I'm self-employed and don't need a job but am still open to the right opportunity. The last job I interviewed for was looking for a specialist in a particular field, which I am (fairly well known in that circle), and they told me they've been looking to fill the position for a full year before they interviewed me. The interview seemed to go well, and they wanted to continue with the process, but they said the next step was a take-home project. I wasn't thrilled, because my qualifications should already be established, but they said it's their mandatory procedure. I thought, ok, I'm interested in this job, and maybe I can power through the project quickly. But no, the project was rather open-ended, more of an unsolved problem than an already solved problem, and I started to see that I could spend an unknown number of hours on it. So I said fuck it and told them I've changed my mind about the job.
I noticed many months later after I turned them down that they were still trying to fill the position. This is an employer just shooting themselves in the foot. They created their own "labor shortage".
It's actually the second time in a row that I got this kind of absurdity. I was contacted unsolicited by an engineering manager from DuckDuckGo looking for a specialist. I asked them what their hiring procedure was, and it was even worse: they had multiple pre-hiring projects and some kind of probationary period before permanent hire. So I asked if I could just skip this, given my qualifications, and they said no, that's just how they do things at DuckDuckGo, and they believed their hiring process has been "successful" for them. So I basically said no thanks, buh-bye. And they also were continuing to try to fill the position many months after I said no.
> I noticed many months later after I turned them down that they were still trying to fill the position. This is an employer just shooting themselves in the foot. They created their own "labor shortage".
These are the companies that for whatever bullshit internal political reasons don't actually want to hire. When a company actually wants to hire they move fast. In the last 10 years I got my last 3 jobs after a single 30-45 minute conversation with CTO or team lead.
> they had multiple pre-hiring projects and some kind of probationary period
Duck Duck Go paid me to do their projects. I can understand skipping it if you don't want to put the time in; but at least they aren't taking your work for free.
> Duck Duck Go paid me to do their projects. I can understand skipping it if you don't want to put the time in; but at least they aren't taking your work for free.
Correct, they did pay. But I didn't really care about that. My only interest was a permanent job, not a short term contract. If I want short term contracts, I can find those elsewhere.
> and some kind of probationary period before permanent hire
I had this same experience with a company about a decade ago. I'd been in a job for about 8 years where I was an expert in a few niche areas.
One day a CEO of some company calls and says I'd be "perfect" for his company and would I be interested? I say of course, and in the end it comes out that I would have to endure a 6-month probationary period where you didn't have benefits (I'm not even sure this is legal in California).
I politely turned him down, and he actually called back about an hour later incredulous that I wouldn't consider an offer? And I explained to him, I was in a job that was relatively stable, why would I leave that job only to have benefits dangled in front of me.
I also pointed out the asymmetry of them asking me to leave a position I'd been in for multiple years while they couldn't commit to a "perfect" candidate.
It fell on deaf ears. The dude was used to getting what he wanted.
I don't even say "no thanks" as I simply ignore them. I am not interested in going through some random company's BS hiring hazing ritual. I will interview and draw a few diagrams on the whiteboard for 3-4 hours max then walkout if you're wasting my time.
A call with the hiring manager. An open-ended take-home. Rounds of interviews with "the team" that for some reason includes multiple executives, the mobile team, the frontend team, the backend team, the data team, the product team...
It ought to be unsurprising that these requisitions sit empty for months and years.
It’s funny you say this because the take-home project is meant to find good candidates who don’t interview well [0]
Also this practice arose as a response to the notion of high pressure coding exercises during interviews, how predictive they are, and how to improve them.
You people need to get some self-respect and stop working for free. They only get away away with this because you allow them to. Next time you're asked to work for free, this is what you do: you say, "Fuck you, pay me".
If you want to be a little less blunt, have ready a template contract to write up the job they've requested, with your price, ready for them to sign. If they laugh in your face, laugh in theirs and walk away.
If you're in a position of desperation, first get out of that position before you go to these interviews. You cannot negotiate when you're hungry.
Unfortunately, the reality is, many people are hungry, which is why they put up with this stuff.
>If you're in a position of desperation, first get out of that position before you go to these interviews.
You're contradicting yourself here. If you're hungry, you don't have the leverage to get out of that position without first accepting some jobs you won't find ideal, unless you're incredibly lucky or talented or have huge savings, but if you were, you probably wouldn't be hungry in the first place.
Once, I did the take-home assignment, which took around six hours. I submitted it by linking to a public GitHub repo titled "Company X Take Home Assignment".
I ended up taking a different position and the original company asked that I take down the repo. I told them that since I did the work on my own time, I own the resultant code and declined to take it down. They sent me a nastygram from their in-house lawyer.
I responded with an invoice for $900 - six hours at $150 / hour. That got me a phone call scheduled with their lawyer. I figured they either owned the code (in which case, they should pay for it) or I owned the code (in which case, they had no legal right to demand that I take it down).
The next day they sent me $500 over PayPal and I took it down.
Based on my experience and since you mention it, the only thing they were responding to was the fact that you put the company’s name in your code base. There’s probably also a good chance that their take-home instructions specifically say NOT to do this.
Whether or not you’re “right” about ownership (whatever this means), to me you just sound like a jerk.
> Based on my experience and since you mention it, the only thing they were responding to was the fact that you put the company’s name in your code base.
Correct.
> There’s probably also a good chance that their take-home instructions specifically say NOT to do this.
Also correct. I disregarded it.
> Whether or not you’re “right” about ownership (whatever this means), to me you just sound like a jerk.
Perhaps. I wouldn’t even argue that it wasn’t an asshole thing to do. I would argue that it’s no more of an asshole thing to do than to require someone to perform six hours of unpaid work.
From their perspective, it was easier to pay me than it would have been to pay their attorney to take me to court or to pay their engineers to come up with a new take-home assignment so the “answer” wasn’t just a Google search away.
“Being a jerk” is just acting in a way that’s contrary to the prevailing cultural norms. I believe this particular norm is harmful, and don’t mind being called a jerk to challenge it.
I agree it's probably a contradiction to many people, as a job may be their only ticket out of desperation, especially if they're knee-deep in debt or living paycheck to paycheck.
But I would wager many others do have options they can exercise such as becoming more frugal, cutting out rent by living with family, taking no-bullshit (no free work) wage jobs temporarily, etc.
