>I turned down the [exploding] offer because the experience got me thinking about the company’s work culture. Were the methods employed by the company to get me to accept the offer indicative of their work culture?
I've never found the interview process to be reflective of the company. I find the interview process to be a random hodgepodge across the entire industry because nobody knows what they are doing. Small/not-big-tech companies literally just have people that googled "how to do a programming interview for ________ language" and skimmed a youtube video, lifted some questions from some articles, and made you solve it in codepen.
Extrapolating that to the actual culture is totally a miss.
I have personally given up on "whiteboarding people"... reminds me of waterboarding.
I skim the resume, underline anything we use internally and talk to them about experiences.
We've done over 300 interviews in the last expansion year (2017) because we had to build a brand new development office (+50 devs).
After hiring all of these people, we've quantified this as three things: Curiosity, Ability to Learn and Ability to Listen. 2 out of 3 is good, but 3 is best. Almost every person we've hired who has been a success has had some of these, they're willing to be curious about new technologies and how things work, they are capable of learning (desiring isn't the same thing, they are capable of it), and listening is a good trait for enabling communication.
It is still possible that we chose these traits yet rejected other traits which are far more successful, and there is a chance we also rejected good people who would have also succeeded.
> I've never found the interview process to be reflective of the company. I find the interview process to be a random hodgepodge across the entire industry because nobody knows what they are doing.
If people in a company don't know what they're doing, yet (it appears) have a deathgrip belief in the equivalent of something they found on StackOverflow or in a blog post... doesn't that reflect something about the company?
Or, given that this seems to be a pretty common dysfunction in our industry right now, with not a lot of good role models, maybe any particular org having that problem doesn't reflect too much on them. At the same time, maybe the situation means that an org not cargo-culting, and trying to do it better, tells us something more, and positive, about that org?
From the hiring side, a (reasonable) expiration on the offer helps be fair to the other people who are interviewing, too. If I have a single position open and multiple people interviewing, as a hiring manager I really need to know whether my top choice is serious once we're having a discussion about signing a contract - because if they aren't, or are still trying to land better offers from other places because they have concerns about my offer and aren't raising them, I have other candidates just hanging out and waiting. Its not fair to the other candidates to say "you're not my top choice from this round, please hang on just in case we need you", or to just stall while we see how things play out - nobody feels good about that.
Granted, if you're getting very short exploding offers from big companies who are almost certainly hiring for a role continuously or in bulk, that would leave a bad taste in my mouth too. But if you're interviewing at the kind of company that may have budget for just a single new hire, and multiple people are interviewing, a reasonable expiration makes sure we're both mutually serious about eachother. I want to hire you enough that we've put together a (hopefully) compelling offer, you want to work on the team enough that you (hopefully) either feel good accepting the offer quickly or raising your concerns so we can discuss. If the offer isn't right for you, sitting on it as a backup in hopes that you can find something better is detrimental everyone involved.
I don't think what you're talking about applies to the particular criticism leveled in the post.
The company gave him 72 hours to accept an offer. To me, that's a red flag right there.
And then they started pestering him (well before the 72 hour time limit) to accept the offer. If this had just been HR or the recruiter, I'd find it annoying, but perhaps not a big red flag.
But the VP and hiring manager were calling him. To me this says that they are pushy people who don't respect boundaries (not even the boundaries they themselves lay out!). I would be very worried about those attitudes from my boss-to-be and boss's-boss-to-be when it comes to project scheduling and deadlines.
Even if this doesn't reflect company culture as a whole, it certainly reflects the behavior of the people who would be in my direct reporting chain, and that's not the type of people I want to work for.
I completely agree. I work for a big company. I've been here for 18 years. It is a fantastic place to work. The people, the pay, the flexibility, the meaningful work, all are great. No place is perfect, but I haven't yet found anywhere I'd rather be.
However, our hiring process is sometimes shameful. You name it, we've probably done it. We've ghosted candidates that did really well in their interview. We've taken weeks to make an offer, and we've asked candidates to fly across the country for a 2nd onsite interview because some middle manager thought that Team X should talk to them.
