100 Interviews in 1 Year: Part I — The Data.

12 min readDec 12, 2023

In June 2022, after a messy acquisition, I decided to resign from my job and spend a few years on pursuing my passions at my own pace. Not a fully-fledged sabbatical, though, as I had quite a few hobby projects and faculty initiatives that demanded my attention.

Despite the break, I didn’t want to lose touch with the IT industry, and since I became highly interested in the current market situation, as it was the time of the greatest lay-offs in the past ten years, I decided to apply for a few job positions and investigate the market’s dynamics, as I did in 2013 and 2019.

It hooked me to such an extent that it eventually evolved into the greatest research I have ever conducted, lasting nearly a year. Between August 2022 and June 2023, I:

Applied for IT roles in 100 different companies — for various positions: senior developer, team lead, dev advocate, dev experience manager, business analyst, engineering lead.
Interacted with 847 recruiters.
Joined two companies for a short period of time, to get deeper insights into contrasting work cultures, namely: an ambitious GenZ startup (from September to December 2022), and a toxic corporate (from February to March 2023). Further details on these experiences will be uncovered in upcoming articles.

The results of this research are stunning. I’ve collected very interesting outputs, insights, even revelations.

This is the first of a series of articles where I would like to share my findings, with this one focusing on raw outputs and statistics.

Disclaimer: please note that data collected from 100 interviews is not enough for any statistical significancy. Had I applied for ten times more interviews, some numbers would probably be very different.

My Rules

Before diving in, I made a set of guidelines, consisting of several rules I tended to stick to. These rules helped me better categorize collected outputs.

I applied only for technical roles that aligned with my current tech-stack (JavaScript, C# and Flutter), and managerial positions I believed I could be qualified for.
The selection of companies was random (to some degree), using various job portals. Nearly half of the companies were domestic (Czechia).
I never lied about my background, my job experience, trainings, or education. However, in some cases, I chose not to be 100% honest regarding my opinions and attitude, so that I could test various responses.
To the companies that were worth the effort, I delivered objective feedback on the interview process.

That’s it. Now, let’s present the data! Unless specified otherwise, all percentages correspond to actual numbers, as I interviewed 100 companies. Wohohooo!

The Overall Candidate Experience

My experience as a candidate was a lot better than in 2013, yet it fell short of 2019. Back then, you could be hired to many companies just based on your potential, with mission discovery coming later. Now, most roles are tightly outlined, having limited options for customization.

A mere 16% of companies truly did their homework, meaning they checked my websites, YouTube channels, and even hobby projects. These companies made an important sign of care I’d like to write about in my next articles.

I have been interviewed by 100 companies:

I received 65 offers
I failed 16 interviews in the culture fit part
I failed 8 interviews in the technical part
5 interviews were cancelled after the final part due to unexpected budget-cuts
I haven’t completed 6 interviews due to various reasons

I’ve interacted with 847 recruiters in total. How many of them were really good? Let’s break it down:

There were 8 recruiters I’d hire, if I were running a company
I also enjoyed the interaction with 23 other recruiters
95 recruiters could benefit significantly from additional training
721 recruiters (85%) did, in my opinion, a very poor job

So, who were those 85%? They were mostly people who send you messages about random jobs with a very vague description, or even without any relevancy to your skills. I tried to give them as objective feedback as possible; however, after spending dozens of hours replying to over 40 recruiters, and not receiving a single reply back, I gave up.

It’s also important to mention that 23% of companies had no in-house recruitment team. The interview process was therefore managed by an external agency.

Countries of Origin

A applied for interviews in companies that were located in the following countries:

62% Czechia
12% Germany
14% USA
12% other countries (mainly EU — France, Netherlands, Sweden)

Comparing the interview process in various countries, several differences have been observed:

In many countries, it’s very common for the company to check your background thoroughly (76% in the USA, and 42% in Germany). In Czechia, nobody really cared to verify what I put on my resumé.
Asking for referrals is also quite common (43% in Germany, 37% in the USA). In Czechia, nobody asked me for any referrals.
74% of interviews where I failed in the culture fit part were from the USA. Probably due to the fact that the culture fit part had much higher significance — some rounds were conducted as roundtable interviews, with 3+ people present, asking a lot of questions, both behavioral and hypothetical.
Regarding the list of requirements, posts from American companies were quite often filled with buzzwords and god-like requirements (words like enhance, empower, leverage, foster, customer-obsessed, deadline-driven, innovative), while German companies were significantly more specific with the numbers (X years of experience, leading a team of at least X people, experience with a project that had X budget).

