[zimmertr]

I've been starting to refuse 4 hour technicals myself and they all immediately drop me. I don't have your seniority but I have some. As well as a powerful online presence across Github and LinkedIn. At what level of seniority did you start doing this and what is your success rate?

[eckesicle]

There's not really a seniority level where this happens.

The outrage around the technical interviews shows a lack of understanding for the situation companies face when hiring.

The reality is that something closer to 99% of the pool are applying for jobs they're not qualified for (not the same as saying 99% of developers aren't qualified - there's extreme survivorship bias in the pool).

At company X we would hire ~1/400 applicants who applied, and about ~1/20 referrals. At a smaller company I worked for we hired perhaps 1/200.

The thing is, many of these applicants have five to ten years experience (some at FAANG), but can't code at all. It's simply not possible to trust anything on a CV without verifying it. How do you verify this at scale? A pair programming exercise.

Now the training of most interviewers is often poor, but it's far better to go down this route than the HN alternative: hiring without technical screening.

[ushakov]

they drop me too, but those companies are not worth working at to begin with

they’re not interested in hiring employees, their interest is to get candidates through the loop and to see you fail

this is fine when you’re applying to FAANG, but a terminal sickness when the company is barely known

rather than spending weeks on interviewing, i’d suggest making a open-source contribution or reading a book

the companies, especially startups have a bigger problem than you - they need to show the growth so they can attract more investors. Therefor, if they’re not getting people, they have harder time growing. If they see you as a potential candidate, but you refuse, they’ll bend their back over backwards