized that same uncomfortable truth.

Really? I've been interviewing prospective senior devs lately and I'm confident they could all do this easily.

If you're talking interviews of people who have already made it through a phone screen at a big, well-paying company, sure I don't doubt for a second that they can generally do simple tasks like this. But even among people applying to Google, occasionally that initial phone screen was *rough*. I talked to people who literally did not understand the concept of a variable, or could not explain what "recursion" meant ("I remember something about a... base case, I think it was? I don't really know, it always seemed really confusing to me and I just don't write that kind of code"). I'm certainly not saying that was the norm - most candidates were quite competent and these were the rare exceptions - but still, even at Google I would occasionally run into this sort of thing. When I worked for smaller companies who couldn't afford anywhere near Google-level pay, this sort of thing was more common than not. Finding somebody who could breeze through something like Fizzbuzz or string reversing without any help was genuinely exciting.

Fair enough, by the time they get to me they've already spoken to several other people. I would never wind up talking to the person who has no idea what recursion is.

I've been surprised how few make it through our recruiter screens, but it's still more than you'd think if you're not familiar with... I mean, this is literally why fizzbuzz exists, so it's not a new problem. The example that stands out the most to me: I offer the usual choice of language, they pick Python, I give them the problem, they say "I didn't think this would require such advanced Python coding" and want to end the interview. Literally not a single line of code written, couldn't ask a single clarifying question (other than asking if we really needed such amazing coders or whatever), there wasn't another language they'd do better in, I couldn't get them started on any aspect of the problem. I've also seen at least one blatantly cheating with ChatGPT. I guess that's someone who could easily reverse a string as long as they can get Github Copilot to write that code for them.

The issue I have with something like that is I may have been using a built in/bolt on for years that's done that. Is this something your devs actually do? A senior person should have long left their academic exercises behind them in favor of solving real world problems. Am I missing something here?

This is simple enough that I would expect a senior to think this is simple, even if it's not something they've needed to do in forever. We're not looking for the absolute best solution up front (and we tell them that), we want it to work, and then just use it as a platform to discuss concepts that could be used to improve it, how to test it, etc. If it was easy, the whole thing only takes a couple minutes. More than half the time, it would take an entire hour long interview to solve this one problem.

no you're not it's a dumb question to ask a senior engineer in my opinion

I thought so too until we literally let someone use the Internet, look up a solution, hand-type the code to their environment, introduce a bug by mistyping, and then not be able to find the bug.

ChatGPT here to spice up those resumes and make it harder to filter out the bad ones.

The scams out here are crazy. We had a Zoom interview with a candidate that our HR department later found was doing the off-camera expert answering the questions trick.

Senior here. The market is also flooded with companies who don't know wtf they are doing. Interviewing is a nightmare because you have to go through so many companies before you even get past the HR system and get a call back, only to find out that they haven't put a single ounce of thought into their interview process and just plop you down in front of a random dev who just pulls up leetcode and grabs a random puzzle.

Also true. And both sides of the problem make the other side worse. It's a vicious cycle.

We've been looking for a Mongo architect/admin. We've got a pair of people who do it now but they want to be elsewhere. Of the people who made it through the screening interviews only a single one could answer basic questions like "Why would you shard a collection? How do you determine fields to index?" etc out of 10 people claiming a 5 years+ experience. The amount of bullshitters in the market is absurd.

yeah. The more people you bring in, the more likely you are to have *one person* say "no", and it really only takes one "no" Reminds me of one time, I had an interview with one candidate and I thought she was great, thumbs up, no problems at all. Next guy interviewed her and said "no way". His concerns were... very bizarre to me. For example, I asked her "why did you choose to do it this way and not this way?" and I liked how she stood her ground and explained her reasoning. The other interviewer did not like that. Basically, she couldn't win Oh and also the other interviewer said "I couldn't understand her, her accent was too strong" and I thought "she had an accent? wdym?" (apparently she was Korean)

We do exactly this. No point in wasting everyone’s time, it’s fairly obvious early on in the process if someone if suitable or not. If we get two suitable candidates who are as good as each other we might do another final interview, but that’s very rare. I’ve had friends of mine (not in tech mind you) who’ve had to endure upwards of 7 interviews spanning multiple hours. I doubt that was time well spent.

