Made to exhaust you #2
Today I had the third interview or informal talk, nothing special, just to get to know each other, with one of the 3 co-founders of a startup I got a referral to via an acquaintance.
Everything is very informal, light, and friendly. The CEO is probably between 5-6 years younger than me and is taking the call with his earphones from his phone. He was walking around the room, his tone and upbeat demeanor were the first things that caught my eye. He spoke fast and unstructuredly, in quick sentences.
They had recently raised a second investment round and wanted to expand the team. He said he enjoyed talking to me. He also explained they wanted to move fast because they valued their prospect's time and didn't want to waste neither theirs nor ours.
The next step was for me to be contacted by them in at most 2 days. It was after 5 days of cricket noise that I decided to ask for some feedback about the interview process. The CEO apologized and set me up for another interview with their CTO to meet him, see how we vibed and such.
The interview with their CTO was cordial and uneventful, with an absence of technical questions. As a matter of fact, 3 weeks have passed since this interview and I don't remember anything about it other than talking to him.
Once the time for our interview was up, he proposed that I join their Head of Engineering, the person in charge of refactoring their application for it to be able to scale it up to the volume of users and queries they were growing into.
I got contacted around 1 week afterward and had a call with him. An amazing technical guy, he had extensive experience in scaling distributed systems and high availability. The conversation revolved around technical topics and ranting about tools & software that didn't work for us, it was a nice experience overall.
He proposed that I solve a technical task to gauge my knowledge of the kind of problems the job entailed and evaluate how I structured my code. He mentioned I would be doing a new exercise because he wasn't convinced of the current coding exercise they had in the company. So I was about to become a guinea pig for the interview 😅.
Two days later I reached out back to them and received the coding challenge that, while relatively easy, had me working out the whole structure of a multi-container docker project (API, crawler, DB, testing) so I had not only to implement the problem's solution but the boilerplate as well. Despite the task not being particularly challenging, I spend 3/4 of the time working on the minor things with dependency management, docker image issues, and overall silly mistakes one makes while bootstrapping a project. It took me several hours to check all the boxes so the project was good to go. Again, not particularly challenging, but it was a lot of grunt work, all because the interviewer hadn't quite estimated how long the exercise could take me.
Finally, when it came to defend my project in front of the interviewer, the conversation took a detour and we touched other technical topics more related to the job advertised. It was enriching but I couldn't avoid feeling like I had spent a lot of unnecessary time programming for a job that didn't have a direct correlation with the exercise.
I know the interview process is broken, but there has to be something else. The market is experiencing a downturn for awhile, and unless it is a hair on fire situation, interviewing and hiring will be postponed until the team that is carrying the workload reaches their throughput and the whole project is in dire straits.
But also, it might be that some of these endless interviews serve a purpose of making the candidate feel exhausted and incur in the Sunk Cost Fallacy after so many hoops they had to go through to arrive at the mythical job offer.
We can do better!