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Comment by szx | Hacker News Reader

"If you hire someone with a trendy background who’s good at traditional coding interviews and they don’t work out, who could blame you? And no one’s going to notice all the people you missed out on."

How is it that fear of false positives keeps coming up again and again in discussions of hiring practices?

Considering at-will employment (is that the correct term?) is the default here, you'd think it wouldn't be that big of a problem to get rid of an underperforming employee. I guess it's more of a cultural/social issue but I can't pretend to fully understand it.

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Being the bad guy is no fun.

People are not fungible, and depending on internal politics and procedures hiring probably only happens reactively instead of proactively. If you have to fire an under-performer, you're now short-staffed even worse until you can get another job posting approved and someone hired for it.

Lost productivity from being too picky is less visible than lost productivity from telling someone to go home.

Management is often seen as a career progression from non-management. This means a lot of managers - and especially the newer and therefore lower-level ones - are still figuring out wtf they're doing and aren't (yet) very good at it.

First, it's depressing to introduce someone on Monday and get them out the door by Friday.

Second, people don't want to be known as "the lemon picker" within the company.

Yes, I understand that but obviously there's a trade-off here, the point being that by avoiding firing people at all costs you're missing out on some great developers.

Like I said, it's a cultural/social issue disproportionally tilting the cost effectiveness scale.

Firing someone isn't he problem. The sunk costs of bringing that person onboard, and the new costs of doing the same for a new hire, are the real killers.

There is a philosophical view that optimizing onboarding is equally (or more) important when compared to recruiting processes. A common blocker here is that onboarding isn't done by HR.

The only rational solution is to hire two people for every open position. I do that when I hire contractors. I think the same would work well for employees - for the same reasons.

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