Offer vs Market Value

Since the companies were from many countries and cities, with significant market differences, I compared the final offer based on the market value I obtained from the Glassdoor portal.

5% of companies gave me an offer high above the market value (+30%).
12% of companies gave me an offer slightly above the market value (10–30%).
46% of companies gave me an offer roughly the market value (-10–10%).
27% of companies gave me an offer slightly under the market value (-10 — -30%).
10% of companies gave me an offer significantly under the market value (less than -30%).
4% of companies offered me more than what I asked for.
17% of companies offered me less than what I asked for (sometimes it was just a few percent, probably for the sake of a forced win-win outcome).
The lowest offer came from a feature factory that employed students and fresh graduates.
The highest offer came from a small yet well-founded company that aimed to build up their dev community and introduce employee experience practices.
The longest interview was with a Swedish fintech company — 6 rounds, 3 technical tasks (including graph theory and an IQ test), and one culture-fit round with quite an arrogant team lead (behavioral questions following the STAR scheme). The offer was 15% below the market value. Duh!
The most time-consuming interview took 46 hours (two homework assignments, a workshop, and a trial day within the company). Never more!
The fastest interview was a short call with the CEO who needed a consultant for internal processes. The offer was the third highest.

Were did the highest offers come from? In all cases, they came from companies that needed very specific expertise, even without having an open job position for that.

If you strike up a conversation about something the company desperately needs, but they aren’t aware of it yet, it opens a door for very favorable negotiation.

Other observations:

Offers from small yet well-founded companies were the highest.
Start-ups, on average, offered slightly below the market value.
Software houses offered slightly less pay than product-oriented companies, and non-IT companies that had their own IT department offered the least (not in all cases, though).

The main take-away: the harder the interview, the lower the offer. There were many exceptions, though, yet I could conclude that this pattern was prevalent.

The Requirements vs Responsibilities

There were two negative patterns I’ve noticed:

Companies looking for god-like engineers who will eventually be merely gluing React components (I’ve come across several entry positions requiring 5+ years ofexperience).
Companies searching for super-heroes who would manage the workload of an entire department.

37% of companies had expectations that couldn’t be met within a 40-hour timeframe.
76% of companies had requirements that surpassed the responsibilities (for instance, requiring PostgreSQL and Mongo knowledge for a front-end developer who barely touches the API).
16% of companies required university education, although many times there was no reason for it (e.g., companies managing e-shops).

“We will pay you less because you don’t know stuff you won’t even need here.”

Culture Fit Interview

64% of companies conducted a culture-fit round. Sometimes, it was managed by the recruiter, at other times, it took the form of a round-table interview where people from the management were present, asking various questions. In some cases, the people looked like they could benefit from some additional training to run such an interview.

The best interview is the one where you don’t even feel like you are being interviewed. Because only then you really open up and engage in a spontaneous conversation, providing valuable outputs to the interviewer without even noticing it. Even technical rounds can be managed this way, but this takes some extra effort.

Sometimes, I received behavioral questions following the STAR schema, such as:

Tell me what negative things your colleagues would say about you?
Tell me about a time when you tried to initiate something and it failed?
Tell me about a case when you had to take over a complex project

Sometimes I received hypothetical questions (which is actually a very bad sign):

What would you do if your manager told you that your vacation needs to be cancelled due to an unexpected priority change?
What would you do if you found out that your colleague is faking their booked time on the project?
How would you react if the QA department re-assigned a delivered feature to you for the third time?

And sometimes, the questions made no sense:

What is your opinion on overtime?
Do you have a mortgage?
What was your salary in your past job?

There were also some very good questions I was asked:

What is your super power?
What would you like NOT to do?
How you think this company could help you achieve your dreams?

I’m glad to note that the question “Where do you see yourself in 5 years” was never asked.

