This happened to me as well. A recruiter told me that I had done very well in the PS, and would move me forward to the virtual onsite. I prepared for a week, including a whole weekend. Then I received a call from the recruiter telling me that the team that wanted me to interview changed their product direction, and would not move forward with me anymore. I was pretty upset, I just said thank you for letting me know since I did not know and do not know what else I could say. It was a totally waste of my time. I was actually pretty busy in that week, I could have done something else over that weekend. I guess this is how life goes.
it is, its kind of unfortunate, but things are always in a state of flux. Can happen the other way around, a company goes through an entire elimination process, gets the final choice, and they turn it down.
a presentation about your projects you've worked on? hmmm, when I interview someone about their projects its pretty much a conversation where there is no set plan. Quite often you end up swapping what projects you talk about based on questions asked. I find freeform pretty effective to get to the interesting things.
The only company I encountered recently who wanted me to give a presentation when applying for a software engineering job was Snowflake. I guess asking everyone to jump through that hoop is one way of cutting down on the number of candidates.
It's one way to bias the interview towards extroverts. Based in the percentage of extroverts to introverts developers they will probably end up with less technically able development and the amount of meetings will be higher than average and meetings will be filled with people who need to add in something so meeting length will increase.
Should have more people wanting to come into the office.
What? No. Being good at presentations is IMO uncorrelated to extroversion, I have literally seen hundreds of them (science grad school, was in two labs with weekly group meetings and went to two journal clubs a week, plus lectures by visiting profs, etc) a rough estimate would be I've seen about 500 presentations, most presented by people whom I know and have a good feel of whether or not they are extroverted.
Maybe not uncorrelated but I mostly agree. A presentation is a performance. And there are people who can be very good at performing who are not especially into introducing themselves to strangers one on one.
The reason why I disagree is that presentation is a skill and introverts are more likely to be conscientious about their presentation, their mistakes, and put effort into patching them up over time. Even if it's their first go at it, they are likely to be conscientious about the content of their preso because they know they're going to suck at the live aspect (I'm an extrovert, btw). There might be a maturity aspect too, as in: when you're a high school or college student you are one-tracked to barf all of your knowledge onto the screen, probably due to insecurity, but that's uncorrelated to social temperament
I agree. I think presentation skills can be learned by anyone, regardless of personality. Maybe some people will have to work harder to develop them, but it's possible. I'm pretty introverted, but I have worked as both a waitress and a DJ. Learning to interact confidently with the public is just a skill for those jobs. Extroverted people might just master it more quickly.
Back before the plague, we used to include a short presentation round for senior hires on the final day. After all, a senior engineer is expected to occasionally explain and simplify potentially complex issues to people outside their immediate circles.
But we never made it a gauntlet. Presentation was for 15-20 minutes, on a technical and hopefully interesting subject of the candidate's choosing. It was also the first "real" interview slot, because the idea was always that by allowing the candidates to warm up on a topic they were familiar and comfortable with, they would be more relaxed afterwards. And of course we explained the reasoning to the candidate, upfront.
Sure enough - we have people who enjoy being exposed to new, interesting, technical things. If they learned something new, great. If they found the topic interesting enough to ask further questions thanks to their own curiosity, even better.
On the other hand, Spotify used to require an on-the-spot adlib presentation during their initial interview a decade ago. That was disturbing.
For a senior position, a short technical presentation seems pretty reasonable to me. Many in that situation probably already have something they can repurpose. As you say, most senior technical positions aren't just about churning out code in a vacuum.
Something that held me back is that all of my work has been under NDA, and my side projects aren’t worth presenting. I think discussions about my past work in interviews may borderline violate the NDA if I say the wrong thing, but putting it together into a formal presentation seems to cross some kind of line, and create documentation of a willful violation.
If you’re interviewing academics, people who work in open source, or people who have already gotten a presentation cleared to give a talk somewhere, that wouldn’t be an issue. Those might be people you want to select for, but you should be aware that’s what you’re doing.
Companies these days expend way too much energy interviewing people, and people then fail to prepare for the interviews or communicate internally afterwards. When I went for interviews I hated it when people did not even read my resume and sometimes did not even know what position it was for. Companies demand so many interviews from their existing people that they become jaded and no longer care.
I once went for an interview as a contractor and they scheduled 8 consecutive interviews in a row. Half never showed up, or asked the same lame questions. Also what they were looking for was actually different than what they had told me, so I flew to another city (they paid) for nothing. I didn't get (or want) the job.
Good thing too, a month later the entire division was shut down.
Companies these days expend way too much energy interviewing people
The only thing that wastes more time than interviews is hiring the wrong person. Many companies take interviewing seriously, my company meets before each interview to go over the candidate's resume and discuss what we each want to talk to the candidate about. Then we have a debrief after the interview. Anyone can veto a candidate for any reason and only candidates that get a majority vote to proceed move on to the next step. If everyone is lukewarm on the candidate, then he doesn't move to the next step.
Interviews don't guarantee that you'll hire the right person, but do help screen out the wrong people -- like bad personality fit, insufficient knowledge of what they claim to know, etc
Good thing too, a month later the entire division was shut down.
Perhaps your experience at a failing division was not typical at this company
Yes. FWIW, I've been in the recent position of not making it past multiple rounds with top tier companies. And of course, it hurts to get rejected.
A mentor of mine essentially said to me it's not personal, think of how much each of those engineers are making and how much it costs to interview you. If you didn't leave a great impression (and I fully admit that I wasn't on my game), it's cheaper to move on. A bad hire is very costly in terms of money/time/energy.
At the end of the day, there's other opportunities. Plus, there's nothing that says given more time improving oneself, one can't land the opportunity they were looking for.
> so I flew to another city (they paid) for nothing
Remind me of the time when a company flew me to their office for a remote position to interview with the team, and 4 out of the 6 sessions were held over zoom because the interviewers were working from home that day.
And then they ghosted me after telling me I was great.
I once conducted an on-site interview with a candidate for a software engineering position whose resume had no software engineering experience or education listed and who politely told me about five minutes into the interview that they couldn't design or write software. They weren't aware they were interviewing for a software engineering position.
Despite multiple resume reviews and two phone interviews (one of which was supposedly technical) I was the first person to pick up on this.
The company had paid for them to fly over from the east coast, too.
I did some interviewing last year. I've been in my current position for about 5 years; I enjoy it, but was looking to see what else was out there. After going through about 5 interviews I decided to call it quits. The entire process of tweaking resumes, writing cover letters, and applying eats up your post-work hours. Once you get a call back, preparing for the different interview stages will take up the rest of your nights, or weekends if you are assigned a work project. Working from home makes it easy to schedule calls during lunch hours, but that just makes your regular work day more stressful.
After my fifth interview I decided to take a break. It was a good experience for me; I was incredibly rusty during my first few interviews, but gained a lot of confidence by my last one. Overall though it was incredibly stressful. This authors experience sounded terrible, but not at all surprising. I think job hunting while out of work would be stressful for other reasons, but being able to commit your full attention to searching and preparing would be advantageous in my opinion.
I feel like the main blind spot for companies in the hiring process is that they expect candidates to already be caring about and deeply invested in what the company works on, and the more specialized the sub-field or tech the more the company expects candidates to have familiarity or expertise.
That is certainly a problem. I intentionally applied to companies I had some knowledge or interest in, but I definitely had to bullshit more when I knew less about the company. I tried to take the approach of putting my cards on the table; ex: I have a strong interest in security, automation, and devsecops, hopefully there is some intersection! Sometimes that worked, but I still ran into cases where I felt like I checked 9 out of 12 boxes, and by missing those 3 boxes they weren't interested, or they had someone who checked more then 9.
Either way, I have major respect for anyone looking for a new job right now. I wish you the best of luck, and I empathize with how exhausting it can be.
Hah, thanks. I was interviewing for 9 months straight, but still didn’t manage to land a gig. Took a two month hiatus, and now back into it. It’s pretty brutal!
In my experience, it's caused by a reactive, rather than proactive, response to being short staffed. Interviews happen at least a year after those in the trenches have realized, and signaled, that staffing is short. By the time of the interview, something negative has already happened (dates slipped, etc), with that being the trigger that caused management to approve a hire. Add some delay to actually finding the candidates and you're well into fire fighting, and hiring someone with direct experience, with a minimal ramp up time, is a huge plus.
I think that text was never supposed to be read. It is a print of the landing page of the platform the author built. I presume they would say just that and no would bother much trying to read it either.
Good riddance, if they don't respect your time probably it is not a company to sink some portion of your life into it.
Unfortunately people on the other side of hiring process have less respect for the candidates. Somehow they feel more powerful than the interviewee and forgetting that they were and will be on the other side one day.
