I wish you could see how a potential employee acted in a Slack room and in pull requests for a week or two before hiring them. (It's doable, but fairly rare in

I wish you could see how a potential employee acted in a Slack room and in pull requests for a week or two before hiring them. (It's doable, but fairly rare in the industry right now.) As we move more and more towards working in a distributed fashion, using tools that don't require us to even meet someone in person for months at a time, it's a little strange that there's so much emphasis placed on in-person interviews (which is inherently a fairly stressful process). How someone communicates in person is fine, but that's sometimes only part of the picture. On top of that, some people are much more comfortable communicating over the internet, and weighing in-person interviews so heavily ends up discounting their real talents. Ideally you find people have skills with both asynchronous and synchronous communication... but you need to be keeping an eye out for both qualities for that.