if you've ever been through a Meta loop (and their method is to cast an extremely wide net, so chances are you have), you've seen how inefficient their loop can be for long term success
6-7 38* minute interviews, while the interviewee is trying to squeeze in showcasing their skills and experience, the interviewer is obsessed with figuring out a rigid set of pre-determined "signals"
Once these candidates actually start work, their success in the team is a complete coinflip
* 38 minutes = 45 minute scheduled - 2 minute intro - 5 minute saved for candidate questions at the end
That wasn't my experience at all. I had a recruiter screen where she asked me some technical questions. I then had a longer discussion, then a code screen, then an arch-deep-dive. The entire process was very professional and EVERY person came off like they really wanted me to succeed. (Sure it's an act but it's a very helpful act when you're in the hot seat)
My intervews were in 20202/2021. Perhaps things have changed?
Things have changed. I worked with a very senior and professional recruiter at FB during that time. While things didn't work out then, someone else reached maybe a year and a half ago for a fairly similar role -- massive difference, strictly a disposable drone style process and barely a conversation. I chose to not even start the process.
A sample size of one but many anecdotes together can make a trend.
I interviewed in the past 2 years and my experience matches the parent. Very professional and the interviewers were great to talk to. Same with Google.
Back in 2020, $META was desperate to hire. Nowadays the tide has turned and interview process shifted accordingly. They are super picky now, even for those who nail every stage of the interview, folks are still routinely passed over.
So let me ask this. What is the perfect mix of inerviews and durations?
If you ask my blue collar friends, the answer is one and however long it takes to drink three beers.
If you ask any married person, the onboarding process (courtship) may last YEARS and consist of many interviews (dates).
As an EM, ive always struggled with this one. Im about to invest some serious coin and brainspace for you, so I tended towards a max of 3-6 total hours and a takehome assignment.
As an IC, I preferred short and sweet. Heres my portfolio (github), heres my resume. Lets make this work. Maybe 1-2 hours; its not like we're getting married.
The happy place has to be in there somewhere. Whats your take?
I’ve never worked at big tech but the usual interview process I’ve seen is one initial phone call to check both sides are on the same page and it’s worth scheduling an interview. Then a technical interview, sometimes a take home task, then a non technical interview with management. There’s no reason you need longer than that.
The "usual" process in big tech is a recruiter call, 1-2 technical screening calls (sometimes an EM call), then the main series of 3-6 domain knowledge interviews are done over 1-2 days.
The latter are pretty grueling, especially when conducted on-site. Apple recommends you show up 1-2 hours ahead so you have enough time to get through security, for example.
That might be fine if they are offering incredible pay and conditions at a highly desirable company. But you get so many mid tier companies looking at Apple and Google and replicating their process without the pay or reason to put up with that process.
I just eject from the interview process when I hear it's going to be so many rounds because I know there will be another company that's just as good that will get it done with less.
At my last job we generally had 3 interviews beyond the initial screening. One was a coding challenge (1 hour with 45 really working on the challenge), one was an architecture discussion, and one was more of a culture fit and similar with the hiring manager.
It worked very well for us, I was a bit surprised with some of the red flags that showed up that I wouldn't have expected to be caught in the hiring rounds done at previous jobs.
Pilot at a major airline here: 1.5 hours of interviews with two people (recruiter and another pilot). Technical and HR-style questions, a personality test, no other homework.
Blood test, background check including all prior training records that are reported to the FAA.
Not a lot of work for the candidate in the interview, but it's easy to fail one too many training events or accumulate a violation and become radioactive.
While I cannot respond as a doctor, I can respond as an EMT. Totally different. But heres the deal.
The person who is the most important to you on the worst day of your life is the emt. The interview was literally "do you have a drivers license, and are you grossed out by stuff?" The rest you learned on the job.
Weird how doctors are vetted but prehospital folk are not.
edit yes there is training, but it happens after hire
Doctors are continually interviewed every time a patient gets pissed and sues them or files a board complaint. If there's any fault they're (very publicly) assigned remedial training or put on a PIP. They're also in incredibly high demand, so its often the doctor interviewing the practice.
