I do agree that there’s no reason face to face interviews shouldn’t be the norm again after an initial screen.
If some of those things don’t appeal to some candidates? <shrug> I don’t totally mean that. But some practices should be the default even if some candidates don’t really like them (and even if they’re less convenient or more costly for hiring managers.)
Not sure about the suit at a lot of tech companies but dressing neatly and even throwing on a sports jacket probably doesn’t hurt.
Employers didn't have a whole lot of choice in that matter for a long time. Candidates wouldn't show up if you tried to impose that upon them.
Granted, nowadays it does appear that the tide has turned back to employers getting to call the shots, especially for lower-level positions. It is less clear how desperate the top talent is.
Where there was clear benefit to the trip, perhaps. Otherwise no – senior talent time is way too valuable to be jetting around the world on wild goose chases.
The interview is the time to discuss if there is any benefit to be had. Maybe you'd consider the trip after everyone is generally happy, offers are on the table, and you feel the need for final due diligence. But you are past interview territory at that point.
They'll come to you if face-to-face during the interview is deemed important.
I agree that lying was possible before AI, but something about AI has emboldened a lot more people to try to lie.
Something about having the machine fabricate the lie for you seems to lessen the guilt of lying.
There's also a growing sentiment online that using AI to cheat/lie is "fair" because they think companies are using AI to screen candidates. It's not logically consistent, but it appeals to people who approach these problems as class warfare.
People taking minute-long pauses before answering questions. People confidently saying things that are factually incorrect and not being able to explain why they would say that. People submitting code they don't understand & getting mad when asked why they wrote something that way.
I get that candidates are desperate for jobs, because a bunch of tech companies have given up on building useful software and are betting their entire business on these spam bots instead, but these techniques _do not help_. They just make the interview a waste of time for the candidate and the interviewer alike.
- A candidate who wore glasses and I could faintly see the reflection of ChatGPT.
- A candidate that would pause and look in a different specific direction and think for about 20, 30 seconds whenever I asked something a bit difficult. It was always the same direction, so it could have been a second monitor.
- Someone who provided us with a Resumé that said 25 years of experience but the text was 100% early ChatGPT, full of superlatives. I forgot to open the CV before the interview, but this was SO BAD that I ended in about 20 minutes.
- Also, few months before ChatGPT I interviewed someone for an internship who was getting directions from someone whispering to them. I managed to hear it when they forgot to mute the mic a couple times.
Our freelance recruiter said that people who aren't super social are getting the short end of the stick. Some haven't worked for one, two years. It's rough.
What do you do when something like this happens in an interview? Do you ignore it, call out the interviewee, make a joke about it?
I'm not cold blooded enough to joke about this hahahaha
I do tend to give immediate feedback to most candidates, but I try to make it strictly technical and very matter-of-fact. A suspicion of cheating is not really something that I'd give feedback on. :/
Just like with semi-personalized phishing/spam, it's not that these things didn't happen already, it's that people are empowered and emboldened to cheat by it becoming easier. The difference is in quantitative not qualitative.
(The recruiters only come in for non-technical parts like resume filtering, general information and benefits. Sometimes there is non-technical "culture fit" interview, that is usually some sort of middle manager from the department doing the hiring)
How is it not logically consistent?
But not using it for creating lies and pretending you're skilled in areas where you're not.
Or would you say that if HR uses humans to screen CVs, you can cheat by using a friend's CV instead (using a human, like HR)
i used my words to speak to the candidate, so they think its fair game to use their words to lie.
screening using AI could be a totally legitimate usage of AI depending on how its done. cheating/lying has no chance of being legitimate. just like speaking can potentially be used to lie.
most people here arent straight up vilifying the use of AI, just certain uses of it.
It's like if you saw a headline that some grocery stores were price fixing, so you decide it's only fair if you steal from your local grocery store. One bad behavior does not justify another in a different context. Both are wrong. It's also nonsensical to try to punish your local grocery store for perceived wrongs of other grocery stores.
That's why it's such a ridiculous claim: Two wrongs don't make a right and you don't even know if the people you're interviewing with are the same as the people doing the thing you don't like.
That's a false equivalence on your part. Real equivalence would be to find out that the store decided to keep zero tills manned and forced you to do the work yourself and go the self checkout. You go do the self checkout and keep a few items extra as a form of payment for the work you did. This would be the real equivalence
If your interview format allows people to use outside help but only if they think to ask, that's hardly a level playing field. You're testing the candidate's willingness to ask. In most interview formats it would not be acceptable to Google the answer, so most people won't ask.
If you have an interview format that allows Googling, you should mention that at the start. Not leave it as a secret for people to discover.
The notion that a candidate must remember the name of a thing or a specific algorithm is just ridiculous. When was the last time you implemented some fancy sorting or tree traversal algorithm from memory?
and if a guy thinks he's able to parse that amount of information in less than a minute, why should I refuse it? The end goal is to hire problem solvers, people with analytical thinking and capable of learning autonomously.
In most companies, the development process is collaborative - spikes, code reviews, informal meetings; why would you evaluate a candidate for such a team solely on what narrow knowledge he brings to the table when the power is down?
No. Those are costumes that benefit no one but the seller of the costume. They wear the costume precisely once and never put it on again. It's an old classist ritual that forces people to spend money on clothes they dont want or need.
This particular signal also indicates a willingness to set aside one's individual ego in order to assimilate in the workplace, which is especially valuable to the companies demanding developers abandon good sense in order to push AI adoption.
If we want that signals to not be "a suit", it will need to be something else. But one advantage suits have is that they have served as that signal for so long that they are extremely accessible: just go to the thrift store, take what you find to a tailor and you are good to go. It is very easy to look up what is expected, and there are a variety of ways to trade money for effort or vice versa.