Technical Interview

An interesting fact is that the most of the things that got me past the tech rounds were knowledge I learned just a few weeks prior. This simply means that most interviews don’t test how skilled you are but how prepared you are. It’s like a school exam.

12% of rounds contained questions from graph theory and algorithms. I have a specific opinion on this one — yes, I have worked on several projects that DID require this knowledge. However, I would never list it among the primary requirements.
38% of companies gave me a homework to solve (time consumption ranged from 2 to 18 hours).
22% of rounds were just technical questions with no live coding.
6% of rounds were about trying to implement a real task on their product (which is something I’d definitely recommend).
26% of rounds involved simple live coding.

Homework was something I feared the most. If I applied to five companies at once, and everyone gave me a homework, I would have a hell of a busy week ahead.

The fastest and smoothest technical rounds were a combination of live coding on short tasks, and a technical discussion over some of my hobby projects, because I had the benefit of showing the best of what I’ve ever done, how did I plan for it, how did I manage it, etc.

Remaining Data

Integrity, Values, Order

78% of companies had company values.
9% of companies who had values, had at least one value associated with customer obsession.
34% of companies were able to clearly explain to me their objectives for the next quarter.
13% of companies had OKRs, KPIs, SMART goals, or other internal goal-setting frameworks.
6% of companies had dress-code guidelines.
12% of companies either utilized or were interested in gamification.
44% of companies followed agile practices, yet 87% of them demonstrated negative patterns (a scrum master who was also a product owner, new features in the middle of the sprint, estimation in man days, and the like).
33% of companies had all-hands meetings or status updates.
26% of companies had a clear delivery pipeline.
67% of companies admitted to Friday releases.
22% of companies didn’t handle their technical debt (refactoring) on a regular basis.
19% of companies claimed that they didn’t do automated testing.

Company Teamwork and Culture

17% of companies offered the possibility to pick up my own team (2% used Belbin theory, 3% took MBTI indicators into consideration).
77% of companies had team-building events at least twice a year.
35% of companies had Halloween parties.
83% of companies had Christmas parties.
6% of companies had off-site trips.
12% of companies had pulse surveys.
19% of companies utilized 360-degree feedbacks.
28% of companies utilized performance reviews.

Benefits

Nowadays, almost every company offers refreshment, free drinks and gym cards, but there are even more practical things that are not very often listed, such as the possibility to have a parking spot.

12% of companies offered a parking place.
22% of companies offered the possibility to have a sleepover in the office.
95% of companies provided free coffee.
3% of companies provided free lunch.
78% of companies offered occasional refreshment (mainly weekly breakfast).
17% of companies offered stock options.
3% of companies offered unlimited vacation.
77% of companies had a budget for internal training and self-development.

What does it mean when a company doesn’t have a budget for internal training? That employees are expected to learn new things in their free time. This works in an environment full of youngsters who read IT news while taking a shower, excited to try out brand-new technologies once they get home. However, it’s not sustainable in the long run.

Toxic Environments

I’d like to discuss red flags and toxic companies in a separate article. For now, I can conclude that I evaluated 32% of companies as having a toxic workplace, or demonstrating behavior that resembled a toxic workplace.

Management Structure

Even a flat hierarchical structure is a hierarchical structure. I’ve been always attracted to meritocratic and holacratic companies, where employees are organized according to their skills and interests, rather than job titles.

68% of companies had hierarchical title-based structure.
25% of companies had a mixture of hierarchical and holacratic structure.
6% of companies had (at least according to my limited data) autocratic structure.
1% of companies (just one company) claimed that they had holacratic structure.

Home Office

2% of companies didn’t allow home-office (both were state institutions)
35% of companies offered unlimited home office (mostly claiming that it depends on the agreement within the team).
27% of companies offered a full remote option.

Full-time, Half-time

86% of companies offered only full-time.
14% of companies offered part-time (mostly 4/5).

To Conclude

It was really a tough job to pull that off. Although I haven’t found a company that would bring me to the excitement level I was looking for, I joined two companies for a short time to get insights into contrasting working cultures. But this is going to be discussed in upcoming articles.

In the next article, we are going to uncover some tips and tricks for people who are looking for a job — how to recognize toxic environments, what are the most common red flags, and how to properly negotiate an offer. Stay tuned!