how is it better than alternatives? this seems like a huge straw-man given almost every company that hires developers thinks they’re a large tech company and mimics their hiring process. it doesn’t seem like serious alternatives have been explored.
And it shows, barely anyone in my entire career has ever been fired. I only personally have been close to one.
I knew a guy at a FAANG who earned himself and his report a PIP for the grave sin of choosing the wrong deputy to send upstairs while he was on vacation. The deputized person went to one meeting and ran his mouth (arguably, told the truth). Both are no longer at the company.
PIP politics are absolutely routine in FAANG and if you’re arguing the other side you don’t know. FAANG is actively trying to fire or replace you at all times. I’ve worked at two so I can’t speak for three, but I’ve also worked for the two in that older acronym that you’d think of as the “nicest”. People read that that and probably hear me saying “giant evil entity is out to get you”, but it’s really middle managers cosplaying Kings Landing in the office, mostly unchecked, that does it.
Seriously; people want to work at a FAANG/MAMAA or whatever so they often assume it’s good. I had someone ask me if I noticed how light my calendar was now that the org considered me irrelevant. There’s an idea that FAANG is a bunch of nerds with glasses cooking up cool shit in a Zen commune with ambient drone music but it’s honestly some of the worst office politics I’ve ever seen across what is now two careers, and the PIP process is a big tool in that kit.
I went from long time IC to manager at a faang adjacent company. It was eye opening to see who was on a PIP and go through calibrations.
There were well liked, competent people who others on the team got along with but they just were not delivering at the expected level. Sometimes the problem was lack of motivation or bad role fit.
Another i think is when management doesn't understand that someone is, in your wording, a "well liked, competent person", doesn't adequately understand what they bring to the team. Performance reviews, especially of ICs but not exclusively, have a bias towards perceived individual contribution and against teamwork.
So is the 7 interview gauntlet. But I guess it just shifts the burden on the candidates and externalizes cost.
Maybe it was always that way though
People who put up with anything are expensive. They keep billing you hours for tasks that could have been reduced to minutes by someone with a lower tolerance for BS.
Similarly, someone with a flexible, relatively good job is more easily able to look around and find an even better opportunity.
On the other hand, it takes some courage and risk tolerance to step out from the day to day grind and find something better, even if it could ruffle some feathers. That's not something that comes naturally to most people. Break some eggs to make an omelette.
I mean, maybe their other job isn't doing great, because they clearly have all this time to interview, wonder what is going to happen when they join your company...
Where do you people work because I'd like to (a) avoid it and (b) poach people because your world view sucks and I can only assume that's a direct response to a shit environment.
To put it into perspective, my first 1:1 with everyone on the team includes questions like "what have previous managers done to help you be successful?" Managing people can be difficult but managers shouldn't be.
My current company ambushed me with a full interview panel, Gilligan's Island style, when a former coworker invited me to come in for a 3 hour tour. I took it in stride and had fun, and it gave me some additional leverage while negotiating compensation. I remember writing an architecture doc and unit tests when they asked me to code something in an hour and a half. I've been there 6 years and it's been most rewarding for me and my family.
My first job out of school was a solid 8 hours of interviews, and I had a lot of fun during that interview too. I got to work on space ships, and in time made a fortune in equity. I remember preparing a presentation slide deck completely in valid C++ syntax. I also remember taking a red-eye after that interview for another 8 hours of interviews at another company, which I also enjoyed despite having only had 4 hours of sleep.
The 2nd company I worked for decided last minute to interview me for two different roles. That was like 11 hours of interviews. I actually ended up taking the 2nd role because it was a significantly better fit. I brought a large cast iron skillet to that interview, which was a nice ice breaker.
It's true that I put up with a lot of frustrating tasks without complaining, but I personally have zero tolerance for BS. It turns out that the more I push back on BS within an organization, the more I tend to get paid, so in that sense I suppose I am expensive!
Going through TSA with a cast iron skillet in your carry-on is actually pretty fun because it's impossible for the screener not to giggle. I've also gone through airport security with a 20lb printed circuit board with about 90% copper fill, which surprisingly got less scrutiny.
Having something fun to make your interview memorable seems to go over well. I got selected for an internship because I showed up to the "interview" in a Hawaiian shirt. Apparently every other candidate showed up in a suit. We were meeting at a coffee shop on a college campus, so I just dressed for the environment.
Other than fiat wealth generation, what gains are there to treating each other like this?
It’s very difficult to quantify individual performance, and even harder to put a dollar figure on it.
The more competent people weren’t necessarily the ones getting more things done, or the most visible, but were those engineers who understood the long term implications of what they were building, how it related to the business, and their relationship to other teams and customers. It’s trivial to be a good “performer” toiling away on a feature or system that shouldn’t exist. It’s exponentially harder to have the awareness to identify where the real problems are, and make sure you’re investing effort where it actually needs to go.
Last week I had fully intended to spend at least 20 hours heads down coding, but instead I spent the entire work week writing and updating an architecture document. It was the best use of my time, though, as it allowed two other people to be heads down coding instead. Now this week it's three of us frantically writing code instead of just me, and we all know the final result will work and be boring. We're replacing a 7 year old piece of critical infrastructure.