The highest-paying developer jobs have always expected programmers to wear suits to the interviews: in a recession those things previously only top payers could demand cascade down market. I don't love it, but I don't think this prediction is wrong.
> It is very easy to look up what is expected, and there are a variety of ways to trade money for effort or vice versa.
This confuses me. Am I doing manual work for my tailor? Am I tailoring my own suit?
this is the inverse of the hacker aesthetic. you might be right, but it's just sad.
personally, I'd assume the candidates that look the most non-conforming would be more talented and creative - more likely to love the work than the paycheck - but maybe it's no surprise that the highest-paying positions look for suits like quants at an investment bank.
I am FAANG/FAANG adjacent. People making 400-700k/yr. I only see suits at holiday parties.
There are very few companies I'd fly out for TBH.
IMO Make firing easier, pay people a massive severance if you're firing them for a mistake you made in hiring, and initially start them out as remote so you're not forcing a lifestyle change for them if you realize you made a mistake.
They didn't fire many people quickly, but it had a deeply chilling effect when someone was only at the company for a month or two before disappearing.
One of the unspoken difficulties of firing fast is that the person does a lot of relationship building with people who don't work with their output. It was often the case that someone would become well-liked by people who never saw their code, who would then become distraught when the likable person vanished one day.
The surprise was for the people around them, not the person being fired.
> Totally unrelated people should reserve judgment.
In the real world, they don't.
If so, a question is why they aren't bothered by that. Is the culture then cold-hearted? Mercenary? Sociopathic? Oblivious?
The real challenge was when recent hires would see it and get spooked. One person would get fired and then two people around them would panic and start looking for other jobs. Several people panicked and jumped right back into their previous jobs.
It was also tough when we'd hire someone and they'd discover their predecessor lasted for 2-3 months.
There were also problems with the hire fast part: Often teams would "hire fast" and then lose 3-4 months because they had to deal with someone who lied through the interview, had to be fired, and then another hiring cycle restarted.
What kind of sense of working as a team, and loyalty to the team, developed there? (Among the people who lasted, and how they related to new hires.)
Do you think the hire&fire practices influenced that?
That sounds like a vicious cycle: when people are stressed out, they are less likely to be able to learn successfully, setting them up to under-perform, get fired and then further stress out everyone else around them.
Cortisol has never improved a line of code.
Doing an explicit probationary period could at least reassure people who have been there longer, but it seems like it would be hard to regain trust at that point. The company should probably be praying its employees are unionizing behind the scenes & can save them from the mess they are making.
So I think what I’m suggesting does have precedence and from my research there’s not that big of an opposition to it.
Not sure about everyone else, but to me it's often obvious who wasn't going to make the cut within the first 1-2 months of their employment.
But if they think they need someone who has a secret desire to man a ship or be a touring musician – cool. A good fit isn't a good fit.
Of course. If a company wants to be quirky, that is their choice to make.
> I would probably be one of those people-/absent compelling reasons.
Agreed. A job isn't usually all that compelling – there are jobs everywhere – but for the right business deal you can look past certain things.
You’re absolutely right this would filter out candidates like me.
No, business casual is just fine. Who wants to try to do a grueling technical interview in a suit? No thanks. I sweat enough as it is in interviews.
> - people are probably going to have to fly out for interviews, again.
Fly where? Many companies don't have offices anymore.
> - awkward and/or neurodivergent people are going to have to learn social skills again.
Ahh... the age old, "just do better" position for neurodivergent people. Classic bigotry.
> - And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit.
Suits were out in tech 30 years ago when I first interviewed. They have only gone more out of style. Fashion doesn't work the way you think it works.
My guess is that we'll see more contract-to-hire positions and "talking through code" style interviews. Though I think we'll see lots of things tried which will be a general improvement over what much of the industry was doing before.
Hiring is all about finding the best candidate. If you find you cannot function sitting in conference room with three other people for an hour, there is a 100% chance there is a better candidate suited for the role, even if his/her technical skills are less than yours.
Jobs have soft skill requirements, and there is nothing bigoted about that.
This assumes that was the job? What if the job never talks or sits in a room with anyone?
> Hiring is all about finding the best candidate.
Then what is leet code about?
That's perfectly fine. Some coding jobs also don't require deep knowledge on data structures. Each company and project has its own requirements.
This does not reject the value of soft skills and being able to interact with other people.
You can also frame this from another perspective. How far should a hiring manager go to accommodate antisocial and straight out toxic people? Does an eggregious backstabber have the right to advance in hiring processes just because others found him unpleasant to work with?
You're complaining about the hypothetical effectiveness of concrete hiring practices. You are not rejecting the value and importance of soft skills.
Also, the ability to work under pressure is valuable skill. If you have a candidate that fails to perform when being in a room with someone else, I doubt you can argue that that's your hiring decision when other candidates are able to perform in similar circumstances.
All of the really damaging hires, I’ve seen in the last couple decades have been engineers with high negative productivity who were great at passing high pressure technical interviews.
Also in a couple decades working everywhere from startups to big tech companies in staff+ roles, I have never experienced anything even remotely similar to a performative technical interview. Even when everything is on fire, it’s not even close to the same thing.
Let's fix the real problem then? Why can't tech be like this?
Why should it? What problems would they solve? Are you so afraid of competing with those who might not get a certiciation?
And as far as certs go, just having a simple one for algorithms/data structures can seriously fix the issue of having to go through the Leetcode gauntlet at every single place one interviews at. A certificate for that class of questions would go a long way towards smoothing the existing interview process. DRY, anyone?