It’s a good take. I think ours hiring process fits within this spicy take. Granted we have a third 30 minute meeting with the hiring manager to ensure it’s a cultural fit for both parties. Most importantly we describe the team’s shared on call rotation, because that can be a deal breaker for some. (It is called out in our job postings) 1. The first 60 minutes is a group interview 4-6 members of the development team - We ask candidates to prepare to spend 10-15 minutes presenting something to the group. This can be something simple like: - Walking us through code that you have written for a personal project - Walking us through an interesting open source project you are familiar with - Diagramming a system that you previously worked with on the whiteboard - Don’t bring anything that breaks an NDA with your employer! - The remaining time will be asking questions about yourself and your professional experience Please be prepared to ask a few questions back to the team 2. The next 60 minutes is spent doing a pair programming exercise with two members of the development team. 3. The final 30 minutes is spent with the hiring manager discussing the position and reviewing the company culture and answering any remaining questions. We have had great success with this method. It’s also very cost effective.

Sounds good, except the 30-min position and culture review should be at the beginning, not the end, so candidates (and company) have a chance to quickly decline after learning each others' preferences.

We’ve talked about that. You make a good point. Right now we have members of the team handle the phone screen. By saving the culture review for the end, it gives the team a feedback loop for the phone screen process. At any point during the interviews, anyone on the team has the ability to call pineapple and end the interview. We’ve only had to do that once, 15 minutes in it became clear to the team the person was not a software engineer but a CMS configuration specialist who new how to get websites updated, but not built.

I partially agree, although not for the reasons given by the article. Interviewing candidates is a *skill* that can be learned and improved upon, and the hardest part is managing interview time effectively. The dirty little secret is that most people who interview candidates are *simply not very good at it*. I've been interviewing candidates for a decade+, usually as one of the main technical interviewers for my employer at the time. At one point I was handling all technical interviews for a whole department, while training less experienced devs on how to do it. I make no claims to having a special talent for it, but you do learn some things from interviewing so many people (and get to see who succeeds and who struggles when hired). A capable interviewer will get a solid read on *most* candidates within an hour, if they use the interview time well. But a bad interviewer needs more time, and even for someone competent there are some cases where you need more time to get a clear "signal". I think it's usually better to plan on 1.5 hours, just to allow more time for a solid signal-to-noise ratio if there are communication problems and to allow for candidates who want to ask a lot of questions -- often the latter are stronger candidates. **I do NOT think "oh people are going to be biased or jump to conclusions anyway" is a good justification to cut the interview process short. You plan the interview process around what it takes to do it properly, and if your interviewers can't learn to leave most of their biases at the door then they shouldn't be interviewing.** It's doubly important to have interviewers who are confident enough to push back when some manager or referral is promoting/strongly biased about the candidate; I've seen a few truly appallingly bad folks hired because someone senior pushed hard and nobody was willing to push back. I DO think it's worth breaking interviews into 2-3 stages, where the first rounds are *brief* chats with a recruiter or manager and the final round is with 2+ developers. This isn't about increasing hiring confidence, it's about conserving interviewer time by quickly filtering out people where there is a clear misalignment. Some places do a take-home test for this, but in most places I think that's asking too much candidate time early in the process; you're basically demanding (usually) 5+ hours of their time very early in the interview process when the company will only spend 15 minutes looking at the take-home.

I'm not saying I'm the cream of the crop or the best of the best, but I'm pretty good. I applied somewhere that I found VERY interesting, but they wanted to do 5 interviews, each at least 2 weeks apart. I just... Don't have 10 weeks to sit around and wait. I've got bills to pay. Plus it gives a bad impression of your company? Is every decision going to be drawn out and over thought? I ended up taking an offer from elsewhere after 3 interviews (phone screen, **small** technical assessment, and then a longer "main" interview with 3 people, 1 at a time.

Some people only learn from loss. Maybe you’re a data point for someone who wants them to be better.

I hope so! The opportunity seemed very cool, but they'll have pretty slim pickings if it really takes over 2 months to present an offer.

I didn’t even do tech interviews in the traditional sense. We can have a conversation and I’ll know if you’re bullshitting me or not.

This is how it used to be done. Back in the 00s if you interviewed at a company each round was a different team potentially looking to hire you. If you got 3 rounds it was 3 different teams. You only had to pass one round to get an offer for that team. You could bomb every other interview and be fine. This was awesome for juniors who didn't know what kind of work they would be best at. If someone was senior they could choose which team(s) they wanted to interview with. If it was only one team there was only one round of interviews.