We're getting better, but sometimes there are legitimate reasons for things like delays and ghosting that can't be disclosed to the candidate. I try to keep this in mind when I get treated similarly by other companies.
The problem I have with the setup the author listed is not the exploding part, it's the pressure to accept and calls from the hiring manager pressing to accept. All well within the exploding offer window.
If the team has this attitude before hiring, it often indicates that it will be "we need A B and C done by first thing Monday morning" after joining. My 2c.
Yes and no. At a smaller company? Probably. But after a certain point many companies realize their interview process is a mess or sloppy and bring someone in to standardize it/spend time standardizing it.
Will the DevOps team that interviews for 1 role a year working on a very specific platform still have a wonky interview process that might but something the manager put together or just feels like asking? Sure but on average the company will have their shit together.
If they haven't done this then it is reflective of the culture. Why didnt they do this? Do they not really care about recruiting? The experience potential new hires have during the interview process? Do they just not think its important? Those are all things that are reflective of the culture.
Extrapolating that to the actual culture is totally a miss.
That says to me that the culture of the company is based on hacking it together at the last minute. I've never come across a company with a slick recruitment process that wasn't technologically adept too.
At a previous large company more than once I had to explain that the interview process 'is HR's show'...but once the job starts it is now 'our show' and they don't have to worry about that song and dance anymore.
It's frustrating that it is that way, but the hiring at that company was a whole other song and dance that took very little input from anyone about the hiring process.
Really? Yes, sometimes you catch them an interviewer on a bad day or something, and often people are just cargo culting what they're familiar with, but if their interview process is a complete mess their company likely is too.
Once I interviewed somewhere and their engineers seemed very burnt out, an interviewer I was scheduled to meet with had left the company, and two of the interview rounds seemed like they had no idea what to ask me. I ran away screaming as fast as I could.
Another time I interviewed by a company who was recently acquired and missed my scheduled interview time (twice!) so I decided to withdraw. My friend working there left the company a year later, saying that it was a complete mess there.
Otoh a friend accepted an offer at a company because of their interview process - it was extremely well thought out and designed to be respectful of candidates and test what really mattered. Those values and mindset carried over to her experience at the company.
>I turned down the [exploding] offer because the experience got me thinking about the company’s work culture. Were the methods employed by the company to get me to accept the offer indicative of their work culture?
What I line - I would never hire this person. There are people who see big deals when much more obvious reasons exist, they just can't see beyond themselves.
In this case, orgs I work with our small, we almost always have a #2 and #3 candidate ready to go. It's rude to drag this out more than it needs to be for everyone, and it tells you how interested someone is if they want to sit on an offer. 2 days, let us know. If you are not interested, fine.
Note, I've normally already talked through comp packages and ranges early and asked them if this is in the range or what they are looking for. If they have been straight at this stage I normally get offers signed within hours. That's a good sign for everyone.
Had similar marathon 8 years ago and it is draining.
Now, being on the other side (hiring folks for a startup), I would argue that some of flags are a bit misleading. Examples:
“Undue pressure to accept an offer letter” - interviews are not free, companies are investing eng time into evaluating each candidate and once they find great one, they really want them to join. They also do not want to be part of a bidding war, so it is natural to impose limits (some folks do go overboard). Recency bias also tells us that if you sit on the offer for a long time and continue interviewing, chances of you accepting the first one are going down.
And something I learned only recently - offer stage is also part of the interview, it shows how 2 sides will be working together in the future.
“ Not enough clarity about your role” - normal for growing startups. I tell the candidates - here is what we do, pick something you like and run with it. Of course it is biased towards entrepreneurial types who thrive in uncertainty, but that is the state of many startups.
Mostly agree with other examples. One fun thought, they had 60 interviews. Assume some were 1 hour phone screens and some 1 + 5 hours virtual on sites. If we do 50:50, the industry spent 30 + 30 * 6 = 210 hours of eng time + debriefs, outreaches, negotiations, ... I think statistically, it is not in the interests of companies to participate in such marathons as ROI will be low.
