4 ms·

Interviews suck for both parties, a world without interviews would be a better world. Why can't we just hire someone based on his experience and projects he pre

by XCSme 9y ago

Interviews suck for both parties, a world without interviews would be a better world. Why can't we just hire someone based on his experience and projects he previously worked on? You can have a first month as a "trial" where both parties can cancel the contract. Why interviews suck is because they are very, very biased and subjective and also not a good way to estimate the actual performance of a candidate. Say no to interviews! If you like what someone did, hire him. You can't get to know a person after 1 or even 10 interviews, because the interview environment is totally different from the work environment. PS: I have been interviewed by 14 different people at Google. I didn't get the job. The overall conclusion was that some interviewers loved me, my skill and my work, others didn't like me from the start or simply didn't care about me. Some of them had a good day so they gave a good "review" even though I made mistakes, some of them had a really bad day (one fell of the chair) and gave me a really bad review even though, related to the actual interview questions, I did really well. (14 interviews = applied twice, 2 x (5 on-site + 1 online), and they also wanted 2 extra interviews to take a decision)

CJefferson 9y ago
I'm sure most businesses would love that situation, but for employees it would require you quit your current job, but have a good chance of being fired after a month at your new job. I imagine young employees would be happy (I did a bunch of short-term contracts myself), but once you have a mortgage and kids, it's nice to be a little more certain about your new job, before quitting your old one.
- nolemurs 9y ago
  > I imagine young employees would be happy (I did a bunch of short-term contracts myself), but once you have a mortgage and kids, it's nice to be a little more certain about your new job, before quitting your old one. And just to make this really explicit - this means that a company with this hiring practice would have a very hard time hiring experienced competent engineers. If I were looking for a job, I'd have lots of options, and I would not waste time on a company that demanded this.
njovin 9y ago
As a hirer at my current company I would love to end interviews but far too many candidates have resumes that look impressive but they then fall short on pretty basic code scrutiny. The ease of appearing competent due to previous successes (whether by team support or outright luck) make interviews a necessary evil. You would be amazed the number of candidates we get with solid work history who submit code samples containing red-flag issues like SQL injection vulnerabilities. We always provide helpful feedback and politely decline these hires (we are a small time and we all learn from each other but I can't start off a senior-level hire who doesn't understand the basic web security) only to find out that they've been placed at some other company for their sought-after senior/level salary.
mseebach 9y ago
The effort required to get someone new spun up on your project isn't trivial (unless what you're doing is trivial...). There is a lot to understand, both "hard" knowledge about the tech stack, product, specific features you're working on, customer use cases etc as well as the "soft" stuff, like communication style, the specific rhythm of the team and more often than not, reading a bit of politics. Never mind that this is stressful for the applicant (and would require them to quit their previous job for a perfectly insecure alternative), it takes a substantial effort on part of the existing team to do this. A commonly mentioned number for application success rates are on the order of 1:100. Even if this process is 10x better, a team will have to welcome a new "apprentice" every month (and fire most of them again) to get a single new hire a year. This is not obviously an improvement for either employer or employee.
morgante 9y ago
> Interviews suck for both parties, a world without interviews would be a better world. Actually, I rather like interviews. They typically pose some fun programming problems and I have a chance to talk about a lot of the cool work I've done over the years. Honestly, I do think the interviewing process is very risky from a company perspective (it's insane to me that companies will invest tens of thousands of dollars into someone based on essentially an afternoon of conversations), but it's perfectly great for some candidates.
- XCSme 9y ago
  I didn't say I didn't enjoy the interviews, I loved most of them where the interviewer was actually involved. That being said, that's my point with interviews, if you don't trust something that the interviewer wrote on his CV (right 20 years experience and a history of successful products) then how can you decide to hire him or not after only a few hours of talking to him? You could have a bad day, he could have a bad day, it might happen that he knows exactly the question he has been asked or that he knows everything else EXCEPT that question. Usually it takes months of working next to someone to know how good he really is.

by XCSme 9y ago

CJefferson 9y ago

I'm sure most businesses would love that situation, but for employees it would require you quit your current job, but have a good chance of being fired after a month at your new job. I imagine young employees would be happy (I did a bunch of short-term contracts myself), but once you have a mortgage and kids, it's nice to be a little more certain about your new job, before quitting your old one.

nolemurs 9y ago
> I imagine young employees would be happy (I did a bunch of short-term contracts myself), but once you have a mortgage and kids, it's nice to be a little more certain about your new job, before quitting your old one. And just to make this really explicit - this means that a company with this hiring practice would have a very hard time hiring experienced competent engineers. If I were looking for a job, I'd have lots of options, and I would not waste time on a company that demanded this.

njovin 9y ago

As a hirer at my current company I would love to end interviews but far too many candidates have resumes that look impressive but they then fall short on pretty basic code scrutiny. The ease of appearing competent due to previous successes (whether by team support or outright luck) make interviews a necessary evil. You would be amazed the number of candidates we get with solid work history who submit code samples containing red-flag issues like SQL injection vulnerabilities. We always provide helpful feedback and politely decline these hires (we are a small time and we all learn from each other but I can't start off a senior-level hire who doesn't understand the basic web security) only to find out that they've been placed at some other company for their sought-after senior/level salary.

mseebach 9y ago

The effort required to get someone new spun up on your project isn't trivial (unless what you're doing is trivial...). There is a lot to understand, both "hard" knowledge about the tech stack, product, specific features you're working on, customer use cases etc as well as the "soft" stuff, like communication style, the specific rhythm of the team and more often than not, reading a bit of politics. Never mind that this is stressful for the applicant (and would require them to quit their previous job for a perfectly insecure alternative), it takes a substantial effort on part of the existing team to do this. A commonly mentioned number for application success rates are on the order of 1:100. Even if this process is 10x better, a team will have to welcome a new "apprentice" every month (and fire most of them again) to get a single new hire a year. This is not obviously an improvement for either employer or employee.

morgante 9y ago

> Interviews suck for both parties, a world without interviews would be a better world. Actually, I rather like interviews. They typically pose some fun programming problems and I have a chance to talk about a lot of the cool work I've done over the years. Honestly, I do think the interviewing process is very risky from a company perspective (it's insane to me that companies will invest tens of thousands of dollars into someone based on essentially an afternoon of conversations), but it's perfectly great for some candidates.

XCSme 9y ago
I didn't say I didn't enjoy the interviews, I loved most of them where the interviewer was actually involved. That being said, that's my point with interviews, if you don't trust something that the interviewer wrote on his CV (right 20 years experience and a history of successful products) then how can you decide to hire him or not after only a few hours of talking to him? You could have a bad day, he could have a bad day, it might happen that he knows exactly the question he has been asked or that he knows everything else EXCEPT that question. Usually it takes months of working next to someone to know how good he really is.