Are 3+ round interviews for non FAANG dev positions the new normal?
Posted by sortinousn@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 133 comments
I am on month 5 of being unemployed as a mobile dev. The amount of take home assessments plus 3 round interviews I've completed only to me text messaged that you weren't selected is infuriating. I also imagine making a team of people available to interview candidates and dedicate 4+ hours of their time must be stressful as well. I purposely avoid the Google and Meta positions because of how difficult ridiculous the interview process can be.
Last month I had to create an entire app for a week long coding project. Present the app in the Round One interview to developers. In Round 2 I spent 5 hours on MS Teams with 4 different departments doing a technical interview. Round 3 was a live coding assessment and Round 4 was an interview with the principal developer. I am told I did amazing. Two weeks pass and I get a text saying I wasn't selected because they thought I had a degree and I didn't (I didn't even have a degree on my resume!!!). The principal dev wanted to hire me but HR wouldn't allow it as they require a degree. It was such a soul crushing miserable experience and such a massive waste of time for both parties. Having to now contend with AI, massive layoffs, less pay, less remote work and these interviews is making me think that SWE is no longer a worthwhile career.
bteam3r@reddit
3 round interviews are normal, yes - week long take home projects are not. If I can't complete a take-home in a Saturday morning (so say, 3-4 hours max), I'm not doing it.
Own-Necessary4974@reddit
Fuck that. My buddy is a nuclear engineer building shit that will kill millions of people if he fucks it up and his interview process was just “ok - check his degree and make sure he didn’t lie on his employment history”
What’s the point of credentials if they don’t mean anything?
I hate tech market interview culture. It’s blind following blind at best, cringy gatekeeping more often than not, and systemic racism at worst.
Jaeriko@reddit
To be fair, your buddy is in a very rare position that is backed up by serious credentials. It'd be very hard to fake the kind of paper trail and schooling required to qualify for that position, whereas a regular developer could be massively exaggerating their appropriateness for the role on paper.
Not arguing for more interview rounds, just that I don't think it's quite so easy to compare for developer interviews.
Own-Necessary4974@reddit
Sure but CS degrees are very objective - a journeyman’s exam could easily be added to standardize. Instead we’re all just making stuff up and pretending to be geniuses even though no other industry operates like this. At what point do we question the stupid box we put ourselves in?
Jaeriko@reddit
You don't need a cs degree to be a software engineer though, and in many cases the things you learn in a CS degree don't really carry over to a functional development position. A general development journeymans exam wouldn't work either, as there's no industry-wide standard what you do and don't need at any given career level.
Standard certificates for languages might be possible though, like AWS or Azure.
Own-Necessary4974@reddit
There is no industry standard because we aren’t building one. The tech industry has an ego problem thinking that the applied science we do is some sort of unobtanium that only we are stewards of. As tech matures, it gets sadder and sadder that we can’t get our act together.
If we really gave a shit about meritocracy we’d create a shared bar - at least for entry level roles.
Jaeriko@reddit
That would be the case in your potential hypothetical though. You're basically arguing against your own proposal with that.
The creation and enforcement of a standards system inherently requires stewardship to maintain value, and currently nobody is able to define and enforce that standard across such a varied discipline. We do have standards, but they are usually downstream technical and uptime requirements of our products rather than our unique licenses and liabilities therein (e.g. ATC systems, critical defense infrastructure, etc.).
Own-Necessary4974@reddit
The same thing is true for doctors and medical professionals.
Would a hospital ever ask you to save a patient as a test if you were applying for a new role?
Jaeriko@reddit
Doctors have years of on the job training directly under a senior that is part of their schooling. I would certainly expect anyone working with a medical license to be experienced in the practice of saving lives, given that training is required for it. Developers aren't trained in the same way (or, arguably in many cases, at all).
Own-Necessary4974@reddit
But there are plenty of other technical professions where the same is true, the stakes are higher, and they still don’t interview like tech does.
I think some exception makes sense for nascent technology but not for anyone with less than 5 years experience. The core concepts of OOP, procedural programming, design patterns, operating systems, databases, client side development haven’t changed in decades. Yes the implementations and surface layer technologies are constantly improving but under the hood - what they are and how they work and the key concepts they drive are absolutely stable enough that a standard, written test could measure aptitude and capability better than a random interview question some gatekeeper googled 12 minutes before an interview.
