Is it just me or are interviews becoming more and more drawn out?
Posted by beethoven1827@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 144 comments
Interviewing for Senior Software Engineer (my experience: 9 years) with a leaning towards React/TypeScript or just full-stack.
I just got done with HR screening for a job and here is the whole interview loop:
- HR Screen (15 mins)
- Live coding Algo assessment (1.5 hours)
- Take home project (~4 hours)
- Virtual onsite (3.5 hours one day)
- Take home discussion (1hr)
- Systems design discussion (1.5hr)
- Behavior (1hr)
The hours are straight from the recruiter.
It use to be either a live coding or take home. I'm seeing more and more of both. Am I being taken for a ride or is this the norm now?
deuteros@reddit
The extent that you have to demonstrate that you know how to code has gotten ridiculous. Multiple rounds of coding problems, then only to get rejected in the final round because they throw you some curveball algorithm puzzle.
pgdevhd@reddit
Lol "take home project" makes me crack up, like treating adults like children
throwaway_4759@reddit
That’s more excessive than what I’ve seen. The biggest thing to me is the take home. For many reasons. If they want to rule out AI, congrats, they didn’t. If the candidate is honest and wants to do well, they probably put in even more than four hours. It basically weeds out responsible parents. It basically weeds out people who are interviewing at multiple places, since they could each request that amount of take home time. I did a take home when I was fresh out of college and tbh I was eager and it was fun but I spent like 8 hours. I could/would not do it today. And years later when I was on the other side of this and telling management that it was a waste of candidate time the response I got was that it wasn’t a great filter but made candidates feel like it was a more prestigious job.
xxxhipsterxx@reddit
I've had a take home where if you just chatgpt to do it, you would get something close to working but lacks the domain knowledge to show you really know what you're doing. It's the extra choices and subtle design choices AI can't think of generating.
DirectedAcyclicGraph@reddit
Look at those subtle design choices, the tasteful humanness of it. Oh my god, it even works.
lunar515@reddit
Something wrong DirectedAcyclicGraph? You’re sweating
xxxhipsterxx@reddit
We're all doomed by AI aren't we?
huge-centipede@reddit
It's not like you can't edit the code ChatGPT or Claude makes? Anyone outside of a Jr. would know you can only really rely on AI for scaffolding.
xxxhipsterxx@reddit
That's exactly what I did on my last coding project. ChatGPT'd it then added extra knowledge I know.
Paul721@reddit
I like to give the option of either take home or live coding problems. Of course my live coding problems aren’t your typical leetcode BS which has zero use in real life stuff.
exploradorobservador@reddit
Take home is the worst. Like honor system timeboxed interviews with some herculean task that requires more hours to set it up than was given for the task alone. No thanks you've just shown me how realistic you are about job expectations.
Potato-Engineer@reddit
And I've got so much more practice at editing an existing project than setting up a new one. The next time I get one of these, I'm going to burn so many hours on setting up, and then pretending it didn't take that long.
UntestedMethod@reddit
wow, now that's a hot take. Of all the ways they could think of to market the job as prestigious, the best choice was to waste the candidate's time with an assignment they admit isn't a great filter?
As an applicant, I don't think take home assignments have ever once made me feel like a job I was applying to might be more prestigious or not.
It seems possible to me that it's a cover story for "it's a great way to rope in candidates who have the extra time to spend and are potentially more desperate for a job offer"... and we all know how negotiations do not favour the desperate.
PermabearsEatBeets@reddit
I do prefer a take home because I just can't do live challenges, but yeah I've only ever done 2 take homes that were realistic in their time estimation. I can either do this requirements list in the time you claim, and it's SHIT, or I can do it with proper testing and show you what I know and it takes a full weekend.
Best ones are usually where they give you a half finished bit of code and ask you to finish it, or implement a feature, or find the problems.
BusinessDiscount2616@reddit
Well said, same here. No to take homes.
drumstand@reddit
Big +1 from me. I would definitely perform better on a take home than a live coding assessment just from nerves, but it really biases you to people who have the spare time and energy to overdo a take home.
thekwoka@reddit
And you don't know if they did the "90 minute take home" in 8 hours or 60 minutes.