I know it's a luxury that I'm in a position to do this, but anyway: in general I won't continue interviewing with a company that expects me to put in significant effort into just preparing for the interview. Make a full presentation, build a small service or other not-trivial take-home coding challenge, put together a business proposal, etc.: I'm sorry, I don't do any of that for free. My resume and references speak for my abilities, and while I'm happy to have them probed and challenged (heavily!) in an interview context, that doesn't extend to my putting in hours of work just go conduct the interview at all.
This isn't high school, and you're not going to give me homework just for the chance to work for you. And I use the homework analogy intentionally, because just like with school, this doesn't scale. I can't interview at, say, 10+ companies all of whom are expecting me to put in paying-employee-level work just for the interview while also holding down my regular job. And I'm not going to go with a significantly shortened list of candidate companies just because their interview process is so onerous that I literally don't have the time to talk to more.
Again, I know not everyone can do this, but realize that companies try to exploit you during the interview phase, too. You need to also have standards for what you're willing to put up with.
I signed up for a freelancing site that had an involved screening process. The first two parts were pretty simple. The third or fourth part required a 20-30 hour project and a presentation. I laughed and bailed out before that. A few days later I found some other freelance thing that had a half hour phone screen.
Could you give some insight as to how you perform interviews?
How do you get the candidate to clearly show they have the broad knowledge and creativity required to be a good developer? What kinds of whiteboard coding problems do you usually give?
A few years back an SF startup asked me to prepare a presentation as part of the final round of interviews. It was supposed to be something I like to do. I chose making pizza on my charcoal grill using my KettlePizza [0]. At the time, our family tradition was to make homemade pizza on Friday nights so it wasn't much of an imposition to snap a few photos during the process and slap it together into a Powerpoint.
Overall the presentation portion was a decent experience. I presented for 10-15 minutes and the folks in the room asked questions for about that long.
I didn't get an offer because of "concerns around culture & team fit." I'm pretty sure that wasn't a result of my presentation, but, rather, that I indicated I didn't care much for death marches (and they were clearly on one at the time).
Had I put 10 hours into the presentation like Op I would have been annoyed. But an hour wasn't bad. Altogether, I think it's not a bad way to facilitate conversation and allow a broader group of folks to participate.
While I'm not generally a fan of test projects, etc., I have to admit that a writing and/or presentation sample is pretty much necessary for some jobs. That said, I probably wouldn't assign one so if a person already had examples, that would probably be fine. (And for a job that requires such things, they typically would.)
This was a developer job. I doubt making presentations was a key part of the job. As such, they emphasized that I shouldn't spend a lot of time on the presentation. It functioned as a conversation starter. For that it worked well.
Makes sense. Senior developers do often give a fair number of presentations to external audiences but I wouldn't consider it a core competency of most developer jobs. (Though general ability to communicate can be important.)
12 hours of unpaid labor to just get your foot in the door? I'll take the hardest conceivable pass, please.
If a company sees no issue with asking for a TED talk just to consider you for a position, imagine what kind of work/life balance you can expect once hired. What kind of last minute assignments, what kind of weekend calls to wipe some higher up's rear end after they foot-mouthed with a client, and promised the moon, and now you've gotta go to Kroger and find 40 tons of cheese and carve it up so they don't need to look stupid.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: we as software devs/code monkeys/devops/admins have fucking worth. You should not EVER be willing to put yourself through this kind of meat grinder, not just to avoid demeaning yourself, but for demeaning everyone else who practices your craft alongside you. They're not worth so little as to need to do that, and neither are you.
You want me to write code for your company? Awesome, I'd love to do that. Pay me.
Personally, I'd prefer to give a 1 hour presentation of my work over a full day of technical interviews one after the other. I like this presentation idea - I've only ever seen it done when hiring people with PhDs just out of academia, but I'd like to see it as an option for non-PhD positions as well. This way you get all of the interested parties in the room at one time, they hear your presentation and there's some Q&A afterward and you'd be done in like 90 minutes to 2 hours.
If this became standard practice interviewees would create a presentation once and then adapt it for each company. So sure, you'd put in a dozen hours or so the first time but then for future presentations it would take much less time to tweak it for the intended audience.
> Personally, I'd prefer to give a 1 hour presentation of my work over a full day of technical interviews one after the other. I like this presentation idea - I've only ever seen it done when hiring people with PhDs just out of academia, but I'd like to see it as an option for non-PhD positions as well. This way you get all of the interested parties in the room at one time, they hear your presentation and there's some Q&A afterward and you'd be done in like 90 minutes to 2 hours.
Personally, I wouldn't do either one. I'm fine with multi-stage interviews, even multiple drives to a given location, but there are limits. If a company wants me there for an all-day affair, I better have some compensation on the way, either the job itself or just for the time investment. I'm too damn busy to just flush a day down the toilet on a "maybe we'll hire you," not even going into the travel expenses, arranging time off from my current job, etc.
All my career I have watched as stories from fellow tech workers get more and more ridiculous, the lengths they're expected to go to for a freaking interview. It's gotten disgusting. If a company thinks you're a good fit for their position, they should be ready to court you as well. The only context these death march assembly line interviews make sense in, is if you are utterly meaningless to them, just another cog to be placed, and eventually, replaced. And I don't want to work for anyone like that anyway.
Very much agree with the sentiment. Interviewing in tech is so broken that I consider myself fortunate to not have to do it anymore. It's not like I've completely retired, but I've retired from interviewing. If someone wants to hire me for contract work based on past performance or working knowledge or on my github code and if the gig is interesting I'll take it. I had a short gig last Fall like that - former coworker emailed and asked if I was interested in working on a contract project that was in my area of expertise. I did the project - they knew my past work and I knew I liked working with them, no interview dance required.
But if a company wants to play the interview game (phone screen -> coding test -> full day interviews -> followup interview, etc.) then I'm not at all interested. If more of us would refuse to play the game maybe companies would try harder.
Exactly! They have to. If they can't fill positions that must be filled, changes will be made. But we all have to demand that, all the time. And that also means preaching this to everyone here who is just starting out in their careers. Lack of previous work to show is not permission to an interviewer to treat an aspiring developer like garbage. Everyone has to start somewhere.
To be fair, whatever time you prepare for this specific company is useful preparation for your current job search cycle anyways.
My job search cycle is once every 2-4 years. Within each cycle, I've always found my later interviews go much smoother than the early ones, due to incremental preparations adding up to much smoother execution.
The first new interviews are always rough, after a long hiatus. I generally look at those as warm-up interviews...
So it's not necessarily a net-zero reward, for the story portrayed by the author.
Sounds exciting. Some time ago during a ~5h interview I got to present my coded solution to a UI problem to the entire (~10 person) company at the end, panel-style. This was told to me after they described the problem they wanted solved in a couple hours. In hindsight it was kind of fun; in retrospect perhaps I could've done without the adrenaline.
They just have a organizing issues, its normal to give a presentation for a high level competitive job, but they should have gone through with it regardless if they found a better candidate. They don't know how to make a situation a win/win.
At the end of the day you never know what you're getting from an interview, some great candidates turn into duds and vice versa. It's amazing how many people in hiring positions are just really shit at judging character, instead they rely on some bullshit metrics and process to fill in their lack of intuition.
Feels like we constantly talk about how interviews suck, but we kind of all know why.
1. It's tough to fire people (in that, if you ask someone to move and it turns out they aren't a good fit, it's kind of a jerk move to then drop them like a hot potato).
2. Performance indicators are tough. How do you know someone is doing bad vs good?
3. Keeping on a bad hire (especially one you can't identify), is damaging as heck. Best case scenario they don't get much work done, worst case scenario they suck away the time of all your good hires through bad decisions.
So while I agree that interviewing sucks, I've come to terms with why it is so bad.
Those aren't directly reasons why interviews suck. IMO it's more that interviews, no matter how done/how well done, are a very imperfect tool. So we try to make up for quality with quantity--for the reasons you say. What you probably really want is internships and referrals from employees who have actually worked with the person, i.e. they're not just a college buddy. But you can't come close to filling every position that way.
Steve Yegge has a thing he calls the "Interview Anti-Loop" or "anti-panel".
Basically, for every person that works at some company (say, Google), there is a least one set of employees (the anti-panel) that would reject that person in an interview.
Filtering out obviously bad employees is really not an issue. It's the fact that you're asking a committee to do exactly what a committee does worst at: making a decision.
So every interview panel collectively decides that it's best to not make the decision (i.e. reject the candidate). It's the path of least consequence for the members of the panel. If it turns out the hire was bad, they don't look like a bunch of fools.