MightyMustard@reddit
It is a bit extreme example, sure,… but doesn’t change the fact that much. I had a winding career path before ending up in IT. Worked (and done a lot of interviews) as mechanical and manufacturing engineer, even did a short stint as a ship engineer… none of those jobs required anything remotely close to IT interviews.
Affectionate_Horse86@reddit
There are not very many profession like software engineering where the variance in performance between individuals is so large. Also, with people changing jobs every two years is problematic to distinguish strong candidates that do it because they want more challenges/money and the ones that are effectively kicked out or cannot work with people.
that said, I’m not sure the typical interviews are able to filter that out.
MightyMustard@reddit
I would say that a lot of professions (technical ones more so I guess) are like this. There is always a big difference in performance. But perhaps it is more obvious to average employee in IT (code reviews and collaboration etc) but it is far from being unique to IT.
The place I’m working at right now, I had a very painless interview process. A short 5min screening call, then an in-person chat with hiring manager and team lead to align expectations etc, and single longer technical meeting with future team members where we talked about the project and challenges, and questions for each other. That’s 2.1 step interview.
And everyone I have worked with in this company is very competent. And the product is in a complex business domain. So obviously (in my personal experience) we don’t need these extremely long and drawn out interview processes.
Affectionate_Horse86@reddit
you would say, but unless you propose examples it is rather impossible to discuss further.
Yes, there're other professions, mostly in engineering where the performance can vary greatly (but in general not as much as in software engineering). And there're creative professions where one can nail one graphic design after another and somebody else zero, but for those portfolio and past performance let you know who you're hiring. And other professions where either you make it or not (musicians, painters, actors, athletes) but there you're paid if you make it (e.g. you don't get Jack Nicholson salaries if you're nobody). And others like salespeople where one can easily be 4-10x better than another one, but in general they're paid mostly on commission.
I find hard to find another profession where people in a certain band are paid essentially the same but one can be a dead weight that needs to be told exactly what to do and another one is effectively operating at the next level and is ready for promotion.
MightyMustard@reddit
Then I can give an example easily… banking and financial institutions, or any kinda corporate business with big offices…all together making probably like the half of the workforce.
Don’t get me wrong. I love my job… but the exceptionalism the average IT professional has about IT industry is a bit silly. There is nothing unique to 90% (pulled out of my ass, but you know what I mean… except the minority of places where cutting edge things happen) of IT that is not happening somewhere else. 🤷♂️
Affectionate_Horse86@reddit
I'd be surprised if those banking positions where there could be a great difference in performance (which is not most of banking jobs) didn't have a pay structure that is not a relatively small base salary and a relatively large bonus component tied to performance, that differently from software, can be demonstrated with hard dollar numbers.
So you're right, there're professions where performance can vary (still unconvinced it is as much as in SWE where one can literally get a solution and another fail to get any solution, but let's concede the point). And we were discussing performance, so you're right. But variability of performance for roughly similar pay is something I find rather unique in SWE.
MightyMustard@reddit
I have a lot of friends in finance/banking, so I have a bit of insight.
(Admittedly this is not in US. But I don’t think it is that different over there)
A lot of them have payment scale based on position, and some bonus. But salary makes the competitive part. Yearly bonuses are provided based on performance however a lot of politics go into that.
For example: you can often get 5 in your performance one year and 3 next because they have filled the quota for people who can have 5.
So when it comes to variability of performance vs pay, it gets even worse because worse performers can actually get even higher pay sometimes because of office politics. It’s mad 😄
ddarrko@reddit
From a hiring manager that has until recently always kept interviews to one stage (not inc initial call with recruiter/HR)
There are SO many engineers who have impressive CVs and can talk the talk in the interview yet when you get to working with them make extremely junior mistakes or can't progress simple tickets without loads of feedback, let alone take on larger pieces of work.
I have been fighting the multi stage interview process for a long time but with AI tools making it even easier to perform at interview stage I cannot see a path forward without having more stringent practice.