Everything from the hiring company's perspective also applies to the candidate.
The company is investing a lot of time and effort in the interviewing process. The candidate has been preparing for weeks for an assessment that has nothing to do with their actual job, and is being assigned multiple take-home challenges that take 4-8 hours of their time, etc.
The company wants to feel free to shop around and spend as much time as they want to hire "the right candidate?" The candidate is entitled to the same, shopping around for "the right company."
The company wants to avoid a bidding war to get the candidate for the least amount of money they can get away with? The candidate wants a bidding war so they can get the most amount of money they can get away with.
The company asks the candidate what salary they are expecting. The candidate can simply ask what the range for the position is, since the company has that information.
The company spends the entire interview assessing the candidate, and maybe asks if they have any questions at the last minute? The candidate is entitled to know just as much about what they are potentially getting themselves into by accepting an offer as the company is by hiring a candidate.
etc.
The process is a 2-way negotiation between equal parties.
Especially for a small company, the biggest reason for an exploding offer is there might be a second-best candidate in the wings. The longer it takes the first candidate to make up their mind, the longer the company has to hold off the second candidate.
Sure, but the higher the pressure to sign soon, the more urgent it is to hire someone. I once signed a contract where there was even a fine if I wouldn't show up on the first working day. After I started it turned out there were 10 guys before me in the last 12 months ;) Needless to say, the work culture was horrible.
> “ Not enough clarity about your role” - normal for growing startups.
Everybody claims this, even Bigcorp. I think it's an okay point but the more unclear, the more likely it is that there is a constant pressure about the role.
It's perfectly normal and reasonable to put a reasonable deadline on getting a response to an offer because the company must indeed fill the role, ideally this should be communicated when the offer is made. But putting pressure or having an "exploding offers" really is a trick to create urgency exactly in the same way time-limited sales work and the aim is the same: Making people buy things without shopping around.
Also offers are not symmetric for the same role. A candidate can receive and evaluate multiple offers and pick the best one. Companies cannot send out multiple offers for the same role and pick the best candidate that responds.
I once got stood up for a round of interviews — I showed up, waited, emailed them multiple times to let them know I was there, and then 30 minutes later they wrote to me to ask if I could come in another day (rather than meeting me at the front desk where I was sitting). At the time I was just annoyed that they had wasted my time, but in retrospect, the real red flag there was that no one took responsibility — “there was a scheduling conflict” was as much as I got. I went to the next interview but when I got a weird feeling about it, I withdrew from the process.
You can learn a lot about an org if you just watch how they treat you and each other. That’s the lesson I took from this article as well.
I had a second round with the CEO of a small startup on zoom. 5 times in a 45 minute interview he said "Sorry hold that thought, just responding to a customer email real quick"
It was tempting to tell him that we should just wrap this up if he had more important things to do.
Stuff does happen. I actually got stood up for my first in-person discussion with someone from my current company. But, in all fairness, it was informal, a call came up, and their admin didn't have my cell. (The scheduled meeting wasn't even in the office.)
So, this is cynical but I actually look for some of these red flags specifically. For me they are not red flags. For me they are green flags.
Not enough clarity about your role - Consistent lack of interest or low morale from interviewers - Perfect , the less enthusiasm the better. Your interviewers aren’t prepared for the interview - Oh yeah, love those ones. Lack of a clear direction on where the company is headed - One of the best flags for me.
The reason I go for these companies is because I get to slack off and no one does anything about it. Especially now with wfh being the norm.
This strategy worked for me for close to 4 years. The last job I put actual effort in was around 2017. There are weeks on end where I just go to the morning standup, say I am working on it and for the rest of the day I play computer games or watch shows or go out dates. Sometimes, I just move jira tickets through the columns without even looking at them. No one checks, no one measures, no one seems to care.