Humans are prone to group think, belief in words of power, sigils; why believe in unfalsifiable value assessment when it comes down to tried and true ownership?
If traditional politics win at the end of the day why the belief this matrix of value isn’t just another cognitive boondoggle?
There's very little science in interviewing, and it is indeed heavily based on heuristics. The whole point of lots of interviews is to reduce bias. Unfortunately, it's possible for candidates to mistakenly think an interview went poorly because they didn't get the answer right away, when from the interviewer's point of view it was one of the best answers they've heard because of the process by which the candidate arrived on the answer.
A popular metric for whether a candidate is likely to be able to solve practical problems is whether or not they've shipped products before. A lot of people pad out their resume with collective achievements, though, and so it's something that needs to be dug into. It's unfortunately not uncommon for folk to not understand the stuff on their own resume.
I never consented to this culture. I see little different here than a church, meat based tape recorders thinking the noises they emit are “the way” with little proof except “feudal capitalism” continues to “work”.
We don’t owe deference and agency to CEOs, VCs, and founders. The syntax is different but the LARP of being sheep for “wise men” is the same.
Only 13% of the country has an advanced degree (mine is MSc in math earned in the 90s; I’m old) and knowledge is not locked away in those heads. Education does not make people infallible and omniscient.
This is a result of traditional political memes; owners rule, everyone else drools. The filtering and sorting inside that cognitive bubble is just the proles making proles dance like jesters. No scientific theory makes this the one true way of organizing effort.
Memorizing semantics is not proof they’re correct. If GME can be shorted to the extent it is despite that being illegal, our institutions are built on deference to BS, since that system is the bedrock used to prop up tech VCs.
I enjoy living in and participating in a society. Thanks to the productivity gains of specialization and free trade, technology has been developed to the point that I spend my days designing embedded software to fly autonomous aircraft. Those aircraft deliver medical supplies, primarily in developing countries with poor road infrastructure. At least a few people a week don't die specifically because a UAV I helped make was able to deliver them a blood transfusion. The company is for-profit, and in exchange for my work I am compensated in salary and in equity. The better the company does, the more people have access to life saving medical care, and the more money I personally make. The UAV system also requires people to operate them, and so the company employs hundreds of people in those developing countries. One of the earliest and most tenacious in-country employees quit a couple years ago because they got accepted to a robotics program at Stanford.
The last employee I personally managed the hiring of only had a couple years of community college experience and self-proclaimed ADHD. Despite my intent for them to only spend 6 hours or so on the interview process, they spent probably 16 hours because they found the interview process itself personally rewarding.
The company CEO drives a crappier car than everyone else at the office. By coincidence, I had a serious problem last week that required intervention, and I quite literally made the CEO dance like a jester for me in order to make a point. There was no scientific theory involved.
I'm right there with you regarding the corruption of most financial and government institutions. I don't think it's as black and white as "capitalism bad", though.
Shorting is only illegal if it's naked. When I ask people who say this what they mean, the answer is usually that the shorting must be naked because so many shares are being shorted. But that isn't how that works. If you have other evidence though, I'd certainly be interested.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/01/28/yes-a-stock-can-ha...
Worked for me.
I know how the boring numbers game works and optimized for it. I’m being honest instead of equivocating in Anglo-babble reasons why a process is an acceptable measure for filtering some people. To see poetry in this is a bit weird. It’s the same old fundamental arithmetic operations applied to different geometry. Pretty routine for us been there done that’s.
Picking numbers from a hat say 15 * 7 * 20 = 2,100 unproductive hours to avoid a subpar employee that still actually gets something done in the ~3,000 hours before being fired. That could easily be a net loss depending on how much onboarding time is needed and how unproductive they are on average.
Honestly, I think those numbers may be overly generous to long onboarding processes.
I've been a hiring manager before, and hiring good people is a huge time investment. The reality is that something like 99% of applicants aren't qualified, and the majority seemingly lack enough self-awareness to know it. The really good people also tend to be bad at marketing themselves. I don't think of interviews as a waste of time, though, even when it's a no-hire.
You also need to factor in the odds of this whole process working.
There’s not a whole lot of empirical research that measures the correlation between the interview process and employee performance.
And of course, employee performance measurement is as dubiously effective as ever.
I know multiple FAANG companies that track this data.
And so, every time I go in a section of code to fix a bug or adjust a feature and I see his name in git blame... I spend another few hours to make sure that I'm not breaking some of the twisted framework code that he had and possibly fix it up a bit and adding a unit test for the functionality before I touch anything to assure myself that I know what it is doing.
An unproductive poor employee is bad... a productive bad employee is where the real problems are for years and years to follow.
In your case code reviews could have caught the issue early before it became such a problem. Though obviously they also have a cost.
Well maybe thats the actual problem the company should be fixing?