> You people need to get some self-respect and stop working for free.
"You people" need to unionize. That's the only way you get some negotiating power. Alas, that won't happen until tech workers (and white collar workers in general) realize they're workers and not capital owners. We're closer to really well paid plumbers than to Bezos & co.
> Alas, that won't happen until tech workers (and white collar workers in general) realize they're workers and not capital owners.
Workers though they may be, it is within reach for most programmers to jump on the real estate ladder, heavily invest, and retire comfortably.
> That's the only way you get some negotiating power.
For the duration of this bull market, Software Jobs have been easy to come by. Negotiating power, while never completely in employees favor, has given most programmers the chance to live _far more comfortable lives than anyone else they know or went to school with_.
> it is within reach for most programmers to jump on the real estate ladder, heavily invest, and retire comfortably.
In Amsterdam, where I currently live, I would say a normal salary for a senior dev would be ~ 80k euros gross. A decent apartment somewhere in the city could be ~ 500k. Unless you can pay a pretty significant deposit you won't qualify for a loan (rule of thumb is you get 5x gross salary = 400k in this case).
Back in the day the same kind of apartment could probably have been bought on a working class salary.
Climbing the real-estate ladder is hard for a dev, impossible for anybody making less than dev salaries.
In Australia the average is over $100k and it tends to be younger people under and people with 10 years experience way over that amount. An average apartment is still $500k which is very affordable. Chuck in a second income and it’s basically cheap.
Unions in general are overly focused on job security and fairness in pay at the expense of other things like total salary. While there may be a place in tech for unions the last place that would want to unionize is a big tech employer. A grift mill that churns through underpaid consultants needs a union.
> Unions in general are overly focused on job security and fairness in pay at the expense of other things like total salary.
Not necessarily true. Pro sports athletes have unions, and their compensation is usually much larger than ours.
But there's almost always a power differential between employers and employees, which is why collective bargaining can be helpful. And it's not just about pay, it's about working conditions. There's a massive controversy nowadays about WFH for example.
> Pro sports athletes have unions, and their compensation is usually much larger than ours.
I would be curious to see an analysis of all professional athletes. Looking at baseball, the sport I'm familiar with, shows that there are huge salary disparities between the major leagues (who have the MLBPA as their union) and the minor leagues (who have no union, this is news to me). Both are still considered pro sports athletes, though I'm sure you meant only MLB athletes by that term.
There are 902 major league players and a conservative estimate of 3,000 to 4,000 minor league players (excluding rookie and international players).
The major leagues have an average salary of $4.17 million, with a median salary of $1.15 million. But compensation is not distributed evenly. 33.4% of all pay goes to the top 50 players. 52.4% goes to the top 100. Of 902 players on opening-day rosters, 417 (62%) had salaries under $1 million, including 316 (35%) under $600,000. Details taken from [1].
Minor league salaries have minimums that are at most $700 per week for AAA players, and lower minimums for the rest of the minor leagues. For a 10 week season that gives $7,000 for the maximum minor league minimum. There are some exceptions with players on the 40 man MLB roster playing in the minors that make a minimum of $46,000 / season [2]. The interesting part of [2] is the comparison with the NBA minor leagues (they have union representation) which has a minimum monthly salary of $7,000, and the AHL (also has union representation) minimum season salary of $52,000.
Another source for athlete salaries is the BLS, which seems to show there are 16,700 athletes and entertainers with a median salary of $77,300 per year [3]. BLS shows higher median salaries for developers.
So, I guess if you include all professional athletes, then the median software developer makes more than the median professional athlete. I have heard of Google giving an employee $100 million in stock to stay at Google, but I'm not sure what the stock options are like for early developers at start ups. I guess that would be the equivalent to the top talent in the professional sports leagues making 10s of millions a season?
That's the kicker, nobody wants to unionize because they're actually pretty well off - and (and this may be an anti-union talking point) it has the risk of actually lowering the income for some, so that the lower-paid people get paid more.
Anyway that said, if you're working in tech and feel like you are being exploited - underpaid, overworked, unpaid overtime, expected to be always online / on call without specified pay, etc - by all means, unionize.
Another issue is that there's a lot of naïve, young people who still have the energy and lack the corporate culture cynicism who do end up working 14+ hour work days and ask for seconds; this is what people are up against as well. But this is where the awareness has to come in; if you do not get paid for those hours, you are being exploited. The hours you spend, you will not get them back. And, just spending long hours when you're still young does not automatically translate in success later on. If you're unlucky you'll end up with burn-out. And of course, if you need to work long hours or multiple jobs, you're not being paid enough. I know the housing market especially in SF is fucked, but working more will not unfuck that. Look into remote work and live somewhere cheaper.
As a manager I would love to see this happen to our field; I would also be disqualified (being lower-rung management) but there are reasons beyond just exploitation.
If information and data is valuable, then the market hasn’t correctly adjusted.
That is, there’s value in paying and retaining intelligent engineers with a low appetite for risk, who value longevity over a quick
pay-off
I personally feel that I have more negotiating power and can better apply it when I'm acting as my own advocate, rather than relying on others to advocate for me on my behalf.
With that said, I have no objection with others unionizing if they feel that they don't have sufficient negotiating power on their own; unions are really helpful in these kinds of situations.
Unions with their "someone else's job" attitude have soured me on the whole concept. They need to clean up internally before they can attract me.
I'm given the impression that unions in Europe are not as bad as Unions in the US though. Maybe if I lived in Europe I'd me more willing for the unions there, I'm not sure as it isn't an option I have and thus isn't worth investigating.
I've never been in a union, so I can't assess their inner workings.
However, nobody says you have to join an existing one - you can just make your own. Amazon and Starbucks workers are doing it in much harsher conditions, so why wouldn't developers be able to?
Unions could insure that you get some sort of compensation for the work you put in during your application. If you just try to ask for the money on your own they'll laugh in your face and show you the door.
Management and executives are DEFINITELY underpaying us relative to what we bring to the table for them. This is true of every industry going on decades of increasing productivity and stagnating pay. What's new here besides greater awareness and labor churn? Will there be an actual change going forward? Of course the demographics favor workers now, but the laws and politics often don't. Immigration and outsourcing and automation can change that power dynamic very quickly. What're you going to do? Form a union? Start a company? Vote? Quit and work elsewhere? Interesting times we live in. Maybe that is one of the reason headcounts have ballooned and complexity has increased so much -- an attempt to minimize individual impact.