We clearly do have a problem. No 1 learns from past mistakes. We keep reinventing the wheel e.g. the land of NodeJs, Javascript, etc. Even within companies there's no learnings passed down. Each new hire thinks they're the best and tries to redo it all.
> Are you so afraid of competing with those who might not get a certiciation?
I rather compete on certification than compete on leet code. Do you miss the point that the whole leet code system has nothing to do with any job? At least certification might be slightly be relevant.
The whole point of credentials is that they are designed to be revoked. That's their whole point. If your credentials are pulled, you lose your ability to practice. That's by design. They are not gate-keeping tools. They are "this guy killed patients, so let's keep him far away from them" tools.
The closest thing you’ll find is actors and musicians auditioning. But performing is an actually a part of their job.
Nurses only have 4 years of school and they don’t have whiteboard interview equivalents. Medical technicians don’t either and they don’t even have degrees in most cases.
Also one minor correction most residencies are 3 years, although some are longer.
* special demerits to Canonical
No, not really. Take for example FANGs. Their hiring process is notorious for culminating with an on-site interview, where 4 or more interviewers grill you on all topics they find relevant.
Some FANGs are also very clear that their hiring process focuses particularly on soft-skills.
Where in the world do hope to find an engineering job where you are not evaluated on soft skills and cultural fit?
In this context when you say perform I assumed (as would most people) that you’re talking about technical/work sample interviews not culture fit tell me about a time you did x interviews.
If you’re talking about those, then yes every job in every industry does that. If you’re talking about stand at this white board and solve a problem that I know the answer to to while I watch.
No one outside of software engineering does this for anyone but new grads.
I think you're failing to understand what actually happens in hiring rounds. You stand in front of a whiteboard to showcase your knowledge on abstract topics like systems architecture. This is exactly what happens in the real world in design rounds. I lost count of the amount of time I spent in front of a whiteboard this year alone. Perhaps you don't work with systems architecture, but if you are applying for a position where in the very least you are expected to have a cursory understanding of systems architecture, you are obviously expected to showcase your skills to help hiring managers compare you with other applicants.
And no. The point of whiteboards is not to solve problems. Their point is to help you present and clarify your thoughts in a dialogue with people in the room. It's a communication tool.
1. No other industry makes senior people perform “work sample” tests in interviews with the exceptions I mentioned above.
2. There is absolutely no comparison between whiteboard sessions in interviews and in reality.
I have never once had a whiteboard session where someone says “I’m going to give you a system to design. I have built 100 of these systems before, so I have fairly specific things I’m gonna to look for. But I’m not going to tell you exactly what those are. You have 45 minutes in which to do it. No you can’t think about it over lunch. No you can’t spend 30 minutes reading up on it. No we can’t do another session tomorrow.”
If you think this is anything remotely like designing a system in real life, I definitely don’t want to work anywhere you have.
>expected to showcase your skills
Yeah that’s my point. Other industries don’t do this for senior people because they realized it’s not actually predictive enough to be worth it.
EVERY job in EVERY industry???
Well apparently the penguins have to pay tariffs. Do you know what industry they are in and how they do interviews?
I'm curious, as a software engineer when was the last time you've seriously worked under pressure? Like, 'do this thing now or you're fired/the company goes under' and so forth? The kind of snap pressure that interviews can push on you.
I haven't been under significant pressure in the past 10 or so years of software engineering. Not when on live ops diagnosing why our server is failing to work in prod, not when identifying critical client crashes.
Jetbrain's 2023 Developers’ Lifestyles survey states that around 29% of all developers work on weekends for work.
Having to work weekends is the last resort when working under pressure. Nearly 1/3 of all developers claim they are at that stage. No other profession has the concept of "crunch time".
> Having to work weekends is the last resort when working under pressure
No, it's not. I've had to work weekends before. We had a live ops rotation that would occur roughly once every eight weeks or so for me. The times I've had to work on the weekend were due to needing to solve some prod bug that was causing relatively minor headaches but they wanted some triage and solutions in earlier as possible. This was not a 'you are fired if you fail to solve the bug issue' or a thing where management is breathing down my neck to fix it because they're all busy sleeping on the weekend while I'm tanking the call.
It's often the result of either shitty management or people that cannot log off.
> No other profession has the concept of "crunch time".
Crunch time is a vastly different kind of pressure. I would know, I've worked in professional game development. And again, it's often the result of shitty management. If a game is going to fail and management is forcing you to work long hours in order to fix it then it's time to walk away.
All the time. Depends on where you work. It happens in startups, small companies and many others. Even in large organizations with stack ranking for example.
> The kind of snap pressure that interviews can push on you.
Not even close to the same. How do you equate pressure? Someone can fear spiders more than jumping off a cliff. Crunch time for them can be less than interviews. Point being?
At FAANG and friends? Discouraging job hopping to slow wage growth.
Elsewhere? "FAANG does it and they're rich, so if we want to become rich we should also do it".
> Jobs have soft skill requirements, and there is nothing bigoted about that.
Everything you just said also applies to someone who's deaf, blind, or physically impaired.
Apply that same logic to someone with one of those conditions, and enjoy losing the discrimination lawsuit.
A blind person is not a good bus driver. A physically impaired person is not a good mover or yoga teacher. A deaf person is not a good session musician. A person who cannot function sitting in a meeting with 3 people for an hour is not a good employee where that is required. What makes the last one special compared to others? They can be a great yoga teacher/bus driver/session musician/mover, I just don't see controversy
Simple accommodations can be made if needed and then there's no need to exclude people on old-fashioned prejudice.
maybe there is a company where being an amazing programmer is enough. I worked with capable depressed programmer who never delivers and is too shy to delegate anything, capable psycho programmer who no one wants to work with, bad programmer who works crazy hours, carries the project and interacts nicely with customers when needed. The last one was probably the most valuable
I mean... that's what the title and context of the discussion thread is all about?
