Never do more than 3 interviews. And that’s assuming they’re relatively short, maybe 1 hour apiece. Any more than that, and they don’t want you bad enough.
I don’t know if I agree with that. Having been on the hiring side of the table more than a few times.
Hiring a new employee is a risk; especially when you’re hiring at a senior enough level where the wrong decisions are amplified as the complexity of the software grows—and it becomes far more expensive to un/redo bad architectural decisions.
And the amount of time it takes for even an experienced engineer to learn their way around your existing stack, understand the reasons for certain design decisions, and contribute in a way that’s not disruptive—that’s like 6 months minimum for some code bases. More if there’s crazy data flows and weird ML stuff. And if they’re “full stack (backend and frontend) then it’s gonna be even longer before you see how good of a hiring decision you really made. For a $160k+/yr senior dev role, that’s $80k (before benefits and other onboarding costs) before you really expect to see anything really significant.
So you schedule as many interviews as you need to get a feel for what they can do, because false negatives are way less expensive than false positives.
Sometimes people can be cunning: charm, wow annd woo their way past even the savviest of recruiters with the right combinations of jargon patterns.
Sometimes they can even fool a technical round interviewer.
4-5 interviews (esp. if the last is an onsite in which you’ll meet many) seems to be about the norm in my field. Even if it kinda sucks for the person looking for the job.
Never do more than 3 interviews. And that’s assuming they’re relatively short, maybe 1 hour apiece. Any more than that, and they don’t want you bad enough.
I don’t know if I agree with that. Having been on the hiring side of the table more than a few times.
Hiring a new employee is a risk; especially when you’re hiring at a senior enough level where the wrong decisions are amplified as the complexity of the software grows—and it becomes far more expensive to un/redo bad architectural decisions.
And the amount of time it takes for even an experienced engineer to learn their way around your existing stack, understand the reasons for certain design decisions, and contribute in a way that’s not disruptive—that’s like 6 months minimum for some code bases. More if there’s crazy data flows and weird ML stuff. And if they’re “full stack (backend and frontend) then it’s gonna be even longer before you see how good of a hiring decision you really made. For a $160k+/yr senior dev role, that’s $80k (before benefits and other onboarding costs) before you really expect to see anything really significant.
So you schedule as many interviews as you need to get a feel for what they can do, because false negatives are way less expensive than false positives.
Sometimes people can be cunning: charm, wow annd woo their way past even the savviest of recruiters with the right combinations of jargon patterns.
Sometimes they can even fool a technical round interviewer.
4-5 interviews (esp. if the last is an onsite in which you’ll meet many) seems to be about the norm in my field. Even if it kinda sucks for the person looking for the job.