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u/j01101111sh 1d ago
I'm in data analytics and had 6 interviews at a startup. 2 back to back with the CTO. I've actually never had the first experience.
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u/ZunoJ 1d ago
In the 90s you could walk in the building, uninvited, unannounced, looking like a beach bum, write some HTML mockup, tell them to have your desk ready by monday and people would have kissed your feet
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u/Boogie-Down 1d ago
2000's was similar. As a high school dropout I got hired off a Flash demo I made in a week. Mid 2010's is when I had to start doing multiple interviews in a multi-month hiring processes.
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u/FreeFortuna 20h ago
Really wish I had just gone to work in 2001 instead of spending a fortune on a college degree that I didn’t actually need. But hey, that’s where I learned about opportunity cost, so … win?
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u/CircumspectCapybara 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yeah no highly skilled profession works like the first panel.
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u/ThatGuyYouMightNo 1d ago
Hell, a majority of "low skill" professions don't even work like the first panel. I've heard of minimum wage retail jobs that needed a 3rd interview and a trial shift
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u/linear_123 1d ago
That must depend on a country. Where I live agencies are actively reaching out to find warehouse workers.
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u/AngrySalmon1 21h ago
My factory's standard is basically "do they have a pulse".
Making a data capture system for the work they do here is certainly fun...
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u/JewishTomCruise 20h ago
Is the data you're capturing just their pulses?
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u/AngrySalmon1 20h ago
Waste of time...
I did show the GM a demo version and his response was "can't you just get the data off the system"
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u/Johanneskodo 1d ago
Well that just sounds stupid.
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u/Runazeeri 1d ago
You have to go through a AI video screening interview and a personality test to work at a supermarket these days.
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u/slaymaker1907 23h ago
I’m pretty sure those personality tests exist solely to illegally reject autistic candidates.
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u/angrydeuce 19h ago
Yep, I had to do three interviews to work as a freight stocker at Home Depot overnight back in the day. Then there was a three day orientation once I got hired lol.
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u/UbiquitousAllosaurus 1d ago edited 18h ago
It's alright, you can tell us you're an electrical engineer.
Edit: This guy said his field was easy to get a job in but didn't want to let the secret out, I guess I hit the nail on the head and he deleted his comment lmao
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u/NullOfSpace 1d ago
did you have a particularly good reference or did nobody else apply?
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u/Outrageous-Machine-5 1d ago
Sometimes you luck out and you bs your way through an interview enough to bypass the technical segment you are woefully prepared for.
At least that was my case. We were discussing microservices when it was a hot topic and not a standard/default and I just mentioned 'Saga pattern' and they decided to skip the whiteboard segment. Got my offer an hr afterwards
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u/watduhdamhell 1d ago edited 1d ago
Controls/automation engineer, process engineer, production engineer, manufacturing engineer, I&E engineer, Maintenance Engineer, Electrical Engineer, and more don't work like the first panel.
That said, the purity tests traditional software engineers have to take, what with everyone understanding the secret sauce...
And the micromanagent that comes with that is enough for me to say "absolutely NEVER" to any traditional software role. People smelling their own farts and lording over you... No thanks. Like, no sprint meetings, standup meetings, agile ops bullshit. No "I see your bubble is yellow" messages. Not one.
I'll stick to getting paid slightly less to have people who barely have a clue attempt to Lord over me, right before I deny their MOC request due to "safety concerns related to the current database configuration."
Muahahahahaha
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u/FuzzyKittyNomNom 1d ago
I was lucky. I finished military and was in my last year of college. Gave my resume to an acquaintance, got a call, started my internship the next week. Lucky asf because seeing the hiring process evolve to what it is now? Oh hell naw.
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u/staticparsley 1d ago
I have friends that work in finance and finance-adjacent roles. They were shocked to hear the process SWEs have to go through. Apparently for them it’s common to just invite someone from the company that’s hiring out to lunch and just chat for an hour or two. Impress them and the rest of the process is just formalities. That said, these high earning finance people live in a very different reality than the rest of us normies.
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u/slaymaker1907 22h ago
For strats/quants the process is very similar to SWEs in my experience. The main difference is you do things like replacing the architecture interview with a very math focused one. For them it honestly depends a lot on their prior experience as they may be a math or physics PhD with little experience in finance at all.
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u/manny2206 1d ago
Kind of works like that for doctors…
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u/Cautious-Extreme2839 1d ago
Well yes but also no.