Just because they are physically impaired now doesn't mean they were before, and an instructor won't necessarily move through the poses with the class since they can have 2-3 classes per day.
People sometimes think that's a silly thing to ponder: it's obviously obvious! But at most places I've worked, we spend lots of time defining the technical skills required for a job and handwave the rest.
I guess people assume "they'll know it when they see it". But there's a lot of ambiguity. Parent comment suggests that being comfortable sitting in a conference room for an hour is an important part of their job. In some workplaces that would be an odd requirement. I've worked at places where the important thing was being able to go away and make progress on something for a few weeks.
I suspect there are people with autism reading these threads and feeling disheartened. It would be easy to leave with the impression that neurotypical people expect you to make all the effort and they won't try to meet you half way. Some workplaces are like that. But in all the talk about neurotypical vs neurodivergent, it's easy to forget that neurotypical people are a varied lot, just like neurodivergent people. Workplaces are a varied lot too.
In this respect interviewing is a bit like LeetCode. LeetCode problems and writing code to satisfy business requirements are both "coding" but they're quite different kinds of coding; someone being able to do the former is probably good evidence they can do the latter, but there are also plenty of people who can do the latter without being able to do the former. So it is, in my view, with interviewing vs. interacting with people on the job.
Being able to communicate clearly and interact with coworkers is the most basic soft skill required for most jobs.
Communicating clearly with coworkers is foundational to interviews because you have to communicate as part of the interview. Don't overthink it into something more complicated.
> being comfortable sitting in a conference room for an hour is an important part of their job. In some workplaces that would be an odd requirement.
I think you're taking it too literally. Being able to converse with coworkers in a conference room is an interview proxy for being able to communicate with coworkers on the job. You're not literally testing their ability to sit in a conference room, you just happen to be in a conference room because that's where the interview takes place.
The internet is always full of arguments that some people might be really bad at interviewing but great at the job. That's true to some degree, but in my experience a lot of the difficult behaviors that show up in the interview (poor communication, uncomfortable talking to coworkers, or even if someone is difficult to work with) don't disappear after those candidates are hired. People are usually trying their hardest during the interview to look good, so often those characteristics become worse, not better, once they're hired.
It's tough to discuss online because nobody likes to think about rejecting people for soft skills. We want to maintain this Platonic ideal of a programmer who creates brilliant code in a vacuum and nothing else matters, but in real jobs clear communication is really important.
I'll call you on your bullshit.
Show me the interview where that's the requirement. Right now. Name the company where merely functioning while sitting with three other people is the requirement.
Oh, but in every case, it's more than just functioning in a room with three other people, and we both know you're a liar.
It's not as simple as "requiring people to be able to interact with other people."
The tools for in-person are getting better, but aren't frictionless to set up and sometimes require you to spend time futzing with getting your iPad or iPhone to actually see an external microphone. I don't know if Android is better about this or not, unfortunately. I would _hope_ that interviewers would extend people a bit of grace about this, but who knows.
As an aside - I saw your post on Apple Live Captions, and completely agree with you. I've been slowly adding to a collection of reviews of various captioning tools, and was _very_ critical of some of the choices Apple made there.
In fact many mention it up front on the screening call before any questions are asked.
so neuro divergence isn't a legitimate disability?
It doesn't really matter if it is or isn't, if being able to function well around other humans is a job requirement, as it often is in technical occupations. Why do you think behavioral questions are often asked during interviews?
For the same reason someone who requires a wheelchair could not reasonably be expected to be a firefighter, or a blind person be a pilot or bus driver, regardless of any accommodation provided.
I mean, this comment is literally an emotion. It's not a fact, and even if it was, well it's changing thanks to AI and all the people who promote AI, and AI isn't going anywhere, so neurodivergent people really I think might have to disclose it/ Maybe if they can truly prove that they are neurodivergent, companies can go back to remote interviews?
https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/enforcement-guidance-reas...
Anyway in Germany I bet there’s a Taubenausweis (Gehöhrlosigkeitsbescheinigung?) or other form of official status marker, and the employer would expect you to show it to HR.
When it comes to the types of disabilities that are being discussed in this thread and that I was referring to - to say varied types of autism - I doubt any type of organisation that treats employees as "resources" will work in a decent way.
It's dehumanizing, it's lacking empathy, and it usually ends up having people trivialise the problem a person might suffer from.
As long as the disability doesn't prevent a person from executing their contractual obligations, gatekeeping a position behind "you need to be able to function in society" is an indecent request to people that have difficulties doing so.
And from personal experience, once you're in the second half of your life, looking for an autism diagnosis and then using that to fight the gauntlet of bureaucracy required to get a government approved "stigma certificate" is a chore that really eats into one's provision of spoons.
I for one would like my manager and my employer to understand when I tell them I have trouble in loud open spaces with many people and disruptions, and I would prefer to do my job at home in a comfortable environment.
How do you propose I demonstrate to you that being in an office severely impairs my ability to reason about problems and write code? Is heart rate enough? Are higher bugs per feature enough? Is being an asshole to people enough?
That's exactly the context. In the US, if you're being asked to prove a disability, it's part of a request for accommodations.
> And from personal experience, once you're in the second half of your life, looking for an autism diagnosis and then using that to fight the gauntlet of bureaucracy required to get a government approved "stigma certificate" is a chore that really eats into one's provision of spoons.
