[afpx]

In the late 90s, early 00s I would submit 5 resumes, get interviews from 4, get offers from 3. The whole process would take a few hours - no studying, no projects, no indefinite rounds of interviews. I could actually talk to the hiring manager and get a sense for my odds of getting the job before putting the effort in.

Now it's like submit 1000 resumes, get interviews from 4, spend 20+ hours preparing and doing interviews, get ghosted at the end.

I have a friend who works for local government. They have an open GIS programmer position. I've done GIS programming for government (as a contractor), and it's not hard stuff. She says they received many 100s of resumes and are currently interviewing 30 people. They had so many people apply that they required each applicant to submit a very involved project beforehand just to weed people out. So, there are literally 30 people out there right now, putting in 20+ hours to complete a project just to get a job that pays probably $110k / year.

[afpx]

In contrast, a guy in my neighborhood is a head of some local police task force. He says they have open positions that pay 80-90k a year, and they can't fill them. There are people straight out of the police academy (a couple month process) that are demanding over 100k / year. But, that messes with their overall pay structure because there are officers with 10 years of experience that aren't getting paid that much.

[myth_drannon]

The interview process in an average company started to change around mid 2010's, before that it was (mostly) just an hour interview with some FizzBuzz (even that was rare).

[giancarlostoro]

Might as well pick a name from a hat and hire someone out of those 30 people, and just tell no one that's how you picked them. At least then you wouldn't be wasting their precious time they could be looking at other jobs for.

[filoleg]

Reminds me of the old joke about shuffling the stack of candidate resumes multiple times and then picking the top 3 (and throwing away the rest), because you wouldn’t want to hire unlucky people.

[giancarlostoro]

Hah that's great, I'm mostly joking, but like, at the same time, having spent months not finding anything, I'd rather hear that it's not happening sooner than be strung along. Don't make me do a project if I'm not getting any compensation for my efforts. Time is money, and some of us are not making any whatsoever when job hunting.

[filoleg]

Oh, absolutely agreed.

I remember back in college thinking that take-home project assessments were great (as a candidate). Even after getting fleeced on those a few times (e.g., spent a week completing the assessment, everything seemed picture perfect, submitted it, waited a week, automatic rejection with zero feedback or explanation, wtf?).

These days, I would rather go through 5-6 rounds of leetcode+systems design interviews. Takes much less time, each one gets easier and faster, and zero extra overhead with each subsequent interview (while with take-home projects, each one will take around the same amount of time). And I am not even gonna dive into the whole cheating issue with take-home projects.

I simply got other things in life at this point that I would rather do, than to spend over 10 hours in a week on a single take-home project, while i can spend that exact same number of hours to complete ~2 full leetcode-centric interview loops at 2 different companies. And that’s not even mentioning that take-home project interviews also have leetcode and other rounds as follow-ups anyway. As well as the whole “the company doesn’t care about this being easily cheatable” attitude with take-home projects not really making me want to work there (acting as a weak proxy for the general quality of candidates they are hiring).

P.S. I think of leetcode as the best lowest common denominator. Yes, there are certain niche interview processes that are very one-of-a-kind that are great, but they are imo not easily transportable outside of the company conducting those. The one that came to my mind personally was Dropbox (the whole process from start to finish was fantastic, and they treated candidates like reasonable adults, no lowballing on offers or any other bs), with one specific round being “prepare to discuss any project you worked on before in depth, and a week ahead of it send a very short 1-2 paragraph description of what the project is to your interviewer.” It was one of the best interviews I ever had in my entire life (not talking about my performance on it, but rather in terms of how in-depth it went and how just great it felt to talk all that systems design and decision-making).

P.P.S. Another one I can think of is Netflix, but I didn’t interview there myself yet. A couple friends of mine did, and apparently there was almost no code involved at any point there (no leetcode, no take home projects, nothing). 3 years later, those firends are still at Netflix and seem to be loving it, so Netflix definitely did something right there.

[BiteCode_dev]

Strangely I'm more comfortable with this kind of market.

I was fed up to see entitled wannabees be paid a lot of money to slow me down by forcing me to do some parody of scrum that they learn at one bootcamp, feeling they were in any way important as they drank they in-house latte during multiple remote meetings a day.

I much prefer a market where people I work with are actually paid according to their skill and ship code rather than power point or worse, an update to the code of conduct to include some inclusive edge case.

I would prefer a balance of all worlds, that would be fairer. But you can never quite reach it, because you pass it on the way up or down quickly as the pendulum swing.

So if I have to choose, I prefer a hard market.

I understand that people need to eat and that it's not everybody's preference, though.

[malfist]

Why do you think the current interview style leads to "paid according to their skill"?

[LogHouse]

IT/CS pays well which brings in a lot of competition to the market.

[VirusNewbie]

>In the late 90s, early 00s

Right, but in the late 90s and early 2000s, unless you were a manager climbing the ranks, you weren't making big bucks.

Even folks at Microsoft, which at the time was one of the most dominant software companies, were only millionaires if they joined pre-IPO. The company wasn't minting IC millionaires.

Now you have a whole host of FAANGMULA companies that do mint millionaires if you stay long enough and get your full vest, and don't get totally unlucky on the timing of RSU grants.