I'm open to hearing other peoples suggestions but recently I hired someone with over 12 YOE. Pretty impressive CV - took ages to get himself set up locally - even though it is well documented. I asked his manager to keep an eye and forward me first few PRs. They all had 15/20 comments on basic things. One that really stuck out was they were doing a comparison on an ID which obviously may change between environments. Think isState(stateID) rather than isState(stateKeyName). How are you not considering that so far in?! Demonstrated a severe lack of seniority.
RighteousSelfBurner@reddit
The main problem is that IT is extremely broad category and experience in one company doesn't necessarily translate to another and you cannot evaluate skill levels based on that unless you are already familiar with the company they are coming from.
The more narrow your area of expertise, the more credentials you have and bigger your social circle the less of these barriers exist. And it still doesn't guarantee anything. My company recently turned away an extremely qualified professional because he had no experience in a critical skill we were looking for. And it wasn't really anyone's fault. While he was excellent our company currently doesn't have the financial capabilities to take up the risk of someone gaining that particular skill during the process as the average roll on time is half a year or more for it. Everything just sucks when the global situation is the way it is now.
SpookyLoop@reddit
Same, everything from serving coffee, from being weeks away from working on nuclear reactors.
I could, right now, literally cripple my business for months in under 5 minutes as a "SWE". I could never do something so damaging in any of my previous jobs.
Ultimately, I personally believe that the core issue is how flexible "SWE" is as a title, and how much trust SWEs are typically given. Until someone comes up with "sensible rules and regulations" that restrict what a "SWE" really means, I don't see any way to avoid the current"hiring problem".
Codex_Dev@reddit
Tbf, I have heard similar horror stories when there was a glut of teachers back around 2015-ish. I had friends who were competing against hundreds of other candidates and kept getting close to the finish line only to be rejected. It was also several rounds of interviews and any miscule mistakes would lead to immediate disqualification.
Job applications are basically the Tinder effect, on steroids.
drnullpointer@reddit
> What’s the point of credentials if they don’t mean anything?
Credentials do not work in software development.
I have met many candidates who had stellar "credentials" but simply couldn't program their way out of the paper bag.
I will never hire a person without seeing them code. Period.
BTW, I don't give take home tasks. I can't trust this is actually solved by the person and therefore I assume it brings exactly zero information for my interview process.
Own-Necessary4974@reddit
I love how coding skill is somehow simultaneously objective and meritocratic by skilled programmers and yet something too ephemeral that a test can’t possibly catch it.
It can’t be both.
drnullpointer@reddit
I am not saying coding skills are objective.
I am saying I can objectively say I would like or would not like to work with the person, based on spending some time actually working with them.
Own-Necessary4974@reddit
“I am saying I can objectively say…” - you’re literally being subjective. They’re slow and can’t keep up with you - maybe they’re slowing down for you because they told you something objectively accurate you didn’t understand.
drnullpointer@reddit
> They’re slow and can’t keep up with you - maybe they’re slowing down for you because they told you something objectively accurate which you didn’t understand or grasp.
Well, if they are too smart for me to understand them they wouldn't be happy with the job anyway.
Own-Necessary4974@reddit
I think the only point we disagree on here is that an objective measurement cannot exist. If you can write an algorithm to compute a factorial, and that thing runs on a machine on command given variable inputs, you have some objective measurement.
You can say pre-existing objective bars aren’t good enough. You can also say you’re actually more concerned about a cultural fit. But you can’t say an objective bar doesn’t exist. The industry simply isn’t trying.
bteam3r@reddit
The way to do take-homes (IMO) is to give a fairly simple task that can be completed numerous different ways. Then the next interview phase is having the candidate talk through the code. Have them explain why they made certain choices. If they didn't write the code themselves it will be extremely obvious.
I have gotten a few of my better jobs this way, and I now do it this way as the interviewer. Has worked great all around for me.
drnullpointer@reddit
I think before you start even trying ot figure out what's "the way" to do take-homes, you need to ask yourself "what I want to get from it". What's the value to your hiring process.
Once you put it this way you figure out there is no value to hiring process.
If this is a filtering step, people who want to pass the filter will pass the filter whether they have or do not have coding ability.
If this is to see if they can write quality code, candidates go as far as hire other people to do take homes for them. So you are not testing for their ability to code, you are testing for their desperation to get the job and resourcefulness at circumventing the quality gates.
