Never do more than 3 interviews. And thatâs assuming theyâre relatively short, maybe 1 hour apiece. Any more than that, and they donât want you bad enough.
Comment on đŁđŁđŁ
model_tar_gz@lemmy.world â¨3⊠â¨days⊠ago
I took an interview like this before. I checked the vast majority of the boxes of technologies used, and experience in a specific type of processing models prior to deployment. Thought it was bagged and tagged mine. 4 rounds of interviews, two technical rounds and a system design.
Asked me some hyper-specific question about X and wanted a hyper-specific implementation of Z technology to solve the problem. The way I solved it would have worked, but it wasnât the X they were looking for.
Turns out the guy interviewing me at the second tech interview round was the manager of the guy he wanted in the roleâand the guy working for him already was the founder of the startup that commercialized X, and they just needed to check a box for corporate saying theyâd done their diligence looking for a relevant senior engineer.
That fucking company put me through the wringer for that bullshit. 4 rounds of interviews.
Never again.
sirblastalot@ttrpg.network â¨2⊠â¨days⊠ago
model_tar_gz@lemmy.world â¨1⊠â¨day⊠ago
I donât know if I agree with that. Having been on the hiring side of the table more than a few times.
Hiring a new employee is a risk; especially when youâre hiring at a senior enough level where the wrong decisions are amplified as the complexity of the software growsâand it becomes far more expensive to un/redo bad architectural decisions.
And the amount of time it takes for even an experienced engineer to learn their way around your existing stack, understand the reasons for certain design decisions, and contribute in a way thatâs not disruptiveâthatâs like 6 months minimum for some code bases. More if thereâs crazy data flows and weird ML stuff. And if theyâre âfull stack (backend and frontend) then itâs gonna be even longer before you see how good of a hiring decision you really made. For a $160k+/yr senior dev role, thatâs $80k (before benefits and other onboarding costs) before you really expect to see anything really significant.
So you schedule as many interviews as you need to get a feel for what they can do, because false negatives are way less expensive than false positives.
Sometimes people can be cunning: charm, wow annd woo their way past even the savviest of recruiters with the right combinations of jargon patterns.
Sometimes they can even fool a technical round interviewer.
4-5 interviews (esp. if the last is an onsite in which youâll meet many) seems to be about the norm in my field. Even if it kinda sucks for the person looking for the job.
sirblastalot@ttrpg.network â¨1⊠â¨day⊠ago
Yeah, it saves you moneyâŚby costing the prospective employee. Thereâs only so much we can or should be willing to give up for free, and itâs 3 interviews.
I also question if more than that is really improving the quality of your hires. Far more often, multiple interviews are more a symptom of bureaucracy; multiple managers insisting that they get to stick their fingers in the pie, rather than actually learning anything more meaningful about the candidate.
model_tar_gz@lemmy.world â¨1⊠â¨day⊠ago
Iâve rejected someone on their 4th round beforeâ1st round with me. That candidate had managed to convince the recruiter that they had the chops for a staff engineer (>$200k/yr!) and passed two coding rounds before mine, testing knowledge of relevant techs on our stackâat this level of role, you have to know this coming in; table stakes.
I was giving the systems design round. Asked them to design something that was on their resumeâthey couldnât. Theyâd grossly misrepresented their role/involvement in that project and since they were interviewing for a staff level role, high-level design is going to be a big part of it and will impact the product and development team in significant ways. No doubt theyâd been involved in implementing, and can codeâbut it was very clear that they didnât understand the design decisions that were made and I had no confidence that they would contribute positively in our team.
Sucks for them to be rejected, but one criteria we look for is someone who will be honest when they donât knowâand we do push to find the frontiers of their knowledge. We even instruct them to just say it when they donât know and we can problem-solve together. But a lot of people have too much ego to accept that, but we donât have time for people like that on the team either.
Look, I get what youâre saying and clearly Iâve been on the wrong end of it too, but if we make a bad hiring decision, it costs not just the candidate their job but also the team and company they work on can get into a bad place too. What would you do in that situation? Just hire them anyway and risk the livelihood of everyone else on the team? Thatâs a non-starter; try to see a bigger picture.
model_tar_gz@lemmy.world â¨2⊠â¨days⊠ago
⌠come to think of it now, I would have played ball with them if theyâd just been transparent about the situation upfront. It was good interview practice and in retrospect prepared me well for the interviews at my current role. And Iâm way happier with this company than I wouldâve been there.
The Universe does funny things.