Candidates aren't going to wait 3 months and delaying all the other offers they are receiving, that's not going to work unless you are working in a FAANG maybe and the prestige of your company can make this work.
Or was the manager just interested in trivia?
I've also interviewed at Two Sigma where I was flown in onsite and by the last interview they had already reviewed most of my feedback and told me that they were going to extend an offer. I got the sense that if I wasn't using a 3rd party recruiter with rules they might have handed me an offer before I left offsite. But it was great having the chance to talk to my would-be manager knowing I would likely have the offer to discuss my role while I was still onsite.
No hard feelings on my end; I was out of my depth at the time, and knew it, and was glad I wasn't going to have to waste the rest of my day and theirs.
If, during an interview, it becomes obvious to you that you aren't a good fit at the place for whatever reason, you don't have to wait for them to end the process early.
Doing so yourself is not only acceptable, it's also a professional courtesy that they will appreciate.
Remember, with all interview processes, you're evaluating the potential employer just as much as they're evaluating you.
Don't get discouraged. Work on a personal project if you want, so you have something to show. In my experience it's only hard to land the first job. Once you do, it becomes easier. Don't read other people's experiences and think something is wrong. Good luck <3
Given how the other processes work, I sort of prefer to get it over with. But I understand that that's not viable for people searching while still working full time.
Well.. have you met their CEO?
The truth is once companies have a certain size and revenue, their software developers don't matter really that much. Yes it can be hell to work there, everyone is overworked, things are low quality, etc. As long as the checks keep coming in ( and they will ) there is really no critical problem to be addressed.
Now the funny part: once the alarm bells go off and they try to change course... not happens, the "ship" is unresponsive and in most cases it will sink. But depending on the size of the company that will take years and maybe even decades.
So the best skill everyone needs to have (I wish really technical introverted software developers had this more ) is: Develop "street smarts" and tell these people to go fuck themselves and shove their "hiring process" up their asses.
Are you telling us to be your own boss working the streets?
I am not sure I would stay motivated in another context.
It was hard turning folks down, and it pushed us to have very crisp reasons for saying no, but I think it made us better interviewers and more humane in the process.
My wife interviewed years ago for a UK govt research agency. They took three months to respond but did eventually set up an on-site interview. She went along anyway. HR met her at the gate and took her to the office of the person who owned the opportunity. When they arrived and there was no-one at his desk it turned out that he had died two months earlier and that the HR drone hadn't known. Needless to say the interview was cancelled.
Sounds like a vacancy
Cut to some time later, the interviewee's skeleton is sitting there still waiting. Maybe I've read too much Douglas Adams.
“You are the Bob now”
1. Excruciatingly long application processes, especially when companies required you to use workday for applying (30mins - 2 hours)
2. 2 weeks to hear back from the recruiter
3. 1-2 weeks to schedule a recruiter call
4. 1-2 weeks for a phone screen
5. 1 week to confirm results
6. 1-2 weeks for another round if not moving to on-site directly
7. 2-3 weeks for scheduling an onsite
8. 1-2 weeks for results (more immediate if it’s an obvious reject)
9. Additional 1-2 weeks for finalizing an offer and signing it.
The shortest end to end I could manage to get was around 2 and a half months, which is crazy.
This sounds like a standard big-tech run around, but IME most companies that take hiring seriously (i.e. more than "churn management") are not this slow.
The vast, vast majority of jobs have godawful applications and hiring process for entirely human, rather than technical, reasons (before anyone at a startup chimes in with 'our platform makes this better!')
I don't think this claim holds outside of technical jobs at big tech and big-tech-aspirers.
I think you're trying to say that jobs with godawful applications/hiring processes acquire this disease for human reasons? If so, we agree. I'd sum it up as decadence.
SMBs, inclusive of the "earlier" stage startups that are a big source of employment for the people who frequent this site, can't afford the decadence.
I was curious about what pond they were fishing in, because that representation of an average experience is totally alien to me. As for which pond "most" people on this site should aspire to fish in (on which I made no claim), ymmv. Just collecting data.
If you're understaffed and can't meet goals it's because you're understaffed and it's the business's fault. If you have enough people and can't meet goals it's because you're messing up and it's your fault. If you hire someone and don't get 'enough output' from them then you made a bad call and it's your fault. It's damn near incentivized to slow-roll hiring and agonize over the choices instead of getting people in the door and working on your tasks.
I know someone who applied for a technical job based in antarctica and the interview process was much less arduous than the one described here.
I could see a dystopian sci-fi short story or Black Mirror episode with the same theme.
There's a Joel on Software or Stack Overflow thing on this....
When in reality I believe the hiring process follows some kind of logistic curve - after some point you're only getting very, very marginal returns on the extra effort spent.
The issue is more that this process can't possibly be selecting for the best hires.
Thinking of cost like this is very shallow
The post is not doing any favours and it is not convincing anybody to apply to the position, quite the contrary
And guess what, your company is not the shining star that has to make absolute sure to never have a bad hire. Sure, take the low-hanging fruit as early in the process as possible, but up to a certain point, more interviews won't mean better results
Their lengthy process might mean they don't get your typical fast-flying FAANG engineer, but it does mean they get someone who's a die-hard Canonical fan.
