I remember a time when I would go to an interview and be asked the following questions:

   Interviewer: Do you want to work?
   Me: Yes, of course!
   Interviewer: You like learning new things?
   Me: Always.
   Interviewer: Is it OK to start on Monday?
   Me: Sure thing (!), why not?
   Interviewer: Welcome to FooExample.
   Me: Thank you very much; see you on Monday.

If a candidate didn't seem competent or effective for a position, by the end of the week warning signs were given to them and if they weren't honest with their management, by the end of the month they were let go; as simple as that.

The total number of employees used for the interview cost more than hiring one candidate for one month, don't they understand nor see that?

- Can you setup a ppp connection on Linux via terminal (I did it, using minicom)

- My future manager and partner (I ended up becoming a partner in the ISP, and technical director, some years later), gave me a sendmail book, and asked me to restrict the relay on sendmail using the book. I did it.

I was hired, and spent the next years of my life, setting routes on cisco routers and managing some linux and freebsds in a small ISP. It was a great school.

Only people deeply interested in computing did. They gravitated toward it, it was fun, they had an aptitude for it.

These days, people enter the field for cash, or because they are mildly interested and it is the best option, out of other mildly interesting things.

There is a vast difference between these two classes of candidates. Note, I am not saying that there are no younger employees that fit #1, but merely that they are far outnumbered by those barely able to perform the job.

Everyone was self taught in the day, when I started there was no internet to help me, and places like stack overflow came much, much later.

If something didn't work, I had to figure it out, no one could help. I had to look at sources, read entire books, learn how to debug, learn debugging tools, etc, etc.

Meanwhile, most modern candidates want cash cash cash, and if you ask them use your tool chain, they're pissed.

On top of that, I have seen endless candidates come out of College with zero ability for analytical thinking. It's only rote work for them.

Without frameworks, sql abstraction, and 100 other crutches, a rote worker cannot do this work.

This, I think, is why modern interview processes are so absurd. There's good money now, so naturally everyone wants the job.

This leads to the follow up, which is that rote workers are now looking to hire other rote workers. And thus, a rote workers do, they ape other company's processes.

They try to hire like google, even thought they are tiny in size, or, even though the type of work is different.

FWIW I would never sit for any interview that was multi-tier over several hours. I'm fortunate in that I have a pretty good network and everyone in my network would hire me if they had a spot open. I haven't cold-interviewed since probably 2012 and that was on a whim for iPhone dev work (I had released 3 fairly successful but not life changing apps already). I ended the process when they wanted me to write code over Thanksgiving because I hadn't already written enough code to their satisfaction. That company is now out of business.

Oh, and my favorite one, a ‘pop-quiz’ take home test. They wouldn’t tell me what time they were sending it, and just suddenly sent it. I mean they told me what day, but they wouldn’t say what time. So I had to sit around and just wait for hours and ‘bam’ there was the email with a time limit given.

Can’t make this shit up. There’s truly something uniquely douchey about tech hiring that I can’t exactly put my finger on. It’s either some tacky attempt by startups, or in a similar vein, a tacky attempt by larger orgs. Douchey is the only word that comes to mind.

    Interviewer: Hi there. Wait. I was just called for an emergency. I am really sorry, but I have to go.
    Me: Oh dear. I hope everything is okay.
    Interviewer: Thanks. Again, sorry. Talk soon. Bye.

    Interviewer: When can you start?

[0] Except for the past year, when I took a pay cut to continue working on a project I loved as an employee after starting that project as freelancer. That didn't really require an interview, just stiff negotiations (which got me nowhere, hence the pay cut).

It's a bit like shops adopting Kubernetes for their tiny startup with 100 max concurrent users when Heroku would do the job just fine.

Somehow cheap hacks is frowned apon but if you use stupidly complex systems then, ye, you have to be competent and doing best practice or something. Just spread the mess out over multiple layers of abstraction and no-one will realize it is bad ...

I'm not sure if you are trolling or not, but I can imagine that some power plants around the world do it :)

My point is KISS in the amount of knowledge required to do something, not just the implementation complexity.

E.g. on my last job we were really machine engineers doing some c programming. Good luck establishing fancy pancy workflows. Instead of trying to use relative paths and setup env variables for dependencies we just all had the same version controlled folder on c:\ with everything in it. And it is fine.

If he can't swing HR or the salary, you don't want to work for a wet noodle and you've now dodged a bullet.

This is a key point that too many of us lose sight of. Getting into a bad relationship is never a positive. When you're (semi) stuck in a bad relationship you'll struggle to find the time and energy to pursue a better relationship.

But seriously, when you get an offer, test it. If it falls apart as soon as you try to negotiate anything, run away. This is even if it's your dream job that you think you'll never need to change and pays you way more than you wanted, because if you do like I say and you lose it, you don't lose anything.

Porcelain jobs are the worst.

I have never gotten a recruiter that doesn't tell me the salary when I do this.

IMHO That third round should have been rolled into one longer session (no more than 2 hours). Anything any more convoluted than that is just eating the candidate's time because your processes are bad. Then adding more hurdles... nah.

Companies so often miss that you can have a probation period, try someone out in the role, which will give you a much better idea of how it's going to work than selecting for people who will tolerate your byzantine hiring oddyssey

https://nearshoreamericas.com/us-makes-h1b-visa-harder-obtai...