All of my friends and aquaintinces in nursing, tax, retail, and trucking have a few people who are trying to break into programming because of the benefits and pay. Outsourcing, scope creep, and automation exist and are expanding in my industry as well. How long until this drags down programmers as well?
If people from all those other industries are scrambling to break into tech because it’s so lucrative, what is it you or I are bringing to the table that they couldn’t?
You can be both underpaid and paid far more than most people. Different jobs have different values, and so someone in a correctly paid job can still make more money by switching to an underpaid position that has far more value.
Of course in reality pay is about to supply and demand, not value. Thus underpaid just means you haven't found it worth your while to switch to a job that pays better. There might be good reasons for this.
Most certainly yes. If nothing else, just by nature of corporations setting "market rates," or at least defining the position and what they are willing to pay.
Another example, that famous productivity pay gap chart? Most of that is through automation done by computerization.
An interesting thing about the real estate market is that most buyers and sellers hire an agent, who likely knows much more about the market than you do personally.
As far as I've seen, job seekers in most industries rarely hire agents. The information differential between buyers and sellers in the labor market is vast.
I'm not saying job seekers should hire agents. I'm not saying they shouldn't either though...
> "As far as I've seen, job seekers in most industries rarely hire agents."
If software job seekers hired agents, it would be the agents (the reputable ones anyway) that would require stringent testing of the seekers. One has to know exactly what one is selling to get the best price for the sale; they're not going to take the seeker's word for it any more than an employer would.
> it would be the agents (the reputable ones anyway) that would require stringent testing of the seekers
That's a great way to get zero clients. ;-) It's one thing to go through all that crap to get a job, but who wants to go through all that crap just to get an agent? Not to mention, how is an agent even qualified to give a technical test to a software engineer.
In real estate, a home inspection is required by the buyer's agent, not by the seller's agent. Sellers would rather not have that contingency. And the home inspection is only performed after the offer is accepted.
An agent that sells dud employees to employers will have zero clients much, much faster. An agent with a high placement and retention rate, well, people will be lined up around the block to become their clients. So ;-) right back 'atchya, sport.
As for houses, they can be visually be examined by the seller's agent. They are not going to take the seller's word for it that it has four bedrooms when they can see it only has two and are certainly not going to try to sell it as if it had four.
> An agent that sells dud employees to employers will have zero clients much, much faster. An agent with a high placement and retention rate, well, people will be lined up around the block to become their clients.
A new agent starts with zero clients. The beginning is "faster" than anything. You can't place any clients if you don't have any, so this is putting the cart before the horse.
> As for houses, they can be visually be examined by the seller's agent. They are not going to take the seller's word for it that it has four bedrooms when they can see it only has two.
Of course. But the linked article is "The 'working' job interviews that go too far". It discusses huge time-consuming pre-hire projects. This is not at all comparable to a walkthrough of a house. I've bought and sold, personally experienced the real estate market on both sides.
Addendum:
The seller's agent doesn't walk through the house to check whether the seller is lying about the number of rooms. Any buyer who goes to a showing will see the number of rooms immediately, nobody can get away with lying about that. The seller's agent walks through the house to estimate the list price of the house, to give the seller advice on how to best present the house, and to gather information for buyer questions. Also they need to take photos for the listing.
I think you're misunderstanding the role of a real estate agent. The seller's agent is not the seller. The transaction is still directly between the seller and the buyer. Nobody buys a house because of the "reputation" of the seller's agent, that would be insanity. The purpose of an agent is to help their client through the process and give them advice. The seller's agent may hold open houses, but it's actually the buyer's agent who usually takes the buyer on a personal showing, so the seller's agent is not even there to "sell" the house to the buyer.
A home inspection is not conducted by a real estate agent, it's conducted by a professional home inspector, it costs hundreds of dollars, it's paid for by the buyer, and it's not done until after the offer is accepted.
I'm going on at length here because these facts should be obvious to anyone who has been on the real estate market. The way you describe agents in your imagination is not how real agents behave.
Define the market rate, that's the trick. If I define the market rate and I'm the only one to do that, I say your $200K house is really only $180K, then that's what payers will be willing to pay assuming a not-fire market. Right now, it's a seller's housing market, it's also a seller's market in tech. One market has sky-high prices, one does not.
But isn’t that idea - the level at which both sides agree the transaction is “worthwhile” / the arrangement is “worth keeping” the definition of “market rate?”
Price is what the market will bear, all that?
In your example, I have two options. I take your “lowball,” grumble about it, etc - but I also establish that evidently my house is worth $180K.
Or, I sit back and wait, grumble about it, etc, and see if in fact my house is worth $200K after all.
And then that gives you two options; both involve grumbling, one involves establishing a “market rate”
There's all kinda of things in the labor market to pressure lower prices than the housing market. For example, H1B visas, offshoring, etc.
Also, if people don't work, they starve, so there is an incentive to take a job whether it's a good one that pays what they need or not. This also doesn't exist in a housing market.
Comparing the labor market to the housing market only works if you squint and don't compare it too long.
I acknowledge that analogies fail at a certain remove. I wasn’t particularly trying to make a comparison to the housing market, it was just the example that sprang to mind. Any market should operate similarly, no? Buyers and sellers negotiating over what they consider acceptable terms of exchange?
Regarding the “things... [which] pressure lower prices,” how do you account for the record high pay in the US tech sector [1], or pay increases being greater than the overall US average over the past several years [2]?
I suppose I’m just wondering how much of this is real examples of corporate malfeasance / runaway capitalism / extortionate price extraction and how much of it is standard side-effects of the way markets operate.
Ya if you ignore all the forces on that market, supply and demand forces work great in a vacuum. Unfortunately everyone remembers chapter 1 of their Econ book but forgets chapter 2+ (myself included). There are a lot of ways to manipulate those supply and demand forces. Employers certainly have a lot more power to manipulate them than employees do. "Market wages," are one. Who says they are market wages and wages for what position?
I think articles like these try to lump everyone as a "technologist," and it's too broad a category to be useful information.
