| I recently accepted a job two months ago but when I was interviewing it was a complete disaster from my perspective. The worst were companies that were hiring frontend developers (what I specialize in) but during the interview process they ask questions about the backend or creating microservices (Qs more advanced than basic crud/pagination stuff). Like the only person available to interview was some BE dev writing microservices asking very basic questions about JS. Github was the absolute worst at this, applied for an accessibility FE position and the online assessment was to create a REST api. I just abandoned the process. Other companies were asking Qs about the frontend at least. I feel like I can put up with the interviewing process from Facebook or Google because those companies pay the absolute best in our industry; most companies aren't paying the best but they all want to interview like they are FB. It's completely odd. Companies like Capital One, Fidelity were asking LC hards and paying below industry averages. Another thing that I will absolutely never do are take homes, they are often too cryptic and while everyone says "spend no more than 3-hours" it feels like you need to put in 40 to stand a chance against those that do. They also require zero effort from the company. I want them to have some skin in the interviewing game. This is why I prefer white board style interviews, at least we are both awkwardly solving a problem. There is nothing absolutely worst than having a great talk with the HM and completing a take-home to only get completely ghosted. The process for the position I accepted was this: spoke to recruiter, spoke to HM, "on-site" where I spoke to 6 different people in a 3-hour span with a decision being made that day. Probably spent a total of 5-hours interviewing. This is a decent company too; while pay is average for my location they give employees equity, have 401k matching, and an ESPP. I think the onus should be put on companies. They often lament about candidates but the interview process is anything but accessible or reasonable. |
I'm currently quite underpaid (comparatively) but honestly the biggest thing stopping me is the barrier to entry anywhere else. I don't want to grind leetcode to answer questions that have zero bearing on my work, that I have _never_ had to implement IRL, that will never be used in my line of work, deal with unlocking credit to pass a credit check and re-locking it, waste 3 days interviewing just to get ghosted, put together a portfolio or code samples only to clearly see in access.log they have never been looked at once