I'm self-employed and don't need a job but am still open to the right opportunity. The last job I interviewed for was looking for a specialist in a particular field, which I am (fairly well known in that circle), and they told me they've been looking to fill the position for a full year before they interviewed me. The interview seemed to go well, and they wanted to continue with the process, but they said the next step was a take-home project. I wasn't thrilled, because my qualifications should already be established, but they said it's their mandatory procedure. I thought, ok, I'm interested in this job, and maybe I can power through the project quickly. But no, the project was rather open-ended, more of an unsolved problem than an already solved problem, and I started to see that I could spend an unknown number of hours on it. So I said fuck it and told them I've changed my mind about the job.
I noticed many months later after I turned them down that they were still trying to fill the position. This is an employer just shooting themselves in the foot. They created their own "labor shortage".
It's actually the second time in a row that I got this kind of absurdity. I was contacted unsolicited by an engineering manager from DuckDuckGo looking for a specialist. I asked them what their hiring procedure was, and it was even worse: they had multiple pre-hiring projects and some kind of probationary period before permanent hire. So I asked if I could just skip this, given my qualifications, and they said no, that's just how they do things at DuckDuckGo, and they believed their hiring process has been "successful" for them. So I basically said no thanks, buh-bye. And they also were continuing to try to fill the position many months after I said no.
> I noticed many months later after I turned them down that they were still trying to fill the position. This is an employer just shooting themselves in the foot. They created their own "labor shortage".
These are the companies that for whatever bullshit internal political reasons don't actually want to hire. When a company actually wants to hire they move fast. In the last 10 years I got my last 3 jobs after a single 30-45 minute conversation with CTO or team lead.
> they had multiple pre-hiring projects and some kind of probationary period
Duck Duck Go paid me to do their projects. I can understand skipping it if you don't want to put the time in; but at least they aren't taking your work for free.
> Duck Duck Go paid me to do their projects. I can understand skipping it if you don't want to put the time in; but at least they aren't taking your work for free.
Correct, they did pay. But I didn't really care about that. My only interest was a permanent job, not a short term contract. If I want short term contracts, I can find those elsewhere.
> and some kind of probationary period before permanent hire
I had this same experience with a company about a decade ago. I'd been in a job for about 8 years where I was an expert in a few niche areas.
One day a CEO of some company calls and says I'd be "perfect" for his company and would I be interested? I say of course, and in the end it comes out that I would have to endure a 6-month probationary period where you didn't have benefits (I'm not even sure this is legal in California).
I politely turned him down, and he actually called back about an hour later incredulous that I wouldn't consider an offer? And I explained to him, I was in a job that was relatively stable, why would I leave that job only to have benefits dangled in front of me.
I also pointed out the asymmetry of them asking me to leave a position I'd been in for multiple years while they couldn't commit to a "perfect" candidate.
It fell on deaf ears. The dude was used to getting what he wanted.
I don't even say "no thanks" as I simply ignore them. I am not interested in going through some random company's BS hiring hazing ritual. I will interview and draw a few diagrams on the whiteboard for 3-4 hours max then walkout if you're wasting my time.
A call with the hiring manager. An open-ended take-home. Rounds of interviews with "the team" that for some reason includes multiple executives, the mobile team, the frontend team, the backend team, the data team, the product team...
It ought to be unsurprising that these requisitions sit empty for months and years.
It’s funny you say this because the take-home project is meant to find good candidates who don’t interview well [0]
Also this practice arose as a response to the notion of high pressure coding exercises during interviews, how predictive they are, and how to improve them.
You people need to get some self-respect and stop working for free. They only get away away with this because you allow them to. Next time you're asked to work for free, this is what you do: you say, "Fuck you, pay me".
If you want to be a little less blunt, have ready a template contract to write up the job they've requested, with your price, ready for them to sign. If they laugh in your face, laugh in theirs and walk away.
If you're in a position of desperation, first get out of that position before you go to these interviews. You cannot negotiate when you're hungry.
Unfortunately, the reality is, many people are hungry, which is why they put up with this stuff.
>If you're in a position of desperation, first get out of that position before you go to these interviews.
You're contradicting yourself here. If you're hungry, you don't have the leverage to get out of that position without first accepting some jobs you won't find ideal, unless you're incredibly lucky or talented or have huge savings, but if you were, you probably wouldn't be hungry in the first place.
