
Ask HN: Can the “Who is Hiring?” post include a bit about the interview process? - curiousgeek
It&#x27;s almost time for the monthly &quot;Who is Hiring&quot; thread!<p>Considering how much time we spend discussing tech interviews here, wouldn&#x27;t it be nice if each hiring post is accompanied by a line about the nature of the interview process?<p>Examples:<p>i) Interview process: two phone screens, 3 onsite whiteboard<p>ii) Interview process:  two rounds on HackerRank, 5 onsite whiteboard<p>iii) Interview process: one take home assignment, 2 on site whiteboard, 1 pair programming session<p>That will help candidates prioritize which companies they want to contact first. Companies also benefit by the fact that the applicant has self-selected for their interview process.
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dang
It's a good idea but I'm a bit worried about making those threads even more
top-heavy than they already are by asking people to include even more info in
their posts.

It might also be hard to explain what we're asking submitters to do in a way
that makes sense to everyone, especially the ones who don't post on HN except
in those threads.

We'll think about it. There's a couple days before the next thread.

Edit: ok, I added such a sentence. Let's see if it improves the quality of the
posts.

~~~
delecti
I think it's a pretty low bar to write an extra sentence or two about the
interview process when they already a paragraph about how they're changing the
world with their revolutionary JS framework.

~~~
dang
I think that's an uncharitable way to describe the overwhelming majority of
those posts. Let's get out of the habit of heaping snark on others in
discussion threads. It feels amusing for a little while, but corrodes the
qualities we most want here. Not a good trade.

~~~
delecti
You're right, I was unfairly snarky, but quite a few jobs on every month's
post try and describe themselves with overly grandiose language without really
saying what they do. I just think that job posts on this site reach a fairly
narrow and high quality audience (certainly more so than most job sites), and
in return it's not asking too much for a grounded, concrete description of
what to expect both from the company, and the interview process.

The Javascipt framework part was purely a joke, and I think was probably
recognized as such by most people, though again, was probably not helpful.

~~~
dang
What you say is surely true, but it's trumped by the more important concern of
working together to make HN the kind of place we want it to be. That means
turning ourselves into damping filters for annoyance, not amplifying ones. It
doesn't mean that the inputs aren't annoying, just that when producing outputs
we need to be less so.

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llamataboot
I wish companies didn't think their interviews were some weird "secret sauce"
\-- I've had companies flat out refuse to tell me what the interview process
would be like, or even how long I should expect for the interview beyond "1-4
hours". Well, you know 1 hour is a lot different than 4 hours!

Personally I think all companies should be using pair-programming or contract
to hire, as I think trivia questions and whiteboarding are worse than useless.
I'm happy to do take home work for a company I'm really interested in, but it
does feel a little unfair and like a bit of a waste of time overall.

~~~
imh
I think a part of the secrecy is so that if it goes poorly they can stop the
interview after a really bad session without indicating to the candidate that
it's gone so badly. "Yup, it's always just two sessions, goodbye." This is an
actual rational I've heard. I don't agree with it, but it's a thing.

~~~
tdkl
I'd rather wish for being open, honest and direct with the rejection then
tolerant and polite. It saves a lot of time and emotional investment.

~~~
joelx
As an employer, I have found that if you honestly tell 10 people the reason
that you did not hire them that a minimum of 3 people will have hostile
reactions to you.

I do agree that it would be a better way for all employees to give feedback to
all candidates and for those candidates to handle the rejection in an
emotionally mature way.

~~~
p4wnc6
Most companies do not handle candidate review in an emotionally mature or
professional way, and the widespread lack of feedback is one of the ways they
secure protection from possible downsides of their own blatantly disrespectful
and sometimes outright discriminatory hiring practices.

Assuming that you are like the other 90% or so of employers who treat
employees and candidates exceptionally poorly (I'm not saying you are, just
assuming for a second), then getting only a 30% rate of feedback calling you
out on use of superficial, inconsistent, and (in some cases) borderline (or
even blatantly) illegal reasons for rejecting a candidate doesn't sound so
bad.