If you want to grow in terms of skills, yeah, those are red flags to avoid. If you want to chill and bill, go for those sorts of companies. Big corporate, preferably non tech, preferably somewhere with a big churn rate so you can have the excuse of the original author no being there anymore.
Good to see an article like this as so many people think an interview is a one-way process, it's two-way and you are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you. SO many let the potential employer dominate the whole process, with the token - do you have any questions at the end. If you have an interview like that, it wasn't a good interview and you will either find out by not getting the job, or later on, doing the job and regretting it down the line.
Interesting read but I (and I think many others) would be more interested in reading about how one manages to land 60 interviews, at all, in the current job market. You must have either a stellar resume, incredible experience, access to a huge network, or a combination of the above.
Are we in the same job market? It might be geographically related. I get bothered non stop by recruiters (And I'm not special, just a humble software dev)
He never says how many actual positions he interviewed for, or at how many companies for that matter. From the article it sounds like he was counting initial phone-screens as well.
If he had applied to 20 separate job postings they could have included a technical phone-screen, a "take-home" test, and a technical interview. Still a banana's amount of engagement for someone to receive in just 30-days though.
That being said and looking at the writer's LinkedIn profile he does appear to have a stellar resume, solid experience, and a large network.
To get a job at a Big N, go to an elite university, another Big N, or grind Leetcode for months.
To get a job at a corporation, grind Leetcode and have recruiters spam your resume.
Different jobs require different applicants. A balanced, general approach, would be to do 1 Leetcode problem and send 1 application per day. It'd be hard to still be underemployed after doing that for any while.
I have 1 year of experience (not at a FAANG) and I get 3 recruiters a week through LinkedIn. And beyond a casual resume screening, they are direct to interview.
Where are you? The market is roaring here in Canada.
I had about 15 interviews all within a span of two weeks; I applied for those jobs the week before and I was fairly selective based on what I'm interested in doing and the kind of company I'm looking for. I don't have an incredible resume and I've never worked for any important company that you've heard of, I live in flyover country.
> Consistent lack of interest or low morale from interviewers
This one in particular pisses me off, especially if it’s late in the interviewing cycle. I interviewed with a certain YC startup recently and it was a long form programming exercise with two observers watching me work without really interacting much, where one of them was not even paying attention at all for their time (I know because they told me they were “rushing to get code out right now haha”). Come on, seriously? They rejected me because I didn’t do a good enough job I guess, or was deemed a poor culture fit idk, hope they found the “rockstar” they were after!
I experienced this one to the extreme. Not only would the recruiter not tell me what the scope of the job was, neither would the interviewing engineers nor the hiring manager. I went to the on-site interview with the promise that I would be working on "world-changing technology". The location of the interview was a nondescript building in the Bay area with an off-limits engineering pen I wasn't allowed to see. They kept me in a 10x10 cubicle with a white board and small table for 6+ hours during which a parade of engineers came through to ask me puzzle questions. None of the interviewers could answer simple questions like "What do you do?" or "What am I going to do?"
Seriously, how does anyone accept a job without knowing what the job is? I guess if you're a big enough corporation you can get away with that kind of thing.
> In both interviews, even though the interviewers shared some details about the company, there was a lot of vagueness and about the company’s direction and where the company was headed.
In addition to asking about company direction, I've found this list[0] extremely helpful in both as a hiring manager and as an interviewee.
I'm a little unclear how you could possibly get that many interviews in such a short time unless you're a famous "rockstar" coder. I'm not familiar with the blog author, is he a very well known person?
There's definitely a mindset thing to this that I need to work on, but my last experience going through the interview process was so draining that I didn't recover for several months.
It was my first time interviewing for "senior" roles — I did 5 on-sites (maybe 8 screens, starting from 15 phone calls?) while working full-time. I'm naturally pretty high-stress before interviews, and I felt like I needed to constantly be preparing, so it seemed like 3 months of a nightmarish grind.
Any advice from experienced interviewers for the next time around?
