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Comment by StupidUser123 | Hacker News Reader

I’m a HM at a big tech company with this format as well. Honestly, I really like it. I don’t want to hire the wrong person, it’s expensive and it makes my job awful for a while. It’s great getting data points on several programming interviews, system design, etc. That makes my sell interview so much easier because I can trust the process to assess their technical skills. You need multiple people because you’re constantly training up new people and need to calibrate everyone fairly.

Scaling any process to thousands of people is always hard.

Is it annoying for candidates? Yeah, but we pay you a lot of money, and it does actually work for us. Is it perfect? No, but it does work.

“Hire and Fire fast” doesn’t actually work well if you want to give people a chance to succeed. Also people tend to keep low performers around too long. Best to avoid this as much as possible.

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People get PIP’ed and fired routinely that make it through this process. I think there’s a lot of bias in your response. The process worked for you, you work at a large tech company and it gives you validation. It also makes you feel good to lord over the process and boosts your ego, reinforcing your priors.

> People get PIP’ed and fired routinely that make it through this process.

Compared to what? I don’t think anyone is claiming this process is perfect. Just that it’s better than alternatives.

People will always get PIP’d and fired. But the goal is to reduce that as low as possible.

how is it better than alternatives? this seems like a huge straw-man given almost every company that hires developers thinks they’re a large tech company and mimics their hiring process. it doesn’t seem like serious alternatives have been explored.

PIPing and firing is a huge time and emotional energy suck, and it sucks for people on both sides. To reduce the amount it happens is worthy. You can’t in practice just say, “this guy sucks, lets fire him next week”

And it shows, barely anyone in my entire career has ever been fired. I only personally have been close to one.

So you’ve been close to one person getting fired? How do you have an opinion on the PIP process or firing at all if you have next to no experience with it?

I knew a guy at a FAANG who earned himself and his report a PIP for the grave sin of choosing the wrong deputy to send upstairs while he was on vacation. The deputized person went to one meeting and ran his mouth (arguably, told the truth). Both are no longer at the company.

PIP politics are absolutely routine in FAANG and if you’re arguing the other side you don’t know. FAANG is actively trying to fire or replace you at all times. I’ve worked at two so I can’t speak for three, but I’ve also worked for the two in that older acronym that you’d think of as the “nicest”. People read that that and probably hear me saying “giant evil entity is out to get you”, but it’s really middle managers cosplaying Kings Landing in the office, mostly unchecked, that does it.

Seriously; people want to work at a FAANG/MAMAA or whatever so they often assume it’s good. I had someone ask me if I noticed how light my calendar was now that the org considered me irrelevant. There’s an idea that FAANG is a bunch of nerds with glasses cooking up cool shit in a Zen commune with ambient drone music but it’s honestly some of the worst office politics I’ve ever seen across what is now two careers, and the PIP process is a big tool in that kit.

I worked at a FAANG for 3 years and I'm pretty sure no one I worked with was on a PIP. A PIP is extreme. It's sufficient to simply not give people raises, most people can and will easily find another job earning 10% more.

How would you really know? People don't usually talk publicly about their PIP.

I went from long time IC to manager at a faang adjacent company. It was eye opening to see who was on a PIP and go through calibrations.

There were well liked, competent people who others on the team got along with but they just were not delivering at the expected level. Sometimes the problem was lack of motivation or bad role fit.

> but they just were not delivering at the expected level. Sometimes the problem was lack of motivation or bad role fit.

Another i think is when management doesn't understand that someone is, in your wording, a "well liked, competent person", doesn't adequately understand what they bring to the team. Performance reviews, especially of ICs but not exclusively, have a bias towards perceived individual contribution and against teamwork.

Um, this is an antonymous forum, wouldn't you expect many comments from people that were PIPed if it was a very common thing?

Sure, but that doesn't give you any information about your particular company or team. In my experience, how aggressive companies are about "performance management" (using PIPs but this can also include other strategies like layoffs and outright firing) varies quite a lot.

I've worked at a FAANG for almost 5 years. I know probably a dozen or two people who have been PIP'd. I even know one guy who was PIP'd twice and then left when he was given his third PIP.

This sounds awful. Disrespectful. Glad I never worked for a FAANG.

The smartest person I ever met at Google got PIP'ed, and a few of the engineers from my vintage did as well.

Been at one of FAANG for a few years. Never saw this play out. Sounds like something that is more likely to happen on the management side than it is the IC side…

Most ICs are pretty well insulated from this, because if they understood what went on at calibration a lot of good contributors would become pretty bitter.

Thank goodness ICs never see the top-level calibration with the executives. It's the most insane, ill-informed drive-by management I've ever experienced.

I had a lot of managers and higher level ICs explain calibration and rage quit (although it was long overdue) after an unfairly low review. There were extreme politics happening at the time that the current ED laid out to me in an exit conversation, and most of it came into play. I should have made way more money off of my contributions than I did but didn't play politics, and honestly, given my role and position could not. I was a resource and not a player:)

FINALLY someone on this thread that understands politics and freaking understands that human beings are not spherical and frictionless.

> PIPing and firing is a huge time and emotional energy suck, and it sucks

So is the 7 interview gauntlet. But I guess it just shifts the burden on the candidates and externalizes cost.

Cost externalization is the entire basis of businesses/corporations these days it seems.

Maybe it was always that way though

I think it has gotten better in some areas. Sales processes used to be brutal for buyers. Pricing today is more transparent in general.

It also selects for people who will put up with anything, which to a cynical manager might sound like a good employee, except that our job is to replace labor with machines.

People who put up with anything are expensive. They keep billing you hours for tasks that could have been reduced to minutes by someone with a lower tolerance for BS.

It's probably also selecting for people who are unemployed and therefore much more able to attend the entire gauntlet than those already employed.

How would this really be possible while currently employed, kids, real deliverables?

To some extent, perhaps it's analogous to poor vs. rich people buying boots. Someone living paycheck to paycheck can only afford cheap boots, so they wear out quickly. Someone with money to spare can afford the high quality boots, and they last years.

Similarly, someone with a flexible, relatively good job is more easily able to look around and find an even better opportunity.

On the other hand, it takes some courage and risk tolerance to step out from the day to day grind and find something better, even if it could ruffle some feathers. That's not something that comes naturally to most people. Break some eggs to make an omelette.

I would think the opposite is more likely.If you are employed, there is no pressure. You may go through 12 interviews for a 12 different jobs and be only so slightly offended. For the unemployed, time is most likely ticking, if not financially, at least emotionally. A relative slowness at any step of the process affects the unemployed mindset. Stress alone lowers interview performance, especially on the soft skills side. I would guess that more people in the employed pool make it through.

If you're employed it's more likely you don't have time for 12 interviews because you're working.

True but being employed goes a long way to giving the perception that you are employable so in the cases that the decision is a toss-up between an unemployed person and an employed one I’d be willing to bet the employed one wins almost every time.

So what its a circle jerk of people putting up with BS, then going through BS again because they did so well the first time?

I mean, maybe their other job isn't doing great, because they clearly have all this time to interview, wonder what is going to happen when they join your company...

exactly my point, well said for me :)

You do have time. those interviews are scattered across multiple weeks, if you work place doesn't let you take a couple of hours of working hours away for personal matters, you got to quit even before having a lined up job as you don't want to stay there for far more important reasons than inability to take even 5 interviews

There might not be pressure, but you have to schedule time away from your current job to take interviews.

I swear some of you have had terrible work experiences. I've been an engineer for the last 20 years. The first time I tried being manager, I sucked and it sucked. (I definitely sucked more because the place sucked but I wasn't great.) That was a decade ago though and I've gradually stepped back into management because I've had great leadership and learned a ton along the way. My primary goal as a manager is to ensure the team is happy and healthy, so that they are able to work effectively. Our hiring process supports this by ensuring we're not hiring dead weight, toxic people or engineers that can't provide value and drag the team down.

Where do you people work because I'd like to (a) avoid it and (b) poach people because your world view sucks and I can only assume that's a direct response to a shit environment.

To put it into perspective, my first 1:1 with everyone on the team includes questions like "what have previous managers done to help you be successful?" Managing people can be difficult but managers shouldn't be.

Or it selects for easy going people with patience, grit or humility, which seem like positive traits. It is true that companies tend to only hire the suckers that complete their full interview process.

My current company ambushed me with a full interview panel, Gilligan's Island style, when a former coworker invited me to come in for a 3 hour tour. I took it in stride and had fun, and it gave me some additional leverage while negotiating compensation. I remember writing an architecture doc and unit tests when they asked me to code something in an hour and a half. I've been there 6 years and it's been most rewarding for me and my family.

My first job out of school was a solid 8 hours of interviews, and I had a lot of fun during that interview too. I got to work on space ships, and in time made a fortune in equity. I remember preparing a presentation slide deck completely in valid C++ syntax. I also remember taking a red-eye after that interview for another 8 hours of interviews at another company, which I also enjoyed despite having only had 4 hours of sleep.

The 2nd company I worked for decided last minute to interview me for two different roles. That was like 11 hours of interviews. I actually ended up taking the 2nd role because it was a significantly better fit. I brought a large cast iron skillet to that interview, which was a nice ice breaker.

It's true that I put up with a lot of frustrating tasks without complaining, but I personally have zero tolerance for BS. It turns out that the more I push back on BS within an organization, the more I tend to get paid, so in that sense I suppose I am expensive!

What's with the skillet?

One of the interview sessions was with an industrial designer. Seemed silly to me as a software engineer but what do I know. Leading up to the interview, they asked me to bring in a photo of something I thought had elegant design. After brian storming for not very long I decided on my skillet, and I thought it would be more fun to bring it along. When they asked for my photo, I pulled it out and plopped it on the table. After the initial WTF moment, we had a lengthy and interesting discussion about the merits of cast iron cook wear. All the subsequent interviews started with, "why is there a cast iron skillet?"

Going through TSA with a cast iron skillet in your carry-on is actually pretty fun because it's impossible for the screener not to giggle. I've also gone through airport security with a 20lb printed circuit board with about 90% copper fill, which surprisingly got less scrutiny.

