Sasha Luccioni, a Montreal-based artificial intelligence researcher, responded to the Wired report by saying the report was “10,000% true!” She added that over-interviewing is a long-standing problem in some industries. During a past job search, she wrote on Twitter, a major tech company “had me do *12* interviews and a take-home assignment.” (Luccione declined to name which company. The company put her through this ordeal.)
Low price offer
What looks like diligence to a hiring manager under pressure may be unfair to a candidate. Interviewing.io is a testing platform where software engineers can hone their skills in mock interviews. The platform published a report this week alleging that Meta had recently used questionable negotiation tactics against candidates who had passed the interview gauntlet.
Aline Lerner, founder and CEO of Interviewing.io, said that among six large technology companies – Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Netflix – despite simultaneous layoffs, the past 12 Meta saw the largest hiring increase in June. This also gives Meta unique leverage over interview candidates, as they are less likely to receive competing offers from other giants.
Lerner said she evaluated 20 interview invitations that Interviewing.io clients had received from Meta over the past few months and found that the company often “downgraded” engineering candidates by offering them lower positions than those they originally interviewed.
She also said the salaries Meta offers engineers are $50,000 less than the average total compensation for similar jobs at other companies. If job seekers have competitive job offers, they have a good chance of negotiating for more, but these job offers can be difficult to obtain in a tight tech market.
“It’s a very clear pattern,” Lerner told Wired, referring to the lowball offers. “I initially planned to send this guide only to our users, but decided the broader engineering community would gain value from it.”
During a recent earnings call, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company had a backlog of positions that needed to be filled last year and plans to replace certain job types with others this year. Although it has laid off tens of thousands of employees since the end of 2022, the company said its pay philosophy and pay bands (the salary ranges for different positions) have not changed in recent years.
Meta spokesperson Stacey Yip said the company is committed to being fair and equitable to every job applicant. “Our recruitment philosophy allows us to assess individuals based on their potential impact on different teams and assign each candidate to roles and levels that match their skills and career ambitions,” she said. For offers that are sometimes $50,000 lower than expected Yip declined to comment.
unintended consequences
Amanda Richardson, CEO of CoderPad, a platform used by hiring managers to assess coding skills, says tech companies can make life easier for candidates and hiring managers by questioning the recent industry-wide shift toward more rigorous assessments Easier. Asking more of candidates could end up wasting both parties’ time and excluding potential talent, she said.
“You have to be aware of biases that may arise during the interview process,” said Richardson, whose CoderPad clients include Spotify, LinkedIn and Lyft. “If you set up a process for a 12-hour take-home test, you automatically filter out people who have 12 hours to complete the take-home test. As a parent with two kids, that’s hard for me.” It may also exclude some very talented programmers. Therefore, CoderPad customers are strongly encouraged to limit their take-home testing time to between 90 minutes and two hours.
Richardson also encourages hiring and engineering managers to test candidates on collaboration issues in live coding tests, rather than simply observing how engineers work individually. This helps test what it would be like to actually work together if this person joined the company. Instead of asking candidates to build a sample product or solve an imaginary problem during the interview, Richardson recommends asking for real problems that teams within the company have already solved. “That way, when a candidate presents an idea, you can fast-forward through the complexity of it,” she says.
Richardson said there has been some adoption of her advice, but mainly smaller companies or companies outside of the core software business still compete for technical talent, such as in industries such as retail, manufacturing, biotech and financial services. Technical interviews are far from “fixed”, but she believes both job seekers and employers would benefit from better practices that can overcome “complex, cumbersome interview processes and find the right candidates”.