Once, I did the take-home assignment, which took around six hours. I submitted it by linking to a public GitHub repo titled "Company X Take Home Assignment".
I ended up taking a different position and the original company asked that I take down the repo. I told them that since I did the work on my own time, I own the resultant code and declined to take it down. They sent me a nastygram from their in-house lawyer.
I responded with an invoice for $900 - six hours at $150 / hour. That got me a phone call scheduled with their lawyer. I figured they either owned the code (in which case, they should pay for it) or I owned the code (in which case, they had no legal right to demand that I take it down).
The next day they sent me $500 over PayPal and I took it down.
I agree it's probably a contradiction to many people, as a job may be their only ticket out of desperation, especially if they're knee-deep in debt or living paycheck to paycheck.
But I would wager many others do have options they can exercise such as becoming more frugal, cutting out rent by living with family, taking no-bullshit (no free work) wage jobs temporarily, etc.
> You people need to get some self-respect and stop working for free.
"You people" need to unionize. That's the only way you get some negotiating power. Alas, that won't happen until tech workers (and white collar workers in general) realize they're workers and not capital owners. We're closer to really well paid plumbers than to Bezos & co.
> Alas, that won't happen until tech workers (and white collar workers in general) realize they're workers and not capital owners.
Workers though they may be, it is within reach for most programmers to jump on the real estate ladder, heavily invest, and retire comfortably.
> That's the only way you get some negotiating power.
For the duration of this bull market, Software Jobs have been easy to come by. Negotiating power, while never completely in employees favor, has given most programmers the chance to live _far more comfortable lives than anyone else they know or went to school with_.
That's the kicker, nobody wants to unionize because they're actually pretty well off - and (and this may be an anti-union talking point) it has the risk of actually lowering the income for some, so that the lower-paid people get paid more.
Anyway that said, if you're working in tech and feel like you are being exploited - underpaid, overworked, unpaid overtime, expected to be always online / on call without specified pay, etc - by all means, unionize.
Another issue is that there's a lot of naïve, young people who still have the energy and lack the corporate culture cynicism who do end up working 14+ hour work days and ask for seconds; this is what people are up against as well. But this is where the awareness has to come in; if you do not get paid for those hours, you are being exploited. The hours you spend, you will not get them back. And, just spending long hours when you're still young does not automatically translate in success later on. If you're unlucky you'll end up with burn-out. And of course, if you need to work long hours or multiple jobs, you're not being paid enough. I know the housing market especially in SF is fucked, but working more will not unfuck that. Look into remote work and live somewhere cheaper.
I personally feel that I have more negotiating power and can better apply it when I'm acting as my own advocate, rather than relying on others to advocate for me on my behalf.
With that said, I have no objection with others unionizing if they feel that they don't have sufficient negotiating power on their own; unions are really helpful in these kinds of situations.
Unions with their "someone else's job" attitude have soured me on the whole concept. They need to clean up internally before they can attract me.
I'm given the impression that unions in Europe are not as bad as Unions in the US though. Maybe if I lived in Europe I'd me more willing for the unions there, I'm not sure as it isn't an option I have and thus isn't worth investigating.
Management and executives are DEFINITELY underpaying us relative to what we bring to the table for them. This is true of every industry going on decades of increasing productivity and stagnating pay. What's new here besides greater awareness and labor churn? Will there be an actual change going forward? Of course the demographics favor workers now, but the laws and politics often don't. Immigration and outsourcing and automation can change that power dynamic very quickly. What're you going to do? Form a union? Start a company? Vote? Quit and work elsewhere? Interesting times we live in. Maybe that is one of the reason headcounts have ballooned and complexity has increased so much -- an attempt to minimize individual impact.
All of my friends and aquaintinces in nursing, tax, retail, and trucking have a few people who are trying to break into programming because of the benefits and pay. Outsourcing, scope creep, and automation exist and are expanding in my industry as well. How long until this drags down programmers as well?
If people from all those other industries are scrambling to break into tech because it’s so lucrative, what is it you or I are bringing to the table that they couldn’t?
I assume they meant "many tech workers / job hunters / the kind of people on this forum", not orphans in darkest Africa or Christian Bale losing weight for a role.