It suggests to me that candidates on the whole are more professional than
companies, but companies can use certain bureaucratic policies and processes
to make sure they effectively hide the unprofessionalism from ways in which it
could come back to negatively affect them.

------
gaza3g
This is a great idea. I've been in many interviews where I thought I did
pretty well only to be told, "oh, this is just the first of many interviews".
I wouldn't have applied if I had known since every onsite interview requires
me to at least take half a day off from work. That is time that can be used
for something else.

But I do have to mention that with the Big4, they will let you know in detail
about the whole process during the phone interview so that's cool by me.

~~~
peteretep
Who constitutes the big 4? Facebook, Google, ...?

~~~
_asummers
Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, I think is the current list.

~~~
melvinmt
Apple not big enough?

~~~
santaclaus
I've heard from various friends at Apple that their interviews are __way
__less structured than Google or Facebook or Microsoft 's. For similar
software positions, one friend was seriously grilled on implementation details
of WebKit internals, while the other said he just shot some high level shit
about music production software for a coupe of hours. Similar resumes, similar
backgrounds, both got gigs but I was kind of surprised at how different their
experiences were.

------
spitfire
Since this is appropriate to the (coming) subject, I'll post this here.

Tokenadult isn't around to chime in here, so I'll take his place today. Hunter
and Schmit did a meta-study of 70 years of research on hiring criteria. [1]
There are three attributes you need to select for to identify performing
employees in intellectual fields.

    
    
      - General mental ability (Are they generally smart)
        Use WAIS or if there are artifacts of GMA(Complex work they've done themselves) available use them as proxies.
    
      - Work sample test. NOT HAZING! As close as possible to the actual work they'd be doing. Try to make it apples-to-apples comparison.
    
      - Integrity (The first two won't matter if the candidate is a sociopath).
    

This alone will get you > 65% hit rate. [1]
[http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...](http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf)

One of these companies should hire me to do data driven recruiting.

~~~
nfriedly
Also worth mentioning: an IQ test as part of the interview process is
basically illegal in the US.

------
JDiculous
Before even that, I'd rather see salaries posted. Only a disappointingly small
number of companies post salary information.

~~~
salarynope
In my company, it's very rare that we'll have a need that's so specific that
we could actually know the salary within $10k before we hire.

It's far more common that we have openings for "Software Engineers", and we
end up hiring one very junior, one very senior engineer, and some folks in
between. Thus, from the same ad, compensation could range from $90k w/1,000
shares to $280k w/20,000 shares. And, frankly, saying "salary is typically
between $75k and $300k" isn't useful information.

How our comp actually works is that at some point in the interview process,
you tell us how much you're hoping to make, and then we set the bar
appropriately. If you want $250k, the bar will be very high. If you want
$100k, it will be substantially lower.

There is no reason to be "disappointed" by it.

~~~
thedufer
>And, frankly, saying "salary is typically between $75k and $300k" isn't
useful information.

I disagree. That is absolutely better than not posting anything.

Also, I suspect that ranges for most positions aren't that big - not everyone
is lumping everything from the most junior to the most senior into one
position.

~~~
captaindiego
Yes, I'd agree as well that knowing the low end is useful information. Having
gone through interview processes, only to be given a very low-ball offer is
annoying. Knowing how how the employer's expectations for salary compare to
your own is quite useful to avoid wasting everyone's time.

------
repsilat
The posts that are transparent about the interview seem to have positive
responses, too -- I distinctly remember seeing Compose's listings with
comments like this one:

> _great hiring process and response from the team, even though I didn 't get
> the job I enjoyed my application process_

What better feedback (or recommendation) could you ask for?

That said, I need a little more convincing that always including this
information will increase the quality of the listings. For Compose this set
them apart, for most places I'd guess there's a pretty common pattern, and for
the terrible places they just may not say.