>A "widespread hunger" for technology professionals has see the average salary for technologists in the US hit a record high of $104,566
Imagine that was "healthcare workers," where they averaged in the salaries of the doctors, neurosurgeons, hospital administration and all the high paid workers, then ponder why nurses think they are underpaid when the average healthcare worker salary is $200K a year. They are misrepresenting what nurses make by obfuscating their actual wage/hours with "average healthcare worker salary."
This also goes back to the "average market wages," discussion. If a company tried to hire an architect and said that they pay market wages, but the market wages they site are the average of all technology workers, the salary would be considered low for the architect. Depending on his circumstance, he might be willing to take it though.
>real examples of corporate malfeasance / runaway capitalism / extortionate price extraction and how much of it is standard side-effects of the way markets operate.
I think it's both. The big problem is the government opened the doors with free trade and H1B visas and it really hurt US workers. Sure it arguably helps the poor in other countries to a degree, but it really helps corporations; both at the expense of the US worker. Those laws probably weren't enacted for the long term benefit of the constituency.
I am sincerely having difficulty parsing your argument.
I think you are saying:
1. Despite the news articles, tech workers by and large are underpaid.
2. Some exceptions to 1 exist that are sufficiently large and outsized that they are carrying the average. After discounting those individuals, tech wages are below what they should be.
3. Free trade and H1B visas are allowing large numbers of non-US tech talent into the hiring supply; this is driving down wages at the expense of the American tech worker.
4. Regardless of the fact that the supply of these workers is driving down wages as econ 1 would dictate, actual market wages should be much higher, because... (this is where I’m losing you)?
I'm not the person you were discussing this with. I posted the first post about this up thread I think. I think you did a good job of summarizing the sentiment, yes. On 3, I think immigration is good, but it can also depress wages. I agree with 1 and 2 generally. On 4, I think that the revenue per employee in the tech industry vs salary is absolutely ridiculous and that tech workers need a union or higher wages across the industry. I would like to see a higher share of profits going to labor more generally rather than capital. I'm not against profit, but I think that the American worker has been cheated out wages correlating with rising productivity. Now I'm not saying that corporations are holding workers at gunpoint with a ski mask. You should dismiss that mental image. However, Mr. Wilson, I hope that you consider, with all of the retirements and demographics favoring workers now, that this could be a seminal moment for workers to organize and achieve fair wages for perhaps the first time in 40 years. However, outsourcing, scope creep, up-skilling, and automation are all factors, broadly, that could depress wage or job growth or neuter labor organization and rights. Stagnation and inflation could take bites out of the metaphorical apple as well. I'm not denying (most?) tech workers are paid highly relative to other industries. I think for the revenue that they generate or that they protect that they ought to be paid more. However, I think the stress/pay disparity with other industries has and will attract a lot of talent to IT and programming that could depress wages. Nurses, waiters, grocery workers, retail workers, and so forth aren't being paid enough to work in many places or commensurate with the working conditions or education or abuse from customers. There's too much to say and not enough space/time. I hope that summarizes my take on the issue for you, Mr. Wilson.
I appreciate you taking time to reply to the thread.
I’m still struggling to understand the logic whereby tech workers, being overpaid relative to those other industries (so much so that there’s a brisk business and a lot of interest in bootcamps and tech training), are unfairly affected by this system and should unionize.
I think it’s amazing that we’re increasing the talent pool, diversity, and technical literacy of the American workforce. I think it’s remarkable that the barriers to entry into the space are so low, and the potential for improvement so high. I think the opportunity boundary for technological innovation is broad, and the barriers to entry similarly low, that the best possible answer to the current situation to drive even more money to even more people is to keep innovating, keep creating tech businesses, and keep pulling in and expanding that talent pool.
Which, perhaps, will in turn start applying sufficient scarcity effects on nursing, service workers, and so forth that wages inevitably increase there and/or the threshold gets met for tech innovation in those spaces to even further lift the bar for what we can all benefit from in those aspects of our lives.
Saying tech workers are underpaid when there are so many people making bananas levels of income relative to those other economic sectors is tonedeaf af, imo. What am I missing?
You fail to appreciate the value provided by capital. The work I do today will earn my company zero this year, since the code won't be released to production yet. (in embedded we don't have the luxury of releasing on each push). Capital provides the pay I need to work today and will recover it over the next few years.
sure, but thats not revenue and doesnt contradict what i wrote above. The revenue of year 2 replaces the investment of year 1, everything beyond is unbounded profit. Whether capital investment earns the right to sole access of those profits is the question.
You can see before your eyes what happens when the answer to that question is "Yes".
I assume they meant "many tech workers / job hunters / the kind of people on this forum", not orphans in darkest Africa or Christian Bale losing weight for a role.
And hungry in the sense of hungry for money, achievements and career, not literally hungry.
I mean some SF folk live in such luxury that they think eating is a nuisance not worth their attention, so they take on subscriptions or all-in-one meal replacements at 10x the cost and 0.1x the flavor of normal food (think Soylent, Juicero, etc).
If your company or colleagues glorify that lifestyle, run away.
That's become me, to be honest. Money has reached the point where it doesn't mean anything any more. For the last year or so I've taken cabs everywhere I've gone, even down the road to go to the shops. This sounds like a brag, but it's really not: I'm not rich, and it means I'm pinioned to my job and can't quit. I was addicted to heroin before, but I think quality-of-life addiction is possibly worse in some ways.
Perhaps, but I meant to emphasize the latter. There is a globe full of desperately hungry (perhaps physically but at least psychologically) people that can out-obey other applicants, and a certain percentage of them will have at least some knowledge and skill. Hiring strategies will look to build orgs with very few charismatic and influential tech leaders and a huge group of obedient implementors.
I'm too nervous to name the company, but here we go. [Edit: whatever, I didn't sign an NDA. This was Algolia]
I've been meaning to get this off my chest. Out of all ~100 interviews I took over the last 8 months, there was a singular egregious example.
It netted out upwards of 25hrs.