I'm too nervous to name the company, but here we go. [Edit: whatever, I didn't sign an NDA. This was Algolia]
I've been meaning to get this off my chest. Out of all ~100 interviews I took over the last 8 months, there was a singular egregious example.
It netted out upwards of 25hrs.
You may ask, "lelandfe, why did you go through all of this?" It had been 8 months without a paycheck; I barely made rent this month (landed a dream job recently! phew). This was for a senior demo eng role:
1. 30m phone screen
2. 30m behavioral
3. 1hr technical. Asked to write a hashmap to filter JSON, binary search over an array, and a Markdown renderer
4. 8hr take home assignment. But, "if you do wish to spend more [time], please go ahead." I spend the minimum time needed, which winds up being more like 14hrs.
I have to register for the platform, come up with a fictitious company, and then design and build a real demo site using the service – turning over the source code and live demo at the end. The scoring rubric is how creative the use of the platform is, and how much value the search service adds to my fake company.
5. 2hr written email correspondence test. I'm given 3 fake emails from "customers," each asking about specifics of the platform, e.g. "where can I find X and Y on the admin?" and "please define concepts Z and A for me."
6. 30m presentation of take home to 10 employees of the SaaS company, followed by 30m Q&A with the team. I'm only made aware of this after turning in my take home. Building and rehearsing the presentation takes around 3hrs.
7. 3hr on-site
8. Day after on-site: 15m wrap-up discussion w/HR
9. 15m wrap-up discussion w/engineering manager
Through all of this, every decision maker expressed extreme satisfaction with my performance, and the engineering manager repeatedly told me how smart and well-spoken I was.
A week later, I get, as an email: "our team has decided to pass on your candidacy." They adamantly refuse to give me more feedback (though admitting: position still open, no other candidates in final stages), and don't refer me to other roles.
In my experience, there are usually (at least) three reasons for that to happen - i.e. you getting rejected after a seemingly impeccable interview:
1) They already had a candidate they wanted to hire, but have some internal hiring protocol / process they must follow.
2) You and the other candidate(s) were incredibly similar, but one had to go.
3) Everyone but one senior decision maker liked you. Could have been for whatever reason. We like to think that most companies have a somewhat democratic recruitment panel, where all the decision makers get a (somewhat) equally weighted say. But some places, it's more like gatekeeper after gatekeeper...you might get passed all the previous ones, but not the last one.
Yeah, 4 and 5 are things they should train you on after you start. Also, I don't know why anyone would ever need to write their own hashmap, and if you have a hashmap then you don't need binary search :\ .
I agree with TrackerFF that someone likely vetoed the group consensus, also potentially a funding issue.
On a serious note, I've also been nearly burned out by these week-long take home assignments which are only one stage of several and end up eating my weekends completely only to find myself rejected or ghosted after completing them (I'm a penetration tester so most common candidate testing methodology I've seen is a week long CTF set up by their security team, where you need to find as many flags/vulnerabilities as you can and also write a report, so it always ends up into a huge time sink of finding needles in a haystack and also write a multi page report about how I did it, only for then to be rejected). Often there's also some IQ test and other nonsense stages, plus the usual Zoom/Teams/Meets calls in between with their recruiters/hiring managers, during working hours. Oh, and don't get me started on the 20 page online form with 50 questions some companies want you to fill as part of your application.
I honestly have no idea how people with full time jobs who can't slack off at work and have other responsibilities, hobbies and interests, are able to keep this up. I feel like these long and stressful interview processes are mainly geared towards ambitious new-grads or people with no other goal in life than always interviewing for the next best job.
I sometimes want to give up on the IT industry and go to med school instead as I don't see how I can keep this up long term, for the grand sum of €50K/year, if this interviewing process is the norm or if it will get even crazyer. Or maybe I should quit my job, start learning leetcode, and move to a country with some FAANG jobs.
>Often there's also some IQ test and other nonsense stages
I actually support IQ tests and the likes, but it's the way that all these companies are doing this which sticks out. All of them somehow have their own flavor and keep the information to themselves (or to the company which they outsource their shenanigans to). It would be so much more efficient if we had an employee-centric approach where employees could provide access to this information, with verification, and it was up to the employee to give employers information on their current status and growth. You want the data? There you go, verified, now move on to stage 5 and no dawdling.
