[voakbasda]

I have decided that I will end any interviews where the process does not feel right. That means I will not work anywhere that requires leetcode, whiteboarding, live coding, take home tasks, or other exercises that have no bearing on my actual job or thirty years of verifiable past performance. These are all an insulting waste of my time, and I will have none of it anymore. They only demonstrate the willingness to squander enthusiasm and ability.

When enough people walk away from these interviews, they will get the message and the status quo will change. In the meantime, I will continue working for shops that do not feel the need to use such abusive interview tactics.

[amozoss]

I'm lucky in that I don't actually need a job yet.

Hence the reason I decided to go in pretty much cold-turkey. I wrongly assumed a decade of shipping 5 SaaS products from scratch (some completely by myself), that have real revenue, and thousands of users, sometimes millions.

They only want to see me dance with a funny hat on

Nothing else seems to matter.

I mean I get it, they need to screen people.

Is there not another way to screen people though that doesn't amplify my anxiety?

[voakbasda]

I have suffered life-long anxiety too, with some recent PTSD to make things really fun. I totally get it. Certainly, not needing a job should help, as you should feel like you need to continue with an interview.

Recently, I posted an ad for myself on the monthly "Who wants to be hired" post here on HN, after failing for most of 2021 in searching the "Who's Hiring" posts and applying directly. I got several responses within a day, and one candidate in particular seems to be a remarkably good fit. That has been a stark contrast to my run of unsuccessful interviews, where I was applying and competing alongside an untold number of others.

Interestingly, I had not previously considered applying to this particular employer, though I had seen and envied the position they had listed here (for months!). Since they did not specifically say they would allow fully remote workers in the position, I simply did not bother applying, because I didn't want to waste my time or theirs. If you're an ideal candidate, the right employer will work to accommodate your needs.

YMMV, but I personally have experienced remarkably less anxiety when interviewing with companies that have actively reached out to me. If my current contender doesn't pan out, I'll rewrite my post from scratch each month, until I find my next job. If you go that route, I suspect that you can parlay your success stories into a few worthwhile interviews. Best of luck.

[gorjusborg]

How would you feel about providing a chunk of code yourself, and being asked to work with it?

The interviewer could ask you about the code, and maybe ask for you to modify it?

It sort of shifts the burden to the interviewer to come up with reasonable changes on the fly, but would offer insight into the candidate's abilities on code they are familiar with.

[amozoss]

My favorite interview in the past was when the company took a ticket off the backlog and I asked questions to solve it. Aka they hired me for a half day.

They were available to ask questions, but mostly I was there figuring it out by myself.

In this case, I had never used golang before, but by the end of the half day, I had a solution I was happy with.

Sure they took a risk giving me access to the entire codebase... But as a tool to assess my ability it was top notch.

Later, when I was working there, that same ticket got prioritized and it ended up taking 3 or 4 days to solve by other team mates (my solution wasn't quite right).

[decafninja]

Curious what country/region and industry you work in, and whether you have some sort of niche specialization vs. being a generalist SWE?