You may ask, "lelandfe, why did you go through all of this?" It had been 8 months without a paycheck; I barely made rent this month (landed a dream job recently! phew). This was for a senior demo eng role:
1. 30m phone screen
2. 30m behavioral
3. 1hr technical. Asked to write a hashmap to filter JSON, binary search over an array, and a Markdown renderer
4. 8hr take home assignment. But, "if you do wish to spend more [time], please go ahead." I spend the minimum time needed, which winds up being more like 14hrs.
I have to register for the platform, come up with a fictitious company, and then design and build a real demo site using the service – turning over the source code and live demo at the end. The scoring rubric is how creative the use of the platform is, and how much value the search service adds to my fake company.
5. 2hr written email correspondence test. I'm given 3 fake emails from "customers," each asking about specifics of the platform, e.g. "where can I find X and Y on the admin?" and "please define concepts Z and A for me."
6. 30m presentation of take home to 10 employees of the SaaS company, followed by 30m Q&A with the team. I'm only made aware of this after turning in my take home. Building and rehearsing the presentation takes around 3hrs.
7. 3hr on-site
8. Day after on-site: 15m wrap-up discussion w/HR
9. 15m wrap-up discussion w/engineering manager
Through all of this, every decision maker expressed extreme satisfaction with my performance, and the engineering manager repeatedly told me how smart and well-spoken I was.
A week later, I get, as an email: "our team has decided to pass on your candidacy." They adamantly refuse to give me more feedback (though admitting: position still open, no other candidates in final stages), and don't refer me to other roles.
In my experience, there are usually (at least) three reasons for that to happen - i.e. you getting rejected after a seemingly impeccable interview:
1) They already had a candidate they wanted to hire, but have some internal hiring protocol / process they must follow.
2) You and the other candidate(s) were incredibly similar, but one had to go.
3) Everyone but one senior decision maker liked you. Could have been for whatever reason. We like to think that most companies have a somewhat democratic recruitment panel, where all the decision makers get a (somewhat) equally weighted say. But some places, it's more like gatekeeper after gatekeeper...you might get passed all the previous ones, but not the last one.
Yeah, 4 and 5 are things they should train you on after you start. Also, I don't know why anyone would ever need to write their own hashmap, and if you have a hashmap then you don't need binary search :\ .
I agree with TrackerFF that someone likely vetoed the group consensus, also potentially a funding issue.
On a serious note, I've also been nearly burned out by these week-long take home assignments which are only one stage of several and end up eating my weekends completely only to find myself rejected or ghosted after completing them (I'm a penetration tester so most common candidate testing methodology I've seen is a week long CTF set up by their security team, where you need to find as many flags/vulnerabilities as you can and also write a report, so it always ends up into a huge time sink of finding needles in a haystack and also write a multi page report about how I did it, only for then to be rejected). Often there's also some IQ test and other nonsense stages, plus the usual Zoom/Teams/Meets calls in between with their recruiters/hiring managers, during working hours. Oh, and don't get me started on the 20 page online form with 50 questions some companies want you to fill as part of your application.
I honestly have no idea how people with full time jobs who can't slack off at work and have other responsibilities, hobbies and interests, are able to keep this up. I feel like these long and stressful interview processes are mainly geared towards ambitious new-grads or people with no other goal in life than always interviewing for the next best job.
I sometimes want to give up on the IT industry and go to med school instead as I don't see how I can keep this up long term, for the grand sum of €50K/year, if this interviewing process is the norm or if it will get even crazyer. Or maybe I should quit my job, start learning leetcode, and move to a country with some FAANG jobs.
>Often there's also some IQ test and other nonsense stages
I actually support IQ tests and the likes, but it's the way that all these companies are doing this which sticks out. All of them somehow have their own flavor and keep the information to themselves (or to the company which they outsource their shenanigans to). It would be so much more efficient if we had an employee-centric approach where employees could provide access to this information, with verification, and it was up to the employee to give employers information on their current status and growth. You want the data? There you go, verified, now move on to stage 5 and no dawdling.
If you're going to toss out CVs, portfolios, certificates, diplomas, that's one thing (why again are we doing this?). If you're also going to give us all different kinds of "here's this whacky syntax no one uses" questions along with the umpteenth "IQ test" because god forbid we shorten the process, you're not suffering from a labor shortage. You're suffering from being a pretty princess too afraid to take a risk.
Pretend you’re hiring in this landscape. If people will submit to it, if it provides a more reliable signal of likely success than degrees or certifications do, and if you feel like it’s required to stay competitive, why wouldn’t you?
(To be clear: I don’t condone the practice at all, but I at least can understand possible rationales)
>If people will submit to it, if it provides a more reliable signal of likely success than degrees or certifications do
I agree with the general premise (this wouldn't happen if people finally stood up against it), but this has yet to be proven. Hiring absolutely isn't grounded in reality as much as it likes to think it is, even if the arguments sound rational beyond surface level.
Additionally I feel most companies severely underestimate the costs of this entire circus, and overestimate the risks and cost of bad hires. But that's not something I can back up with numbers.
> if it provides a more reliable signal of likely success than degrees or certifications do
Does it though? Has anyone done any form of analysis to show it works? I know my boss a few years back asked about asking technical questions and HR said we had to run a real scientific experiment to prove it works, basically a round of technical interviews, but the technical interviewers write down a score but are not invited to the actual decision process, then after 6 months we open the score and see if it correlates at all to on the job performance. When we interview there is a set of questions we are allowed to ask/score on (HR says they have run the data to prove those results make a difference)
Most companies could get just as good results if they put all resumes in a box and do a random drawing to figure out who to hire.
In my experience, just having a degree at all (in CS, Eng, IT/MIS, but even math, music, languages) isn’t a terribly strong predictor within the field. It’s mostly used, by those who do, again ime, to filter out against lack of commitment/perseverance/grit.
Personally I feel I get much more signal talking to people about their particular passions, accomplishments, struggles, and ideas.
On a some related note, I struggle to understand how those with no-slack full-time technical jobs have technical hobbies. I'll give it a go every so often but get burned out quickly. I have a nice collection of in-progess but dormant pieces of software.
At big tech companies when times are good, many people are sitting around waiting for paint to dry. (Ie some nutty process) Remember they are a profit center and get slacktime and fancy stuff.
Ditto outside of engineering. I knew one SE with a pretty big territory who travelled with his wife. They were swingers. The dude would just setup random meetings so the company would spring for their hotel. We’d get our steak dinner, they would get their freak on. At the end, he’s pulling in 3% of whatever crap we were buying.
