I was a platform engineer for a cyber security company for 6+ years and had worked in another ramshackle garage-based startup before that. I was burnt out and angry all the time. On call for a week out of every month.
I recently got a job writing software fully remote for a medical device company with a single 30min interview with a non-technical manager.
They don’t even know how to use my skills well. My “mentor” can hardly write an Excel formula. My boss has once seen an excruciatingly simple app I made at someone else’s request. I built it in a couple hours. It has a file chooser button and a run button. Blew her mind. Multi-platform builds are now automated via CI/CD. I seriously over-deliver and they won’t ever know it.
I actually put in about 30 hours/week and bill 40. I have 3-4 short meetings a week to interface with a couple vendors. None of them, even my 1:1 with my boss is on camera. It just isn’t done. I get maybe 2 chat messages and 2 emails a day.
Easiest $150k/yr ever. And my spouse has great benefits through work.
Why the hell would I ever go back to “tech?”
You hiring? Jesus that sounds amazing
medical device company with a single 30min interview with a non-technical manager.
Easiest $150k/yr ever. And my spouse has great benefits through work.
I did five interviews and a project for the last job I didnt get. I’m scheduled for interview number four for a job I’m working now.
When I was hiring engineers I capped it at three interviews, maximum two hours of candidate time.
The reality is that if you know shit about your job, you will know if someone is a good fit in the first 10 minutes. If they suck, you will know it faster. It doesn’t take hours and weeks to hire people, you just have to grow a set and be secure that you know your shit.
I’ve seen this and the other extreme, like at my current job. We hire basically anyone, overlooking obvious flaws, then give them a basically blank check for fucking up. I don’t know why no one can get the balance right. Don’t hire just anyone, but also don’t grill the living shit out of the candidate! A single one hour interview is probably enough, but also don’t be so forgiving that anything off about the candidate needs to be noticed by everyone on the hiring panel to matter.
yeah, it’s absolutely madness that some companies expect people to go through 3 to 6 rounds to receive a “we’ll let you know”
I had roughly 5 interviews at the last place. Then they said I had to do one with the VP. Told the recruiter I was getting fed up and suddenly it was waived. Don’t be afraid to push back (unless you are desperate).
Much later on while helping with interviews myself there, I asked why they had this terrible process and they said it was because people were caught cheating with AI. I asked why they didn’t do in-person to prevent that. Fly them out. If they’re invested, and truly interested, they’ll do it. Then I realized my folly after they didn’t have an answer - they’re cheap fucks.
they’re cheap fucks.
This is also the issue with most tech job postings. I got this one job offer, entirely unsolicited from my end, to move across the country to Manitoba to a small town. They were going to offer up to $5000 moving costs. And the job was for a full stack developer. The salary? $42k Canadian.
I emailed them back telling them in blunt terms that their offer is insulting and far too low for any developer role.
Shit, that’s what I get here in France and that’s too low already! Cheap fucks all over the world, it seems.
Man, wish I’d thought of that. The last place I applied I went through two leetcode and two system design interviews, as well as the usual battery of recruiter, manager, and director meetings.
I asked why they had this terrible process and they said it was because people were caught cheating with AI.
How does conducting many interviews help against candidates cheating with AI?
They thought it would help them notice patterns that give it away. Some candidates still got through and they didn’t notice until they were put to work where AI wasn’t accessible.
So it turns out artificial intelligence can beat natural stupidity after all?
My last interview was for a job I was on the fence about. I decided to go though the process anyways. I did a coding assignment that I aced. Then I had an interview with their recruiter.
Then I met with two developers. They grilled me for an hour. It was a fine conversation, we got along.
Then I had an interview with the boss of the dept. That went well.
Then they wanted me to prepare and give a technical presentation to some directors. At this point I told them no thanks.
You should have asked them who to send the invoice to
Im in my last year of highschool… this scares me
Don’t participate in such a process and the problem solves itself (unless you are very desperate). As long as companies find some idiot who jumps through these hoops, they will continue to do this. When they realize that they are deterring candidates with this shitty process, they might start changing it.
the problem solves itself (unless you are very desperate)
Have you seen dating sites? When the market is such that one side can clearly pick whoever they want, not everyone has the luxury (good looks for dating / relevant experience for jobs) to not play ball
I just did and got it actually
I’m still mad that a contracting company made me take a general intelligence test and programming test before sending my resume to a client only for the client to reject me because I didn’t have enough experience. Literally wasted over three hours of my life. Not to mention the general test they let me retake because I didn’t finish it in time (if I didn’t finish it that time I may have pulled the ADHD card because wtf that test was insane), so if they just let me retake it for basically no reason, they’re basically admitting it’s bullshit. The programming test was all questions about extremely outdated Spring (Java framework) concepts, like XML configs. Nobody uses that anymore unless they’re maintaining something ancient (and based on the requirements for the position they weren’t, they were using newer stuff).
I dunno I got my job last year and it was two interviews:
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General personality interview, the sorts of normal interview questions like “Who are you? What do you do in your current job” etc.
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Technical interview, which consisted of “Here’s some code. Tell me what it’s doing. How would you make it better?” and then some more general ones like “What design patterns have you heard of? Have you used them? If you have, when and why did you choose them?”
That was pretty good when compared to some of the other jobs I applied for back when I was a student. I applied at Boots, and it was phone interview, technical interview, abstract reasoning test, group work test, a powerpoint presentation, final interview, and then I got rejected. I applied to Nissan, phone interview, big group interview day having to spend money to get to the location, rejected.
I’m a bit more picky these days. One job wanted to record my screen and my face while doing a technical test, and I just refused outright, which pissed off the recruiter because she seemed pretty desperate to fill the role.
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