Earlier quoted context omitted.
> people put too much effort > spend a reasonable time like a month Spending a month on interview training is exactly what I would consider unreasonable effort. Here's a scenario – I have worked at big tech company A for a decade writing backend code. Big tech company B has many openings for senior backend coders, and is desperate to fill them. B's recruiters are hounding me every day to consider a switch. The job lo…
Have you ever ran interviews? I have, and there's an incredibly wide range of candidates, all of whom with fantastic pedigrees, but some of whom are completely incapable of demonstrating their problem-solving ability. Likewise, some candidates have poor pedigrees, but make it clear to me that they can think, communicate, and code. I'm not saying that some of my rejections can't do that. But I can't measure what I did…
I've interviewed four digits worth of candidates, under different rubrics and different expected difficulty levels, and all the good I can say about the modern interview is that at least it tends to crib out the people that can't write code at all, at least if you are making sure nobody is feeding them answers. But can I say that interview performance with me, and how well I rated the person's work when they were hired and ended up working close enough to me, had much to do with each other? I don't think so.
That's why, when working at a small enough place I have some control over the interviewing process, I'll offer options to the candidate, and dedicate far more time to the process than I would in a large software firm. It's OK to just raise the technical bar enormously when you are offering the best salaries in the market, and you can expect to never run out of candidates. But when you are not competitive, you have to do something to find great candidates that don't look wonderful in a FAANG style interview format, but will be very good in practice anyway.