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 Getting to many final rounds, 1 lowballed offer, 1 rescinded offer, and it’s playing a mental toll.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.
Interviewing shouldn’t require such thick skin. I’m here questioning my life, and reduced to worthlessness.
Been there buddy (including that exact, form-letter rejection email). I feel for you. I just finished a 9 month interview cycle of funemployment, with a break of two months in-between where I too, was questioning my reason for even being in this industry.
My background is a coding bootcamp + relentless up-skilling and self-directed learning (with the help of some mentors), plus a healthy side of ADHD/spectrum issues, including, best of all, crippling social anxiety.
I cannot tell you in words how astounding it is to go from a full stack dev lead, to being reduced to failing junior-level code interviews because my brain just leaves the chat in the middle of most interactions with new people, let alone interactions involving cognitive effort/hazing.
You matter and the fact we have to spin our wheels on this grindstone does not change that.
Have you tried ADHD medications? I don't normally take them but they really helped me going through the interviews (I legitimately have ADHD, but the side effects are too much for me for normal use)
Did you find that that helped you focus despite anxiety? Annoyingly, I've only been able to get my hands on the most common one, Adderall, which turns me into a bouncy boy flying off the walls for some reason. It sadly seemed to trigger my anxiety too. Child comment mentions trying some others, which I might do.
(Have been on multiple different anti anxiety / depression meds, as well as a few anti seizure meds too fwiw.)
Adderral is rough.
I’ve had better luck with Concerta or vyvanse
Adderall would make me super energetic for hours. Crazy chattt. Then I would be really focused for a for a couple hours. Then it would wear off and I would be drained. After a few weeks I started having horrific burning pain throughout body.
Extended release is supposed to be better.
I do much better on other Medication. Kids do great on them. One is best on concerta. Other does better on vyvanse. My whole family is crazy strong ADHD. I prefer concerta.
Vvyanze initially made me crazy sad. When I tried it again a year later it didn’t do that.
Ah that's the catch, I didn't get anxiety from Adderall so that wasn't a problem. As others have said, I would try some other medication if possible at all, they really do help.
How many of those jobs pay just as much or more as a medical doctor for a fraction of the education and arguably quite a bit less stress? I’m not a fan of the interview process at all and not defending it at all, but when you compare it to “other jobs”, it’s very clear that most software engineers (in the states at least) are compensated quite well
most people find one of the most high paying jobs they can, then adjust their lifestyle to that income, then if they miss the mark ('lowball offer') they have to keep looking.
lifestyle regression is exceptionally hard for humans, especially if your friends/neighbors don't have to go through the same thing (e.g. there's no war raging in your country).
the best thing to do would be to keep your spend way below your means. this maximizes your options and gives you choice. but who does that?
I’ve found keeping expenses well below my means provide a great sense of freedom and autonomy. I don’t need to stay at a job I don’t enjoy and not having work means it’s not a big stressor. It also means I can be selective in the job I do end up taking instead of worry about not being able to pay the bills if I’m out of work too long.
This. But it really depends where you live and when (or if) you bought a house. I live in a city that has very expensive housing but bought in 2011 just before the prices corrected after the 2007/2008 crash. That single choice was the biggest we made. But aside from that, for ethical and lifestyle reasons, we are frugal. We use old phones and laptops, a 10 year old TV, don't fly, don't own a car and don't have kids. Result is that the house is paid off and we have enough in the bank to walk out on any job and remain funemployed for months (or more). You might think our lifestyle sounds boring, but when you remove stress and worry, you realise that a simple life can be a very happy one. A job you like, gardening, board games, long walks, DIY, cooking... None of it needs to cost much. I think that people who live with worry and stress desperately need to escape on holidays and reward themselves with expensive purchases (new cars/tech/fashion) to keep their spirits up and make it seem like the huge effort is worthwhile.
keep your expenses low is easier said than done. Things are different when you have kids, elder people in the family you have to support, than when you’re young and single. In my case, I wanna buy a modest two bedroom apartment that I can afford to pay the mortgage. My family wants to buy a house with a garden.
One of my family members’ 12 year old son suddenly developed a health issue. His dad is worth at least 3M, and was looking to retire in his 40s. But the medical bills are insane, he can’t retire anytime soon, as most of the bills (tens of thousands a month) are being paid by the good insurance his employer gives him.
I have always spent much less than what I make (I don’t even have a bed, I happily sleep on the floor on a sleeping bag). But I also haven’t gotten any raise the last few years, while my rent (for the same apartment) has gone up 20% in the last 4 years. So has my other basic expense like phone bill (same phone, same carrier, same plan), internet etc.
There is a reason people spend long hours working because the alternative is worse.
The most sensible thing to do while one is young is to live frugally, but also earn as much as you can and save.
I live in Europe, and honestly, medical bills are not a concern. My sister had terminal cancer and through the entire horrible process, the medical bills were zero. That's not because she had health insurance either. It just didn't cost anything, apart from a few doctor visits (which we pay for). Once she was assigned a specialist at the hospital, everything from that point was free, including multiple hospital stays, an ambulance trip, drugs, multiple life-saving procedures (collapsed lung, blood clots, all the stuff that happens near the end with terminal cancer). It's completely unfair that anyone would be bankrupted over illness, and that's the reason I would never move to the US.
I mean it sounds comfortable, and minimally stressful, but if it’s not that you can’t have kids, you should start a family. You’re now in such a good position to do it!
Then your life can be chaotic, messy, stressful, and you lose much freedom for many years! But on the plus side you learn to sacrifice everything you’ve done and earned for the good of children who don’t even know how to appreciate it!
We never wanted kids (we're mid 40s, it won't change). We spend time with nephews and nieces, and while it can be fun, we're always very thankful we can return to a calm house with two sleeping dogs and no mess. My wife is even less interested in kids than I am. Lucky it worked out that way, plenty of couples break up over that choice.
Yeah I can respect that. For me it’s more about living for yourself or sacrificing for others. You can choose either whether you have kids or don’t have kids.
Kids just happen to be the easiest way to force yourself to stop living for yourself.
My spouse and I have household income around the median for the area, and through a combination of discipline and good luck have managed to keep expenses very low.
It's not a life of depravation. We take nice vacations and buy the things we want, but we have to be careful not to want things like fancy cars or elaborate remodels. These seem like very unimportant things to forego when you stand to gain freedom from monetary worry.
Family of five, two engineers in Germany (normal engineers salaries there, nothing really big), we live with 1.1 to 1.2 salary.
And we enjoy our life, we rent (luckily not too expensive) and can do what we want. Of course we do not play the traditional "show off your nice stuff" game the society tries to force us into, but for us happiness is time well spent, not accumulated stuff.
I keep my expenses 20% below net income and invest the rest on the stock market. It is a great anti-stress way to live.
Happiness is all about your expectations and who you compare yourself with. I try my best to compare myself with myself 1 year ago instead of random strangers. It makes me focus on what I can actually control (my own actions) instead of things I can’t control (the actions of others).
If you can’t help comparing yourself with your neighbours and feel “poor” where you live then moved to a place where you are “rich” compared with the neighbours. It will do wonders for your happiness.
I just went through an interview cycle at a FAANG, and I'm pretty sure only one interviewer out of five was directly involved in the actual position. And I'm somewhat certain that it was the others who were the nos. I actually didn't find out anything about the position until the final interview. Additionally, no one in the panel was a software engineer ... for a software engineering position.
That sounds unlike faang interviews (the only one person being a swe part). Which one was it and what were the interviews like?
The non-team thing is common but they do it to bring “objectivity” to the process and since it’s leetcode or system design questions, it usually doesn’t matter unless you’re applying for a highly specialized role.
I can speak for google and Amazon - you might not even apply for a specific team till you’re in, and do that afterwards. Facebook also did team match post boot camp.
The interview revolved almost 100% around their leadership principles, of which humility is not one, so that should pinpoint it. And I said no one was a software engineer. All six were management.
Google told me the interview would be in my choice of language. I chose C#, passed the first interview, then the second interview was in C and was based on language trivia. The kind of stuff you won’t know unless you work with C on a daily basis.
That is right in line with the experience of a good friend of mine.
He went on a Google interview, and they said he could solve a problem in the language of his choice. They gave him the assignment and left the room. Since we were at Apple at the time, he was coding daily in Objective-C. So he solved the problem in that.
Despite having said "use any language," the guy came back and said, "Oh, not THAT one."
And that's not even covering the douchebaggery that reportedly occurs once you work there. Another trusted friend, who worked there for years, reported being forced to rank coworkers with a graphical tool that shows pictures of them... and requires you to move them up or down on the screen to put some above others. It makes it impossible for you to put people on an equal level.
This is not from someone who makes stuff up, not to mention that this would be an oddly detailed thing to make up.
> The interview revolved almost 100% around their leadership principles, of which humility is not one, so that should pinpoint it. And I said no one was a software engineer.
"Leadership principles" sound like Amazon. As far as I know they purposely get all their SDEs involved in hiring, and the bulk of their interviews is based on hard-skills, even when the interviewer's goal is to assess "leadership principles".
Also, one of their explicit interview goals is to have the candidate leave the interview round with a good impression of the company.
Nothing in your story adds up. Either you're embellishing it too hard or you're misusing the FANG keyword.
> Additionally, no one in the panel was a software engineer ... for a software engineering position.
None of the FANGs I know ever had non-software engineers interview candidates for SDE positions, specially when software development managers are primarily software engineers themselves and interviews have a considerable software development aspect.
The bullet would have paid well, lol, and the domain area was pretty damn interesting (only reason I considered it in the first place), but yes. Although, it's honestly a little unclear. I really enjoyed speaking with the hiring manager and thought it went well enough, but the other parts and the overall process was not enjoyable. It was nothing but A-type people and subtlety hostile (?), if that makes sense. Like the others weren't interested or I was untrustworthy or not capable or wasting their time or something. Just a weird feeling. But I wouldn't have worked with those people? Either way, I guess they're looking for a very specific type of engineer, and I am not that engineer I suppose.
Overall, I somewhat expected such an experience and am glad I ended up where I did. The place I am going is filled with great people, and honestly, more intelligent and curious people.
One thing to always remember, because it's the same for me as for you, remember that most jobs are already accounted for. They often interview for quotas, gotta try out 3 people or such. I've clearly been the best qualified candidate a few times, as a grizzled software developer going for devops jobs. Still don't get it. They often know who they want to hire before any interviews begin.
While that's not always true, it is far more often than you think. So assume that's what happened to you, it probably was if you look at the odds.
