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Comment by awinder | Hacker News Reader

On the rationality point, I've definitely been one to talk openly when asked about times I've failed / would have done something differently. I've looked at it as a no-loss scenario: if I'm talking with a company and they can't accept that no one is perfect, then I'd rather not work for that company anyways.

Interviewing in a sense is kinda like dating, one way to really screw things up is if you're both looking for different things. If you're both trying to get into a fling, then yeah I guess lie your pants off and have unreasonable expectations of each other. If you're looking for long-term match, just lay your cards on the table and if you match, you match.

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There is one rather big key difference in dating versus interviews. You only get once chance to find out _everything_ about a company during an interview. Whereas dating has many "meetings". This is the real problem with interviews. They're an all or nothing.

Dating only has many meetings if you don't tank the first one.

First dates are probably most analogous to phone interviews. It's a testing of the water. If you've met the barrier of entry, you'll probably make it to the next one unless there is no chemistry whatsoever.

Interviews are like blind dates, you need to be in the social circle to have an idea of what you're getting into before you go to the interview.

Many selective companies have many phone screens and coding projects, plus hours of on site interviewing. Google's process notoriously takes months. Some companies interviews likely take 10+ hours all in all. That's more like 3rd date territory in terms of hours spent together, and plenty of time to evaluate a hire, not some one shot thing.

Google's process consists essentially of 2 meetings - phone screen, and onsites. You don't get engaged to someone after the second or third date. It's not about hours spent, it's also about hours spent reflecting on the relationship.

So right here is the mysterious reason why perfectly qualified people don't get hired at Google - they didn't spend hours reflecting on the relationship!!!

Oh, so that's why.

Here I thought it was their high false negative rate. I should have known it wasn't the google process.

I realize you're trying to mock me, but you've totally failed because that's exactly my point. If your interview process consisted of a 6 month work trial period for every single candidate (and assuming no candidates dropped out), you would pretty much be able to detect nearly every single qualified person. Of course, this is not feasible in practice, so we settle for interviews.

Google's process is absurdly slow.

> If you're looking for long-term match, just lay your cards on the table and if you match, you match

This is an excellent point. If someone does this I view it as a signal that they are intelligent, rational, and honest.

A key distinction is that daters who are really good at identifying the right life partners are rarely on the market.

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