I’m still mad that a contracting company made me take a general intelligence test and programming test before sending my resume to a client only for the client to reject me because I didn’t have enough experience. Literally wasted over three hours of my life. Not to mention the general test they let me retake because I didn’t finish it in time (if I didn’t finish it that time I may have pulled the ADHD card because wtf that test was insane), so if they just let me retake it for basically no reason, they’re basically admitting it’s bullshit. The programming test was all questions about extremely outdated Spring (Java framework) concepts, like XML configs. Nobody uses that anymore unless they’re maintaining something ancient (and based on the requirements for the position they weren’t, they were using newer stuff).

I dunno I got my job last year and it was two interviews:

• General personality interview, the sorts of normal interview questions like “Who are you? What do you do in your current job” etc.

• Technical interview, which consisted of “Here’s some code. Tell me what it’s doing. How would you make it better?” and then some more general ones like “What design patterns have you heard of? Have you used them? If you have, when and why did you choose them?”

That was pretty good when compared to some of the other jobs I applied for back when I was a student. I applied at Boots, and it was phone interview, technical interview, abstract reasoning test, group work test, a powerpoint presentation, final interview, and then I got rejected. I applied to Nissan, phone interview, big group interview day having to spend money to get to the location, rejected.

I’m a bit more picky these days. One job wanted to record my screen and my face while doing a technical test, and I just refused outright, which pissed off the recruiter because she seemed pretty desperate to fill the role.

Been working 12+ years (10yrs in current role). I never had a technical interview and my initial interview was essentially a handshake at a job fair.

Pay the candidate a days salary, make the team work with them and day, and let the decide…

I had roughly 5 interviews at the last place. Then they said I had to do one with the VP. Told the recruiter I was getting fed up and suddenly it was waived. Don’t be afraid to push back (unless you are desperate).

Much later on while helping with interviews myself there, I asked why they had this terrible process and they said it was because people were caught cheating with AI. I asked why they didn’t do in-person to prevent that. Fly them out. If they’re invested, and truly interested, they’ll do it. Then I realized my folly after they didn’t have an answer - they’re cheap fucks.

My last interview was for a job I was on the fence about. I decided to go though the process anyways. I did a coding assignment that I aced. Then I had an interview with their recruiter.

Then I met with two developers. They grilled me for an hour. It was a fine conversation, we got along.

Then I had an interview with the boss of the dept. That went well.

Then they wanted me to prepare and give a technical presentation to some directors. At this point I told them no thanks.

Don’t participate in such a process and the problem solves itself (unless you are very desperate). As long as companies find some idiot who jumps through these hoops, they will continue to do this. When they realize that they are deterring candidates with this shitty process, they might start changing it.

Interviews have always been a crappy way to determine candidate quality. Eventually people started to realize this, but then their idea was just ‘what if we did the same thing, but twice?’

It’s still like this here; more than one interview or special evaluation or whatever is only for high trust jobs.

Post 2008 crash grad who eventually made it into engineering. I didnt realize this world existed so recently. I’ve never had less than three interviews for any job other than receptionist.

I was a platform engineer for a cyber security company for 6+ years and had worked in another ramshackle garage-based startup before that. I was burnt out and angry all the time. On call for a week out of every month.

I recently got a job writing software fully remote for a medical device company with a single 30min interview with a non-technical manager.

They don’t even know how to use my skills well. My “mentor” can hardly write an Excel formula. My boss has once seen an excruciatingly simple app I made at someone else’s request. I built it in a couple hours. It has a file chooser button and a run button. Blew her mind. Multi-platform builds are now automated via CI/CD. I seriously over-deliver and they won’t ever know it.

I actually put in about 30 hours/week and bill 40. I have 3-4 short meetings a week to interface with a couple vendors. None of them, even my 1:1 with my boss is on camera. It just isn’t done. I get maybe 2 chat messages and 2 emails a day.

Easiest $150k/yr ever. And my spouse has great benefits through work.

Why the hell would I ever go back to “tech?”

I feel like every time I have changed jobs the number of interview sessions has gone up by one. My first job didn’t even have a coding session, just a single conversation with the boss and another engineer.

I’m job hunting right now and it is so ridiculous how many interviews I have for each place. The last one I went through an hr phone call, a manager phone call, a remote coding session, a presentation, a whiteboard coding session, a schematic review, a general C++ quiz/architecture conversation and a follow on remote coding session. I ended up not getting it because the whiteboard guy didn’t like that I didn’t remember the formula for an n-dimensional plane off the top of my head.

I did five interviews and a project for the last job I didnt get. I’m scheduled for interview number four for a job I’m working now.

When I was hiring engineers I capped it at three interviews, maximum two hours of candidate time.

The reality is that if you know shit about your job, you will know if someone is a good fit in the first 10 minutes. If they suck, you will know it faster. It doesn’t take hours and weeks to hire people, you just have to grow a set and be secure that you know your shit.

Im in my last year of highschool… this scares me

yeah, it’s absolutely madness that some companies expect people to go through 3 to 6 rounds to receive a “we’ll let you know”