Having something fun to make your interview memorable seems to go over well. I got selected for an internship because I showed up to the "interview" in a Hawaiian shirt. Apparently every other candidate showed up in a suit. We were meeting at a coffee shop on a college campus, so I just dressed for the environment.

In my experience, it seems to take a company about 1-1.5 years to fire someone that's well intended but ineffective in their role. 15 or so "wasted" person-hours up front is well worth avoiding thousands of wasted person-hours, especially considering maybe 1 in 5 candidates that make it to a full interview are a good fit.

How do we know this isn’t blind faith and the numbers are “made up”?

Other than fiat wealth generation, what gains are there to treating each other like this?

I'm not sure what you mean? Are you suggesting that companies shouldn't avoid hiring unqualified people that generate less value than their cost on average?

I’m dubious that companies can accurately measure ability or performance, either in the interview process or on the job.

Have you ever been in a job or taken a class with other people and not been able to see the different between the more competent and more incompetent people?

Indeed. Experienced interviewers can size up a candidate in the first 10 minutes and fairly accurately predict how their debrief will go. The rest of the interviews are just building up confidence, and making sure there's enough redundancy to tolerate the occasional bungle or accidental awkwardness. Folk get hired all the time despite getting imperfect interviewer feedback. I've had interviews where the first 45 minutes were painful but then the candidate blew me away in the last 15 minutes.

Yes, but I only see facets of their performance. And I’m only interested in specific areas, and might be blind to other talents or issues. They might be the brightest bulb in the training class, but spend all their day reading hacker news and creating memes.

It’s very difficult to quantify individual performance, and even harder to put a dollar figure on it.

This is one of those things I stupidly thought I understood when I was a Jr. Engineer, and now understand quite a bit differently after decades have gone by.

The more competent people weren’t necessarily the ones getting more things done, or the most visible, but were those engineers who understood the long term implications of what they were building, how it related to the business, and their relationship to other teams and customers. It’s trivial to be a good “performer” toiling away on a feature or system that shouldn’t exist. It’s exponentially harder to have the awareness to identify where the real problems are, and make sure you’re investing effort where it actually needs to go.

Re: experience and working hard vs. working on what the project needs, that's definitely a trait of more seasoned engineers. I'd say it's a matter of learning strategy over tactics. I've gotten pretty good at that balance over the years. When I came into my current project I focused on aspects of the software that had been sorely neglected before me, and plenty of folk where skeptical for the first year or so. Now in hindsight the results speak for themselves, and it's apparently become a story of legend that my coworkers tell new hires.

Last week I had fully intended to spend at least 20 hours heads down coding, but instead I spent the entire work week writing and updating an architecture document. It was the best use of my time, though, as it allowed two other people to be heads down coding instead. Now this week it's three of us frantically writing code instead of just me, and we all know the final result will work and be boring. We're replacing a 7 year old piece of critical infrastructure.

Research into who brings value, what technologies improve efficiency, has been inconclusive. The models end up with so many variables the conclusions are meaningless; any one parameter is insufficient, all the parameters needed mean no one parameter is greater than another. How can a value assessment being useful given all the required context that also has to exist? Is it a measure of value or traditional human bias?

Humans are prone to group think, belief in words of power, sigils; why believe in unfalsifiable value assessment when it comes down to tried and true ownership?

If traditional politics win at the end of the day why the belief this matrix of value isn’t just another cognitive boondoggle?

I think there's a bit of a misunderstanding in what interviewers are testing for. Interviewers at most companies aren't trying to evaluate or quantify a candidate's inherent value or general technical prowess. They're trying to determine whether or not the candidate can help solve immediate and real problems that the company has, while also trying to get a sense of whether the candidate has the potential to grow with the company long term.

There's very little science in interviewing, and it is indeed heavily based on heuristics. The whole point of lots of interviews is to reduce bias. Unfortunately, it's possible for candidates to mistakenly think an interview went poorly because they didn't get the answer right away, when from the interviewer's point of view it was one of the best answers they've heard because of the process by which the candidate arrived on the answer.

A popular metric for whether a candidate is likely to be able to solve practical problems is whether or not they've shipped products before. A lot of people pad out their resume with collective achievements, though, and so it's something that needs to be dug into. It's unfortunately not uncommon for folk to not understand the stuff on their own resume.

There is no misunderstanding on my part.

I never consented to this culture. I see little different here than a church, meat based tape recorders thinking the noises they emit are “the way” with little proof except “feudal capitalism” continues to “work”.

We don’t owe deference and agency to CEOs, VCs, and founders. The syntax is different but the LARP of being sheep for “wise men” is the same.

Only 13% of the country has an advanced degree (mine is MSc in math earned in the 90s; I’m old) and knowledge is not locked away in those heads. Education does not make people infallible and omniscient.

This is a result of traditional political memes; owners rule, everyone else drools. The filtering and sorting inside that cognitive bubble is just the proles making proles dance like jesters. No scientific theory makes this the one true way of organizing effort.

Memorizing semantics is not proof they’re correct. If GME can be shorted to the extent it is despite that being illegal, our institutions are built on deference to BS, since that system is the bedrock used to prop up tech VCs.

You seem extremely jaded, and the way you speak about religion is rather boorish in my opinion.

I enjoy living in and participating in a society. Thanks to the productivity gains of specialization and free trade, technology has been developed to the point that I spend my days designing embedded software to fly autonomous aircraft. Those aircraft deliver medical supplies, primarily in developing countries with poor road infrastructure. At least a few people a week don't die specifically because a UAV I helped make was able to deliver them a blood transfusion. The company is for-profit, and in exchange for my work I am compensated in salary and in equity. The better the company does, the more people have access to life saving medical care, and the more money I personally make. The UAV system also requires people to operate them, and so the company employs hundreds of people in those developing countries. One of the earliest and most tenacious in-country employees quit a couple years ago because they got accepted to a robotics program at Stanford.

The last employee I personally managed the hiring of only had a couple years of community college experience and self-proclaimed ADHD. Despite my intent for them to only spend 6 hours or so on the interview process, they spent probably 16 hours because they found the interview process itself personally rewarding.

The company CEO drives a crappier car than everyone else at the office. By coincidence, I had a serious problem last week that required intervention, and I quite literally made the CEO dance like a jester for me in order to make a point. There was no scientific theory involved.

I'm right there with you regarding the corruption of most financial and government institutions. I don't think it's as black and white as "capitalism bad", though.

"If GME can be shorted to the extent it is despite that being illegal"

Shorting is only illegal if it's naked. When I ask people who say this what they mean, the answer is usually that the shorting must be naked because so many shares are being shorted. But that isn't how that works. If you have other evidence though, I'd certainly be interested.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/01/28/yes-a-stock-can-ha...

Here’s my investment advice; go back to the late 90s, load up on tech, use the gains to dabble in btc, use those gains to retire by 40.

Worked for me.

I know how the boring numbers game works and optimized for it. I’m being honest instead of equivocating in Anglo-babble reasons why a process is an acceptable measure for filtering some people. To see poetry in this is a bit weird. It’s the same old fundamental arithmetic operations applied to different geometry. Pretty routine for us been there done that’s.

15 extra hours * N candidates per opening * M people onboarded per additional marginal employee discovered.

Picking numbers from a hat say 15 * 7 * 20 = 2,100 unproductive hours to avoid a subpar employee that still actually gets something done in the ~3,000 hours before being fired. That could easily be a net loss depending on how much onboarding time is needed and how unproductive they are on average.

Honestly, I think those numbers may be overly generous to long onboarding processes.

shrug hiring the wrong person into an engineering role is incredibly expensive and painful for organizations with a long term outlook. It cancels out the productivity of at least one good engineer, and stresses out at least 3 people.

I've been a hiring manager before, and hiring good people is a huge time investment. The reality is that something like 99% of applicants aren't qualified, and the majority seemingly lack enough self-awareness to know it. The really good people also tend to be bad at marketing themselves. I don't think of interviews as a waste of time, though, even when it's a no-hire.

> 2,100 unproductive hours to avoid a subpar employee

You also need to factor in the odds of this whole process working.

There’s not a whole lot of empirical research that measures the correlation between the interview process and employee performance.

And of course, employee performance measurement is as dubiously effective as ever.

There is a lot of empirical research, but it’s internal to companies.

I know multiple FAANG companies that track this data.

I am still fixing up the code of a developer from five years ago who was there for two years prior to me. He had ideas about how things should work and completely disagreed with the conventions of every framework.

And so, every time I go in a section of code to fix a bug or adjust a feature and I see his name in git blame... I spend another few hours to make sure that I'm not breaking some of the twisted framework code that he had and possibly fix it up a bit and adding a unit test for the functionality before I touch anything to assure myself that I know what it is doing.

An unproductive poor employee is bad... a productive bad employee is where the real problems are for years and years to follow.

The question is how likely a longer interview process with avoid such employees not that they have a cost.

In your case code reviews could have caught the issue early before it became such a problem. Though obviously they also have a cost.

I don't think a longer interview process is strictly necessary to avoid hiring unqualified people. Rather, a longer interview process helps to hire more people while maintaining high standards. Individual interview sessions go poorly all the time for silly reasons. If a candidate only had one interview session and botched it, they're probably done. If they had several sessions and botched one but showed excellence in another, they would still have a good chance of getting an offer.

"it seems to take a company about 1-1.5 years to fire someone"

Well maybe thats the actual problem the company should be fixing?

If someone is working hard and trying to make it work, the rest of the team is going to try and make it work too. A seemingly good rule of thumb is to start seriously considering firing someone the moment the thought enters your head. Typically by the time you're having those thoughts, the situation is likely irredeemable. In a generally positive work environment, folk aren't typically thinking about firing each other, and so it can take a while.

Compared to PIPing and firing? Interviewing is probably way, way less of a time and emotional energy suck.