> I have a nice collection of in-progess but dormant pieces of software.
That's already more than I have; I get my job satisfaction from my job, I like to spend my free time with family and hobbies that don't involve more work.
But, different strokes for different people; I like playing video games, others like writing code for fun.
I used to. Then I got married, a wife and kids are far more fulfilling. When I get any free time (rare) I want to be out in my shop doing something not technical. Or at least not technically in the way of my job, sometimes the things I work on are mechanically complex.
> I feel like these long and stressful interview processes are mainly geared towards ambitious new-grads or people with no other goal in life than working.
The point is probably very much this - finding people who will over-perform without reciprocation.
It's fair to ask people to do work, but they should be paid for it if it goes beyond an hour or so. I've turned down opportunities with a ridiculous recruiting process, I couldn't imagine what it would be like when you actually worked for them!
When I was managing the software division of an IT services company, we would send all candidates a fizz-buzz type programming assessment that should only take 5-10 minutes to complete. After that, we would do a 15 minute phone screen then had someone come in for a 1-2 hour long interview with some live programming. The point of the exercises in the interview was to see someone's thought process, not if they could actually "complete" the exercises.
At that point, we'd have a pretty good idea of where a candidate's skill were at and we could start the process of extending an offer if the team agreed they were a good fit.
There were a few occasions where the candidates had no experience with any of the tech we were using, but were obviously capable developers. We'd usually make an offer at the lower end of the salary range for that position with a raise being guaranteed in 10 weeks if they met the requirements. There was the expectation that they'd do a bit learning outside of work hours if needed.
Everyone who was given that offer accepted it and was given the raise.
> then had someone come in for a 1-2 hour long interview with some live programming. The point of the exercises in the interview was to see someone's thought process, not if they could actually "complete" the exercises.
I don't know much about industry and interviews yet. Do you think this is the case for most interviews? That they care about your thought process, not just if you can complete the problem? Is it necessary to learn/memorize all algorithms and data structures, or is it better to practice and focus on improving my problem solving skills and thought process?
Everyone says they care about the thought process, but almost nobody actually does. The GP seems to, but there's plenty of stories where they ask an open question (What happens when you put some text in the search bar and press enter), then fail you for that question if you don't discuss the specifics they want (http/DNS/routing/whatever the interviewer likes).
> There were a few occasions where the candidates had no experience with any of the tech we were using, but were obviously capable developers. We'd usually make an offer at the lower end of the salary range for that position with a raise being guaranteed in 10 weeks if they met the requirements.
This is great. Makes sense for the business, and the results spoke for themselves.
While I didn't have to do any take home projects, one company I interviewed at had multiple hours of different interviews (coding, design, etc). I thought I did pretty well (everyone seemed happy with my answers) and I feel like I'm very well suited to the job I interviewed for, given the projects I've worked on previously, but ultimately I didn't get an offer. That could be for any number of reasons, of course, but the feedback they gave is that I didn't manage to "fully complete" the design interview. This is a little baffling to me because the role I was interviewing for doesn't sound like it requires people to design full, complete distributed services within one hour in a high pressure interview situation. I know I can design complex systems, because I've successfully done so multiple times in the past, and I work well enough under pressure, but that I would miss something in a mere hour of an interview is almost a given. My best designs come when I can sleep on it and take a little time. Besides, some of the greatest engineers I know don't do well in artificial interview situations.
On the other hand, I also interviewed at another company for a very similar role, yet this time it was a 90 minute chat about stuff I'd worked on in the past. They do normally do an hour long coding task, but they let me skip it because they could see from my experience and the person who referred me vouched for my ability to write code. At the end of the 90 minutes, I was basically told they liked me and hoped I would join and that they'd give me an offer the next day. I happily accepted this offer.
During this time a Google recruiter also contacted me but when he said that their process typically takes months I declined right away. I can't think of any time in my career where I'd care to spend months to maybe get a job at Google.
This is why I have a policy of not doing any take-home tests, exactly to discourage this kind of bullshit and force the company to incur a cost (if they want to "test" me they need to sacrifice an hour of their own dev's time for an in-person/screenshare test) so they can't just "spray and pray" the test to everyone that comes by.
I'll do the take home tests if I find them interesting.
Interesting to me is important. Last time I did one I found a recursive (not tail recessive) solution to a problem that I already knew was a simple iteration using a couple standard library functions - but where is the fun in that? I learned a lot and didn't care that I didn't get the job. (I did earn a call back, which is great considering at the time I didn't qualify for the advanced position they were hiring for)
It's also a terrible security practice to advertise. Getting a remote code execution bug in to production would only entail building a free feature for the company and getting it past a trivial code review during an interview you could subsequently turn down!
Government should treat the fake job formula like what it is: Sabotage of the economy. In our system applicants have to pay for their own education, spend time doing it and government is investing in education.
We are extremely serious about training and employment. Parties that want to get involved should be held to high standards.
It's not like we've never created (and enforced) a standard for anything.
heh, I deleted that part of my post as there are more qualified (dare I say competent) people to create such laws.
It could for example work like this (which is much like it use to work in the Netherlands)
- If you are looking for work or if you are looking to improve your position you must submit your resume to the government agency. (Ideally this agency also makes an effort to preserve and validate diplomas and previous employment) You provide a salary indication, travel time and if you are willing to relocate for a new job.
- If you are looking to hire someone or are looking to replace someone you must submit your job offer to the government agency. A rather large fee must be paid. (700-3000 euro) The agency also makes an effort to preserve previous offers and has access to current employment.
- An appointment is scheduled. The employer (or employee) must attend this meeting. You are left very little room for rescheduling. The point of the meeting is to establish how serious you are about hiring (or getting hired). The offer (or resume) is examined and the agency employee asks questions.
- Even the vaguest hint you are not being serious results in termination of services. (The employer shall lose the fee.) They may try again in 3 months or 12 depending on how much of a troll they are.
- Since the investigator has access to a lot of data they can quickly (or at a later date) point out where the job offer is unrealistic. Minimum wage for skills in high demand is not an acceptable offer.
- After the interrogation the investigator compares available resumes to the job offer and schedules a new appointment for the employer and up to 4 candidates.