For filtering, I just get the candidate asked couple simple questions. Stuff that is simple enough that I will not hire a person who can't answer the question.
For coding ability, I usually care about the process more than the result. I do pair programming session and have a conversation about the problem where we work together and the candidate writes code. This is essentially the same as working on a problem with your coworker -- you get the idea whether they are slow or fast to get things, whether they come up with solutions to problem, whether they can write clean code based on it, etc. And most importantly, there is no possibility for interference. I have ways to defeat any AI or outside help.
AnotherRandomUser400@reddit
Are you doing the pair programming sessions in person or remotely? I feel like more are going back to doing in person interviews in order to avoid AI cheating.
drnullpointer@reddit
I am doing interviews remotely.
There are ways to defeat AI cheating. First of all, I talk to the person. If they don't understand what they are talking about, no AI is going to help them.
Second, there are types of tasks that AI is currently unable to handle. For example, refactoring code to make it more pretty doing it in steps and explaining what it is doing. Or implementing a new feature that requires existing code to be refactored a bit.
polypolip@reddit
Dveloper that messes up can kill people too.
Easy entry, high salaries, very uneven education level make one developer not equal to another even with same amount of YoE. So no, cv on its own is not enough.
Own-Necessary4974@reddit
Software bugs have definitely killed people but the vast majority of people in the industry will never even see a code repo where that is possible.
Nuclear engineering on the other hand - that is possible for literally any and every application of knowledge in that field.
polypolip@reddit
well, no, because there should be systems in place, some of them probably developed by software developers, that should prevent this.
Own-Necessary4974@reddit
Any system in any discipline can be refined over time to become more perfect but no system in any discipline is perfect. This is especially true if you view any system through a destructive or adversarial lense - “what can I do intentionally to fuck this thing up?”
And everyone has adversaries.
Affectionate_Horse86@reddit
> Dveloper that messes up can kill people too.
mhh, not in the most typical cases. The vast majority of engineers don’t work on things that physically interact with people. Of the remaining, most things that interact with people don’t have the capability of killing people because of software errors. Of the remaining, multiple levels of scrutiny are in place. Sure you can find the MRI machine that delivered 10x the radiation and killed 6 people, but that was a systemic failure, not the fault of a single software engineer that could have been avoided with a stricter interview process.
polypolip@reddit
But in that case the point about nuclear engineer risking lives of multiple humans is moot because they have even more processes in place to prevent that.
Affectionate_Horse86@reddit
well, yes, two things can be wrong at the same time and one doesn't make the other right. But since here we were discussing software engineers and not nuclear engineers I commented on the most relevant one.
polypolip@reddit
I wouldn't have brought the responsibility part if the comment above me, to which I was responding, didn't bring it up.
SpookyLoop@reddit
As someone who nearly nearby went down the nuclear engineer route (almost went with US military, but health issues) this is just a short-sighted take.
My "work" would've put in jeopardy the love of multiple countries at stake, but surprise surprise, there are much stricter chains (multiple) of command and government regulations (multiple) in play to keep any sort of dumbass from making any sort of critical error.
That's not the case with this field.
It's really not. I really hate sounding like a corporate shill, but you need to try hiring your own devs for your own company if you want to understand why things are the way they are.
Infamous_Ruin6848@reddit
Wait. Can you be more clear what are you implying saying "why things are the way they are"?
SpookyLoop@reddit
We sit in an awkward middle ground between lawyers / doctors, vs. most of the STEM field.
I get why devs want to complain, most STEM fields are really chill, but the "field of SWE" moves much faster than "general STEM", and we're lucky to not have to take something like a bar exam in order to get a license to do what we do.
clotifoth@reddit
Other way around. Other fields have to take something like a bar exam in order to prove their credentials. They are lucky for the privilege - not us.
SpookyLoop@reddit
That take is insane.
You literally cannot practice law (build experience) which is the main thing that matters in any sort of field, without (usually) 7 years of school, and passing the bar exam which has a 40% failure rate.
And after all that, you still need to go through anywhere from 2-8 rounds of interviews, because guess what, a bad lawyer puts a lot of liability on any sort of company.
The OP is talking about three rounds, the comment I'm really at odds with is trying to make it out like 3 rounds is super unreasonable... Just... No...
