The Job Interview Will Soon Be Dead. What It's Being Replaced With | Hacker News Reader

The Job Interview Will Soon Be Dead. What It's Being Replaced With

inc.com

25 pointsgmays36 comments

Not a very good article. At the end of the article they even say "While traditional interviews aren't going away any time soon..."

So which is it? The job interview will soon be dead or it's not going away anytime soon? Stupid clickbait headlines.

The answer is!!!!! Clickbait. That's what won't ever go away.

In an effort to simulate their work environment, they bring in 50 job candidates at one time and pair them for 20 minutes.

Riiiiiiight.

If you're doing a cattle call for college interns, that sounds totally feasible. If I'm looking for a senior embedded developer, I'm lucky to get 5 resumes in hand and getting 2 in the room at the same time is nearly impossible schedule-wise.

Three week "paid trials" -- so they're only going to be able to hire people who have already quit their jobs and who have stopped interviewing elsewhere. Nice power structure there; all the risk is on the applicant. Wonder how many experienced engineers they're able to hire?

it sounds like exploitation.

It actually sounds like they're going to chase away good candidates. Regardless of whether I'm a "good" hire for them [think what you like], I would just walk away from a deal like that.

Given that the company down the street is hungry and in competition for engineers, I suspect that this kind of fear-based nonsense is not serving them well.

this happened with me for a job interview, I did a day trial and next week I had another interview and was offered a job while they were probably mulling over giving me the job.

> Now, every final candidate that makes it that far works for the company for three to eight weeks on a contract basis, doing real tasks alongside the people they would actually be working with if they had the job.

> The goal, says Mullenweg, is not to have those candidates finish a product or do a set amount of work but for a quick and efficient assessment of whether it would be a mutually beneficial relationship.

> To keep it simple, Automattic pays a standard $25 an hour, whether the candidate was hoping to be an engineer or the chief financial officer.

How could you ever hire someone who already had a job? Who would leave an existing job to do a tryout for 3-8 weeks for $25/hour?

Exactly. Your only target are unemployed, which lowers your pool of possibilities a lot.

It seems like it would narrow your pool to those who can afford the risk, those who are coming out of school and those who are unemployed. I'm not sure what that might do to the average level of talent in an org, but would be interesting to hear more from others with more info.

I know personally I wouldn't be willing to go through this process.

$25 means significant opportunity cost for me. If that is three weeks I'm essentially paying $3000+ to interview. The offer waiting on the other end must be really really good.

Sounds like a great way to get contractors / consultants for 1/6 the price.

>>"In an effort to simulate their work environment, they bring in 50 job candidates at one time and pair them for 20 minutes. This is because work at Menlo is done in pairs, two people sharing a single computer, passing the mouse back and forth while brainstorming ideas.

They give them an exercise typical of the kinds of work done at Menlo. While the pair work together, a staff member observes their interactions. At the end of 20 minutes, everyone will get new exercises, new partners, and new observers. Twenty minutes later, they will switch for a third time."

Talk about extreme - excuse the pun - commoditisation of programming. Your experiences no longer matter. Just walk in, do your audition, and hope you can shine against the herd. This is frankly ridiculous and I cannot think of a single benefit this would yield.

That sounds horrible indeed, I think I would just walk out if I was faced with such an interview.

So ... they pair the people who are competing for a limited number of jobs. This is one way to hire a bunch of aggressive A-Holes.

They have a ridiculous turnover, so I'm not surprised. However they have a strict adherence to Scrum Agile (as in, by. the. book.) and they're an agency with some pretty good clients, so they stick around pretty well despite the churn.

(source: I live/work in the area)

I was "interviewed" like that once. I found it incredibly unsettling. It devolved into three politely introducing ideas while trying to outdo the other two in discussion while three people watched silently from across the room. I didn't feel like the discussion was organic or actually moved to solve the problem.

The problem is pretty much always that if there's a breakthrough or hard part to be handled, everyone feels like they need to be the one to do it. (And they're probably right, which is an even bigger problem.)

I've heard of collaborative interviews that work well, but they're almost always collaborations between people who aren't competing for the same role.

Seems like a good step toward dropping programming from Middle Class or High Prole to Middle Prole, to me (following Fussell's descriptions of classes).

An audition. Huh. I'd call it a contract. Kinda like some goofy companies call their employees "associates" as if that means anything.

My short term contracting rate is higher than medium term, so there's that interesting issue.

There are people who do very well on in-person interviews, but do poorly in actual job performance. This article will not likely benefit them. On the other hand, there are people who do very poorly on in-person interviews, but do very well in on the job performance in rare situations that they somehow got hired. Those that don't get hired becomes lost opportunities for both hiring companies and the candidates.

The approach is similar to a consulting contract with option to hire. Getting a candidate working for a few weeks or even a few months on an actual work environment as if he was hired should give hiring managers the real deal about a candidate.

I don't think the specifics has to be the same, but the general idea or structure is important.

This looks like a very promising approach for getting the best possible team.

I agree that the article looks like a clickbait and that this will work with smaller subset of candidates. But I think this information is important and it should be out there.

> In an effort to simulate their work environment, they bring in 50 job candidates at one time and pair them for 20 minutes. This is because work at Menlo is done in pairs, two people sharing a single computer, passing the mouse back and forth while brainstorming ideas.