As far as thick skin, that's life. Stay strong. Remember that failure is never achieved until you give up. This is a cold, hard world if you don't benefit from nepotism as many do.
> They often know who they want to hire before any interviews begin.
I've seen the same thing as well. One company even flew me out to their headquarters to interview for a position they knew they were going to give to somebody internally. I found out because they left me alone with a senior developer on the team. I asked him what my chances were of getting the job and he told me.
I wonder if there's a good way to filter out these roles earlier in the hiring process.
Just like success with the other gender (or whatever you're attracted to), this doesn't mean much about your self worth.
As a hiring manager, I'm desperate for good talent. For the company that liked you, ask if there's other roles in the organization or to be considered for future rounds. Can't hurt, but don't hold your breath. Laws often prevent honesty in rejections.
It's extremely difficult to find good people. Even the most prestigious companies with the most stringent hiring processes are filled with people who shouldn't have been hired. Half the time I hire someone, my workload increases rather than decreases.
I finally find a promising candidate, only to have FAANG come in and offer 50% more than I can. Significantly more than I earn. I try to compete by offering a better work environment, team, and growth. But 50% is life changing. And while I've helped so many grow, they leave holes when they do.
You need to break out some social engineering on these companies. Tell every single one of them that you're interviewing with a bunch of other companies and that you may be approaching a offer soon. On the first call, be straight forward with your expectation in pay, benefits, other compensation and where you expect to do the majority of your work (home / office / farm / park / bathroom). Tell them you do not wish to waste their time or yours, they will often appreciate it.
In the mean time since you are out of work, start volunteering, participating in the community and even create some youtube / twitch content.
I'm in the same boat. Been interviewing for 3 months now. More than half of interviews are ego exercises for the interviewer. I've had a few where I could barely get to my point before the interviewer was finishing my sentences, or suggesting a different but equivalent answer more to their liking. One even refactored my code in coderpad while I was typing elsewhere lol!
My partner just got off the tech job hunt roller coaster last week - signed a solid offer at a great company with a team she's excited to join. It took months, she encountered some similar disappointments, felt the same doubts and fears, and I know how awfully hard it can be. Keep rolling the dice though! It's hard but it will pay off.
The interview process my major companies are often designed to convince you of prestige and the illusion that they are coveted, but if you really look at how things work in the corporate world, we are individually a product that they buy into as consumers. If they undervalue the product, and the product is something they don't really need for whatever reason, they will try to haggle.
If they need you as a product, and you develop and know your value, you can negotiate better, from a position of strength. Personal growth and confidence is a continual process of building and renovating, but it always has a peak, and even ebb and flows throughout. There is never one clear path to success, but rest comfortably in knowing that all you have to do is survive and grow, carrying only what matters for each role you need to play in life.
Your life isn't linked to a job, it's linked to survival. Never let an employer convince you that you are not worthy of a job, and never let a job be the only value you have...
Work to qualify for interviews at companies where you get interviewed by execs, not by middle and lower management. The friends you make in those roles carry weight. A big part of success is the "Grey Hair" rule. Accept that when you are young and less experienced, things will be harder. It gets easier to navigate as you grow grey hairs and more experience if you work efficiently and effectively (not furiously). Resume formatting and a cover letter aren't really what get you the job. Your experience, personal product, and presentation does... Don't overthink the process... Overthink your personal life goals (What you want to accomplish in your personal life, not in work for an employer).
I am not usually a positive person, I am a practical one. The world is a lot less intimidating and more easily understandable when you focus on what you can control... Work to live, don't live to work.
After being burned a few times in similar ways I have detached my feelings from work, to the point that I believe that not actively looking for a better job than the one you have is foolish, I know it's an unpopular opinion but I reached the logical conclusion, that my work is just an asset and I sell it to the best bidder.
There is a handful of cases I would concede that you shouldn't keep searching for a new job but they are rare, like when you reach the position and company you dreamed your whole life and it's everything you wanted (e.g
an artist that dreamed of becoming head animator at studio ghibli), or a company where you own a big stake and strongly believe soon will increase in value, or you found a company that provides so much generous benefits that looking for better position would likely be a waste of time (e.g. 200K, 3 day work week, great teammates)
Man we are living the same hellscape, I had an offer rescinded a couple of weeks ago, been interviewing since April. Got to so many onsites and passed a bunch of hoops only to get "we paused hiring", "we are rescinding your offer", or sometimes just get ghosted.
The tech recruitment process is clearly broken. Companies have left this as an afterthought, its so clear to anyone interviewing that entire recruitment departments are doing the most and putting devs to hell for it
Been doing it for 2 years because I specifically am looking for company looking for founding staff which is hyper-selective.
The worst thing is to be refused without knowing what's wrong so you're kept wondering why. Is it geographical reason? Is it national border reason? Legal reason? Culture fit? Personality fit?
Another worst thing is to be denied without any tests. Nowadays, I'd pick difficult and time consuming technical tests over being denied by technical merits due to incomplete CVs
Serious question: How do you vet for these? I would be interested in a founding engineer position as well but how do you know that the company itself has potential and not just hot air.
Additionally, it seems I cannot get into an early stage startup cause I have never worked in an early stage startup.
I found it quite hard myself, but there are a couple of values that I use as heuristic:
- it is either looking to get sustainable as early as possible,
- or, if not, it is a research into the unknown (e.g. quantum computing, different purpose of db, new kind of AI, space exploration, green earth initiatives, even the early phases of blockchain)
Another points would be if the founders have the motivation to give back rather than take as much profit. My current company's founder have a dream to make an incubator for aspiring game makers, for example.
> I have never worked in an early stage startup.
The young company I have been in is when it was 1-year old. Founders are not looking for a mere "engineer", but one that can drive the team "above and beyond" style, because it is important for a small company. But, it is very difficult to see in people. The common mistake of many is to look for their own virtues in other people, which pretty much limits the other set of people not having the same virtue. E.g. Founders that focus on verbal communication and sales filter out people that cannot speak fluently, even though those are excellent product and engineering people.
Says who? If it was easy to get a high-paying job, everyone would just apply.
It's up to the person with money to decide on the kind of people they want to pay lots of money to, and what the testing methodology is (within the bounds of the law, of course).
I've played that game for over 20 years, and I'm completely immune to rejection. Most of the time you don't even get rejected, there's just silence. It used to bother me, maybe the first couple of years, but not anymore. I'd go to 50 onsite interviews and get maybe 2 offers, even though I'd solve most of their challenges correctly.
The whole rat-in-a-maze interview vibe is creepy and suppressive of true intellect. Solving a maze that the candidate had not studied recently is going to be a trial and error situation unless one gets very lucky with their first try. And if one had studied the maze recently then it's testing for rote learning, not intellect.
I normally ask the interviewing team to allow me to ask an advanced (worthy of PhD thesis) comp sci question for every canned leet code exercise they ask me to do.
They usually say no thank you. Or they say we believe you have the skills (based on the tens of github/youtube links on my resume) and won't test you.
Don't let them get away with one-sided penalty kicks.
Been there in the same situation for the "You were great! 100% perfect! But there was someone who was 110% - sorry & good luck!" more than once, both at the very start of my career as a new grad and as an experienced hire.
It sucks and it is a blow, and it is emotionally quite draining. Try to stick in there - for me things all worked out in the end, and I hope they will for you too.
I try to live my life by the maxim of "you never know what is going to happen" and it cuts both ways, but there are times when something amazing just comes out of nowhere.
Sorry to hear about your negative experience -- interviewing is absolutely the worst.
Complete shot in the dark, but my consulting company is hiring and I'd be happy to hook you in with a recruiter. We hire all types (background matters little if you have the skills), including career industry folks. Drop me a line if you would like more info -- email in profile (email domain is personal, not the company I work for).
Regardless, I wish you the best of luck in your search!
Dumb question, have you tried shorter term contracts? Have you tried networking with your peers from your bootcamp? I get that it's better to have Big Stable Names on your resume, but there's a lot of places that just need things done, and any experience is better than nothing.
Do you have any leads on short term contracts? Would accept one in an instant.
The problem is upwork takes a 20% cut and has bad terms and has a very flaky client base, while everything that VC money touches pays way better but hires non-contract fulltime only (fine) and has these rediculous interview cycles that I never seem to pass through.
I think if you put me in a stack of candidates that did leet code, i am basically never in the top 3 fastest, so that makes me unemployable in a system where resumes dont matter, personality is suspected to be bullshit, and speed of test completion is the only metric that can be used to rank candidates. Not in the top 3 fastest test takers? Get fucked.
Oops, I didn't see your response; I'll shoot you an email from connor[dot]labaume[dot]etc.
I've never interacted with UpWork. My experience is that smaller companies pay fairly well, the interview process is usually easier, and you can learn a lot more about development, and that particular industry. The down side is that office politics matters more, you might have challenges with setting realistic expectations, and you might have trouble with comparisons to the last programmer they hired/fired.
We're letting over a million immigrants in every year. As an American I'm finding it's harder and harder for me to get a job in the tech industry every year and I have a decade of experience and a master's degree. I recently got a job in the industry and I'm on a team of all Indian people, my boss is Indian, and his boss, all the way up to the CEO. Just so you know it's not you. It's a clown world we live in. Vote accordingly
Or get better? You lucking out in which country you’re born in / citizenship shouldn’t be the only thing that allows you get a job. We all work in an industry where we praise meritocracy, so the best thing to do is to earn your role through merit, not privilege.
There's no amount of meritocracy that can override billions of immigrants.
It's why immigrants are coming to America.
And how come Indian teams hire 99% Indians? They don't call that meritocracy with white people....
Also I didn't get lucky. My family has been here for many generations, and helped to build this country, got ancestors died building the railroad My grandfather got a purple heart in world war II.
My ancestors worked hard to contribute to create a country with a stable government and civilized society.
So it is really depressing to see collapsing in on itself. if anyone ever wonders, what Trumps appeal is That's why.
Try reading for comprehension. The parent said, "You lucking out in which country you’re born in..."
You were lucky in that YOU were born in the US. Your parents could have lived in India. Or China. Or Chad. Or the Ukraine. Just so happens they lived in the US and, as a lucky consequence, you were born in the US.
But unless you're Native American your ancestors weren't born here. They were immigrants too. America is a huge multi-cultural melting pot spanning generations. 97% of the population are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants.
Getting tired of the folk that move in and then say, "Hey, I've got mine. Now it's time to close the door on everyone else."
> Getting tired of the folk that move in and then say, "Hey, I've got mine. Now it's time to close the door on everyone else."
You're tired!!!?
