I just finished a preliminary interview for a medium sized engineering company. The interviewer was impressed with my background and asked to proceed with my candidacy but wanted four additional rounds of interviews and a 30 minute technical presentation about how I solved a problem. I turned them down and said I don’t work for free, the amount of time it would take to gather my notes and thoughts on a slide deck would be too much. She quickly soured and we ended the call soon after. I feel like I dodged a bullet going through a gauntlet of work for the high chance of ending up with nothing.
What are Lemmy’s thoughts on preparing presentations for lengthy job interview processes? Would you have considered going through with it?
Over my career I’ve applied for several faculty, research faculty, and research scientist positions, and they always asked for a presentation. I would consider it a red flag if they did not ask for a presentation. I always had 4+ interview sessions with individuals or in groups.
Earlier in my career I interviewed for programmer positions and it was just interviews and “solve this problem on the board”. I always figured the more interviews the better; it gave me a chance to figure out if I myself wanted to be at the place.
Respectfully, I think it was OK for them to ask for that kind of presentation. They probably wanted to see how well you are at communicating technical ideas. It shouldn’t have been that hard anyway. Just think of the hardest problems you had to solve. The structure of your talk could be: Problem, Solution, Details. First just say here’s the problem and why it was important and why it was difficult. Then say: here’s the solution that I applied and why it was clever, or elegant, or hard-won. Then provide all the details, including how you collaborated with people. Really, you should have several examples like that in mind every time you go into an interview, and make sure to insert them in the conversation. So the slides are just reminders to yourself about the details. Try to throw in some graphs and pictures if you can. You can put that in your portfolio or online presence or something.
Maybe you should draw the line at solving THEIR problems for free. A little bit of that is OK bc it introduces you to what their work is like, but obviously if they want you to work for them for free all day, then that’s different.