Granted, I've only ever taken and given interviews, never given (or, fortunately, been under) a PIP or firing. But interviewing is just a few weeks or so of preparation and then a day or two, and the preparation is often fun, and so are some of the interviews. Nobody thinks PIPs and firings are fun.

No kidding! The best people already have jobs and you want to steal them away from somewhere else. 5+ interviews? giant take-home projects or multiple coding assessments? Pass, they're not going to put up with it. "Our 7-interview process ensures we only hire the best" ... of the 10% willing to go through this nonsense.

Well no.

It's expensive for the company too. All of the people involved in the interview process are still getting paid while they are interviewing the candidates. They aren't working on their projects that they have to complete. The company probably has a recruiting or talent acquisition team and the people on that team don't work for free. The company might also work with outside agencies or external recruiters. If you hire one a candidate from one of these sources, you have to pay them too.

It's really expensive in terms of time and money to hire people. It's really hard to build a great team.

> All of the people involved in the interview process are still getting paid

Except the interviewee.

There's often a signing bonus. If there's a 10% chance of getting the job and a $50k signing bonus is common, then your EV is $5000 per interview.

Even if there weren't, then 10% of the extra compensation vs. an easier-to-hire company with your discount horizon applied would also count as payment.

If you’re 10% likely to get a job with a 50k signing bonus and you’re doing 7 interviews for that job your expected value is $715 per interview.

> $50k signing bonus is common

I clearly live in a different labour market to this conversation. How many places in the world is this common?

The interviewee is usually interviewing on their current company's dime. It's even easier now with many folks working from home, you don't even need an excuse.

If you do it right, candidates can leave with a positive impression even after being rejected. I've maintained correspondence with a few candidates over the years because they felt like they learned a thing or two about engineering during the course of the interview, and they wanted some additional mentorship.

Yes it’s an expense but you’re not doing it out of charity it’s for the benefit of the company and so it is also a part of the job.

It doesn’t externalize costs at all. We’re talking easily 20 developer hours per candidate. That’s real money.

Perhaps, but PIPing and firing is bad for the employee, bad for the manager, and bad for the PIP'd employees teammates. PIPs don't happen immediately; it might take a month or two before it's clear to a manager that a new employee isn't performing to the expected level.

So I think I'd rather have a candidate spend 7 hours interviewing if it could save months of pain for multiple people later.

(This does assume, of course, that the 7-person interview panel actually does decrease the incidence of hiring-the-wrong-person enough to be worthwhile. I don't know if that's actually the case.)

Out of all the things I think are wrong with tech jobs -- and with employment in general -- I don't think "I have to interview with 7 people instead of 1 or 2" even cracks the top 50.

Speaking as a senior dev who has interviewed dozens (if not hundreds) of candidates, I assure you that the bulk of the burden is firmly on the interviewers, not the candidates.

> To reduce the amount it happens is worthy

The point is that there is little, if any, evidence that a given interview process does this.

I've worked and interviewed at dozens of companies and literally never experienced a company that had more than 2 interviews plus a discussion with a hiring manager or HR.

I make half-ish of a FAANG salary, but it's enough to comfortably support a family and I'm generally pretty happy and get to work on cool stuff. The only challenge I never get at work are problems that have huge scale components.

Interesting, I’ve interviewed at all of the FAANGs other than Netflix, plus maybe 10 or so much smaller companies. In general the smaller companies all seemed to want to emulate the FAANG hiring process with 4-6 rounds of interviews with engineers after an initial phone screen. I think only 1 or 2 of them limited their interview to just 2 rounds.

I've been approached by a couple of FAANG and told them to stuff it because of the recruitment processes. I'm in London, and here at least they're extreme outliers.

If you're early in your career, they probably matter and it might be worth it, but for me it's not.

Maybe it'd be different in Silicon Valley, but in London they just aren't willing to offer enough over and above the kind of jobs I've had elsewhere to be worth the misery (with the big caveat that I'm at the high end of non-FAANG London market rates; for someone who is not, FAANG may be worth it here too)

You're being kind. "Extreme" doesn't describe it from my experience. For me it was 1 phone call/online meeting and 2 face 2 face. That is about it in terms of interviews. And that is a Fortune Global 500 company that I'm still working for. I was put on a 6 months contract and after 3 they switched to perm.

Other interviews back then and more recent were pretty much the same. Max. 3 x 1h-ish meetings. I do have a bad habit of asking the interviewer to sell me the job on the first face 2 face meeting though. This does offend some of them and we drop it there. No point beating around the bush and wasting time if they think the interview is a one way street.

The part about expecting them to sell the job is a good point, and important. Don't think that's a bad habit at all.

I also tend to make it clear from the outset I will not come cheap, in a "are you sure you can afford me?" kind of way. Not mentioning specifics, but making it clear I know my market value and won't consider low offers.

Some get very taken back, but it sets a tone. I think you're absolutely right you need to make sure they know it's two way, and to give a clear impression they're chasing someone high value, and that they're not the prize, you are.

But if their pitch is all about "changing the world" but they're not willing to share the upside, I know I'm wasting my time, so I want to make sure they know that I expect my share too, not just fuzzy feelings.

E.g. I a while back came across a company that was very proud of how rapidly they were growing, but somehow thought that mattered to me when they were not willing to offer any shares or options. I was meant to be excited about making other people rich...

I pointed out to them I've not once taken a job on terms like that in the last 25 years and called off the process after the first interview. I also explained to the recruiter just how far off market they were for someone at my experience level.

If that had happened after 5-6 interviews I'd have been incensed...

FAANG recruiters in particular also seem to get confused when I insist on getting an indication of salary range and option/rsu amounts before being willing to agree to an interview. Several times I've had recruiters come back to me days later after digging up the information, as their first line seem to not even know, just expecting people to be all excited they're even calling. For my part I'm shocked more people aren't having that conversation. But that does explain leaked info some time back about how Facebook is dealing with high rejection rates once they actually give offers.

Almost every alternative you can imagine has been tried. Lots of interviews, few interviews, take home projects, pair programming, hire fast fire fast, trial periods and on and on and on.

Hire fast fire fast is by far the best one, should you really need it. A 20 minute technical conversation and then firing within 2-3 weeks if they do not seem self-directed has worked in my experience.

If you can't get someone up to speed with your internal processes fast enough to at least gauge if they're following along that indicates an internal problem.

The problem is, I think, that HR does not want technical staff to see the hires for (probably made up) legal reasons. So the decision is mostly made by people who can't actually gauge competency.

How do you handle the obvious problems of churn and reviews at places like Glassdoor? I can just see it now:

"Interview was weak. They don't know what they're doing."

"Aced the interview. Fired after two weeks. Leadership doesn't know how to hire or manage."

"Never seen a place with so much churn. In the last six months, I've seen at least half a dozen engineers exit after two or three weeks."

Know what raises the level of difficulty for finding candidates? Shit reviews about the company. You can have the best tech but if you have a toxic smell, you can't hire. To the outside, perception is reality and reviews are how you get that perception. You can't do the opposite though and say "J Smith passed interview but we let them go after two weeks because they couldn't do more than pseudo code on a whiteboard." and even if you could, you'd look like a shit company and you'd still have an impossible time hiring but for other reasons.

This idea of quick hire/fire is so bad that all you have to do it go one or two steps further to find the obvious problems. But hey, start a company and use that model. See how it goes. Prove us all wrong.

Low performing folks are ubiquitous and them being let go sounds good to me, would put a plus in their column if I read that.

Yes but the damage that they’ll due to your reputation online will make you have to pay more for better talent. They are going to read the glass door and see your company environment as shit and say “I want an extra 20 grand”

Not to mention the amount of technical debt high turnover causes for tech companies

Not that many people actually get fired in a hire fast fire fast workplace. The whole point of hiring this way is allowing yourself to not overprepare in an aversion to hiring poor talent. When you get a poor performer, you just let them go, but the average is not that bad, and you end up filling your billets faster where another company may not at all.

The opposite is 7 interviews and shedding most of your applicants for trivial reasons. Most businesses can't support that, too much work would go undone and they would stop being competitive.

No question the interview process is akin to testing a marathon runner by their 100m dash time.

I was just talking about to implications of poor company chemistry which stems from lack of trust and job insecurity.

I think the best way to evaluate a person is just to talk to them about their experience and why they do what they do. Passion is a critical indicator

Indeed. I remember interviewing for several positions and could have done them with one hand behind my back. A ~year later they were still trying to fill the position but hadn't.

> Hire fast fire fast is by far the best one, should you really need it.

I can only say that: Oh my gosh do I not want to work for a company that "hires fast and fires fast". For many different reasons.

Working is one thing. What about when you need to get hired and don't have six months to waste? If it weren't for finding a quick place to give me a chance I'd be unemployed.

this is rather terrible for people who leave a job to come work for you. Hire fast fire fast only really benefits the employer -and only if they successfully manage to pick up on toxic people that fast. It can take months for someones true colours to show and then in many countries you are past the point you can "fire fast".

Fired after 2 weeks if they don't seem self directed? I have been at one place where I didn't even have my laptop in the first two weeks and multiple places where I did not have access to the codebase yet.

Most people except for a few outliers will be fumbling around the first month while they learn the code and the company.

I personally suck at pairing interviews but I still think they're some of the most relevant & illuminating- if the problem is easy and you're looking for how the candidate works and communicates.

All of these are used in the wild at various companies. Maybe these companies are entirely staffed by subpar engineers, but FAANG style whiteboarding is extremely gameable, especially if you know someone in the inside already, but even if you don't and leetcode enough.

How exactly do you reduce that number when it’s a fixed quantity at FAANG, big tech with their stack ranking, managing out and OKR’s that requires to put a certain number of people as “under performs”?

The entire system makes absolutely no sense, precisely when looking at the numbers. You could do anything you wanted during the interview and that still won’t change the outcome that the same number of people will still be fired at the end of the day.

My company has a phone interview with a developer to ask some technical questions and then whoever passes that is invited in for a single in-person interview with a developer and our supervisor. It has worked for us - every developer we've hired this way has done their job well and stuck around for a long time.