I'm in my 30s, but that's been my experience as well. Unfortunately, from personal experience as well, finding a new job after being fired with cause due to failing to obtain ADA protections really eats into one's spoons too.
> How do you propose I demonstrate to you that being in an office severely impairs my ability to reason about problems and write code? Is heart rate enough? Are higher bugs per feature enough? Is being an asshole to people enough?
Why guess? A diagnosis per the DSM by a qualified professional is how you demonstrate impairment. It's also how you guarantee accommodations. As a bonus, it often come with suggestions tailored to your specific disability.
Just a doctor's note/certificate actually.
> Fight the gauntlet of bureaucracy needed to get a government approved certificate is a chore
Well that is a separate problem. Yes, bureaucracy causes a lot of problems(even renewing your driver's license is a pain), but that doesn't mean the entire basis of needing to prove you are disabled should be thrown away. Everyone in their life faces shit bureaucracy, it's not news.
This was in Germany.
Ultimately, accommodations help but they don’t place me on even ground: they still single me out and make people consider whether I’m capable based on accessibility, not skill.
Comparing it to deaf people (recognized by the ADA) or any other physical disability is extremely offensive.
But neurodivergense is not just a lack of social skills. Painting it this way is one of the reasons people don't understand it and act with bias against those suffering from it. It is a disability and is recognized by the ADA.
Typically, in a context where practical accomodations are being discussed one would want to address specific needs. A person with dyslexia isn't going to need the same accomodations as someone with ADHD, for example
All this aside, if you have e.g. crippling anxiety such that you can't make it through an interview unaided, you probably won't be successful in that job, whatever it is. Whereas a deaf person or someone in a wheelchair would have no long-term problem.
And while someone on the autism spectrum is born that way, anxiety is inflicted. Of course, Genetic temperament plays a role in one's predisposition to anxiety, just like with many physiological illnesses.
In a nutshell, Autism is neither an illness or disorder, but merely a "different order", while crippling anxiety is actually a disorder.
The kind of autism discussed here is, trivialize their experiences and challenges. It's borderline insulting to those for witch it is a disorder.
Presumably to meet the boss. And maybe the key people on the team.
While i dont agree with the idea we'll be flying anywhere for interviews, havent most companies gone back on remote work. "hybrid" is a benefit now and being in the office is the expectation.
I think you're too eager to throw personal attacks on those who raise valid points that are you feel are uncomfortable to address.
You should be aware that engineering is a social activity that requires hard skills. In any project that employs more than one person, you need to be able to interact with others. This means being able to effectively address and interact with others around you.
If you give anyone a choice, anyone at all, on who they work with, they will of course favor those who they are able to effectively interact with.
This is not bigotry, is it?
If "those who they are able to effectively interact with" ends up meaning only people who look, act, or believe like them, then yes it absolutely is.
A more charitable interpretation might mean “the candidate is able to clearly explain (through some medium: orally, typing, etc) how their code works, and why they picked that solution. They were also able to correctly answer follow up questions”. If _that_ is what is meant, then that’s not bigotry IMO.
For everyone here who appreciates the effort to remove unconscious bias from these decisions as much as possible, because they genuinely want to find the most capable person for the job regardless of their personal preferences, there's still a whole world out there where that bias is not only desirable but celebrated.
It's everyone. You don't get to cherry pick.
That's why hiring managers should focus on soft skills. Their job is to hire the guy that fits in your organization and everyone in it is able to effortlessly work with. When hiring managers do their job, you don't need to go way out of your way to suffer toxic people who are utterly unpleasant to work with. Hiring managers filter them out. Problem averted.
Or maybe it works exactly the way they think? Suits are so out, that wearing one is a strong signal of "different thinking" in a way that being casual once was. A colleague of mind would wear a three-piece on "casual Friday", and always showed up to the nines for interviews. Never harmed him, just reinforced his "think different" bona fides.
Others have already commented on this, but do you work in tech? IME getting interviewed by directors and even VPs in t-shirts is the norm. I’ve worn jeans to work my whole career. If anything, I think people in tech have a strong prejudice against people in suits (ie “obviously this person isn’t a real software engineer, they’re wearing a suit.”)
Anyway, probably not good career advice to wear a suit unless dress codes at tech companies are suddenly subject to drastic changes.
In start ups, I have seen candidates nearly rejected just on a suit alone. Def started them on the wrong foot impression wise.
'Uniforms' can go both ways. Would a person who only owns white Oxford shirts and monochrome dress pants have to go out and buy a new wardrobe he would feel very uncomfortable in if he wanted to work there? People who wear 20 year old band t-shirts can be every bit as judgemental about looks as people who wear tailored Italian suits.
Hipster/lumberjack can also work. Make sure the jeans are $400 Japanese raw selvedge to really get it right.
The highest ranking person I ever shook hands with was the GP Morgan head of futures department. He came to talk to the whole company to prep for acquisition. So, it wasn't a super official "ceremony", but it was in front of some fifty men, including senior management of the said company. He was wearing a polo shirt, jeans and a pair of sneakers. I don't know if this is how he'd show up to his office in the bank. Likely not (but who knows?)
Also, nobody in that room was wearing a suit.
Maybe your advise works for other places. For vast majority of programming jobs showing up overdressed will raise more questions about your sanity than score any points on preparedness.
I recommend a t-shirt with a tuxedo design printed on the front. The very definition of smart casual.
He was wearing some sort of jeans and polo shirt combination (the same as the other executives) and it looked terrible to me (the proportions were wrong, the jeans were too long--he looked like a clown) and I thought his attire was disrespectful. The people there, who cared about looking presentable given the importance of the event for the 200-person satellite office, looked much better than the power-ups.