RighteousSelfBurner@reddit
It all depends on the perspective. The grind for other professions are extremely front loaded and it takes a long time to accumulate credentials however they are consistent through the entire process. I find a lot of IT the barrier of entry isn't as high in comparison however the credentials are inconsistent for a long time until it reaches a critical mass.
SpookyLoop@reddit
I would need to clarify that "blind following blind" is a relatively fair take.
The hiring process is absolute ass (not a good experience for anyone involved).
Imagine you're given 96 hours (4 full days) to gauge whether or not a developer is going to stick around for a full year, and you needed to hit a 90% accuracy rate.
Is that reasonable? If you say "yes", you're delusional. If you say no, you've handled some amount of typical hiring.
(Probably most importantly) 3-4 rounds of interviews is very reasonable.
As someone who worked a lot of odd jobs, SWEs are pretty high up on the corporate ladder. I get that most of us want to be more "technical" and avoid "thinking like that", but the alternative is for all of us to be treated like fucking line cooks (no way for me to clarify this, IYKYK).
kitsunde@reddit
Every single time I’ve hired someone without a practical test I’ve ended up regretting it.
Degrees doesn’t mean much in software engineering outside of very junior positions and people lie and exaggerate all the time.
Talk is easy, doing is hard.
Haunting-Traffic-203@reddit
They fail the tasks on the “practical” because these love coding challenges make them cold start in an unfamiliar environment, without typical tooling or ability to reference, they have to hand type often with no linter, while the person across the table watching every keystroke and who has seen the same question 10 times in the last week jumps in to “help” if they pause for more than 10 seconds.
These types of interviews are like asking a 5 star chef to microwave a sandwich and rejecting him because he pulled the plate before the cheese melted.
kitsunde@reddit
Haunting-Traffic-203@reddit
Oh yeah sorry, it’s only that every single live coding circus (sorry “practical”) I’ve ever been subjected to (whether I’ve passed it or not) as well as every single one I’ve ever heard about is like this. And why every single person I’ve ever worked with who loves these can’t build anything useful. But yes, I’m sure yours is different. How arrogant and presuming of me.
Soham parekh was a master of these. I hope you hire him.
kitsunde@reddit
I’m not responding to this as having any sort of substance because you clearly are doing the worst reading of anything other people write, but it’s quite obvious your entire experience is from the being hired side and not from the hiring side where you need to also fire bad hires eventually.
You simply don’t have the experience to have this conversation, and you certainly won’t get it by crying about it to those that do either.
clotifoth@reddit
that’s a very arrogant and presumptuous response.
RighteousSelfBurner@reddit
To be fair so was yours. Making a very condescending and fairly insulting assumption about something you have no knowledge about is both arrogant and presumptuous. If you approach someone with disrespect it's not surprising you get rebuked.
chaoism@reddit
Well, really depends on how desperate you are
funbike@reddit
If you are desparate, would you rather do 7 take-homes over 7 days, or 1 take-home over 7 days?
Cahnis@reddit
If i am desperate i will do 7 take-homes over 7 days. Whatever it takes.
My first job I slept 4 hours per day doing a fullstack app take home during the mothers day weekend.
My second one too.
Here in Brazil these longer take-homes are somewhat the norm. I find it fascinating how the american market starts melting if they get a take home that take more than a few hours.
funbike@reddit
It's also an indication that they don't care about you. In some cases, they are even using you for free labor.
It's a huge red flag.
f1datamesh@reddit
Hi!
Afraid they are. After getting laid off, I interviewed at a bunch of companies, and I am talking very run of the mill ones. The fewest interviews I had was 4. The job I ended up taking - had 5, where they skipped the last one because I was away and they really wanted me to start on a certain date.
junglejon@reddit
They weren’t the normal before? I thought this was industry standard, not just FAANG.
IMovedYourCheese@reddit
I swear people have been spending too much time on Reddit and think that they should be able to walk into a $200K job after a 30 minute interview.
The process has always been: recruiter screen + phone screen + 5 on-site rounds, usually 45-60 mins each. Nowadays some companies throw in a take home test as well.
Own-Necessary4974@reddit
No - it hasn’t always been that. Google made that format popular and everyone followed them like a bunch of lemmings even though there is absolutely zero empirical / academic evidence that this format is in any way better than a simple background check.