If the interview is for becoming a partner at a practice, it's a two way courtship that's more reminiscent of other businesses looking for a co-owner.
Doctors also tend to hear about each other. Even in decent sized metro areas, they can often know who to avoid.
(This process isn't perfect, but it's still way different than for software.)
Pilots and doctors are exhaustively certified for a very narrow set of work. A cop gets a title, to perform a job that's identical in every part of the country.
Software development is neither exhaustively certified, nor narrow, nor perfectly transposable.
Developers want a 15 minutes interview, but also scream "Would you ask a builder if he has experience with blue hammers specifically?" when they get denied an interview because they do not have experience with the exact tech stack of a company.
Because that's how pilots and doctors work. They not only need to have experience with a blue hammer specifically, but it needs to be exact same make and model.
Imagine if a GP claimed to be neurosurgeon because they cured a headache. Developers get to call themselves fullstack the day they modify an API route.
My doctor probably thinks we software developers do a very narrow job. And she is kind of right, we always turn up with those back problems from sitting too much, or RSI or whatever. While doctors have all those medical specializations and different roles and employers.
Rigorous formal education, multiple rigorous exams, then years of shadowing and training. I went through this process, and tech interviews are a breeze by comparison.
That's presumably what he meant but the response is highly relevant nonetheless. Comparing credentialed and noncredentialed professions is apples to oranges here because the credentialed professions effectively consist of pools of prescreened candidates. Among those, MDs in particular have an absolutely grueling process before they can get started. Imagine if your surgeon (versus backend dev) was proud of being self taught.
The short interview time helps keeping the interview process focused on high signal questions/discussions. That is better than a 1h where 1/3 of the process is a bunch of soft balls.
What I don’t like about them is how “dry” and mechanical the interview feels
I believe they optimize for fairness and consistency. They interview a huge number of people from very different backgrounds so they need a standardized process. It's not perfect but I can understand the logic. And there's team matching phase if the candidate pass the interview, it's not a random allocation.
This was exactly my experience too. The interviewer seemed more focused on checking boxes on the grading rubric than actually understanding the design discussion. They barely engaged with alternative approaches.
The interviewer was also very hard for me to understand, which made the interview harder than it should have been.
I am ESL too, so this is not about someone’s background. The problem is communication in an interview where both sides need to understand each other clearly.
From what I have seen on Blind, others have had similar experiences.
Labubus peaking and falling doesnt really say much about scarcity and trends. Labubu is made by a public company, who's stock skyrocketed, and essentially decided to go all in and mass produce to meet the popularity
thats one option. But other companies sometimes choose to keep the scarcity and secrecy for years, even decades, and if they play their cards right it keeps working
Labubus fall is more about its makers decision to increase sales numbers instead of keeping them flat and generating more and more and more hype
Hermes can sell a $15,000 Birkin to everyone, im sure they can figure out the supply chain aspects if they really wanted to. and within a month everyone that wanted one would have one and sales would drop. Hermes will have a spike in sales, followed by a drop
Instead they force you to play years long games with their sales staff to get an opportunity to spend $15,000. And decades later people still opt in to spending thousands of dollars on plates and scarves hoping one day they will be offered one
This is just as true about a $40 Supreme, or Aime Leon Dore T-shirt, than it is for a $15,000 handbag. If you keep the scarcity going just right, it lasts much longer
That might be true of handbags, I am doubtful it is true of dolls. A handbag is a necessary accessory and has been for decades. The popular brands grew their way there slowly over many years. A company that explodes into popularity suddenly for a product people never knew they needed is likely to only stay in the spotlight for a short while and is best served taking advantage as best they can.
I agree that cashing in quickly before the fad faded was probably the right move for Labubu. However, there’s no world where Birkins (or other designer handbags) are a “necessary accessory”.
A handbag is necessary for many people to carry their thing. Whether they choose a more or less expensive item to fulfill that function is a separate question.
A lot of designer handbags are truly awful at carrying things. In practice they are primarily used as fashion accessory rather than as a functional bag.
True, but this does not particularly apply to the Birkin, which was famously created for the actress Jane Birkin after she complained to the CEO of Hermes that she couldn’t get a bag big enough to hold both scripts and baby diapers. Sure, it’s not as good at carrying things as a backpack, but it’s not bad either.
