Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

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I'd be happy to discuss with readers who disagree with this comment what the nature of your disagreement is.

I think you're generally being rather kind on the not-yet-employer here, but I have one specific point: giving up a whole day of your labour for free for every interview is not a sustainable strategy.

I don't know what the average number of interviews is prior to taking a new position, but if they all last a day, that is a lot of work for each applicant to do without getting paid, and it's a lot of work from a lot of applicants that the prospective employer gets for free.

Everyone is taking a risk going through a recruitment process, but typically it's already stacked heavily in the prospective employer's favour as they set the terms of the interview and generally it's held at their choice of venue, using their preferred facilities, and with minimal overhead for their existing staff.

Throwing in working for free on the prospective employer's real project, and IMHO this tips from unbalanced to downright insulting. If you want to hire a professional, give them some professional courtesy and treat them as such.

(I would almost certainly have ended the interview in that situation as well, though perhaps not with quite the same choice of words. But then this sort of one-sided relationship is why I choose not to work for anyone as an employee any more and instead run my own businesses, so I do have a well-established bias here.)

Most interviews I've been in take essentially a whole day. Whether I add code to their codebase or not. I'd prefer working for free for the day... At least I'd have a better idea of what I'm getting into.

May I ask where you're from? I'm in the UK, and in my entire career I have never had a single visit to a prospective employer that lasted more than a half-day. It's not unusual (IME) to do that a couple of times, so maybe some places do everything on the same day, but I've never been through a recruitment process that wasn't all done in a couple of half-day visits at most. Maybe my experience is just coincidental and completely out of the mainstream.

I am not the person you are responding to, but multiple day interviews are pretty common in silicon valley. A few weeks ago I did a whole day interview of nothing but frigging white board exercises while they stared in their phones and look annoyed when I talked to them., and didn't question me about my resume or otherwise try to figure out if I was a fit or skilled beyond implementing memcpy twice in a row (I shit you not). That's a bit unfair, there were good questions, and good interviewers as well, but it was still just "find the bug", "implement XX". Then they called me and asked for another round. Uh, no. I then hear I'm ungrateful because they were prepared to throw a bunch of money at me. Oh la-de-friggin-da.

Hmm, obviously had something to get off my chest there. But interviews can go 2-3 rounds on the phone alone, 1 day or more on technical, and then more to actually talk to the team. It works for some companies because they have a steady stream of people that want to work for "Google" or whoever. Then everyone w/o the reputation of Google decide they should be like Google, follow suit, and you have the current madness.

There is the fact that a bad hire is extremely expensive, and it makes sense to be careful. But what working, skilled person has the time for such impersonal, multi-day efforts? When I put my resume on the street I had multiple inquiries from Yahoo, Amazon, Google, not to mention a bunch of smaller players. Just dealing with the proposed phone interviews would be a full time job, and I'd have to take a month off to go interview with them just to make an informed decision (why take the first job that comes along).

Something is seriously broken. So long as it is possible for me I'm not going to play the game, and do it the old school way - connections, people that know my work, and so on. But the trouble is, your connection ends up at a big company, and they are powerless to stop the HR/"best practices" juggernaut.

Thank you for shining a light on this madness. I've had the same experiences here in SV and these "extreme hiring" practices don't seem sustainable to me.

I've been lately thinking that perhaps we'd be better off with a more fluid style of hiring, say something involving real probation periods after which both parties assess how things are going and decide whether to continue. That approach is complicated, though, by the fact that on-boarding an employee is costly. Perhaps THAT's what we need to optimize.

A very successful department lead I know exclusively uses a probationary hiring practice on top of a pretty extensive set of interviews and coding tests (a bit excessive for my taste, but meh).

Candidates are told up front about the probationary period and can back out if they want, but everybody who works there accepted it. It's amazing how many people make it through the hiring gauntlet (no matter how extensive, rigorous or complex she made it) and the completely bombed out during actual work.

Interestingly for the ones that don't work out, most of the time, the employees (I'm calling them that because that's what they are) opt to leave before the end of the probationary period. Nobody's upset about this because it's all handled professionally and sometimes people just don't work out.

However, the ones that make it past the probationary period are really really good employees. I think the average employment period with her company is around 5 years and while she's run the show they've had 99.999% up time in an industry that would probably get by just fine with an 80% up time.

Yeah I've interviewed in Seattle and Chicago mostly. A couple half day visits sounds like a day's worth to me. :)

You're right I'm talking more like 4-6 hours... but at that point you need to schedule the entire day for it so you can be on time, leave room for extra time to talk if the employer wants, etc.

So again, it's not that it is exactly 8 hours, but that it pretty much takes up a day.

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