What I'm reading here is that even as an experienced interviewer you struggle to make the format effective and equitable.
Sounds to me like the format isn't worth keeping; time to hire more, and fire fast?
Sounds to me like the format isn't worth keeping; time to hire more, and fire fast?
I can't even fathom in what ways you think "time to hire more, and fire fast?" is more "effective and equitable"? You just shove even more risk onto individuals who might be getting their footing still.
You're just turning a 8-9 hours commitment to an interview into a 6 month commitment. Sure, you get paid but you also have to deal with churn and burn.
I mean, did you think stack ranking was a good idea?
You're tacitly expressing a concern that a fast hiring commitment would be riskier; but that's not necessarily so. A minimal set of filters are meaningfully effective: resume, references, and meet the team. Anything beyond that doesn't have just diminishing returns, it can negatively impact the company by narrowing the field of viable candidates too far.
I think it is necessarily so. Hiring fast is effectively hiring randomly and that is way riskier.
Would you read random books? Watch random movies? Maybe, but probably not.
Would you buy a random car? Of course not. Would you buy a random home? Etc etc
You can logistically reduce the number of days by maybe doing multiple interviews into a single day, but that’s still hours.
I’ve worked back in the dot com days where you were hired on the spot and that was fun until they fired on the spot.
Having a well-designed process that takes a while is not perfect, but is better than the other options. “Slow to hire, slow to fire” is a good maxim.
There are a very large number of idiots who can do those things. I strongly disagree that this is a significant filter.
It's really not the risk folks seem to think it is.
It can take weeks for someone to orient, and as mentioned all over this thread it’s hard to fire people.
I’d rather use a system that avoids hiring people that will need to be fired. Blindly trusting resumes is silly since resumes are hard to verify.
Resume, references, and team meeting filters out almost everyone who needs to be fired. Folks who lie on their resume, who arrange dishonest references and who defraud their way through a meet and greet are _exceedingly rare_. It's such a vanishingly small segment of possibility that it's not worth troubling oneself over.
The reality is that companies use complex and obtuse hiring practices to cover for poor internal practices. They recognize an inability to deliver and perform on their teams, and consider it a hiring failure; but the reality, most of the time, is that it's a structural or management failure. Most hires, most of the time, are sufficiently able to deliver on their desired roles; but often, management is unwilling and unable to identify that they are responsible for poor performance. And so they blame the candidates, the new hires, to their teams. Not themselves.
Honestly all three of those things test the exact same thing, the person's ability to sell themselves. Which is why I would not work anywhere with such lax interviews. I don't want to work somewhere that only values likability and talking oneself up.
It's dirty because we like to believe that our technical proficiency and ability is elite and rare, but the truth is that with a little training, with a little on the ground experience, many people can do what we do.
You don't want to work somewhere where that's proven possible.
What you said is that those three things, including the resume, are significant filters. I am saying they are not and you seem to not have a rebuttal on my point about the resume.
Many tech companies have gone to "unlimited" PTO, so there's no cost to taking a few days off. But even outside that, almost no managers are following the letter of the law. Last time I changed jobs, my employer at the time had explicit PTO time, but unlimited sick leave, and in practice during COVID (and especially near any holiday) was pretty lax with accounting for "I need to be out on Friday afternoon" as long as work was getting done and you were somewhat responsive to email/pings on the day in question. I wasn't hunting very actively, so it was just the one day of interviews with one potential new employer - I concede that if you needed to do many full-day interviews, it would eventually become conspicuous.
Yah, no. That's a ridiculous proposal for many people, particularly parents and anyone with any sort of disability.
2. Hire more, fire fast sounds good on paper but will destroy morale as the team identity will be constantly influx.
3. Engineers will spend less time onboarding newer engineers to the detriment of everyone because well, they might not just last.
Morale is improved when team members feel like they have some control over their membership.
It seems like you're assuming that a great many people would be fired; why so? In my experience, having worked for several such companies, firing is rare because even minimal filters are effective.
Resume check, reference check, and meet the team. Done.
The processes you are questioning scale to thousands of people with varying backgrounds. It’s not an accident all of these companies do this. Your process places extreme trust in one group of people. It’s just so risky.
Also, resumes are mostly bullshit, IMO. Reference checks are complete bullshit, IMO. I’ve worked with my buddies at startups (who get lofty titles) and just have them give me reference checks. Other references have asked me for call scripts.
Also keep in mind that most of these big tech jobs are highly competitive. Your solution eventually requires a coin toss if you have limited spots. There’s only so much data you can collect from the process you propose. The natural thing is to then assess each candidate a bit more until you’re confident you’ve picked the right one. And then you’re here.