I remember being in an interview, with a very respected figure/researcher in the local ML/AI scene - had seen some guest lectures/seminars he held at the local Uni., which were excellent.
He was glued to his phone for about 95% of the interview, completely focused on something else. It was quite the letdown.
But I understand that a lot of people really, really loathe doing interviews. Probably stipulated in their work contract that they need to attend to stuff like that.
I have never found interview process to be reflective of the company.
> Lack of a clear direction on where the company is headed
Unless you're joining as an exec or a high level architect position, you are just a mere rank and file pleb in the company. At that point, its important to know if your manager has enough social capital to get you the right opportunities to grow, rather than looking for companies "vision" and all the buzz words they throw at you.
> 1. Your interviewer is only open to solving the problem ONE way
This may have also been the interviewer wanting to guage how the candidate would react to being asked to do a task in another method which was dictated vs. their preferred method.
A lot of development is a team sport, and quite a bit of it is subjective and opinionated - you're not always going to get to do it your way all the time.
I don't actually see this one as a red-flag right awya.
My biggest annoyance is late interviewers who then try to rush you through a question. I’ve had multiple interviews in the past where they are around 10 min late when you’ve taken time from your day and they barely acknowledge it, then clearly rush for time. I guarantee they also write down in many cases that they didn’t get enough data points, not noting that a big part of that is their own time management problem (not to mention many of these places won’t get back to you for a month+, but that’s a different issue)
I wonder - if you got an unfair[1] exploding offer, why not just accept it and keep shopping quietly?
[1] A small company may have only one spot open and another candidate lined up, so that's fair enough. But larger companies likely have more than one position open so they are just bossing you around. Nothing fair about that, and you don't have to make it easy for them.
Example 1 was interesting. Who was it that was inflexible and may be difficult to work with? The interviewer that wanted to ask about another specific solution or the person who was interviewed who was not interested in another solution?
[+] [-] vmception|5 years ago|reply
I've never found the interview process to be reflective of the company. I find the interview process to be a random hodgepodge across the entire industry because nobody knows what they are doing. Small/not-big-tech companies literally just have people that googled "how to do a programming interview for ________ language" and skimmed a youtube video, lifted some questions from some articles, and made you solve it in codepen.
Extrapolating that to the actual culture is totally a miss.
[+] [-] WrtCdEvrydy|5 years ago|reply
I skim the resume, underline anything we use internally and talk to them about experiences.
We've done over 300 interviews in the last expansion year (2017) because we had to build a brand new development office (+50 devs).
After hiring all of these people, we've quantified this as three things: Curiosity, Ability to Learn and Ability to Listen. 2 out of 3 is good, but 3 is best. Almost every person we've hired who has been a success has had some of these, they're willing to be curious about new technologies and how things work, they are capable of learning (desiring isn't the same thing, they are capable of it), and listening is a good trait for enabling communication.
It is still possible that we chose these traits yet rejected other traits which are far more successful, and there is a chance we also rejected good people who would have also succeeded.
[+] [-] neilv|5 years ago|reply
If people in a company don't know what they're doing, yet (it appears) have a deathgrip belief in the equivalent of something they found on StackOverflow or in a blog post... doesn't that reflect something about the company?
Or, given that this seems to be a pretty common dysfunction in our industry right now, with not a lot of good role models, maybe any particular org having that problem doesn't reflect too much on them. At the same time, maybe the situation means that an org not cargo-culting, and trying to do it better, tells us something more, and positive, about that org?
[+] [-] sethhochberg|5 years ago|reply
Granted, if you're getting very short exploding offers from big companies who are almost certainly hiring for a role continuously or in bulk, that would leave a bad taste in my mouth too. But if you're interviewing at the kind of company that may have budget for just a single new hire, and multiple people are interviewing, a reasonable expiration makes sure we're both mutually serious about eachother. I want to hire you enough that we've put together a (hopefully) compelling offer, you want to work on the team enough that you (hopefully) either feel good accepting the offer quickly or raising your concerns so we can discuss. If the offer isn't right for you, sitting on it as a backup in hopes that you can find something better is detrimental everyone involved.
