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Comment by codr7 | Hacker News Reader

Hiring doesn't scale, period; deal with it.

Exactly. People go like “the ideal way to interview is <whatever they themselves are the best at>”. Pair programming interviews suck and don’t scale, just like every other alternate way of hiring.

it isn't about scale. It is about core principle of the tech hiring - all the companies hire only the best. Not only it is impossible to scale, it is plain impossible. Even if all the companies hired only "above the average" it would still be a pretty tall order :)

There is no one-size-fits-all for software developers. Different companies are looking to hire people at different experience/pay levels, with different skill sets, etc. Just as with dating, most companies are also going to have some understanding of their own "attractiveness", and not try to date out of their league.

FAANG companies offering industry leading compensation packages and prestige are in a position to be able to hold out for the best (even if their interviewing practices may fail to achieve that), but most companies are just looking for someone that checks the boxes and seems like a good fit.

Employers trying to hire for fit and culture has resulted in the most inhumane and counterproductive processes I've witnessed. If that's what you really want to do, let the person work for at least a month in the team.

Provisional hires (which often exist in theory but they're pretty much a formality in general) don't work for the most part. Lot of overhead for the company. And in many cases you're asking for the candidate to quit a job and possibly relocate on the possibility they'll get a new position assuming that they click in a short time interval.

So, accept the overhead as the cost of hiring the right people?

There's even more overhead on the people being provisionally hired.

Yes, sometimes things just don't work out. But, if someone quits a job and maybe relocates, that's a big personal cost. It's just the way things work in some limited contexts (e.g. professional sports) but it's not and shouldn't be the norm.

I suppose you can give a huge sign-on bonus with no claw-back provision, but that's never going to happen in most cases.

I'm fully convinced the way to make better hires is to invest more, which will be more expensive. Which wouldn't be a problem unless we expected something else. It starts with quitting pretending the current process is working, or even close to optimal.

Has hiring ever really worked, anywhere? Especially as roles and need evolve? I guess you could argue that it sort of did, apropos of a play I saw last night on the astronaut program--and maybe the military in many cases more broadly.

But, in many cases, I'm not sure how I, as a candidate for a tech job, would feel about a company offering me $200K--no strings attached--with the proviso that I statistically only had a 25% chance of making it through the next 6 months. (And is that really long enough anyway?)

There are tournament-style professions. But I'm not convinced most professional jobs are or should be among them in general.

>Has hiring ever really worked, anywhere?

yes. Best place i worked at - we hired only by internal references and only people from our University. Up until the company grew around 200 people. We didn't do technical interviews, just a short talk. And we were among top employers, including salary-wise.

When you have high trust a lot of other processes become unnecessary. When that trust is broken, and surely a lot of grifters BSed their ways into jobs, that’s when all kinds of barriers were added.

My first startup did one interview per person and then a trial period, all good.

Who said anything about relocation? That has to be a tiny percentage of hires.

Relocation used to be pretty common for professional jobs. Don't know about today when there's more remote work. And maybe companies aren't as willing to pay for in general.

in the end it did not even achieve that. Those who spent 6 months at last job practicing leet code were not necessarily the best of the best

IMO interviewing is the biggest bottleneck and if interviewing was decoupled from hiring then it wouldn't be a problem. But this requires a Guild-like organization to manage interviewing/vetting and for companies to use said Guild for hiring. The companies could then do a single team culture meeting (if they wanted) before hiring.

I wish I could remember who, but there is a company out there who conducts tech interviews to create a pool of candidates for their customers. Pretty sure there was a post here about it, but it's lost in my ocean of unread favorites.

I personally think outsourcing hiring is the worst idea ever, and completely lose confidence in companies that do.

They’re outsourcing technical interviews, not the same thing as hiring.

(Update: technically I would guess they're only outsourcing the first few rounds. Presumably their customers will conduct further interviews.)

What if the best candidates have already been filtered out by then?

Create a scalable, practical interview process where the result is reliably the best candidate, and you'll take over the world.

At this point in my career I no longer even believe that "best candidate" is a meaningful description except perhaps for highly specialized roles. We're all stumbling blindly in the dark.

Triplebyte is the company.

You still interview with the end companies, but technical interviews aren’t given.

For companies that successfully scale their team size, it literally did scale, right? I think you mean that hiring is very difficult to scale.

Define successfully, I'm pretty sure they could have been a lot more successful by giving hiring the attention it deserves.

Exactly. Its almost like optimising for finding your best possible match for marriage. You don't go over a billion prospects, you choose from the ones locally available to you, as they come.

You're right, premature optimization is exactly what it is.

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