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Only one or two of those interview descriptions mention anything like the bullshit tech trivia this thread is about. Most describe take-home problems, extended
by p4wnc6 10y ago
Only one or two of those interview descriptions mention anything like the bullshit tech trivia this thread is about. Most describe take-home problems, extended design conversations, and technical sessions that are more like extended conversations.
You seem to infer that the phrase "just hire them" means you do absolutely zero interviewing, which was not my intention.
When I said "just hire them" I meant "do some obvious stuff, like talk about their experience, ask a high-level question and expect a discussiony answer, not short, commoditized trivia, and if based on that stuff it seems reasonable, then just hire them and don't obsess over cramming more dumb trivia filters into the process."
I took it for granted that everyone reading this would understand that basic interview (e.g. talk to someone, ask about their resume items, have a discussion) is always necessary.
The "just hire them" part is meant to say that people should not get stuck up their own ass with trying to put together a ridiculous number of commodity filters up front before getting to that conversation stage, and that the conversation stage should function more like a rolling basis hire than like a process in which you tediously examine every candidate first, then go back and eliminate and re-interview, etc.
I think the Netflix process fits what I'm saying very well.
- ktRolster 10y agoWhen I said "just hire them" I meant "do some obvious stuff, like talk about their experience, ask a high-level question and expect a discussiony answer, not short, commoditized trivia, and if based on that stuff it seems reasonable, then just hire them and don't obsess over cramming more dumb trivia filters into the process." There's a big difference between the words "just hire them" and what you meant by those words.
- p4wnc6 10y agoI disagree. It's pretty obvious that no one would mean to literally hire someone with zero screening of any kind. It's unreasonable to read "just hire them" to mean something that extreme.
- ktRolster 10y agoI disagree. It's pretty obvious ok. It wasn't obvious to me lol
- p4wnc6 10y agoIt surprises me greatly that you wouldn't account for some base level of vetting of any candidate, and place my comment in the context of much of the rest of the thread, which is clearly about whether or not commoditized trivia testing is a useful way of vetting candidates. It greatly surprises me that anyone enough in touch with tech to even be reading Hacker News in the first place would choose to read my comment that way. I'm not saying you're wrong or trying to defend my writing. I'm just saying there's no way in a million lifetimes that I would have anticipated even the most remote possibility of someone taking it that way, and even after reading that you saw it that way, my prior is still so heavily weighted towards the obviousness from context that I still wouldn't ever expect this and doubt that if I make similar comments in the future, they will adequately account for someone reading it in the manner in which you did. It's just too unlikely of a perspective.