Truly bullshit credentialing is immediately apparent to teams that receive new hires. In some places, it's fraud and actionable by the company as fraud.
I don't think companies with billions in revenue really have a budget constraint on hiring; it's structural constraints that are holding them back. They can, and do, engage in mass hiring and construction of whole new departments when it suits their strategy.
That said, further constraints can happen at the credentialling level; I'm not advocating hiring literally anyone.
Yep. Lots of places with even stricter pro-employee laws, including Europe, also have it.
For one thing, it's a huge amount of uncertainty to put on the potential hire, which means you'll be strongly biasing your hiring pool towards people who don't have better options. It feels like in an effort to reduce the interview time, you've effectively expanded it to multiple months.
Second, how do you calibrate the "default" option? Is the expectation that everyone on a probation period will be hired unless proven otherwise, or is it that most will be let go unless actively vouched for? Is that expectation clear across the team? If there's a mismatch across team members, you have big problems. People who want to keep a prospect will be annoyed if they're let go, and vice versa. People who need to work with a prospect will have to figure out whether it's safe to actually trust them with anything - on the one hand, you have to give them enough work to prove themselves; on the other hand, you can't give them anything too important or with too long a horizon, because they might be gone before they get to launch.
And finally - how long does that trial period need to go on to be useful? The goal in designing a hiring process is to get a reasonable level of precision/recall (different companies will balance differently between those) with a reasonable level of investment. If you've increased investment without increasing precision, then you've done something wrong. Given how long it takes to ramp up a new hire and have them actually be productive, I don't think you're going to learn much in a ~6 month probationary period that you couldn't already tell in a day of interviews.
I've worked at many companies, and those that hire fast, and fire fast, tend to be those that _fire least_. They have _lower expectations_ for performance, and so are more likely to be receptive to _training new hires_, rather than expecting them to hit the ground running as equally effective as their new team mates.
I’d also like to add that having multiple interviewers, if they have diverse backgrounds, is more likely to be equitable than a single interviewer.
I’d take 15 interviews before taking that risk.
Moreover, if someone has the skills on paper, and the references to support that, then any tech screening is unnecessary. It just tests for ability to pass tech screens.
University students already have a three-month gap in their schedule where they aren't doing anything, so they are willing to take a temporary role to fill that gap.
Experienced people who already have a job aren't going to drop that to take on a temporary role unless they have an unusually high risk-tolerance or unless they are desperate.
And yes, I lament that internships are so maligned. It shouldn't be that interns are poorly paid; we should be able to hire someone with decades of experience in a tangentially-related field at a competitive salary, and consider them to be interning on an unfamiliar field.
The tech screens can show a person's skill. Sure, lots of people are gaming that too and memorize solutions, but that's not most candidates.
Foo Corp
- Wrote Java on Bar project
Foo Corp
- Designed and developed infrastructure for Baz for Bar project (Java)
It's so easy to inflate your role on a project and what you contributed and the people who are best at it are usually also able to talk, talk, talk.
The first interview question I ask is so easy that I don't think anyone should be paid to write software anywhere if they can't solve it. And yet, I have candidates with plenty of nice bulletpoints like your second one on their resume who can't solve it or take 30-45 minutes to solve it. Good candidates take less than 10 minutes, very good ones take less than 5.
If you know what a hash map or dictionary is then you can solve it. If you can't answer a problem because you're under pressure then that's a no hire signal on its own.
I think it's because the awareness of the need to ensure performance is baked-in to the process; rather than having an assumption that the hire should have a high level of performance. Employees aren't like other physical assets, like computers and other hardware, they're malleable human beings that are accepting of improvement.
But I don't know of any large studies on the merits of this approach, so perhaps I've simply been lucky to have had positive experiences.
If not, it might help to actually try this. Take an aggregate of 15 interviews in the next couple of months and you're bound to learn something. My hypothesis would be some new empathy for interviewees but maybe you find a better role at a better company in the process. If the worst case is that it is a colossal waste of time, then you again have found empathy for the interviewee.
Ultimately, you might be narrowing your pool of applicants to only those willing or unwitting to go through that process.
If employers with lengthy interviews want to pay people for their time that would be fair.
I’d much rather not get hired then get fired “fast”.
Look what that did to their reputation and company culture.
Netflix is a little more successful at this, but they have a much smaller eng footprint and much higher compensation in order to attract and retain top performers.
I wouldn't consider that negative, really. Daunting, perhaps.