> it's highly likely that someone on the loop will be unimpressed with you, even if you are Alan Turing.
I fully believe this. The only reason you will ever get hired is because the company is desperate to fill a seat at that particular moment in time. It has zero to do with technical skills, social skills, or anything. It's 100% pure luck.
Almost every tech company is "hiring." These companies don't stop hiring. Hiring being the advertising of positions and the interviewing of candidates. But that does not mean those companies are hiring right now. Or even have positions available for those they are advertising. It's often a big bureaucratic ship that doesn't have the capability of even knowing what their needs are at any given time.
Maybe. I'm not involved in a lot of hiring but my general experience is that the interview panel usually ends up at one of two positions. Everyone is sort of meh (and maybe one or two people are actively negative). Or everyone is hire this person now--maybe with some minor caveats here and there. I'm not sure I can remember a situation where there was a strong split in opinion.
You're kind of describing the situation we're heading towards already, as I see contract to hire as essentially an internship. And maybe it's just where I'm living, but almost everything is trending towards that.
It's kind of wild. We are now putting people through an insane interview, and then also telling them we are going put them through probation. Choose one, at least that's what I would say.
The referrals are a mixed bag, and I think would create a bit of a revolving door where it's hard to enter the industry unless you have connections.
But is the "process" making it better at finding good hires? I know for myself I did big interviews at one stage, and realized most of it was redundant, I wasn't really learning more that would change my decision, I quickly learnt most of what I needed with a conversation and writing a small amount of code ( not tricky code either ). Students are a bit harder, but we participate in a summer intern program, and give most anyone a chance . We have taken on a few people from that, and that's worked well.
If these ridiculous interviews don't produce top notch performance reviews after a year on the job, then the interviews are worthless.
If I were to ever try a startup (I won't), my philosophy would be to hire easily and fire easily. Do my level best to interview fairly, and give people a chance. But if they don't work out, fire them quickly and give them a 2-3 month severance bonus.
Then I would remove most titles and pay in the top tier. I think at the beginning of hiring, it would probably have a high turnover, but as the company matures, if it survives it will be filled with a lot of happy engineers that won't want to leave.
Great, now my company has to issue a 1099 U. S. tax form for every candidate. What labor laws apply during the interview process? Man, better get legal and HR in on this.
I know for sure couple of company does give money for the interview time. If your competitive advantage is getting unpaid work from people then sorry to say your company suck.
>A company that will remain nameless (unless someone convinces me otherwise)
I'll give it a shot. They're going to keep doing it because they keep getting away with it. You've tied this to (I'm assuming) your real identity, so that makes it a little more difficult to call them out because they can respond. But if you don't let us know, we can't know to avoid them. Even avoiding spending time getting to a final round, only to be asked to do this, would be helpful.
They got you to work for free. They probably didn't benefit directly unless you gave them new ideas they didn't know about before, but you still put the time in. It was work to you. And they obviously didn't respect it at all, much less take the time to read your resume. Maybe they weren't even interested in hiring you?
The only saving grace for that could be an exceptional position with great responsibility and great pay. But even if that's true, they flippantly sent you through interviews for that position, so they're likely a bad company from the inside. They only way they would face consequences is if they're named.
Companies don't just interview people for shits and giggles. It costs a lot of money and people-hours to interview someone. The notion that "they didn't even read the resume and had no intention of ever hiring this person" is silly - no company is going to waste the time and money to go through 3 interviews with a person unless they were at least willing to hear them out. They don't want to waste their own time any more than you want to waste yours.
The most likely thing that happened is that the company was willing to hire this person even without the requisite experience if the interviews had gone well, but then someone else also applied and they were a better fit. That's a shitty result for the OP, but I'm not sure the alternative is any better. Should the company just not have given OP a shot at all, reducing their chance to get that job to 0%? That's not beneficial for OP, either.
Why did the author experience this then? This should have been 1 phone call max to establish the author didn't have this experience. But instead, they sent him through multiple rounds and made them give a lengthy presentation.
>They were looking for someone with a few years of experience working with a specific technology I had never used. But… they knew that from my resume.
Can you explain why they might have gone with the above excuse rather than "we found someone better" or "we won't be moving forward"?
They were likely willing to hire the author anyway, even without the experience. But they ended up finding someone that was better than the author.
>Can you explain why they might have gone with the above excuse rather than "we found someone better" or "we won't be moving forward"?
They did say "we found someone better". From the article: "They said that I interviewed extremely well, but that they decided to go with another candidate."
Unfortunately rejecting candidates and/or providing feedback can be a legal minefield. The most generic excuse is the best one and using objective facts is one of the safest ways to reject someone.
I see liability cited as a reason all the time, but I never hear about specific cases or settlements, or even a justification from an actual legal team (HR doesn't count, they are trained to never allow anything as far as I can tell).
It comes across from the inside and the outside as pure laziness.
It's a legal minefield in the sense that there is legal trouble if a hiring manager says "I hired the other candidate because they were white", but there is no such trouble if they just privately think it.
Would there be anything wrong with "we really liked you but found someone else better"? That's been the situation in my company recently. None of the candidates were bad, all of them would have been capable of doing the job but we had to choose one.
Sure they do. HR metrics are all based around pipelines, just like sales people. They get measured on number of candidates interviewed, and the more candidates interviewed for a specific position the better, as it makes them appear to be doing more 'due diligence'.
I've worked at, hired at, and consulted at many companies. I've never once seen an HR department be incentivized to interview people just for the sake of interviewing. At my last two companies, recruiters are measured on the number of candidates that end up being extended an offer, and are negatively measured against the number of candidates that are rejected. If a recruiter is pulling in a large number of people that all get rejected, that's not due diligence, it's wasting everyone's time and is a signal that the recruiter is not very good at identifying suitable candidates.
>HR metrics are all based around pipelines, just like sales people. They get measured on number of candidates interviewed, and the more candidates interviewed for a specific position the better, as it makes them appear to be doing more 'due diligence'.
Wait, is this really a widely prevalent practice? Any stats/data?
The primary criteria at my company is retention. Once the HR forwards the resume, the interview only moves forward if the hiring manager is interested in the candidate. The hiring manager wont waste their time with multiple interviews when they know for sure that they're going to reject the candidate. What purpose would that serve?
When they asked them to prepare the presentation, they likely had full intention to consider them for hiring. Then, another candidate filled the role, meaning the company no longer would be able to hire the author.
Informing them of this and cancelling the interview is the most respectful thing they could have done. It's certainly better than wasting the author's time by making them give the presentation even though the company then knew there was no longer a position they could offer.
I disagree with your statement that it was respectful.
Accepting your scenario, this suggests that they did not really want to hire the candidate and at best thought they might settle - when it came to it, they were not even willing to compare the candidate at the next stage, despite already asking them to do this work.
You say "strung along", I say "they were willing to give OP a chance at the job even though OP was not fully qualified for it, and when it was decided that the role was no longer available to OP, they told OP that rather than having OP waste their time giving a pointless presentation that wouldn't have changed anything".
I say "They asked OP to do a bunch of wasted work on the off-chance that their prize candidate was not available - even though they were not (under no circumstances) interested in considering the OP against the prize candidate"
There's a simple and known solution to not have to do this - which is to conduct fleets of interviews at the same time, so that you can fairly and accurately compare the candidates.
I highly doubt that the HR went from 0 to a hire in <1 week. The hired candidate was obviously already in a more advanced stage of the interviewing process when the OP was asked to make a presentation.
So they were double disrespectful: They asked for a presentation knowing that there's a very high chance it will be meaningless. They didn't have the courtesy to sit through the presentation they asked for, or at least offer a token of their appreciation for the time the OP put to prepare for the cancelled presentation.
>I highly doubt that the HR went from 0 to a hire in <1 week. The hired candidate was obviously already in a more advanced stage of the interviewing process when the OP was asked to make a presentation.
That doesn't change anything. The company had no idea if the other candidate would pass the final interview or accept the offer until the very moment when they did, at which point they would have canceled OP's presentation. And that's what they did.
>They asked for a presentation knowing that there's a very high chance it will be meaningless.
So are you saying the better option would be for the company to say "well, there's a small chance we might hire you, but instead of giving you the opportunity we're just going to go ahead and reject you without even giving you the chance"? No, that's disrespectful.
>They didn't have the courtesy to sit through the presentation they asked for
Telling the candidate to waste their time giving the presentation that they already know won't change any outcome is disrespectful. If that had happened, we would all be here commenting about how the company is assholish for wasting OP's time by making them give a pointless presentation.
You seem to be arguing as if the company wasting the author's time was a hypothetical. No, they veritably, absolutely, wasted his time.
