me: i’ve single-handedly written software used by tens of millions of people, you can see it right over at github.com/april
prospective employers: sorry, but unfortunately you did poorly in a high-stress 40-minute coding exercise, writing code with no time to think about how to solve a problem you’ve never seen before, in a terrible dev environment, while someone stares at you the whole time
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@april that doesn't sound like an environment one would want to work in
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@jomo nope it’s entirely unnatural and uncomfortable and doesn’t reflect real development at all and yet it’s a fundamental part of almost every single hiring loop because ???
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@april hmm, is this a US(-company) thing? And/Or a big corp thing? I think nearly all of the weird hiring stories I've heard were from big US corps.
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@jomo maybe it’s a US only thing but pretty much every tech company does it, with a few enlightened ones (such as Netflix) doing smart take home coding exercises instead.
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@april @jomo Its not a US thing, its a corporate thing. Corporate likes checklists because checklists delegate responsibilities, so hiring someone because they pass all the tests is just comfy for the person doing the hiring.
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@ck @april @jomo happens in small startups in Germany too, all the time. I'm yet to see a single company that doesn't have a coding challenge (ranging from one-hour coding in a terrible environment during the interview, to unpaid take-home exercise taking three days of time and basically checking how good are you at writing tedious boilerplate which should either not be done or be automated at the company you're interviewing at).
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@IngaLovinde @april @jomo Sure, it's become a thing because everyone wants to be Google, don't they? For startups, its of course very attractive to just adopt other corps processes. You don't have to invest time and actually think about what you want out of a candidate, you just slap a standard-leet-code-exelence label on it and it'll probably be good enough. The process is also pretty much industry standard by now so you can be reasonably sure every candidate expects and acceptes it as such.
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@ck @april @jomo I'm applying to a startup with ~30 people right now, one of the few that make their hiring process transparent and list all the stages in public.
So this process? An hour-long call with HR, an hour-long interview with the hiring manager, a day-long (by the looks of it) take-home challenge (where you are required to spend half-day just to create a scaffolding for a new CRUD service), 2-hour interview on take-home challenge with 3-4 developers, half-hour interview with CTO, hour-long interview with the remaining developers on the team they're hiring into, half-hour interview with product owner, optionally half-hour interview with CEO. That's six or seven interviews with 10+ people, for 6+ hours of interviewing time alone (plus the take-home assignment).
And this is not even atypical. And they're just a regular startup doing regular startup things, solving regular boring business problems, no rocket science or anything, not anywhere near, say, Igalia level of tech competence. (I would have zero questions if Igalia or similar places had this kind of a hiring process.)
And of course if at any of the stages any of the interviewers thinks that you're too queer or too neurospicy or just too much not of a techbro, you're out.
(Incidentally, searching for "software engineer" on the "people" tab of their linkedin produces twenty identically looking dudes, as if they were clones, and nobody else.)
IDK maybe this is what people mean when they say "vetocracy".
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@IngaLovinde @april @jomo Yeah, if a startup with ~30 people has that much overhead I'd stay clear. I read those as warning signs for the CEO being a control freak which at a company of that size usually means middle management is afraid or does not have the mandate to make any decisions, meaning day to day operations usually suck.
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@ck @april @jomo the problem is, most startups seem to have processes like that, maybe a bit shorter, but general idea is the same
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@IngaLovinde @april @jomo To a degree, I can understand where they are coming from. 50% of people working in IT have less than 5 years of experience, > 50% of those 50% call themselves senior even though their skill level is equivalent to mediocre Medium posts. If you are in the position (as a company) to actually use the six months probation to find out if someone is actually capable, that's quite the luxury.
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@ck @april @jomo but that's the funny thing, all this vetocracy means that they are going to hire someone who is vaguely ok for all ten interviewers, over someone who gets nine out of ten very excited but one out of ten unhappy (because queer or neurospicy or not a man or not into cryptoshit or something else).
So they end up hiring a very mediocre techbro identical to the ones they already have, who can somewhat write code but not more than that, passing over highly qualified candidates (because a highly qualified candidate who is a cishet man is not going to apply for a startup where they only pay regular average salary anyway).
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@IngaLovinde @april @jomo I'm not saying I agree with the method, as a matter of fact, I'd agree with you take, but I can see why it's a shitty situation all around. The market us turning around an junior are no longer getting hired easily because nobody can / wants to afford training them into actual professionals. That puts additional pressure on the hiring process to filter aggressively.
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@ck @april @jomo but even if you want to filter out juniors, you can easily do this on CV screening stage.
Feels weird to apply with great CV covering two decades of professional experience, with small but still reasonable body of work linked, with list of open-source projects done, only for a chance to pass the screening and get subjected to that seven-step process where they don't even check "can she code?" to filter out liars, but "do I like her? Did we connect as humans during this hour?"
Not that I had any choice of course.
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@IngaLovinde @ck @april @jomo exactly why I'm not even trying to apply for anything
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@lena @ck @april @jomo unfortunately not trying to apply for anything won't pay the bills...
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