If you're going to toss out CVs, portfolios, certificates, diplomas, that's one thing (why again are we doing this?). If you're also going to give us all different kinds of "here's this whacky syntax no one uses" questions along with the umpteenth "IQ test" because god forbid we shorten the process, you're not suffering from a labor shortage. You're suffering from being a pretty princess too afraid to take a risk.
Pretend you’re hiring in this landscape. If people will submit to it, if it provides a more reliable signal of likely success than degrees or certifications do, and if you feel like it’s required to stay competitive, why wouldn’t you?
(To be clear: I don’t condone the practice at all, but I at least can understand possible rationales)
On a some related note, I struggle to understand how those with no-slack full-time technical jobs have technical hobbies. I'll give it a go every so often but get burned out quickly. I have a nice collection of in-progess but dormant pieces of software.
At big tech companies when times are good, many people are sitting around waiting for paint to dry. (Ie some nutty process) Remember they are a profit center and get slacktime and fancy stuff.
Ditto outside of engineering. I knew one SE with a pretty big territory who travelled with his wife. They were swingers. The dude would just setup random meetings so the company would spring for their hotel. We’d get our steak dinner, they would get their freak on. At the end, he’s pulling in 3% of whatever crap we were buying.
> I have a nice collection of in-progess but dormant pieces of software.
That's already more than I have; I get my job satisfaction from my job, I like to spend my free time with family and hobbies that don't involve more work.
But, different strokes for different people; I like playing video games, others like writing code for fun.
I used to. Then I got married, a wife and kids are far more fulfilling. When I get any free time (rare) I want to be out in my shop doing something not technical. Or at least not technically in the way of my job, sometimes the things I work on are mechanically complex.
> I feel like these long and stressful interview processes are mainly geared towards ambitious new-grads or people with no other goal in life than working.
The point is probably very much this - finding people who will over-perform without reciprocation.
It's fair to ask people to do work, but they should be paid for it if it goes beyond an hour or so. I've turned down opportunities with a ridiculous recruiting process, I couldn't imagine what it would be like when you actually worked for them!
When I was managing the software division of an IT services company, we would send all candidates a fizz-buzz type programming assessment that should only take 5-10 minutes to complete. After that, we would do a 15 minute phone screen then had someone come in for a 1-2 hour long interview with some live programming. The point of the exercises in the interview was to see someone's thought process, not if they could actually "complete" the exercises.
At that point, we'd have a pretty good idea of where a candidate's skill were at and we could start the process of extending an offer if the team agreed they were a good fit.
There were a few occasions where the candidates had no experience with any of the tech we were using, but were obviously capable developers. We'd usually make an offer at the lower end of the salary range for that position with a raise being guaranteed in 10 weeks if they met the requirements. There was the expectation that they'd do a bit learning outside of work hours if needed.
Everyone who was given that offer accepted it and was given the raise.
> then had someone come in for a 1-2 hour long interview with some live programming. The point of the exercises in the interview was to see someone's thought process, not if they could actually "complete" the exercises.
I don't know much about industry and interviews yet. Do you think this is the case for most interviews? That they care about your thought process, not just if you can complete the problem? Is it necessary to learn/memorize all algorithms and data structures, or is it better to practice and focus on improving my problem solving skills and thought process?
Everyone says they care about the thought process, but almost nobody actually does. The GP seems to, but there's plenty of stories where they ask an open question (What happens when you put some text in the search bar and press enter), then fail you for that question if you don't discuss the specifics they want (http/DNS/routing/whatever the interviewer likes).
> There were a few occasions where the candidates had no experience with any of the tech we were using, but were obviously capable developers. We'd usually make an offer at the lower end of the salary range for that position with a raise being guaranteed in 10 weeks if they met the requirements.
This is great. Makes sense for the business, and the results spoke for themselves.