I'm sick and tired of Western countries being responsible for Eastern countries billions of children! Stop having children! Maybe your country might actually be livable and not be something you want to run away from!
Notice that almost all of the countries that are desirable to immigrate to have a native population with a declining birth rate.
Also no one's closing any doors. any country can create their own prosperous economy? why not do that? Are they incapable of creating their own prosperous economy? It's closing the door because they're incapable of being successful on their own?
Instead Western countries get a billion people trying to immigrate and make the cost of labor dirt cheap.
It's pretty sad situation because the desirable countries are being turned into the rest of the world.
I didn’t interview for 8 months at one company. I’ve been trying to leave my current company for 8 months, and have been going on interviews during that time.
I do similar, though only a few times per year. I also advise all my colleagues (and sometimes managers!) to do likewise. My rationale:
1. Interviewing is a career skill that has an outsized influence on your earning potential. You need to practice it to get good and keep those skills sharp.
2. Interviewing regularly (minimum twice per year, YMMV) keeps you up to speed on what skills are in demand and what problems companies are trying to solve.
3. It's a great way to network. I'm up-front about being a passive candidate and I still get takers for interviews. Even if you don't take the job after passing an interview, you'll have a foot in the door if you revisit your interviewee in the near future or have somebody you can send their way.
4. You never know when you'll need to change jobs. Job satisfaction, change in life circumstances, layoffs/economic downturns, or any number of things completely outside of your control can force a change in your employment.
It doesn't matter if you're happy, busy, or hate interviewing--interview regularly or suffer the consequences for being unpracticed and unprepared.
One interview a week? Are you serious? You must move job every few months then? Do you not get new job fatigue? The first few months at a company are horrible - getting the lay of the land, understanding who you have to impress and who you don’t…etc
Yes. I usually target hybrid roles in a place I am unwilling to live like New York as many are explicitly for practice. And I generally do not interview for smaller companies as the process is usually wacky. I was once asked to argue for forcing a company on Linux, Mac, or Windows for a dev role.
Not OP, but why would you feel bad? Anecdotally, I’ve gone into interviews before thinking it means nothing, and one of the small companies I wasn’t serious about ended up convincing me to join. It’s really on the company to sell their vision.
I just now am understanding this. I usually do a leetcode per week. But now I'm straight up booking interviews. They created the game, I'm just playing it.
> Once you interview and turn them down then will they interview you again? Doesn't that close a lot of doors?
Currently, at least, big tech cos will keep that door open. Think of it this way - a company spending $$$ on recruiters cold-emailing a bunch of candidates, the majority of whom fail the process, isn't gonna throw away leads of people who they know have passed the process at least once.
My solution to this is to book many of my interviews in places where I am unwilling to live, like New York. So whether or not I am burning bridges, it does not matter because I would not accept many of those roles anyway.
"I took a test to see if I was a sociopath, I scored 1 point under the threshold, but I think I got that point back when I broke in to the testing site to see my result early"
Because later business treats people in a way where "everyone can be replaced" but interviews are like "we are looking for someone who will save our company".
It was at a crypto trading platform who gave me a verbal offer, and then a month later tried to pull a fast one and wrote down an offer 50% less than what was discussed. When I probed, they responded “it’s out of my hands, leadership changed their needs…etc”
The offer was a pay cut from my current, very boring, but stable role.
There's something to be said about boring and stable. I don't know how long you've been in your career, but I do know we're coming off a very long bull market for developer roles and salaries. That has created an expectation that our career must always be fun and fruitful. I've been doing this long enough that I've seen the other side of the market, and have gotten emails from talented developers desperate to get a job with the very boring company I was working with at the time.
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?
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.
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.
> We have a probation period to work out if they’ve over-promised
I'm curious what you mean by over-promised?
Unless you only do this for people who don't already have a job, this sounds more toxic than multiple interviews. "Oh yeah we want you to work for us, but quit your old company, we'll try you out for a few weeks and if not we'll go our separate ways" ... but they quit their previous company so it's not as nice as it sounds.
If they said in the interview they’re very comfortable with Vue.js and Postgres, and then you find out after a few weeks that actually they barely know Vue or Postgres, they actually come from a React/SQLite background, they’ve overpromised.
Rather than ensuring every bullet point on their resume is factual through six interviews I’ve found it’s better to assume they’re honest and as capable as advertised, interview for personality, and then if they’ve oversold themselves that’s why it’s called a 90 probationary period.
I don’t get cranky if someone quits (even with no notice) within 90 days, for any reason. And I’ll let someone go within 90 days, for any (legal, ethical) reason.
> And I’ll let someone go within 90 days, for any (legal, ethical) reason.
I think it's a cultural difference. Many companies see firing as a failure to competently hire. Many employees see firing as a sign of instability. In the few startups I've worked at, I saw top talent leave at the first sign of instability/layoffs.
Find me an engineer who knows both vue.js and Postgres and they’re worth their pound of salt. And, if you’re differentiating against React and SQLite - e.g. they’re not familiar with JSONB style queries or CTEs, but instead have some alternative, par familiarity with another db… and the same level of sophistication with an FE stack - e.g usage of useRef vs forwardRef… and you cut them loose… well, they’ll probably be going on to a better position at another company.
Glad to see there’s still some love for DB knowledge. Seems like everyday someone is coming to me with an issue that could be quickly solved by leaning on a mature RDBMS, instead of an ORM/NoSQL/flavor of the year tool.
Too bad most roles in this industry (that pay well and don’t work you to premature balding) need niche specialists, instead of deep generalists.
And all the faddery (see: MongoDB, MySQL, DocumentDB). “We don’t need a full-fledged RDBMS. We’ll ride this malnourished pony all the way past the finish line. We gotta stay lean; we gotta stay hungry. There’s no ‘OLTP’ in first to market.”
Vue / Vuetify / Nuxt dev here, and a pinch of php. I used to work with some Postgres in a previous job.
Personally I don’t understand how people can keep switching between different libraries all the time. I’ve been working Vue for the past year and I still know I don’t know everything.
I would expect any halfway decent hire with real React and SQLite experience to be able to pick up survival level Vue and PG within those 90 days though?
At the end of the day JS is JS and SQL is SQL, particularly if you're a dev and not a DBA. You'd have a problem if they (say) have never touched a database before.
For us, it’s a tiny fraction. I’ve hired around 30 engineers over 5 years and we’ve let go of 2 during probation, both for dramatically overstating their capabilities compared to their actual experience, to such a degree that it was clear it was done intentionally and with no effort to try and bridge the gap with learning during the period. Others who may have slightly embellished their skills but could learn as they went turned out fantastically, and I feel like those sorts of hires would not make it through the multi-round grillings satirised in the article.
I like that approach now more that you said that. It's very true, many will surprise you for various ways, and would never survive the absurd interview gauntlet and tests.
I just present myself as-is, which is probably less impressive, but I don't want to be hired somewhere based on false pretenses. That's just stress I don't need. I'd rather just switch careers and find something else to do before I do that. So I guess I just don't care enough to lie, which is kind of a lack of ambition of sorts. Misrepresentation is probably a better qualification for a sales position though.
I do think with poignant questions during interviews, you can tease out if someone knows what they're talking about. I just had a few interviews at a Fortune 500 and they peppered me with pretty great questions. Simple stuff, but good questions like, "what is a singleton" etc. You need to give a candidate some leeway, it's stressful and I don't sit around thinking about what a singleton is.. but I did have an acceptable answers to questions like that in my mind. "A static class which can only have a single instance". They liked me, but didn't hire me.
It's a tough industry that has brought engineers to their knees. Begging when nothing would work without them. It was supposed to be the next buoy of the American working class but instead the state of affairs is pathetic. That's what we get for disrespecting collective bargaining. At this point, there's definitely easier ways to make a buck than software. I wouldn't do it again but it's all I know.
The poster is in Australia which has a different set of employment practices than America. Every company in Australia talks about the probation period. During probation it is basically like America at-will employment. After probation it is harder to get rid of staff with legal standards on dismissal periods, redundancy pay, and so on.
They can take you the Fair Work Commission for an unfair dismissal claim so companies have have processes in place to make sure they don't face that risk, which includes things like written warnings for underperformance, setting clear expectations, and giving the employee a chance to correct underperformance.
Managers in Australia much prefer to rid of underperformers during probation.
> The possibility of ending up unemployed is a bit stressful here.
Isn't getting unemployed always a possibility? It seems to me that parent commenter makes things clear and transparent to the candidate. Otherwise, the company could just fire without any such probation period anyways. Why should a company stick with an employee if the employee misrepresented themselves in the first place.
I’ll side with you. I lead a big team, but also an employee myself, I find probation period a very uncomfortable concept. There is no promises in interviews. You ask your questions, you get your answers, you make your decisions. If your questions ask for promises to make your decision easier, you are doing it wrong. From my perspective, any hire that ends up with negative probation outcome should be marked against interviewers performance. We are people, working with people with families, obligations, dreams. We have to let that sink in our thinking rather than take cover behind corporate policies, procedures, legislation etc.
I can absolutely see this position, for me it’s more a case of protecting ourselves against the rare but increasing occasions of candidates actually making misleading claims. As I’ve said in a sibling comment, for me I like to be able to take basic skills at face value, and focus on core competencies. If someone can learn the skill during probation, that’s totally fine.
In our case, we try and be very upfront about the nature of the process and that it works both ways, i.e. if they find the workplace isn’t for them, then theres no hard feelings either. It’s part of Australian workplace law so whether we mention it or not it is going to apply, so we make sure its not something hidden that might surprise someone.
In our case, we do also explain the types of circumstance in which we might use such a clause, and for us those are very narrow, we don’t hire people just to let them go for nothing 6 months later.
To be fair to the original poster, in Australia, whether you tell every new hire or not, they are still on probation legally in terms of employer obligations, so it is good to tell if you want to establish clarity, and follow appropriate procedures in terms of setting goals and keeping them up to date as end of probation nears to avoid vagueness and stress. Depending on size of hiring organisation, probation is 6 months for big organisations and 12 months for smaller ones.
Usually during this period you can also leave at will. I think it is in law that the contract should be symmetrical for both sides. The system seems to be working ok-ish.
Valid question. By that I mean if were looking for someone with experience in X, Y, and Z, we’ve had situations where applicants have done enough research to have a conversation about X but not have any practical or troubleshooting experience with it, which we needed. The probation period means we don’t need to grill someone on every aspect of the role, instead we can focus on the absolute core of what we need and specify the rest in the JD, and if someone claims to know it we can safely take their word with minimal risk of committing ourselves if they can’t then pick it up in a few weeks.