ParadiceSC2@reddit
Academic evidence? Lmao
IMovedYourCheese@reddit
Microsoft was doing it well before Google, and IBM was doing it before Microsoft. The tech industry is older than most people here.
Own-Necessary4974@reddit
I worked at IBM almost 20 years ago. It absolutely was not like that.
Giving Google the benefit of a doubt, in the early days of the internet they needed HTML programmers and schools didn’t teach it. Right now, the only technology that nascent is LLMs and no - I don’t mean everyone learning about agentic programming on Coursera - I’m talking about someone that could literally build, maintain, and enhance an LLM.
That said, most of the technology is not nascent and almost everyone starts with python, java, then a focus on backend or front end stack based on interest. It’s been like this for decades.
There is no reasonable justification for paying your engineers to come up with a novel test for how to build implement factory pattern in Java.
Affectionate_Horse86@reddit
Not always, but it has been this way for at least 20 years in the US and I’d say a bit less in Europe, I suspect it is the same there too (haven’t interviewed or lived there in a long time, so I might be wrong for Europe)
tommyk1210@reddit
I’d say this is a very American thing. Typically here in the U.K. it’s a screening interview, then a technical interview with competency questions (usually with a coding task), and then sometimes a final interview with the CTO/VPEng/HoE
nigirizushi@reddit
It wasn't always 4-5 on site interviews. It has been for 5-10 years maybe m
Etiennera@reddit
Long enough that nobody should be surprised. I wonder why anyone expects just 1 interview?
Even non-tech has increased the number of interviews. In general, companies want to measure multiple times and take an average, while also having more chances for finding red flags. As well, businesses have realized that it is better to miss out on a good candidate than accidentally hire a bad one.
BenOfTomorrow@reddit
It’s been a standard for over 20 years at least. Source: every interview I’ve done before 2020.
IMovedYourCheese@reddit
I interviewed in tech 15 years ago and every company had an onsite round with 5 interviews. And back then you had to physically go to their HQ, so it was an all day affair. In most of them I had to write code on a whiteboard.
nigirizushi@reddit
They flew you out for a day, but I've never seen the 5 interview loops anyway
drcforbin@reddit
This has been common for the decades I've been in software. Are people conflating N onsite interviews with N whole trips onsite, rather than meeting with N people/groups of people in the one trip?
junglejon@reddit
Could be regional, def been more than 10 years here (in FAANG country)
ElasticSpeakers@reddit
I think the actual issue is the week+ long take home projects, then 8+ hours of group projects on top of the interviews, not the interview process itself.
junglejon@reddit
Ya, the take home addition is newer to me, as are the code screenings. Used to be more white board coding and talking through algorithms
nsxwolf@reddit
Early in my career it was 1 interview.
Tacos314@reddit
this,
alien3d@reddit
not normal. Think logic , if they can wait 6 month for interview process.What really their project ?How urgent is it ?
Castyr3o9@reddit
It’s been this way for 10 years at competitive companies, your small dev shops not until maybe 5 years ago when the industry began to get saturated with lower skill devs.
socialist-viking@reddit
They're the old normal. I've been looking for work for 5 years, and every bullshit startup wants rounds and rounds of interviews. Slack makes you do a whole take-home project, which I did but I wised up and stopped doing them after that because they're pointless. So many 8-round interviews only to get ghosted because I'm too old. The new normal is to bail on me half an hour before the first interview, but at least that saves me the trouble of talking to people for hours for a job that will magically disappear once they realize I'm over 50.
opx22@reddit
I’m guessing you already tried contracting?
socialist-viking@reddit
I have been contracting, but the person who gets me the work doesn't get me enough and my other major client had two ceos die in one year and shut down. I bid on government jobs at the county level, but those have a two-year lead time and getting one is like getting struck by lightning. I was one day away from signing a deal with a health dept in another state, then trump happened.
opx22@reddit
I see. I had a coworker get laid off a year ago who is around your age and lives in a dead zone for IT work (Green Bay) so I was curious. Does it have anything to do with the company you’re contracting through or do you just have a very specific skill set?
skidmark_zuckerberg@reddit
Yeah, can’t think of any job in the last 7 years where I didn’t have less than 2 rounds. My current job was a recruiter phone screen, a 1 hour chat with our CTO and direct engineering manager, a 1-2 hour technical discussion with a couple lead developers, followed by a 1 hour live coding session and then finally a 1 hour discussion with the CEO and a couple other stakeholders. This was in 2021, a time when getting interviews was as easy as opening up LinkedIn.
