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Exactly, it's so sad hearing someone not realize that their hiring process is basically discriminatory in nature. Can you tell someone had the chops to figure things out if they came from a different cultural background than one you're familiar with? If they had a different social upbringing from yours? If they presented themselves in a way that you personally misunderstood but someone else would have been completely comfortable with?

Of course not, OP basically hired someone he got along with, and that's fine on a small scale, but it's not something to pride oneself over.

A better approach in my opinion is if you find someone who you get along with, you think they have that kind of fire and passion you're looking for, but they don't know the basics and fundamentals of computer science nor are they familiar with data structures and algorithms, you advise them that if they want to make the most of their potential then they should take some minimal amount of time to really devote themselves to understanding those aspects and then they can reapply for the position at a later date. You can keep in touch with them, even potentially mentor them if you really think they are worth it, but you don't just give someone a pass.

Letting someone get by without that knowledge because you like them doesn't really do anyone any favors.

"Exactly, it's so sad hearing someone not realize that their hiring process is basically discriminatory in nature."

Yep. I've seen this so much in my company for performance review. It's completely subjective and managers dont even realize when they are discriminating or violating company policies (or laws!).

> Exactly, it's so sad hearing someone not realize that their hiring process is basically discriminatory in nature.

I've come to the sad conclusion that this is a fundamental tension.

Ignoring the pre-interview filtering, our industry has, on one end of the spectrum, a relatively nondiscriminatory process that assumes basically nothing and tests you on as much of the field as they can before hiring. It's nondiscriminatory in that it doesn't matter where you come from as long as you can solve the same structured problems as everyone else. This is the whiteboard interview everyone hates, and it's not all that inclusive.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have the fuzzy 'does this person seem like they could become capable quickly and work well with me' process. It's inclusive in that it doesn't require you to be able to solve those stupid problems yet, just be bright enough and hard working enough to learn. But it's not at all unbiased.

So do you go for unbiased and give people the same standardized questions, or go for inclusive and have a real conversation? I've found the best people come from the latter process, but I would say that, right? I'm biased.

I agree there is tension and it's imperfect and I don't think one needs to go to one extreme or another... but GP literally said that they hired someone who didn't know "the first thing about programming" who took a single course on Java programming and just hired that person because they had the "chops and passion".

That is what I am criticizing as not being helpful. If someone has the chops and passion for a job, they have the chops and passion to learn a few data structures and algorithms before interviewing for said job. Let them know it, keep in touch with them, and have them come back after they can tackle a proper technical interview.

>I've found the best people come from the latter process, but I would say that, right? I'm biased.

Right and that's a valid observation and there's nothing wrong with that bias per say. On the other hand I've found the opposite, the best software developers I currently have the pleasure of working with know their fundamental data structures and algorithms and have no trouble explaining deeply technical topics with rigor and precision, so that's what I hire for.

It was a fresh college graduate, I don't expect them to know shit about software development honestly. What I do expect is for them to work hard and show passion for what they're doing and the learning process. I expect to see prior experience of self-motivation and hard work which is easily teased out in the interview process.

This person became one of those legendary developers that could do the work of 3 without breaking a sweat. I interviewed tons of people from the same university with actual CS degrees and knowledge of data structures and algorithms. I actually hired lots of them and only a few were as competent as this person was. Your degrees and knowledge of a few data structures and algorithms mean nothing if you're lazy and don't show passion for what you're doing.

That’s just confirmation bias on your part, my dude. You’re kinda glossing over the fact you took a chance and it worked out. How many times did you take chances like this on people? Probably not a lot.

You likely hired the other folks not because they were passionate or had some quality you looked for in the other candidate but because they were clearly apt and able to do the job.

I’d also say that there are many people out there that are incredibly intelligent, hardworking, knowledgeable, and just don’t give a single fuck about any business they work for. Most of my peers put me in that group. Don’t be bitter with us - we don’t find the shit challenging or appealing. A lot of us spent years in college grinding at rigorous academics and came out jaded. There’s relatively little left to learn compared to a starry eyed kid who took a single course, barely knows shit as you said, and is being given a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Kid will leave and likely be jaded like the rest. It happens. Mentally, software is a horrible career.

> Exactly, it's so sad hearing someone not realize that their hiring process is basically discriminatory in nature.

Leetcode and take-home assignments, to some degree, filter for younger people. I don't think too many people are going to solve two Leetcode hard questions in 45 minutes without some practice. I suspect this is a feature, not a bug, but I will take off my tinfoil hat now.

Whether or not you like it, people want to work with people they think they will get along with. Someone can crush objective screens but maybe they come off as arrogant or potentially difficult to work with.

The big tech hiring process discriminates in other ways. In fact every time you make a choice you by definition discriminate.

I think your way of thinking or perhaps pretending that there are objective ways of making choices is a far bigger issue.

> Hiring is a Hard Problem, and there's a big gap between well-intentioned intuition and translating that into robust processes.

Ultimately, hiring is INTRINSICALLY a subjective process. If it were quantifiable and one could reliably screen based on "objective" criteria, it would have been a solved problem by now and employers could hire "robustly". But it is not and it never will be that way.

That said, hiring and assessing talent takes practice and there are some techniques that work better than others. In particular, behavioral techniques are extremely valuable and sadly often take a back seat to persnickety homework quiz questions. It takes some skill and practice to get good at behavioral interviews (for both parties). But when it's used properly, the candidate has a chance to actually demonstrate "chops" even though they may lack some of the job requirements.

Your argument presupposes that an objective criteria is optimal. It's trivial to refute that, for example a company could hire people based on whether they are greater than 6 ft tall, that's an objective criteria but it would still be terrible.