Wouldn't it be hysterical if the hiring process all these companies are cargo-culting was actually designed to not hire people so H-1Bs could be used.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

"until this point, we didn't even talk about money"

Big mistake. For years I was desperate for a job (STEM PhD). Now it would be my first question to ask. And I ask this on the phone before I would even bother to go for an interview. But again, now I don't need your shitty job. Chances are, you need me more than I need you.

I remember when I talk to a company once on the phone. Besides that I did not really like the salary, I realized I would not be able to do the job since it was basically two jobs and their chances of success were much slimmer then they were assuming. Didn't bother to go on. But the HR guy said, please apply, worst thing that can happen is that we don't hire you. WRONG. Worst thing that can happen is that I get treated disrespectful in an interview and that I waste time. Most companies value your time with zero.

And if you applied already you ask in the first phone interview why they think you are suited for the job. You would be surprised how many people have you come in without ever having looked at your resume and then tell you that you are not a good fit based on your resume in the interview. It is basically the first time they look at it.

which can hurt your self-esteem / motivation for the next interview.

So if you see red flags and have other options that look more promising, walk away.

It makes sense if employers sold employees to other employers, but it falls apart in the standard labor market.

If I am currently employed and job searching, it is because my current employer is a lemon, not me. The prospective employer should be focused on determining my value to them. Everyone has some value (possibly negative, in extreme cases) and if we both agree then we should both be happy.

In this context, an employer could be a lemon for a million different reasons.

A good employer assumes that only bad employees are left in the market. As do good employees think that only bad employers are looking via job ads.

Hence more and more god jobs are filled via referrals from fiends etc. I basically think the same about job ads. Why bother applying?

But the market for lemons does not describe the labor market. Good companies grow and need more employees. Good employees do not get market-competitive salary adjustments and thus look for different jobs. It's the complete opposite!

There are exceptions, without a doubt.

EDIT - and let me also say that if the market for lemons accurately describes the labor market, why is it that tech is the only industry with such broken hiring practices?

Yes. But it is incredibly hard to get into a good company.

"and let me also say that if the market for lemons accurately describes the labor market, why is it that tech is the only industry with such broken hiring practices? "

In other "tech" industries it is the same. How do you get into a blue chip company?

1. contacts of your parents

2. contacts of your professor at University

3. you work for a start-up that they buy

In my experience this is true for 9/10 people I know.

I did my PhD in NYC and I once was asked in an interview for a med-sized medical company what the street name in Brooklyn is with all the hipsters. Think deeply what could be the reason for such a question.

Did you answer "all of them"?

On a different topic: what's the diversity manager interview for? And what's the point of a diversity manager?

Genuinely curious. Do others see this as a red flag? That would be an immediate deal breaker to me, as it suggests the company is dominated by political obsessions. I know this sort of this has become more common, but having it in the hiring pipeline seems quite extreme.

I honestly don't know what the reason for it is, but I do tend to give people the benefit of the doubt. I suppose it could also just be meaningless theatre. If people have real-life experience with diversity managers, I'd love to hear them.

No. And even if this were true, having some kind of diversity specialist quiz people to see if they are racist (for what definition?) would still be ridiculous.

Companies have policies for employees about workplace behavior like racism, harassment, safety, whatever. If they are concerned about workplace discrimination, there are normal corporate ways of dealing with this. Having a diversity interview is something entirely different, and seems much closer to being asked if you're a communist or a christian. It's patently absurd, and a sign of a company that has lost all focus on actually building something.

That said, I have zero idea why diversity manager would interview anyone.. it is not like I am going to change my demographic based on it..

Then companies that care about diversity would be right not to hire them.

I would. I've gone to battle with HR over candidates that I've felt strongly about, and I've always won. In my experience, you're dead-on about the TODO list.

Years later, some recruiter I talked to said, "I know we passed on you a few years ago". I guess it's good that they were taking responsibility?

A Diversity Manager? Is that a joke?

What would that interview even look like?

To me, the fact that this company is paying staff to conduct these non-technical interviews for technical staff would be a red flag that they clearly can't allocate resources adequately.

Is it your understanding that the new hiring process includes all of these steps, or that you ended up in the middle of both the old and the new one and that there was some overlap?

Anyway, judging from your story it seems to me like they’ve been very disrespectful of your time. I always ask up front what exactly the process will be, and I would’ve taken it as a bad sign if in the middle of it they had come and told me ”oh by the way we’re experimenting with how we’re doing this, we’ll need you to do a few more interviews than we told you earlier”. I don’t have unlimited time on my hands.

"Hi $MYNAME,

I know that you have already sent over your interview availability but we are in the process of moving to a new interview process so wondered whether you..."

I've never interviewed for a FAANG, but I understand that they can and need to be very picky, and can typically get away with things like seven round hiring processes. I still think it's disrespectful of your time not to let you know the whole process up front, and then sticking to it.

Best of luck to you!

It’s also a good sign the company might be in disarray and every day might feel like that there.

Anyways, sorry, from the profession as a whole. A lot of us are doing the best we can (even these individuals might be), but hiring generally sucks at the lower levels and gets easier as you become more senior (that’s been my experience).

Good luck!

Wouldn't it make sense to talk with the diversity officer at the very first? I am assuming if you don't tick some diversity checkbox, you'll have much lower change to get hired regardless.

Thinking on the hiring process as a CI pipeline, I think filtering out people that cannot code is easier and less time consuming, than going through some 1:1 call with their diversity manager.

Ignore their calls and emails for 90 days, then after 6 months email them and CC everyone you got an email from during the first three rounds telling them that you have decided solely based on their hiring process that tech corporations are bad and you are starting a wood chipping business instead.