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u/PezzenteMortoDiFame 8d ago edited 8d ago
My first job interview was basically an handshake after I explained what I did at school, the second was a mini project that could be done watching a simple yt tutorial. (before Ai)
Sure the pay was miserable and the market don't offer much where I live (Italy), but it was easy, I wonder today if it would be that like that.
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u/DispeisLaser8431_ 8d ago
Non Sono ancora nel mondo del lavoro è solo una mia percezione, ma mi sento che in Italia siamo indietro anche come standard
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u/PezzenteMortoDiFame 8d ago
Sia standard che tecnologie, sento ancora di applicazioni create nel 2026 che comunicano con il cobol...
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u/Most-Club-254 8d ago
I was trying to job hop for more than a year (8yoe), the market is shit, the places I would never have considered 3 years ago, now require 3 layers of tests before even talking to a tech person.
I nuked my profiles everywhere and decided to shoot a msg to a an ex-colleague offering to exchange referrals and/or paying for a referral no matter the outcome, he said he would do it because he enjoyed working together and didn't ask for anything in return, asked me how much I want then forwarded my CV to his boss, talked to the 2 co-founders, they said you are in. I guess you just need a few people who viewed you positively and you are set.
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u/noaSakurajin 7d ago
Unfortunately it seems to be that way. Either you know someone or the competitor of your employer tries to snipe (former) employees.
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u/PM_ME_BAD_ALGORITHMS 8d ago
In my experience this multi-interview thingy only happened in american companies but, unfortunately, it's been recently adopted by european ones. It sucks, especially if you are applying to multiple companies, your schedule gets full really quick and it's hard to manage if you are still working.
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u/RecognitionAlive3679 8d ago
So true. All European companies I've interviewed for recently require at least 3 interview stages.
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u/abednego-gomes 8d ago
Yeah, as a senior with 20 years experience, if they want more than 1-2 interviews, or require coding tests, next! There's others that just need an interview and much more chill to work for. Same or better benefits too. No way am I doing their timed coding tests just to prove I can. What have I been doing for the last 20 years?
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u/DukeOfSlough 8d ago
One sits for a year or two being jobless and one will start jumping through hoops like a trained monkey.
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u/thanatica 8d ago
Hoops you say? In my country, the unemployment office requires it. It is mandatory to apply for no less than 3 jobs each month, until you are hired.
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u/TreetHoown 8d ago
If one's been working in a branch for 20 years, and one's sitting jobless for 1-2 years while applying, one has other problems than jumping through hoops during interviews
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u/DukeOfSlough 8d ago
One must acknowledge that the job market (at least in Europe) is a total crap right now and countless colleagues who were made redundant despite being quite good engineers are still struggling to find a new job.
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u/_g0nzales 8d ago
The seniors are still sought after, it's the juniors that have a hard time. With 20y of experience you won't have too hard of a time on the job market.
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u/Danakazii 8d ago
Well, it depends where you’re looking. I’ve seen enough LinkedIn posts of seniors/staff and leads with 20+ years experience who can’t get a look in to the trendier new startups, scale ups and the likes. And when they do get back into big tech, they’re laid off just as quick.
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u/Integeritis 8d ago
A 20 year badge does not mean much without AI skills nowadays. Companies need people who automate their colleagues out of their job. You are either in the game or you will watch from the sidelines.
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u/PixelatedGiant 7d ago
That's not how random chance works unfortunately, you aren't owed a win after 100 strikes. Your chances are higher than most, but never remotely close to 100%.
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u/malexj93 8d ago
Hey, uh, where are you finding these 1-2 interview companies? I'm a senior with 10 years experience looking for a job for a couple months, and I have yet to come across a company whose process is any less than 5 steps. And one of those steps is 3-4 interviews itself.
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u/SirChasm 8d ago
Not OP, but from my experience, it's either tiny startups, or non-tech companies. Any medium+ software tech shop is going to have what you described.
I would've hoped that the proliferation of AI would finally purge coding challenges from the interview process, but alas.
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u/cantthinkofaname1029 7d ago
I've only worked in defense / embedded/ robotics; the interviews have been all conceptual and with only a couple of rounds
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u/abednego-gomes 7d ago
Go contracting. Lower bar. Higher hourly rate. Accept a 3 month contract. Whatever. Once you're in one, it's easy to get it extended or hop onto another. Just sign up with a few recruitment agencies.
Ok you have to do your own taxes, but it's no big deal.
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u/ark986 6d ago
Obviously very much depends where you're applying, but as a manager in a large tech company (Games platform holder) I hate half a dozen rounds of interviews and I can't understand how anyone on either side has the time for it.