Objective doesn't mean "good/optimal/solved" and subjective doesn't mean "bad/suboptimal/unsolved". All subjective/objective refer to is how sensitive a property is to a specific context. An objective measure is not particularly context sensitive whereas a subjective measure is.

My company has both objective and subjective criteria. Competency is mostly measured objectively and represents the bulk of our hiring criteria, the subjective assessment involves things like communication, collaboration and professionalism.

Both aspects are difficult and imperfect to assess regardless of whether they are objective or subjective, but I don't think it's particularly appropriate to assess someone's competency based on a subjective measure.

If someone is a good basketball player, or a good plumber etc... they are likely good regardless of the intricacies of the individual making the assessment that day and hence it's something that is probably best measured objectively. However, whether someone will get along with the rest of the basketball team, or whether a plumber can properly communicate to a customer what the issue is and how to fix it, that may very well depend on what team that player is playing for, or the relationship between that specific plumber and the specific customer. That would be more of a subjective criteria.

There certainly are subjective aspects to competency as well as objective aspects to communication, but it's minor (perhaps a basketball player is good only on a specific team, perhaps a plumber is illiterate).

Thanks, but I don't need the explanation about the difference and nature of objectivity and subjectivity and don't need to be told that it's not a value or worthiness dichotomy. Admittedly, the HN crowd clearly heavily favor what they think is objectivity, so it's easy to assume everyone thinks like that on here!

I do think we sort-of agree that BOTH subjective and objective measures need assessment and they're both difficult to measure.

The purpose of the explanation is to point out the flaw in your argument that if hiring was purely quantitative and objective then it would be a solved problem. To quote you:

"If it were quantifiable and one could reliably screen based on "objective" criteria, it would have been a solved problem by now"

Given that was the premise of your entire argument, once that flaw is exposed the rest of your argument falls apart.

There is something to be said about the value of human intuition, though. While it may be fallible, part of what makes hiring a hard problem is that many of the things that distinguish good candidates just aren’t objectively measurable.

> There is something to be said about the value of human intuition,

IMO, the something to be said about it is that people have a good intuition about people who remind them of their family, friends, and celebrities they admire; and a bad intuition about people who don't, and remind them of people seen as criminals or bad guys.

Obliquely related: http://www.skinema.com/evil/

This mysterious robust process that can deterministically fit humans into the "hire" and "no hire" box doesn't exist. Everything you can describe that's negative about human intuition, I can use to describe whatever robust process you can think of.

I want candidates to succeed -- I always start out rooting for them. The interview is not a place to beat people down but it give them opportunities to show their strengths.

> unquantifiable and almost totally subjective

That’s what intuition and judgment calls are for.

What does your intuition say is a good way to approach hiring? Does it maybe tell you to figure out relevant skills and ask the candidate about those? Yet if you ignore that voice, you end up timing how long it takes them to invert binary trees from memory instead

Everybody on earth who is good at what they do relies utterly on their carefully trained intuition

I hired a lot of very good developers, so I was able to rely on my intuition pretty well.

Then one time I hired an excellent candidate, technically very strong. Then it turned out he couldn't figure things out on his own. I had a co-interviewer who also thought he was very strong. In the end we had to fire him after a month since he couldn't pick up the pace (his colleague who started at the same time is actually very good)

I was "very good at hiring", until I hired the wrong person. Even now it's hard for me to tell what actually went wrong there. It was mostly theory and understanding underlying concepts, but now I definitely mix in a lot of practical issues and examples. Sometimes I think we interviewed his twin brother who could actually program ;).

Hiring developers is indeed very difficult. You can only tell when working with them for a few weeks.

I've been responsible for hiring for most of the last 20 years. I've literally never had a false positive where I recommended someone and they performed poorly. I have had one case where I said no, was overruled, and then the person turned out to be awful. To be fair, I have no idea how many false negatives I've had where I said no but they would've been great.

I'm always puzzled by people/companies who find this difficult. I don't believe for a second that my intuition is magical. I have a very simple interview process and it works really well. I just ask you what you did, and then I keep asking you increasingly more complex or detailed questions about what you said you did until one of us hits our boundary of knowledge. Then I ask a couple of social questions, usually in the form of "Have you ever dealt with x kind of situation?"

Funny anecdote, I asked one guy if he'd ever had a coworker he had personal issues with. He told me some guy made a racist comment and his response was to ask the guy to step outside to fight. We did not hire that guy.

I always thought a huge blind spot in hiring is that nobody counts or worries about false negatives: Those people who you said "no" to but would have turned out to be great. False positives are often, but not always, easy to spot, and you can know and feel regret about how many hires turned out to be low performers. But it's hard to know or feel regret about the people you turn away. I mean, how would you even track this or correct it? Keep track of everyone you interview, then look at their career 10yrs in the future? Flag people as "no, but maybe we're wrong" in the HR system and then wait for them to re-apply?

As an interviewer, I sometimes wonder if I made the right "No Hire" call on that person who might just have been nervous. As a candidate, I always know that when they say "NO" they're wrong :)

I never worry about this. I usually have some idea of what I am looking for: junior, senior, architect. I just want to find someone suitable in an efficient manner. There's tons of solid candidates out there, it's not my responsibility to make sure the ones who get too nervous to communicate during an interview are taken care of.

oh no doubt, getting around implicit bias and all that is hard and is training I've been through and try not to let get in the way. I've interviewed hundreds of people over the course of my career and I've had the greatest success in evaluating the soft skills of an engineer rather than their stated resume skills. For experienced engineers, I still ask technical questions to make sure they're not BSing their way in and have some knowledge of development. But college grads I really want someone with those soft skills.

Yes, it is slightly subjective, but not unquantifiable. You have to have shown me times you've done those things, not just say them.