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The Last Technical Interview

steve-yegge.medium.com

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Re: The Last Technical Interview

#281

Post by kasey_junk »

tptacek wrote: post #181
esafak wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Provisional employment only makes sense if you work remotely and have full benefits (esp. healthcare). Moving is costly.

A committed or indefinite term of employment is itself a benefit, so if you're going to work on a temporary basis you should expect contractor returns, not FTE comp; revise your baseline up 150%-200%. Nobody does this, of course, but then provisional employment is a silly idea to begin with.

It has to be more than that. 150-200 is what your rate is _if you have a pipeline for more work_. If you don’t, you need to account for building the pipeline. So if a non-contract job wants me to work like a contractor, they have to account for the risk they’ve asked me to assume.

FWIW I came up with a provisional employment scheme that I thought would work at a job where I was responsible for hiring pipelines. It involved making an annual bonus (in an industry that was bonus driven) garaunteed and accelerating it so it was 50% sign on bonus and 50% delivered at 6 months. The company balked. Because provisional screening is a very good mechanism. Its must more expensive than hire and fire, at least on paper.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#282

Post by [deleted] »

danieltanfh95 wrote: post #270
socratic_weeb wrote: post #64

The industry should get down from its egocentric ivory tower and start hiring like other industries. You are not special, tech. Just have a sort of bar exam you have to take every x amount of years. The actual interview should just be an in-person behavioral one, with your future boss. Period. Don't get enough signal from that? Sorry, that's life, taking risks. Imagine trying to open a business without taking risks,…

This is why we need interviews to filter off people who are bad enough to think "bar exam" is the right abstraction for software engineer.

[deleted]

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#284

Post by woeirua »

em-bee wrote: post #26
andrewstuart wrote: post #12

Steve Yegge is one of my very favorite authors I love his work. But lots of things to say here. FIRST - is that before you get to campfire anyone, you have to have done some sort of interview process to boil it down to the one person to do the campfire - so how does that work eh? SECOND - campfire is deeply invasive to the candidate's life and time. THIRD - you have to pretty damn sure someone is a hire before doing…

You CANNOT do campfire as an evaluation step why not? to expensive? candidates don't have the time? i'd love to do that because it also gives me insights into the company. how they work, etc... I can tell you how to recruit people why is interviewing broken then? You TALK to people about software development didn't we try that and find out that the sweet-talkers master this and are able to fool everyone? or didn't we…

How are you going to do a campfire while gainfully employed? Job hopping becomes way harder in this world.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#285

Post by em-bee »

woeirua wrote: post #284
em-bee wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You CANNOT do campfire as an evaluation step why not? to expensive? candidates don't have the time? i'd love to do that because it also gives me insights into the company. how they work, etc... I can tell you how to recruit people why is interviewing broken then? You TALK to people about software development didn't we try that and find out that the sweet-talkers master this and are able to fool everyone? or didn't we…

How are you going to do a campfire while gainfully employed? Job hopping becomes way harder in this world.

take a few days off. ok, in the US with only two weeks yearly vacation that is a bit harder. so this mostly works for people who are already out of work. but i don't think that's a downside.

these days there are so many people being laid off that you still get a large selection of potentially good candidates, also, for someone who has been out of work for some time i would like to test them more intensively. in fact from a social standpoint i should optimize hiring for people who don't already have a job.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#286

Post by The_Fox »

tptacek wrote: post #180
esafak wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you are talking to them face to face; over the phone they will use AI with speech recognition and parrot its response, erasing all signal. Then the interview becomes all about AI detection.

I've been hearing these kinds of things since 2014 (when I wrote a long post about the work sample process we had used at Matasano). I've been hiring continuously since 2008, so 18 years, and in that entire time I have never come close to hiring a scammer. It might be a more salient concern now, in the era of AI agents, and we are much warier today than I was at Matasano, but generally I think this risk is more talke…

I read that post back in the day and have remembered it ever since, and used it as a basis for the process at my current employment. Thank you!

(For those interested: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/)

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#287

Post by libraryofbabel »

jb1991 wrote: post #73
shoopadoop wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an obstacle when hiring people who are currently enjoying stable employment. Probably fine for juniors, but not for experienced people with families and whatnot.

That is directly addressed in the article.

Where? Please point it out! All he says is there will be more desperate people on the market in future and because they're desperate they'll have to accept trial work. But that's not answering the objection that people who do still have stable jobs in that world won't want to interview at your company if you require them to do a stint of trial work first. And those people include a lot of desirable candidates.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#289

Post by cherry_tree »

QuiEgo wrote: post #265
cherry_tree wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most places? Are you a human? Have you been to the United States? Do you genuinely think McDonald’s is building a months long case against a fry cook? That Amazon is building a months long case against a delivery driver or warehouse worker who refused to pee in a bottle? That target is putting a cashier on a pip for months and allowing lost sales or theft?

The article is about tech interviews (and tech workers with the resources to sue), not McDonald’s or blue collar? And yes, I’m human? Strange comment internet stranger.

It isn’t strange in 2026 to wonder if an internet comment is from a human.

Tech workers have been laid off (without pips) en masse for the past 24 months, so it seems like I’m talking to a model trained in 2023 to be so absent of the obvious facts around us in the industry.

That’s why I ask. Because you’re either not in the industry and talking bullshit, not paying attention to the world around you, or a bot.

Re: The Last Technical Interview

#290

Post by QuiEgo »

cherry_tree wrote: post #289
QuiEgo wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is about tech interviews (and tech workers with the resources to sue), not McDonald’s or blue collar? And yes, I’m human? Strange comment internet stranger.

It isn’t strange in 2026 to wonder if an internet comment is from a human. Tech workers have been laid off (without pips) en masse for the past 24 months, so it seems like I’m talking to a model trained in 2023 to be so absent of the obvious facts around us in the industry. That’s why I ask. Because you’re either not in the industry and talking bullshit, not paying attention to the world around you, or a bot.

The comment chain is about firing people for cause (performance issues), not layoffs.

You seem determined to feel attacked ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

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