[+] [-] kelnos|5 years ago|reply
The company gave him 72 hours to accept an offer. To me, that's a red flag right there.
And then they started pestering him (well before the 72 hour time limit) to accept the offer. If this had just been HR or the recruiter, I'd find it annoying, but perhaps not a big red flag.
But the VP and hiring manager were calling him. To me this says that they are pushy people who don't respect boundaries (not even the boundaries they themselves lay out!). I would be very worried about those attitudes from my boss-to-be and boss's-boss-to-be when it comes to project scheduling and deadlines.
Even if this doesn't reflect company culture as a whole, it certainly reflects the behavior of the people who would be in my direct reporting chain, and that's not the type of people I want to work for.
[+] [-] kevinskii|5 years ago|reply
However, our hiring process is sometimes shameful. You name it, we've probably done it. We've ghosted candidates that did really well in their interview. We've taken weeks to make an offer, and we've asked candidates to fly across the country for a 2nd onsite interview because some middle manager thought that Team X should talk to them.
We're getting better, but sometimes there are legitimate reasons for things like delays and ghosting that can't be disclosed to the candidate. I try to keep this in mind when I get treated similarly by other companies.
[+] [-] beforeolives|5 years ago|reply
> Then the pressure started, incessant calls from the hiring manager and the VP of Engineering, back-to-back emails, all within the allotted time.
I agree with the author that it's a red flag - it communicates that they don't respect boundaries or behave professionally.
[+] [-] ptero|5 years ago|reply
If the team has this attitude before hiring, it often indicates that it will be "we need A B and C done by first thing Monday morning" after joining. My 2c.
[+] [-] AlwaysRock|5 years ago|reply
Will the DevOps team that interviews for 1 role a year working on a very specific platform still have a wonky interview process that might but something the manager put together or just feels like asking? Sure but on average the company will have their shit together.
If they haven't done this then it is reflective of the culture. Why didnt they do this? Do they not really care about recruiting? The experience potential new hires have during the interview process? Do they just not think its important? Those are all things that are reflective of the culture.
[+] [-] goatinaboat|5 years ago|reply
That says to me that the culture of the company is based on hacking it together at the last minute. I've never come across a company with a slick recruitment process that wasn't technologically adept too.
[+] [-] duxup|5 years ago|reply
It's frustrating that it is that way, but the hiring at that company was a whole other song and dance that took very little input from anyone about the hiring process.
[+] [-] jmcgough|5 years ago|reply
Once I interviewed somewhere and their engineers seemed very burnt out, an interviewer I was scheduled to meet with had left the company, and two of the interview rounds seemed like they had no idea what to ask me. I ran away screaming as fast as I could.
Another time I interviewed by a company who was recently acquired and missed my scheduled interview time (twice!) so I decided to withdraw. My friend working there left the company a year later, saying that it was a complete mess there.
Otoh a friend accepted an offer at a company because of their interview process - it was extremely well thought out and designed to be respectful of candidates and test what really mattered. Those values and mindset carried over to her experience at the company.
[+] [-] statstutor|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] temp667|5 years ago|reply
What I line - I would never hire this person. There are people who see big deals when much more obvious reasons exist, they just can't see beyond themselves.
In this case, orgs I work with our small, we almost always have a #2 and #3 candidate ready to go. It's rude to drag this out more than it needs to be for everyone, and it tells you how interested someone is if they want to sit on an offer. 2 days, let us know. If you are not interested, fine.
Note, I've normally already talked through comp packages and ranges early and asked them if this is in the range or what they are looking for. If they have been straight at this stage I normally get offers signed within hours. That's a good sign for everyone.