We make an effort to take up as little of the candidate's time as possible.

Umm how is this normal when you have stack ranking (sorry curve fitting) to identify the yo-be-fired?

I don’t think that’s routine. While I know it happens, certainly I’ve personally never worked with someone who this has happened to.

There will always be burning mistakes, or people who lie or are otherwise hard to predict will be a disaster. What else would you propose?

making the interview process similar to the job is a good first step. when I worked at Invitae this was my proudest achievement from my time there. I suggested that we change the interview process to a paired programming session that were situations from our day to day work. the candidate brought in their own laptop or was provided one (their choice). the session was 90-120 minutes and didn’t involve leetcode hard problems, just practical day to day stuff a web developer might run into on the job.

The problem with this is that many jobs require weeks worth of on ramping into internal systems, code bases, etc, not to mention many aspects of the job would be working on otherwise secretive stuff. I don’t think this would work at a FAANG, and many bigger companies.

of course — so you have to make it accessible to the candidate. using the internal code base is probably not the best choice. we had them write up a small API with specific requirements in the tech of their choice, and tried to have someone programming with them familiar with their choice of tech.

I think this would be the most fair to the candidates, especially ones with prior experience who don’t want to spend time on useless leetcode questions that have zero to do with the job itself. I can’t help but feel this is just gate keeping.

YMMV, but it's actually quite difficult to get a PIP in many tech companies, and it's rarely if ever for lack of tech skills. The ones I've seen usually involve either motivation, output, or both plummeting to zero for extended periods of time due to burnout or a similar extended personal crisis.

From what I’ve seen it’s almost always as you describe or something political like a manager taking over a group and wanting to make room for their friends. But if employees are burning out and then being PIPed instead of getting support I think that is a rather sad indictment of our industry in an of itself.

>if employees are burning out and then being PIPed instead of getting support I think that is a rather sad indictment of our industry in an of itself

The thing is most big companies don't care about your burn-out or personal situation, they either have product launch deadlines to meet, or revenue targets or customers to please, and people in the trenches are considered replaceable so churn is something they account for in order to meet those commitments.

If you're lucky you might have an understanding manager, but he himself may have targets to reach for his bonus or promotion, and if you're dragging his team down and his bonus promotion with it, then ... it's nothing personal, it's just business, you will be let go.

I worked for a major European semi company and the churn there is insane, either they fire people or people leave by themselves within the first 2 years. All because managers are given near impossible targets, along with great bonuses and stock packages to incentivize them to use whatever means necessary to deliver on those targets, usually at the expense of people in the trenches which are treated as expendable commodities.

Your manager might also have a specific target for “unregretted attrition”, i.e. getting rid of people using the PIP process. If there is not a clear person who is the weakest link, then the manager will pick their least favorite. And remember, performance is very subjective.

I have seen a couple of people get fired for cause; that was always clear. I’ve never seen an unambiguous PIP.

As far as I know only Amazon has targets for “unregretted attrition.”

I heard Microsoft did this for a long time as we. It’s my under it changed though since Nadella

Presumably, any Jack Welch-esque stack rank shop is going to have URA targets.

> it's rarely if ever for lack of tech skills.

isn't output related with lack of tech skills?

not really, plenty of talented lazy people out there

Not if output was satisfactory before and then drops

To a point, but it's rarely the inability to code that is leading to lack of output. Output often means "did sufficient work that was seen, by management, as impactful enough". This has more to do with communication and task choice than anything. This is not really a skill that we even really attempt to measure in interview.

In my experience in high performing tech companies, I've seen about 40 PIPs. There are 'utter tech incompetence' PIPs in the world, but as far as I've seen, they are far less popular than 'thoroughly uninterested in working' PIPs, 'disliked by new manager' PIPs and 'person has a work unrelated crisis' PIPs. Those tech related PIPs will normally have all the symptoms already in the first review cycle. If someone made it to their 2nd year in the company, tech incompetence is not really the issue. It's just unfortunate that nobody provides stats for this kind of thing, so we don't have to just rely on "you have seen" vs "I have seen" arguments.

> This has more to do with communication and task choice than anything.

In some cases, task assignment instead of task choice. Sometimes by unluck of the draw, you just get assigned to a shit project with no visibility. You could be Einstein, write entirely bug-free code, and you’re not going to get rewarded for the work.

I’ve seen really mediocre people brown-nose and schmooze themselves onto a rocket ship project that takes off despite their mediocrity, and they get promoted to the moon. That’s how some VP’s and Directors are made. Meanwhile, a literal genius languishes away improving the performance of InvisibleInternalTool by 500%.

The older I get the more I realize how much corporate tech performance evaluation has to do with politics and bullshitting and “being highly visible” and how little it has to do with performance.

> YMMV, but it's actually quite difficult to get a PIP in many tech companies

Generally, the more the company practices “hire fast, fire fast” the easier and more common it will be to PIP people.

The companies with 4+ stage interviews and entire departments devoted to recruiting and candidate evaluation tend to not have as many PIPs because they’ve studied their interviewing processes and prevented most of the underperformers from getting hired in the first place.

The most quick-to-fire company I ever worked for had barely a 1-hour interview process. They’d hire anyone who seemed remotely qualified and then they’d fire everyone who didn’t work out. It was terrible and now I’m actually suspicious of companies that don’t do much technical screening for applicants.

How do extended interviews root out people that are going to later go through some kind of major personal issue or have burnout or have a lack of motivation?

Lack of motivation and burnout maybe could be somewhat sussed out in an interview if it was obvious, but the people that I've been around that's happened to (and myself at one point in my career) were completely fine, but I'm skeptical of any interviewer that says they can reliably fish that out.

They don't/can't, which is why you still see both at any company, no matter how it interviews.

I think this is highly dependent on your company. People talk about FANG/SiValley companies like they're all the same but that is completely untrue. There are orders of magnitude difference in culture between companies and even within companies. I guess when you're on the outside looking in it all seems the same. It also changes depending on how the business is doing. I suspect, for instance, things are about to seriously go downhill at Netflix. That may cause the culture to become even more cutthroat.

Isn't that only at a handful of companies?

How does me being okay with a smaller role in the overall hiring process equate to me wanting to lord over people? I’m a hiring manager, it’s literally my job to pick people to hire. I’d rather have the opinions of my colleagues in addition to my own.

My response was in good faith, and yours is not.

Let me add my experience. I've never had the FKANG experience but for a number of startups that I've contracted for I've had a chance to observe if not participate in the hiring process.

They were US startups and they've all tried to emulate what I think of as the FAANK process: so you have an initial call, a technical screen a couple of other rounds of technical screens, that maybe include system design, and fit/behavioral with people you might be working with. In practice the people who got hired endured 5 to 7 interviews.

It's interesting to see the statements here saying that the reason for the large number of interviews is to assess the candidate from a number of dimensions and perspectives. What I observed was that was not how it really worked.

My position as an outside contractor, as well as someone who loves chatting with people, made me sort of the ideal confessional for the engineers who directly participated in the hiring process.

The main dynamic that drives having such a high number of interviews is that the hiring process is less about assessing the candidate (beyond a certain point) and more about allowing to play out the implicit political power and conflicts of the people who are judging the candidate.

For example in the first startup we had this engineer who was identified by the CTO and co-founder (who formally stepped down as CEO) as being a good potential hire, and they excelled in the technical aspects of the interview but they received meh votes from one of the engineers who was lead on a significant project and had a bit of clout, at 3rd interview, and were subsequently rejected, after 7th interview.

So basically the feeling of the staff that I talked to was the reason there existed four more interviews after the consensus was to hire, was to allow the political player to promulgate their preferences and manufacture consent with the motion to reject. So through a careful orchestration of four additional interviews closely managed by the political player who asked doubt-casting questions in each debrief this lead was able to cultivate doubt where formally there had been consensus (besides his sole dissent -- he wouldn't have been working with a person anyway, heh :)). So basically it would have been intolerable for this politically clouted lead person to have "lost" to those other staff with less clout by having their preference denied. I felt really sorry for the candidate but I heard that when they got the 7th interview rejection that already accepted an offer at a FAANG, go figure. Heh :)

Observed a similar dynamic play out in another hiring process at a different startup. That stage we had the director of engineering identify candidate that was a good hire. And basically softly railroad them through the process which didn't prove difficult as everyone was mostly on board and the team was really desperate for high quality technical talent with the right skills and this person had that.

So what was interesting to observe was that the other candidates in the pipeline at that time were still taken through interviews even though this person was basically from the initial screen stage already being moved to be hired internally, and all of the other interviews were basically friendly get to know you sessions with super lightweight technical questions and a lot of I suppose you could call it confirmation bias but it's really just you know people being nice to someone they want to work with.

But all of these other poor candidates in the pipeline were still put through all these interviews with the idea that you know there was still a role out there for them being told the same things they would have been told were they you know actually under contention. Or maybe that was because we didn't know if the candidate was going to accept or not but they seemed pretty keen and the thing is I'm almost 100% sure the team wouldn't have hired any of the other candidates in the pipeline anyway.

But again I observe the dynamic where the debrief interviews about these non-starter candidates were basically role-playing games for politics in the organization where people projected their preferences into little power games against their colleagues to try to have their own preferences be the ones that win. Decidedly wasn't about those candidates at all because they had not even had any chance of being in the process. The only point of the subsequent interviews of all those non-starter candidates was to act as an arena for the staff to role play their sort of political status conflict games with each other but this was never exposed or stated it was just this sort of implicit thing.

So given that experience I wonder how much that is a dynamic driving these lengthy and in a lot of cases unnecessary interview processes across all of the tech hiring and organizations that are utilizing this type of process these days.

I don't think it could apply everywhere I think there's probably places like Amazon where they are really doing something different. And like I said I don't have any of the data from the ZFAMG stuff.

