Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tade0 | Hacker News Reader

I had an interesting conversation the other day with our delivery manager and two other developers from another team, who had a wildly different than me assessment of a recent candidate.

Their argument was that he didn't know this and that and how is it that I deemed him worthy?

I interjected by saying that during these 30min I get to ask questions I don't have nearly the time to check one's skills throughly. And the same is true for them.

The most I can achieve in this timeframe is check whether the person won't be actively harmful to the project by e.g. being a charlatan or just malicious.

This was news to the delivery manager and they didn't approve of that.

I refrained from replying that our rates vs the market don't really put us in a position to be picky.

But I did tell them that I worked with "net negative" people(with examples) and it's really not about the skills at the moment of hiring.

View on HN

I'd like to see more of this.

It astounds me that software dev, historically seen as a field with and for "poor communicators", somehow believes its interviewers can do what top psychologists consider almost impossible to do. Same happens across almost every industry, but really, tech? "Cold hard logic" tech somehow became "yeah we can totally psychoanalyze someone in 30 minutes by talking"?

Worse, the lack of structure across the entirety makes it more of a lottery and a guessing game which is more or less sold as one's personal (in)capabilities. It's far more harmful than people make it out to be.

Or perhaps the interviewers are under-experienced, under-perpared and/or under-trained?

True story: I had an interview a couple of weeks ago. I was interviewed by two people who were younger than me, and relatively less experienced than me.

My CV has a number of links to repos for various side projects and such. Best I could tell, neither of them looked, at least not more than a minute. Not a single "Your ____ repo looks ____ let's discuss a bit..." Instead I got ovetly basic questions, some of which didn't map to the role / opportunity.

Furthermore, I could only find one of them on GitHub and it was routine stuff (e.g., wedding website). Apparently, neither understood I was interviewing them as well.

I'll never get that hour of my life back.

I have a phrase:

"How you hire is who you hire."

It's sadly funny how many outfits still don't get that.

My theory: most hiring absolutely doesn't matter (from the interviewer's side).

Most people will either have the skills needed or the capability to learn said skills. Weeding out obvious poor cases is easy, the remainder is semi-arbitrary weeding out of true positives in hopes of weeding potential false positives. Much of higher education alone does a good job at pushing people to learn difficult things in a short timeframe, with little incentive beyond "getting that paper".

Also, hiring is a lot like parenting, but the bad aspects magnified at least a few times. As you say, barely anyone knows what to do. No one has experience. Almost everyone claims to be an expert (not verbally, but they do act like it). Non-obvious bad choices often go undiscovered; as above, most picks themselves aren't bad (they just aren't great), or something else is blamed instead. Pride, neuroticism and personal bias play huge parts in the decisions.

Worst of all, no one actually reads the studies showcasing most of what hiring managers do have close to zero correlation to anything. I'm really just waiting for a mass study where two companies do an initial vetting, then company A throws darts at a dartboard and company B does the whole job interview shtick, and compare the results 2 years down the line. And maybe add a company C which actually does what studies suggest.

Agreed. But now we're back to:

"How you hire is who you hire."

And I have a new one...

"You're not only the interviewer, you're an interviewee as well."

Understanding these two basic are essential to a decent hiring process. Ignore these and you're just another fool in a sea of fools.

> Best I could tell, neither of them looked, at least not more than a minute.

I once interviewed a guy with a nice, short 1-pager résumé—not from lack of experience, just a solid, terse document. Not just out of school. Had three or four tech jobs in his history.

He listed one research paper near the bottom, that he'd co-authored in grad school.

I found the paper, skimmed it, and asked him about it in the interview (a lot of times in interviews I just ask candidates about stuff that it seems like they'd know about, that I don't know about, to satisfy my curiosity—I have no idea whether this is good or bad interviewing technique, but my intuition is having someone teach you about something you don't know, that they do, is probably at least as good as asking them to tell you stuff you already know) and he told me I was the only interviewer who'd ever brought it up at all.

My resume is quite similar. On the bottom, I have a link to something that I'm quite proud of under a small heading titled, "Ask me about it!" I've been interviewing passively / casually for the last 18 months. I've spoke to a couple dozen different organizations in that time. I've had exactly 1 person ask me about it. I've thought about removing it from my resume with the thought that maybe people are just put off by it.

Put off? Or lazy? At the end of the day the relationship comes down to "fit". Time and signals are very limited. A bad decision by either party is costly in a number of ways. You threw them a softball and they...couldn't be bothered?

Moi? I'd leave it. Them not looking tells as much as if they do.

I think it's a good approach. My position is: we're considering a possible long term relationship. We both have an interest in this meeting. That is, I hold as many cards as you do.

Those that see it otherwise? That to me a culture red flag. It's an easy swipe left.

I've found that unfortunately it's most often people at the peak of the Dunning-Kruger effect who volunteer to do interviews, so hiring decisions are ultimately made in part by those who vastly overestimate the scale of insight they can get from those relatively short conversations.

I had people get visibly angry during interviews where I was the candidate when I called them out on giving me a problem to solve, that they obviously had in their project and spent weeks on figuring out, while I was somehow supposed to do that in less than an hour.

Oddly specific interview questions are a red flag to me, because they indicate someone had a strong opinion on what's the "proper" way to solve a given problem.

I've gone through this before. The end result was that I was quite literally dis-invited from interviewing candidates. I left that place shortly thereafter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com