- The next meeting starts with the investigator briefly describing the upcoming candidates.
- The potential employees one by one get to sit next to the employer in front of the desk. The investigator starts each interview with the glorification of the company looking to hire and asks the employee if they have any questions.
- Then the employer is granted a bit of room to ask his questions.
- After the final applicant is interviewed the investigator gives his preference to the employer but they are free to chose one of the other applicants. The employer orders the acceptable applicants by preference.
- If non of the applicants are satisfying the job description is considered insufficient. If it is mildly insufficient a new job offer can be filled for which a new fee shall be paid. If it is terribly insufficient the employer will have to wait for 3 months before trying again.
- If the investigator agrees the available candidates are poor fits for the job opening the offer shall remain open and compared against new resumes.
- Each employee gets up to 4 interviews. They may chose who to work for if they are the preferred candidate. If they didn't make it to the top of the list they get additional interviews.
- If they decline what the investigator considers a great offer they get no further service for 3-12 months. A great offer must be substantial improvement over their current job.
- If any party is unhappy with the result they must fill an appeal with an independent oversight committee. The investigator will assist with filling out the forms.
- If the new hire fails to live up to expectations the employer must schedule a meeting and discuss this with the investigator.
The biggest advantage of the formula is that the employer is not the authority figure in the room. They are as much the subject of the process as the applicant. Demonstrate poor behavior and you are out.
> The biggest advantage of the formula is that the employer is not the authority figure in the room.
This is the case for how employment works now. If you turn employment from "an agreement between two parties, each of whom has a direct interest in picking the right thing for themselves" and you instead grant almost all of the power in the agreement to the state, with none of the responsibility, aren't you creating the world's biggest principal-agent problem? With all the corruption that entails?
I have a company that told me their first tech round (before speaking to coworkers, manager, etc) is a recorded programming sandbox problem solving for an hour.
They give you a MSFT Teams number to call into someone on the team who is on-call while doing work, in case you have any questions re: the test.
Otherwise they stressed it is “not interactive”. They then look at your results / watch the recording and let you know if they want to talk.
A bit over the top for an experienced hire interview loop.
At least it's only one hour and not a "3 hour take home tests with REST APIs, microservices, containers, NoSQL database, documentation and unit tests", that actually takes a full weekend to a whole week to complete to spec.
Devil's advocate here. That's the kind of interview problem solving test I prefer.
You're given an hour to solve a problem that probably takes less than half that time (if we go by the typical problem given for tech interviews). The ticking time stress effect is thus somewhat alleviated and you can focus more on the problem.
You're left solving the problem on your own. The alternative is a distracting onlooker who keeps bugging you with "what are you thinking?" As if probing people for meta explanations of their mental processes is how we help them solve problems.
You're given a phone number to call if you need help.
If my assumptions are correct, their approach is not too far off the mark.
I guess I’ll just add that - as a candidate, for a somewhat niche experienced role, it is incredibly off-putting. They absolutely do not get a lot of applicants for this role. I don’t even have a job spec & having not spoken to anyone technical, I really don’t know the day to day & responsibilities of the potential job. Which is to say, I don’t know that I even want it. I will probably not bother to continue with them as there were some other red flags that point to them being very lean & stingy, which is their reputation on the street.
It sounds like that company gets a lot of applicants, enough that they need a quick and minimum-person-hour way to filter out the chaff.
I mean I'm all for having people do a technical test; at my previous company it was one that would take about eight hours in total, testing people for application design, back- and front-end, XML, JSON, REST, maths, logic, etc. It was a consultancy that "only hired the best", because of course. The technical interview was the 3rd stage though, before that there would have been a CV scan, an introduction, and an hourlong meeting. After the take-home assignment there would be a one hour chat with developers about the assignment, then a short / casual chat with the CEO because he wanted to do final grilling of everyone.
I'm pretty sure one example project I was requested to do was just a way for them to solve a problem, I solved it and never heard back. It turned out to be pretty tricky to accomplish, requiring tracking down some obscure tool.
I did do it in the time limit required, but looking back on it, it was a very particular problem with very specific constraints that most common industry tools did not solve...
Have you ever looked at a job at Canonical (Ubuntu)? I think that's the most jaw dropping interview process I've ever seen
Effectively you write an autobiography and they might read it. I gave up after a couple of hours realising it was such a dumb waste of time to be writing about high school.. I left over half my lifetime ago lmao. It was like squeezing blood out of a stone trying to remember anything from that time.
Don't even bother applying if you have ADHD or anything with similar symptoms, you're not what they're after.
Having just been through the recruitment hellscape last year the take home tests are absurd. Some companies are asking for whole weekends worth of work before you even get to speak to anyone.
Needless to say if a company is asking for an 8 hour take home, you bet your ass they don't respect you as a candidate and won't respect you as an employee.
I hoped that if we collectively stopped doing these then they would go away but there are a lot of people who like doing these and believe they are a net positive for some reason.
I tell candidates to bring some code--any code--they wrote and are particularly proud of.
Then in the interview, I have them teach me how it works, tell me about potential improvements, and describe rationale.
In my experience, this has been a quick and effective measure, both technical and behavioral.
I find it immoral to ask candidates to put in hours of uncompensated work they wouldn't have normally done. And I don't think it gives good data.
Once we hired a dev with zero experience with the platform, language, libraries, or tooling. It was clear from the interview they had skills, though. After two weeks, they were producing good code. After a month, great code. Absolute win. And they never would have been picked by a "spend 16 hours making us a demo project" company.
I'm actually all for take-home projects, because I excel at them - and I have the time. But I fully understand that others don't have the time, or don't want to risk being ghosted after submitting work.
Ideally, if we're stuck with whiteboarding and take-homes, candidates should get to choose.
But with that said, ref. the article...25 pages? Who comes up with that kind of work?
My take-home projects have been like 2-3 pages max, and took maybe 2-3 hour to finish from beginning to end.
There are always people in vulnerable positions and there are more than enough suckers willing to take advantage of that.
My tip to avoid that is to ask for a phone screening for around a hour, walk away if cannot get one. If they don't want to invest one hour in you, then why would you spend anytime with them?