The respectful thing to do, IMO, is not to ask people to perform this type of free work, specially if the likelihood of the preparation going to waste is this high.
Thankfully, no company so far has asked me to do something like this, because I would just refuse.
They didn't waste his time. OP put in work and in return the company gave them a chance to be hired. Once it was known that there was no longer a chance for them to be hired, the company told OP to stop putting in work for it.
If the company had known from the start that there was 0% chance of hiring OP, or if the company had allowed OP to give their presentation while already knowing that there was 0% chance that OP would be hired, that would be wasting their time. But that's not what they did.
You only seem to be repeating the same two arguments with no variation, and without actually addressing what other people are saying in response to those arguments. That makes it seem to me that not only you're not actually open to discussing the matter, but also that we fundamentally disagree on what constitutes "making someone else waste time" so I guess I'll just say that I agree to disagree.
Ironic, because your initial comment was just repeating the same argument that someone made before you with no variation. If you wanted a different response, you should have tried coming up with a novel thought rather than one that was already stated two comments above.
>> The respectful thing to do, IMO, is not to ask people to perform this type of free work
Could you share the link to where someone else presented that same point? In fact, I only commented because I found it odd that nobody had said it yet in this subthread.
Its the companies place to take the risk. The power imbalance is greatly in favor of the employer. At worst they hire someone not quite perfect but also have a pool of other candidates they looked at to move onto if it really is that bad of a choice.
>It costs a lot of money and people-hours to interview someone.
True. Doesn't mean they're managing it properly.
>no company is going to waste the time and money to go through 3 interviews with a person
Again, assuming the company is carefully keeping track of this.
Sounds like an "ideal world" fantasy to me. Yes, the situation you describe is how things would ideally be. But they're clearly not. This happens, a lot more than many feel comfortable admitting.
I understand that getting rejected is frustrating. What I don't understand is the apparently pervasive attitude that asking candidates to put in some effort is unacceptable. It reeks of entitlement.
I was asked to make a presentation for an interview last year. I did so happily. I was excited to get to tell the panel about something I was passionate about, and to go into deep technical detail on a project I'd put a lot of time into. Who wouldn't want to do this? Sure, it's stressful and it takes time, but it's also fun. You get to talk about yourself! That's everyone's favorite subject.
I also understand that any sane company is going to do its due diligence before making a bet on someone who just walked in off the street. A bad hire has huge downsides, from simply wasting time and money to setting a whole team back. You're literally saying to the company, "hi, we just met; give me a bucket of money and make me a dependency in your roadmap."
Some company just expecting free work comes closer to the definition of "entitlement", in my opinion.
> Who wouldn't want to do this? Sure, it's stressful and it takes time, but it's also fun. You get to talk about yourself! That's everyone's favorite subject.
I wouldn't, so there's that. And, mind you, I don't even consider myself particularly introverted, so I highly doubt that I'm the single exception to what you said. So what I'm trying to say is that one can't assume that one's sensibilities are shared by everyone else.
> someone who just walked in off the street.
Not only had the author already been through a process, the fact that there was a recruiter involved makes it seem to me that the company (or the recruiter) contacted him, not viceversa. So it doesn't seem like he "just walked off the street".
>Some company just expecting free work comes closer to the definition of "entitlement", in my opinion.
If you want a job, you have to put in work. That's just how it is. I too wish companies would just throw job offers at me without me having to put in any effort to get them, but I acknowledge that this just isn't realistic. There is a reasonable upper limit on how much work a company can expect from a candidate, but I do not think a 1 hour presentation is past that limit (and it depends on the job - if I'm interviewing for a warehouse worker job, then no it's not worth preparing a presentation for. but if it's a good job at a good company, then I begrudgingly accept that I've going to have to put in some extra effort). If the OP disagreed, they were free to decline to prepare the presentation and not continue the process. But if you read the OP, they weren't concerned about this "free work" and they actually said they were excited to give the presentation.
I also disagree with the idea in this thread that the company is trying to get "free work" out of the candidate in any way. It's not like the company is going to take your presentation on your random side project and go use it to try and sell services to customers or something. That's fantasy land. After your presentation, your PPT file is going into the recycle bin whether or not you got hired. Trust me, they don't want to sit through your random throwaway presentation either. They just want you to do it to see if you're a worthwhile hire, and then they want it to end. They aren't doing it for "the work".
> the fact that there was a recruiter involved makes it seem to me that they contacted him
Recruiters are involved in all hiring at the companies I've been at, even ones where the candidate applied. "Recruiter" is just the generic term for "HR person who is the point of contact for the candidate during the interview process".
I think the ‘free work’ idea is just a misapplication of a trend from another context.
It’s a relatively recent thing to call out unpaid work on social media. The bar that runs entirely on trial shifts. The media giant running unpaid internships.
In those cases the work really is valuable to the business. You can do bar work or proofreading at close to the output of an experienced person right off the bat. So those are rightly called out when abused.
On the other hand, the idea that you’re gonna come to an established engineering or product team with novel and valuable new insights, after a random Saturday of you thinking about it, is patently silly.
I’ve never had a candidate do the take home and come back with some significant angle on it we’d never thought of before. The value of the ‘free work’ to the company is the same as the value it has to you; it lets them evaluate you.
Some companies structure that better than others. Some feel like more of a time waste than others. But the idea that the company is getting you to do work for its value outside of the interview process just seems naive. It’s not a trial shift at a bar.
> The value of the ‘free work’ to the company is the same as the value it has to you
Absolutely none? I somehow doubt that, otherwise only the most incompetently run companies would still ask for that kind of commitment during the process and... Actually, you might have a point. I certainly have rarely liked work in companies that demanded free work from me during the hiring process. That might be one of the reasons why I haven't done an unpaid take home test in a long time.
> But the idea that the company is getting you to do work for its value outside of the interview process just seems
So the company isn't getting the candidate to work for free because it isn't getting value... If we ignore the value it gets from the interview process itself.
Providing some company a service so that it can make a decision on how it operates sounds like work to me.
On another note, this doesn't take into account that pointless busywork is still work.
I don’t recall ever saying it wasn’t work, so I’m not sure why you’ve taken the discussion in that direction.
It is work, it’s just not the cynical exploitation that’s being implied. The intent is that both employer and candidate mutually benefit from it. Evaluating the output of these assignments is also work given for your mutual benefit, and it’s typically seen by multiple people, which makes it a non-trivial amount. Both sides do speculative work for the evaluation stage, in that sense.
Primarily, the employer benefits - which is particularly evident in this case.
They can ask the applicant to do the work to prove themselves, with the pretence of an available job, and don't even have to consider the result of that work.
This scenario lays bare that the employer has all the power in the situation.
It doesn't matter much if it is entitlement or not, does it? If you are sought after, you can afford to refuse jumping through hoops. If you are desperate for work, you will be more likely to jump through hoops.
Likewise, if companies are in desperate need for employees, they will behave differently than when they are swamped by job applications.
It is kind of "entitled" to be able to picky about jobs or applications, but people and companies probably got there by acquiring valuable skills or valuable market positions. I don't see what labeling it "entitled" adds to the issue.
I could say you sound "privileged" for being able to afford to spend so much time on your applications, talking about yourself. But what would be the point? I personally wouldn't even say it is unfair if companies filter for young candidates without family or money issues that way. It just is what it is. People without family or generally more spare time also need jobs.
Another way to look at it, think of job interviews like a date. It is not a one sided thing. How much "testing" would you accept from date? I once had a company call me in for interviews four times (each time costing me at least half a day). Imagine a date telling you after three dates "I'm not sure if I like you yet" - how much more would that make you want to invest into those dates?
>I understand that getting rejected is frustrating. What I don't understand is the apparently pervasive attitude that asking candidates to put in some effort is unacceptable. It reeks of entitlement.
Most of us put effort into the skills on our resume. What's annoying is that no one on the other side apparently recognizes that and asks us to reprove our skills with things like this anyway.
>I also understand that any sane company is going to do its due diligence before making a bet on someone who just walked in off the street
And there's not a better way to assert my argument than when a company treats a PhD the same as someone who just walked in off the street.
Do you think a technical test estimated at 10 hours is acceptable (remember that estimates are almost always under in this industry)?
Do you think giving such a test to 10 candidates is acceptable when there is one job going? 9 candidates have put in a few hundred hours dollars worth of work just to get the chance to interview for that job.
The key word being "unpaid work". Interviewers should be required to pay at least minimum wage for any time taken up by an interview. Better companies will pay better rates.
Problem with "work assignments" like this is that there is completely assymetric skin in the game on this. I don't know if you have sent this same task to 1000 other people or just 3.
If everyone who did the interview was being paid, you can at least assume that they are moderately serious about your chance of joining the company.