While I didn't have to do any take home projects, one company I interviewed at had multiple hours of different interviews (coding, design, etc). I thought I did pretty well (everyone seemed happy with my answers) and I feel like I'm very well suited to the job I interviewed for, given the projects I've worked on previously, but ultimately I didn't get an offer. That could be for any number of reasons, of course, but the feedback they gave is that I didn't manage to "fully complete" the design interview. This is a little baffling to me because the role I was interviewing for doesn't sound like it requires people to design full, complete distributed services within one hour in a high pressure interview situation. I know I can design complex systems, because I've successfully done so multiple times in the past, and I work well enough under pressure, but that I would miss something in a mere hour of an interview is almost a given. My best designs come when I can sleep on it and take a little time. Besides, some of the greatest engineers I know don't do well in artificial interview situations.
On the other hand, I also interviewed at another company for a very similar role, yet this time it was a 90 minute chat about stuff I'd worked on in the past. They do normally do an hour long coding task, but they let me skip it because they could see from my experience and the person who referred me vouched for my ability to write code. At the end of the 90 minutes, I was basically told they liked me and hoped I would join and that they'd give me an offer the next day. I happily accepted this offer.
During this time a Google recruiter also contacted me but when he said that their process typically takes months I declined right away. I can't think of any time in my career where I'd care to spend months to maybe get a job at Google.
This is why I have a policy of not doing any take-home tests, exactly to discourage this kind of bullshit and force the company to incur a cost (if they want to "test" me they need to sacrifice an hour of their own dev's time for an in-person/screenshare test) so they can't just "spray and pray" the test to everyone that comes by.
I'll do the take home tests if I find them interesting.
Interesting to me is important. Last time I did one I found a recursive (not tail recessive) solution to a problem that I already knew was a simple iteration using a couple standard library functions - but where is the fun in that? I learned a lot and didn't care that I didn't get the job. (I did earn a call back, which is great considering at the time I didn't qualify for the advanced position they were hiring for)
It's also a terrible security practice to advertise. Getting a remote code execution bug in to production would only entail building a free feature for the company and getting it past a trivial code review during an interview you could subsequently turn down!
Government should treat the fake job formula like what it is: Sabotage of the economy. In our system applicants have to pay for their own education, spend time doing it and government is investing in education.
We are extremely serious about training and employment. Parties that want to get involved should be held to high standards.
It's not like we've never created (and enforced) a standard for anything.
Readit News
I noticed many months later after I turned them down that they were still trying to fill the position. This is an employer just shooting themselves in the foot. They created their own "labor shortage".
It's actually the second time in a row that I got this kind of absurdity. I was contacted unsolicited by an engineering manager from DuckDuckGo looking for a specialist. I asked them what their hiring procedure was, and it was even worse: they had multiple pre-hiring projects and some kind of probationary period before permanent hire. So I asked if I could just skip this, given my qualifications, and they said no, that's just how they do things at DuckDuckGo, and they believed their hiring process has been "successful" for them. So I basically said no thanks, buh-bye. And they also were continuing to try to fill the position many months after I said no.
These are the companies that for whatever bullshit internal political reasons don't actually want to hire. When a company actually wants to hire they move fast. In the last 10 years I got my last 3 jobs after a single 30-45 minute conversation with CTO or team lead.
Duck Duck Go paid me to do their projects. I can understand skipping it if you don't want to put the time in; but at least they aren't taking your work for free.
Correct, they did pay. But I didn't really care about that. My only interest was a permanent job, not a short term contract. If I want short term contracts, I can find those elsewhere.
I had this same experience with a company about a decade ago. I'd been in a job for about 8 years where I was an expert in a few niche areas.
One day a CEO of some company calls and says I'd be "perfect" for his company and would I be interested? I say of course, and in the end it comes out that I would have to endure a 6-month probationary period where you didn't have benefits (I'm not even sure this is legal in California).
I politely turned him down, and he actually called back about an hour later incredulous that I wouldn't consider an offer? And I explained to him, I was in a job that was relatively stable, why would I leave that job only to have benefits dangled in front of me.
I also pointed out the asymmetry of them asking me to leave a position I'd been in for multiple years while they couldn't commit to a "perfect" candidate.
It fell on deaf ears. The dude was used to getting what he wanted.
A call with the hiring manager. An open-ended take-home. Rounds of interviews with "the team" that for some reason includes multiple executives, the mobile team, the frontend team, the backend team, the data team, the product team...
It ought to be unsurprising that these requisitions sit empty for months and years.
