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Comment by inopinatus | Hacker News Reader

Articles like this - and the comments that follow - always overlook the primary value of job interviews, which to me is answering the question: "Do I want to work for this company?"

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They're not ignoring that value; that's simply not what they're writing about. I don't think anyone is advocating for sight-unseen hiring. The problem is with using interviews as a candidate qualification mechanism, where they simply do not work.

And articles like this are almost universally written from the perspective of someone being interviewed, rather than the one interviewing.

The article that I just read following the submitted link was from the perspective of neither, but of someone looking at the hiring process as an observer. The anecdotes are anecdotes and they don't matter except to lighten up a newspaper article for the masses, so we can ignore them - I'm talking about what was actually studied.

Sure, because poor management, crippling technical debt, and a toxic work environment are totally plainly presented to you in an interview. /s

Not plainly, no, but easily inferred.

You should publish because I know I and a lot of other people would be incredibly interested in divining this information during a job interview.

The best I've come up with is a few proxies, like their deployment process. Someone doing continuous or frequent deployments probably have pretty decent code quality. A company that takes several weeks, several rounds of QA and a dozen release documents that need to be signed in triplicate, they have that process because they've been burned and need scapegoats when the inevitable happens.

The best part is that most people at companies like this aren't aware that it's not normal, so they'll be open about it.

Yeah, that's basically all it takes. Talk to engineers about their everyday processes. (If the company doesn't let you talk to their engineers during the interview process, or if they're unwilling to discuss, consider that the huge red flag).

This might not be true given just a couple of hours staying in the office and talking to people. Management issues / technical debt are not visible until you work for the company.

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