My main takeaway from this article is that the author wasn't necessarily frustrated with spending 12 hours to prepare a 1-hour long presentation - though this does seem like a big ask - but was more frustrated that they didn't even get the opportunity to present it because the company was
> looking for someone with a few years of experience working with a specific technology I had never used. But… they knew that from my resume. And from my first interview. And from my second interview. And when they told me that I needed to prep a talk.
Shouldn't the company have seen this deal breaker before the interview process started? Or at least after the first interview or two? Acknowledging that the author wasn't the right fit would have saved both the company and the candidate the time and effort of going through an interview process that the company should have known wouldn't yield an offer.
I'm not sure if this is common practice, but I've encountered something similar, going through multiple rounds of interviews over many hours only to have the recruiter tell me that "based on your resume, you don't have the skills we're looking for in a candidate for this position". Why waster my time, and yours, going through the interview process then?
I don't think any of these rationales are very satisfying, but here are some possibilities:
1) The company didn't know what it was looking for when it started the process and came to a different understanding of the job requirements as the candidate moved deeper in the process.
2) The company is covering up the real reason they didn't want to move forward and "lack of relevant skill" is an easy excuse.
3) The company's recruiting process is immature/messy/sloppy/ineffective and they literally missed the lack of required skills until the very end.
4) The position had to be filled and the company wanted to maintain a backup candidate in case their first choice didn't work out.
I'd love to hear from those with experience on the recruiting/hiring manager side to see whether any of these reasons ring true or if something else might be at play.
I'm guessing #2 is probably closest (to be charitable). The required skill may have been a soft requirement for a candidate who otherwise wowed them but, as they moved through the process, that just wasn't the case.
A few years ago we were interviewing for a position, and one of the candidates was very up front with what the knew / didn't know -- however everything about this candidate showed that they would excel in the skills that were listed. Another candidate matched up with the skills we were looking for, and on paper was very impressive (same with the technical answers in the interview). However this person came off as a bit arrogant and inflexible. So we went with the less qualified, but better personality fit candidate, and that was one of our better hires.
So I can easily see the tables being turned the other way -- a candidate that doesn't have all the skills, but failed to wow us, would lose out to a candidate that better matched the skill set we were looking for.
My guess is that it wasn't actually a deal-breaker, and if there were no other candidates or if the other candidate ended up not being a good fit, the company wanted to go ahead with the presentation to see if they would be a good fit even without that specific experience.
It's a complicated situation from both side. If you're the company, you have to anticipate that the other candidate might get another offer, or turn you down, or turn out to be a flop, so you want to interview other candidates at the same time to have a back-up plan. And that's a good thing for the article author too, because it gives them the chance to see if they're a fit for the job and could learn the required skills even if they don't have them now. And it's great if it works out... but shitty when it doesn't.
It's worth realizing that it's a losing situation for the company, too. It's not like they want to waste a bunch of time interviewing you for a job you're ultimately not going to be in any more than you want to waste time on it. But unfortunately "wasting a bunch of time interviewing" is just how job hunting/hiring works these days.
> And that's a good thing for the article author too, because it gives them the chance to see if they're a fit for the job and could learn the required skills even if they don't have them now.
I think you're right on here, but I also think the benefits diminish the further a candidate goes in the process only to get turned down with an explanation that was known at the beginning. How many interviews does it take to come to that realization?
> It's not like they want to waste a bunch of time interviewing you for a job you're ultimately not going to be in any more than you want to waste time on it.
It seems like this should be true, and I hope it is, but I have worked for companies that seem to interview just for the sake of feeling or appearing to move forward in filling a position. Maybe the recruiter or hiring manager is incentivized in that way? Some action, even if it's in the wrong direction, is perceived as better than no action at all.
>only to get turned down with an explanation that was known at the beginning. How many interviews does it take to come to that realization?
The explanation likely wasn't known at the beginning. The thing that changed was the other candidate, and the company almost certainly had no way of knowing if this other candidate was going to fill the role up until the moment they did, at which time (I'm assuming) is when the company cancelled OP's presentation. The company likely had full intention to hire OP until that point.
>It seems like this should be true, and I hope it is, but I have worked for companies that seem to interview just for the sake of feeling or appearing to move forward in filling a position. Maybe the recruiter or hiring manager is incentivized in that way? Some action, even if it's in the wrong direction, is perceived as better than no action at all.
That's opposite my experience as a hiring manager. If we're "iffy" on a candidate, we'll likely give another interview to see if the first interview was a fluke. But if it's already known off the bat that the candidate won't be hired, we certainly don't waste time interviewing them anyway. Interviewing someone that's already a "no" means wasting multiple peoples' entire day in interviews, meetings, debriefs for no progress. That's something I want to avoid as much as humanly possible, and although I'm sure it happens some places, it's definitely not incentivized at any of the companies I've worked at.
I don't think anyone would disagree with the statement that hiring is terribly, atrociously, and disastrously broken. It's been talked about ad nauseum. But I don't think I've ever seen (nor do I personally have) any practical solutions to improve it.
Hiring is a two-way hard problem. On the company's side, they have conflicting interests where they want to hire someone as quickly and cheaply (cheap as in not spending hundreds of man hours interviewing just to fill a role), but also want to do due diligence so that they hire the right person. On the candidate's side, they also have conflicting interests where they just want a job and don't want to spend multiple entire days doing interviews, but they also need to do their due diligence to make sure the job is actually something they want.
This almost necessitates spending a decent chunk of time with each other, but not too much. The balance that most big tech company's seem to go with is 6-7 hours total in interviews for each candidate (and then ~10+ additional hours for both the candidate and the company doing preparation/debriefs). I really don't know why or how this was the number arrived at, though. From my perspective as a candidate, even after 6-7 hours of interviews I often come away still knowing very little about what the job actually is. And from my perspective as an interviewer, I know that requiring so much time from internal employees serving as interviewers is draining and stressful. It seems like it ultimately comes out to a lose-lose, but for some reason it's still what big tech sticks with.
I think you're way underselling the existing methods, or maybe I'm misunderstanding your words. To me if something is terribly, atrociously, disastrously broken you must stop using it immediately, because its harmful to use it any further. Are we really at that stage? I think having an honest dialogue about hiring is also about accepting that there are things that are working about the current system - even if it needs changes.
Broadly, I feel like we need to work to get better at most processes that involve humans. Managers need to get better at setting expectations, giving feedback, appreciating people's work, etc, etc. Employees need to improve their communication skills, reliability at forecasting, etc, etc. HR needs to make sure employees feel comfortable, welcomed, valued etc. Leaders need to better convey a vision for the company, etc. Basically everyone needs to improve in whatever job function they're responsible for. Hiring is no different - its just one of the many functions of a company.
People love to base arguments in data, but in what cases will data/models lie to you? If a company has been around for a while, has no obvious problems keeping their employees, does that mean that another company can simply adopt their model and be successful? Specifically, should we expect that companies which measure identically on key metrics (employee churn/turnover rate, employee work/life balance perception, employee retention, etc) are also similarly great at hiring?
I’m working on a tiny piece of the broken hiring process, Job Descriptions. Many of them (esp non technical role) are essentially illegible and absolute garbage.
Hopefully it reduces the wasted time upfront by improving the quality of matching between job postings and job seekers
I'll give you the best interviewing experience I had as some inspiration for improving it. (I have had far more with people wasting time or rejecting technical tests because of ridiculous reasons than pleasant experiences).
The interviewer asked me to bring in a laptop with some code I could discuss. I did, we discussed. He asked me some questions, I added a simple feature at his request. No time wasted on my part (ok, I was in a position that I had code I could bring in). It was code I knew, so no gotcha or anything fancy. Relaxed, friendly, the interviewer learned something rather than trying to one up me.
Like I say the only downside I can see to this approach is that people may not have a side project that they can share easily. In which case they will have to do the equivalent work of a normal technical test. So the worst case scenario using this method is the same as the standard scenario.
I'm building something to help for this on the hiring manager side! I think that all hiring software is focused on the recruiting funnel side of things rather than optimizing the actual interview/panel interview process to ensure fair data collection and execution overall.
After having done a lot of hiring interviews (100s) over the years, I can say that my own methodologies have improved substantially in terms of asking the right questions and being as objective as possible, but ultimately 1) members of my panel might not have that many experiences to hone their skills and 2) the data capture and evaluation process is a "clunky spreadsheet" exercise at best.
EDIT: The book "Who: The A Method for Hiring" is a great resource for this.
Tesla made me give a presentation, that's the only time I've encountered this request. That was fine with me. The presentation bit went well and they were an easy crowd.
Someone else got the job though.