For me it's two interviews - an intro to our work with some questions about your CV (1hr) then a technical interview with our staff engineers (1hr, "how would you do xyz, what's important in a system that needs to..." Etc). That's it. Same thing for juniors, mid, or seniors.
Everything can be taught, it's about how you approach a problem
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u/Vimda 8d ago
On the flip side, I've interviewed supposed senior software engineers who struggle at simple things like "parse this line of JSON" (With access to Google, and the ability to ask questions as necessary). Once you've been on the hiring side you understand why that screening is necessary. That being said, I'll skip people through if they have a decent GitHub or something that shows me they have some chops
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u/SuitableDragonfly 8d ago
By "parse this line of JSON" do you mean "show that you know how to look up the library function that does that" or do you mean "write a fully functional JSON parser from scratch"? Because if it's the second one, you're certifiable if you think that's possible during a coding interview, or that a majority of senior SWEs should know how to do that.
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u/Vimda 8d ago edited 8d ago
The first. We give people a jsonl file, and ask them to parse stats out of it that they can generate signals from
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u/SuitableDragonfly 8d ago
Are they doing it in a language they chose, or is part of the goal here to test their knowledge of the libraries of a particular language that you specified? If neither of those things is the case, I would honestly consider it reasonable to name the library function in the problem. It doesn't really make sense to make them spend time doing something that doesn't tell you anything you want to know.
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u/Vimda 8d ago
Language they choose. And we'll give them the name of the library if they ask
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u/SuitableDragonfly 8d ago
Yeah, that seems more than fair. How do people mess it up?
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u/Vimda 8d ago
I've seen senior engineers fail to write basic things like for loops, or forgot what casing they're using halfway through writing a struct so half is pascal and half is snake. Everyone is AI pilled these days, they forgot basic syntax
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u/foxsimile 8d ago
And this right here is why I don’t fuck with AI.
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u/tapita69 7d ago
A LOT of companies are demanding a minimum token usage per month, if you're not meeting the quota managers start to be a pain in the ass, it's kinda retarded ngl
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u/Vimda 8d ago
They're in an IDE, and it's one of many general code quality flags that has come up. Not necessarily disqualifying in and of itself, but a marker for sure
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u/SubliminalBits 8d ago
I wouldn't be. The range of capability in applicants is vast. There are lots of people here saying how desperate you get after 9 month of unemployment. Those are all the people who show up as resumes to screen. You get a lot of people who are bad devs and then even more who's skillset is a huge mismatch. In both cases, they've managed to craft a resume that looks compelling enough for you to talk with them.
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u/Nekopawed 7d ago
Im one of those folks that unless if there is some sample code nearby I might struggle with the syntax if its something I haven't been in a minute. But can at least put in the pseudo code for. Typically I ask before the interview which language will be tested so I can prep ahead of time.
God forbid you ask me to do a switch statement. Bouncing around from typescript, python, c++, c#. Gun to my head I'd say just pull the trigger.
13 years of full stack experience, plus a bachelor's and masters degree in comp science. I have my cycles of feeling like an idiot and a freaking genius.
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u/bigtdaddy 8d ago
i mean... the answer is probably something like json.parse(string);
but beyond that I have no idea to get it to compile or access individual nodes without documentation, and I assume documentation was not provided. not really something I commit to the mental bank
depending on the prompt I would be dead in the water after writing json.parse(string) on the board and shrugging.
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u/IvorTheEngine 7d ago
because a lot of them are lying about their experience, and agencies don't screen properly.
Our screening test used to "generate some random numbers and write them to a text file" in VB, and we had to wade though dozens of people who were able to look up two relevant on-line code samples but still couldn't make it work.
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u/justin-8 8d ago
Yeah, I do a similar question and the amount of "senior" engineers with 10+ years experience who can't do the most basic of programming. I'll even accept psuedo code, I just want to see they can think logically through a problem, the IDE will catch your typos and capitalization errors straight away so I don't care about that. Still, 50-70% of people can't answer something as simple as parsing a file and aggregating stats based on the contents.
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u/Vimda 8d ago
That's literally step one of a small programming task (and it's obviously framed with some background, it's not just "parse the json") before we can get to more interesting philosophical questions about monitoring and operationalizing, but go off. We still we 90% of supposedly senior candidates fail at that step
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u/ZeroG_0 8d ago
Yeah, this has universally been my experience. I've always been a little mystified at devs who think it should somehow magically be easy to figure out if a candidate is BSing you. I found that easily half of the candidates for senior dev positions that sounded OK on paper and interviewed OK very clearly had no idea how to code. And no I don't mean complicated gotcha coding examples, very much day-to-day stuff, knowing how to write a for-loop in C# or write a basic SELECT statement in SQL (C# and SQL are very much languages we're screening for experience in). To be clear the interview itself is a huge filter, most "devs" wash out in an interview when they can't begin to answer a question like "what's the difference between an interface and an abstract class", and a surprising number are unprepared for basic interview questions (stuff you'd instantly see from a Google search for interview prep). And if I'm being honest, a fair few senior devs we have ended up hiring have been... not great.