In my opinion, this doesn't show that he only cares about the work and not silly, old-fashioned dress codes, but that he's too good for us to take the time to look good.
In case you mean JP Morgan, here's the CEO, Jamie Dimon, on cover of annual shareholder letter, back in ... 2015:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jamie-dimons-style-telling-jp...
My expectation is that turning up in a suit would get better results. The effect is probably smaller in hard-skill roles but I'd assume still present.
Turning up in formal business wear isn’t going to be a positive social cue if everybody you interact with is dressed casually.
The social cue you’d be giving off is that you stick out like a sore thumb and probably didn’t do your research on the company before you showed up.
Literally no different than turning up to Lloyd’s of London in a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts.
These are just instances of my point (a): not having a clue about SV work culture.
> there are even people who wear suits all the time
Not in silicon valley tech. I mean, sure, maybe there's one guy and the number is not zero.
So then by your own admission, the best way to come dressed is the same way your interviewer tends to dress.
Which is essentially what most people in this thread are arguing for - dress to match the company's culture.
There are many ways to wear a suit. If you walking in wearing a suit that doesn't fit, doesn't suite (no pun intended) you, and it obviously makes you feel uncomfortable then that could count against you. But you walk in wearing a suit that fits, makes you look good, and that you are comfortable wearing, then I have a hard time seeing how it will count against you.
Being hyper judgemental about the clothes people wear isn't productive
However, like it or not, it is a signal because it means you deviate significantly from the mode of the distribution. And a sober application of Bayes suggests that if anything, all else equal that signal is a negative one.
Admittedly I thankfully wasn't in the SV bubble where people are wound this tightly about it!
If an interviewer can't tell the difference between a flex and show of good intent, they probably should go back to jobs where they don't need to make judgements of character.
If you forgive me the analogy, and assuming you're American, would you think of checking the etiquette of entering into a shop? In the US, the concept itself is weird, you go in, buy stuff, and leave. In France, you must greet the shopkeeper right as you go in through the door. In Hungary, you must wish the shopkeeper a good day in reply to their greeting. It's simple... if you know it's even a thing you should check.
As long as suits and ties remain the uniform of politicians and managers, I don't think techies will ever willingly adopt it for themselves as well.
I personally dress like a hobo when I'm out and about, and wear a uniform of jeans and a blue shirt when I go into the office, so I really don't care about the suit either way. I'm wearing it for your benefit, so if you don't like it, just tell me upfront - don't make me guess if the job isn't about mindreading.
I now have no idea how I am supposed to dress for most things other than formal occasions like wedding, funerals, or formal dinners.
Can't go wrong with “smart casual”
// not sure that helps :)
What if wearing a suit is "being myself"? You'll be penalized in tech for that.
Not everyone views the wearing of suits as some kind of punishment.
(1) This person really really needs the job. Probably is in a bad negotiation position, due to this urgent need.
(2) Are you here to impress people with looks, or with your skills?
(3) They take looks way more serious than they should, maybe not focussing enough on the technical side of things.
(4) Hopefully this is not an "EnTeRpRiSe software" developer, and if they are, hopefully they don't work on my team and if they are, hopefully my next up manager does not get blinded by fancy clothes, instead of technical reasoning.
That said, I would try to keep an open mind about the person, but they would be initially sorted into the category of managerial or close to management, rather than close to the other engineers, which is not a positive signal to send.
So what if a candidate wants to look good? How you feel about your looks affects your confidence, and you want to be confident in an interview.
And like, if a candidate came in with a well groomed beard would you think “he probably spends too much time on his beard, he must be a bad programmer”? I bet you don’t.
I’m not trying to criticize you too much, but this just feels antithetical to everything that tech stands for. You get judged on your merits, not on anything else. This way of thinking is how you create an environment hostile to women and minorities.
Our industry in north america is known for lots its egotistical slobs, but I thought that was changing.
Like it or not, if someone needs to wear a suit to feel confident that says something about them. It may just be a personality quirk of them unrelated to their skills, but it often is not. There’s no reason you need to wear a suit to feel confident.
> You get judged on your merits, not on anything else. This way of thinking is how you create an environment hostile to women and minorities.
How often does tech discriminate for “culture fit” reasons? Someone’s personality fit is often a huge point of contention, and wearing a suit is part of someone’s personality and choices.
I’m not advocating for it being an absolute state, but you certainly have to give some consideration to the fact that dressing up far more than is needed implies you don’t culturally understand. It’s as simple as that.
I’d suggest you reacquaint yourself with the comment guidelines, as this just is a simple ad hominem attack on me, despite not even making any claims as to what I wear to work.
Replace “wearing a suit” with literally anything else unrelated to programming skills. Wearing a dress. Having a particular speech pattern. Being old.
As soon as you start judging people for anything other than their performance you fucked up. People’s personality comes through in the interview process. By the end of an hour working with someone you should have a pretty good idea of what working with them is like, suit or no suit.
> I’m not advocating for it being an absolute state, but you certainly have to give some consideration to the fact that dressing up far more than is needed implies you don’t culturally understand. It’s as simple as that.
I'm not saying you immediately throw a candidate out for wearing a suit. It's entirely possible I'm wrong and my mind can be changed by their performance, but it is something that would make me take a closer look.
I'll give you another example I experienced recently: a candidate who would not stop drumming their fingers on the table throughout the interview. Is that specifically related to their performance? No, not really. Is it annoying, a bit disrespectful, and shows a lack of restraint? Yeah, it is. This candidate had other flaws that made them disqualifying, but their finger drumming didn't help them at all.
