Oh gosh, this is totally true.

I honestly find it almost disrespectful when you feel some company is putting you through a pipeline. They set up an interview day, line everyone up, grind through them one by one.

The other thing is the technical interview which is unreflective of the job itself. In one recently, I was told before going in I had to code on a whiteboard. I ask, "Can I have I use a text editor, not an IDE or anything, just a text editor?" I get told, no (for nonsensical reasons I won't list here). That sort of arbitrariness and inflexibility turn me off, not to mention the standoffishness of having people stare over your shoulder and judge you rather than work as collaborators.

So I walked away from the interview. I'm happy where I am and you're gonna have to woo me, just a little bit, to get me to care.

Sometimes I wish we were unionized so we could set some standards (for many other things, but this as well).

For what it's worth, one of the things I did with my interview process was to make all the coding involve an actual computer. I gave the interviewee their choice of editor, and was happy to let them use their own computer.

My theory was that in an interview I wanted to see people at their best. I wasn't hiring them to code on whiteboards or learn how to use new text editors; I was hiring them to spend a lot of time coding in an environment they liked.

More details here: http://williampietri.com/writing/2015/slightly-less-awful-hi...

On the flip side, as an interviewer I give all candidates the opportunity to use a text editor, and less than 15% of candidates take it. The rest opt for whiteboard.

This was my experience as well (actually, even more extreme). Here's a room with a whiteboard or a laptop+TV. All 10 people I interviewed in that room chose the whiteboard.

One of them mentioned feeling less pressure to have perfect syntax and everything at a whiteboard than in an editor. In retrospect, wish I'd asked more of them about their preference, although at the same time, it wasn't something I judged them on so I wouldn't want them to think I was nitpicking their choice.

I'd probably choose a whiteboard too, honestly, for spatial reasons (able to write up separate things off to the side, easily annotate stuff in a different color to step through the code, etc).

I think that's because a lot of people are already trained to use whiteboard during interview.

That really truly surprises me. I'm so much quicker and more in my element with a text editor.

Lucky you, I was once asked to write code on a napkin and on another occasion to say lines of code over the phone :)

One of the things I've noticed is that scammers (ask for your SSN/birthday/etc, bad sales jobs, etc) are the most attentive with callbacks and 'hiring'. Because it's all they do and they actually optimize their hiring for applicant satisfaction.

I agree with you, but here's the thing. If the vast majority of companies are running like that and succeeding, does that not suggest that there really is a workeer surplus and job scarcity, and that impressions to the contrary are self-imposed?

Well, all it really shows is that the "market" in this instance is incredibly inefficient. People need jobs, and if the vast majority of companies have a poor interview process, and 1% have a good one, assuming that this is the only thing that people care about (it's not), all that's going to happen is the 1% get the employees they want, and the other 99% still get some employees.

The market is likely inefficient for the same reason that the advertising industry is inefficient - difficulty to show than any given change independently improves outcomes.

For some jobs, sure. But what I really think it suggests is a power asymmetry. A company can do without 1 worker much more easily than a worker can do without 1 job. Plus, current processes let hiring managers feel powerful. Given the high percentage of hiring managers who are social primates, I expect that's a big factor.

In tech, though, you hear endless complaints about how hard it is to hire, so I didn't hesitate to optimize the process for interviewee happiness. I expect it would make people more likely to apply, more likely to stay through the process, more likely to accept an offer, and more likely to refer friends.

Regardless, there's enormous waste to be removed from the process for anybody who's willing to put a little thought and work in.

> worker surplus and job scarcity

I'm convinced that's the only reason why processes at places like google aren't considered completely broken.

Google, Facebook, Amazon are all a different category than most other companies that are hiring software developers. They care a lot less about false negatives because their hiring pool is so large. They are prestigious places that a lot of people really want to work at. As a result they have more candidates than they can reasonably get through without some massive filtering.

Some of that filtering, whether intentional or not, is how rigorous the interview process is. They can afford to be that rigorous though because the fact is that even if they miss out on one really good candidate there are 10 or more replacements in the pipeline.

The same does not apply for smaller companies with less engineering centric workplaces. If they try to do it Google's way they'll be shooting themselves in the foot.

Very true. Some well known companies, like Google, still have more applicants than jobs, and so they need to filter people out. Most companies have the opposite problem - they need to attract people. This shift means that the interview process has to be re-thought.

> "still have more applicants than jobs"

This is true for a lot of companies - but there's only a surplus of labor if the applicants are qualified.

For a company to be able to be frivolous with their process, they'd need to have more qualified applicants than jobs, and I think even for many name-brand BigCorps, this isn't the case.

I suspect most name-brand BigCos (including Google and friends) are pretty bad at first-pass decisions about what applicants are qualified. Has anybody stopped to consider that the root cause of their stream of Terri le interview candidates is a terrible filtering process for deciding who gets interviewed?