[+] [-] LaserToy|5 years ago|reply
Now, being on the other side (hiring folks for a startup), I would argue that some of flags are a bit misleading. Examples: “Undue pressure to accept an offer letter” - interviews are not free, companies are investing eng time into evaluating each candidate and once they find great one, they really want them to join. They also do not want to be part of a bidding war, so it is natural to impose limits (some folks do go overboard). Recency bias also tells us that if you sit on the offer for a long time and continue interviewing, chances of you accepting the first one are going down. And something I learned only recently - offer stage is also part of the interview, it shows how 2 sides will be working together in the future.
“ Not enough clarity about your role” - normal for growing startups. I tell the candidates - here is what we do, pick something you like and run with it. Of course it is biased towards entrepreneurial types who thrive in uncertainty, but that is the state of many startups.
Mostly agree with other examples. One fun thought, they had 60 interviews. Assume some were 1 hour phone screens and some 1 + 5 hours virtual on sites. If we do 50:50, the industry spent 30 + 30 * 6 = 210 hours of eng time + debriefs, outreaches, negotiations, ... I think statistically, it is not in the interests of companies to participate in such marathons as ROI will be low.
[+] [-] electrondood|5 years ago|reply
The company is investing a lot of time and effort in the interviewing process. The candidate has been preparing for weeks for an assessment that has nothing to do with their actual job, and is being assigned multiple take-home challenges that take 4-8 hours of their time, etc.
The company wants to feel free to shop around and spend as much time as they want to hire "the right candidate?" The candidate is entitled to the same, shopping around for "the right company."
The company wants to avoid a bidding war to get the candidate for the least amount of money they can get away with? The candidate wants a bidding war so they can get the most amount of money they can get away with.
The company asks the candidate what salary they are expecting. The candidate can simply ask what the range for the position is, since the company has that information.
The company spends the entire interview assessing the candidate, and maybe asks if they have any questions at the last minute? The candidate is entitled to know just as much about what they are potentially getting themselves into by accepting an offer as the company is by hiring a candidate.
etc.
The process is a 2-way negotiation between equal parties.
[+] [-] jnwatson|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omgwtfbbq|5 years ago|reply
AKA accept our lowball offer before you realize how much you're worth
[+] [-] jcims|5 years ago|reply
This is true at large organizations as well, it's not like there is some jigsaw puzzle waiting for the candidate that's a perfect fit.
[+] [-] blablabla123|5 years ago|reply
> “ Not enough clarity about your role” - normal for growing startups.
Everybody claims this, even Bigcorp. I think it's an okay point but the more unclear, the more likely it is that there is a constant pressure about the role.
[+] [-] mytailorisrich|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yibg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] setgree|5 years ago|reply
You can learn a lot about an org if you just watch how they treat you and each other. That’s the lesson I took from this article as well.
[+] [-] bob33212|5 years ago|reply
It was tempting to tell him that we should just wrap this up if he had more important things to do.
[+] [-] ghaff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawayacc2|5 years ago|reply
Not enough clarity about your role - Consistent lack of interest or low morale from interviewers - Perfect , the less enthusiasm the better. Your interviewers aren’t prepared for the interview - Oh yeah, love those ones. Lack of a clear direction on where the company is headed - One of the best flags for me.
The reason I go for these companies is because I get to slack off and no one does anything about it. Especially now with wfh being the norm.
This strategy worked for me for close to 4 years. The last job I put actual effort in was around 2017. There are weeks on end where I just go to the morning standup, say I am working on it and for the rest of the day I play computer games or watch shows or go out dates. Sometimes, I just move jira tickets through the columns without even looking at them. No one checks, no one measures, no one seems to care.
If you want to grow in terms of skills, yeah, those are red flags to avoid. If you want to chill and bill, go for those sorts of companies. Big corporate, preferably non tech, preferably somewhere with a big churn rate so you can have the excuse of the original author no being there anymore.
[+] [-] dmos62|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsj_hn|5 years ago|reply
Previous dupes:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24482119
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24017555
[+] [-] Zenst|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ziddoap|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kache_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajcp|5 years ago|reply
If he had applied to 20 separate job postings they could have included a technical phone-screen, a "take-home" test, and a technical interview. Still a banana's amount of engagement for someone to receive in just 30-days though.