Years ago, after doing well on regular interviews, I was once asked to do a presentation like this and I withdrew instead. For a regular interview, both candidate and employer give equal time. But for take home assignments, the employer is not putting in an equal amount. They're asking for more commitment than they're willing to put in (sometimes significantly so).
Maybe fixing the technical interview process starts with the highly qualified candidates decisively saying no to these things. I understand that not everyone is in a position to do this, but those who are should just say no and maybe it will help fix things (the takehome assignment fad and other brokenness).
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadShould have more people wanting to come into the office.
But we never made it a gauntlet. Presentation was for 15-20 minutes, on a technical and hopefully interesting subject of the candidate's choosing. It was also the first "real" interview slot, because the idea was always that by allowing the candidates to warm up on a topic they were familiar and comfortable with, they would be more relaxed afterwards. And of course we explained the reasoning to the candidate, upfront.
Sure enough - we have people who enjoy being exposed to new, interesting, technical things. If they learned something new, great. If they found the topic interesting enough to ask further questions thanks to their own curiosity, even better.
On the other hand, Spotify used to require an on-the-spot adlib presentation during their initial interview a decade ago. That was disturbing.
If you’re interviewing academics, people who work in open source, or people who have already gotten a presentation cleared to give a talk somewhere, that wouldn’t be an issue. Those might be people you want to select for, but you should be aware that’s what you’re doing.
I once went for an interview as a contractor and they scheduled 8 consecutive interviews in a row. Half never showed up, or asked the same lame questions. Also what they were looking for was actually different than what they had told me, so I flew to another city (they paid) for nothing. I didn't get (or want) the job.
Good thing too, a month later the entire division was shut down.
The only thing that wastes more time than interviews is hiring the wrong person. Many companies take interviewing seriously, my company meets before each interview to go over the candidate's resume and discuss what we each want to talk to the candidate about. Then we have a debrief after the interview. Anyone can veto a candidate for any reason and only candidates that get a majority vote to proceed move on to the next step. If everyone is lukewarm on the candidate, then he doesn't move to the next step.
Interviews don't guarantee that you'll hire the right person, but do help screen out the wrong people -- like bad personality fit, insufficient knowledge of what they claim to know, etc
Good thing too, a month later the entire division was shut down.
Perhaps your experience at a failing division was not typical at this company
A mentor of mine essentially said to me it's not personal, think of how much each of those engineers are making and how much it costs to interview you. If you didn't leave a great impression (and I fully admit that I wasn't on my game), it's cheaper to move on. A bad hire is very costly in terms of money/time/energy.
At the end of the day, there's other opportunities. Plus, there's nothing that says given more time improving oneself, one can't land the opportunity they were looking for.
Remind me of the time when a company flew me to their office for a remote position to interview with the team, and 4 out of the 6 sessions were held over zoom because the interviewers were working from home that day.
And then they ghosted me after telling me I was great.
Despite multiple resume reviews and two phone interviews (one of which was supposedly technical) I was the first person to pick up on this.
The company had paid for them to fly over from the east coast, too.
After my fifth interview I decided to take a break. It was a good experience for me; I was incredibly rusty during my first few interviews, but gained a lot of confidence by my last one. Overall though it was incredibly stressful. This authors experience sounded terrible, but not at all surprising. I think job hunting while out of work would be stressful for other reasons, but being able to commit your full attention to searching and preparing would be advantageous in my opinion.
Either way, I have major respect for anyone looking for a new job right now. I wish you the best of luck, and I empathize with how exhausting it can be.
And I shall say that I am on a 1920x1200 screen. If the interviewer was watching on a corporate laptop this might be 2 pixels per letter.
This isn't high school, and you're not going to give me homework just for the chance to work for you. And I use the homework analogy intentionally, because just like with school, this doesn't scale. I can't interview at, say, 10+ companies all of whom are expecting me to put in paying-employee-level work just for the interview while also holding down my regular job. And I'm not going to go with a significantly shortened list of candidate companies just because their interview process is so onerous that I literally don't have the time to talk to more.
Again, I know not everyone can do this, but realize that companies try to exploit you during the interview phase, too. You need to also have standards for what you're willing to put up with.
I was lucky to get laid off and having time to find work without interviews last time I was looking for work.
Also I have small children and zero time for stuff right now.
How do you get the candidate to clearly show they have the broad knowledge and creativity required to be a good developer? What kinds of whiteboard coding problems do you usually give?
Overall the presentation portion was a decent experience. I presented for 10-15 minutes and the folks in the room asked questions for about that long.
I didn't get an offer because of "concerns around culture & team fit." I'm pretty sure that wasn't a result of my presentation, but, rather, that I indicated I didn't care much for death marches (and they were clearly on one at the time).
Had I put 10 hours into the presentation like Op I would have been annoyed. But an hour wasn't bad. Altogether, I think it's not a bad way to facilitate conversation and allow a broader group of folks to participate.
[0] https://www.kettlepizza.com/
If a company sees no issue with asking for a TED talk just to consider you for a position, imagine what kind of work/life balance you can expect once hired. What kind of last minute assignments, what kind of weekend calls to wipe some higher up's rear end after they foot-mouthed with a client, and promised the moon, and now you've gotta go to Kroger and find 40 tons of cheese and carve it up so they don't need to look stupid.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: we as software devs/code monkeys/devops/admins have fucking worth. You should not EVER be willing to put yourself through this kind of meat grinder, not just to avoid demeaning yourself, but for demeaning everyone else who practices your craft alongside you. They're not worth so little as to need to do that, and neither are you.
You want me to write code for your company? Awesome, I'd love to do that. Pay me.
If this became standard practice interviewees would create a presentation once and then adapt it for each company. So sure, you'd put in a dozen hours or so the first time but then for future presentations it would take much less time to tweak it for the intended audience.
Personally, I wouldn't do either one. I'm fine with multi-stage interviews, even multiple drives to a given location, but there are limits. If a company wants me there for an all-day affair, I better have some compensation on the way, either the job itself or just for the time investment. I'm too damn busy to just flush a day down the toilet on a "maybe we'll hire you," not even going into the travel expenses, arranging time off from my current job, etc.
All my career I have watched as stories from fellow tech workers get more and more ridiculous, the lengths they're expected to go to for a freaking interview. It's gotten disgusting. If a company thinks you're a good fit for their position, they should be ready to court you as well. The only context these death march assembly line interviews make sense in, is if you are utterly meaningless to them, just another cog to be placed, and eventually, replaced. And I don't want to work for anyone like that anyway.
But if a company wants to play the interview game (phone screen -> coding test -> full day interviews -> followup interview, etc.) then I'm not at all interested. If more of us would refuse to play the game maybe companies would try harder.
My job search cycle is once every 2-4 years. Within each cycle, I've always found my later interviews go much smoother than the early ones, due to incremental preparations adding up to much smoother execution.
The first new interviews are always rough, after a long hiatus. I generally look at those as warm-up interviews...
So it's not necessarily a net-zero reward, for the story portrayed by the author.
At the end of the day you never know what you're getting from an interview, some great candidates turn into duds and vice versa. It's amazing how many people in hiring positions are just really shit at judging character, instead they rely on some bullshit metrics and process to fill in their lack of intuition.
1. It's tough to fire people (in that, if you ask someone to move and it turns out they aren't a good fit, it's kind of a jerk move to then drop them like a hot potato).
2. Performance indicators are tough. How do you know someone is doing bad vs good?
3. Keeping on a bad hire (especially one you can't identify), is damaging as heck. Best case scenario they don't get much work done, worst case scenario they suck away the time of all your good hires through bad decisions.
So while I agree that interviewing sucks, I've come to terms with why it is so bad.
Basically, for every person that works at some company (say, Google), there is a least one set of employees (the anti-panel) that would reject that person in an interview.
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...
Filtering out obviously bad employees is really not an issue. It's the fact that you're asking a committee to do exactly what a committee does worst at: making a decision.
So every interview panel collectively decides that it's best to not make the decision (i.e. reject the candidate). It's the path of least consequence for the members of the panel. If it turns out the hire was bad, they don't look like a bunch of fools.
> it's highly likely that someone on the loop will be unimpressed with you, even if you are Alan Turing.
I fully believe this. The only reason you will ever get hired is because the company is desperate to fill a seat at that particular moment in time. It has zero to do with technical skills, social skills, or anything. It's 100% pure luck.
Almost every tech company is "hiring." These companies don't stop hiring. Hiring being the advertising of positions and the interviewing of candidates. But that does not mean those companies are hiring right now. Or even have positions available for those they are advertising. It's often a big bureaucratic ship that doesn't have the capability of even knowing what their needs are at any given time.