Granted, I've only ever taken and given interviews, never given (or, fortunately, been under) a PIP or firing. But interviewing is just a few weeks or so of preparation and then a day or two, and the preparation is often fun, and so are some of the interviews. Nobody thinks PIPs and firings are fun.
It's expensive for the company too. All of the people involved in the interview process are still getting paid while they are interviewing the candidates. They aren't working on their projects that they have to complete. The company probably has a recruiting or talent acquisition team and the people on that team don't work for free. The company might also work with outside agencies or external recruiters. If you hire one a candidate from one of these sources, you have to pay them too.
It's really expensive in terms of time and money to hire people. It's really hard to build a great team.
Except the interviewee.
Even if there weren't, then 10% of the extra compensation vs. an easier-to-hire company with your discount horizon applied would also count as payment.
I clearly live in a different labour market to this conversation. How many places in the world is this common?
So I think I'd rather have a candidate spend 7 hours interviewing if it could save months of pain for multiple people later.
(This does assume, of course, that the 7-person interview panel actually does decrease the incidence of hiring-the-wrong-person enough to be worthwhile. I don't know if that's actually the case.)
Out of all the things I think are wrong with tech jobs -- and with employment in general -- I don't think "I have to interview with 7 people instead of 1 or 2" even cracks the top 50.
The point is that there is little, if any, evidence that a given interview process does this.
I make half-ish of a FAANG salary, but it's enough to comfortably support a family and I'm generally pretty happy and get to work on cool stuff. The only challenge I never get at work are problems that have huge scale components.
If you're early in your career, they probably matter and it might be worth it, but for me it's not.
Maybe it'd be different in Silicon Valley, but in London they just aren't willing to offer enough over and above the kind of jobs I've had elsewhere to be worth the misery (with the big caveat that I'm at the high end of non-FAANG London market rates; for someone who is not, FAANG may be worth it here too)
Other interviews back then and more recent were pretty much the same. Max. 3 x 1h-ish meetings. I do have a bad habit of asking the interviewer to sell me the job on the first face 2 face meeting though. This does offend some of them and we drop it there. No point beating around the bush and wasting time if they think the interview is a one way street.
I also tend to make it clear from the outset I will not come cheap, in a "are you sure you can afford me?" kind of way. Not mentioning specifics, but making it clear I know my market value and won't consider low offers.
Some get very taken back, but it sets a tone. I think you're absolutely right you need to make sure they know it's two way, and to give a clear impression they're chasing someone high value, and that they're not the prize, you are.
But if their pitch is all about "changing the world" but they're not willing to share the upside, I know I'm wasting my time, so I want to make sure they know that I expect my share too, not just fuzzy feelings.
E.g. I a while back came across a company that was very proud of how rapidly they were growing, but somehow thought that mattered to me when they were not willing to offer any shares or options. I was meant to be excited about making other people rich...
I pointed out to them I've not once taken a job on terms like that in the last 25 years and called off the process after the first interview. I also explained to the recruiter just how far off market they were for someone at my experience level.
If that had happened after 5-6 interviews I'd have been incensed...
FAANG recruiters in particular also seem to get confused when I insist on getting an indication of salary range and option/rsu amounts before being willing to agree to an interview. Several times I've had recruiters come back to me days later after digging up the information, as their first line seem to not even know, just expecting people to be all excited they're even calling. For my part I'm shocked more people aren't having that conversation. But that does explain leaked info some time back about how Facebook is dealing with high rejection rates once they actually give offers.
If you can't get someone up to speed with your internal processes fast enough to at least gauge if they're following along that indicates an internal problem.
The problem is, I think, that HR does not want technical staff to see the hires for (probably made up) legal reasons. So the decision is mostly made by people who can't actually gauge competency.
"Interview was weak. They don't know what they're doing."
"Aced the interview. Fired after two weeks. Leadership doesn't know how to hire or manage."
"Never seen a place with so much churn. In the last six months, I've seen at least half a dozen engineers exit after two or three weeks."
Know what raises the level of difficulty for finding candidates? Shit reviews about the company. You can have the best tech but if you have a toxic smell, you can't hire. To the outside, perception is reality and reviews are how you get that perception. You can't do the opposite though and say "J Smith passed interview but we let them go after two weeks because they couldn't do more than pseudo code on a whiteboard." and even if you could, you'd look like a shit company and you'd still have an impossible time hiring but for other reasons.
This idea of quick hire/fire is so bad that all you have to do it go one or two steps further to find the obvious problems. But hey, start a company and use that model. See how it goes. Prove us all wrong.
Not to mention the amount of technical debt high turnover causes for tech companies
The opposite is 7 interviews and shedding most of your applicants for trivial reasons. Most businesses can't support that, too much work would go undone and they would stop being competitive.
I was just talking about to implications of poor company chemistry which stems from lack of trust and job insecurity.
I think the best way to evaluate a person is just to talk to them about their experience and why they do what they do. Passion is a critical indicator
I can only say that: Oh my gosh do I not want to work for a company that "hires fast and fires fast". For many different reasons.
Most people except for a few outliers will be fumbling around the first month while they learn the code and the company.