[dangus]

This point gets repeated a lot as if we are supposed to coddle engineers by making interviews wildly easy.

At some point as an employer you do want someone who is motivated enough to take some time out of their day to prepare for an interview.

Do you really want an employee who gives so little of a shit that they refuse to use their brain to get a job?

This isn’t exactly a hot labor market in tech. Companies have a good selection of quality talent available right now.

[angiolillo]

Making interviews efficient and making them easy are orthogonal. It depends on what attributes your organization is trying to select for.

To select for people who are willing to commit to a slow bureaucratic organization, make them go through repetitive interview rounds spread over many weeks.

To select for people who do well under pressure, make the interview stressful.

To select for people who can solve challenging problems, make the interview challenging.

There's no right answer as long as your hiring process is tailored to select for the attributes your company needs.

[zipy124]

Thank you for explaining my point. The fact these two are orthogonal is exactly the point I was trying to make.

[ninininino]

> an employee who gives so little of a shit that they refuse to use their brain to get a job?

Many many folks are the type that is willing to hard grind/suffer short-term to get through a hoop, but as soon as they are inside they turn that 'optimizer' mindset towards 'how can I do the minimum necessary to coast and collect my paycheck'.

And many many folks who are highly motivated to work hard every day at their job are not highly motivated to prepare for jumping through a hoop like a circus clown.

[dangus]

For your first paragraph, that’s just a risk of hiring employees that has nothing to do with the interview process. You can possibly surface some of that during behavioral interviews.

If you as a manager can’t detect your employees coasting that’s a you problem. Understanding how to motivate your current employees is not in the scope of the interview process.

For your second paragraph, we can use a cynical attitude calling this “jumping through a hoop like a circus clown” but do you really want to hire someone with such a cynical view of the minor inconvenience of interviewing?

A lot of candidates are very accepting of the fact that interviews will take some work to complete and don’t take a cynical attitude to it.

I don’t have any interest in hiring someone who thinks 2-3 hours of time for a short list candidate interview after the screening process is unreasonable.

If you have made it to my 2-3 hour interview process, you are only competing against 2-3 people for the job. This isn’t some kind of unreasonable waste of time, I’m offering salaries multiple times the median salary, sign-on bonus, equity, generous PTO and free healthcare plan, etc. Having a chance to get all that is definitely worth 3 hours of interviews.

I don’t really need to hire the person who has $10 million in their bank account and refuses to lift a finger to get a job. That person can enjoy their life and do something else.

[andrewstuart]

If I think your interview process is onerous, I’ll ditch your company.

I’m not interested in companies arrogant enough to think people should want to work there so much that they will endure your hoop jumping.

[garciasn]

'Hoop-jumping' is an indication that the rest of the organization is inept at moving fast and being decision-oriented. I believe capable organizations can make good decisions on limited information and their interview process should be reflective of that.

If the interview process takes more than 3 steps and 3h, I'm out.

[dangus]

That’s fine, I don’t need to hire cynical people.

My interview process is very reasonable. If you’ve hit the point where you are required to do a 2-3 hour technical interview round with me, you’re a short list candidate and only have 1-3 competitors for a very lucrative job.

If that’s too much of a hoop for you, I’ll just take the sandwich, no fries with that.

[andrewstuart]

This is the mechanism:

“Oh, you don’t want to work for us? Well that’s a bullet dodged because not wanting to work for us means you suck (expressed in any number of ways, in this case you say I’m cynical) . We remain awesome!”

[dangus]

I mean, there definitely are bad companies that abuse that attitude.

However, on the other hand, a lot of keyboard warriors on here love to be edgelords about refusing to take any initiative, as if every single form of interview that makes you work the muscle in your skull is a violation of the Geneva convention.

Like I said, perhaps selfishly, I don’t want to work with people who are going to complain every time they’re made to do something while being paid very good money to do it. I’m not telling them to work a 996 or miss their kids’ dance recital, I’m just asking for a solid 4-6 hours of honest work per day.

[newtonianrules]

I don’t want to put my future coworker through six rounds of interviews. If it takes more than three rounds + a phone screen to figure out if someone is a good fit then the process is broken.

[dangus]

Depends how long the rounds are. 6 rounds of 20 minutes is only 2 hours.

If you think that’s unreasonable, please go ahead and add a few fire sauce packets to the bag for me.

[angiolillo]

Whether it's reasonable depends on the distribution, not just the duration.

A 2 hour onsite with the candidate being rapid-fire interviewed by six different different teams and a 20 minute call every couple weeks for three months are very different (and select for very different types of candidates) despite having the same overall duration.

[newtonianrules]

How many interviews have you been on that a round is 20 minutes?

[zipy124]

I am not talking about difficulty but length and bureaucracy.