But I'm reminded of something Peter thiel said which is you know in academia the battles are so fierce because the stakes are so small. But another side of that is everything so secure there and that's why the stakes are so small. Same thing is true in tech I mean once you score one of those 150k plus contracts and you're doing something that you basically love doing it is a great ride and everything really is so secure so how do people take out their natural ape brain competitive urges in that environment? I think as another commenter said, where can people project their risk-focused paranoia in such a low risk environment? and it's onto personnel.

So I think there's definitely the case to be made for maladaptive pathological psychological underpinning of these lengthy hiring processes as much as there is a case to be made for how they could be useful at getting data from from a bunch of candidates.

Personally I think the best types of hiring interviews are some sort of pair programming work emulation. The problem with that is in my experience companies are generally very terrified to open up their internal code base to the eyes of outsiders because they're basically scared that oh my God people are going to steal our code.

But it's always the case where after someone's hired and you start working with them that's something you end up doing and that's where you really get a sense you know if can I trust this person to deliver and do they match what people are being saying about them from the interviews.

So I just think those sort of work emulation tasks you where you're pair programming or talking through something with someone it really has more of a place than it seems to have been given so far in most of the places that I've seen and heard about.

this is the in-depth reply that illustrates my flippant comment. there can be an inherent competitiveness in white-boarding interviews. the interviewer can implicitly want to show their superiority over the candidate. i think that's the core reason behind a lot of overly difficult problems being offered that have no analogous presence in the day to day work. how many times have you written a graph traversal algorithm on the job? or implemented a geofence in 45 minutes, from scratch, without a search engine?

i whole heartedly agree on the pair programming approach being practical and yielding good results. i think you can skip exposing the candidate to the internal codebase, and replicate an internal problem in a more generic and high level way.

agree, now let's you and me apply to YC with our disruptive, upending-the-traditional-inefficiencies in tech hiring startup idea. Ho ho ho! :)

haha — my email is in my profile page if you really want to talk about it. i have interjected at previous companies where it was possible to influence the process a little bit. my biggest question would be “how could you do it differently than triplebyte when they first start?” they started by interviewing people themselves which is hard to scale.

>>> there can be an inherent competitiveness in white-boarding interviews. the interviewer can implicitly want to show their superiority over the candidate

This can be present even in non-FAANG interviews. Early in my career, I had an interview at a financial company and for a question about how do you style html pages, my answer was CSS and the interviewer expected something about ASP.NET webstyles. He was't ready to accept my answer saying you are a dotnet dev and should use ASP.NET functionality since it was more superior rather than CSS. I was like CSS is a web standard and anyone even designers can modify CSS.

So yeah, it depends on the maturity of the interviewer.

right — it’s certainly not FAANG specific but seems to arise from these styles of interviews. maybe it’s lack of interviewing training or standards? i think the standard now is, “pick your favorite hard problem and have a candidate do it on the whiteboard.” which presents this opportunity for an interview lacking compassion.

I think mylons had the perception that you were a senior engineer conducting technical interviews as opposed to a hiring manager.

Having had a fair bit of experience interviewing on the technical side, I've observed a huge variance in quality of interviewer. Sometimes you get someone who values communication, creative problem solving and asking good questions. Sometimes you get a whiz kid who gets off on playing gatekeeper and judging people as below their superior intellect.

Even a single person in the chain who falls into that latter group can completely derail a potential hire, leading to an overabundance of false negatives, IMO.

What is PIP?

"(Personal|Professional|Performance) Improvement Plan". It's the first formal stage in the firing process at most companies with HR depts, which would almost certainly include any publicly-listed company.

If you're at the PIP stage, it generally means your boss and your superboss have decided that it's time for you to go, but for legal purposes, they need to look like they tried to give you a chance, so they work with HR to craft specific-but-typically-unattainable goals which would theoretically allow you to save your job if you hit them all. But with boss+superboss already wanting you gone, the likelihood that they'll agree you've hit an improvement goal that's usually a thinly-veiled form of "stop me from hating you anymore, lol" is pretty low.

If you get a PIP, in nearly 100% of cases, you should just take it as notice that your employment is going to end at the specified review date in the PIP. It's not usually worth trying to hit the goals. Focus on interviewing.

That said, I once managed an individual who had survived 4 PIPs by the time he reported to me. I heard that he was eventually fired about 2 years after I left, but not sure if it was his 6th or 7th PIP. He was a particular discrimination liability at a company that was very sensitive to that type of thing.

That rules

PIPs are not exclusively foregone conclusion/CYA before firing. I've personally been on a PIP while in the "red zone" before an expected promotion, and came out the other side with an "exceeds" rating and said promotion during the next cycle. Sometimes, it's legitimately just a formal way of stating "this is what we expect from you if you want to stay here"; if you can meet those expectations, then great!

Are you sure that was a PIP? That’s really not what a PIP is used for.

In your exp

The cover sheet has the words "Performance Improvement Plan", with key goals to achieve in a 30 day period, with the final page to be signed by me and my manager.

https://cdn.n7.gg/pip/pip-1.png

https://cdn.n7.gg/pip/pip-2.png

Not every company is awful.

I wonder what these performance expectations are.

Basically boiled down to:

1) build a plan and make meaningful progress on a high impact, but stalled, project

2) communicate about progress and/or roadblocks to the team, and ask for help where needed to get past said roadblocks

3) be more proactive about finding and proposing high impact work, or areas where others could bring their expertise to help benefit my work or get it done faster

Details are confidential, of course.

> it generally means your boss and your superboss have decided that it's time for you to go

The problem is that those are two highly correlated data points. Toxic bosses are eventually found but at that point they leave a track of dead bodies.

What I have seen sometimes is moving around disgruntled employees. It has its own problems but a lot of the times they are recovered and even become very productive again.

> The problem is that those are two highly correlated data points. Toxic bosses are eventually found but at that point they leave a track of dead bodies.

Agree, and this is often overlooked. There's a handful of people I used to admire whose tendency to readily believe whatever's being sold by their middling middle management chain has left me deeply disappointed.

Middle management is a necessary evil, but there's little hope if upper management fails to recognize and subvert its inherent incentive structure.

I once was told by an HR person at a prior job, who almost certainly shouldn't have said it, regarding my PIP (I had extremely pathological sleep outcomes sometimes, unpredictably, but my boss and boss's boss etc loved my work), "It's really neat to see - usually when we get people on PIPs, it's because their bosses want them gone, but your boss really really wants to keep you. "

It rather stuck in my mind.

(I also did not, ultimately, end up exiting the company as a result of the PIP, just for completeness given the context of the thread.)

It might be true where you are, but that's not strictly correct everywhere. Here in Australia, if a company wanted to fire an employee, the employee has a chance to sue on an "unfair dismissal" grounds. One of the ways a company can protect against allegations of unfair dismissals is to demonstrate that a) there are genuine performance issues, and b) the company has made good-faith efforts to improve the employee's performance, and that's where the PIP cones in.

This means if an employee here were put on a PIP, it's usually (but not always) the first step towards them being fired.

At the company I work for PiPs _usually_ lead to issues being solved. There are several developers I've worked with on PiPs (we do specific mentoring and follow ups on the areas of concern) that were able to improve and are now doing great. It isn't always a terrible thing, certainly not comfortable for the person on the PiP but it can be a positive thing in the long run!

Good on your company; PIP should focus on shoring up skill gaps or finding better role fit or invinting someone to take unpaid LOA to work through whatever life challenge they have.

BUT, I’ve only ever seen the “unattainable goal” type.

Performance improvement plan.

Performance improvement plan. It’s basically a social credit rating system for employees.

I was wondering the same thing! After a bit of searching, my best guess is "Performance Improvement Plan".

I doubt many engineers "lord over the process" - it's seen more as something you volunteer your time for for the good of the company.

I would agree with you if the interview process included ANY feedback to interviewees when they were rejected. Prior to COVID, I got flown to Seattle mid-week for 2 nights and interviewed well (the recruiter told me to start looking for houses). But 20 days later I was basically ghosted by my recruiter and I had to escalate to their manager to get a response that I was rejected. They gave me no feedback at all.

The interview process asks a LOT of the interviewee and then does not provide anything that could help the person improve next time, so the entire process feels like a complete waste of time. In my case, I was also disrespected by the recruiter.

The next time they reached out, I failed the phone screen somehow by someone who sounded 20 years younger than me (which is frustrating when you have already passed these same steps before). I don't respond to Amazon recruiters anymore.

> I failed the phone screen somehow by someone who sounded 20 years younger than me

I am definitely a little pretentious for saying this but I get kinda peeved when I am interviewing for high-level roles and my initial tech screen is by a junior engineer. It's not so much that I think I am too smart to be properly evaluated by them or that they aren't worth being part of a hiring pipeline (they very much should be!), but my opinion is that junior engineers aren't properly tuned for what is and isn't a good engineer and if they are, they shouldn't be a junior engineer.

The other side is when I get reached out to interview for a high-level role then get talked down to about how I don't fit their criteria and I basically wasted the executive vice president of external internal engineering's time.

> but my opinion is that junior engineers aren't properly tuned for what is and isn't a good engineer and if they are, they shouldn't be a junior engineer.

Presumably they aren't instructed to evaluate for that, but instead to identify glaring communication or other interaction issues.

I went through the exact same thing at a big tech company a few weeks ago. Basically told me I got it, ghosted me for weeks, I had to escalate to higher managers, got told a generic “someone was a better match”. Do these companies think about the reputation hit these kinds of things cause? Amazon is the best example - I’m sure half the people on here would never apply to Amazon because their reputation is beyond repair at this point. Some other companies aren’t far behind. They alienate and disrespect people and those are the people that talk and spread the word.

From what I've read from managers of recruiters from FAANG companies is:

1) Recruiters at these companies are under a large amount of pressure to bring candidates in.

2) There is only so much time in the day

3) They feel all of their time must be spent on potential hires because of #1 and #2

4) No one likes giving bad news

I don't feel like any of these reasons excuse you from being a considerate human being. Ultimately, it happens because recruiters are never rewarded for being considerate. People who fail the interview process are treated like legal liabilities.

And the ultimate irony…they send me an e-mail a few days later asking me to take a few minutes to give feedback on their interview process.