It's kind of wild. We are now putting people through an insane interview, and then also telling them we are going put them through probation. Choose one, at least that's what I would say.
The referrals are a mixed bag, and I think would create a bit of a revolving door where it's hard to enter the industry unless you have connections.
If I were to ever try a startup (I won't), my philosophy would be to hire easily and fire easily. Do my level best to interview fairly, and give people a chance. But if they don't work out, fire them quickly and give them a 2-3 month severance bonus.
Then I would remove most titles and pay in the top tier. I think at the beginning of hiring, it would probably have a high turnover, but as the company matures, if it survives it will be filled with a lot of happy engineers that won't want to leave.
I'll give it a shot. They're going to keep doing it because they keep getting away with it. You've tied this to (I'm assuming) your real identity, so that makes it a little more difficult to call them out because they can respond. But if you don't let us know, we can't know to avoid them. Even avoiding spending time getting to a final round, only to be asked to do this, would be helpful.
They got you to work for free. They probably didn't benefit directly unless you gave them new ideas they didn't know about before, but you still put the time in. It was work to you. And they obviously didn't respect it at all, much less take the time to read your resume. Maybe they weren't even interested in hiring you?
The only saving grace for that could be an exceptional position with great responsibility and great pay. But even if that's true, they flippantly sent you through interviews for that position, so they're likely a bad company from the inside. They only way they would face consequences is if they're named.
The most likely thing that happened is that the company was willing to hire this person even without the requisite experience if the interviews had gone well, but then someone else also applied and they were a better fit. That's a shitty result for the OP, but I'm not sure the alternative is any better. Should the company just not have given OP a shot at all, reducing their chance to get that job to 0%? That's not beneficial for OP, either.
>They were looking for someone with a few years of experience working with a specific technology I had never used. But… they knew that from my resume.
Can you explain why they might have gone with the above excuse rather than "we found someone better" or "we won't be moving forward"?
>Can you explain why they might have gone with the above excuse rather than "we found someone better" or "we won't be moving forward"?
They did say "we found someone better". From the article: "They said that I interviewed extremely well, but that they decided to go with another candidate."
Wait, is this really a widely prevalent practice? Any stats/data?
The primary criteria at my company is retention. Once the HR forwards the resume, the interview only moves forward if the hiring manager is interested in the candidate. The hiring manager wont waste their time with multiple interviews when they know for sure that they're going to reject the candidate. What purpose would that serve?
That's mightily disrespectful and sounds a lot like 'shits and giggles'.
Informing them of this and cancelling the interview is the most respectful thing they could have done. It's certainly better than wasting the author's time by making them give the presentation even though the company then knew there was no longer a position they could offer.
Accepting your scenario, this suggests that they did not really want to hire the candidate and at best thought they might settle - when it came to it, they were not even willing to compare the candidate at the next stage, despite already asking them to do this work.
They strung the candidate along.
There's a simple and known solution to not have to do this - which is to conduct fleets of interviews at the same time, so that you can fairly and accurately compare the candidates.
I highly doubt that the HR went from 0 to a hire in <1 week. The hired candidate was obviously already in a more advanced stage of the interviewing process when the OP was asked to make a presentation.
So they were double disrespectful: They asked for a presentation knowing that there's a very high chance it will be meaningless. They didn't have the courtesy to sit through the presentation they asked for, or at least offer a token of their appreciation for the time the OP put to prepare for the cancelled presentation.
That doesn't change anything. The company had no idea if the other candidate would pass the final interview or accept the offer until the very moment when they did, at which point they would have canceled OP's presentation. And that's what they did.
>They asked for a presentation knowing that there's a very high chance it will be meaningless.
So are you saying the better option would be for the company to say "well, there's a small chance we might hire you, but instead of giving you the opportunity we're just going to go ahead and reject you without even giving you the chance"? No, that's disrespectful.
>They didn't have the courtesy to sit through the presentation they asked for
Telling the candidate to waste their time giving the presentation that they already know won't change any outcome is disrespectful. If that had happened, we would all be here commenting about how the company is assholish for wasting OP's time by making them give a pointless presentation.
You seem to be arguing as if the company wasting the author's time was a hypothetical. No, they veritably, absolutely, wasted his time.
The respectful thing to do, IMO, is not to ask people to perform this type of free work, specially if the likelihood of the preparation going to waste is this high.
Thankfully, no company so far has asked me to do something like this, because I would just refuse.
If the company had known from the start that there was 0% chance of hiring OP, or if the company had allowed OP to give their presentation while already knowing that there was 0% chance that OP would be hired, that would be wasting their time. But that's not what they did.
Have a good night!
Good night.
Could you share the link to where someone else presented that same point? In fact, I only commented because I found it odd that nobody had said it yet in this subthread.
True. Doesn't mean they're managing it properly.
>no company is going to waste the time and money to go through 3 interviews with a person
Again, assuming the company is carefully keeping track of this.
Sounds like an "ideal world" fantasy to me. Yes, the situation you describe is how things would ideally be. But they're clearly not. This happens, a lot more than many feel comfortable admitting.
I was asked to make a presentation for an interview last year. I did so happily. I was excited to get to tell the panel about something I was passionate about, and to go into deep technical detail on a project I'd put a lot of time into. Who wouldn't want to do this? Sure, it's stressful and it takes time, but it's also fun. You get to talk about yourself! That's everyone's favorite subject.
I also understand that any sane company is going to do its due diligence before making a bet on someone who just walked in off the street. A bad hire has huge downsides, from simply wasting time and money to setting a whole team back. You're literally saying to the company, "hi, we just met; give me a bucket of money and make me a dependency in your roadmap."
Some company just expecting free work comes closer to the definition of "entitlement", in my opinion.
> Who wouldn't want to do this? Sure, it's stressful and it takes time, but it's also fun. You get to talk about yourself! That's everyone's favorite subject.
I wouldn't, so there's that. And, mind you, I don't even consider myself particularly introverted, so I highly doubt that I'm the single exception to what you said. So what I'm trying to say is that one can't assume that one's sensibilities are shared by everyone else.
> someone who just walked in off the street.
Not only had the author already been through a process, the fact that there was a recruiter involved makes it seem to me that the company (or the recruiter) contacted him, not viceversa. So it doesn't seem like he "just walked off the street".
If you want a job, you have to put in work. That's just how it is. I too wish companies would just throw job offers at me without me having to put in any effort to get them, but I acknowledge that this just isn't realistic. There is a reasonable upper limit on how much work a company can expect from a candidate, but I do not think a 1 hour presentation is past that limit (and it depends on the job - if I'm interviewing for a warehouse worker job, then no it's not worth preparing a presentation for. but if it's a good job at a good company, then I begrudgingly accept that I've going to have to put in some extra effort). If the OP disagreed, they were free to decline to prepare the presentation and not continue the process. But if you read the OP, they weren't concerned about this "free work" and they actually said they were excited to give the presentation.
I also disagree with the idea in this thread that the company is trying to get "free work" out of the candidate in any way. It's not like the company is going to take your presentation on your random side project and go use it to try and sell services to customers or something. That's fantasy land. After your presentation, your PPT file is going into the recycle bin whether or not you got hired. Trust me, they don't want to sit through your random throwaway presentation either. They just want you to do it to see if you're a worthwhile hire, and then they want it to end. They aren't doing it for "the work".
> the fact that there was a recruiter involved makes it seem to me that they contacted him
Recruiters are involved in all hiring at the companies I've been at, even ones where the candidate applied. "Recruiter" is just the generic term for "HR person who is the point of contact for the candidate during the interview process".
It’s a relatively recent thing to call out unpaid work on social media. The bar that runs entirely on trial shifts. The media giant running unpaid internships.
In those cases the work really is valuable to the business. You can do bar work or proofreading at close to the output of an experienced person right off the bat. So those are rightly called out when abused.
On the other hand, the idea that you’re gonna come to an established engineering or product team with novel and valuable new insights, after a random Saturday of you thinking about it, is patently silly.
Some companies structure that better than others. Some feel like more of a time waste than others. But the idea that the company is getting you to do work for its value outside of the interview process just seems naive. It’s not a trial shift at a bar.
Absolutely none? I somehow doubt that, otherwise only the most incompetently run companies would still ask for that kind of commitment during the process and... Actually, you might have a point. I certainly have rarely liked work in companies that demanded free work from me during the hiring process. That might be one of the reasons why I haven't done an unpaid take home test in a long time.
> But the idea that the company is getting you to do work for its value outside of the interview process just seems
So the company isn't getting the candidate to work for free because it isn't getting value... If we ignore the value it gets from the interview process itself.
Providing some company a service so that it can make a decision on how it operates sounds like work to me.
On another note, this doesn't take into account that pointless busywork is still work.
