Tech Job Interviews Are Out of Control
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.
That graphic sums up my entire educational experience. https://archive.is/hvZ5q
This has been ramping up for years. The first time that I was asked to do "homework" for an interview was probably in 2014 or so. Since then, it's gone from "make a quick prototype" to assignments that clearly take several full work days. The last time I job hunted, I'd politely accept the assignment and ask them if $120/hr is an acceptable rate, and if so, I can send over the contract and we can get started ASAP! If not, I refer them to my thousands upon thousands of lines of open source code.
My experience with these interactions is not that they're looking for the most qualified applicants, but that they're filtering for compliant workers who will unquestioningly accept the conditions offered in exchange for the generally lucrative salaries. It's the kind of employees that they need to keep their internal corporate identity of being the good guys as tech goes from being universally beloved to generally reviled by society in general.
It’s definitely pro-single person, and anti-parent.
At least give people an option. Otherwise you’re just hiring people with the most time on their hands.
I have worked at two different start ups where the boss explicitly didn't want to hire anyone with kids and had to be informed that there are laws about that, so yes, definitely anti-parent. One of them also kept saying that they only wanted employees like our autistic coworker when we asked him why he had spent weeks rejecting every interviewee that we had liked. Don't even get me started on people that the CEO wouldn't have a beer with, and how often they just so happen to be women or foreigners! Just gross shit all around.
It's very clear when you work closely with founders that they see their businesses as a moral good in the world, and as a result, they have a lot of entitlement about their relationship with labor. They view laws about it as inconveniences on their moral imperative to grow the startup.
Probably by design, to be honest. Jobs tend to be very anti-parent, especially in US states where FMLA is legally protected.
I’m fortunate to work for a company that has a culture of prioritizing real life so you can do your best work. Sadly, that’s antithetical to next quarter thinking, so it’s not the norm.
The dumb thing is (in my experience) parents seem to work harder and stay at companies for longer than childless folks. They’re just shorter on free time and need some basic flexibility to address emergent issues. Not to mention being better at teaching and managing in general.
It is completely crazy that businesses mainly do not have strong internship/apprenticeship programs in place. It is hard to predict who is going to be good at tech (or probably most jobs) until given a chance. Some of our most brilliant have been high school dropouts. Even those with credentials and experience will do better with time to learn the company systems and culture. "We need someone who can hit the ground running..." ug, grow up.
Collectivly, we need a major commitment to building the workforce not leeching off of disposable labor.
Couldn't agree more. IMO, the perfect talent is the kind you grow yourself.
No number of interviews or tests will lead you to a magical perfect candidate 100% of the time, but those with less experience are great because they're eager to accept a lower salary and will attack just about any problem you throw at them enthusiastically because every challenge is a new chance to prove their mettle.
Obviously it takes time to build a program where mentorship is valued and more senior folks help to develop newer teammates, but if you want the highest quality talent, it's hard to beat homegrown.
The problem is that there's no incentive for employees to stay beyond a few years. Why spend months or years training someone if they leave after the second year?
But then you have to question why employees aren't loyal any longer, and that's because pensions and benefits have eroded, and your pay doesn't keep up as you stay longer at a company. Why stay at a company for 20, 30, or 40 years when you can come out way ahead financially by hopping jobs every 2-4 years?
An internship isn't a magic bullet that cures all ills but it does improve thing meaningfully in several ways.
To address your point, I agree with you in part but giving people a chance who otherwise would not, does build loyalty making it more likely they will stay longer (on average). You still have to be a good company to have a chance of retaining people, it isn't just a cynical ploy to fool people into working for you. There is a middle ground between your example of 20-40 years vs 2-4 that is very meaningful because it takes a lot more time than people give credit, to get good at a job. So that >2 years time frame is very valuable.
I do think a lot of companies, but crucially not all, effectively treat even highly skilled labor as a disposable asset to leech off of. I also think an employment system that expects career advancement to require changing employers, is crazy shortsighted. Just as is degrading the public education system and putting young people into massive debt with college. The system has problems all over the place but an internship is a very practical way for a company to do better.