These are usually highly paid jobs, and I’ve always found the effort in interviews correlates with that. I think IT interviews may be a bit outdated, but even so, I wouldn’t expect to spend less than a couple hours interviewing for a 6 figure job.
Xsiah@reddit
Supply and demand problem. If they have lots of candidates then they will need to add more steps to weed more people out.
That said, I don't work on mobile, but it seems like a whole app in a weekend is too big of an ask
BertRenolds@reddit
I don't work in mobile.
I yolo'd an app in 4 hours with AI.. it's completely unmaintainable and I have no idea how it works tbh
opx22@reddit
When my on-dev coworkers make (lighthearted) jokes about AI replacing me, I always challenge them to write and deploy an app with ChatGPT lol
BertRenolds@reddit
It's entirely possible. It's also possible with Google.
opx22@reddit
It’s also entirely possible I win the lottery
sortinousn@reddit (OP)
AI for mobile dev has come a long way but is still way off. A lot of boiler plate spaghetti code.
BertRenolds@reddit
Yeah, but I can now make apps for myself easily.
Bobby-McBobster@reddit
This is 7.5 hours of interviewing, it's insane. You'll get less to be hired in any FAANG.
commonsearchterm@reddit
Based off what your putting up with already you might as well try those too. Big companies usually have their shit together as far as hiring goes.
Maktube@reddit
This is defs true on average, so not arguing, but funny story: the one time I interviewed with Google, I didn't get an offer. The recruiter and a friend who worked there at the time both told me that it was a very close thing and they ended up saying no because they thought I probably was a good candidate, but they "didn't get good signal" from one of the four technical interviews.
The reason that they "didn't get good signal" from that interview was because neither the interviewer, nor the receptionist he called, nor the maintenance guy the receptionist called, nor the building security person the maintenance guy called could figure out how to open the door to the interview room. But also, no one wanted to just use a different room. So we spent 40 of the ~50 minutes on that.
And I don't mean that they didn't have the key. The door did not have a place where you could use the key. I literally mean they could not figure out how to open the door. Apparently they had changed out the locks in this building recently, and no one on the premises knew how the new ones worked.
I'm not going to lie, when the recruiter called me and told me that "we didn't get good signal" from that interview, I was very tempted to be like, "but we did, didn't we? Just maybe not about me."
Affectionate_Horse86@reddit
> they could not figure out how one was intended to open the door
seems like it could have been THE interview question and they were waiting for you to open the door or propose alternatives :-) and actually it wouldn’t be half bad as an interview question.
Dyledion@reddit
I think I'm up to round 5, currently.
Rymasq@reddit
I just finished with a company and it was 3 rounds, but it was a fair 3 rounds.
It used to be 2 rounds, and those 2 rounds were usually a phone screen and then an in person, but the in person was meeting with a ton of people across a longer session.
FIREstopdropandsave@reddit
3 rounds is not terrible, but 6 hours of coding across two rounds like you shared is completely unreasonable.
ButchersBoy@reddit
4 hours coding, plus 2 hours coding? Just no.
The_Real_Slim_Lemon@reddit
What a stitch up - HR wasting a dozen work hours of different people in the company to tick a box. I’ve changed jobs twice this year - a lot of companies did the 3-4 interview thing, my current job is like halfway to FAANG and had a two interview process:
A call with their HR girl, an interview with the tech lead (actually the head of engineering, lead was on maternity) followed by an interview with some seniors I’d be working with - then I had a contract. Didn’t write a single line of code till I was in office
casualPlayerThink@reddit
To have 3+ rounds (or rather, 5+) is quite standard, unfortunately - in the EU, in the past 5 years.
