Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

"I'd rather hire a smart person and teach them X then hire someone who knows everything about X but lacks creativity, logic, and reasoning."

False dichotomy. How about a smart person who knows a lot about X and is creative and logical? They do exist.

I feel like many interviewers want to categorize someone in to one of those two categories from the outset - "this person already knows a lot about XYZ, therefore, I'd rather look for a smart person who doesn't know XYZ and teach them". Sounds crazy writing it out, but it's the impression I got years ago interviewing. It's also the impression I get from friends of mine who have interviewed in the more recent few months.

It's more like, "we want smart people, so let's optimize our interview process to find smart people, and give everyone the same interview questions."

The problem here is that firms tend to prefer giving "engineering interview problems" to everyone, and do not want to segment interview questions by position.

Because that takes a lot more time for the interviewers. For a growing tech company, they could have as many open reqs as they have engineers. Crafting questions for all of those positions takes a lot of time that most companies don't have time to do.

Ideally they should be having people in that area of expertise doing the interviewing of the candidate, since they have ready access to the domain specific information to ask relevant questions.

Hiring is pretty much the most important thing you do as a company.. if you can't spend an hour per position developing applicable questions for each position, you are setting yourself up for failure.

Yet, time and time again, these posts come up and the comments contain a not-insignificant of anecdotes about hiring processes that resulted in high failure rates in interviews, so they hire someone kinda smart anyway and teach them the concepts that other interviewers failed to answer satisfactorily in the interviews. Why ask at all, then?

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