It does delight me no end to see a whole thread on handbags on HN. I agree with one of the parent posters though, handbags are an unusual category with long-lived brand status (like cars and watches) and not really comparable to lububus.
> which was famously created for the actress Jane Birkin after she complained to the CEO of Hermes that she couldn’t get a bag big enough to hold both scripts and baby diapers. Sure, it’s not as good at carrying things as a backpack, but it’s not bad either.
I checked this out and was amused to see that wikipedia notes:
> Birkin used the bag initially but later changed her mind because she was carrying too many things in it: "What's the use of having a second one?" she said laughingly. "You only need one and that busts your arm; they're bloody heavy. I'm going to have an operation for tendonitis in the shoulder".
In my experience it's pretty common to carry stuff in backpacks. They put a lot of weight on your spine, which can take it. Jane Birkin's comment reminded me of the idea in Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need that frequent travelers are always on the lookout for luggage that can hold more than it can actually hold.
I always found the birkin interesting because of how working class it looks versus its price tag. I grew up fairly poor, and the birkin bags always remind me of the leather purses my aunts, grandmothers, and teachers would carry.
This seems to occur in high fashion a lot, an upscale rendition of something popular among the working class.
It happens in fashion going both ways for a variety of reasons, though with fast fashion it's all so intermingled.
Many rock bands with working class roots "bring up" styles (like the newsboy cap), but also lower classes try and "look" upwards which can give us the nouveau riche clichés. Celebrities trying to hid their identity in public started to wear large sunglasses and suddenly everybody would start to wear them.
It's the primary reason why brands have become so important - fabric quality can vary, but jeans are otherwise just jeans; slap Gucci or Prada on it and suddenly you're signalling conspicuous consumption.
> This is just as true about a $40 Supreme, or Aime Leon Dore T-shirt, than it is for a $15,000 handbag.
According to a more fashion and design orientated friend of mine, you can buy knockoffs of Birkin or any other high-end bag. And, guess what? Some of those knockoffs and their manufacturers have developed a certain cachet, and actually sell for quite high prices. So of course, those have spawned knockoffs too.
It's like the bit in Pattern Recognition, isn't it?
There are whole subreddits devoted to this, the most well-known being repladies, which went private after it got too famous due to an NYT article. People will spend $1000 or more for a really good Birkin knockoff with high quality leather and hardware. The bags are almost all made in workshops in China. Getting one is apparently (I haven’t done it myself) an interesting exercise in trust and reputation: how do you know the seller isn’t going to send you a cheap knockoff from China rather than a “real” $1000 knockoff? In practice there is a whole world of trusted Chinese middlemen with reviews etc. who have a strong stake in keeping their reputation high in the “reps” community (but you’d better make sure the reviews are real…).
It's sad and petty I know, but if I were a billionaire edgelord like Elon Musk, rather than Twitter, I'd buy Hermes and sell their products in supermarkets. All the past limited editions too. Just to fuck with the kind of people who buy them.
Then again Hermes is worth 200 billion and upsetting an oligarch's sidechick might just get me killed so maybe not.
He probably couldn't buy it if he wanted. They built their stock structure to be resistant to takeover attempts and instead they are controlled by a family holding. I _guess_ if Musk slings his whole fortune at it he might get it, but unlikely. Hermes is a very interesting company, I recommend the Acquired episode on them, along with the one about LVMH.
All that would happen is the Birkin would lose its appeal and some other company would step in to fill the role, and people would empty their closets of orange boxes and fill them with some other colour box
Like, I get that you were referring to the fact that they keep things scarce even for rich people, but you literally said “everyone”, so I just gotta check: Are you saying that everyday people would be willing and able to spend $15000 on a luxury handbag?
The sale of new Birkin bags is famously invite-only. In that context, to "sell" to "everyone" means making the bag available for sale to everyone. "Anyone" would have been a less ambiguous word choice, but it's a minor grammatical issue and the meaning is still clear.
There was an implied ‘who is on the waiting list for a Birkin bag currently’ in ‘everyone’. They did not mean every single person on Earth, they meant Hermes could sell a Birkin bag to every interested buyer.