No-District2404@reddit
We are at a point where your degrees, previous experiences, your references do not matter at all. They simply ignore your all past all they care about if you can answer their questions the way that they want to hear. If you can solve some stupid leetcode questions under stress with the perfect algorithm which you would never use that kind of algorithm in their real codebase. The whole sector is broken
keyboardsoldier@reddit
What? Even before I became a dev, any sort of corporate job would have 3, one with HR, one with the hiring manager, one with the manager's manager.
orturt@reddit
The number of interviews sounds standard. The 4 hour pair programming session on that list is a bit much though.
nasanu@reddit
Its not normal to only have 3 rounds, usually its 8+.
Easy-Philosophy-214@reddit
Usually: screening call, live coding/test, take home and last call which is just formality. I'd say that's the minimum. For certain roles like freelance it might be much easier.
wigum211@reddit
3+ rounds is very normal. A 4 hour live coding exercise would have me immediately pulling out though.
BeachNo8367@reddit
Any more then one coding test I'll pass.
MrEs@reddit
In my 19 years as a dev, I've always had 3 round interviews, yes.
texruska@reddit
3 rounds is borderline reasonable these days
Anxious-Possibility@reddit
I've been doing 4-5🫠
TornadoFS@reddit
4 interviews is not unusual (I would even say it is the norm and would be suspicious if I didn't get at least 3 rounds), but 5-hour long one is very unnusual. Usually it is 30min to 2 hour long each, the shorter ones done remotely most of the time.
ZunoJ@reddit
Unlimited PTO but only 12 weeks paid parental leave?
Packeselt@reddit
Yes
Scared_Astronaut9377@reddit
Google and meta interviews are ridiculous and yet you spend a week on a take home loooool
Aromatic-Low-4578@reddit
You all are convincing me to stay at my current job.
opx22@reddit
Yeah that interview process seems awful.
Particular-Cloud3684@reddit
Shit it took 5 interviews at my current company and they're not even a tech company lol.
opx22@reddit
It took one phone screen and 2 in person interviews for me. The coding part took me 15 minutes to finish. Non tech, good salary and bi-yearly bonuses, sign on bonus, super flexible hours, nobody tracks my vacation days. I know tech jobs are super cool but I dont know if I can go back lol
MightyMustard@reddit
I am surprised at “what do you expect? It should be 5 steps. It is not” comments honestly. Some of you have never worked in none-coding highly technical fields and it shows. IT interviews are extremely bloated.
jpec342@reddit
This looks like a little more than average, but pretty close to standard.
Non-taken-Meursault@reddit
I've always been in 3 round interview processes. 1 week assignments though? Go fck yourself. I completely understand that you need to assess my level and I also prefer async coding tasks. I'll dedicate max three nights to your assessments.
fragglet@reddit
Stop doing unpaid work for companies. Take-home assignments are bad enough but the fact you did a week long coding project is insane.
PaulTR88@reddit
Tell them TensorFlow Lite is called LiteRT now for me.
GammaGargoyle@reddit
Yes, it’s a professional, highly skilled job, it’s not like applying at McDonald’s or something.
nsxwolf@reddit
McDonald’s is 7 rounds now.
Beneficial_Map6129@reddit
standard for me in big tech is 1 recruiter call, 1-2 45min technical phone interviews, 1 onsite of maybe 2 leetcode, 1 design, 1 Hiring Manager "values" screen
janyk@reddit
3 rounds, while still too much, has been normal for like the past 10 years at least. It's 5, 6, 7 rounds that people are complaining about.
ndm250@reddit
This looks light tbh
lastPixelDigital@reddit
In my experience, it's common for any job in tech, start up or not.
I think for entry level positions there should definitely be less tho.
Main-Eagle-26@reddit
Yep. Been that way for a long time. 3-4 person loops after a tech screen are standard.
Human-Kick-784@reddit
If the role demands a take home exam requiring more than 3h, you're being duped into doing free labor.
Walk away from those ones.
I'd be clear with hiring managers that you're currently interviewing for multiple potential roles and that you will not have time for a full set of exhaustive interviews; make it clear your happy for a take home, a technical interview, and 1 or 2 face to faces, but that is IT.
Value your time. Be clear, calm and upfront about your expectations. It's fine to have them as an applicant and it WILL make you look more professional and stand out. Worst case they say no and you save yourself a bunch of time.
Choles2rol@reddit
I don’t think any company arbitrarily requiring a degree is worth it. I realize when you’re unemployed you just need a job but in a better market companies like this miss out on the best talent.