So you also can't easily judge the result between people.
tjsr@reddit
If your interview process requires more than 3.5 hours of a candidates time, it tells me you're shit at interviewing. There's just no excuse. Allowing things like take homes where desperate candidates can, if they want, sink in 20 hours, just means I'm gonna be working alongside the guy that basically cheated to get the job. And like you said, if I'm applying to five companies, that's multiple hours of work. That's an outright no from me.
Pttrnr@reddit
(about 10 years ago in germany) wednesday: sent application. thursday: made appointmnet. friday: 3 hour talk, 10 minutes after that i got hired. was mainframe/COBOL/assembly related.
ElliotAlderson2024@reddit
FAANG or nothing.
AggressiveAsk1337@reddit
Not going to lie that’s normal and making debating on switching careers.
Odd_Lettuce_7285@reddit
Hiring is a crapshoot. People interview well, memorize leetcode, but then can't produce. Sometimes people cheat on interviews too. I've seen it myself. Some guy reading a ChatGPT response to me while I watch the text building up on the reflection of his glasses. If there weren't so much bad, then maybe the interview loops wouldn't be so hard.
Meanwhile, there are some engineers who will 10x everyone else. Orgs would be happy with just a 1x'er or a 1.5x'er, but there's too many engineers that are 0.5x'ers and are net negatives to their teams.
watupdoods@reddit
So make firing people easier. We should just normalize like okay congrats you made it through our gut check interview and didn’t perform as we hoped, here’s an additional 30 days pay so we don’t feel bad and there is the door, good luck.
Hiring is so sacred in the software world it’s what leads to these crazy interview pipelines.
Antique_Pin5266@reddit
If there’s one thing devs on Reddit hate more than take homes it’s probationary periods
Give me both of those any day all day over LC bullshit.
ccricers@reddit
That is based. Imagine if firing people costed a lot less. Companies would be less risk averse. I'd rather prefer this setup, because it allows us to be more "liquid", more okay with job hopping and fewer people will be stuck in place.
Many people say stagnation is bad. If the barriers in companies are made easier to pass through in both directions, there'd be a lot more momentum and less stagnation.
justUseAnSvm@reddit
This. Dealing with a guy on my team who can leetcode with the best of them, but assigning work to them is never a net time save for me. Most likely they'll get pip'd and replaced.
skywalkerze@reddit
But will you remove leetcode from interviews?
Ailiefex@reddit
Narrator: Oh, and wouldn't you know it - the company added a "practical coding task" interview round right after this, to test how people handle real dev work instead of just algorithm puzzles. Because apparently that was the solution they needed...
gobo_my_choscro@reddit
“Real dev work” writing a sloppy, bare-bones first draft to “solve” an isolated toy problem with zero context to the business value… Writing more lines of code is what the job is all about right?
lt947329@reddit
Yet when people get “real” problems to solve in take-home tests, the resounding advice is “never work for free.”
Best interview I ever did was with a US government contractor. They let you pick your choice of four interesting problems they had solved over the previous few years written up as blog posts with pictures, background info, and downloadable datasets. But they didn’t reveal how they solved the problem (only that they did, and therefore it was technically solvable).
You had 72 hours to think about the problem, write up a couple paragraphs or diagram your approach, and write some basic code to apply it to their test dataset. Apparently they assigned you to different teams based on which problem you chose to solve. No leetcode at all. But this was pre-ChatGPT, I wonder if it would be tenable to do that nowadays…
thekwoka@reddit
No, because there are also people that this quickly eliminates.
If you are a good developer, the random ass leetcode question shouldn't even be much of a speed bump, much less a road block.
Designer_Holiday3284@reddit
BUT CAN YOU DSA???
nocrimps@reddit
No way! Leetcode skill means SWE skill. That's what they told me on r/leetcode!
AggressiveAsk1337@reddit
Yeah I’m having fun integrating AWS with other APIS on my side project. Struggling to get the will to practice binary trees when I haven’t looked at one in 5 years.
marvdl93@reddit
Gosh, maybe my EU salary is shit compared to you guys, at least I’m not stuck in this interview hell. Technical interviews in Netherlands are quite rare. We have one or two months probation time in which we can get fired without any arguments to weed out bad hires.
Ok_Parsley9031@reddit
It’s made me just focus on staying in a role I’m happy with.