I do fine on my own but would probably make more money working for a bigger company. I won't do a long interview process for free though. Oh well.
I’d have told them I wasn’t interested.
If they’re not capable of figuring you out at a interview, that’s a red flag.
Also this practice arose as a response to the notion of high pressure coding exercises during interviews, how predictive they are, and how to improve them.
0 - https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/
If you want to be a little less blunt, have ready a template contract to write up the job they've requested, with your price, ready for them to sign. If they laugh in your face, laugh in theirs and walk away.
If you're in a position of desperation, first get out of that position before you go to these interviews. You cannot negotiate when you're hungry.
Unfortunately, the reality is, many people are hungry, which is why they put up with this stuff.
You're contradicting yourself here. If you're hungry, you don't have the leverage to get out of that position without first accepting some jobs you won't find ideal, unless you're incredibly lucky or talented or have huge savings, but if you were, you probably wouldn't be hungry in the first place.
Once, I did the take-home assignment, which took around six hours. I submitted it by linking to a public GitHub repo titled "Company X Take Home Assignment".
I ended up taking a different position and the original company asked that I take down the repo. I told them that since I did the work on my own time, I own the resultant code and declined to take it down. They sent me a nastygram from their in-house lawyer.
I responded with an invoice for $900 - six hours at $150 / hour. That got me a phone call scheduled with their lawyer. I figured they either owned the code (in which case, they should pay for it) or I owned the code (in which case, they had no legal right to demand that I take it down).
The next day they sent me $500 over PayPal and I took it down.
But I would wager many others do have options they can exercise such as becoming more frugal, cutting out rent by living with family, taking no-bullshit (no free work) wage jobs temporarily, etc.
"You people" need to unionize. That's the only way you get some negotiating power. Alas, that won't happen until tech workers (and white collar workers in general) realize they're workers and not capital owners. We're closer to really well paid plumbers than to Bezos & co.
Workers though they may be, it is within reach for most programmers to jump on the real estate ladder, heavily invest, and retire comfortably.
> That's the only way you get some negotiating power.
For the duration of this bull market, Software Jobs have been easy to come by. Negotiating power, while never completely in employees favor, has given most programmers the chance to live _far more comfortable lives than anyone else they know or went to school with_.
That's what your message is up against.
That's the kicker, nobody wants to unionize because they're actually pretty well off - and (and this may be an anti-union talking point) it has the risk of actually lowering the income for some, so that the lower-paid people get paid more.
Anyway that said, if you're working in tech and feel like you are being exploited - underpaid, overworked, unpaid overtime, expected to be always online / on call without specified pay, etc - by all means, unionize.
Another issue is that there's a lot of naïve, young people who still have the energy and lack the corporate culture cynicism who do end up working 14+ hour work days and ask for seconds; this is what people are up against as well. But this is where the awareness has to come in; if you do not get paid for those hours, you are being exploited. The hours you spend, you will not get them back. And, just spending long hours when you're still young does not automatically translate in success later on. If you're unlucky you'll end up with burn-out. And of course, if you need to work long hours or multiple jobs, you're not being paid enough. I know the housing market especially in SF is fucked, but working more will not unfuck that. Look into remote work and live somewhere cheaper.
With that said, I have no objection with others unionizing if they feel that they don't have sufficient negotiating power on their own; unions are really helpful in these kinds of situations.
I'm given the impression that unions in Europe are not as bad as Unions in the US though. Maybe if I lived in Europe I'd me more willing for the unions there, I'm not sure as it isn't an option I have and thus isn't worth investigating.
Hiring would just be some other set of hoops and process to jump through. There's no silver bullet.
I love take home projects as I don't have a CS degree (EE) and usually flop leet code whiteboard quizzes.
All of my friends and aquaintinces in nursing, tax, retail, and trucking have a few people who are trying to break into programming because of the benefits and pay. Outsourcing, scope creep, and automation exist and are expanding in my industry as well. How long until this drags down programmers as well?
If people from all those other industries are scrambling to break into tech because it’s so lucrative, what is it you or I are bringing to the table that they couldn’t?
Many? Billions.
> Changes in consumption patterns have contributed to about two billion adults now being overweight or obese (high confidence).
