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Hiring should be done by the team, not by these ridiculous "committees". The metrics and data have clearly shown them to be ineffective at both preventing bad h
by iamleppert 10y ago
Hiring should be done by the team, not by these ridiculous "committees". The metrics and data have clearly shown them to be ineffective at both preventing bad hires as well as the prediction of future employee performance, time and time again.
They are still around in companies because it gives "senior" engineers something to do, and it makes them feel good about themselves. From the people I know who work at Facebook, there is a marked lack of work at the higher levels of technical leadership; thus you get these kinds of "committees" that serve no business purpose and actively harm the hiring process.
Like I said, the people best suited to do hiring are the people whom will work directly with the person. They need to be able to get along, "like" the other person, respect them, and they need to be smart. There is so much more to hiring and team building than checking off the technical checkboxes, whatever those are. You're dealing with intellectual people (knowledge workers) and an intricate social dynamic.
Of course, Facebook's goal is to likely not build great teams. They already have the teams built and self-sustaining that run the actual business. This dog and pony show exists purely to placate to existing mediocre senior engineers who have attained that position through some sort of osmosis effect but who lack talent or real power in the organization.
- jkaptur 10y agoIs there much internal mobility at Facebook? My understanding is that the point of a single hiring committee is to ensure that every individual at the company has met a similar standard, which reduces the barrier to switching teams. I've heard of companies without a common standard where switching teams is as hard as quitting and reapplying for the new job (complete with the beloved algorithms-on-a-whiteboard process), which seems silly.
- cpeterso 10y agoI heard that Facebook offers new hires the opportunity to moonlight on a different team for one month after their first year.
- srj 10y agoIf each team controls hiring you will end up with teams that have different standards for hiring. That implies that internal transfers will also need "re-hiring". It also implies that compensation may need to vary between teams. I think it promotes fairness to have a committee of people who haven't met the candidate to decide on them from the details given by interviewers. This should be increasing diversity if anything as it relies on objective metrics rather than any hidden bias. The problems cited in the article are that committee members are focusing on where the candidate went to school, and who at FB can vouch for them. By trying to make sure new candidates resemble existing employees they will of course have trouble diversifying their workforce.
- threatofrain 10y agoAllowing each team to customize their hiring process also makes hiring opaque and difficult to empirically tune.
- carsongross 10y agoYep. And that's good.
- st3v3r 10y agoOpaque hiring practices are never good.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- prostoalex 10y ago> Hiring should be done by the team This provides an incentive for hiring managers who are under pressure to deliver to throw away all corporate hiring standards and sign up anyone with a pulse. That's just short-term. Long-term this leads to divisions within the company where some teams are deemed "significantly below average" because of that one crunch time a few years back, causing cultural tension, which eventually forces good people out.