I’ve hired developers who ended up lacking experience in something that they claimed they had experience in, but they hunkered down and quickly learned the technology. That’s fine. honestly, I’d say that if you don’t slightly exaggerate experience in interviews you’re doing them wrong. It’s when someone outright lies and then fails to actually learn what they’ve said they know that’s the problem.
As another datapoint, this is also pretty standard in Japan. However Japan's school-to-salaryman hiring pipeline is built around the idea that you're not changing jobs, and after the 3-month probationary period (though it can vary by company) you basically become unfireable and are expected to be at that company for life.
In the more western culture of recognising that company loyalty is severed both ways, a probationary period makes much less sense.
> In the more western culture of recognising that company loyalty is severed both ways, a probationary period makes much less sense.
American, not Western. Probationary periods are the norm in Western(or developed for that matter) countries, same as worker rights (such as you can't be fired on a whim). Due to said worker protections, a probationary period gives the company some time to realise it made a mistake in hiring, because afterwards it's drastically harder to let someone go. Same goes for the employee, during the probationary period you can leave with little to no notice, but once it's over the mandatory notice is in the multiple weeks to months period (at my last job it was the max for France, 3 months).
But is it better than the alternative, that’s the current system of multi-round interview that takes months because companies try to avoid a wrong decision?
I don't like having one interview with one interviewer. That can easily result in that interviewer having a bad day or simply being biased and costing someone a job.
For one, this one only requires the candidate to provide an hour of their time, which for me is the main reason I personally avoid multi-round interviews.
Agreed, it can also be uncomfortable for persons not of the same gender as the interviewer, so I always take a second person and try to ensure we always have a mix of men and women scheduled as that other person depending on who we’re interviewing to minimise the single point of me/another manager having a bad day.
That'd be a problem if there'd be a shortage of interesting jobs.
And, speaking as somebody who's seen a 4-digit number of interview packets: The multi-interviewer format is far from flawless, too. The capability of groups of humans to collectively fuck up without ever talking to each other is quite impressive.
If you absolutely want to invest more time, at least build a multi-hour interview that has people do their job, in a team environment. Because that's what ultimately will happen.
For a small company the interviewer might well be the beneficiary of your work and in the end he needs you more than you need him. So a good one won't let his bad day ruin a nice candidate.
Also, depends on culture. There are countries where 1:1 interviews with a different gender candidate are okay.
I’m all for probation periods. I think this is where the industry should go. Before I got hired at my current job, I think I went through around 20 hours of total interviews at several companies. I got to the final round three times for three separate companies, but they always found a reason to say no at the end. At my current company, I’m thriving and people constantly tell me so. It really makes me wonder if those other companies had just given me a chance, how much I would’ve thrived there. Really just a waste of time for everyone in the end.
The industry is trying to optimize for avoiding opposite. How many more hours wasted for a candidate that is sub-par? 20 hours? That’s not even a single probation period. Must be hundreds of hours spent per candidate, and I can easily imagine 5 subpar candidates in a row. A colossal waste of time.
Honestly we also have a senior contractor on my who we only did 1 or 2 60 min basic screens for and they’re a huge disappointment and we’ve been dealing with them for a year I guess because they’re not quite bad enough to fire immediately. I bet a full panel would not have accepted them.
In the old day, salary may be increased after probation if the performance is better than expected. I don't know why this practice fades out in my country.
> We have a probation period to work out if they’ve over-promised
That's what contracting is for and I tell everybody to turn down any position that starts as a "contractor". Commit or GTFO, stop wasting peoples time.
I disagree. Some of my best jobs were contract to hire positions. The interviews are much more humane because the company isn't so worried about making a hiring mistake.
I don't know why, but something about "not renewing a contract" makes HR and the C-Suite at most companies feel a lot safer than "we're firing you" despite the fact they're virtually identical with the standard US at-will employment contract.
That’s just not the case in the Australian market. Contractors generally receive a higher rate of pay in exchange for an ongoing risk that they won’t be renewed, and are generally used to fill temporary skills gaps for projects and such. Permanent roles are expected to be for ongoing work, but that still leaves a risk of a bad hire as our labour laws are quite strict in terms of how you can terminate a permanent employee, which is what our probation laws cover, as it encourages employers to take risks with potentially under qualified candidates or be less prone to these sorts of 20 hour long 10 stage interviews to eliminate the possibility of a bad hire at the expense of wasting countless hours for even a good hire.
On the balance, I prefer the probation approach as it makes life easier for everyone.
Read OPs comment again, they're in Australia, so you should not apply out of place American logic and labour "laws".
Probationary periods are a normal part of employment contracts in most developed/Western countries, with few glaring exceptions like the US, due to the presence of worker protection laws like the fact you can't be fired on a whim, and you can't quit on a whim without notice. So the probationary period leaves both parties the opportunity to quit before it becomes hard to do so.
You can certainly hit AUD 200k (including superannuation) as a senior software engineer at one of the big australian banks. To go much higher you probably have to stop being an IC and start being an engineering manager. Or stop being a permie and start being a contractor.
Some US-based well funded companies that hire software engineers in Australia are willing to bid substantially higher for senior engineers (i.e. ~ AUD 300k comp + stock).
Day-rate contracting can get you very close if the last minute renewals are something you can deal with. The telcos are currently going through a hiring period and I’ve seen 1250/day plus super offered a few times recently. For perm roles, it’s certainly much harder, and I’ve only seen one IC role offered in market at over $220k at the firms I’ve worked at, but the flip side is I’ve seen a few higher ones offered to recommended candidates off market.
The old adage still applies, the jobs you want aren’t advertised and the candidates you’re looking for aren’t on job boards looking.
If it's anything like Europe, presenting at meetups and contributing to industry-relevant open source software opens doors both for hiring and being hired.
As sibling comment says, meetups and conferences are a great way to get your name out there. Working closely with vendors when the opportunity comes up in your organisation can also help build a relationship and reputation if managed properly. Anything to establish yourself as a person of some authority in the area such that when a need is identified, your name comes up as a ‘we should see if x is looking around’
Job boards can still give decent results? They just don't give you the best possible results and have a lot of real trash (sorry, employers, but offering 70k for someone with 4 YOE in software is a not-so-amusing joke and I shudder to think of what working for you is like).
Surprised to see Square and Canva in the list there. I’m currently staff level elsewhere but semi-regularly get approached by them with offers lower than $200k for senior roles. Would you say the salaries mentioned are fairly common there or fairly niche?
They would be very rare unless he’s talking total compensation (inc. super, stocks, bonuses) at the larger companies. Even then I’d expect the average to be low $200k for a senior depending on how they define senior.
In Australia, we have compulsory employer contributions to a retirement account called superannuation. Similar to the American concept of a 401k but mandatory.
Depends which section of the industry you end up in, but in the big banks which are some of the largest java shops, a cadet/intern will end up around $45k, a junior around $55-65k, an ordinary dev around $80-90k, and a senior anywhere from $115-$150k but weighted toward the lower end. Then of course there’s the rest of the buzzword fleet, DevOps engineers are a bit of a premium on those figures, architects the same.
I am seeing interns joining at 90k+ atm and you can extrapolate but on a <45deg angle from there. I even know a junior (<2yr experience) at 140k, not any kind of superstar but lucky I guess. Are you talking Aussie market? Maybe for entrenched big java teams that are reluctant to restructure their compensation for the whole team. I’d advise anyone to look at newer teams that can accommodate market rates easier.
I ran a bunch of interviews over the last couple of years, in some (reasonably rare) cases I saw quite junior candidates with only a year or two experience who scored very strongly on our technical interviews -- not at a senior level but as a solid intermediate level hire. I suspect if that candidate gets a junior or intermediate grade offer for salary may depend quite a bit on how strong their negotiating position is.
Yep Australian market. The numbers I’ve talked about above are what I’d classify as ‘normal’, there are of course always exceptions, and I’ve been fortunate enough to exist outside these ranges for most of my career, but ultimately I left the banks a few years ago for better prospects.
$AUD. These numbers are your run of the mill salaries seen around the industry, someone with specialised experience such as an ex-FAANG engineer might be more likely to end up at the higher end, but in general outside of a few local unicorns the salaries aren’t that impressive save for a few exceptions for top talent. It’s a real shame since everything else in Sydney is so expensive…
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.
This was my exact experience. But I scheduled so many interviews I didn't have time to dwell. Which is great, because I am good at dwelling. I bombed many interviews in an embarrassing fashion. After about 10 or so, I started to improve. And as the questions on each successive interview began to rhyme with previous ones, I got faster and better. You know your comfort zone best, but just as a data point, consider whether scheduling interviews like its your job (or your second job) would help. And again just anecdote, but I think if I'd interviews with less than 10 companies, I probably would have convinced myself I was stupid. Instead I went from 10+ straight rejections to multiple offers and a sizable salary bump.
> But I scheduled so many interviews I didn't have time to dwell
If you are sensitive to failure, a trick to overcoming it is to overwhelm your ability to dwell through sheer volume of experiences. Usually the anticipation of the next experience makes dwelling on the last one difficult to impossible. This works for dating, interviewing, presenting, and probably myriad other things that I haven't had to get better at.
Does this make it so your body thrums with cortisol nearly 24/7? Yes! But do you improve quickly? Also yes! How long do you want to spend getting better? There's both a time cost and emotional cost to improving slowly. Conversely, improving quickly is exciting and motivating.
I went through period where I was not only bad at interviewing, but so nervous that I couldn't control my palms sweating so profusely that it was embarrassing to shake hands with my interviewer (and probably gross for them!). Once I realized I had to go for volume to get over my nerves, things changed dramatically for the better.
The tragic part of the inane way that we interview candidates is that if the new job works out, interview hacking skills begin to decay immediately. After a few years, interview skills for the next job search will begin in roughly the same place.
I feel your pain! I had an initial phone interview with Yahoo in mid 2000 or so and my anxiety got the best of me on "hello". I went blank! Forgot how to talk - so I hanged up and DECIDED that very minute that I would start my own company and never interview again!
I once blanked in the middle of n interview because in the back of my mind I was thinking “do I really want to work for these guys?” And my brain started to wonder.
I had the same experience. I've bombed a lot of CS interviews - a lot more than I've done well on, hah! I'm a couple classes away from a Master's in CS and would still have to study my butt off to be successful in a whiteboard interview. The first few rejections hurt a little, but once I started taking the interviews for what they were it all became a big joke to me. And the recruiter process may be even worse than the interviews. At this point I'm of the opinion that I'm not gonna waste one more minute on Leetcode or any "kata" a recruiter sends me. I've got much better things to do with my time.
