Is it just me or are interviews becoming more and more drawn out?

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AggressiveAsk1337@reddit

Not going to lie that’s normal and making debating on switching careers.

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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.

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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.

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skywalkerze@reddit

But will you remove leetcode from interviews?

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Designer_Holiday3284@reddit

BUT CAN YOU DSA???

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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DirectedAcyclicGraph@reddit

Look at those subtle design choices, the tasteful humanness of it. Oh my god, it even works.

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xxxhipsterxx@reddit

We're all doomed by AI aren't we?

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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.

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xxxhipsterxx@reddit

That's exactly what I did on my last coding project. ChatGPT'd it then added extra knowledge I know.

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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.

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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.

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Gammusbert@reddit

Why not just do an onsite then lol

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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?

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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

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Material_Policy6327@reddit

I dunno lately it feels like competing against the interviewer who is fed up giving interviews

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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.

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Odd_Lettuce_7285@reddit

That's a sign of the market conditions. Too many applicants and too few qualified.

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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.

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FrezoreR@reddit

I wouldn't call this typical but I've experienced it myself.

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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!

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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:

Recruiter Screen (15-30min)
Live coding (60 min)
Tech Fundamentals (60 min)
System Design (60 min)
Hiring Manager (60 min)

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?

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Mission_Trip_1055@reddit

Worst of all is the take home assignment

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grad_ml@reddit

This is nothing, recently I had 11 rounds at apple interview, and then vanilla rejection email.

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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.

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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.

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ballsohaahd@reddit

So you had 7 rounds in on site interviews?! That is legit insane (of apple)

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tinmru@reddit

Oof, damn, sorry to hear that man 🥵

Hope next interview goes better 🤞

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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.

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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.

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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

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i_have_a_semicolon@reddit

Exactly. Also the interview question can't be that bad literally not even leetcode

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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.

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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?

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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.

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hippydipster@reddit

Live coding or a take home: choose ONE mofos

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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.

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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.

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pm_me_n_wecantalk@reddit

I had an interview where besides all of this, there was an IQ test too.

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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.

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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.

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Odd_Lettuce_7285@reddit

So how many people have you interviewed, and what % of them are leveling up your org and helping it grow?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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jeerabiscuit@reddit

Such companies are scams making money from interviewing and from you.

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_176_@reddit

That's normal except the take-home. I wouldn't do a take-home.

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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.

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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

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thecodingart@reddit

It’s getting worse

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ProfessorPhi@reddit

I can tell you from the hiring side, there are just so many bad applicants

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queenofdiscs@reddit

This is unhinged.

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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.

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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?

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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

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Best_Fish_2941@reddit

Reject the company

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hippydipster@reddit

So you tell them no and move on

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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.

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gomihako_@reddit

Lector AND a take home? Fuck that

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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.

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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.

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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

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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?

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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.

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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

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beethoven1827@reddit (OP)

Nah, this is the 3rd one this week where it was both.