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Comment by hiAndrewQuinn | Hacker News Reader

Bingo. A good hire is a windfall, a bad hire can be an existential threat to the team or the entire company.

> a bad hire can be an existential threat to the team or the entire company.

Totally, but leetcode wont filter them out.

Incompetent is fairly easy to navigate around, pathological bastardness is impossible to work past. I know that some companies use psychometric tests, but they are not based in anything remotely scientific, but are also super easy to game.

> Totally, but leetcode wont filter them out.

Coding challenges won’t filter every pathological bad hire, but coding challenges do catch a lot of bad hires.

LeetCode shouldn’t be the entirety of the interview. It’s just part of it.

> but coding challenges do catch a lot of bad hires.

leetcode doesn't catch bad hires, as someone whos done a lot of interviews, we could easily catch "bad" coders with a very simple whiteboard test or a "look at this code and tell me what you think"

but people being bad at code aren't the company killers, its the toxic people who are "good" at coding that do. They can be very good at these kind of tests, but are absolute shites to work with.

I think we actually agree more that I let on, and you are right that coding tests should only be a part of the interview process.

You are right, there's not enough time to filter a bad hire. Not enough time to fully vet anyone during an interview. We can work a challenge together to see how you work collaboratively

But you hired them at-will, right? The bad hires I've seen that are existential threats were only there because management refused to fire them.

Depends on the jurisdiction, needless to say. I've interviewed in London, say.

"At-will", he says to the expat to Finland. I wish. It's nearly impossible for me, or any FTE I know here, to get fired. (To be fair, I have never to my knowledge been considered 'a bad hire' by anyone except Home Depot.)

But in fact even in at-will situations, firing aversion seems to be a real and expensive issue that all kinds of managers in organizations face [1] [2].

So, in one sense I agree, bad hires are existential threats "only" because we don't fire them fast enough. On the other hand, have you ever had to fire someone yourself? Try it. It's heart-wrenching, even to a heartless utility monster like yours truly.

[1]: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/06/firing_aversion_2.h...

[2]: https://www.econlib.org/firing-and-the-left/

I've never had to fire a bad employee. So every time has been awful. But I would have gleefully fired the bad ones had I the authority to do so. :)

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