My current position was basically just a conversation for an hour. Best interview ever... Went in thinking I was gonna have to do the whiteboard thing and they never asked me one question about any kind of algorithm. Been on the team several years now and it's the best position I've ever had.
I'd probably need something like a 50 to 75% salary bump to consider leaving, and I would flat out refuse any whiteboard interviews. I always count myself blessed that I'm in the position where I can be selective. If I was desperate, I'd have to compete for them like everyone else.
Each employee, when interviewing candidates, is required to make the interview harder than their own was. In this way we incrementally improve talent velocity. We call it Agile Interviewing.
Back when I was a regular employee I would take 2-3 interviews every 6 months. I found many benefits to doing this: interviewing skills, salaries in my market, skills people are hiring for. I definitely recommend it to anyone, especially if you are the type of person who is anxious about interviews.
If you have a gap just say you took time off between jobs. Are you exploring startup ideas but decided to go back to a company. Have a few startup ideas in your back pocket just in case.
I’ve just hired a wrong person. I’m extremely worried how I should manage an exit plan with her, I don’t see a good way of minimizing the impact.
Some employers are stupid and make bad decisions because they’re too shy to ask for a third round of interview when we assume everyone at that level will know the standard set of JS skills, especially since the market is difficult for employers. While it’s painful to give them the time to evaluate you properly, it may also save you from a bad employer.
> This is why propbation periods exist. It’s a chance for the employee or employer to back out.
It's not an equal risk though - the employer can easily weather (or not even notice) the ending of that employment, while the employee undergoes a life-changing event.
In a large business maybe, but more often than not in a large business you're a number and you're gonna pass probation regardless.
In a smaller business, the cost of recruitment process can be huge, it's not just 1 hour interview and you're done as an employer. It's hours of reviewing CVs, contacting people, arranging times, conducting interviews, weening people out, disruption to your primary job role, etc etc. That's a huge cost and drain on the business.
If the business decides they don't want you during that probation period, you must have done something pretty bad, because that's a huge cost sink to that business.
In a medium business alot of that goes away, sure, but they pay for in recruitment fees, interviews (less) offers, onboarding, etc.
My point is, its very difficult for a business to weather this stuff. If a business lets you go during a probation period, it must really not be a good fit.
I've been involved in some recruitment process over my 18 year career, never the primary person doing it, so only reviewed CVs and been in the interviews.
Only once did we let someone go during probation, because he was quite toxic and spent all his time complaining rather than working.
At the same time I've only seen 1 person quit during probation after 1 week. He was hired to do Design and HTML/CSS, but decided after 1 week he didn't like doing HTML/CSS and decided to leave. Which made my boss absolutely furious because of the wasted time that the typical 1 week notice was thrown out the window and he was asked to leave the building right away.
> In a smaller business, the cost of recruitment process can be huge, it's not just 1 hour interview and you're done as an employer. It's hours of reviewing CVs, contacting people, arranging times, conducting interviews, weening people out, disruption to your primary job role, etc etc. That's a huge cost and drain on the business.
Not as life-changing to the business as it is to the employee.
> At the same time I've only seen 1 person quit during probation after 1 week. He was hired to do Design and HTML/CSS, but decided after 1 week he didn't like doing HTML/CSS and decided to leave. Which made my boss absolutely furious because of the wasted time that the typical 1 week notice was thrown out the window and he was asked to leave the building right away.
And yet, that did not cause the business to pay the current employees less, or downstaff, did it?
After all, if the financial implication did not involve cutting costs down just to survive, then it is not comparable to an individual, who literally has to spend less money and cut out existing costs just to survive.
> And yet, that did not cause the business to pay the current employees less, or downstaff, did it?
> After all, if the financial implication did not involve cutting costs down just to survive, then it is not comparable to an individual, who literally has to spend less money and cut out existing costs just to survive.
I’m not sure you understand. It still costs the company.
It was the employees decision to leave because he decided he didn’t want to do the work he was hired to do.
Should the company say “oh no problem we will just pay you because we have some money in the bank right at this very moment in time”?
> I’m not sure you understand. It still costs the company.
I'm not contending that, I'm saying that for the employee it is a matter of survival. For the company, it's not.
> Should the company say “oh no problem we will just pay you because we have some money in the bank right at this very moment in time”?
Where in " the employer can easily weather (or not even notice) the ending of that employment, while the employee undergoes a life-changing event. " did you read that?
I said that it's not an equal risk; the individual stands to lose a lot more by losing their job than the company stands to lose by losing the individual.
But the risk to the individual doesn’t matter. Yeah it’s difficult for different people. But ultimately it’s better for both parties to end it sooner rather than later.
To the company, the risk to the individual doesn't matter. To the individual, the risk to the company is irrelevant.
IOW, when someone leaves their stable employment and starts with a new company, the company's risk (lose some money) is almost insignificant compared to the individual's risk (starve).
Hence I said that the risk isn't equally shared between the parties. In comparison to literally dying, the company's risk looks almost negligible.
Probationary periods are good for companies, but they're horrible for early stage engineers. They don't know how to take it, and they probably don't have a lot of money saved up. I think if companies decide to fire someone after a probationary period they should give them a $1,000 bonus or something to carry them over. That engineer has given up other opportunities and maybe moved or made changes in their life. Not everyone is a reasonably well off software engineer with money in the bank.
Probation periods are also good for employees. If you arrive at a company and the new boss screams at you to work harder you can leave without having to stay for the full notice period.
I can quit any job any time I want in the us, perhaps unless I've signed an unusual contract. Never seen that in software but I'm also not a contractor but a full time employee only. So what's the benefit to the employee to be on probation?
I don’t know about the US but in UK, NZ, AUS, Singapore, Taiwan (countries I know about) it’s pretty standard to have a notice period of 1-2 months.
So you can’t “just quit”.
Probation shortens that notice period to typically 1 week however most people tend to leave straight away as it’s fruitless to both parties if the employee stays.
Standard contract in Europe is 1 month notice for the first year, after that 3 months. This way there's actually time for handover and employers can better invest in and give responsibility to their employees.
It happens. It's awkward because not only does it obviously suck for the employee but it means there's a big problem with the interview process. When I worked for a company that encountered the same problem we corrected for it by adding a screening call, after CTO chat and before an on-site. We used that call with a senior engineer to perform a trivial live-coding problem in Code Sandbox. Every candidate got the same problem, so it became our benchmark. It was a 5 minute problem, 10-15 if you're nervous in an interview. We were able to weed out not only all the candidates who couldn't solve it, but those that took 40 minutes, those that could barely find their way around a text editor, those who struggled to write syntacticly correct JS, and those who had to rely on Google to write a for loop.
For those rare candidates that completed the problem rapidly, we would give them a follow-on question that was a more typical interview question, just so that they didn't think our bar was set stupidly low.
Adding three interviews put you a little close to the joke situation on the original poster's article. Asking everyone to write fizz buzz smart though.
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.
Google is one of the few companies that has enough talent applying to be able to turn away perfectly good candidates. All those hoops you jump through ensure you're willing to go above and beyond a healthy level to "serve" the company.
Google is not some special company, its a big company and it has shitshows to fit their big company status. Just because they can keep throwing money at their recruitment department doesn't mean this is something worth replicating or that they get the absolute best talent (if that was the case their messaging apps would not get deprecated after a year)
They're special in one specific aspect: they have their pick of qualified applications. It's not like your typical mid-sized company with a limited budget that has to spend months to find a good quality candidate and can't afford arbitrary reasons to turn those candidates away.
Google interviews sound awful if I'm being honest. The last recruiter I spoke with said it involved a technical test and phone interview, after which they'd see what teams had openings and that it would be 3-4 2+ hour interviews per team before an offer was made if I was a fit. Who has the time for this?
> after which they'd see what teams had openings and that it would be 3-4 2+ hour interviews per team before an offer was made if I was a fit. Who has the time for this?
This is really not how the Google interview process works. At least not as far as I know.
1) Each interview is only 1 hour
2) Usually it's 5 technical interviews (after you pass phone screening and the 2 initial remote interviews)
3) The team matching (unless you're applying for a specific position or under special circumstances) happens after you've passed all interviews and the hiring committee has approved you for hire
That's right, for SWE positions there's only one set of interviews and each interview lasts 45 minutes. The composition of an interview slate varies by level and role applied for (e.g. some roles require domain knowledge and it's not uncommon for one interview to focus on that). There are no per-team interviews.
And I'm perfectly fine with that and agree with it. Maybe they should stop paying for outbound recruiting and save everyone time, given the tons of talented people that apply.
I guess they have so much money and need that much more talent that they'd rather just spend to sift through the talent pool faster. They also probably want to be sifting continuously - it can be a competitive strategy.
What about this view. They keep the talented people on hold to the job interview, wasting the precious time that might be used to improve their competitors.
I had a bunch of onsites and Google was the one only one which caused me angst. The fastest that the recruiter ever responded to me was in two days and the scheduler was based in India which meant 1+ day response time.
So during my onsite, one of my interviewers turned up around 5+ minutes late and I realized a) I had no idea what to do about this as recruiter is not responsive b). There is nothing stopping the interviewer from just saying "the candidate is a no show. Rejected!"
This is the major reason I haven't been looking for a new job. I haven't been super happy at my current place, but at least I don't have to go through yet another life draining and de-humanizing interviewing process.
Not to mention the first 6 months or so at a new job trying to figure out how the internal politics work. "Better the devil you know" and all that.
> but at least I don't have to go through yet another life draining and de-humanizing interviewing process.
Stop interviewing at code assembly lines? There are loads of sane places to work at with sane interviews and great tech and pay. FAANG and similar are undergoing a slow rot. You’ll do fine.
I've never even interviewed at a FAANG. I've interviewed at like a dozen companies throughout my career, across all sorts of different businesses. All of the interview processes I've been through were awful.
Admittedly, I'm doing devops/sre interviews, but I just changed jobs for the first time in 5 years.
4 different jobs I interviewed for. All of them were reasonable, the one I accepted had 3, 1 hour interviews, the questions asked were very reasonable, friendly, etc.
I dunno, maybe I'm lucky but I've avoided FAANG my whole career and only had good experiences in interviews.
How come? Genuine question. I interviewed at a company once. They asked me to do some funky stuff with some hex css colours, many many years ago. After i proudly failed they said thats what their buddy was tested about at google. Company went under and didnt shed a tear over not joining. Truly a waste of time. Later found a similar “test” in a high school cs “olympiad” book under a different name and context.