Scarface74@reddit
I have a rule. I don’t jump through hoops for any job paying less than around 200K. I can get an enterprise CRUD “full stack” job just from three behavioral/system design interfaces
ghostdopamine@reddit
Care to explain how you can get a enterprise CRUD easy ass job with just behavior and system design questions?
What role do you search for to get these?
I'm trying to purposely avoid anything other than "enterprise CRUD". I'm not bout that leetcode grind. I just want to make it to retirement 😪
ghostdopamine@reddit
Is this for a major company that is going to pay you 400k a year ( like FANNG or some major Wallstreet player ) or is this some no name little company nobody ever hear of paying 140k a year?
If it's a giant prestigious company that looks amazing on your resume and they are paying major coin then I suppose it's not a piss take.. but some little company making some bs software and paying little company money .. wtf is that?
grad_ml@reddit
This is nothing, recently I had 11 rounds at apple interview, and then vanilla rejection email.
GoziMai@reddit
God what a waste of time 🙄if you can’t get enough signals after 3-4 interviews, then your company is the problem
hashtag-bang@reddit
Had the same experience with Apple years ago. Literally spent the whole Summer interviewing and had even talked to a Sr Director there who really liked me and said they definitely had a spot for me.
Then I eventually interviewed with some Indian guy with a thick accent who rejected me because I didn't have experience with something that was a very specific implementation detail that only Apple would choose. Had nothing to do with all of my previous rounds and resume. 🙄
grad_ml@reddit
If it's any consolation, I'm an Indian guy, lol.
hashtag-bang@reddit
Lol, fair enough! Did you get rejected by an Asian interviewer? Lol.
As soon as I hit Indian or Asian interviewers, I know it's going to be a 95% failure rate for me. They seem to only want to hire people like them.
People talk about it all of the time on Blind, but I'm not sure that I've seen that same discussion here.
grad_ml@reddit
lol yes, very likely by an Asian girl. There are many good people and few bad people everywhere. Don't let these things get into your skin.
hashtag-bang@reddit
Yeah, I'm with you, I don't worry about it too much.
Overall, I think the problem is that the processes are so crazy now and it only takes one person to torpedo your interview process. Especially if you've clearly been building big things for a long time with decent tenures. It's even worse and beyond leetcode grinding now.
big_chung3413@reddit
That’s such a massive time commitment. Are they split into a few days? I feel like at that point you deserve more than just an email as a debrief.
grad_ml@reddit
1 recruiter call + 2 engineering manager interviews to gauge my expertise( 2 different days) + 4 interview in one day + 1 recruiter call + 3 interview one day and then the rejection. when I mentioned I have a deadline. They wanted to small change me because they're stable and all, I went to another FAANG company. I'm glad she didn't ask more interview loops before rejecting lmao. I was really exhausted in the end ti give a damm; ofcourse I had a offer by then.
ballsohaahd@reddit
So you had 7 rounds in on site interviews?! That is legit insane (of apple)
tinmru@reddit
Oof, damn, sorry to hear that man 🥵
Hope next interview goes better 🤞
GoziMai@reddit
Noticing a lot more weed out steps like Karat interviews. One start up had me take a cognitive test and I’m pretty damn sure it’s designed to exclude people who’s English is their second language which feels sinister and discriminatory to me 😬
Ill_Tomato8088@reddit
Here’s a realistic hiring process.
Most of us are hired “at will” so there isn’t a problem there.
For the most part, I think you can trust developers to do well, even if they aren’t crushing it right off the bat. We have to work, therefore we learn to run with the pack in quick-time.
Odd_Lettuce_7285@reddit
I think you're missing the big picture. WHY are there so many different parts of the interview loop?
It has nothing to do with the engineer, it has everything to do with various stakeholders in the organization wanting to work with this person.
We don't create interview loops to make the candidate suffer. We want to make hires that myself, the product managers, other engineers on the team, the director of engineering, etc. all feel good about this person because each person brings their own perspective of what is successful at that org.
beethoven1827@reddit (OP)
All of that can easily be gleaned from takehome/live-coding + ~2 interviews. Not whatever this was. I get there's terrible applicants but it shouldn't be difficult to weed them out.
lvlint67@reddit
the commenter about you highlighted interpersonal skills and you focused on coding exercises you think you can pass with an objective score...