> ANY feedback to interviewees when they were rejected

This is a lawyer thing

Without large societal changes to no longer have the US be crazy litigious, no big company will ever give you actionable feedback about your interview.

I’m skeptical. Several times in my career I’ve traced back “it’s a legal restriction” and found that it was not in fact a legal restriction. It was a mutated and distorted version of a legal restriction passed down a game of telephone, in some cases stretching back years.

I got some from IBM, of all places, so it's not impossible.

Legal counsel will almost always give advice based on the worst case scenario. This isn’t reflective of the likelihood of the worst case scenario so, unless they can point to a strong amount of evidence that shows companies being sued and losing for giving feedback, blindly following such advice is just lazy. I’m more inclined to be grateful towards and have more respect for any company that gives me useful feedback than I would be vindictive.

> "...I failed the phone screen somehow by someone who sounded 20 years younger than me..."

Consider, possibly, that the mismatch is explained in this sentence.

I will absolutely give high weight to how the receptionist is treated by the candidate.

If you are implying that I was rude to this person, you are mistaken. I treated the interviewer with the same good nature and respect that I would treat anyone. The difference between someone less than 5 years out from school and someone who has been doing this for decades is that, when you are younger, you believe that software engineering skills have anything to do with what you learned in undergrad. I misspoke on a topic that I hadn't thought about for years and I heard the shift in his tone. When I interview people and they miss something that seems obvious to me, I usually give them another chance and think of a new way to ask the question.

> If you are implying that I was rude to this person, you are mistaken.

Nothing rising to the level of implying and certainly not implying rude.

Just, "I failed the phone screen somehow by someone who sounded 20 years younger than me" might be suggestive of something to self-examine.

But since you're confident that you are fully innocent in the interaction and the rejection is solely due to your interlocutor's naivete and inexperience, then it's no doubt true.

At amazon your interviewer is supposed to be >= the job level you're applying for.

> I’m a HM at a big tech company with this format as well. Honestly, I really like it.

The truth is that nobody likes being interviewed. Getting tested and judged by strangers isn’t fun.

But developers also really don’t like being surrounded by unqualified developers who slipped through a weak interview process. They also don’t like having significant numbers of their teammates fired and replaced all the time because the company had “hire fast, fire fast” interview styles. It’s miserable and slightly terrifying to work at a company where nobody really wants to invest much time into building relationships with new hires because many of them are going to be PIPed out before the year is over.

So while the interviews may not be fun, the reality is that strong developers really appreciate the outcome of such a rigorous process. It also helps protect people from becoming false negatives because they didn’t mesh with a single interviewer or struggled with a single interview problem.

So now we’re at this weird equilibrium where devs simultaneously hate the interview process for themselves but appreciate it being applied to everyone around they (even if it’s not immediately obvious).

> the outcome of such a rigorous process. It also helps protect people from becoming false negatives because they didn’t mesh with a single interviewer or struggled with a single interview problem.

Not really. When I was at Google there were tons of candidates that would get passed on because of one of the interviews going badly.

> The truth is that nobody likes being interviewed. Getting tested and judged by strangers isn’t fun.

I do. It might be because I'm way better at performing in interviews than in the actual job. It's also way more exciting to do. I have also done interviews on the hiring side of the table, and that's not nearly as enjoyable. However, especially finding people to work with you is quite rewarding.

> The truth is that nobody likes being interviewed. Getting tested and judged by strangers isn’t fun.

I sort of do. It's fun problem solving, at least sometimes.

> nobody really wants to invest much time into building relationships with new hires because many of them are going.

That's what a "farm team" is for, developing folks with a growth mindset. Never thought of it as either miserable or terrifying.

> the outcome of such a rigorous process. It also helps protect people from becoming false negatives because they didn’t mesh with a single interviewer or struggled with a single interview problem.

Only if we assume the managerial class doesn't use this extended process as a chance to do politics and if we assume a longer interview results in better matches.

My experience in casting actors (different field I know) is, that after a certain duration you will get diminishing results. You can tell most of the time within an 20 minutes or less of someone could do the job or not. The rest of the hour is needed to figure out how they work in different situations.

What I would never do is have my existing actors interview them. They can veto someone, they can tell me what they think, but why on earth would I let them interview someone?

Funny, last time around it wasn't the interviewing that got to me, but the nightmare of lining up and going through interviews while also having a young baby and working full time. I remember working during the baby's naps on the weekend and then doing take home quizzes / online tests at like 10pm and like, barely scraping through.

I considered applying for Google at the time, but the combination of the famously arduous interview process, AFAIK both in terms of the time taken and difficulty (for which the recruiter recommended taking further studies in advanced data structures and algorithms) meant that attempting it would be silly.

“Is it annoying for candidates?” Not just annoying, it can be downright demoralizing going through the interview process when the standard is “reject for any one reason, only accept if all agree.” and no feedback whatsoever is given.

That is a fair point, thank you for commenting.

Discussing how many no’s it should take to reject a candidate is a worthwhile discussion. I can override specific no’s with good reason at my company, but not all companies have that.

My broader point is that this is a specific issue with the process we can iterate on. We don’t need to throw out the whole process.

Also the fact that hiring almost ends up looking to the most senior engineers for up and down which means you've just wasted multiple hours having less senior people interview them.

Rarely have I ever seen a candidate be rejected by seniors or leads and still get the job even when the decision had to be argued until it was unanimous. Pretty much if a senior goes thumbs down, the decision has been made and the meeting is over.

Leads and CTOs especially have to be mindful of either not being part of the decision or being the last vote, as to not taint the results... which again, means that the most senior vote will flip a "yes" to a flat "no"

There is another thing - if you want to work at a FAANG, presumably you want to be there a while. Anyone who can't put up with a little bit of nonsense and headache for something meaningful is likely to struggle with any nonsense and headache generally. Working on any large scale project at a FAANG is going to involve a decent amount of nonsense and headache, and you gotta roll with it.

And then on the flip side - if you are really a star, and you are interviewing at a small company you should want 5-7 interviews to gauge the caliber of people you will work with.

I agree with this. Honestly, as a candidate, I don't mind the longer interview loop. What I do mind is if it's very spread out. I'm willing to invest an hour up front + a full day round, but I don't want that longer round spread out over the course of multiple days. I'll give you 6 hours in a day, but not 2-3 days of 2-3 hours each.

My expectation at this point is:

Pre-onsite:

- 15 minute with a recruiter, tell me a little bit about the role, spend the majority of the time telling me why I should join the company, and take a few questions

- 30-45 minutes with the hiring manager. Tell me about what you really want, scope, the challenges, and let's talk about how I might fit. Do enough Q&A both ways to feel comfortable, and then let's make a call right there as to whether we want to continue on. For my part, I always tell the HM at this stage whether or not I'd be excited to continue.

Up to now, I've invested an hour. This is reasonable. Maybe we both like each other, so presuming we do, when you call me about the on-site, we should work out acceptable comp ranges. These may move upward after the on-site based on what I learn about the role, but let's make sure we won't waste one anothers' time with the on-site.

Continuing to the on-site:

- 60-90 mins on whatever technical background is required for the role. I'm fairly senior in management, so this usually doesn't involve code, but should cover whether or not I have a clue how to lead it. For an IC technical role, if we're smart about it, we'll know enough without doing 5X leetcode and 3X design here. I can also evaluate whether I care about your problem space if we don't make the content entirely synthetic. In 90 minutes, it's perfectly reasonable to do a design exercise + picking something in there to write some code around. This is it, though. One technical round!

- 30 mins x 3-4 with key peers/stakeholders. Make sure my behavioral stuff works for you, that we can understand one another, and yeah, that we might actually like each other enough to work together. I like to talk, and so if the other person does, make it 45 mins.

- 60 mins with the HM again to dive deeper on the role with the context gained from the interviews. Heavy Q&A. Let's give each other enough to make a decision.

- If you want, 60 minutes with whatever executive (besides the HM) will be closest to the role. Whatever you want to talk about. Let's just see if we can communicate.

You can cut this to half a day if you cut your most efficient interviewers down to 45 mins and don't overdo it with peer/stakeholder interviews, but I'd rather make it a full day with some breaks. This is because I need time to interview you, and that mostly happens after you've run through your things in each interview. We should all have enough information to decide here, and I'm not taking the on-site anyway if the first hour we had together didn't generate strong interest, right?

After this, call me within a couple of days, let me know if we're doing an offer or not. If we are, let's confirm expectations. The only things that will offend me at this point is if we're not in the ranges we previously discussed, or you want to do more rounds. I'm open to one more if there's a good reason for it (not wanting to use that person's time for the on-site is not a good reason). But we've had a day together. While one day is not necessarily enough to know for sure that things will work well long-term, even another full day isn't going to change anything about that.

Also, while the focus of the original post is mostly critical of the lengthy process and it being annoying to candidates, there's also the reality that the longer the loop, the fewer candidate throughput the hiring manager can have. There are only so many interview cycles per week before an interviewer burns out on it or can't get their job done as well. I'd argue that if you stretch these things out to a day, you will think harder about who you are bringing on-site.

If we agree for the most part that the time together wasn't nonsense and a headache, as you put it, that's a good indicator that we should work together!

tl;dr - I'm fine with 7 interviews if they're the right 7 interviews and planned thoughtfully.

> Honestly, as a candidate, I don't mind the longer interview loop. What I do mind is if it's very spread out.

As a candidate, I would also be wondering what it would be like to work for a company with a spread out interview process. I have been through multistage interviews, but decisions were always made quickly. Made it to the end of the phone screening, at the end of the conversation there is an offer to be flown out for a panel interview. Made it past an interview with the IT manager, then head straight down to someone else to discuss software development. Made it past the interview with the lead scientist, then head straight down to the lab to see the lab and meet the research team. Even though I was in my prime, I was by no means special and I only secured some of the positions I applied for. Yet I always knew one way or another within days. I was happy to work for those who I did get hired by and I would have been proud to be hired by those who declined.