That being said and looking at the writer's LinkedIn profile he does appear to have a stellar resume, solid experience, and a large network.
[+] [-] jtsiskin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ipnon|5 years ago|reply
To get a job at a startup, have an app portfolio.
To get a job at a Big N, go to an elite university, another Big N, or grind Leetcode for months.
To get a job at a corporation, grind Leetcode and have recruiters spam your resume.
Different jobs require different applicants. A balanced, general approach, would be to do 1 Leetcode problem and send 1 application per day. It'd be hard to still be underemployed after doing that for any while.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
[+] [-] MattGaiser|5 years ago|reply
Where are you? The market is roaring here in Canada.
[+] [-] potta_coffee|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corytheboyd|5 years ago|reply
This one in particular pisses me off, especially if it’s late in the interviewing cycle. I interviewed with a certain YC startup recently and it was a long form programming exercise with two observers watching me work without really interacting much, where one of them was not even paying attention at all for their time (I know because they told me they were “rushing to get code out right now haha”). Come on, seriously? They rejected me because I didn’t do a good enough job I guess, or was deemed a poor culture fit idk, hope they found the “rockstar” they were after!
[+] [-] ModernMech|5 years ago|reply
I experienced this one to the extreme. Not only would the recruiter not tell me what the scope of the job was, neither would the interviewing engineers nor the hiring manager. I went to the on-site interview with the promise that I would be working on "world-changing technology". The location of the interview was a nondescript building in the Bay area with an off-limits engineering pen I wasn't allowed to see. They kept me in a 10x10 cubicle with a white board and small table for 6+ hours during which a parade of engineers came through to ask me puzzle questions. None of the interviewers could answer simple questions like "What do you do?" or "What am I going to do?"
Seriously, how does anyone accept a job without knowing what the job is? I guess if you're a big enough corporation you can get away with that kind of thing.
[+] [-] riffic|5 years ago|reply
These are called "exploding offers". It's horrendously shady.
edit: I once got one with a limit of one hour before expiration. I was completely naive and took the position anyways. What a complete nightmare.
[+] [-] NickNaraghi|5 years ago|reply
In addition to asking about company direction, I've found this list[0] extremely helpful in both as a hiring manager and as an interviewee.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/35mjw8/what_i_ask...
[+] [-] aerovistae|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] austinl|5 years ago|reply
It was my first time interviewing for "senior" roles — I did 5 on-sites (maybe 8 screens, starting from 15 phone calls?) while working full-time. I'm naturally pretty high-stress before interviews, and I felt like I needed to constantly be preparing, so it seemed like 3 months of a nightmarish grind.
Any advice from experienced interviewers for the next time around?
[+] [-] TrackerFF|5 years ago|reply
He was glued to his phone for about 95% of the interview, completely focused on something else. It was quite the letdown.
But I understand that a lot of people really, really loathe doing interviews. Probably stipulated in their work contract that they need to attend to stuff like that.
[+] [-] ram_rar|5 years ago|reply
> Lack of a clear direction on where the company is headed
Unless you're joining as an exec or a high level architect position, you are just a mere rank and file pleb in the company. At that point, its important to know if your manager has enough social capital to get you the right opportunities to grow, rather than looking for companies "vision" and all the buzz words they throw at you.
[+] [-] Dystopian|5 years ago|reply
This may have also been the interviewer wanting to guage how the candidate would react to being asked to do a task in another method which was dictated vs. their preferred method.
A lot of development is a team sport, and quite a bit of it is subjective and opinionated - you're not always going to get to do it your way all the time.
I don't actually see this one as a red-flag right awya.
[+] [-] dbish|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anon4984|5 years ago|reply
[1] A small company may have only one spot open and another candidate lined up, so that's fair enough. But larger companies likely have more than one position open so they are just bossing you around. Nothing fair about that, and you don't have to make it easy for them.
[+] [-] havkom|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsj_hn|5 years ago|reply