Starting to see the disconnect in thought processes yet?
beethoven1827@reddit (OP)
That's your opinion. But I wouldn't put them through 6+ loops because we're not FAANG.
Odd_Lettuce_7285@reddit
So how many people have you interviewed, and what % of them are leveling up your org and helping it grow?
toolatetopartyagain@reddit
As an interviewer, all I look for is that the candidate is technically decent and has exposure to the areas he will be working in.
What is far far more important is his attitude to work. His willingness to work and personality.
Somehow hiring managers forget that in software, any skill is one week of Udemy/Pluralsight for a dedicated developer.
lvlint67@reddit
Seriously. Show me you picked up something and learned it ont he job at your last job and you aren't scared to do it again, and you're at the front of the list.
I don't need you to come in with an in-depth knowledge of parsing pbit status codes and cat48 messages. I just need to see that if presented witht he resources you can figure out how to start in 3 months.
old-new-programmer@reddit
Why aren’t references a thing anymore? I mean call my boss…. I guess that could also be faked, but ask specific questions only they would know related to prior discussions you’ve had with me and I think you could tell of they were being truthful.
That also takes more time away from cold messaging a thousand people a day so I dunno.
lvlint67@reddit
I've been a professional reference for several friends that i've worked on projects together with. Gave glowing reviews each time... People realized that finding 3 people that would say nice things about you was a useless bar to meet.
We'll check references before we send the offer.
lvlint67@reddit
We bring you in for about 4 hours.
wtf even is a virtual onsite?
janyk@reddit
Yes it's the norm, but it's been the norm for a couple years, now. Companies are getting away with it because it's a buyer's market. If engineers just agreed to stop interviewing at such companies perhaps they would be incentivized to change their ways.
The unfortunate thing about drawing out the process like this is that it is scientifically proven to do absolutely nothing to increase the probability of hiring the best candidate. It's comparable to having a shoddy TV antenna picking up a noisy signal and hoping that leaving your TV on long enough will let it decode a signal. Obviously this is bullshit, you have to fix the antenna to let the signal come through. Likewise, companies need to fix their own signal detection instead of just picking up more of the same noise.
Codex_Dev@reddit
Every year China and India produce another 1 million developers. US schools are producing about \~100K developers. The market is flooded and will only get worse in the next few years.
Regular-Active-9877@reddit
The vast majority of these from all three regions are unhirable.
The problem is not too many developers. The problem is too many liars.
Improving the screening process is the only way out of this mess. The way you do that is to start hiring talented recruiters with real developer experience... but then who hires the recruiters? 🫤
iknowsomeguy@reddit
I'd like to apply for the position of Recruiter Recruitment Specialist. I specialize in recruiting recruiters who recruit better recruits.
Legote@reddit
What we need is for the economy to get better so people will start job hopping more.
segfault-rs@reddit
I agree. I recently interviewed at a big software company. They had me do:
With trying to schedule all of this around my regular work schedule, it took me close to 3 months to complete. I did get a verbal offer recently though.
youngktam@reddit
I hate it. Especially when they waste your time and make you go through all those interviews to tell you you didn't get the job at the end. I had that happen to me before even though I passed all their interviews. Their reason was that I didn't have enough experience when they could've figured that out from looking at my resume.
Truck_Stop_Sushi@reddit
There’s so much more fraudulent applicants out there now. Blatant lies on resumes. Phone interviews with someone other than the candidate. Candidate being coached by someone offscreen. So I completely understand why interviews have become so intense. Just remember, you’re competing against other candidates, not the interviewer.
Gammusbert@reddit
Why not just do an onsite then lol
ElbowWavingOversight@reddit
That's how interviews used to work. You'd fly out to the company HQ and do an in-person interview loop. Coding would be done on a whiteboard (terrible, but every candidate had the same handicap). For big companies they'd sometimes do the opposite and fly interviewers out to a location to spend a few days interviewing a bunch of candidates, rather than having all the candidates fly to the HQ. If you were hired you would have to pack everything up and move to the Bay Area or Seattle or whatever.
But if you think that interview loops are arduous now, do you think they would be less arduous if you had to fly halfway across the country to do the interview?
Gammusbert@reddit
Im aware of how interviews worked lol but regardless realistically the worst perpetrators of these intense interviews usually have the resources to put you up somewhere for a day or two to do the interview if it’s actually remote, otherwise you’re probably going to have to move to a city with an office anyway.