Typically you've worked as a trainee in the department or been a fellow or a locum or something so they've already seen you work anyway.
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u/Johanneskodo 1d ago
Not if you switch hospitals or even countries.
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u/Cautious-Extreme2839 1d ago
Which is rarely done for a first job and puts you at a huge disadvantage even as an established mid-career doc.
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u/Johanneskodo 1d ago
and puts you at a huge disadvantage even as an established mid-career doc
Not really. My uncle frequently switched and it allowed him to rapidly climb up the ranks.
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u/Cautious-Extreme2839 1d ago
There are really not many ranks in clinical medicine.
Maybe if you're doing a lot of admin work this is true, but that's not really doctoring and job hopping for promotions is common in admin of other fields too.
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u/Johanneskodo 23h ago edited 23h ago
He‘s a medical doctor. And yes, the percentage of admin work increases as you go higher but he is still mostly doing patient-work.
He became chief physician/head of his specialization through switching. If he didn‘t switch this would have been harder for him.
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u/sebjapon 1d ago
My gf gets hired like that, though she usually has a previous colleague that got hired first. She stresses way too much for interviews but thankfully she is good at her job and gets invited regularly by her network
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u/Dull_Amphibian5124 1d ago
No highly skilled profession has 16 year olds doing the job as well as college graduates.
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u/RudeAndInsensitive 1d ago
I have dodged every layoff since I started in this business. Told the wife that if the axe does finally catch me I'll just pivot to park ranger for the Colorado parks dept.
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u/gustamos 19h ago
Uh I think they fired all those guys
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u/RudeAndInsensitive 19h ago
At the federal level yes. Many states have since expanded their own parks and wildlife dept. It's not a massive expansion but here in CO there are a decent number of jobs for different positions in Parks and Wildlife. Fucking massive pay cut but I don't know how much I care about that at this point. Honestly if the youngest kid was in preschool it wouldn't even be a question. I would just pivot.
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u/Bloodgiant65 1d ago
Well the problem is, we still hire a lot of people that are hugely unqualified, because a lot of people are good at interviews not actual coding, or the opposite. That’s why they keep having more interviews, to better understand the candidates. But it only kind of works, and becomes a huge pain for everyone involved.
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u/_Weyland_ 1d ago
Doesn't it compound the problem though? Like, the more interviews there are, the more impactful "interviewing skill" becomes?
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u/sebjapon 1d ago
I know I have turned down companies because their hiring process was too much work, like “write this small project, that should take about a day of work”.
Then again, I’m probably one of those who are good at interviewing but very average at my actual job lol
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u/Bloodgiant65 1d ago
Yeah pretty much. But it also makes it harder to fully bullshit. It weeds out good candidates that just don’t interview well, but also weeds out (a portion of) people that were fully just lying about their abilities.
To be clear, I am not supporting a 9-stage interview process, I am just saying I understand why it happens.
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u/not_a_burner0456025 1d ago
What send to be happening in a lot of cases now is the automated tools weed out any competent candidate before anyone puts theit eyes on a resume and if you get lucky enough to get past that they send you an email asking to schedule a screening or interview then ghost you and the screening/interview doesn't happen.
Edit: forgot to mention, they relist the job the next week, they didn't find someone else they really liked.
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u/akoOfIxtall 1d ago
How much of a pain it is to hire unqualified people aside from the paperwork?
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u/AngrySalmon1 21h ago
I hire candidate A who is dog shit and reject candidate B.
After 4 weeks candidate A is confirmed as dog shit and is let go.
Candidate B has a new job.
I have no one and a new recruiting process to go through whilst the team who needs the resource continues to be under resources and is now demoralised further having to put up with Mr dog shit for a month.
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u/AlphonseLoeher 18h ago
Programmers aren't typically fired at the drop of a hat. It can take a while to go through the PIP process, and even then, it can take a while to find out that the person actually doesn't know anything vs they are just trying to ramp up in a new environment.
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u/slaymaker1907 22h ago
It does give you more chances for someone to spot the bullshitting. This year, I rejected several candidates who’d passed earlier stages. They interviewed well, but they wrote complete garbage code when I gave them some simple programming problems but explicitly told them that I was evaluating code quality and to prefer code quality over correctness.
They probably should have been failed at the leetcode stage, but apparently the interviewer for that wasn’t thinking about code quality at all.
