This is literally unbelievable. I cannot remember a time when the east coast was inaccessible for three weeks…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_5%E2%80%936,_2010_N...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_25%E2%80%9327,_2010...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_25%E2%80%9327,_2010...

Two back to back storms, there was about 12 hour window where you could get in or out. This poor guy was supposed to fly back during the first, got pushed to a flight during the second, and then the pile-on of rebookings pushed him further. I don't remember if he got trapped due to the third storm too.

It wasn't completely cut off. During the first storm, I got head notice of the next one and rebooked my flight out of the east coast to be one day earlier, and threaded the needle by politely asking customer service. I was in and out of the east coast for a week.

Anyways, Some cities on the east coast are less prepared than others for this sort of thing.

Overall, though, it doesn’t change your original point about interviews, and I didn’t really need to take us on this tangent.

And why should you talk to all those people? Talk to the tech folks, then to the CTO, then the founder, then what, the VC investors, the whole board? Can the CTO not describe the company vision and how IT fits in that picture? It does smell of a lack of vision or an inability to delegate.

Personally I still prefer the version with a take home project, even if longer, as I don't like performative programming.

I haven't had to cold interview in 20+ years. I hope I never have to based on how it works now. I get all my jobs from previous colleagues. Companies are closing the door to a lot of great talent based on this silliness, but they'll never learn.

We should fix the modern interview loop (very hard) but the idea we’d ever go back to one hour is kind of out there.

Calculate it this way. I can spend 3x 1 hour (3 people interviewing a candidate for 1 hour) and have a 60% chance of hiring a performant person. I could also spend 3x 6 hours and have about the same chance. When that 40% non-performant candidate shows up and I have to repeat the hiring cycle, It's significantly less expensive in both labor costs and opportunity costs for the 3x1 interview style than the 3x6 interview style.

This doesn't take into account all the talent that has no need or interest to go through a 3x6 interview process (I am one of them).

>the idea we’d ever go back to one hour is kind of out there.

Ya like I said, the industry just kinda does what it does, complains about not being able to find talent, and will never learn.

Okay, sure - dispute it if you want. It doesn't change the fact that the industry seemingly collectively decided that 1 hour isn't a sufficient amount of time to gauge fit/effectiveness/etc.

My point to you is that given the above, you have to make a choice. Spending the extra few hours gives you some hopeful assurance of what you're getting.

I once again will note it's not a good system, but there is to date seemingly no widely agreed upon good system.

class Foo {

}

On the whiteboard.

In any context.

That one saved us a lot of time.

It wasn’t some weird out of context thing either, he just literally didn’t know how to write Java at all. Even approximately.

I also got lectured by senior management for exposing them to liability since I didn’t ’go through the whole process’.

And this was a middle aged white dude candidate, a small company, and about 20 years ago.

The risk tolerance has only decreased since then.

I work in an "at will" state. Our 3 people are usually on teams chatting about the interview going on and will decide to end it early and not waste everyone's time if it's not going well. We've never had anyone tell us they were concerned about that. What liability was senior management at your company concerned about?

To paraphase "We want to give the candidate every chance to prove themselves, and cutting the interview short gives them a bad impression of the company (and it would make it easier to sue us for unfair discrimination)."

Since it was just a few (or in this case 1) interviews, and that makes it easier to claim that I cut it short because queue whatever protected class. Which, if someone was going to be that kind of jerk to a candidate, I guess doing it on the first interview WOULD be the one, eh? It would just be my word against theirs, instead of x interviewers vs theirs.

And I guess the riskiest type of candidate for that kind of crazy behavior WOULD be the person who felt okay blatantly lying on their resume about such a fundamental fact AND EVEN SHOWING UP FOR THE INTERVIEW, come to think about it.

We didn't get sued in this case though. I think the interviewee was just surprised someone was interviewing him who actually knew how to code.

After getting chewed out, I never walked them out early though.

I guess that is why FAANG told us to not talk between ourselves and put everything into the system for the HC independently - so we wouldn’t know what we were in for, and would give each individual interview a fresh shot without all the anticipated pain and suffering. Makes it easier when you can’t see the nut shot coming I guess?

Makes sense, but yeah - terrible.

To be fair though, out of hundreds of interviews I’ve done, that was top 5ish for bad. Most were much better.

That place never stopped doing the practice, but other places I've worked (including the current) have decided against that pretty brutal candidate experience. (And, as you say, have also had a policy not to share any information about the candidate's performance until after submitting the write-up and recommendation from the interview.)

Add in the 6-hour take home (which companies delusionally believe will take 2 hours, despite being often inadequately scoped or otherwise poorly presented; while quite often expecting a nitpick-proof solution); and all the random delays, and other hoops - and the none-too-occasional ghosting (even at the very end of the process) -

Yup, it adds up.

I have to go on a rant about this one cause it happened to me recently.

I applied for a Sr. Frontend position, and they have me do a takehome where I recreate some small component with some time-travelling functionality. It was actually quite fun to do and I enjoyed building it, but the feedback afterwards was maddening.

One of the points of feedback they gave me was that what I implemented wasn't 1:1 aligned with the design they gave me... The design they gave me was a blurry JPG with compression artifacts that was maybe 300x300 embedded into a random Notion document they sent me with an extremely vague list of requirements. I even explicitly asked them if they could give me a higher quality version of it so I could match it more closely, but they said that was the only document they could give me.

When I tried to somewhat align the picture to the actual design I was implementing, the border-radii of the elements was so blurry from the compression that it was literally impossible to know whether I got it exactly right or not. They also gave me no notes on specific fonts used (the one on their marketing site was a licensed font that cost money), specific brand colors (I had to go to their marketing website and hope the green I saw on the buttons there was the one they were expecting) or anything else of the sort.

It was obvious they expected me to spend at least 6 hours on it considering the feedback, but they explicitly said 2 hours and didn't give nearly enough reference for me to go off of to know what they truly expected from me. Absolutely ridiculous process

It takes less than one week to travel across the country by road. There's a whole system of Greyhound buses that serve exactly this purpose. How is it possible to get stuck for three weeks?

https://www.greyhound.com/bus-routes/san-francisco-ca-new-yo... notes that it takes 76 hours and costs $300.

Once flights resume it’s a thundering herd problem of annoying proportions too.

Sometimes you just need to push back - won't always work - but at least you can have some control over the process.