Tech Job Interviews Are Out of Control

Tech companies are famous for coddling their workers, but after mass layoffs the industry's culture has shifted. Engineers say that getting hired can require days of work on unpaid assignments.

In 2022, feeling burned out by the pandemic and a five-year sprint at a cloud storage company, Catherine decided it was time for a break.

Catherine, who uses the pronouns they/them and asked that their full name be withheld due to the sensitive nature of job hunting, had adequate savings and a partner with health insurance. So Catherine spent five months hiking the 2,650 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. By the end of 2023, they were ready to look for another software engineering job. But the hunt for work proved harder than the hike.

In one recent interview, Catherine was given a take-home assignment: Build a desktop app from scratch, connect it to a mock-up of a backend system, and provide extensive documentation of each step. After spending the entire day coding and still not completing the task, they withdrew their job application. “If the company had asked me to add a new feature to an app in that time frame, that would have made more sense,” Catherine says. “I thought, maybe this is a sign.”

It was a sign—of how the tech industry has made technical interviews more punishing, part of a wider pullback from Silicon Valley’s famously coder-friendly culture. After pandemic hiring sprees, tech companies reversed course in 2022 as interest rates began to rise, making sweeping layoffs and cuts to office perks. Now managers have turned the hiring process for technical roles into more of a gauntlet. Long gone are the days of Google HR managers prompting candidates with clever brain teasers and Silicon Valley engineers easily landing jobs with six-figure starting salaries.

Nearly a dozen engineers, hiring managers, and entrepreneurs who spoke with WIRED describe an environment in which technical job applicants are being put through the wringer. Take-home coding tests used to be rare, deployed only if an employer needed to be further convinced. Now interviewees are regularly given projects described as requiring just two to three hours that instead take days of work.

Live-coding exercises are also more intense, industry insiders say. One job seeker described an experience where an engineering manager said during an interview, “OK, we’re going to build a To Do List app right now,” a process that might normally take weeks.

Emails reviewed by WIRED showed that in one interview for an engineering role at Netflix, a technical recruiter requested that a job candidate submit a three-page project evaluation within 48 hours—all before the first round of interviews. A Netflix spokesperson said the process is different for each role and otherwise declined to comment. A similar email at Snap outlined a six-part interview process for a potential engineering candidate, with each part lasting an hour. A company spokesperson says its interview process hasn’t changed as a result of labor market changes.

“The balance of power has shifted back to employers, which has resulted in hiring getting tougher,” says Laszlo Bock, who ran hiring at Google as SVP of people operations for 10 years and is now an adviser at the venture capital firm General Catalyst.

Bock says the shift is partly due to mass layoffs; employers are more able to flex their muscles in a tighter labor market. But there’s also a broader psychological shift. “After years of tech workers being pampered, of ‘bring your whole selves to work’ and ‘work from anywhere,’ executives are now overcompensating in the other direction,” he says.

The upshot for job-seeking coders is confusion, culture shock, and hours of work done for free. Buzz Andersen, who has held engineering roles at Apple, Square, and Tumblr, recently hit the job market again. He noted on Threads last month, “Tech industry job interviews have, of late, reached a new level of absurdity.”

Coding Olympics

Last year an estimated 260,000 workers were let go across 1,189 tech companies, according to a live-update layoff tracker called Layoffs.fyi. And the layoffs have continued into 2024, forcing a glut of talent into an already competitive market. An estimated 41,000 tech workers have been laid off so far this year.

Of course, not all of the tech workers losing their jobs are engineers. Engineers are often still seen as a privileged class within tech companies and the wider economy. Typically they’re the highest-paying class of workers below the C-suite in tech companies. Aline Lerner, who runs a popular interviewing practice platform called Interviewing.io, believes that the total number of engineering layoffs last year was closer to 15,000.

Data from Interviewing.io backs up job seekers’ claims that the bar for technical interviewing has gotten quantifiably higher.

Interviewing.io connects people willing to pay $225 or more for interview practice with experienced hiring managers. These managers conduct mock interviews and then provide detailed feedback. Over the past eight years Lerner’s company has recorded thousands of grades from these encounters. Interview subjects are graded not just on their technical interviews, but also behavioral interviews, which focus on problem-solving and communication.

