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I liked most of the decisions you made and how you addressed the problem of hiring coders. One question, do you think, maybe not in your case but in some situat
by xigency 11y ago
I liked most of the decisions you made and how you addressed the problem of hiring coders. One question, do you think, maybe not in your case but in some situations, that a process like this might be too drawn out or too selective?
Recently I spent some time interviewing and jumping between jobs, and compared to the amount of time I spent working at one company, I was spending a lot of time interviewing, preparing for interviews, and applying to companies.
Basically, my impression from being a high school programmer was walking in the door, being qualified, and being hired essentially in the same afternoon. After getting through college, it seems to be way more of a contest to win a job.
Similarly, I earned an internship at a high-profile company in New York City, which I didn't actually complete due to extenuating circumstances, but the impression I had from the interview and from a few days on the job was that the role was trivially easy and they were somehow scouting the absolutely most qualified and talented programmers in the country, anyway. This might happen to work out but something seems broken in this situation, too.
- wpietri 11y agoAs to being drawn out, I think that I would love to find ways to make it quicker. At startups, where you're basically always hiring, it's easier because you can hire on a rolling basis. At my last company if somebody was eager, they could do all the stages over one or two days and we could quickly make an offer. In this case, though, this team had only one position to fill and hadn't hired together before, so we needed to see a fair number of candidates in a batch so that we could collectively calibrate. That took more time than I wanted. I definitely don't think we were too selective, though. Good developers can quickly improve both a team and a code base. Bad ones can harm both in ways that are expensive to fix. I think a lot of typical selection criteria are bunk (e.g., fancy schools, fancy companies on the resume), and I'm not always looking for amazing technical qualifications. But I definitely think it's worth time to find people who are great fits for the job.
- xigency 11y agoThanks, those are good points. I enjoyed the article.