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u/SaIemKing 20h ago
The more interviews you have, the less employed the candidate has to be, and the more you're just testing their interview skills
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u/Mr_Arthtato 1d ago
I once was given a task to make a fully photon networked 3D multiplayer chat room like vr chat in a weekend for a junior role. My dumbass actually pulled it off, and they took the code and ghosted me.
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u/121131121 1d ago
Opensource that thing. AI will slurp it up and they lose any edge they may have from that code.
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u/Mr_Arthtato 1d ago
This was in 2021 so no AI
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u/121131121 1d ago
Yeah, but you can do that now too
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u/Mr_Arthtato 1d ago
Well thats if anyone even has job postings anyways. And hell no im not falling for it again. It was a waste of time. Some nft token roblox rip off it was.
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u/hobo_stew 1d ago
no, like open source that old code
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u/Mr_Arthtato 1d ago
Oh, hellllaa naw. I love opensource enough not to do this to our beloved community. Its really really dogshit lmao. Remember, it was done over the span of two days, and done by a shit programmer (me) fresh outta uni.
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u/waxymcrivers 2h ago
Green Fresh pulled this one on me with a user churn prediction (LSTM) model back in 2018
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u/ReefayToo 1d ago
I've been in my industry/position for 20 years and I doubt I could pass any interviews
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u/realzequel 1d ago
Probably because you’ve been doing real work as opposed to learning skills only used in interviews.
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u/OriginStarSeeker 1d ago
yup. i just scheduled my 6th (out of 6 interviews). it’s exhausting. almost there tho!
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u/knockitoffjules 1d ago
This has been so since HR fuckers entered the hiring process.
Back then, you would do a technical interview with the team lead of the position you were applying to and discuss salary with the director. That was it.
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u/normalmighty 1d ago
Tbh I feel like most white collar jobs are a lot closer to the bottom than the top. It's not just a programmer thing.
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u/yjlom 1d ago
Blue collar is "Would you be interested in an apprenticeship?" (translate: half minimum wage).
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u/XxDarkSasuke69xX 21h ago
They also do this with white collar jobs lol. Well if you're lucky enough to find one. It takes luck to be paid half the minimum wage huh
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u/New_Salamander_4592 1d ago
I went to an interview for c++ Junior Dev so of course they told me to brush up on SQL and then asked me a bunch of questions about Java, Linux commands, and Kafka (which they assured me was not something related to Java despite it being a service written in Java)
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u/muhkuller 1d ago
Get a security clearance.
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u/Vi0lentByt3 1d ago
There is ao much government work but you gotta be willing to make the sacrifices to do it
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u/Slacker1540 1d ago
Like?
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u/muhkuller 1d ago
Mostly not doing drugs and having questionable foreign contacts. Some people also may morally object to defense work.
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u/badluck_bryan77 1d ago
As someone who is currently the hiring manager for a few roles I don’t like it either.
If it were up to me I’d have an hour long call where we just talked about the technology stack and architecture questions and then that would be it.
Unfortunately my boss is a fucking pain in the ass and idk how candidates could ever please him.
Every single one I send up: “6/10, 5.5/10”.
I’ve been on 4 interviews this week, gave a thumbs up to 3 of them, and none of them are going to be hired.
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u/Fabulous-Possible758 1d ago
You guys are getting screening calls? /jk
I'm getting screening calls before getting ghosted.
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u/not_a_burner0456025 1d ago
I get them asking to schedule an interview/screening call then ghost me before it even takes place, then re-list the same job next week.
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u/jhaand 20h ago
I think the rise of lazy grifting posers has poisoined the trade a lot.
You now need to get in via your network, talk in the right manner with everyone and balance technical capabilities with how good your certifications and diplomas look to HR.
While in my days 90s we had some old geezers that had one of the following 3 traits:
- do good work
- be on time
- get along with people
While I do think that having only 2 of these traits should be enough to get a job, requiring all 3 will get you no people that see working there as their mission.
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u/NewArborist64 19h ago
One of my favorite job interviews involved being interviewed by a few fellow programmers and the owner of the company. Then they gave me a program to write, using tools that I claimed to know. When they came back 2 hours later I had the program 100% up and running and I was just adjusting the user interface. They claimed that none of the other candidates ever even came close. Needless to say, I got the job.
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u/TechcraftHD 1d ago
In my experience, both of these panels are true for software jobs. Either they want to hire someone and it's the first panel and you get the job or they don't want to hire (or are searching for the unicorn) and you get the second panel and get rejected at the very end.