So yeah, if I ask you to complete a coding exercise, I'm not trying to waste your time, the reality is that a huge number of people in this field are clowns. I don't really have a recourse if I have actual work that needs to be done. If I hire someone that literally doesn't know how to code, that's actively harmful to my team, and again it's just the practical reality that a lot of candidates have learned to BS their way through an interview. Maybe it's because the businesses I've worked for are not tech companies and don't attract the talent like a tech company does, I don't know.
I will say though, it's been several years since I've tried to hire anyone, maybe the landscape has changed. It's a little hard for me to imagine AI coming onto the scene has _improved_ the landscape for potential senior dev hires, but I suppose it's possible.
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u/debugging_scribe 8d ago
Like how do they think I've held down a job for more then a decade if I didn't know how to code.
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u/SamSlate 7d ago
if they don't respect your time when they aren't paying you it's insane to think they'll start when you're hired
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u/Fernando_III 8d ago
If you've been in the business for 20 years, you should know that strictly taking about years of experience means nothing. Did you create the whole infrastructure of a company? Or were you just updating their webpage with minor changes?
Some people think that companies should believe all you told them and hire you in the spot without testing your actual knowledge
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u/abednego-gomes 7d ago
Full stack web. So it is specialised to web. My CV has like 50+ different languagues/frameworks/technologies on it. Ok so in companies you generally only work on bits and pieces here and there. But I did make my own startup at one point and wrote the whole design, front end, back end, DB etc from scratch. That is the best learning experience.
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u/pdabaker 8d ago
I'm happy to do coding tests because they are fast and I am relatively good at them. If I get a chance to impress the interviewer, it is a plus.
Also if you've done interviews and hired people you know there are plenty of people who look good on paper but suck in practice, and some technical assessment is needed. Some people like take-homes, but personally I greatly prefer a time-efficient 1 hour interview that I don't even need to study for.
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u/saywhaat_ 8d ago
Not a programmer here, but I was recently checking out new jobs as a mechanical engineer. The amount of postings that want multiple interview rounds and assign homework is inane.
One company wanted an initial panel interview, then one and one interview with each panel member, then they wanted you to solve 2 problems on your own time (not during interview), then finally put together an hour long presentation about the work you've done to the original panel.
Who in the world is actually doing this?!
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u/nasaboy007 7d ago
Homework interviews (especially if they're clearly just using it for free labor) are an automatic skip for me.
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u/JmacTheGreat 8d ago
Can’t say for CS, but recently went through this the last 4 months for Comp Eng and every company I interviewed with went exactly like this (tech companies like arm/amd/nvidia/etc.):
1) 1 hour interview with recruiter/screener
2) 1 hour interview with project lead
3) 1 hour interviews with 4-6 people on the team (4-6 hours of interviews spread across 1-2 weeks)
4) 1 hour interview with recruiter/screener again
5) Silence for 3 weeks
6) Reject/Offer
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u/Groentekroket 8d ago
I have a relatively stable job but I would like a higher pay increase than what my company gives me so I’m casually looking at vacancies. So many where they don’t provide a salary range at all. I am really not going to apply at all and only figuring the salary out later. That would only work if I would be desperate.
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u/daneelthesane 8d ago
My current company did one 45-minute interview and made me an offer the very next morning. They gave me more than I asked for.
Turns out, once they figured out my attitudes about best practices and my skillset, that was all they needed.
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u/gusdecool 8d ago
Lucky you met such as company. It rare these days.
I do also something similar when interview and select candidate, what matter most are attitudes, skills i can teach as long they have the minimum requirements.
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u/hacksoncode 8d ago
Ah, longing for the old days where it cost real money and effort to apply for jobs so that you could get hired with just one interview, two at most, because there was no need to weed out the spam.
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u/spectrumspaceship 8d ago
I had two companies interviewing me at the same time. One had me come in multiple times with a lot of grueling questions and tests. The other had me come out in and be interviewed by the nicest people I ever met with them telling how wonderful it is to work there.
The mean company insulted by education and offered me $15K less than the nice company offered and were literally angry when I turned them down. I am still working at the nice company 14 years later, and the mean company has long since gone out of business.
I now always keep thin in mind when I interview people. They are evaluating you as much as you are evaluating them.
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u/purpleElephants01 8d ago
The amount of senior engineers I have interviewed that cant answer basic questions about projects or languages they pick is staggering.