Good article. Makes me sad though as I'm a self taught web dev starting out. Just gonna keep going though. Nothing much else to do tbh.
You’re not alone. I feel this way too. I don’t know what else to do so I’m just going to keep going, but it definitely seems bleak at times.
I love making things and I love figuring out how stuff works so at least it’s not a chore for me.
Thanks. Yeah, it definitely seems bleak. I just keep making things though while trying to basically get a CS degree without the actual piece of paper. Lots of resources online and I have family and friends in the industry, so that helps keep me motivated.
Same. I’m in a bootcamp and college and I have 3 years experience being a sys admin for the gov. I think there’s a serious chance I’ve been rejected for every tech job on the internet.
Good luck to you on the job search. I have hope that your hard work will pay off.
My stance has been that, just as long as I’m interviewing with someone, I’m happy to do it, up to an undetermined time threshold. A screening interview, a tech screen, and then a bunch of panels is what I expect from a solid firm. Just as long as I’m interviewing with someone, I have a lot of opportunities to learn myself. I will also occasionally do a take home if and only if there’s a novel problem I want to solve related to that take home (eg I want to learn a library related to the task) but this is very rare.
As a hiring manager, I try to keep things to a hiring screen, a tech screen, a team interview, and a culture interview. My team is small. I don’t want to spend more than three hours of someone’s time (partially because I can’t really afford to spend more than that myself per candidate or lose more team hours than that). My tech screens are related to the things I actually need people to do, not random problems you’ll never see.
My assumption is that a good dev has lots of opportunity and I am in competition with everywhere else. I need to present the best possible candidate experience. Big companies with shitty employee experience telegraph that by presenting a shitty candidate experience, which is where the employee experience begins. You can’t have a good customer focus without starting from a good employee focus.
I cannot tell if it is satire.
Not the OP but it doesn’t read as satire to me
an engineering manager said during an interview, “OK, we’re going to build a To Do List app right now,” a process that might normally take weeks.
Tbf you can do that in one day with ChatGPT, although it requires some generic software engineering skills. But that's the point.
Even if you don't complete the task, the process of coding can prove your skill level in a positive way.
You're exactly right. I didn't read the article yet, but you can build a to do list app in a handful of minutes if you know your way around. I'm still green as a coder, but have been through dozens of tutorials, one of which was a simple to do list in JavaScript. I managed to complete it in about an hour. Seeing that someone thinks it takes weeks to do, that makes me wonder about them.
you can build a to do list app in a handful of minutes if you know your way around
No you can't. You're mistaking a "hastily thrown together prototype", for an "actual app" with all its requirements, tests, multiple target support, hundreds of tiny features, QA for all that, then deployment, and ongoing support.
Depending on where on the scale between "prototype" and "final product" you look at, it's going to be anywhere from less than an hour, to a full team working for years.
Now, arguably, showing whether you know the difference, can be the real test.
I do a lot of dev interviews. We do require a BS in computer science.. it's just a good way of filtering out the hordes of terrible candidates. Beyond that, the most important thing we look for is honest representations on the resume, and the ability to clearly show competency in the required areas. Ramblers, people who make shit up and can't say "I don't know" are filtered out quick. We do a 1hr tech screen, after which I make a recommendation and if good, the candidate is brought in for a second interview that is pretty much a formality.
We do require a BS in computer science
That's wild that people are still pushing the paper ceiling like this. I've been working in my industry for 11+ years, progressing from engineer to tech lead to architect, with several (very) large-scale, public projects successfully under my belt.
I don't have any degree.
Requiring a comp sci degree is a terrific way to filter out people who had to actually learn their shit and prove their worth, instead of relying on a name on a piece of paper to get them a job interview.
I'm facing this as well across the board, not just where a CS degree is expected. I started off in CS, then a year in discovered I liked working at my school paper enough to drop out after hitting managing ed and having no one left to learn from because the J-school had been gutted in the '80s ... in 2000.