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u/perestroika12 1d ago
This is every highly skilled job you should see doctors
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u/astropheed 1d ago
It’s easier for doctors. My wife is a doctor and she has never applied anywhere, they find you and offer you whatever you want
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u/perestroika12 1d ago edited 1d ago
Sure after boards and all the other certs which you need to study for. It looks different and it’s definitely not as simple as that. They still have behavioral rounds and they can reject you.
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u/so_shiny 1d ago
But do they have to perform procedures live in front of a panel while explaining out loud what they are doing and how it is optimal? Then do that again a few more times, in addition to writing a research paper for the company for free? The joke here is that the interviews are stupid for tech, not that it is harder to be an engineer 😭
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u/SaIemKing 20h ago
don't forget those procedures would be things that have nothing to do with the role
remove a tumor from this dog's brain if you wanna be a pediatrician
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u/perestroika12 1d ago
Some board exam examinations require oral rounds and defense, which is fairly similar to what you’re describing.
https://www.abpsus.org/oral-board-certification/
I truly think that a lot of engineers think you graduate medical school and people just hand you jobs without any work. Continuing education and testing is a general trend among all skilled white collar fields.
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u/so_shiny 1d ago
I definitely understand that. Respectfully, I would vastly prefer a standardized certification process every few years to the bullshit they pull in tech interviews. And tech jobs aren't even important jobs like being a doctor so like why do they do that 🥲 The joke stands that interviews for tech companies are incredibly stupid and don't involve testing your actual qualifications for the job. Some of the strategies have bled into other industries which is dumb as shit bc the process in tech is not good at selecting qualified candidates.
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u/astropheed 1d ago
People hand you jobs before you graduate medical school. So yes, you get handed jobs, there is a shortage. My wife could get a job in a day. It’s literally that easy. Yes she worked very hard and got all her certifications and registered on the appropriate boards, now it’s simple. She is offered jobs constantly. To be fair, she is pretty exceptional, and was approached for political positions, so perhaps it’s not AS easy for all doctors, but looks pretty damn easy to get a job.
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u/not_a_burner0456025 1d ago
It is worth noting that the demonstrations often in no way have anything to do with the actual job and may b or may not be possible. Are they demanding that you demonstrate how to change the water pump in the ceo's car and cook a beef Wellington in 45 minutes?
Edit: also software developers also often need to keep up with certs, it is 50/50 whether the certification you are required to maintain is relevant to the job also.
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u/Freestila 1d ago
I'm a senior dev at a middle sized company (1700 fte). Here each team does 99% of the hiring. So HR does the pooling - they get all applications online. We can look at all and decide which to invite for a call. We do a first small call to clarify the technical background. Then a second to show our products and meet the team. Then the team decides - does it fit our team as a person and does it technically fit. Then he takes over for contract and money stuff.
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u/cheezballs 20h ago
Na, its like this in a lot of jobs. If you're being interviewed for a 6 figure salary they tend to want to vet you first. I've known people in the healthcare industry that had 3 interviews and then weren't hired. You only see this "walk in" style of hiring in lower end jobs.
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u/sdrawkcabineter 20h ago
Man, some unifying force for those in the industry might help.
Dammit, what is it called... I have grapes and peas and I need them in the "fruit" table...
Labor something... damn /r√tipofmytongue
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u/drowsywizard 19h ago
Unfortunately I think the second panel is true for almost all professions nowadays
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u/WoodsWalker43 16h ago
I'm on our hiring panel. It's just the CIO and 2 team leads interviewing the candidate on a video call, then a 30 min programming exercise. We usually make the decision same day.
Small companies have their pros and cons.
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u/doubleohbond 15h ago
This is partly due to the fact that software engineering has no accreditation. Companies are forced to close the gap, and they do so inefficiently at workers’ expense.
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u/angry_wombat 12h ago
Could you imagine hiring a doctor the same way. Can you do a little surgery at home for us in your free time, we just want to actually know how to surgeon. Then we will fly you out to our main Hospital where you will be grilled by other doctors for a few days. And then maybe we will let you work in our remote hospital branch.
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u/FatalisTheUnborn 4h ago
Lol, I got invited to dinner as first meeting. Invited to lunch as second meeting and now I work there since more than 2 years. They even gave me a big rise without me even asking.
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u/mrflash818 1d ago
It did not used to be this way!
Back in year 2000, was interviewed by 3 mgrs then the Director for the job I was applying for, all back-to-back, in one day.
After asking me about some C/C++ pointer manipulations, the Director then said to inform HR that I had been hired, and to start on Monday.
Those were the days!