Tech Job Interviews Are Out of Control::Tech companies are famous for coddling their workers but after mass layoffs the industry’s culture has shifted. Engineers say that getting hired can require days of work on unpaid assignments.
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Why do people agree to this? An hour assignment after speaking with someone is one thing, biut I had a couple of companies ask for homework before meeting anyone. Just didn’t respond. Teach them it’s not OK.
Some people are desperate for employment.
Many people…
Exactly. I was unemployed for several months and once the desperation kicked in, I would have done anything to get a job.
You’ve been unemployed for months, your bank account is almost depleted, and the thought of being homeless is becoming very real. It’s tough to stay being picky at that point.
This is by design
Can you please explain this idea—I’ve not heard it before? And who, specifically, has designed and implemented this?
Yeah, I ghosted at least one company because the pre-interview task was far too much effort. I’m all for having some writing of code as part of the process, though IME reading code is much more frequent/important.
I guess we all set our own limits, but I refuse to work more than an hour or two without (at least an expectation of) pay. Maybe that’s privilege talking, tho.
I had something similar. I didn’t ghost them, I specifically called them and said I wasn’t doing a day’s worth of their work for free.
They wanted me to write a bunch of unit tests and other stuff. There was a list to do. It would have taken all weekend.
Mind you, this was to qualify to interview.
I told them I wasn’t interested in working for free and said I’m terminating the interview process because of their ridiculous request.
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Send them an invoice at your expected hourly rate.
I had 5 rounds of interviews with a company last year. After the last round, HR said they got good feedback from everyone but they are cancelling that role because they dont have the funds. Thats 5 hours of time wasted on their side but, I lost so much more time because I had to do research for interviews. You can imagine how I felt after hearing that.
I’d probably just carpet-bomb their office for that.
I remember hearing google crediting every interview as 2-3 hours time per interviewer once to account for prep, scorecard filling, and discussions. They lost two days work on you for nothing.
And soon they all complain how top talent from other companies stay where they are and for some unknown reason don’t come to interviews anymore.
Also by design. Tech companies collude like this all the fucking time.
Paywall.
Six hour-long segments is pretty far from abnormal.
Homework - especially anything before the rest of the process - is absolute bullshit. If you’re not also investing any time in the interview, you can compensate me. My time is not less valuable than yours.
I did once spend an hour or two putting together a presentation for one prospective employer - it was attended by several engineers and managers over the course of a half hour, so there was still reciprocation - but I declined to perform the at-home coding exercise at the end of the process.
They still extended an offer.
Multiple hour-long interviews I’m actually fine with. It’s not ideal, but in that case at least the company is also spending resources on the process.
Homework / pre-interview projects that take more than a hour is unreasonable, to me. I have public repositories / commits I can share with you if you want to see how I write code.
I don’t want them to see my hobby code, it’s far worse than my professional code.
I recommend having a public portfolio. You needn’t have all your hobby code be public, but I think having source you’ve written available is an advantage.
When I was doing interviews, I definitely looked at GitHub (etc.) profiles of they were listed on the resume. I even found at least one indirectly – either from their email or LinkedIn.
I like to point people at my accepted patched to open source software (Git and a Haskell library).
Presentations and homework for interviews, wtf? I’ve been at my job for about 7 years now, and I don’t remember any prospective employers asking for this type of shit. Is this really becoming common? If so, I’ve been thinking about how vocational jobs don’t seem so bad these days in terms of pay…
Reader mode on firefox shows the whole thing
Paywall.
Paywall.
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Nope.
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Seems like you failed to notice that my comment prompted someone to post a non-paywalled link, helping everyone.
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I applied to a small tech company back in late 2021, when everywhere was hiring like crazy. It was my first full time role, but I have my bachelor’s and had work experience.
Overall I had:
- a phone screen with the recruiter
- a video interview with the recruiter for the specific role
- a video interview with HR
- a cognitive aptitude test online
- a personality test online
- an interview with a team member from the department hiring
- a take home assessment that I completed then went over on a video call/interview with my would-be manager and the same team member
I also had my credit checked, and had to provide 3 references which were all called.
The job paid $36,000. Though it is definitely getting worse, these people have always been out of touch. My company was just ahead of the times, I guess.
When I left last year, they had just excitedly announced that they would be using video interview question submissions for all candidates going forward. The only feedback I gave in my exit interview was that I wouldn’t apply today with the required video interviews.
That sounds like a nightmare and tonne of work for a small and unknown company. Not to mention the low salary. It’s like that company’s HR read the latest hiring fad and decided to do it on a whim.
Are these folks sniffing their own farts?
Same experience, but oddly I worked in telecoms.
I experienced this too, and landed at a smart company that paid me for the time I spent on the take home project. Yes, it’s less money than I might earn at a more prestigious company who abused my time, but I’ve also successfully selected for a company that has a good working environment.
They have an engineer for probably 30% less than what I demanded from another company with a dumb hiring practice. The dumb company was willing to give me the money too, but I was annoyed with their process so I told them I would not work for them unless they put a four day work week in my offer.
A weird thing I’ve noticed is that “tech job” is a big buzzword this last year or so, but its literal translation seems to be “software developers” specifically. It’s weird that so many of these articles are being pointlessly vague. Is it just clickbait, to reel in more readers than the articles apply to?
Seven years ago I was asked to do interview with recruiter, technical screening, a take home test that took me most of a weekend, and a 3.5 hours long interview with a BE, a FE and a tech architect asking me stuff from all the stack including infrastructure and architecture, and including pair programming with yhe FE and then the BE on the project I presented. It was hard but worth it in the end, my point is the process depends on the company and there is huge variability.
