Now that you said it, I remember my first job interview as well. 1999, Linux administrator in an ISP.

- 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.

So here's the difference now. Back in the 90s, absolutely no one went into computing for the money, or the job prospects.

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.

The irony to me is it seems the current interview process stands to filter out the people who are genuinely interested in tech and learning and caters to people who google "tech interview questions for X."

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.

I do remember a take home project given to me over Christmas, with a serious expectation that I not take more than 48 hours.

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.

i have a good network too and they all now work at FAANG like companies, and want to hire me, to do domain specific work. But have no power to do direct hiring. So it varies really.

Exactly. In 1999, I just wanted to experiment. My first salary was like 500 bucks. The IT/software development world was boring. I remember telling my father, territory manager at IBM, that I would never be like him and he telling me that I should invest my time on Windows NT and Visual Basic because Linux would never get anywhere.. we were both totally wrong.

Interestingly, in 1999 my father worked at Microsoft on the Windows NT kernel but at home he had a Linux server and taught me to install Debian from floppy disks.

I think the shortest interview I ever had was:

    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.

The next day by e-mail:

    Interviewer: When can you start?

That lead to a great working relationship. The current age is indeed ridiculous.

Is this only the case in the US, or also in other countries? I live in Netherland, and haven't seen anything like those neverending interviews. Then again, I work as freelancer[0], and most projects just take one or two interviews, and they're mostly about what the project is about and what kind of developer I am.

[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).

A lot of companies lack confidence and experience, so they cargo-cult processes from companies they view as big+successful. In the tech world, it's FAANG or MAANG or whatever the acronym is these days.

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.

or some years ago, when people were forcing hadoop to biggy data easily queryable with traditional SQL.

Or people forcing SQL when CGI endpoints executing bat files querying Excel documents on a network drive is 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 ...

> Or people forcing SQL when CGI endpoints executing bat files querying Excel documents on a network drive is fine.

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

Heh ye well I am exaggerating alot.

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.

Querying Excel files doesn't sound easy, though. SQL is not that hard. Though easiest would probably be a Ruby-on-Rails-like framework that just sets up your basic CRUD-stuff for you.

Sure. It was meant as an exaggerated joke, but I mean the point (with a bad example). You would probably need to write some VBA to query the excel doc, which is not easier then using SQL.

Companies are being picky that shouldn't be picky.

I think this is kind of related to that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28031782