So, no degree. Which now means no job. Not even interviews. I never had any pure development titles that AI would pick up on, so the coding I've done also doesn't count. Your basic bottom-of-the-barrel "and then we were able to lay off half the team" automation that then got me pushed out for providing a useful but unrequested solution that made me a threat.
I determine my needs and then choose my tools, so sure, I'll get back up to speed in Python for a visualization project, but I'm not going to spend a couple of weeks trying to retain things with zero goal.
We do require a BS in computer science.. it's just a good way of filtering out the hordes of terrible candidates.
Elitist nonsense.
I have a bachelor's of computer science, but some of the best coders I met just did a 2 year community college diploma.
I don't think that spending lots of money on education is really a great litmus test, it's just one minor indicator.
We do require a BS in computer science
The only scenarios where I'd think I wouldn't require one are
- I want cheaper labor
- I am really desperate to fill a position
- The skills I need in a candidate are incredibly niche, thus I want to widen the applicant pool.
#1 and #2 are indicative of other problems in your company. I get that you can be a good dev without a degree, but from an employer perspective, it seems like an easy way to save time and money on hiring. I am convinced that a lot of money is wasted on recruiters who throw everyone under the sun into the hiring process just so they can justify their existence.
it seems like an easy way to save time and money on hiring
If you are seeing this change based on whether you exclude people without comp sci degrees, what you're really seeing is your recruitment firm/ team's lack of effort or expertise. It's literally the job of recruiters to separate the wheat from the chaff. If you're doing it yourselves by putting hard restrictions on the recruitment team to remove the bad results they are letting go through, you should be taking a hard look at that company or team.
whoever possesses the three sacred sankara stones at the end of the day becomes the lead dev
I mostly agree with the article, but I'll say that hiring based solely on resume experience is really hard for software. Experience honestly translates poorly to ability in my... experience.
I find it amazing how few companies don’t even give people a chance. I’m tech-inclined, but the only thing I have to my name is a Comptia A+ cert. However, I’ve also done a lot of things that are well beyond that skill set in a multitude of ways, and I also learn quite quickly. It’s tough to put ‘Hey, I managed a MYSQL database for a modded Minecraft server and I set everything up myself.’ on a resume. Nobody even bothers to read that because it mentions Minecraft, never mind the amount of actual work it takes to run a public-facing server like that with hundreds of active players logged in at once. It certainly isn’t ’just playing a video game’.
Don;t mention Minecraft. You implemented and adminstered a MYSQL database system which supported N concurrent users and Y transactions per minute with 99.xxx uptime over Z years, you also developed a custom front-end etc etc
The cool thing is, you're right that you've got marketable skills that employers want, you just gotta present them in corporate lingo that sanitizes it of any humanity and fun, lmao. You could rephrase that part about the Minecraft server to something like "Actively maintaining a high-uptime server with
[X amount]of daily clients by utilizing[insert type of tools/languages here, e.g. MySQL databases]."I've always hated the process of "translating" real life experience into the marketable buzzwords that employers like to see, but until it seems like hiring managers on a wider scale are willing to listen to words that normal people would write, I'm gonna keep trying to speak their language.
Sometimes, the less you say, the better. You have to manipulate them and do not worry about if it's bad/wrong. In the corporate world, most are just greedy assholes who don't care about who you are.
Don't ever lie on your resume, just make it glittery on how THEY want to see it, not how you feel about it.
It's a sad world we are living in right now, good luck don't ever give up !
Just to put out the other side of this, you're competing with a lot of people with more visible credentials. If the hiring manager can look through the stack and pick out 10 people to interview all with easily understood credentials, they have no reason to consider anyone else. Interviewing isn't free for the company, every additional candidate to consider is probably at least an hour or more of time the company is paying someone for.
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Is this in the USA?
I work in marketing and have also done a ton of homework. No job offers from any of those.
I bet they mean FAANG when they say tech industry. Nobody outside of that circle even have to care what they say.