How come I went through those interviews? Because I needed a job, and almost every company is horrible at interviewing, so you just kind of have to deal with the hazing ritual. Unless you manage to get really lucky.
Sorry, i meant how come they all had horrible interviews. Silly phrasing and anecdoting on my part. You indicated “hazing”. What happened? Anyway no need to answer. I’ll do an instagram reply on you: the ocean is deep. There’s room for everyone. Learn anything you can from failure and move on.
I've been doing the look for work grind off and on for a few months. I've had one okay, one great (Render), a couple comically bad, and then a bunch of leetcode type places… for an SRE role. The best of the leetcode fans actually had the self-awareness to ask why I declined the interview request. One recruiter begged me to go through with it because they were working hard on getting an exemption for SRE hires so it wouldn't matter if I passed. One of the worst was a company that's been posting on HN for nearly a year looking to fill a bunch of spots, I can't imagine why they've been looking for so long…
If there's a good filter to avoid that nonsense I'd love to know what it is. Somewhere around a decade ago I interviewed with Apple and it was nowhere near as obnoxious as what I've seen so far.
I probably have a lower tolerance for bullshit both compared to my younger self and compared to most other people. So it's not just the effort of filtering out ridiculous job postings – I'm not going to work for a blockchain equipped, NFT based dog therapy app company, nor do I share your passion in bringing social media to defecation tracking, etc. Now I'm spending some time and landing right into the leetcode queue. Or going through a decent interview process only to get met with a hiring freeze. The whole process is just tedious.
Nuance is everywhere. We all have filters and goals and its important to apply them. If the leetcode queue will get you where you want then thats best. As a matter of principle i dont like it, because i think its too junior - no insult intended. Usually the types of companies that employ this interview technique also suffer from hiring freezes now and then. I skipped all that and went for the go getters. Can you do it? Sure if you pay enough.
The first time I looked for a job, it took about 11 months.
11 months of learning about companies that I'm not interested in just so that I can pretend to be excited to join them, pretending to be interested in the field they're in, of practicing leet code questions, of being asked to redo my resume in a specific way, of being asked to build web apps and do code challenges before being able to have a discussion with someone in their IT team, of showing up at interviews where a recruiter oversold my profile, and so on...
Is there some magical keyword or ‘tell’ that you’ve zeroed in on and want to share with the rest of us when looking at a job ad to tell if it’s a “code assembly line” or not before applying?
From the rest of your comments you seem pretty confident and specific about not having these problems, so I’m curious to know what’s in your secret sauce.
I don’t have magic to share and certainly have taken on bad jobs I regretted signing on to, but for one, I always look for some degree of humanized speech in the job listings. So what I mean by that is not so much fluff about how great the company is and how big the mission is, and more about “we’re looking to add X people who are good at Y”. But most of all, just simply job descriptions that feel like they weren’t churned out by a machine trained to hunt for “3 years of python”.
Also I like to see that engineering managers are the ones doing recruiting if it’s a company that is not Google sized, or at least a recruiter who specializes in engineering. I don’t trust that the “Head of talent” shares the same motivators that get me out of bed In the morning. An engineering manager might not either, but I feel safer betting in that direction.
> That’s how I feel when I try to interview for an software engineering role.
You meant to say when you interview for the wrong companies?
Google’s (and other leetcode nurseries) been steadily regressing. Not sure you want to be a part of it. Only idiots build sorting algos in 2022 let alone ask highschool questions about them. Keep hunting and grab some popcorn - it will be fun to watch.
Salaries for MBAs likely follow a similar distribution as for programmers. A small fraction of elite workers enjoy outstanding compensation, while the vast majority sit somewhere on a long flat tail of mediocre incomes.
> Even if they're at the "elite grand master SRE" level. Still a fraction of some MBA.
Most MBAs didn’t graduate from Harvard or Wharton or equivalent schools. They’re people who believed that there were high returns to the valuable skills they were going to learn instead of realising it’s a finishing school where you network. Graduates of the University of Northeastern Illinois’s business school are not going to do much better than FAANG software engineers. This holds more, not less for the members of the professions. The super rich people with JDs aren’t practicing lawyers.
thats why i keep telling people that software “engineering” or computer “science” are not worth pursuing. unless you use either as a launchpad. these types of jobs are just fancy bricklaying.
however there is nuance to everything. some people find 200k a year and living with flatmates in an expensive city rewarding. to each their own. i know i did. until it hit me.
All work is fancy bricklaying if you're jaded enough.
Surgeon? Just spackling the same old organs day in day out, with the additional downside of potentially killing someone if you have an off day and place a brick upside down.
Professional football player? It's repetitive manual labor! Often performed outdoors in inclement weather. High likelihood of involuntary retirement due to workplace injury.
Executive? Staring at endless spreadsheets all day... With rows and rows of those brick-like rectangular cells...
All fun aside, I don't think many bricklayers could find it within themselves to complain about making 200k a year to work in jeans and a hoodie in an air-conditioned building with foosball tables and free snacks.
Bricklaying? Google had a great WLB and l5s were clearing 500-700k TC and l6 was bumping up against a mil a year when I left more than 5 years ago. That’s early retirement and you don’t have to make a single sales call or ever manage people.
Yeah sure i should chase making a boss happy instead “for stuff that matters”. No thanks. I’ll work my butt off instead for the right people and pay. It’s a win win situation.
Working your butt off is one option, working significantly less than full time is another.
However, if you only focus on pay you drastically diminish your search space. No SV company is actually pushing the bounds of AGI research for example.
There’s enough competition for good software engineers you don’t really need to do this to yourself. You won’t get in a FAANG but if a process is getting really annoying like this just withdraw.
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.
Two of the best programmers I ever worked with I interviewed over the phone for an hour each and that was it.
Maybe, I worked at a company where it was done in the name of of inclusion. The company wanted the whole team to be involved so that each team member could feel included in the process and have a say.
> architect designed classes, lead designed methods, and programmers filled them out
Incredible. So they all have to take vacation at the same time (and stick together too — the architect lays out the suitcase, the lead gathers the clothes, etc.)
- If they send me a leetcode or test before speaking to me, no thanks.
- If the job ad says anything about "culture", no thanks.
- If my first interview is with an HR person, no thanks.
- If the job ad or email mention anything about making a video of myself, I will delete that mofo with extreme prejudice.
- If the job application requires me to sign up to your website, no thanks.
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.
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.
> If my first interview is with an HR person, no thanks
I always think of these as a sniff-test. They just want to see if you are a real person, who can speak and recite whatever is on your CV/resume. If in-person, that you shower and dress. That's it. If you can pass that stage, you're on to the more expensive interviews.
I must stink, because I get most of my rejections at the HR stage.
But I also have no idea what to ask during them either. They always give their 10 minute spiel about what the company is, ask me to give my own 5-10 minute spiel about my work history, then ask if I have any questions. I give my 5-10 minutes of regurgitating my resume in sentence form, and then generally don't have any questions. what kind of questions would I have for HR during a first round interview that hasn't already been answered in a job posting or basic company research anyway?
Ask about the company culture and work environment, the team you’ll be working on. Compensation if they haven’t said anything yet.
This HR sniff test also serves to check for interest. When I interview, if the person has zero questions for me it means they don’t really care that much or weren’t paying attention. Questions mean you’re curious. A 10-minute speech about what the company is and the team does is not enough for you to understand the job and work, so follow-up questions are important. Also it lets the person know where your mind goes, what questions come up first, etc.
Just don’t brown-nose them and ask fake questions just to ask any :)
I don't ask about culture because even if I did, I wouldn't believe it unless I saw it. There is no incentive for people with bad culture to be truthful. And even then, I'd rather ask the people I'd be working with, not the HR department.
I do ask about the team I'll be working on, but that's basically it.
You're right that the 10 minute speech isn't enough. I'd even say it serves no value. Which is why it goes in one ear and out the other.
While I try to put on my fake HR face to hide it, I don't have interest. I'm a replaceable cog, and the company is a replaceable machine. But we all need money to live.
Tbh, if sounds like HR interviews want brown-nosing. Not in compliments or anything, but in asking the questions they expect you to ask, and faking your responses and enthusiasm to be just right to tickle their fancy.
At my old startup I probably interviewed 80-100 people for all roles, from sales to SE. We’d have 3 rounds, the 1st being a quick 20min chat over the phone/call as a sniff test.
HR would do those to filter bullshitters, but also set expectations on culture, salary, work etc. If the person came from a huge bank and is joining a 50-people team, they need to understand the difference in work environments.
So I’d second other comments saying that I wouldn’t rule out a company just because HR is doing triage.
Interviewing is hard, requires skills precisely zero people are trained to do, and has huge long-term upsides and downsides to a business.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
I think I've been fairly successful as an interviewer by having a few basic rules.
Basically, do your homework, which I'm routinely surprised is so lacking in the adult world. For interviews, that means read their resume and probably have it with you in print form or other when you interview them. Print feels more sociable than staring at them over a laptop and clicking a bunch of keys while they talk - though I do type on video interviews.
The resume should somewhat align with the job they're interviewing for - that's on HR to get that far. Basically, I want to know if the person is going to be OK to work with and isn't full of shit. Hopefully you can get that much out of an interview because otherwise they aren't really that useful.
Basically I just ask a few normal interview questions mostly focusing on projects or accomplishments people have done. Cross reference with their resume and ask them about some points on it and make sure that their answers make sense. Ideally HR can verify that their work history at least matches their resume.
I never interviewed that much, but as far as I know, I never had any serious bozos let through, so I think I did OK.
As an interviewee I've always been flattered when the interviewer shows up with a copy of my resume covered in notes and we have a good conversation about my background.
The most offended I've been in an interview was a senior manager who, despite having had the interview rescheduled for his schedule - pushed up by a week - still had apparently never glanced at my resume until he was sitting across from me, and repeatedly misread details, which made things even more awkward.
I had spent probably 8 hours reading up about the company, the CEO, and this senior manager.
I really wish I hadn't needed the job as badly as I did, because otherwise I would have stood up and asked to be shown out the second it was obvious he was reading my resume for the first time. It was deeply insulting.
+1 for paper, you can even point to things on their c.v. to direct their attention to something you want to discuss... this is a good way to put them at ease, after all, if they don't know their own c.v. what do they know?
Maybe I'm accidentally good at interviewing and hiring. At least, all my hires have worked out well. I've never hired anyone who didn't last long and all ended up being great. I don't trust 'professionals' to do that hiring. Maybe what I'm trying to say is we should train the people on the team on whatever it is they are missing in order to hire people better. The people on the team know best what they are looking for and what they need.