I had a few friends that were flown to seattle for entry level positions (pre-covid) even though the actual position was in another city.
MoreRopePlease@reddit
Full day of interviews after you flew across two time zones the night before? Ugh. I far prefer zoom.
canadian_Biscuit@reddit
This can be solved simply by meeting the candidate in person, once. If a company is concerned with cheating, then their interview is flawed to begin with
bjogc42069@reddit
I went through 5 rounds with a company I can see from my bedroom, all on zoom. I proposed just walking over there and they acted like it was the dumbest idea they had ever heard
Material_Policy6327@reddit
I dunno lately it feels like competing against the interviewer who is fed up giving interviews
Soccham@reddit
I had over 1000 resumes for my last DevOps position. I reviewed about 100 resumes, interviewed 20 as a hiring manager, passed 10 on to our take home coding test, 7 moved onto our live technical assessment explaining the coding test and similar, and 2 made it to the final “super day” interview which was 3 interviews back to back.
That shit was so painful and so many people overrepresented themselves.
tjsr@reddit
Software engineers are supposed to be smart, yet the people responsible for these processes see sk stupid they can't even design a process whereby the resume never gsrts to you unless they pass a certain bar (eg write something that formats, signs and uploads the resume to an endpoint). Or they're so inefficient and heads up their own arses thst they can't say "walk me through one of your opensource repos".
Or a lot of the time they're just using the take-home to try get some neat tricks to implement in their containers, build pipelines or scaffholds.
Odd_Lettuce_7285@reddit
That's a sign of the market conditions. Too many applicants and too few qualified.
GlobalScreen2223@reddit
It's no different than the entry-level market in 2020 and 2021, to be honest. It's just that all of these people who may have never had to experience it suddenly have to. Now you understand how hard it is and how powerless it makes you feel and how one truly can't overthink power dynamics as much as I was invalidated as a junior engineer about it. There's no joy in being right.
elusiveoso@reddit
It's out of hand and a broken process. Everyone hears how FAANG companies do things and just follow suit without really thinking if they need it or if they're even remotely close to solving those kinds of problems at that kind of scale. At the end of the day, companies need to realize they aren't conducting a child adoption interview and need to just get on with it.
The company that I got hired at earlier this year had a the lightest interview process out of all the other companies I interviewed at, and it was still a lot. It was a 20-minute recruiter screen, a 1 hour behavioral, a 1 hour thing where I got to ask them questions, a take home, and a 1 hour code review. I was seeing a lot of 7 or 8 round interview processes that I began opting out of ones that long after getting all the way through a 7 round interview process and getting passed on.
The problem is that we need to eat, so we just keep accepting these long, drawn out processes where companies just keep adding more steps.
I started in the field in 2005, and back then it was 1 or 2 interviews and then an offer. I didn't take a technical interview until my 3rd job, and even then that was just a knowledge assessment quiz.
goma_goma@reddit
This sounds like what I was seeing this year interviewing for senior roles, similar YoE. It feels excessive but I chose to do it.
dysrog_myrcial@reddit
Hour-long with the CEO? Dead giveaway they don't have that much going on as a company if the CEO has that much free time to interview a dev.
OverEggplant3405@reddit
It depends. There are places that don't screen so heavily, but the pay is usually lower.
nsxwolf@reddit
Exactly 7 rounds. Standard.
ar3s3ru@reddit
Yup: it tends to happen when either: 1. The company “hiring” is not really hiring, they just keep up their recruitment process for many reasons, 2. They have such a limited budget for new hires and so much demand that they try to play the market as much as possible (e.g. hiring an individual performing at their next level already, but downlevel them and pay them below market rate)
Chezzymann@reddit
When you combine the amount of applications and rounds, its kind of like a game show to get a job in tech now. My friends and family don't understand why it took me 6+ months to find a job and think I was doing something wrong. Their fields are generally one recruiter call and one interview, and they just have to say 'yeah I've used skill XYZ' and answer a question about a time where they had a disagreement with a coworker.
abraham_linklater@reddit
I would tell anyone with two takehome rounds to get stuffed unless there's a 90th percentile paying job on the other side waiting for me.
hippydipster@reddit
Live coding or a take home: choose ONE mofos
tuckfrump69@reddit
Live coding no questions
DependentlyHyped@reddit
I had an interview recently with a recruiter screening, a live technical interview, a take home that took 10-15 hours, and an onsite 5 hour live coding.