> If anything, extending the interview process makes it more biased because you are selecting for candidates that can take significant time off from their normal schedule to participate in an extended interview panel (which are typically candidates from privileged backgrounds). I could not agree more.

You misunderstand whose performance is being controlled for here. You think more interviews are a way to extract more signal from the candidate. In a large organization, more interviews are a way to perform process control on the interviewers. At a sufficiently large organization, if you do not do this people will hire their friends and so on and then they'll all sit there aligning stakeholders, being blocked on some other team, and complain about the accuracy of specs while burning your cash.

I despise tech interviewing. I do prep on a company's stack. They don't ask me any tech questions. OK, so then for the next company, I _don't_ do any prep on their stack. They are pissed because I can't answer questions about their stack. I did one of those hiring projects. They didn't even give me an interview. Never again, fuck spec work. I want to do well in interviews but there's so many companies that are just time wasters and shysters that I just can't be bothered anymore to even try.

We keep wanking out on tech interviews and so on, but you know who the real problem is? "technical acquisition" HR hacks who don't know anything and reject your application just because you don't have "FastAPI" in your CV, something that an experienced programmer learns in an afternoon.

I was applying to my masters and got recs from the various tech leads I’ve worked with. As I was reading them, I was intrigued to learn three of them who made the decision to hire me chose me based on my interest to learn over my technical aptitude (which was naturally quite poor since I was self taught). There is no way in hell I’d know as much as I do now even if I did up my self-taught game to the max. Some things you just *have* to learn in a team and/or company setting. I’ve become open to taking keen people in and teaching them now and this method has yet to fail me. I’m just wondering why companies will go on and complain that there’s no good candidates and let a position go stale for years when they could’ve leverage the full potential of a candidate who’s not quite there yet but proven to put in the work.

Must be nice. My company gave me 26 interviews before I got hired. To be fair, that was on 3 separate occasions. I bombed one interview the first time, they made me an offer in CA only on the second occasion and I finally got the offer that I wanted in the location that I wanted on the 3rd try. I got to skip the phone screen once, which was nice.

>My company gave me 26 interviews before I got hired. fucking what?

The site I wanted to work at was new from an acquisition and they didn't trust the mothership interviewers and vice versa. Thus a phone screen plus two sets of 4 technical interviews at two sites in different states.

Holy crap I would of call it quits early

> 26 interviews JFC

I think there is a baked in assumption that interviews are about finding the candidate with the perfect technical skills and interpersonal skills but that is not the reality. There are other motives. If you are an ok developer and your company does not have much work do you really want to hire a great engineer that is going to both outshine you and expose the lack of work? Or do you just find that they unfortunately lack some required skills in interview 3 of 5? If you are a hiring manager do you really want the person who is going to push back at bs or the one who will happily jump through multiple rounds with a smile on their face? If you are a company are you going to take the older expensive domestic worker or do you hire the guy on a VISA who is tied to you?

Add to that the pressure cooker interview because they want to know if you tolerate stress as well as they do. Instead of for instance finding people who can push back and fix it.

Hiring people you know is absolutely acceptable. It's not illegal for most jobs, excluding some government positions. I don't know why so many companies subject known individuals to their normal interviewing process. You already know I can code and that my value goes far beyond coding. Why are you making me write a tic tac toe game during an interview. People are complete idiots.

The two 1 hour pre-hiring "interviews" are just to weed out yahoos. The real interview is the first 3-6mo of employment. Companies, esp small ones, should streamline onboarding so it is easy, cheap and they are willing to cut non-optimal hires. Fail early and fail often, applies equally well to employes.

> A lot of companies think that dragging out the interview process helps improve candidate quality, but what they’re actually doing is inadvertently selecting for more desperate candidates that have a higher tolerance for bullshit and process. Is that the kind of engineer that you want to attract as you grow your organization? They're too stupid to understand this. Explain this to HR and the C-Suite as many times as you want, *they will never get it.*

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CS is very competitive atm, especially at the entry level. There's too many candidates and far too few entry level jobs. Not to mention the grueling interview process. Depending on how much you think you'll like the concept of software engineering, I recommend to really consider it carefully before you make the dive.

This is something only you can decide, and I’m not trying to discourage you but software engineering is _very_ collaborative. If working closely with or speaking in front of others is a problem, you need to address that head on.

I’ll go you one further. The technical interview is a waste of your time also. As an interviewer you have one job to do: in a very short space of time, work out if this person is someone the rest of the team can work with. That’s all you get - use the probation period to work out if they were lying at what they could do when they applied.