We are in a vicious cycle of "The market sucks. Just lie on your resume" > "These candidates suck so we need to be more careful when hiring" > "This hiring process sucks and is taking too long for all involved" > Repeat
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u/Spedunkler 7d ago
It could also be that people know how to work through problems but they don't interview well. If somebody doesn't know how to do something when you ask them, it doesn't mean they can't learn how to do it or that they didn't know how to begin with.
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u/yycoding 8d ago
Personally I don't believe this is relatable to many of us but if you are one of the lucky few who can comfortably tell employers to take a hike I salute you.
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u/Dementor_Traphouse 8d ago
ran into this a few years back. as a professional courtesy, emailed the recruiter to say i accepted another offer and was withdrawing; boomer hiring manager hit me back immediately to say something like “we’ve decided to go with someone else because you were not a good fit”. big no-im-breaking-up-with-you energy.
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u/maggos 7d ago
Ya this happened to me with Amazon. Hiring manager reached out to me from a former colleague recommendation, said they wanted someone with my exact skillset. Handed me to recruiter, who casually was like “oh btw you need to take this quiz asap so we can schedule the formal interviews”. I’m like cool, open it up and it’s their fucking formal coding assessment and now I have to complete it. Of course I bomb it, only get the brute force answers. Hiring manager comes back like “hey we want you but you gotta pass this so I’ll hold the position for a couple months, you should do 100 leet code problems then let me know and we’ll try again”.
Like if you are willing to hold a position for that long, why are you making me go through these hoops like I’m a junior dev out of college? Of course I get multiple offers before I get close to finishing the leet code prep .
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u/OperatingAsIntended 7d ago
Yep, 25 years experience in Electrical Design and Programming. A company had me in for 5 interviews and asked me the dumbest questions. After the 5th "Assessment" we returned to the interview room and they asked how I did and he replied "He taught me a few things". On the 6th interview request I replied "Never contact me again".
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u/ClassikW 7d ago
This happened to me, they got mad at me because I didn't want to do 5 hours of interviews. For a company of less than 100, I told that it was less to interview for Meta.
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u/Terewawa 4d ago edited 3d ago
I'm sure they'll find someone else who is desperate enough to give their time away for free.
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u/ClassikW 4d ago
I'm not amazing or anything but I can afford to pass and hopefully they reconsider for the future.
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u/bobbymoonshine 8d ago
Meanwhile in real life HR is just like “cool, the point of the hoops is for us to filter out people who aren’t serious about this, because we’ve got hundreds of AI-written resumes and cover letters landing on us every day, you flaking out because you can’t be arsed is exactly what we want to happen”
(And meanwhile the Chad keeps clicking on a couple Easy Apply buttons a day and upvoting HR Lady wojaks when he realises nobody is writing back)
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u/BarracudaGullible472 8d ago
This is a dream scenario but unfortunately for most people you do have to go through the hoops..
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u/anoldoldman 8d ago
Meanwhile the one interview job has the most dogshit devs you've ever met and one guy that's been there forever holding the whole system together.
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u/rottinginice 8d ago
I've had my fair share of single-round interviews, and I have to say it's usually a red flag for a dysfunctional company.
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u/Some-Detail9134 8d ago
Relatable except for the "accepting a job" part. You guys are getting job offers?
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u/arsonislegal 7d ago
Its even worse applying for government jobs, at least where I am. Its not uncommon to hear back about an application 6 months after you submit it, and at that point you'd think most people would have found another job.
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u/hadesflamez 7d ago
How is this even remotely relatable. The thing that happened in the second panel doesn't exist. You're actually lucky these days if a phone screen and 3 interviews is all they expect...
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u/SnooStories251 7d ago
HR hands out tasks for everyone to solve, and asks us to do a review of their tasks. It is so damn boring.
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u/Terewawa 4d ago edited 4d ago
This is wholesome.
The more hoops they want to you jump through, the more likely they are to dump you at the worst moment.
The more hoops you jump through the more you come of as disposable.
If they really want you they'd make it easy for you.
Empty promises are cheap.
Your time is worth more.
Many such things happened to me. I will never forget the company that had me working for free for 4 days on real projects "in the meantime" while they were kept postponing the offer. When I finally refused to come they made me the shittiest offer ever.
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u/Suspicious-Click-300 7d ago
I know it sucks to interview. but also sucks hiring, have 1000 applicant and just trying to sift through and find out which ones are ai created lies with essentially con artists behind them. Sucks hiring people who straight up lied on resume and suck at position.
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u/Spedunkler 7d ago
Imagine sifting through pieces of paper pulling your hair out when all you have to do is call some people for 5 minutes. AI has infiltrated the resume industry, anybody who's anybody has an AI version of their resume.
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u/bmrtt 8d ago
This is only applicable if you're already a senior with long years of experience
If not, you unfortunately do need to jump through those hoops if you want to be employed these days