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Comment by conqrr | Hacker News Reader

The so called 'bar' references doesn't make much sense. There is no way to measure the performance of an individual. Leetcode style questions don't indicate performance. And what cannot be measured in the first place in a 4 hour interview, cannot have a 'bar'.

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There are absolutely ways to measure the performance of an individual. That leetcode style questions are not a great indicator of ability to do the job well does not mean you cannot predict job performance at all.

The bar here is interview performance bar. There is no way to judge a person's performance in 4 hours. Anything you come up with can be hacked or imperfect. Therefore there is no way to set a bar.

You can't perfectly judge someone in an interview context, but you can get pretty good if you ask the right questions with the right structure. Where I work the final round interview we give the candidates a week to write a design doc for a recent project they have worked on and present it to us in a 45 minute meeting. We deep dive on their impact, the decisions they made, the tradeoffs etc. It has been an extremely strong signal for us.

I love this method.

That process would be biased to those with experience and enough rank to be able to make decisions. It would miss those who are capable but who haven't gotten the chance. There are many, many people who haven't gotten the chance and a diminishing market of those with experience. How would an interview process identify the capable but not experienced?

It's infinitely hard. I mean, you take the same group of people and change the circumstances slightly and have a completely different outcome. Some groups don't gel. It's like last year's Super Bowl team, they're all still good but the circumstances have changed. Nobody knows how to predict who will step up in a situation and past performance is not a good indicator. The circumstances have changed.

Every interview technique has some horrible downside and therefore it's not really possible to correctly assess talent. Just biasing towards experience isn't solving the problem of figuring out who can do the job. Even just knowing who was capable would be a step up from the current state. Figuring out how to moneyball a team together to win the Super Bowl (hit launch goals) is a whole added level. Our 45 minute tell-us-about-your-previous-projects-interview is nowhere good enough.

You scope the deliverable to the level of the person you’re hiring, but at the end of the day I do want to hire people who have actually really done something, not just people with the potential to do something. There is nothing wrong with that and nearly every other job role and industry works within those constraints. Jr devs with no formal decision making authority have done well in our process, the bad ones do really poorly.

My personal experience has been that this format 1) gives the engineer “home field advantage” by allowing them to go deep on a project they should know a lot about and hopefully show off a bit and be confident 2) allows us to really press on how deep the engineer actually understands the tools they use and what they do/did 3) allows us to understand if the candidate is a leader/get shit done orientation person or a passenger on projects 4) allows us to see how polished their technical writing is

In my current role I've done about 30 whiteboard interviews in the last 2.5 years, and I come down on the side that they are about as predictive as throwing darts.

The most successful candidates I've helped hire in my career were the ones where we had an informal process where we just talked about things and I went with my gut. They say that's not objective or measurable, full of bias, etc.

I toss my hands up in frustration.

That's true for me too but it's not allowed now because of DEI and anti-bias processes

so now it's a leetcode packets for everyone even though the candidates we've hired though them have been worse, our org is now filled people folks who studied for the test instead of having geniuine interest and unique aspirations

it's a charade since I had people from more varied backgrounds (economic, national .. etc) who were able to start decent carreres before having to change

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