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Comment by the_arun | Hacker News Reader

Just curious - Did you guys hire that person to work for Google? or let them go just with a lunch?

He's active on HN as well, his username is jsomers. He made an interesting visualization a couple of days ago and submitted the link.

https://observablehq.com/@jsomers/we-need-more-tiny-knowledg...

Sometimes these chats are just good for network building and professional courtesy. They don’t need to have a direct outcome.

The eng director may get some cool ideas from talking to him. The guy might get cool ideas from talking to the eng director. It’s also a free lunch.

This guy may want a job at Google in 2 years. He can then email the eng director for a referral.

In that situation (let's say the boss finds his new protege or whatever) would you still have to go through the (in)famous invert a binary tree technical interviews?

I never understood why people advocate for job offers sans interviews for someone who has interesting projects. IMO any company allowing such practices opens itself up to corruption and nepotism.

I've worked for startups and even mid-sized publicly traded companies where managers with sufficient seniority were allowed to extend offers on a whim and it always resulted in friends of said employees being hired. Inevitably, entire teams and even business orgs would be filled with friends or fraternity brothers and their work performance would vary greatly.

No one likes interviews but it's crazy that I keep seeing HN users considering this an acceptable practice.

there's a difference between hiring people with a proven track record (especially in this industry, e.g. known projects through github) and hiring your nephew just because he's a great guy. Although I do agree that knowing about people's projects doesn't say enough about the fit (e.g. teamwork). However, white board code reviews won't really help finding that out either, imo. Parent poster didn't want imply that the whole interview process should be circumvented, only the (or some of the) technical part - I agree.

I am against the principle of any individual within a company being able to extend offers at will without any interviews or input from others. A "proven track record" is often too vague and arbitrary a bar and this just lends way to allowing personal bias in hiring decisions. Having interesting experience, projects or an impressive github allows you to get your foot in the door and get to the interview stage. It should not circumvent the technical interviews.

I hire developers and researchers for my company and we are very selective in who we choose to interview (small company in a bleeding edge field). We only consider engineers with relevant, impressive expertise and academics with solid published papers. Still, many of those interviewed don't receive offers and it's not because we ask them to recite some esoteric solution to a riddle. We have called candidates in just because they have promising github projects related to our work, only for these individuals to completely flop when questioned about basic fundamentals. Our interviews were extremely lenient and informal in these cases and we gave multiple chances to some.

Yes.

I think he currently works at Jane Street https://blog.janestreet.com/author/jsomers/

You're assuming the person would want to work at Google.

And you're assuming he wouldn't.

The guy writes for the New Yorker and the Atlantic, doubt he would be willing to work at Google.

Both work for employers that depend on ad sales in order to survive.

Yes, and both work for employers incorporated in the United States. What is your point?

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