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My spiciest take on tech hiring

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Re: My spiciest take on tech hiring

#21

Post by dumbo-octopus »

sfblah wrote: post #12

If you want to see a weird process, apply for a dev role at Meta. They appear to optimize for people who have either memorized leetcode or are really good at cheating. I’m in their process as a pretty senior dev mostly on a lark (I hate the company). I’m pretty sure the only way I could get hired is to cheat. Why would they want to hire folks that way?

You misunderstood. They (Google too) are precisely interested in selecting for folks who love drilling on mundane tasks so much that they’ll willingly devote hours upon hours to doing that very grinding you might detest. Because that’s approximately what the next N years of their life will look like…

Re: My spiciest take on tech hiring

#22

Post by denkmoon »

throwawayUS9 wrote: post #20
CommieBobDole wrote: post #11

This is a mayonnaise-spicy take as far as I'm concerned, in the sense that I agree with it entirely. Once you've read someone's resume you should have a pretty good idea whether or not you want to hire them. The interview should confirm that they can discuss their relevant experience and address any potential concerns that you might have without raising red flags. Beyond that, if they have deep flaws that you didn't…

In the AI/ChatGPT world that we are in, cooking up a neat resume is not that hard. But I agree, you are going to interview someone who did at least that part good, and worked a little hard to prepare for it.

Cooking up a neat resume has never been hard. Templates, free advice, paid services, friends and colleagues existed well before GPT.

The hard part of a resume is having the experiences to talk about. Either you've got it, or you lie, that hasn't changed.

Re: My spiciest take on tech hiring

#23

Post by busterarm »

sublinear wrote: post #14
tptacek wrote: post #2

This is not a very spicy take. A spicier take is that you can hire people without administering any interviews at all. Hire like an orchestra: through an audition process, which, in a work setting, is also known as "work-sample testing". It works a treat.

I agree. If your organization has the resources for it, go contract-to-hire. 3 to 6 month contractor and then make your decision bringing them on as a full employee.

In practice this almost never happens. Most contract to hire roles don't appropriately pay you like you're a contractor (really should be at least 3x salary) and get worse/desperate candidates who will take an unsecure job with no benefits for 3-6 months.

Real human beings with real responsibilities are usually looking for fulltime work or they're running their own business and charging you for services.

Re: My spiciest take on tech hiring

#24

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

sublinear wrote: post #14
tptacek wrote: post #2

This is not a very spicy take. A spicier take is that you can hire people without administering any interviews at all. Hire like an orchestra: through an audition process, which, in a work setting, is also known as "work-sample testing". It works a treat.

I agree. If your organization has the resources for it, go contract-to-hire. 3 to 6 month contractor and then make your decision bringing them on as a full employee.

Similar to what is discussed in the article, this basically optimizes for the most desperate candidates who can't get a job straight out of the gate. For starters, very few people would leave a good, full time job for a contract-to-hire position.

Re: My spiciest take on tech hiring

#25

Post by dumbo-octopus »

sublinear wrote: post #14
tptacek wrote: post #2

This is not a very spicy take. A spicier take is that you can hire people without administering any interviews at all. Hire like an orchestra: through an audition process, which, in a work setting, is also known as "work-sample testing". It works a treat.

I agree. If your organization has the resources for it, go contract-to-hire. 3 to 6 month contractor and then make your decision bringing them on as a full employee.

How many talented folks in the field will accept that kind of job insecurity? If my offer is between 500k+ TC or “do work for us until we feel like commitment and maybe you’ll be on your ass in the street doing all this interview bullshit in 12 weeks; maybe you’ll get an offer better than the competition — but probably not because we’ll be in a position of negotiating strength knowing you probably don’t want to interview again”, I know damn well which one I’m taking.

Especially because I was given just that choice a few month back.

Re: My spiciest take on tech hiring

#26

Post by corimaith »

IMO, any strategy or attempt to filter out the "right" candidates can always be gamed that a change of culture is inevitable. Iron Law of Bureaucracy. You can delay it, but it will happen. Just look at Google today despite their massive investments in the hiring process.

I think if you really want to preserve your culture long term, you need to start looking to exporting your culture outwards into general society rather than filtering things in. Try to make the general candidate more like you in the first place.

Re: My spiciest take on tech hiring

#27

Post by LVB »

sfblah wrote: post #12

If you want to see a weird process, apply for a dev role at Meta. They appear to optimize for people who have either memorized leetcode or are really good at cheating. I’m in their process as a pretty senior dev mostly on a lark (I hate the company). I’m pretty sure the only way I could get hired is to cheat. Why would they want to hire folks that way?

I recently bailed on their process. My reward for passing the leetcode gantlet would be a 50% chance that the offer would require uprooting my family and moving across the country. Ok, we’re done.

Re: My spiciest take on tech hiring

#28

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

foobiekr wrote: post #18
tptacek wrote: post #2

This is not a very spicy take. A spicier take is that you can hire people without administering any interviews at all. Hire like an orchestra: through an audition process, which, in a work setting, is also known as "work-sample testing". It works a treat.

What senior person wants to do this?

That's the problem with so many attempts to "correct" hiring. Especially for more senior roles, the best people you want to hire usually already have jobs, or they have a pick among different companies. Make the hiring process too onerous and you end up selecting for the most desperate people.

I don't know how you'd get a good signal from a "work-sample test" in under a week or so, in which case you've basically weeded out most of the people you want to hire.

Re: My spiciest take on tech hiring

#29

Post by busterarm »

tptacek wrote: post #10
cageface wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you do this on-site? If not how are you sure they did the work?

Are we doing more spicy takes? I'll give you one: this is just not a thing. Unless you're operating at a very large scale, I think you can simply ignore this problem. If your team is at all well run, and your work-sample testing mirrors the team's work, it's not a very good scam to run: it'll be immediately obvious on the job. We thought we'd put some energy into this back in 2021, and we have yet to reach a point wh…

Maybe I am unlucky, but I've been working fulltime for almost 30 years and I can count the number of well-run teams that I've worked on or known people working on with exactly zero hands. And the management of 100% of them acted like they were the best company on Earth to work for.

I have _heard of_ great teams, but even the one person I knew who worked at Pivotal ended up there long after things went downhill culturally.

Re: My spiciest take on tech hiring

#30

Post by AstralStorm »

s17n wrote: post #19
glumreaper wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Addressed directly in TFA: "Drawing out the interview process is a thinly veiled attempt to launder this bias with a "neutral" process that they will likely disregard/overrule if it contradicts their personal preference. That doesn't mean that I think this sort of interviewing bias is good or acceptable, but I also don't think drawing out the interviewing process corrects for this bias either."

Yeah this part didn't make any sense to me - is he claiming that later interviewers will be heavily biased by talking to previous interviewers? If so, I think that's probably not as strong an effect as he's claiming, and its also easily correctable by just having interviewers not talk to each other. I do agree about the "you only need 15 minutes" part, but the solution there would seem to be replacing four hour long…

No, the latter interviewers share the same biases already.

Where do you get the varied interviewers really? Is it from the same biased hiring process?

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