It's not much different than being a GM at a pro sports team and drafting and getting free agents.
I'm the same, I can't relate to the tons of posts I see about people struggling to filter for good candidates. I think part of it might be my autism. Since I can't read non-verbal communication I can't be "tricked" by it like a neurotypical person would. I have to consciously observe/analyze their non-verbal behavior in a totally unfeeling way. I would normally struggle detecting if someone was lying in a social setting, but with technical questions a person is either correct or incorrect.
Isn't it standard practice to have staff participating in interviews be trained for that? I would have thought it is given the gravity of the task.
At my current job interviewer training is one of the mandatory (pretty sure it's the last one, but still) trainings as part of the onboarding process. It's a function of how distributed the interviewing process is, but even in a classical HR+hiring manager+team member process why wouldn't there be any training on what to do?
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.
> I can pretty much determine in about an hour if a candidate is a good fit or not
I have interviewed a lot of people. Most of the time I can determine three questions in if someone is not a good fit. This is on a technical interview. I have never done an interview where someone blew, or gave middling answers to the first three questions, and then recovered. Also, I never gave an interview where the person hit the first three questions out of the park and then started flagging, in terms of technical answers any how.
In terms of people who did well on the first three questions but who did not get an offer, it was always due to "cultural" issues, and it was someone else (often the manager) who raised those cultural issues, with me sometimes disagreeing (for instance, my old manager thought someone was too arrogant, whereas I didn't mind).
They are questions that have gotten some coherent response from about five out of six people, but generally only get a good, clear, robust response from one out of six people.
Usually they touch on different areas - I don't ask three questions about function parameters, I ask about very different topics, as theoretically they may be weak on one area and strong on another (although usually people have the same level of strength over all areas in my experience).
I don't really worry about asking the same questions to each candidate, since if they hit the ones I always ask out of the park but then struggle on ones I only sometimes, or rarely, or never ask, I would find that odd.
I might adopt questions to what they have on their resume, but generally it takes a while to adapt to a newer question. If we start using a new language more and an old language less, I probably will adapt questions to the new language and so on.
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.
Finally, an explanation for all the software devs who can't fizzbuzz!
As you may be aware, you have been drugged and transported to southern Mexico. Both of your kidneys have been removed. Now begins the practical portion of the interviewing process where we analyze your problem solving skills.
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.
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.
Not really. It comes down to the asymmetry in hiring outcomes. It is much more expensive to hire a bad employee than it is to hire a good employee. It’s gotten exceptionally hard to just fire people in corporate America, at-will employment notwithstanding.
Is it more expensive than leaving the position open for months though? I’ve seen multiple companies I’ve applied at and my own employer just sit with empty roles which meant the job never got done.
I was under the impression from the startup world and my won engineering experience that getting to market with a substandard product was always better than never releasing because you were aiming for perfection.
I worked with people that I believe were net-negative contributors: it would literally have been better if they did no "work" at all and never showed up. I've seen good engineers quit because they got tired of dealing with these net-negative contributors, two of which were also assholes (almost did myself).
This is of course the extreme; I've worked with three people where this was the case. But in both cases I believe they seriously set back the product and didn't just squander the salary of these people. In less extreme cases, you are "merely" throwing away the salary, but that can be a high cost too for a small company.
Hiring people can absolutely come with a certain risk, especially if you're not prepared (or legally able) to fire people, or otherwise don't have good enough management to reign in people.
It is easy to imagine it’s more expensive to hire a baddie vs an empty role. Have you not worked with people who were a drain on the entire team? I rather have deadlines pushed back than a bad hire.
I think at big companies that serve millions, it's more the other way. The brand hit of a substandard product or actual defects could result in recalls or lawsuits. It's the problem of scale: imperfect code works for a few hundred users but you need finely engineered code to work for millions. Same with other products as they will be used in every crazy way you can imagine and some you can't.
I get why FAANGs do this, the scale the work at and the salaries they pay make it seem worth the extra scrutiny.
I wasn’t clear in my previous question but I don’t work at FAANG tier, I work at startups and enterprises who struggle to break 200 million/yr in revenue and offer 180k max for principal engineer positions. What I’m curious on is why all these bit players are acting like they need FAANG level talent without paying out the salaries, but more importantly, paying the cost of having this complicated an interview process.
Every position they leave unfilled is an opportunity cost and every extra step they add to their interview process is another few thousands of dollars they add to the acquisition cost of every engineer. I’m struggling to see what the benefit is for them when they do not operate on the scale that requires meticulous engineering
Is it that much more expensive? It's mostly opportunity cost imo, but that's basically a nonfactor for big corps that take ages to do anything anyway, and they are constantly hiring replacements.
I can terminate team members with a couple of clicks in workday if I wanted. Seems overblown.
Ha! that's a funny one a company will not hesitate to fire you. Just look at how many companies started layoffs as soon as the stock market started crashing
Is it really that hard, though? I mean, you say at-will employment notwithstanding, but like, that's not my experience at all. Companies are free to hold you to whatever absurd metersticks they want, and even if they fire you for-cause, it's not like they a) even need a cause or b) will ever properly share that cause with you or c) share it externally at all.
Mind you - not that I actually want them to do C) - but my point is that the law provides zero protection, the culture provides zero protection/accountability, and the only thing that provides anything is whatever weird bureaucratic nonsense the company has imposed upon itself.
My point being, companies have only themselves to blame for making it hard to fire people. Both companies I've worked for have fired really high-performing people for (these are my interpretations, but I do honestly believe they're the "real" reason all these folks were fired, and I was closely familiar with the details in all the situations I mention here):
Chronological order of my witnessing them over the years. Several different companies.
1. My boss didn't like how the guy thought. Literally, the guy got good results and wasn't weird or crazy or anything, but him and my boss always had kind of weirdly unproductive conversations. I liked the guy, personally.
2. He very loosely implied the owner of the company didn't know or like statistics. (Which was correct). This is while the owner of the company was trying to shove his nose way to deep into a system he had designed 20 years ago but had been away from, and in his absence the code and the industry had moved on. He got fired and a complicated statistical modelling system was replaced with one a high-schooler would've built.
3. He was a good performer but a bit brusque, but our newest boss was kind of lukewarm for him, so when my boss's boss's boss's boss decided he was the reason some project failed, he eye-of-sauron'd him and had him fired, and my manager didn't really step up to defend him.
These just off the top of my head. I've also seen droves of people fired essentially because the owner would hired 20-ish new-grad-type folks/early career, then over about a year fire all but 3-5 of them, and those who survived were then kept on for a more normal period of time. The de-facto 1-year trial period wasn't ever explicitly described to them (just a 60-day review that was just a rubber-stamp) or formal. People literally moved hours away (this job was unusually high-paying for our locale) and bought new houses and in some cases moved families (not all were early-career, that was just most of our funnel), only to be fired 1 month later for no (to them) apparent reason other than that they weren't in the small handful the owner decided to keep that year.
Really hard to feel sympathetic towards corporations of any size when being absolutely evil to common folk seems to just be how the game is played.
It is super expensive to hire someone. The costs are enormous.
Let's take a hire that will make $10,000 per month, nice round number.
Someone in HR has to write the job description. This takes the HR person's time, the hiring manager, the hiring manager's boss just to get the information for a job description
Job description cost with hiring manager: $500
Job description cost with hiring manager's boss: $500
HR person's time to talk to hiring managers and to write the job description: $1000
Job board postings: $250
Headhunters if found through them: $30,000 (3 month's salary)
Corporate career page posting and social media posting of job description: $500
Interviewing with multiple people, even a few rounds: $5,000-$10,000
Hring temporary/freelance person to cover work to be done by permanent hire before new employee leaves prior job and starts with yours: $20,000
Filling out paperwork and miscellaneous expenses: $1,500
Employee takes 3 months getting up to speed and not really producing, but still being paid: $30,000
Employee decides the job is not a good fit for him or her and quits 9 months later: $90,000 wasted.
*Total cost to hire and then the person quits:* $184,250 wasted
Additional cost: cost of not getting work done because of hiring errors, that needs to be done: ???? you tell me. A lot.
So a company hires 50 people and 20 quit because the were not vetted propertly: that is $3,685,000 in wasted money. Now, realize that this $3,685,000 is in after tax dollars, so if the company's profit margin is 15%, it takes $24,566,667 in product and/or service sales to cover those wasted hiring expenses. Because those 20 employees were fired or quit, it will take another $24,566,667 in sales to cover the next round of hiring, or almost $50,000,000. If those new 20 hires, if 8 of them quit...well, the game goes on and on.
So, a company best be damn careful in one's hiring practices.
(numbers above might or might not be accurate, but it doesn't matter, that's not the point. The point is that it costs a lot of money to hire and then lose an employee after a short time period due to employee quitting, or getting fired for incompetence, anger issues, harassment problems, or whatever. Hiring highly paid employees is a dangerous game.
This is from the company's perspective, not yours. But if you started your own company, would you want to pay $50 million for bad hiring decisions? No. You would make double-damn sure there would be a lot of vetting processes.
And realize, this is not about you for anyone reading this. It's about the statistics over dozens of hiring decisions.
Companies give tiny raises to loyal employees. If hiring is so expensive why don't companies make effort to retain employees by giving them raises that make their compensation at least at par with that of the new hires.
Because human nature favors inertia. Some may leave because they don't get pay raises, but most people hate change. So they stay. And the company gets higher profits by keeping payroll down. However, if every single person quit exactly at performance review time, every single employee, due to not keeping up with new hires or comparable pay to the industry, they would change. But they don't do this because all employees don't quit. It's a simple calculation. How many people will quit? if you have 100 tech people, getting paid $100,000/year each, that is 10,000,000 per year. Give them 25% raise and then the payroll goes up $2,500,000 per year, and you have to pay that the next year, too, and the next year, and the next year. Plus bonuses and all that. Payroll taxes go up, too. So a lot more expenses. Also, if you give people a 25% raise, what do you give them the following year and the one after that? There's all kinds of psychological things going on in the game. You give someone a 25% raise this year and a 1.5% raise next year, nobody is going to look at it as bringing them on par to others, they are going to look at being ripped off because they got 25% last year and only a measly 1.5% this year. "Why didn't I get at least 12%???"
But if there are low raises, and 2 people quit because they are not getting paid enough, then the company hires 2 more people to replace them, that's going to be $350K to hire two new hires.