Much as I think the ONSITE/REMOTE thing was a success, I think this might be
better left to happen culturally rather than by fiat. Happy to be convinced
otherwise, though.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11014670](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11014670)

------
rdl
I'd prefer if this material were posted as part of the job descriptions on the
website. (it's useful beyond just to the whoishiring crowd). Making it a
_mandatory_ part of the job postings would be a pain for the people who write
them, and I wouldn't want to deter postings.

(Sometimes the interview process gets modified per candidate, too.)

------
swaraj
Never applied to a job through HN, but about to post a req for my company. I'm
definitely going to add a little blurb about the interview process in my post
here. What else do people find useful in posts like this?

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noarchy
If I could blacklist companies that do whiteboard interviews, for example, I'd
do it. I'm not expecting most companies to show their hand, though, precisely
because of how unpopular these practices have become.

~~~
dominotw
> precisely because of how unpopular these practices have become.

I've been interviewing for past 1 month and every single company made me do
whiteboard, big O stuff past phonescreen.

I think you are over estimating how much HN leaks into real world.

~~~
noarchy
>I've been interviewing for past 1 month and every single company made me do
whiteboard, big O stuff past phonescreen.

I don't doubt that at all, and I know whiteboarding is popular with
interviewers. I'm talking about its popularity with interviewees.

~~~
smm2000
I actually like whiteboarding interviews and treat them as intellectual
challenge. The best ones are when I am thinking faster than interviewer or can
come up with optimal solution that he does not know. A lot of fun.

I also understand why some people hate such interviews especially if the are
not good at algo or do not like pressure of interviewing.

~~~
dominotw
I also had a couple where 3 guys sat behind me and watched as I typed up an
implementation of some card game puzzle solver.

Comically sad.

------
gauravmuk
I would love if someone can mention these things too: 1\. For remote jobs, the
timezones that they are comfortable with. 2\. If they can sponsor overseas
candidates.

This would make it easier for the candidates

------
ivankirigin
I wrote a bit about YesGraph's engineering interview process
[http://blog.yesgraph.com/ditching-traditional-
interviews/](http://blog.yesgraph.com/ditching-traditional-interviews/)

------
BuckRogers
This is a good idea. I'd also suggest adding "do you respect the 8 hour
workday"? I'd like to know up front which companies to discard.

~~~
roryokane
But what company would actually answer "no" to that on a job posting? The
companies with long hours would just omit their answer. Or they might lie,
rationalizing to themselves "well, we don't _always_ have long hours". So
asking in the instructions that companies answer won't do candidates any good.

------
bobwaycott
It'd be cool if companies started adding a /hiring.txt or /interview.txt to
their sites with this info. Then they could just link it and avoid cluttering
the threads even more.

~~~
captn3m0
You'd want to use /.well-known/hiring.txt:
[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5785](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5785)

~~~
bobwaycott
Nice!

------
pumblechook
Yes! It needn't be a lot of detail either. Example: I interviewed with a
leading UX consulting firm, and they were very up front about the process. It
was essentially 1 short take home assignment (30 mins), 1 phone screen (30
mins), 1 longer take home assignment (4-8 hours), and 1 full day of on site
interviews where you have to give an hour long presentation. I didn't get the
job, but it was by far the best and most transparent interview process I've
been through.

Edit: on a side note, I really wish more companies would provide honest
feedback to the candidate during the interview process. Especially when you've
invested significant time into an interview process and are ultimately
rejected, it is beyond frustrating to ask for feedback and just hear crickets,
or a generic "other candidates are a better fit", etc...

------
Geekette
In addition to details on the interview process, postings would definitely be
more useful if they also included:

\- Expected duration of interview(s). 1-2 hours differs drastically from all
day.

\- Salary within 10k. If hiring for multiple positions or skill ranges (e.g.
mid-to-snr engr), then state salary for each case. Companies complain about
noise in hiring process, yet won't do one key thing that would improve quality
by getting applications from only those interested in X job at Y wage.

\- An _honest_ estimate of hiring timeline. Don't waste people's time by
saying "yesterday" only to drag it out by months. Applicants can also address
this by asking companies who they hired last and how long it took to do so.

------
greenyoda
This seems like a good idea. I've sent an e-mail to our moderators to bring
this post to their attention in case they missed it.

------
edsiper2
Note that not all companies have a "fixed" interview process, after the first
interview it can change based on the applicant background (proof of
experience).