Thankfully, I have never had to endure a strung out interview process. Because of that, I don't know how I would feel in such a situation. Yet looking at the prospect from afar, it leads me to believe that it would be difficult to work in such an environment: it would involve dealing with people who are more concerned about process than decisions, and with people who are not available when decisions need to be made (or even for process to be followed).

Maybe it's an age thing, because I've already hit 40, but doing 5-7 interviews seems like time lost for all the people involved. If a company cannot decide after 1-2 interviews if the person they're trying to hire it's worth the effort or not then it means it has lost its golden touch, especially in this industry. And vice-versa, if, as a potential employee, you don't "sense" your employer after 1-2 meetings then it means it's not meant to be.

Case in point, all these FAANG companies which pride themselves in doing 6-7 interviews, they all are spitting out shitty product after shitty product (that is when they're launching any new products at all). Exceptions do exist, I know of that, and when do they show up everyone is so surprised (see Apple and M1 recently). The pay at these companies is also very good, that is correct, but it's not correlated with the quality of the people who work for them or to how their talents are put to work. More exactly, a company so immersed in bureaucracy that it needs this amount of work to hire just one person is sure to waste the talent that it already has at its disposal.

This is my conclusion as well: exluding total unusual cases, where three candidates are all equally good and you can't decide: not beeing able to tell whether a candidate fits after more than two interviews tells more about the company than the interview.

I’ve been employed by everyone from small consulting firms to big tech to FAANG and I’ve never seen anyone let go for performance. This includes serial low performers that produced nothing for years. Aside from a very few (like 1 or 2) select companies, the bar to staying employed is laughably low in tech.

In my opinion this is a big problem. I wish there was a stronger culture of letting low performers go quickly in tech. This would reduce the need for exhaustive interview loops and ultimately make the industry more inclusive because you could afford to take a chance on someone without being chained to them for years to come.

> Is it annoying for candidates? Yeah, but we pay you a lot of money

I had to go through 8 interviews for a senior position at Facebook and ended up not getting the offer. I wasn't paid a dime and had to use a few vacation days at the job I had at the time in order to take the interviews. Technically I lost money interviewing at FB.

I went through the same interview for senior at Facebook and failed. Thankfully I got a Google offer a couple of hours after I got my Facebook rejection.

What pushed me over the bar for Google was probably making fewer mistakes on the technical loops but also having more people vouch for me on the inside (they like refs that work at Google).

Yep that's similar to how I got my current job. Strong referral from someone else inside the company, we had worked together for about 4 years. I had one phone screen which was a combination "culture fit" and general talking about my experience programming. One technical interview which was way less abstract than the FB ones. And a final meet-the-team interview which was more of a hangout.

The pay isn't Facebook-tier but is still pretty darn good, and I'm enjoying it a lot, which I'm not sure I would have at Facebook. It was probably the better path for me overall.

In over 20 years, I've never used vacation days for an interview. I just either 1) called in sick, 2) needed to stay home waiting for a repair person (your internet is having trouble!), 3) had a few doctor's appointments. With working from home, fewer of these excuses are necessary. Last couple jobs I'd just disappear for an hour here and there. Nobody notices.

Multiple interviews is annoying as a candidate, but how they are used (or appear to be used) is the bigger problem. Instead of being used to strengthen a consensus they tend to be a series of filters where any "fail" invalidates everyone else's input. After all, why hire someone who everyone doesn't love? But that is the same logic as combining bad mortgages into tranches reduces their risk - sounds good on paper but doesn't work in reality.

Since you have a chance of getting cut at each round as an interviewee you are left hoping not to run into: some esoteric corner of programming you could learn in 10 minutes but haven't seen before; an interviewer who always asks a pet question (even if told not to do this); a personal dislike that is illegal but not challenged (age, gender, race, etc., waved away as "a bad fit").

If multiple interviews were used only to strengthen assumptions about a candidate and each interview had a narrow intent, they COULD help companies avoid more bad hires. But after interview #3 you are probably just filtering reasonable or even exceptional candidates based on random chance.

On the other hand, this may be a fantastic method to strengthen a "hive mind" culture, but that doesn't sound like a worthy goal.

It may work well for hiring young people.

I can guarantee that you will never see me in one of your interviews. Would I be valuable to your company? Maybe, but we will never know because the process is too long.

On one hand, I don’t want to ever get hired for a position and in a culture where I am not a match, so I myself believe that the more datapoints, the better.

On the other hand, I struggle with impostor syndrome. While fairly successful in my day-to-day, I will likely fail whiteboarding sorting algorithms etc. Imagining a series of five interviews stresses me out and I’m not even looking right now :)

> That makes my sell interview so much easier because I can trust the process to assess their technical skills

What makes you think that the process provides an accurate representation of the skills needed for the day to day job? In my experience it simply tests whether the candidate has invested lot of time cramming for that very specific type of test. If I was running a small company I would much rather discuss a candidate's experience with them and leave them the time to build useful skills, not worthless ones for passing a test.

> Is it annoying for candidates? Yeah, but we pay you a lot of money, and it does actually work for us

The best candidates can get jobs paying the same or more money with fewer interviews, so the very best aren’t going to pick you.

Yeah, but the worst will also have an easier time. Missing out on a great developer is still a good deal if you also prevent 10 mishires.

I'd be very suprised if this is the case, I just finished a few months of interviewing and very few places outside very small startups deviate from this format.

Not saying I am the very best, but I just didn't find opportunities for anyone to out earn by skipping the FAANG style loop. Unless you mean getting lots of equity and riding it to an outsized liquidity event, these places just tend to be not competitive to the top FAANG compensation; you would join for other reasons.

Top engineers are often recruited by people they worked with before, and aren’t going through the normal interview process.

> Is it annoying for candidates? Yeah, but we pay you a lot of money, and it does actually work for us. Is it perfect? No, but it does work.

I've never been paid for interviewing. You mean you pay the successful candidates well, which is what? 10% of the people you subject to this obnoxious process?

My FAANG team does 2x screening interviews plus a round of 3 to 4 full interviews. We try to interview at most 4 candidates in the full loop. That’s about 5 hours of interview time, and the average candidate will succeed by the 3rd or 4th interview.

Given that we are making a $200-600k+ decision and that the average candidate stands to gain tens of thousands of dollars or more, the 20-40 hours spent interviewing seems time well spent on both sides.

> and the average candidate will succeed by the 3rd or 4th interview.

What does this mean? It seems unlikely that the average candidate succeeds at all.

Is it annoying for candidates? Yeah, but we pay you a lot of money

Well, no you don't. You pay a lot of money only the people you hired.

However what does a hiring process like this communicate to those being hired?

I had more than one interview, where the things I discovered during the interview made me reconsider my options and go for another company. Not because I wouldn't have fit with the team or my skills were not there, but because this kind of thing tells me how processes are organized or not organized within your company, how people treat each other etc.

What candidates does a hiring process like this drive away? Are it specific character traits that pass through the sieve? If yes, how will that shape your corp and the culture in it in the long term?

Yeah, but we pay you a lot of money, and it does actually work for us

I just want to highlight that this works specifically because there are a very finite number of these we pay you a lot of money companies competing for talent and that's the primary reason candidates put up with this [expletive deleted] treatment. And the result are beneficial for these companies, yes.

I'm a HM at a big tech company as well. We do 3 one hour slots.

In a previous company we pair interviewed, 1/2 hour screen + 2 one hour slots. I liked that format a little bit better.

I've been interviewing people for about 40 years now, I was just reflecting on my first ever interview that I participated in when I was still a teenager.

I would say there are some factors that are not going to come out in any number of interviews. Conversely there are factors that are immediately noticeable.

I can tell in 10-15 minutes how strong someone is technically. At least I can tell the difference between "weak", "maybe", "strong" in 10 minutes.

Going back to my first ever interview. The guy was brilliant. He was technically good. He ended up being a not so good hire for reasons that would have been very hard to discover during the interview. It was partly the intersection of very smart without the experience to match and partly that he was just weird in some other ways. He was hired, he left within a year or so.

I think the science says the best predictor is an IQ test. The rest of our practices are not really evidence based. We tend to want to hire people that are like us, that know the things we know, we have all sorts of biases during the interview process, and throwing more people/time at it doesn't really seem to make a big difference.

I would say the most important thing you can do to get good people is to make your company a place that good people want to be. I.e. what matters is more what enters the pipeline then the interview process. I would bet that having 7 interviews vs. 3 has a difference that's completely in the noise and that at least there's no solid evidence that it gets you anything re: the quality of people working in a company. Every company says it has the best people. Mostly channeling Joel Spolsky here but I've seen this principle in action.

EDIT: Another random thought is that there are other factors that influence whether someone is going to be successful in a given role. Even the best software engineer can fail if the conditions for him to be successful aren't there.

Anecdotal, but I am a HM. The process goes I review cvs with senior engineers, we filter, 1 tech interview to validate cv, one with me to validate decision. Done. 3rd interview only for someone who would be a HM themselves. To be fair, if we could validate that cv is accurate we would not even need the interviews. Junior people are our responsibility to develop, senior you can understand their fit with some key indicators. I believe the detail in recruitment either reflects lack of trust in team or focus on accurate placement of people, which does not lineup with my expectations about how a team of creative people should be run.

Are candidates paid for their time when doing such extensive interviews? Doing 7 rounds, including preparation and travel time, may well add up to a full week.

You pay them a lot of money if they pass, but the others get zero. You’re basically annoying lots of people to make that one person happy.

You can take something out from an interview: practice for other interviews, insight of how others interview (what did you think were good or bad questions, what annoyed you). I know it's not the best use of your time but it's better than a total waste

How do you know that it actually works? Are there formal studies that compare different approaches? (it doesn't look like the difference can be easily evaluated and therefore it is extremely easy to mislead yourself on the effectiveness of some baroque process)

> Is it perfect? No, but it does work.

How do you know it works?

> I don’t want to hire the wrong person, it’s expensive and it makes my job awful for a while.

There we are. It is all about you.

