141–150 of 291 posts
If you want to know if someone is good at your company in 3-4 interviews, it’s tough, the best they can do is ask these technical questions. Talk to you about your past work, ask you technical what ifs. Most dumb ass companies will ask you to do trick coding leet code crap.
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> I gave the feedback at one Google interview that they should send Google employees through to see how many get hired. Good to see they basically tried that. They did, but not with the intention of doing anything about the problem. This is a question of reliability , the conceptual 'correlation' of a measurement instrument with itself when measuring the same thing. Reliability is one of two major concepts in psychom…
Serious question, tell me what you think of using IQ tests to hire SWEs? Should we just do that instead?
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All these objections rely on removing agency from the professionals applying for jobs. You look at the work sample. You use your professional judgement. You decide if it's reasonable to execute it to what you think a professional standard would be in the time allotted. You make a decision. This isn't a college application.
Why would you design a hiring process that scores unprofessional people (by your own definition) higher than professional ones?
The rest of this I'm not interested in. For as long as we've been talking about hiring processes on HN, there have always been staunch defenders of interviews. Lots of people have spent time getting good at them, there are classes on it, there are books, there are drilling exercises. I don't anticipate talking those people out of their investment in interviewing.
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- "This attracts strong candidates to you, because even your rejections are worth something to them." That's some solid gaslighting right there! You're right Steve, I would rather be rejected by your team than wasting my time by doing something positive with my career.
Yah this was the part that really threw me as well. "People would be pleased to have a rejection from us. They'd be proud to carry it sounds with them. Lucky them!" It's funny, I see an article from Yegge and thought "I like that writer, I haven't read any of his stuff in a while, I'll see what he has to say." Then got to the end and see the links to gas town and gas city and remembered it was the same Yegge that whi…
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2 anecdotes ... 1) The worst interview I ever had (BY FAR) was at Google--disrespectful people, no respect for time, I could go on and on. And I went back to try again to get that money showered on me. Worth it in the long run. 2) Their new system for "performance management" is a hoax. Just like at all other places, it "documents" what you should do so they can fire you more easily with unspoken rules and all sorts…
Oh I've had a terrible interview at Google too! They told me it was all about pseudocode and how I think in advance, then on the actual interview they were being annoying about variable names and spaces after comma, while I was supposed to come up with some clever optimisation that boiled down to: "do you know this obscure theorem already? Cool you pass"
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- "This attracts strong candidates to you, because even your rejections are worth something to them." That's some solid gaslighting right there! You're right Steve, I would rather be rejected by your team than wasting my time by doing something positive with my career.
I interviewed at Google last year and they said something similarly magnanimous: that they rejected people who wouldn't have been successful at Google and that the rejects actually thanked them for the wisdom. My eyes rolled all the way back in my head. I cancelled the rest of my loop and went to a different FAANG. When I sent the cancellation email I thanked the recruiter for sharing his wisdom.
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If you run an interview process where candidates who take 6-8 hours and claim to have taken 4 hours score highest, those are the candidates you will hire.
All these objections rely on removing agency from the professionals applying for jobs. You look at the work sample. You use your professional judgement. You decide if it's reasonable to execute it to what you think a professional standard would be in the time allotted. You make a decision. This isn't a college application.
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The only candidates who would be willing to sign up for that would be ones who were currently unemployed, and with the financial reserves to be able to risk being back out of work in 30/60/90 days. Given how arbitrary in terms of talent mass layoffs are, there are of course tons of highly qualified out-of-work candidates (and due to age discrimination, maybe some of the best/most-experienced ones!), so this certainly…
I was being facetious, sorry if that wasn’t clear. That’s just how Regular Employment works. You don’t even need to tell the employee the implications of being on the 90 day plan. You tell them up front what the expectations are for the role, and if they don’t meet them in 90 days, you fire them. Does not need to be more complicated than that. 30/60/90 is pretty standard stuff. It’s literally the documentation and ju…
In the US at least, firing people for cause is difficult to do. More likely you just wait for next RIF and include your low-performers on the list.
So, yes, this is business as usual to some extent, but it's not a very cost effective or efficient way of hiring. If you really have work that needs doing, then you want to hire someone able to do it, not have a haphazard hiring process where it's a crapshoot and "if they don't work out we'll just fire them in our annual RIF, and try again".