> What's being evaluated in this audition process is whether job candidates bring out all the best qualities in their partners and make them look as good as possible.

This is crazy. So the candidates are to compete elbow-to-elbow to 50 other candidates and be evaluated on whether they "bring out all the best qualities in their partners". And that shoudl simulate work environment at Menlo? And that should somehow be better that a traditional interview? I don't know what these guys think about themselves.

Next one is no better:

> To keep it simple, Automattic pays a standard $25 an hour, whether the candidate was hoping to be an engineer or the chief financial officer.

So you do normal inteviews an then get an 8-week-contract for $25 an hour and THEN they maybe decide you're worthy? I'm based in Germany, a senior-level Java dev freelancer gets somewhere between $80-100 an hour. This means a loss of say $60/h for 8 weeks * 5 days * 8 hours which is around $20k. How can it be worth it?

> 8-week-contract for $25 an hour and THEN they maybe decide you're worthy

Even for junior devs outside Silicon Valley that's not a very good rate. On the other hand, contracting firms here seem to love this approach (cynically, it's just discount labor). Last time I was looking for a job, I started getting calls from people who wanted me to do a half salary trial for six months. And no, the 'full' salary wasn't anything special.

I'm assuming these places are trying to pick up people who are desperate or unwilling to move at discount rates, but it's not a very attractive system.

"People who are good looking tend to be evaluated as being more competent...People who are taller tend to be evaluated as having more leadership skills...People who speak with a deeper or lower-pitched voice are viewed as possessing greater strength..."

The problem with this is, that most people have these biases also, when working with other people, not only on interviews.

So hiring a ugly, small person with a high pitched voice won't change the fact that people working with that person will value them less.

Also, people tend to hold their human knowledge rather high. Everyone thinks they know people and how they work.

I don't know how much friends of mine started relationships that were doomed to fail horribly because of this bias.

Or how much executives I worked with hired people based on their hipster-ninja-superhero-factor, that failed to perform later.

On one hand, I think it's a great idea because I've done stages (STAH-jes) as a sous chef, and always liked the experience.

On the other, it definitely excludes a large amount of people who can't dedicate the time, or need to be paid a real salary for their trial period.

I like Menlo's approach of rapid staged pairing. I've gone through Automattic's trial but they pay little and it takes way too long, I wound up cutting it short.

(edited for spelling)

I can see how ignoring the interview can be an interesting approach, but having people do some test work must be limited. I can see myself doing this for a few hours, but just setting up an environment I'm comfortable with takes half that time. IDK, the first point of the article can't be denied, the current process is broken.

Auditions. You mean like coding on a whiteboard to see if I can actually traverse an algorithm? What a novel suggestion!

Pretty much everything in the article is simply unworkable for nearly every company on the planet, but to be fair, there's a huge difference between what the article is talking about -- doing actual company work for a few weeks in the case of Automattic -- and reversing a linked list on a whiteboard while an engineer pretends to read your CV.

Before reading, I thought it was going to claim that deep learning applied to a candidate's social media footprint would develop an accurate profile of the applicant's personality, intelligence, psychological stability, etc, because I think that's what might replace a job interview.

Was disappointed.

This sounds like a terrible idea.

Besides the Facebook phenomenon where people portray a falsely positive self, I often playfully troll or otherwise post sarcastic status updates all the time on social media, because I just don't take it that seriously. It is only intended for my audience, who already know me in person (for the most part), not a bunch of cobbled together algorithms.

Then again, if a company rejects me based on my social media accounts instead of, you know, talking to me, I probably didn't want to work for them anyway. I just hope something like this doesn't become the norm.

> $25 an hour

This is counterproductive. I can (and often do) spend an hour to answer a question on StackOverflow, for free. Offer me $25/hour for answering StackOverflow questions and I'll decline - it's well below my hourly rate. This is a well-known result in psychology.

no longer choosing the best looking candidate can be counter productive, as you could hire someone with bad personal hygiene and compromise the whole team, for example.

I like how just because those physical traits don't correlate to skill that makes it irrelevant or wrong to use as a criteria.

I've rarely seen a job where the performance is based on purely technical skills - the % varied from job to job - but a lot of it comes to how effective you are at working with others and just like the article argues - people in general respond to those physical traits.

> It makes sense. Musicians and singers have to audition. Actors have to audition. The people employing them don't sit down and dart scripted questions their way. They want to see them play, sing, perform. Doesn't it make sense to audition a prospective employee for the same reasons, before they sign an offer letter?

No, that doesn't make sense AT ALL. Musicians, actors and other purveyors of the Arts deal in a subjective and extremely hand-wavy set of skills (not denigrating them at all, just saying) that are oftentimes equally skilled as one another and the "choice" depends on which one fits the given role/piece you have in mind for them.

Software developers are more closely related to skilled craftsmen, even if the fruits of our craft aren't as tactile as a nice table or chair. The current Interview scheme has it's issues, but I can't see how this is improving on a single element of that.

You might be surprised by how technical fine art really is. I've learned as much about programming from painting in the last two years as from programming.

Oh no question, but the difference is the results of a craft can be tested and held to a standard that's firm and very objective, whereas the results of the other are nothing but subjective all the way down (aside from the basics like, did the actor show up).

Music and acting are not "subjective all the way down". They are technical skills which some people spend years honing to an incredible pitch. There's a difference there, but this isn't it.

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