We’re trending away from undernourishment.
https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/chapter/summary-for-policymakers/# - section A.1.4
I've been meaning to get this off my chest. Out of all ~100 interviews I took over the last 8 months, there was a singular egregious example.
It netted out upwards of 25hrs.
You may ask, "lelandfe, why did you go through all of this?" It had been 8 months without a paycheck; I barely made rent this month (landed a dream job recently! phew). This was for a senior demo eng role:
1. 30m phone screen
2. 30m behavioral
3. 1hr technical. Asked to write a hashmap to filter JSON, binary search over an array, and a Markdown renderer
4. 8hr take home assignment. But, "if you do wish to spend more [time], please go ahead." I spend the minimum time needed, which winds up being more like 14hrs.
I have to register for the platform, come up with a fictitious company, and then design and build a real demo site using the service – turning over the source code and live demo at the end. The scoring rubric is how creative the use of the platform is, and how much value the search service adds to my fake company.
5. 2hr written email correspondence test. I'm given 3 fake emails from "customers," each asking about specifics of the platform, e.g. "where can I find X and Y on the admin?" and "please define concepts Z and A for me."
6. 30m presentation of take home to 10 employees of the SaaS company, followed by 30m Q&A with the team. I'm only made aware of this after turning in my take home. Building and rehearsing the presentation takes around 3hrs.
7. 3hr on-site
8. Day after on-site: 15m wrap-up discussion w/HR
9. 15m wrap-up discussion w/engineering manager
Through all of this, every decision maker expressed extreme satisfaction with my performance, and the engineering manager repeatedly told me how smart and well-spoken I was.
A week later, I get, as an email: "our team has decided to pass on your candidacy." They adamantly refuse to give me more feedback (though admitting: position still open, no other candidates in final stages), and don't refer me to other roles.
In my experience, there are usually (at least) three reasons for that to happen - i.e. you getting rejected after a seemingly impeccable interview:
1) They already had a candidate they wanted to hire, but have some internal hiring protocol / process they must follow.
2) You and the other candidate(s) were incredibly similar, but one had to go.
3) Everyone but one senior decision maker liked you. Could have been for whatever reason. We like to think that most companies have a somewhat democratic recruitment panel, where all the decision makers get a (somewhat) equally weighted say. But some places, it's more like gatekeeper after gatekeeper...you might get passed all the previous ones, but not the last one.
Aaaand that's the point I walk away. If I like the company, I'll say "no." If I don't like the company, I ghost.
It's pretty much the only situation I believe ghosting a company is worthwhile.
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1. 30m phone screen 2. Leetcode assessment 3. 1h video call in which I was to implement some DSA 4. 2h Coding + System design 5. 45m behavioural
I didn't imagine it could get worse, but here we are.
I agree with TrackerFF that someone likely vetoed the group consensus, also potentially a funding issue.
On a serious note, I've also been nearly burned out by these week-long take home assignments which are only one stage of several and end up eating my weekends completely only to find myself rejected or ghosted after completing them (I'm a penetration tester so most common candidate testing methodology I've seen is a week long CTF set up by their security team, where you need to find as many flags/vulnerabilities as you can and also write a report, so it always ends up into a huge time sink of finding needles in a haystack and also write a multi page report about how I did it, only for then to be rejected). Often there's also some IQ test and other nonsense stages, plus the usual Zoom/Teams/Meets calls in between with their recruiters/hiring managers, during working hours. Oh, and don't get me started on the 20 page online form with 50 questions some companies want you to fill as part of your application.
I honestly have no idea how people with full time jobs who can't slack off at work and have other responsibilities, hobbies and interests, are able to keep this up. I feel like these long and stressful interview processes are mainly geared towards ambitious new-grads or people with no other goal in life than always interviewing for the next best job.
I sometimes want to give up on the IT industry and go to med school instead as I don't see how I can keep this up long term, for the grand sum of €50K/year, if this interviewing process is the norm or if it will get even crazyer. Or maybe I should quit my job, start learning leetcode, and move to a country with some FAANG jobs.
I actually support IQ tests and the likes, but it's the way that all these companies are doing this which sticks out. All of them somehow have their own flavor and keep the information to themselves (or to the company which they outsource their shenanigans to). It would be so much more efficient if we had an employee-centric approach where employees could provide access to this information, with verification, and it was up to the employee to give employers information on their current status and growth. You want the data? There you go, verified, now move on to stage 5 and no dawdling.
