Deep data dives

The Eng Hiring Bar: What the hell is it?

By / December 7, 2022

Recursive Cactus has been working as a full-stack engineer at a well-known tech company for the past 5 years, but he’s now considering a career move. Over the past 6 months, Recursive Cactus (that’s his anonymous handle on interviewing.io) has been preparing himself to succeed in future interviews, dedicating as much as 20-30 hours/week plowing through LeetCode exercises, digesting algorithms textbooks, and of course, practicing interviews on our platform to benchmark his progress. Recursive Cactus’s typical weekday schedule Time Activity 6:30am – 7:00am Wake up 7:00am – 7:30am Meditate 7:30am – 9:30am Practice algorithmic questions 9:30am – 10:00am Commute to work 10:00am – 6:30pm Work 6:30pm – 7:00pm Commute from work 7:00pm – 7:30pm Hang …

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No engineer has ever sued a company because of constructive post-interview feedback. So why don’t employers do it?

By / February 16, 2021

One of the things that sucks most about technical interviews is that they’re a black box—candidates (usually) get told whether they made it to the next round, but they’re rarely told why they got the outcome that they did. Lack of feedback, or feedback that doesn’t come right away, isn’t just frustrating to candidates. It’s bad for business. We did a whole study on this. It turns out that candidates chronically underrate and overrate their technical interview performance, like so: Where this finding starts to get actionable is that there’s a statistically significant relationship between whether people think they did well in an interview and whether they’d want to work with you. In other words, …

No engineer has ever sued a company because of constructive post-interview feedback. So why don’t employers do it? Read more »

We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in eng hiring.

By / February 25, 2021

If you say the words “there’s a pipeline problem” to explain why we’ve failed to make meaningful progress toward gender parity in software engineering, you probably won’t make many friends (or many hires). The pipeline problem argument goes something like this: “There aren’t enough qualified women out there, so it’s not our fault if we don’t hire them.” Many people don’t like this reductive line of thinking because it ignores the growing body of research that points to unwelcoming environments that drive underrepresented talent out of tech: STEM in early education being unfriendly to children from underrepresented backgrounds, lack of a level playing field and unequal access to quality STEM education (see this study on …

We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in eng hiring. Read more »

You probably don’t factor in engineering time when calculating cost per hire. Here’s why you really should.

By / January 14, 2021

Whether you’re a recruiter yourself or an engineer who’s involved in hiring, you’ve probably heard of the following two recruiting-related metrics: time to hire and cost per hire. Indeed, these are THE two metrics that any self-respecting recruiting team will track. Time to hire is important because it lets you plan — if a given role has historically taken 3 months to fill, you’re going to act differently when you need to fill it again than if it takes 2 weeks. And, traditionally, cost per hire has been a planning tool as well — if you’re setting recruiting budgets for next year and have a headcount in mind, seeing what recruiting spent last year is …

You probably don’t factor in engineering time when calculating cost per hire. Here’s why you really should. Read more »

Can fake names create bias? An exploration into interviewing.io’s random name generator

By / January 14, 2021

Hello everyone, my name is Atomic Artichoke, and I’m the newest employee of the interviewing.io team, having joined a couple months ago as a Data Scientist. Atomic Artichoke isn’t my real name, of course. That’s the pseudonym the interviewing.io platform gave me, right before I took my final interview with the company. If you’ve never used interviewing.io before (and hey, if you haven’t already, why not sign up now?), it’s a platform where you can practice technical interviewing anonymously with experienced engineers (and do real job interviews anonymously too). When it’s time to interview, you and your partner meet in a collaborative coding environment with voice, text chat, and a whiteboard (check out recordings of …

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There is a real connection between technical interview performance and salary. Here’s the data.

By / January 20, 2021

At the end of the day, money is a huge driver for the decisions we make about what jobs to go after. In the past, we’ve written about how to negotiate your salary, and there are a lot of labor statistics and reports out there looking at salaries in the tech industry as a whole. But as with many things in eng hiring, there’s very little concrete data on whether technical interview performance plays a role in compensation offers. So we set out to gather the data and asked our users who had gone on to successfully get jobs after using our platform to share their salary info. With our unique dataset of real coding …

There is a real connection between technical interview performance and salary. Here’s the data. Read more »

Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women… and other findings from thousands of technical interviews

By / February 19, 2021

The modern technical interview is a rite of passage for software engineers and (hopefully!) the precursor to a great job. But it’s also a huge source of stress and endless questions for new candidates. Just searching “how do I prepare for a technical interview” turns up millions of Medium posts, coding bootcamp blogs, Quora discussions, and entire books. Despite all this conversation, people struggle to know how they’re even doing in interviews. In a previous post, we found that a surprisingly large number of interviewing.io’s users consistently underestimate their performance, making them more likely to drop out of the process and ultimately harder to hire. Now, and with considerably more data (over 10k interviews led …

Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women… and other findings from thousands of technical interviews Read more »