[trentnix]

> One thing I noticed (although small sample set) was that the interview processes are very slow (like 1 round per week).

Yep. And almost everyone is hiring by committee now. Because if the committee hires the wrong person, nobody hires the wrong person.

And with all of these people involved, now you are subject to the calendars of the various very busy “stakeholders”. One company I engaged with had me talk to 11 people between individual interviews and panel interviews. That’s 11 calendars to coordinate, with illness and PTO and holidays and on and on to sort through.

I had one situation where I had to wait two weeks for one of the interviewers to have a spot open on their calendar. “She is so busy”, I was assured. They eventually extended an offer, but this and other warning signs made it clear it wasn’t a fit, so I respectfully declined.

[endtime]

> And almost everyone is hiring by committee now. Because if the committee hires the wrong person, nobody hires the wrong person.

At least in some cases, it's a reaction to some managers having made hiring decisions perceived by leadership as mistakes. Impersonal and bureaucratic as it might be, to the extent it keeps the bar higher I think it's a good thing.

[trentnix]

I understand that reasoning, but I don’t think it bears out.

It results in frequently hiring the lowest common denominator. No risks are taken. Bold thinking is suppressed. It trains your managers, whom you don’t trust to hire their own team members, that leadership is done by committees.

And what’s the solution to a bad committee hire? A bigger committee.

[endtime]

All fair points. It probably depends a lot on the size of the company. At some stages you need to take risks; at others, you need to prioritize avoiding bad hires.

[binarydreams]

Could you elaborate on "other warning signs"? Maybe others could learn a thing or two.

[trentnix]

Absolutely. In the case I mentioned, interviewers did more talking than asking and listening, interviews were far too easy (I’m glad you like me but if you can’t really discern whether I’m good at my job, you’ve probably hired other people who are bad at theirs), and bad answers to questions about their business model (when stock options were part of the compensation package).

It just didn’t feel like a fit.

[akhmatova]

interviews were far too easy (I’m glad you like me but if you can’t really discern whether I’m good at my job, you’ve probably hired other people who are bad at theirs),

Maybe they have ways of evaluating your potential without subjecting you to an endless barrage of gratuitously difficult (or simply tedious) questioning.

[trentnix]

Maybe, and it’s flattering to think that. But I have to make my decisions based on the data I have.

[yonaguska]

I give "easy" interviews to people that have shown signs that I can trust their technical work. I far more interested in their communication and organizational skills once we get past the technical aspect of it. As well as their higher level "engineering" experience. What I mean by this is- when we're planning a complex feature, I want someone that has the experience and communication skills to stand up to the team and not be a yes man, point out potential issues and concerns and propose better ideas. Leetcode is not an indicator of this. The interview may feel easy to the person being interviewed, in the sense that there isn't wrong answers, rather, there could be an absence of correct answers.

[trentnix]

I can appreciate all of that. Maybe that’s the case I encountered and I wasn’t savvy enough to discern. But it’s also possible the interview simply wasn’t a good competence filter. And that possibility gave me pause.