It is work, it’s just not the cynical exploitation that’s being implied. The intent is that both employer and candidate mutually benefit from it. Evaluating the output of these assignments is also work given for your mutual benefit, and it’s typically seen by multiple people, which makes it a non-trivial amount. Both sides do speculative work for the evaluation stage, in that sense.
They can ask the applicant to do the work to prove themselves, with the pretence of an available job, and don't even have to consider the result of that work.
This scenario lays bare that the employer has all the power in the situation.
Likewise, if companies are in desperate need for employees, they will behave differently than when they are swamped by job applications.
It is kind of "entitled" to be able to picky about jobs or applications, but people and companies probably got there by acquiring valuable skills or valuable market positions. I don't see what labeling it "entitled" adds to the issue.
I could say you sound "privileged" for being able to afford to spend so much time on your applications, talking about yourself. But what would be the point? I personally wouldn't even say it is unfair if companies filter for young candidates without family or money issues that way. It just is what it is. People without family or generally more spare time also need jobs.
Another way to look at it, think of job interviews like a date. It is not a one sided thing. How much "testing" would you accept from date? I once had a company call me in for interviews four times (each time costing me at least half a day). Imagine a date telling you after three dates "I'm not sure if I like you yet" - how much more would that make you want to invest into those dates?
Most of us put effort into the skills on our resume. What's annoying is that no one on the other side apparently recognizes that and asks us to reprove our skills with things like this anyway.
>I also understand that any sane company is going to do its due diligence before making a bet on someone who just walked in off the street
And there's not a better way to assert my argument than when a company treats a PhD the same as someone who just walked in off the street.
Problem with "work assignments" like this is that there is completely assymetric skin in the game on this. I don't know if you have sent this same task to 1000 other people or just 3.
If everyone who did the interview was being paid, you can at least assume that they are moderately serious about your chance of joining the company.
> looking for someone with a few years of experience working with a specific technology I had never used. But… they knew that from my resume. And from my first interview. And from my second interview. And when they told me that I needed to prep a talk.
Shouldn't the company have seen this deal breaker before the interview process started? Or at least after the first interview or two? Acknowledging that the author wasn't the right fit would have saved both the company and the candidate the time and effort of going through an interview process that the company should have known wouldn't yield an offer.
I'm not sure if this is common practice, but I've encountered something similar, going through multiple rounds of interviews over many hours only to have the recruiter tell me that "based on your resume, you don't have the skills we're looking for in a candidate for this position". Why waster my time, and yours, going through the interview process then?
I don't think any of these rationales are very satisfying, but here are some possibilities: 1) The company didn't know what it was looking for when it started the process and came to a different understanding of the job requirements as the candidate moved deeper in the process. 2) The company is covering up the real reason they didn't want to move forward and "lack of relevant skill" is an easy excuse. 3) The company's recruiting process is immature/messy/sloppy/ineffective and they literally missed the lack of required skills until the very end. 4) The position had to be filled and the company wanted to maintain a backup candidate in case their first choice didn't work out.
I'd love to hear from those with experience on the recruiting/hiring manager side to see whether any of these reasons ring true or if something else might be at play.
So I can easily see the tables being turned the other way -- a candidate that doesn't have all the skills, but failed to wow us, would lose out to a candidate that better matched the skill set we were looking for.
It's a complicated situation from both side. If you're the company, you have to anticipate that the other candidate might get another offer, or turn you down, or turn out to be a flop, so you want to interview other candidates at the same time to have a back-up plan. And that's a good thing for the article author too, because it gives them the chance to see if they're a fit for the job and could learn the required skills even if they don't have them now. And it's great if it works out... but shitty when it doesn't.
It's worth realizing that it's a losing situation for the company, too. It's not like they want to waste a bunch of time interviewing you for a job you're ultimately not going to be in any more than you want to waste time on it. But unfortunately "wasting a bunch of time interviewing" is just how job hunting/hiring works these days.
I think you're right on here, but I also think the benefits diminish the further a candidate goes in the process only to get turned down with an explanation that was known at the beginning. How many interviews does it take to come to that realization?
> It's not like they want to waste a bunch of time interviewing you for a job you're ultimately not going to be in any more than you want to waste time on it.
It seems like this should be true, and I hope it is, but I have worked for companies that seem to interview just for the sake of feeling or appearing to move forward in filling a position. Maybe the recruiter or hiring manager is incentivized in that way? Some action, even if it's in the wrong direction, is perceived as better than no action at all.
The explanation likely wasn't known at the beginning. The thing that changed was the other candidate, and the company almost certainly had no way of knowing if this other candidate was going to fill the role up until the moment they did, at which time (I'm assuming) is when the company cancelled OP's presentation. The company likely had full intention to hire OP until that point.
>It seems like this should be true, and I hope it is, but I have worked for companies that seem to interview just for the sake of feeling or appearing to move forward in filling a position. Maybe the recruiter or hiring manager is incentivized in that way? Some action, even if it's in the wrong direction, is perceived as better than no action at all.
That's opposite my experience as a hiring manager. If we're "iffy" on a candidate, we'll likely give another interview to see if the first interview was a fluke. But if it's already known off the bat that the candidate won't be hired, we certainly don't waste time interviewing them anyway. Interviewing someone that's already a "no" means wasting multiple peoples' entire day in interviews, meetings, debriefs for no progress. That's something I want to avoid as much as humanly possible, and although I'm sure it happens some places, it's definitely not incentivized at any of the companies I've worked at.
Hiring is a two-way hard problem. On the company's side, they have conflicting interests where they want to hire someone as quickly and cheaply (cheap as in not spending hundreds of man hours interviewing just to fill a role), but also want to do due diligence so that they hire the right person. On the candidate's side, they also have conflicting interests where they just want a job and don't want to spend multiple entire days doing interviews, but they also need to do their due diligence to make sure the job is actually something they want.
This almost necessitates spending a decent chunk of time with each other, but not too much. The balance that most big tech company's seem to go with is 6-7 hours total in interviews for each candidate (and then ~10+ additional hours for both the candidate and the company doing preparation/debriefs). I really don't know why or how this was the number arrived at, though. From my perspective as a candidate, even after 6-7 hours of interviews I often come away still knowing very little about what the job actually is. And from my perspective as an interviewer, I know that requiring so much time from internal employees serving as interviewers is draining and stressful. It seems like it ultimately comes out to a lose-lose, but for some reason it's still what big tech sticks with.
Broadly, I feel like we need to work to get better at most processes that involve humans. Managers need to get better at setting expectations, giving feedback, appreciating people's work, etc, etc. Employees need to improve their communication skills, reliability at forecasting, etc, etc. HR needs to make sure employees feel comfortable, welcomed, valued etc. Leaders need to better convey a vision for the company, etc. Basically everyone needs to improve in whatever job function they're responsible for. Hiring is no different - its just one of the many functions of a company.
People love to base arguments in data, but in what cases will data/models lie to you? If a company has been around for a while, has no obvious problems keeping their employees, does that mean that another company can simply adopt their model and be successful? Specifically, should we expect that companies which measure identically on key metrics (employee churn/turnover rate, employee work/life balance perception, employee retention, etc) are also similarly great at hiring?
I’m working on a tiny piece of the broken hiring process, Job Descriptions. Many of them (esp non technical role) are essentially illegible and absolute garbage.
Hopefully it reduces the wasted time upfront by improving the quality of matching between job postings and job seekers
The interviewer asked me to bring in a laptop with some code I could discuss. I did, we discussed. He asked me some questions, I added a simple feature at his request. No time wasted on my part (ok, I was in a position that I had code I could bring in). It was code I knew, so no gotcha or anything fancy. Relaxed, friendly, the interviewer learned something rather than trying to one up me.
Like I say the only downside I can see to this approach is that people may not have a side project that they can share easily. In which case they will have to do the equivalent work of a normal technical test. So the worst case scenario using this method is the same as the standard scenario.
After having done a lot of hiring interviews (100s) over the years, I can say that my own methodologies have improved substantially in terms of asking the right questions and being as objective as possible, but ultimately 1) members of my panel might not have that many experiences to hone their skills and 2) the data capture and evaluation process is a "clunky spreadsheet" exercise at best.
EDIT: The book "Who: The A Method for Hiring" is a great resource for this.
Maybe fixing the technical interview process starts with the highly qualified candidates decisively saying no to these things. I understand that not everyone is in a position to do this, but those who are should just say no and maybe it will help fix things (the takehome assignment fad and other brokenness).
The experienced engineers in the audience absolutely tore me and my code apart. It was a blood bath and semi-traumatizing.
On the upside, I took their criticisms seriously and came out a better engineer in the end.