The one-word answer is: Greed. Never under-estimate the human capacity for emotion and character deficiency to get in the way of the rationally correct strategy.
> So a company hires 50 people and 20 quit because the were not vetted proper[]ly: that is $3,685,000 in wasted money. Now, realize that this $3,685,000 is in after tax dollars, so if the company's profit margin is 15%, it takes $24,566,667 in product and/or service sales to cover those wasted hiring expenses.
Why would a company's operating expenses be in after tax dollars? The whole point of a "before tax" / "after tax" distinction is that operating expenses are before tax.
And the profit margin is not a constant. If you have a certain amount of revenue, and then your expenses go up... that means your profit margin has shrunk.
None of the costs you list would come out of profit, because... they are operating expenses. By definition, profit is what's left after they're covered.
It's next to impossible to figure out what you're trying to say, but my suggestion to you is to model some cash flows. Don't even think about a "profit margin".
> Employee decides the job is not a good fit for him or her and quits 9 months later: $90,000 wasted.
Interesting philosophy. By extension, if the employee decides the job is not a good fit and quits after 240 months, you just wasted $2,400,000.
Well, I'm looking at it like this, in my own viewpoint:
So what I am saying is that one has to have real actual dollars to pay. So if a business makes $100,000 per year, and out of that is rent, utilities,etc, but not including the hiring expense, you have 15% profit margin, or $15,000 left over. So if hiring a person costs $2,000, then you lower your profit margins to $13,000, or 13%. So to keep the profit margin at 15% you have to make extra sales to cover that hiring expense. This is the same with all expenses, but I'm only focusing on the hiring expense. What I'm saying is that for each expense, extra income has to be generated to cover the expenses and hopefully get a profit margin that is acceptable. There's a cost to each dollar earned. You can't operate a business without a profit, and the more the profit the better, and the best is to protect profit margins. But as I said in my original post, I'm not getting technical and/or exact. I'm giving the overall view on it.
>>Employee decides the job is not a good fit for him or her and quits 9 months later: $90,000 wasted.
>Interesting philosophy. By extension, if the employee decides the job is not a good fit and quits after 240 months, you just wasted $2,400,000.
Amortization. Buy a car for $100,000 and keep it for a month and you wreck it (without it being insured), then that car costs you $100,000 per month, if you just drove it out of the lot and wreck it .25 miles after purchase. If you keep it 100,000 months, and you wreck it on the 100,000th month, then it costs you a dollar (ignoring MACRS for kicks).
Point being that after only 9 months, a company would not have got full value out of the hire because of the learning process, but hopefully after 240 months (20 years), a company should have had that employee up and running, but if not, that's yet another hiring/firing error.
Long and short of it in my opinion: You are taking this WAY too seriously. The point is that companies take a long, long time to hire someone because it is super expensive to make a mistake, in cash. I didn't even mention the morale issue of hiring a suck employee and other non-tangible costs. Do you agree with that or not? All the other stuff is just quibbling.
It can go like that. A lot of other times, a trusted dev brings their buddy on after an hour talk with the team and it just works out because one person has directly worked with them in the past and two others have a friend that also vouches for them. Seen this most places I've worked.
Sure. No question about that at all. That's why companies reward employees who bring in new people and they get hired.
That's difficult to control, though, that's the problem. And especially if a company wants to hire 15 devs this quarter, who have the required skill set.
If you have a small company with 5 devs, and it hires 1, maybe 2 new devs over the course of the year and there's no real time frame on finding a new dev, you only hire when you find a good person, well, that is a different scenario entirely.
But like most things, that is only an ad hoc solution. What do you do, as the business owner asks the devs for referral and there are none? What do you do? You have to go to the open market. And as I wrote in my last post:"It's about the statistics over dozens of hiring decisions." So not just a hire here and there, but for a sytem.
I work a lot with people in the trades - electricians, plumbers, dry wallers, insulation installers, etc. Man, you think there's a shortage in devs??? Nobody, but nobody, is going into the trades anymore. There's no one to hire, no one to refer.
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.
They were instructed to schedule 12 different meetings.
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.
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.
Once I showed up and the interviewer wasn’t even there and they hadn’t bothered to let me know.
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.
Then there’s having recruiters breathing down your neck and asking invasive questions while protecting all the details about the client and the job…
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.
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.
I definitely got the vibe from the recruiter that this step was maddening and unpredictable.
Could be one of those ~stress interviews~ to ~see if you'll break or harden~ under adversity, I love arguing, so i got the job after one of those, and had the owner explain it to me exactly like that. It was the worst job I have ever held, you dodged a bullet on that one, as bad as it was.
My best guess is they were looking for me to admit some negative emotion that I had when receiving criticism— but without being asked to describe negative feelings directly. In one example, I genuinely considered the criticism of a project helpful and unrelated to me as a person. In another I was far more concerned with my report’s experience than my own, so I didn’t bother mentioning it.
What an asshole interviewer. I look back and think about a time I was asked what city I lived in and how big my house was (actually asked square footage...wtf) during a post-interview, but part of the interview, lunch. The more I look back and think about it, the more I question why I didn't just walk out then and there.
It's so easy to slip into trying to fit bizarre culture interviews that one may not realize what's highly unethical in the moment.
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.
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.
It’s like a cartel and it works as long as everyone involved keeps up the gig.
It’s either that or interviews just suck and no matter what you do they will suck.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.: https://www.hoganassessments.com/). 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 aced the hogan tests for all my interviews.
Others in this thread are asking why companies do this, and I can't help but wonder - perhaps they've mostly completed their software projects, so this is make-work for them? Think about how many person hours go into interviewing one person if each interview is a several person panel. And then they'll have hours of internal feedback meetings to review the interviews.
> "Phase three starts at 8 a.m. sharp, next Monday, and lasts for fourteen Pomodoro-timer cycles, concluding at 5:38 p.m."
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.
I thought a Pomodoros was one of those little dogs, I guess that is Pomoranian, but that's what my mind went to. So I thought that was some kind of cynical remark like dog years, but short Pomorian dog cycles that dogs have during the day that I didn't know about. Just some throw-away remark by the author that it was measured by some dog cycle that I didn't know about. Arf.
Funnily enough, the end time doesn’t work for the standard “25 minutes on, 5-10 minutes off” Pomodoro standard. Even with the max 10 minutes off, that’s only 5:10 PM.
Maybe I’m not keyed in but is a 28 minute lunch normal?
I guess 25 on and 12 off gives 5:38 precisely. Interesting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
"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!)"
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.
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.
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 every interview.
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.
It's somewhat comforting to hear this is a common occurrence.
Some of the most interesting and friendly places to work at, where I learned the most, were small companies.
I strongly recommend you consider looking around for any small, cool tech companies in your area. Ask among your professors, look for local slack/discord groups, etc.
Or watch for small, neat signs in low rent business parks. Someone who cares enough to present a tidy and professional image while economising on rent is going to make a good boss.
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.
An hour talk, they usually have a person on the team that vouches for you that you've worked with. Then the first couple of months are a trial period that you are paid for.
Honestly, I don't think it's the number of interviews but the number of rounds. Each round takes about a week to schedule and coordinate, requires you to wait to hear if you're moving forward, etc.
I once interviewed at a small AI company. The CTO had a Ph.D. (from MIT!) in Really Tough AI Stuff. He was supported by some of the best programmers in Really Tough AI Stuff. The last round was the multi-hour one. I had to do a couple of different programming challenges, which I think I did all right in. Then I was subjected to multiple rounds, by the CTO and his supporting developers, of Really Tough AI questions. I wasn't trained for this, plus I was nervous and worn out and really off my game, so I tended to open my answers with "I know I'm probably getting this wrong, but..." and then pretty much spitball a guess.
They were kind enough to provide feedback! They said "We really liked your answers and we think you have all the right skills, but you didn't seem very confident, so we're going to have to pass."
I probably had to be a psychopath in order to get that job, at least without a postgrad degree in Really Tough AI Stuff.
Back in 2013 I had an interview with a large company whose game consoles are very rare to find in stores currently where the guy wanted me to recite JS syntax over the phone. He'd tell me I was incorrect if I didn't say "semi-colon". I wish I was making this up. Hoping they've modified their process a bit. :)
You send them a full on mini-vim implementation in Rust that uses ropes and then they just look at you disapprovingly because you didn't just tie together a dozen npm packages.
If you attempt to copy or paste anything during the interview process you will be immediately disqualified from this and all future employment opportunities.
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.
But many companies don't set any expectations. You typically have no idea how many rounds of interviews there are, or how quickly you will hear back. And there is a pretty good chance that if you don't get the job, you will never hear back either way.
I agree with you, I just hate Taleo with a passion because on top of likely having to deal with some form of ambigious process.... You are expected to regurgitate your resume wasting a ton of time to an archaic enterprise dB with disastrous ux constraints. I at least have more control with setting expectations if I hold recruiters/hm's accountable.
I like especially the jump from May 5, 2022 "...we will follow up in two hours to two months" to the next letter dated September 10, 2022, over 4 months later.
Went through a series of interviews back in March - May. Got several rejections recently, 4 - 5 months after my last communication from these companies.
Well, certainly not in an interview. If I showed up and the interviewers sprung some sort of role play scenario or cheesy improv on me I'd be politely thanking them as I quickly shut the door on my way out.
Actually it reminds me of an experience I haven't thought about in years, though not quite the same thing: Fresh out of college I was in a job I hated and desperate to find anything else. I found something advertised as, I think, a marketing job and got called in for an interview. When I arrived there were a dozen other people in the parking lot and the recruiters were ushering us all into a large passenger van where they said we'd split up along the way to some big box stores an hour or two away and be doing some type of soliciting. Donations? Selling crap? I don't know. I'd signed up for an interview, not whatever the hell this was supposed to be. I noped out of that real fast, just turned around and walked away.
Wow, I don't think I've remembered that for 20 years. Anyway yeah, there are definitely some interview practices that should send a up visions of a truck full of red flags crashing into a truck full of "Warning!" signs as they explode outwards from the collision. And then you only walk towards the flaming wreck if you're a dozen kinds of desperate and the drivers crawling out of the debris are waiving paychecks.
Okay to be frank, I enjoy interviews. And interviewing for 7 hours isn't a big deal for me with a company at all.
However it just gets tiring.
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.
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.
Point is... Interviewing suuuucks when you're some of the highest paid employees in the company.
Some hints I want to give for people interviewing:
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.
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.
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.
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!!!
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?"
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.
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.
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 :)
Interviewing shouldn’t require such thick skin. I’m here questioning my life, and reduced to worthlessness.