~~~
ctvo
While true even a quick liner about your general process would be helpful.
There's a handful of categories most fall into:

\- algorithms and data structure heavy white boarding

\- online timed exercises

\- take home exercise and discussion

\- short contract to hire

------
MaggieL
I find it extremely depressng that all the offered examples include
whiteboarding ... a.k.a. "the Stone Tablet Anti-Pattern"

See [https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/ALM-Summit/ALM-
Summit-3/Tec...](https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/ALM-Summit/ALM-
Summit-3/Technical-Interviewing-You-re-Doing-it-Wrong)

------
kevindeasis
What is your guys' go-to strategy in getting an interview?

Especially, if you are a recent grad in Canada (AB) how do you get more job
interviews? Especially for top tech companies?

Like how do you arrange your resume so it passes the key word scan.

Who do you pass your resume to?

Which websites should you go to?

~~~
jrockway
Networking is key. I've never cold-submitted my resume anywhere.

Networking doesn't necessarily mean standing around in a room with a name tag
and making small talk. Put your work out where people can see it; release open
source, talk at conferences, etc. Then the jobs will find you.

HN has also been very helpful; a few kind folks here helped me deal with
Google's hiring process.

------
SFJulie
wages, interview process, financial structure, link to SEC report or anything
relevant according to national law, legal structure, owners, involvement in
legal action either as a defender or as an offender ...

It could be nice to have the information that are hard to gather otherwhise.

It is as true for workers as for companies that a new position is a risk, but,
while companies can ask for references, workers have no ways to ask for
"references" themselves. This asymmetry benefits companies much more than
workers, it would make workers more "trustful" if companies were showing good
will in evening the gap.

------
aprdm
I've interviewed at Intercom in Dublin and they gave their whole process
upfront. Including the questions they made in two steps.

It's all in their website.

I didn't get the role, failed the last step but really enjoyed the interview
process.

------
dguaraglia
This would definitely help a lot of people who are entering the market and
interviewing for the first time.

------
formula_ninguna
where are all the posts "who is hiring, who wants to be hired, seeking a
freelancer?" for May 2016?

------
kafkaesq
A more helpful (accurate) description, for many startups, would probably go
like this:

 _Interview process: one 4-hour take-home assignment (which may or may not be
properly articulated, and which, in any case, there 's a fairly good chance we
may never respond to); 3 on-site whiteboarding sessions (the first conducted
by someone whose first words to you are "man, I'm hungover!"; the second, by a
pair of disinterested devs from another team, apparently shanghaied into
covering for someone else, who take turns boredly rushing you through
algorithm questions, while the other plays with his phone; and the third by
the resident math genius who walks into the room well past the time they said
you'd be done, says "Hey, got time for another?" and proceeds to grill you on
a mis-stated graph search problem that ends up having a null solution class);
and finally, a pair-programming session on some made up problem which you're
required to use certain clearly unsuitable data structures to solve (resulting
in clearly unusable performance in any real system) "because it's easier, and
because I wanna see how you think. Look, just tell me what to type, OK?"_

Only to be told 2 weeks later, when you timidly beg the HR contact for an
"update", that you aren't a "culture fit."

~~~
abustamam
This eerily describes two Valley company start-ups I applied for.

~~~
kafkaesq
It was a montage of real experiences I've had (at various companies over the
years). (Nearly) every company tends to come up with its own unique form
wackiness (or tell-tale indications of blasé indifference as to what the
candidate is actually experiencing) to inject into the process, I find.

------
known
They may not want to disclose the project you're going to work