No need to say anything else - your life is all about you, so of course if it works for you, 'it works'.

> How do you know it works?

Because the hallways aren't empty.

the hallways aren’t empty due to the total compensation and perceived prestige working at a FAANG or similar company offers.

I had a startup give me 2 interviews and a paid coding exercise before making an offer, but the compensation was below market with some long shot equity comp. I had a large consulting company give me one recruiter screen and a series of 3 20 minute interviews, one tech one manager and one in between before making an offer at market rate. Sounds like generally interview time scales with total compensation, which seems fine to me. I’m a data scientist and I’ve never had a live coding interview but I also have no desire to apply to a top tier tech co.

Then there isn’t a problem — at least for FAANG. People are willing to jump through more hoops for more rewards in all aspects of life.

If a less prestigious company with worse compensation tries the same thing, then they will quickly discover they can’t hire anyone. It will be self-correcting.

due to the total compensation

Yes..it's why people do jobs.

Probably not as much as you would guess from talking to FAANG employees. It’s been fifteen years since my compensation exceeded the amount where it makes any difference to me. Now I want to have interesting problems, a business model I am not ashamed of, good and smart coworkers and decent conditions. I won’t be retiring early, which is fine: my work is almost always a fun and valued way I contribute to the world. One of the big problems with software ethics and the joy of solving problems is the influx of people choosing software not due to intrinsic affinity but just for money. Sometimes I wish more of them still went for law degrees or MBAs or surgery. It’s just a little sad to see someone who can make beautiful and useful software gems be dissatisfied because they didn’t get to be a CTO by the time they are thirty or the like.

In the 90s people getting a big software job where thrilled because they were going to change the world. My mom’s friends used stuff that ran my code. Now it seems like people want FIRE or multiple houses or lambos.

Sounds like you're agreeing with me in disagreeing tones

No, it's all about everyone. If I hire a person and fire them in less than a year, that's almost always because of a performance problem that's impacting the team or the org. If you're the one being fired, you probably left a job or didn't take some other job to work with us and now you're going to be unemployed. Additionally, as a hiring manager, I too am a human who wants to enjoy my job and have positive experiences and firing people sucks. It always sucks. It takes a toll on you.

Filtering early is best for everyone. If that means more rounds of interviews to be sure, that's what I'm going to do. I do my best to schedule around candidates and I'm forthcoming about the process during the first call but we try hard to be thorough because we want this to work well for everyone. Would you rather be hired and then fired quickly because we didn't realize there was a misalignment? I wouldn't.

> Would you rather be hired and then fired quickly because we didn't realize there was a misalignment? I wouldn't.

The fact that your knee jerk reaction to a misalignment is firing someone rather than mentoring them and aligning them with the org speaks volumes about your management style… And managers wonder why they have such a hard time hiring or retaining people right now…

They want to outsource the costs of developing talent. To their own detriment, then they want to blame everyone else.

This is of course when they're not busy abusing someone on a visa to make them do more work than a human should have to do.

You've had some bad jobs, haven't you? Want to talk about it? We don't abuse anyone on a visa because we're fully remote and don't do visas. We target the high side of comp in the person's country. We specifically hire senior people because we're small and building. Developing talent is great but the time to do that is expensive and until you've hit a certain scale, it's detrimental to launching a startup. Look around the industry and look at the success stories. Then look at what their early hiring looks like. If you can find a startup that succeeded by hiring new grads and junior engineering first, I'd love to read about it.

> If you can find a startup that succeeded by hiring new grads and junior engineering first, I'd love to read about it.

Mentoring is not something that's only done for new grads and juniors.

Wherever there are skilled people in the company interested in learning more about the systems around them and how to work with them well, it's generally a good idea to figure out some way to mentor/grow them. Whether officially, nor unofficially.

For non-technical roles it's likely a good idea to do the same in ways that suit there as well.

I used "misalignment" as a kind way to say "because we realized we don't want to work with you." But you're chasing a different thread anyway. We're talking about quick hiring and firing being better than thoroughly vetting a candidate. If we want to talk about how to hire junior engineering talents specifical, we can do that.

I definitely spend less time per person, trying to find juniors. You have to because t What you're looking for is different. My only goal for hiring junior engineers is to find out if they know enough to not drown and if I think they're willing and able to learn fast. That takes less time and the risk is generally less because my expectations are lower and so is the compensation.

It's been a while since I hired junior people though. The roles I take are always in early phase startups and I don't have budget for people who need on-the-job training.

> thoroughly vetting a candidate

Either you work at startups or you thoroughly vet candidates, not both.

It's not "best for everyone."

Hired and fired quickly is better because when I have to dedicate weeks or a month of unpaid, uncompensated time to your process then I'm the one losing. You are already getting paid for putting in the work of interviewing me. If your team is stretched so thin that you need to put your time at a premium, that's a problem with your process not having enough throughput.

How many people do you reject to fill one position? How many are "filtered" at later stages to fill one position?

If it's taking months, then they're doing it badly. Our hiring process is five rounds but it never takes more than a couple weeks, including the negotiation phase. Our data shows that we need something like 14 resumes to get one candidate worth interviewing. Of those, it takes 4-6 candidates for one hire. Hiring and firing fast means we also have to invest in onboarding, training and allowing people to settle in. During that time, we've filled the current position and we're no longer interviewing candidates. Once someone is fired, we have to go through the whole mess again. That would be the most wasteful model for everyone involved. By my math, that's a minimum of two months of time on a single person (I think six weeks to fully productive is reasonable) just to go back to searching again. And that's just the US and ignores the two week notice (or more) for each candidate.

I hire in APAC too. Indian engineers are giving 60-90 day notices now and that's contractual. Two candidates, using your model, could easily take up a year. (Hiring in APAC take a long time already.)

I can only assume you've had some bad experiences lately but your personal bias has created a really bad mental model for you that would be a net negative for everyone.

> If it's taking months, then they're doing it badly.

is not responsive to

> I have to dedicate weeks or a month

Sure it is. If a company's hiring process for a single candidate takes multiple months, that's bad. The candidate experience is critically important. We have five stages of our interview process, two of them involve speaking with multiple engineers. The whole process takes less than a month, as long as the candidate has time. In general, it's 2-2.5 weeks and that involves coordinating calls with engineers in the Americas, Europe and APAC.

If it takes longer, it's always an issue with coordinating with the candidate schedule. (this is my experience with my hiring process)

No it sure isn't because I never said months or multiple months.

Fine. I'm mixing replies. A single month is still unreasonable. That's a bad candidate experience. That changes nothing about the number of people who interview you though, just how quickly.

Well due to real world constraints of scheduling even with people who's sole job is to interview candidates the speed at which you interview is most likely going to be a function of how many people need to interview you.

If I could get a job in a week instead of 3 months of interviews? Yeah I'd be fine with that.

A week for a single candidate interviewing with a US only company is entirely reasonable. I don't think two is bad either. I would not stay engaged with a company that took a month, the same way I don't stay engaged with a candidate that can't find time to schedule three or four calls in less than six weeks (I am more forgiving with candidates than I would be with companies).

> Filtering early is best for everyone.

This is a lie that everyone tells themselves to make them feel secure and safe.

The best interview is working with the person. Do a few basic interviews for competency, give them a 2 week - month long 1099 contract and put them on guard rails for the contract duration.

Their daily work isn't just about whether they can jump through time-based hoops or answer basic questions. No one is going to know whether it is a mutual match until the person gets into the codebase and start working.

Plenty of great engineers have "performance problems" not because they are bad engineers but because of problems an interview will never expose or detect like a bad teammate or lead match causing disagreements, a bad codebase, poor planning that only builds tech debt, bad business plan, disagreement on business direction, etc.

The idea that an interview can filter good or bad engineers is laughable. The most you can determine from an interview, regardless of how many flaming hoops and balls the candidate bounces off their nose, is whether they know how to code and _probably_ know what you need them to know.

> The most you can determine from an interview, regardless of how many flaming hoops and balls the candidate bounces off their nose, is whether they know how to code

When I interview I don't even mention code or technical stuff (that is for someone else to ask) and I am able to learn quite a bit about a person and if they would be a good fit. Just because you can't doesn't mean other people can't.

But why would I as a candidate leave my full time job to do a month long 1099 contract?

I agree that bad hires should be avoided and that filtering early is best for everyone. The question is whether a stretched out interview process is the most effective way to filter out misalignments.

Interviews may be the best tool available while searching for unknown talent, but that does not mean they are a good tool. The process is artificial, no matter how much effort is put into framing it otherwise. Even the most honest interviewee will have difficulty behaving as they would in a normal working environment, while many are more than willing to be actors playing a part. Likewise, interviewers are interacting with the interviewee in an unnatural way and are making judgements about the interviewee in a fashion different from making a judgement of a colleague.

Even if one could somehow get beyond that artificiality, what sort of impression does it leave the candidate with? There is a world of a difference between working for a company that is careful and one that is bureaucratic, one that is focussed upon making sound decisions and one that simply follows process. It can also leave the impression that key decision makers are difficult to access, making it more difficult to get the actual meat of the work done.

As for competing for the best employees, a drawn out process doesn't benefit anyone and is the least detrimental to companies that offer a genuine competitive advantage. Keep in mind, that candidate may already be part way through the interview process at another company (or even offered a position) by the time an they are offered the first interview at your company. While both parties form impressions of the other during the interview, the candidate will gain more insight about the company's functioning in how they handle the hiring process than the other way around.

> How do you know it works?

If the company in question is growing its business and the employees and customers are happy, then whatever they are doing is working, at least for now. I'm not sure there is a much better way to measure it.

When I joined NVidia they had me through two phone screens (although they originally planned for three), followed by an onsite with seven different interviewers back to back on the same day. It wasn't fun, but it wasn't the end of the world either.

When I was a hiring manager at Qualcomm we would typically do a phone screen followed by an onsite with maybe four one-hour interviews back to back and there was rarely any disagreement on whether the candidate made the cut or not, so I would argue that it was sufficient.

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