When sales are still growing YoY (like the post covid market), but prices are up 30% or 40%, you understand your customer is still willing to pay the higher price
Its similar to a McDonalds or Starbucks situation where you just keep increasing prices dramatically until you get a first quarter of lower than expected sales, then you start adapting downwards
Most corporations still haven't hit that limit, see streaming companies increasing prices every few months, they still haven't hit the point where profits decrease YoY. When they do the streaming prices start decreasing
They can do it because people are hopelessly addicted to screens.
You won't die if you stop watching Netflix. We aren't talking food or medicine here. In fact your life would probably improve. But addiction is a real animal.
I wish there were some term other than addiction here: addicts routinely steal from friends and family to feed their addiction; addicts who are parents sometimes threaten to stop allowing their children to visit with a grandparent unless the grandparent helps the addict pay for the addiction; drug addicts living in violent neighborhoods sometimes agree to murder somebody in exchange for drugs.
Screen addicts almost never stoop that low and the ones that do are addicted to a cam girl (e.g., Grant Amato), porn or gambling, not Netflix (or social media).
a company with 800 million weekly active users, and only losing $10B-$15B before implementing ads - which IMO is coming fast and soon to the LLM world - i would never calculate a 90% chance their shares end up at $0 before an exit option
This is the easiest money and best relationship JPM could imagine
Yahoo is a disingenuous parallel here. Yahoo lost because they didn't correctly embrace their market position in what's otherwise the very ripe industry of search engines. Search engines created the 4th most valuable company in the world (Google).
We don't know how ripe OpenAI's industry or market position is, yet. Yahoo knew what they had lost pretty early onto its spiral.
At least from what I noticed - Junie from Jetbrains was the first to use a very high quality to do list, and it quickly became my favorite
I haven't used it since it became paid, but back then Junie was slow and thoughtful, while Cursor was constantly re-writing files that worked fine, and Claude was somewhere in the middle
IIRC status pages drive customer compensation for downtime. Updating it is basically signing the check for their biggest customers, in most similar companies you need a very senior executive to approve the update
On the other side of this, Firebase probably doesn't have money at stake making the update
The status page is essentially an admission of guilt. It can require approval from the legal department and a high level official from the company to approve updating it and the verbiage used on the status page.
> It can require approval from the legal department and a high level official from the company to approve updating it and the verbiage used on the status page.
Is that true in this case or are you speculating? My company runs a cloud platform. Our strategy is to have outages happen as rarely as possible and to proactively offer rebates based on customer-measured downtime. I don't know why people would trust vendors that do otherwise.
I don't have any special knowledge about the companies involved in this outage. I do know most (all?) status pages for large companies have to be manually updated and not just anybody can do that. These things impact contracts, so you want to be really sure it is accurate and an actual outage (not just a monitor going off, possibly giving a false positive).
Inter alia, "is essentially", "it can", tell us this is just free-associating.
We should probably avoid punishing them based on free-associating made by a random not-anonymous not-Googler not-Xoogler account on HN. (disclaimer: xoogler)
Nah, its just some client side caching / JS stuff. Clicking the big refresh button fixed it for me, 15 minutes before OP noted it.
(n.b. as much as Google in aggregate is evil, they're smart evil. You can't avoid execs approving every outage because checks without some paper trail, and execs don't want to approve every outage, you'd have to rely on too many engineers and sales people, even as ex-employees, to keep it a secret. disclaimer: xoogler)
(EDIT: for posterity, we're discussing a "overall status" thing with a huge refresh button, right above a huge table chockful of orange triangles that indicate "One or more regions affected" - even when the "overall status" was green, the table was still full of orange and visible immediately underneath. My point being, you gotta suppose a wholeeee bunch of stuff to get to the point there was ever info suppressed, much less suppressed intentionally to avoid cutting checks)
6-7 38* minute interviews, while the interviewee is trying to squeeze in showcasing their skills and experience, the interviewer is obsessed with figuring out a rigid set of pre-determined "signals"
Once these candidates actually start work, their success in the team is a complete coinflip
* 38 minutes = 45 minute scheduled - 2 minute intro - 5 minute saved for candidate questions at the end
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