If you're going to toss out CVs, portfolios, certificates, diplomas, that's one thing (why again are we doing this?). If you're also going to give us all different kinds of "here's this whacky syntax no one uses" questions along with the umpteenth "IQ test" because god forbid we shorten the process, you're not suffering from a labor shortage. You're suffering from being a pretty princess too afraid to take a risk.
(To be clear: I don’t condone the practice at all, but I at least can understand possible rationales)
At big tech companies when times are good, many people are sitting around waiting for paint to dry. (Ie some nutty process) Remember they are a profit center and get slacktime and fancy stuff.
Ditto outside of engineering. I knew one SE with a pretty big territory who travelled with his wife. They were swingers. The dude would just setup random meetings so the company would spring for their hotel. We’d get our steak dinner, they would get their freak on. At the end, he’s pulling in 3% of whatever crap we were buying.
That's already more than I have; I get my job satisfaction from my job, I like to spend my free time with family and hobbies that don't involve more work.
But, different strokes for different people; I like playing video games, others like writing code for fun.
The point is probably very much this - finding people who will over-perform without reciprocation.
When I was managing the software division of an IT services company, we would send all candidates a fizz-buzz type programming assessment that should only take 5-10 minutes to complete. After that, we would do a 15 minute phone screen then had someone come in for a 1-2 hour long interview with some live programming. The point of the exercises in the interview was to see someone's thought process, not if they could actually "complete" the exercises.
At that point, we'd have a pretty good idea of where a candidate's skill were at and we could start the process of extending an offer if the team agreed they were a good fit.
There were a few occasions where the candidates had no experience with any of the tech we were using, but were obviously capable developers. We'd usually make an offer at the lower end of the salary range for that position with a raise being guaranteed in 10 weeks if they met the requirements. There was the expectation that they'd do a bit learning outside of work hours if needed.
Everyone who was given that offer accepted it and was given the raise.
I don't know much about industry and interviews yet. Do you think this is the case for most interviews? That they care about your thought process, not just if you can complete the problem? Is it necessary to learn/memorize all algorithms and data structures, or is it better to practice and focus on improving my problem solving skills and thought process?
This is great. Makes sense for the business, and the results spoke for themselves.
While I didn't have to do any take home projects, one company I interviewed at had multiple hours of different interviews (coding, design, etc). I thought I did pretty well (everyone seemed happy with my answers) and I feel like I'm very well suited to the job I interviewed for, given the projects I've worked on previously, but ultimately I didn't get an offer. That could be for any number of reasons, of course, but the feedback they gave is that I didn't manage to "fully complete" the design interview. This is a little baffling to me because the role I was interviewing for doesn't sound like it requires people to design full, complete distributed services within one hour in a high pressure interview situation. I know I can design complex systems, because I've successfully done so multiple times in the past, and I work well enough under pressure, but that I would miss something in a mere hour of an interview is almost a given. My best designs come when I can sleep on it and take a little time. Besides, some of the greatest engineers I know don't do well in artificial interview situations.
On the other hand, I also interviewed at another company for a very similar role, yet this time it was a 90 minute chat about stuff I'd worked on in the past. They do normally do an hour long coding task, but they let me skip it because they could see from my experience and the person who referred me vouched for my ability to write code. At the end of the 90 minutes, I was basically told they liked me and hoped I would join and that they'd give me an offer the next day. I happily accepted this offer.
During this time a Google recruiter also contacted me but when he said that their process typically takes months I declined right away. I can't think of any time in my career where I'd care to spend months to maybe get a job at Google.
Interesting to me is important. Last time I did one I found a recursive (not tail recessive) solution to a problem that I already knew was a simple iteration using a couple standard library functions - but where is the fun in that? I learned a lot and didn't care that I didn't get the job. (I did earn a call back, which is great considering at the time I didn't qualify for the advanced position they were hiring for)
Government should treat the fake job formula like what it is: Sabotage of the economy. In our system applicants have to pay for their own education, spend time doing it and government is investing in education.
We are extremely serious about training and employment. Parties that want to get involved should be held to high standards.
It's not like we've never created (and enforced) a standard for anything.