But I would like to point out that a rule that allows someone to openly state they discriminate during interviews but forbids a strong reaction to that statement might require some examination.
You could just as easily argue that people “discriminate” against candidates by making them do leetcode, when leetcode is unrelated to performance at the job. Leetcode is a performance some people look at during interviews, just like how you socially meld in an interview is a performance people look at during interviews.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stimming
I have no idea since I wasn’t there when you interviewed that person but it is something that came to mind.
But that is also a narrow view of the world, no? Who says a suit looks good? What if I think pajamas looks good? I am exaggerating of course, but I often think suits don't look particularly better or anything. It is just some random norm, that society has ascribed to that particular piece of clothing. I often find simple, one color only, no writing on it, clothing looking better.
> And like, if a candidate came in with a well groomed beard would you think “he probably spends too much time on his beard, he must be a bad programmer”? I bet you don’t.
I don't, but I do get a sense of them possibly being a bit vain. But more importantly, I think about why I don't wear such a beard. It is annoying when eating, and I don't want my beard in my food. So I will be a little bit baffled by their choice, but it is their choice anyway. I don't have to like it.
Especially if you’re an interviewer.
Great. Fantastic job everyone /S
At least requiring a suit requires something aesthetically better and more worthy of human dignity. Reverse snobbery demands you dress worse and beneath it.
In the Western world, for a long time, at least 100 years, a suit was considered the proper attire for men. Then expectations changed and now some, many even, consider jeans and a t-shirt as aesthetically pleasing as a suit. Maybe in a few years, you'll go and talk to your lawyer, who will turn up to an hour-long meeting that you'll pay 500 dollars for in a tracksuit and it'll be perfectly fine, you'll even find the attire aesthetically pleasing.
Traditionally, it was a suit and hat. Going suit alone was already "dressing down". It is funny that we now consider that to be the paragon of male fashion.
> Maybe in a few years, you'll go and talk to your lawyer [...] in a tracksuit and it'll be perfectly fine, you'll even find the attire aesthetically pleasing.
It seems we'll question why he isn't wearing jeans and a t-shirt like a dignified man.
Most people off the street would agree that a suit is more dignified, and it's not without reason. Wearing a suit indicates a level of discipline, effort, and intention about the way that you look that simply wearing a t shirt with jeans does not.
To contrast, the historical reason for the t shirt / jeans combo is practicality and convenience; tech as an industry got away with it at first, because techies were not interfacing with clients directly or simply because they're working class.
You can argue about the elitism and class differences surrounding suits versus t shirts and jeans, but I think it's a bit ridiculous to say that suits aren't aesthetically better just because of the media image for hacker types.
So all we have is the tradition that "high status males" in the traditional power roles wear suits when in public, which is true and valid, but it does not translate into the inherent superiority of this garment.
The main benefit of a suit is that it can be easily tailored to fit a person perfectly, which isn’t the case with tshirts/hoodies/jeans/etc. I mean, you can tailor those, i guess, but that’s very uncommon.
For non-suits, the pro-tip is to just focus on finding ones that fit your shape the best (or changing your shape; unless you are one of the unlucky few who has a non-conforming shape, e.g very tall), and that’s their main downside.
Well fitting casual clothing > poorly fitting suits any time. Beyond that, it is situational.
I mean you can argue aesthetics, but it’s a fact that in the western world, a suit is considered by everyone, more or less, to be more formal than T-shirt and jeans, and more formal is widely considered to be more dignified than casual wear. The first principles that matter aren’t aesthetics, they are more likely customs and class (socioeconomic status).
Presumably OP had seen/visited an Apple Store before and knew what employees wore there, so it's not a mystery what the uniform is, and therefore what is probably meant by "don't wear anything formal". It's not some kind of gotcha.
I interviewed elsewhere and one other time I wore an Oxford. I passed the university interview but the hiring manager told me for the on campus interview to not wear that again, or I'll stick out too much. I wore a plain T-shirt and have been happily employed for 10 years here :)
I got the job, but was then told "don't listen to your mother"!
Thanks mom!
I always get a positive response.
But you do highlight the flaw of natural language, where it only works where there already is a shared understanding. When quite often there isn't. Heck, 90% of the comments on HN are from actors having different understandings for technical jargon and talking past each other because they aren't even talking about the same thing. Such is the tragedy of the human existence.
It's not like these are skills that they haven't learned, these are things that they have a hard time with. Expecting them to be 'normal' is like asking a person of medium stature to be taller. They could mask them but ultimately it's not who they are and expecting everyone to be the same is a fools errand.
Basic game theory, really. Business are not charities. Hiring a neurodiverse person is riskier than a neurotypical one.
You sound like a typical classist MBA; don't you have Linkedin posts to make and employees to micromanage?
No company worth working for would refuse to hire someone just because they didn't wear a suit to their interview
Dress nicely, sure. Wear a collar? Yeah probably. A tie? Meh.
Let's get rid of this old fashioned boomer nonsense from hiring please
I agree no one will explicitly decide one way or another based on how you dress. But making everyone in the room feel comfortable with each other will help the whole process.
At my previous employer, I had to convince several people in my team that wearing a suit was NOT a reason to reject a candidate out of hand. It's really difficult to gauge the expected dress code at a company beforehand, but it's not good advice to just blindly dress up.
Me personally, I like working at places where people can wear shorts and flip-flops. One level up is "pants and shoes, with socks", not even a collared shirt. Maybe a single-color new T-shirt, to be safe. A full suit would be an alarmingly bad read of the culture, and at that point we'd have made you come eat lunch at a burrito place to get a read on whether you're really a bad fit or just socially awkward.