BUT they also paid you $750 for doing the takehome, and the role was very high paying, so it kinda seemed fair.
_SpaceLord_@reddit
I have zero problems at all with a paid take home assignment, that’s kinda neat.
tjsr@reddit
I reject any company who has take homes as part of their process. They're too often used for free work/ideas with no intent of ever even giving any feedback whatsoever.
hippydipster@reddit
The one time I did one, I never got any feedback on it at all, or acknowledgement of having done it. It wasn't for free work though.
OTOH, I have been the hiring manager before and used a take home to excellent effect, but then I designed it to be fun and very free form.
tjsr@reddit
Precisely why if they want you to do a take-home, it needs to be paid work. Half day increments for your time.
PotentialCopy56@reddit
You must not have had to be in the current job market. Good luck getting anything without bending over backwards in this market.
SpeakingSoftwareShow@reddit
1 technical test is enough. If I've done a live assessment, I'm sure as shit not going to do a take-home as well.
I understand why companies do this (saturated market, filter out bad talent) but jesus it's a grind.
Also what is a "virtual onsite" lol. We're on-site or we're not!
tjsr@reddit
They seem to think the answer is to make the problems larger, not harder. Thing is, they think they're special and their company needs some utter God programmer. No, you don't. You need competent. Just pay less FFS and stop searching for a unicorn, set the difficulty of your interview at a level you're happy with.
Oh, and have your own devs sit your interviews before they're familiar eith the content of it. That'll tell you how BS your expectations are.
SpeakingSoftwareShow@reddit
this 10000%!!!
pm_me_n_wecantalk@reddit
I had an interview where besides all of this, there was an IQ test too.
Make1984FictionAgain@reddit
IQ tests are so effing offensive
xwubstep@reddit
After a recruiter screen at Wealthfront, I was offered a take home project, that took me almost two weeks. I did it for my own practice, but rejected them after that. I think it’s ridiculous that you need to do a take home project before even getting to talk to a real person.
RealSpritanium@reddit
Gotta interview at companies that actually build something other than software. The pay isn't as high, but it's worth it to be treated like a human being.
Wishitweretru@reddit
My last one was (systems architect, large firm): 1. Recruiter interview (embedded) 2. Team interview (3 engineers chat for an hour - easier to just chew the time explaining systems I have worked in, current changes, thoughts about future stack tech) 3. Cohort interview with the PM I would be supporting.
I think the folks further down the chain have code challenges
joyancefa@reddit
You are being taken on a ride. Especially with the take-home project 🥲
Electronic-Walk-6464@reddit
The hoops vary but I'd never do a take home.
My common exp is HR -> Tech -> HM -> Offer, so 3hr max invested for both parties.
SSJxDEADPOOLx@reddit
Red flag. If the hiring company is that incompetent to where they cannot identify fact from fiction from a simple coding exercise and a conversation, that means there are many more bad practices lurking.
You don't wanna work there trust me. The point of a code exercise is not to solve it but instead observe how the developer thinks. I can teach syntax, I cannot teach a good personality or willingness to learn, nor do I have any desire break arrogance.
This same type of company is leaving their teams short staffed while they hunt down a low cost unicorn. Remember interviews are two way streets. Don't their inept arrogance get to you. You are valuable, you are talented. When this market flips like it always has, those scummy practices will all but vanish.
i_have_a_semicolon@reddit
Not all teams have the time to teach basic things. I don't get how our non leet code questions keep tripping senior people up.
Extension-Health@reddit
A lot of people prep for leetcode so non leetcode can throw them off. Had one easy interview I did poorly on because I prepped for leetcode in python but got a straightforward Java only interview. Funny how I can fail that but pass leetcode hard interviews.
i_have_a_semicolon@reddit
We want people with practical skills. Being able to solve a leetcode hard doesn't really line up with the work we tend to do. Preparing for interviews by studying leetcode feels like a broken system anyway
SSJxDEADPOOLx@reddit
I agree, leetcode is a terrible metric, that's why I mentioned the coding exercise and conversation. A good developer can feel out another good developer with a practical exercise and a conversation. Those who can't, should not be interviewing people.
