Two-Way Job Interviews
The cluster discusses how job interviews are a two-way street, where candidates evaluate the company's culture, interviewers, and processes just as companies assess candidates, often viewing poor interview practices as red flags signaling undesirable workplaces.
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Absolutely, many people don't realize that interviews are a two way street. Not only is the company interviewing you to assess your technical skills and cultural fit, but you are interviewing the company as well to see whether you'd like to work there.If you're a "superstar" (I don't really like that term), you want to work with other talented individuals. So if the interview process is non-existent or overly easy, it sends a negative signal about the "potential" quality of other hires.
One thing to realize is that interviews are a two-way street. Do you think you want to work with the interviewers? Do you like the interview process? If the interview process is poor, what other kind of hiring decisions is the company making? Are you going to want to work with the people they end up hiring?You learn a bit about the company during the interview, and if that bit is bad, then move on. If they ask shitty leetcode questions and the interviewers are hostile or hung up on unimportan
one thing tons of people don't understand is that interviews are two way streets. companies are getting to know you, but you are also getting to know the company.as you said, i would never work at a company with bad interviewing practices because it means that either the employees were hired by these bad practices OR the practices changed and no one cares.
These posts always read to me as being a bit presumptuous. The fact that you're looking for a job at that particular company means they're doing _something_ right, with regards to hiring, or shipping quality products, or having a good work culture, etc, etc. If I was the interviewer, I would never hire a person with this sort of "know it all" attitude. If you think you can be a better interviewer, then you have to show you are, rather than coming up with a logical argument of
> "Here's how candidates should act differently to not give a negative impression to important people like me."I'm only important in the sense that my job is to obtain a fair and consistent evaluation of someone along a defined set of criteria - to see if there's a good mutual fit! I want a candidate to succeed once hired, so I'm looking for signals that they would succeed. A mis-hire sucks because getting fired sucks. That's why I'm also looking for
A variant:A blog post titled "The Technical Interview Is an Ego Trip" was submitted to tech forum Hacker News.Here are the top-rated comments on that submission:Here are some more unedited, longer outputs:---"This is a very accurate and useful description of the process of interviewing at most companies. I have seen this for over a decade. The interview is almost always a complete failure from the point of view of the interviewer. They start out with a
The company's values may align to yours, even though they reject you. It's because the interview process doesn't need to have anything to do with their real-world process. Their engineers probe you for the same "best practices" that they themselves were constantly probed for in their own interviews. Interviewing is its very own skill that doesn't necessarily translate into real-life performance.
Remember when people talk about their bad experiences interviewing at companies and write things like:"The 4th Interviewer was really bad. Sat there lobbing obscure questions about XYZ to prove he was smarter than me"and subject of the post is something like "Why I'll never work for Google".They are talking about you.
Just keep in mind that the interview is two-way.They're judging you on your 1337-coding skillz.It's ok to judge them on their poor judgement. And seek employment elsewhere.You can even be more helpful than most employers are to job candidates. Tell them that's why you're not interested. Maybe they'll learn from it. Maybe.
Interviews are a 2 way street. Candidates have as much right to evaluate the companies that are trying to hire them as the opposite.Not the OP but, absolutely I want a personalised interview! I want the company I'm working for to care about the people they hire -- not to efficiently fill empty seats. Yes, normally that means I tend to work for startups. I'm happy with that.It's fair to say that you want to be able to evaluate potential employees cheaply before you invest