The best thing I heard from an interviewee that was wearing a suit was that they interviewed elsewhere nearby that morning, and those people needed to be impressed with clothing.
Millenia. Just ask Nanni what happened when he trusted Ea-nāṣir.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81...
That said, I very much agree with your last paragraph. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a lot of hiring was done this way in the US.
In an American context, this is generally true in 49 out of 50 states, except that the probation period covers the entire duration of your employment. The people who say firing is expensive are thinking about something else.
And I’m a hiring manager. I’m trying to slot new hires with the training they will need and give them realistic tasks I know they can accomplish. And it’s not easy. I’m already 30 days in on a new hire that I’ve been able to peer with for 2 days. And I’m constantly apologizing for the lack of time.
I worry about the retreat to networks. I think it's an inevitable response to the rise of machine-generated fakes, that people are going to start strongly preferring to be physically next to someone talking to them simply in order to verify that they're real, not one of the billions of apparitions knocking on their virtual door. But it also pushes back to networks of preferred universities and preferred drinking societies within those universities. All of which have the opportunity to be little discriminatory clubs.
We just need some sort of qualification which tests practical knowledge.
I could even go further and say that NOT hiring anyone who shows up in a suit will give you better results than the other way around. You filter out a lot of career guys who are really poor programmers and will try to end up as mediocre middle management that way.
In the past we took a chance hiring people with non traditional backgrounds but now that everyone thinks they can do complex engineering with the help of AI, we need to know people have truly studied the fundamentals over a period of 4 years at a university.
The only way to be sure that I know of is to ask questions in-person. They don’t have to be absurd, just things that you should be able to answer if you understand fundamentals, like “describe the differences between a binary tree and a B-tree,” or “describe the fetch-execute cycle.”
Yeah, no. I'd deduct points if the candidate wears a suit. What a huge red flag, missing all sorts of context and appropriateness cues.
The problem with hiring in IT is that it's a bit of a broken system. On one hand you have companies that are overly picky and are alienating good candidates with their convoluted/mildy unfair hiring processes. Being overly picky when it's hard to get good candidates to show any interest because they are in demand is of course counter productive. This has been the default for the last decades. Lots of demand, not a lot of supply of great candidates.
And then on the other hand you have the recruiter / bodies for hire market with candidates that are maybe not that great being lined up with opportunities that are a bit ambitious for their skills. There you need good filters.
I've been on both sides of the table.
My process for hiring is:
- Pre-screen CVs and look for smells (job hopping, a string of meh employers, poor technical skill match, lack of seniority, etc.). You can read a lot from a CV. I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt here. But given 20 CVs, I'm not talking to 20 people.
- Quick phone interview either with myself or somebody I trust to have good judgment. This is a critical call. Mostly this is to confirm the basics line up (availability, expectations, skills).
- Interviews in person (ideally). At this point I either like the person or I really don't. Yes this is subjective. But initial impressions seem to have a strong correlation to long term outcomes. Again benefit of the doubt here. But I'm not going to pretend it's not influencing the outcome.
- Decision to proceed with negotiations or not.
Note I don't do any coding interviews whatsoever. I hate those with a passion. They don't tell me anything. I prefer portfolios (e.g. Github) or having candiates talk about something they did. I'm not going to probe them for encylopedic knowledge of algorithms, doing some shitty IQ test, or whatever.
What's a meh employer?
Not in an interview where maybe they're flustered, this was just an ordinary day on the job. They'd been in strange little enterprise vendor-silo programming environments their entire career. This was accompanied by exactly the sort of lack of understanding of lots of other stuff that you'd expect.
The flip side of this is programmers pushing companies to let them use k8s and Rust and shit when there's not a good business case for it, for fear of having a résumé that eventually starts to look like it could belong to that guy. Not wanting to look like him is a big part of the whole résumé driven development phenomenon.
There's a lot of that going on where companies just don't realize that they aren't just filtering bad candidates out but scaring the best ones away because they approach them wrong. Hiring is as much a sales job as it is a filtering job. After you filter out the bad candidates, how do you make sure you don't lose the good candidates? How do you get them into your hiring funnel to begin with? The assumption that these candidates are going to drop on their knees and beg you to please employ them is just extremely misguided in many cases.
Whenever you hear companies complain that they can't find good people, that's what's going on. Mostly it boils down to the company not being that great and candidates flocking to more interesting opportunities.
Most of your points I agree with, but this? Cmon grandpa
Whatever future interviews look like, I sure as hell hope we don't maintain this ^ attitude.
No man, it's not and never was - unless you are aiming for a "career" at JP Morgan and the likes.
The real answer here is: know the dress expectations of the place you’re applying to, and consider whether you feel comfortable working for a place that won’t pay you the courtesy of letting you dress yourself.
Yeah, hiring is scary. Hiring is insanely expensive on all fronts. Firing people is difficult, it's expensive and legally exposing. Hiring the wrong person, allowing them access your systems and potentially exfiltrate your IP to them is a hazardous but necessary venture.
The thing is, none of these things really changed with AI. People have been lying about their experience for literally centuries. IMO the advent of AI-laden candidates is going to nudge the hiring process back to how we did it 10 years ago, with a good old fashioned face-to-face interview and whiteboard questions. This means a lot of things that we've grown accustomed to in the past 5 years is going to have to melt.
- people are probably going to have to fly out for interviews, again.
- awkward and/or neurodivergent people are going to have to learn social skills again.
- And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit.
Companies should consider reverting to forking the upfront $13-1500 dollars for a set of plane tickets for their hiring team and rented conference rooms for a week. It's a whole lot cheaper than spending 50k because you hired the wrong person for half a year.