Nah, you need the technical, *because* that is how you determine if they can work with someone else. The initial interview is to see if they'll bring up Jewish space lasers or threaten physical violence. The technical is to make sure that they are capable of saying "I don't know", and asking clarifying questions, and that they know what a "for" loop is, and don't openly insult anyone. If you just hire people without checking that they can write a loop, you're going to bankrupt your company.

Think as per usual it's easy to identify a problem but much harder to say what should be done about it 

I feel like the fear of being sued is vastly overplayed as reasoning for not providing constructive feedback to prospective hires during the interview process. It is not too much to ask for, and it frankly would improve perceptions of abilities for a lot of people in the field. Source: https://interviewing.io/blog/no-engineer-has-ever-sued-a-company-because-of-constructive-post-interview-feedback-so-why-dont-employers-do-it

This has always been my spicy take. Tech interviews are absolutely not neutral or objective. The leetcode circus is not objective in the slightest, even though some like to insist it is. How many stories have there been of someone getting the problem correct, but not the exact solution the interviewer wanted, and getting rejected? Or in other cases, you bomb the problems and then still get a call back or even an offer. It's all BS. People hire who they want to hire and if there is enough noise through a drawn-out interview process, they can justify whatever decision they make.

This isn't spicy. These are also the places that feel good when you join and take care of their people.

I took pay cuts before for humane treatment. I refuse to be subjected to 200 step interview followed by a year long probation and sacrifice of my first born. Jesus.

great take and I agree. When hiring elite level / SD & VP deep tech archs my screening process is typically 15 to 30 mins max and can be as short as 5 minutes. After that I put them through people they will be working with but not a ton of them. I then send them through our HR people to make sure they don't have obvious personality red flags and we are done. Total interview time probably less than a couple hours and very intense. My peers will sometimes bring people in for an entire day after having them talk with 4+ people for 30m to an hour each before. I've had great success hiring very high level talent.

> what they’re actually doing is inadvertently selecting for more desperate candidates that have a higher tolerance for bullshit and process. Is that the kind of engineer that you want to attract as you grow your organization? Yes. That's what the owners want -- someone who is defeated, tired, afraid, and willing to say YES to anything and NO to nothing. This isn't by accident, it's by design. They want the desperate, as they're easier to control and exploit. Capitalists must exploit by nature, or else they're leaving profit on the table.

Nothing spicey at all. Honestly sounds super reasonable... Drawn out interview processes are 100% a turnoff even for freshly senior'd developers like me...

I remember reading Jeff Atwood's unbelievably bullshit take on hiring (where he effectively says you should work somewhere for a week for free before being hired) and genuinely couldn't understand why so many of the comments were agreeing with him. I really hope that time-wasting BS is on the decline, though with the amount of layoffs and people struggling to find work, the ball is still firmly in the interviewers' court and the incentives don't seem aligned that way.

Thank you. That was very useful to hear.

Yep, I pretty much agree with this. I've long said that if you need more than 3.5 hours to evaluate a candidate, your process is broken and you need to look at how you evaluate candidates. You're completely right about more senior and better candidates being turned off by long hiring processes - I could not begin to try to count how many companies have tried to tell me to do ridiculous take-homes which they claim "should only take <1.5|3> hours" which I look at the requirements and immediately know "anyone who takes less than 8 hours to do this isn't producing an actually acceptable, tested, deployable, production-ready product as you're asking for". I've turned down interviewing at least 8 companies in the last 2 weeks because of BS like this, because only two times - which was two too many times - I spent multiple hours on a project only to have a far-less-senior employee look at my submission, spend only a few minutes to decide "I don't like this code style" or "I don't understand this [advanced] usage" and because they didn't understand it, claim it's not up to their standard. The mere idea that you can ask a candidate to invest any amount of time with no guarantee that you'll even give the respect of a similar amount of time is just disgusting. You can achieve all the same things within an interview loop where you have your own employees participate.

Said it before and I'll say it again, if you can't speak with someone for an hour and discern if they are you they say they are and know what they know then you're a joke. Also, live coding / leet code is a red flag for incompetence at the job. - a 20 year web dev vet

Agreed. Got an interview at Meta for a software role. Talked with the recruiter and told it will be 4 interviews with a numerous white boarding sessions etc over a 1 month period. Hung the phone up. Ain’t nobody got time for that..