The Last Technical Interview

Post by pixelatedindex » Sat, May 30, 2026, 6:29 PM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #44

tptacek wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Provisional employment does not work. It requires candidates to leave their jobs before they know whether they have a secure job with your firm. I concede that provisional hires are higher-signal than work sample testing (or rather: that they're the platonic ideal of work sample testing), but the entire problem of hiring qualification is to make decisions in the context of a candidate doing a job search .

>> Provisional employment does not work. It requires candidates to leave their jobs before they know whether they have a secure job with your firm. It works. I’ve seen it in two different places. At the second one, the fundamental realization I came to was that it is virtually no different than “regular” employment, where the new employee can get fired for not meeting expectations within an arbitrary time period afte…

Post by pixelatedindex » Sat, May 30, 2026, 6:39 PM UTC

garretraziel wrote: post #175

jb1991 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was that this perspective is not lost on the author of that article, as he directly addresses it.

He addressed it as “job market is in such a bad shape, so perhaps even seniors won’t have any other option”, which might be true, but is sad nonetheless.

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS » Sat, May 30, 2026, 6:53 PM UTC

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #150

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. 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 doi…

Post by sowbug » Sat, May 30, 2026, 6:56 PM UTC

roxolotl wrote: post #5

sameers wrote: post #2

I couldn't find the text of this joke, attributed to Dirac. I'll paraphrase. A man walks into a pet store. There's a parrot for $100, it says this parrot speaks perfect English . The one next to it is $1,000, and says, This parrot speaks 12 languages fluently. Then there's a bedraggled looking, droopy, parrot, and its label simply says One Million Dollars. Does it sing opera and has successfully run for President? th…

There’s an old Malcom Gladwell podcast episode, I think the show was Revisionist History, where he says he’s an interview nihilist. As long as the person seems reasonably capable, and can probably do a bit of what you need, hire them. Interviews are so hard to get right that what you’re saying ends up being most effective. Edit: Didn’t link it initially because I thought it would be hard to find. Turns out it’s not.…

Post by esafak » Sat, May 30, 2026, 7:09 PM UTC

laserlight wrote: post #65

bitwize wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately from an organizational perspective, a bad hire could cause so much damage through incompetence let alone malice, that making no hire the default unless they're a perfect cinnamon roll of a fit, is actually a good strategy.

> a bad hire could cause so much damage through incompetence let alone malice The fact that an organization cannot deal with such a case is a bigger problem in the first place. Eliminating incompetence and malice is among the basic skills of an organization.