I've found in the past that if a company presents an onerous task for interviews, and isn't interested in paying directly for the work, sometimes they are willing to donate an equivalent sum to a non-profit of your choice.
Of course, the fact that they won't pay directly is useful information when interviewing, by itself, but a donation can indicate respect for your investment of time and effort.
Something the article doesn't bother to try and explain, why has interviewing become so difficult?
Is the market oversaturated with low quality candidates? Or has the recruiter been integrated internally into companies such that the role has become more bureaucratic?
My favourite job interview that went too far... I applied for a sysadmin/netadmin job at a 24x7 facility that basically can't go offline. As many 9s as possible. So they required a rather senior tech for the position and I surprisingly did qualified. The requirements were very steep like 10 years experience, loads of certs etc. You know the type.
I got the interview. First I needed to fill out paperwork before I could go onsite. It was general 'this is a factory and is dangerous blah blah, do you have experience' which sure I do. I've worked in countless factories, several were even more industrial and dangerous than theirs.
I get onsite and I'm business casual. First thing I'm told is, "the interview got rescheduled to 30 minutes later so everyone was available.' but they failed to tell me...
Then I get told that I'm dressed to 'froo froo' but I said that business casual seems appropriate. I sat there the ~45 minutes for the interview completely alone. Eventually I get brought to the interview and the conference room is packed. Well over a dozen people there to interview me.
In the interview they explained everything they actually needed. They didn't need just a senior sysadmin and netadmin who must know the tech so well they know how to fix issues instantly. There will also be no other IT people, you're responsible for everything from outlook to factory software. They also needed DBA and someone who can go on the floor to be a labourer sometimes. I answered 'I am always happen to help in an emergency but I don't know anything about how to work the factory floor." At this point I was pretty well done the interview but happy to continue and exercise that skill.
So they ask me what would be one of my top achievements. Given the no-downtime nature they would appreciate my story. I was onsite at a large enterprise and was doing cisco aironet changes as well as some core vlan to leaf changes in relation to a new ssid I was deploying. That all went great. There was another team who was onsite, literally IBM bladecenter supervisor was being paid to fully update a bladecenter. He got to patching while I was working. When i finished i got back together and asked how it was going and they said great. Ive done those firmware patches before, they are certainly annoying but given I'd spent fair amount of time doing my job I was already curious. They ought to have completed already.
I stood around and was trying to be helpful but then the IBM tech decided he needed to go for a smoke. After he came back in from his smoke his hands were shaking like mad. He couldn't type on the keyboard anymore. Middle of the night outside the secured building isn't a safe place to be, I asked if everything was alright. He said he needed another smoke and left for another smoke and he never came back. Quick note, we ended up not paying any $ for the tech. He had a mental breakdown because he realized he applied the wrong firmware to the networking card. It no longer functioned.
Long story short, I took lead to figure out what was even going on. I checked each of the chassis ports and found all traffic was coming over the first port. I broke LACP on the switch and using a single gig port the entire bladecenter operated the next day no big trouble. We were easy 2 hours out of the maintenance window but real major consequences was still an hour ahead. So getting up and running was huge keeping their business running.
So interviewer's response? 'That's the best story you have? a total failure that I would blame you for?'
I answer, "Perhaps I didn't tell it well. The owners sure appreciated my work and even got us the chefs table at a steakhouse as thanks."
His reply, "how much do you want? you seem to think you're worth more than you are."
I replied, "I am worth what someone will pay me for my skills. It's not just salary but benefits as well. I would expect this position described to me has a significant budget."
He pressed me for a number but I said "I'm not 100% what a position like this would pay, it has steep requirements and I don't have many competitors. I believe you will be fair market value you will offer."
He replied, "If I give you too much, we won't have budget for equipment. Typically equipment purchases come out of the technician's budget."
I was 100% certain I wouldn't want the job so I replied, "I would estimate this position would be $25/hr plus the usual benefits." LOL, ok my estimate might have been really far off but when he heard my number his demeanor changed bigtime. He started talking about all the benefits of working there. One of the benefits was that 'sometimes you can even come into the air conditioning and sit at your desk.' like omg.
Obviously they offered me a job at the $25/hr which i had a hearty laugh at.
> One of the benefits was that 'sometimes you can even come into the air conditioning and sit at your desk.' like omg.
Damn, I started laughing out loud in my office and everyone turned around towards me. This is just comedy gold. But hey, sometimes you gotta pay rent and eat, been there myself, so I wouldn't judge anyone for taking that job.
On a similar note, one tech job I saw advertised in Austria had a benefit listed something along the lines of "living in a beautiful and high quality city", as if the 30 person web-shop is responsible for providing that and not the taxpayers and the local government. ROFL.
> I replied, "I am worth what someone will pay me for my skills. It's not just salary but benefits as well. I would expect this position described to me has a significant budget."
That's a good answer
> "..Typically equipment purchases come out of the technician's budget."
Nonsense. Not if you have auditors. I'd have walked out of here long before this. They don't grasp the iron triangle.
So... I happened to tell this story to colleague years later. I heard... they did hire someone and they ended up being down for more than 1 shift. They fired the new person before getting back up and running.
The backup IT people from the other shifts didn't pick up the phone calls and the next person on shift saw the amount of phonecalls. So he never showed up to work. It wasn't until the third shift guy showed up did he know what needed to be done and fixed it.
They threatened to fire him because he didn't pick up the phone. He explained that he was sleeping because he was the night shift immediately before the outage. They said he was now the only IT person and would need to cover shifts until they can get back up and running. He left during his next break and never went back.
The outage of their factory ended up shutting down the main factory that they supply. That would be millions in fees. They brought in a MSP and were up and running and covered off.
I noticed many months later after I turned them down that they were still trying to fill the position. This is an employer just shooting themselves in the foot. They created their own "labor shortage".
It's actually the second time in a row that I got this kind of absurdity. I was contacted unsolicited by an engineering manager from DuckDuckGo looking for a specialist. I asked them what their hiring procedure was, and it was even worse: they had multiple pre-hiring projects and some kind of probationary period before permanent hire. So I asked if I could just skip this, given my qualifications, and they said no, that's just how they do things at DuckDuckGo, and they believed their hiring process has been "successful" for them. So I basically said no thanks, buh-bye. And they also were continuing to try to fill the position many months after I said no.