We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

Now you've got to spend time optimizing your interviewing team. What if one guy just says yes to everything? He might as well not be there but he's still a weight in that decision. What about the opposite where he says No every time? When do you decide he is actually going to say No every time and not worth being part of that decision process?

The more people you put on this decision table, the lower the chances that any one candidate will make it through. But there's an opportunity cost of time/money to that, so you've got another thing to balance.

I think it would be really, really hard for one person to simultaneously impress 10 people beyond a doubt just because of how many people have to reach consensus. And can you imagine the stress of knowing one dude with a nitpicky attitude (that none of the others know about yet) could sink your chances?

While there's always some bias, I think it shifts quite a bit once you move from an artificial "interview environment" to a work environment.

Plus as has been said, since they candidates are working with the people they would be working if hired and that relationship doesn't work out, then maybe it's better to keep looking for someone else.

It is utter voodoo.

I came up in the late 80s. Interviews were maybe 2 hours long. You might be handed a piece of paper with a problem to aggregate some information distributed in a few different arrays and print them out. You know, write some for loops and a few logic statements.

Then you talked about the job. This is the job. Do you want to do it? What do you have to bring to us? Do you have a lot of experience and want to lead, or not a lot and want to learn - we'll adjust position and salary.

And you put a team together. Some were great, some were okay, some needed to be let go. In total, all sw people had a job.

Contrast that with today's voodoo, where proxies are weighed more than on the job performance (the only thing that matters).

In the end, you put a team together. Some are great, some are okay, some need to be let go. In total, all sw people have a job.

It's all exactly the same, except the absurdity of interviewing by proxies. It's simple logic - he average of everything is average. Why have we abandoned logic?

So many things matter more than remembering red-black trees from your midterm (I'm 49. I TA'ed a graduate level algorithms class back in the day, but I don't happen to remember it. That's what books are for). Like being able to run a project. Being able to write documentation. Being able to enter a room with a combative and upset client and keep the business. Being able to mentor your colleagues. Taking ownership. Leading by example. Ability to learn. So many things that are not even discussed in the current interview environment.

I've watched companies spin their wheels for months, rejecting perfectly good people, looking for that mythical person with exactly the right, esoteric combination of skills, who, for some unknown reason, wants to stall their career and get hired into a position where they learn nothing because they are expected to know everything already. People that are eager to learn? No, sorry, not rock-star material. All these prior successes mean nothing, no one could possibly learn a technology or new algorithm, right? And, more than once I've had people get downright snide about it. I'm sorry that you misread my resume, contacted me, and I didn't have that absurdly specific combination of skills. My fault, right?

Y'all have lost your minds. :) Which is okay, we're an eccentric bunch, but jeez, let's inject some reason and introspection into it. The faces are different, but the talent is no different than the 70s and 80s. There's zero evidence that any of these interview techniques are reliable. There's tons of evidence that interview techniques are horribly biased in many ways. Just stop.