Soccham@reddit
I’m paying $200k+ with equity and great benefits. I’m expecting to hire people ready to go, not someone I need to teach basics too
i_have_a_semicolon@reddit
Exactly. Also the interview question can't be that bad literally not even leetcode
Qkumbazoo@reddit
Imagine going through all of that with an 80% chance of getting rejected.
Turbulent_Term_4802@reddit
We just interviewed and hired a senior. 1 hour interview with managers. 1 hour technical interview with devs. Made him an offer the next day and he’s working out great
DAS_BEE@reddit
I just straight up can't get past rejection emails right now, it's fucking rough. Went through a few drawn out interviews and code challenges and phone screens, and still nought. I have over 10 years of experience but I'm still shitcanned before the interview
red-squigglies@reddit
Recently went through a hiring loop for a senior role and ended up rejecting an offer but found 6 rounds excessive
30 min HR screen 30 min EM screen Take home project (spent about 8hrs on it) 1hr Live coding/pairing with EM and Senior dev 2hr System Design 1hr culture fit
To be frank, this is what made me reject the role. They had enough information to make a call about hiring me after seeing my take home project, looking at my github and CV. The rest was just theatre.
FrezoreR@reddit
I wouldn't call this typical but I've experienced it myself.
DisplayedPublicly@reddit
What I wonder is, how do companies manage to find the time for their engineers to do all these interviews?
At my company we do:
Some of these can be back to back, so that depending on a candidates scheduling this can be done in less than two weeks. However this also means that at times I have three interviews a week, with writing feedback that's easily half day spent on interviews.
How do companies manage that have these elaborate hiring processes?
Mission_Trip_1055@reddit
Worst of all is the take home assignment
gautamb0@reddit
Perhaps you're getting longer loops in line with your increasing experience... and yeah, this is pretty normal for senior/staff loops at competitive companies.
Ssssspaghetto@reddit
I did 6 interviews and met with 11 different people. My final interview was over three weeks ago. They've assured me twice that they are wrapping up interviews and I am still being considered.
Interviews now take 2 months to complete a loop. When I got my first engineering job, I went to Chipotle with them between interviews and found out I got it the next day. What the fuck happened?
EngineeredCoconut@reddit
Every interview I have ever done in my career has been:
HR Screen (30mins)
Live Coding Screen (1hr)
Onsite with 2-3 coding, 1 system design, 1 behavioral round (4-5 hrs)
HM chat (30m-1hr)
This has been the case since 2016 which is when I graduated, so it's not a recent thing. I always say no to any interviews which involve a take home project, but most places don't have one.
klowny@reddit
This was the standard when I graduated in 2012. Some more competitive places required take homes after the phone screen before the on-site as well.
jeerabiscuit@reddit
Such companies are scams making money from interviewing and from you.
_176_@reddit
That's normal except the take-home. I wouldn't do a take-home.
brkattk@reddit
I ended up bowing out at one place recently.
.5hr phone screen (2) 1hr background calls 3hr take home
Then they wanted 4.5 more hours worth of virtual on-site over only 2 days.
I said no thanks. I was already late round with 4 other places and beginning with one more. There's no way a normal person can work full time and do all that without at least spreading it out a little.
Not for lack of trying either. I went back and forth with them giving 2hrs of availability at the end of my workday for the whole week and after either radio silence or asking me again to provide availability, I said I don't think this is for me.
thecodingart@reddit
It’s getting worse
ProfessorPhi@reddit
I can tell you from the hiring side, there are just so many bad applicants
queenofdiscs@reddit
This is unhinged.
sha1shroom@reddit
Yeah, it's unfortunately kind of insane. I had a 7 and 9 rounder during my recent job search, and these long loops really just create more opportunities for a candidate to generate a false negative leading to a subsequent rejection.
The two offers I got this past year were from very short loops.
AppuyezSurLeDeux@reddit
That has not been my experience at all, and I would push back heavily (or just bail out) on that big of a time investment unless you are desperate for a job.
I recently wrapped up interviewing at 5 companies for senior/staff roles and didn't see anything beyond 5-6h total, including team matching. By and large it was: technical screen (1h), virtual onsites (structure varied, but all within 3.5-5h), and then some follow up chats with potential team mates or people up the chain if you wanted.