People who love Ubuntu, tend to love Ubuntu.
A very long hiring process pretty much ensures the only ones still waiting around are the ones who really want to work at Canonical.
They are being extremely deliberate with their length hiring process.
However it is true, it's not a universal thing of course.
because i usually use xpdf for pdf files and ubuntu dropped it https://askubuntu.com/questions/1245518/how-to-install-xpdf-...
i was skeptical about ubuntu's business prospects when mark pitched me on it at the ceo conference in 02004 (he was attending, i wasn't) but i've always thought the distribution was pretty decent, and the company's behavior has also been excellent. a couple of my friends have worked there and had no complaints. i would have no hesitation about working there unless i had a better offer on the table
but i'm definitely not a die-hard ubuntu fan
Most available top-tier talent can land a job in much less than 81 days with much less effort at much more prestigious places... and they won't wait around for an average offer like what will come from Canonical.
By dragging out their process, Canonical either intentionally or unintentionally limits themselves to people who really just love Canonical and it's mission (and/or people like Mark). Additionally, this lengthy process ensures the most desirable candidates self-eliminate from the pool due to accepting offers elsewhere in the meantime.
like, yeah, if i had just been laid off and i was trying to get two or three offers on the table at the same time so i could choose between them, getting me an offer in a couple of weeks instead of three months would be crucial
but usually when i've interviewed for a job, i've already had another job
Probably not. Unless you really just wanted to work at Canonical (the dream job opportunity thing).
None of this is to say Canonical isn't a fantastic workspace. It's just a comment on their hiring process and possibly missed opportunities. If you're looking for top-tier talent, it would behoove you to move fast.
FWIW, Ubuntu only didn't ship xpdf in 20.04. It's back in 22.04. Looking at the history of the package in Debian, it looks like it was on "life support" for a while in Debian by people I recognise as Ubuntu developers, but then also got removed from Debian testing for the same reason. However Debian didn't have a release at all in 2020, so it didn't miss a Debian release like it missed an Ubuntu release, and a new maintainer arrived to look after it again after that so it got fixed in time for Debian's 2021 release.
IOW, it was just a matter of timing of releases and the absence of a maintainer in both distributions for a while, rather than some weird Ubuntu decision.
Having said that, Ubuntu does tend to focus on evince, so that would explain why it didn't attract a replacement maintainer quickly from the Ubuntu end.
It seems a bit of a weird reason to change distribution over anyway, which is why I thought I'd explain the details :-)
a more rational person would have compiled xpdf from source obviously
I appreciate that this is all a non-trivial exercise for someone not familiar with the tooling though.
Today? I couldn't care less about whatever Canonical is up to. I don't know if the tipping point was when they put ads in the frigging desktop or if it was just a slow but persistent decline in quality
It seems to me that Canonical doesn't care about desktop anymore (does anyone remember bug #1?) but is focused all in on servers. Which I suppose pays the bills, but resulted in Canonical burning an immense amount of goodwill the last decade+
Maybe they should spend more time hiring people that actually make competitive applications against Microsoft than die-hard nutjobs who think waiting a year to work for an open-source company is a good idea.
Microsoft might not have 70% of the desktop market if they'd done that.
Apple managed to claw back 15% of the desktop market to 20% with their BSD-clone OS, and it still has garbage software compared to what's available on Windows, but at least it's a start...
> $X bad on purpose
> $X is made to appear bad for those who are not die-hard $X fans
You just invented a consipracy theory that has surprisingly huge explanative power in modern world
There are tons of companies that don't do this (at least in the US), though, so there's no real reason to put up with it.
Everything takes ages in the corporate world. Every hiring decision needs to be signed off by interviewers, managers, HR, and sometimes even executives. Someone in this chain is usually on vacation, but there's no clear replacement, so someone else needs to be brought up to speed. Meetings need to take place for everyone to touch base, and discuss the candidates. Coordinating this around everyone's availability is difficult, since they have other meetings to attend. It really takes some outside-the-box thinking to make it happen. :)
Also, depending on the size and popularity of the company, they might be evaluating dozens of candidates at the same time. This also clogs the pipeline considerably.
But not everywhere. I've been hired by a couple of major tech companies and didn't have to go through such an insane, lengthy process as this. I think a lot of it depends on the corporate culture.
As a lowly engineer trying to get subcontractor invoices paid I've had some very Kafkaesque struggles.
I've had it before where I got an offer when I was in a job search from a place I approached from the last time I was in a job search.
In addition, Canonical is HQ'd in the UK, so it's not quite as easy to let someone go if red flags come up.
It's only after that it's hard.
What happened was this: By the time the first pick hires had been cleared, they had gotten another job. Same with second pick. Maybe even third, too.
Most people don't have the luxury or will to just sit and twiddle their thumbs for months and months, and those that do will just say fuck it and look elsewhere.
In our case, the place was a revolving door. ALWAYS hiring, never knowing who they'd hire - and those working there would carry the perpetually understaffed workload.
I can understand a hiring process like this if we're talking about fighter pilots, astronauts, special forces operators, scientists going to antarctica, or whatever. But software engineering? C'mon. Delusions of grandeur.