Since 2022, scoring a “thumbs up” on a technical interview has gotten more difficult by an estimated 22 percent, Lerner says. “It’s a very very clear trend,” she says. “And it’s not just interviews at a few Big Tech companies. It’s happening across many tech companies.”

On the app Blind, an anonymous gossip app where the truth might be elastic but industry trends often emerge, some tech workers say interviews feel “practically impossible.” One user wrote in early February that the bar for getting hired at one of the Big Tech firms is “two LeetCode medium/hard [tests] within 40 minutes and most of my friends failed,” referring to an oft-used online programming platform.

Another worker complained on Blind that preparing for LeetCode questions requires “hundreds of hours” of preparation: “Why are we expected to do the coding Olympics for every company that wants to interview you?” An engineer who became a manager at Dropbox and is now a director in the telecom industry tells WIRED that in his own past job hunting experience, he felt compelled to collect and write over 100 pages of coding material and potential questions before interviews.

For some people trying to hire tech talent, thoroughly probing potential hires can feel like a necessity no matter what the labor market looks like. “Each hire is crucial to us. We only have 14 people,” says Jessica Powell, a former Googler who is now CEO of AI startup AudioShake.

But for candidates being asked to prove their coding prowess over and over again in interviews, the process can start to feel like it’s missing the point. “The analogy I use is, if you were trying to hire a brain surgeon—not that what we’re doing is brain surgery—you would want someone who is a proven specialist in their field,” says Buzz Andersen. “You wouldn’t spend your interview time quizzing someone on the chemistry they studied in their first year of college.”

Artificial Assistance

Tech hiring—like so much else in the industry—has also been transformed by the recent generative AI boom. People who specialize in the field are in more demand than ever, but sometimes at the expense of engineers who aren’t as skilled in this area. AI techniques are increasingly being applied to areas where machine learning wasn’t previously relevant.

“Data scientists now get hired to do much of the work that in the past engineers were hired to do, in part because there’s real overlap in the skill sets,” Bock, the former Google SVP, says.

Unsurprisingly, job seekers are now using AI to turbocharge their search for work—and even cheat in interviews. Last fall, a TikTok video with over 100,000 likes showcased how a job candidate with “zero knowledge using AI” could read directly from a ChatGPT-generated script during a video interview for an engineering role. In another video posted on YouTube, a programmer shows off a ChatGPT browser extension that helps someone quickly respond to an interview question about whether Javascript is a single-threaded language or a multi-threaded one.

These hacks could force tech companies to reevaluate their interview processes, Lerner of Interviewing.io says. The team at Interviewing.io published the results of an experiment they recently conducted on interviewees using ChatGPT during live coding tests. The mock interviewers were not told that ChatGPT would be used, while the interview subjects were given explicit instructions to use ChatGPT for sets of LeetCode questions, as well as some custom questions. (Interviewing.io does not record video during its mock interviews, for privacy reasons.)

Out of 32 interviews included in the final results, not a single person on the interviewing end was able to suss out that the person on the other end was using ChatGPT to “cheat.”

Lerner hopes the threat of AI will help force companies to rethink their approach to interviewing. “A lot of these tech companies are just reusing the same tactics over and over, and it’s gotten so ridiculous. It’s bad for the industry,” she says. “I think with the advent of ChatGPT, companies are going to have to move away from that and start asking more meaningful questions.”

Andersen, who most recently worked at a book club app called Fable, just landed a new job. He took a risk during his interview process and declined when the company asked him to complete tests on Coderpad, a testing platform like LeetCode. Fortunately, his new company was willing to do a face-to-face assessment with his new boss.

Catherine, the PCT hiker, has also decided they’re not prepared to waste time on burdensome interview assessments. Instead, they’re focusing on small companies that they think from the outset will be better suited to their skills. The competition for high-paying engineering jobs at “FAANG”-level companies is just too great. “I’ve been filtering really hard for smaller companies where the culture seemed good,” Catherine says.

They haven’t landed their next job yet, but have interviewed at three places. So far, they say, “the vibes are surprisingly good.”

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