None of these involved take homes. These are all well known, well paying companies that are not hurting for applicants (so not lowering the bar or anything). Maybe I just lucked out, but 5 feels like a decent sample size?
kevinkaburu@reddit
For anything below a senior technical position, this is excessive.
If you've been working on the stack at all you should know the common pitfalls to ask about and chose either a leetcode, project, or 1 hour trial.
If you're contracting them to complete a big task that is not do correctly fo precision in the details a take home project makes sense.
For implementation and devops engineers, you want the guy who knows the information and has the easiest personality. Everyone fakes it, the one who is best at it is usually lying on the gamble or just does it constantly. The people who correctly intuit the limits of their capability responsibly and deliver what customers actually want are the mvps, and companies gatekeep from them constantly before firing their galas and having nothing 3 years down the line.
Looping around 2 or 3 times should tell you everything you need to know.
Being a good admin is about playing well with others and being able to precrunch your homework.
Screw interviewers who insist on solving fma problems for basic application roles who can't actually troubleshoot a crashback.
I've done about 10 full cycles and routinely ask when I can start refactoring their basic infrastructure issues with RBAC and cluster sizing. They need a weirdly deep Leetcode blue, have highly fragile and interdependent systems, or are stuck using 25yo tech based off a single evangelist.
I've seen it all, companies of thousands who only have 3-6 people maintaining their Netops, hundreds of petabytes of S3 data with 200% failures due to aggressive data retention regimes, unmaintainable clusters and servers hosting a web page that require several python scripts nested in each other terminating on the root user, completely undocumented brownfield, 150mb repositories. Everyone always wants the same patterns.
I chose my problems to solve based on what I can fix with my hands, but highly balk at bandaiding solutions.
It's Not helping. We're a step behind on the exact same paradigm.
Please for the love of God do not ask the same overly qualified applicant to spend 6 hours on menial stressing, then call them to find out why they didn't report some nonsense constantly reinvented wheel auth feature, or capacity based resiliency model when they haven't even had a chance to review your policy documentation or see which PVCs are actually up to current SLA.
These tech rounds are concerning in their spastic ADHD recruiting. Some of them might just know what they're talking about, several of the ones who take up pager duty every week and maintain e2.
Their devs are the only one who know the secret reboot combos and when they'll stop response for bad data
Best_Fish_2941@reddit
Reject the company
hippydipster@reddit
So you tell them no and move on
trajan_augustus@reddit
Yeah apparently candidate decisions moved from 50 days on average to 66 days. They are drawing out the process because there more and more candidates. So, they are stuck in this decision paralysis see whether there may be a better candidate.
gomihako_@reddit
Lector AND a take home? Fuck that
DeterminedQuokka@reddit
I mean that’s pretty similar to most things I’ve done.
I actually have found it’s a lot less common to do both a take home and in person coding now. Like 5 years ago it was common to get a take home and then have multiple live coding rounds. The last time I applied to jobs most places gave me the choice of a longer take home or a shorter in person coding.
I actually thought you were going to say they take place over more days which I do find to be true. Since they are remote it will take like a week to get through all the rounds.
Beneficial_Map6129@reddit
aside from the take home and CEO interview it seems normal to me.
my FAANG loops were usually:
1 hour leetcode zoom interview (sometimes i had a second phone interview round)
onsite: 3 rounds of 45 min leetcode, sys design/1 more leetcode when i was a new grad, hm behavioral
i've had some recently that would ask for references at END of the process, like after i got good feedback from the onsite
a few companies would do CEO interviews. i usually want to avoid those companies as it smells like micromanaging or a cult founder.
Material_Policy6327@reddit
FAANG is one things but non FAANG / tech adjacent companies are doing it too claiming it works for FAANG so must work for them. As someone that now has to give this level of interview at a no name healthcare company it’s burning us out just trying to hire folks
starboye@reddit
If the recruiter shows me this then I decide whether I want to use this company as a practice or, if I feel like I am ready for real interviews, I simply refuse to interview with them.
Can you name the company?
Constant-Listen834@reddit
Buddy you did one interview at a single company that was drawn out. That doesn’t mean all interviews are getting more drawn out. Every company has their own process
beethoven1827@reddit (OP)
Nah, this is the 3rd one this week where it was both.