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First day: "Hey welcome to the team hope you got everything setup when you have a minute do you mind going through your contacts we cannot find any good enginee

by dcow 9y ago

First day: "Hey welcome to the team hope you got everything setup when you have a minute do you mind going through your contacts we cannot find any good engineers lately." Me: "Ookaay.. thanks? Sure here are 5 people I've studied and/or worked with. They're literally rockstars. I personally vouch for them and I know most of them are in the market and interested." "Hmm they look too junior thanks anyway." One month later: after spending plenty of time interviewing and rejecting some wildly overqualified candidates because they're not culture fits, hiring manager brings in their "80% but can get the job done" (that is a quote no joke) friend from previous job. Or they bing on a far more expensive contractor. Meanwhile my five recommendations all get hired at competing or peer companies. This has happened in some form or another at most every place I've worked. To date I'm extremely disillusioned with the "tech" hiring process. I've seen everything from perfectly qualified candidates getting rejected because the interviewer woke up on the wrong side of the bed and, in the span of less than an hour, developed a vendetta against the candidate, to plain old nepotism. I've even seen people vote to pass because they wanted the job the candidate came in for and thought they could do a better job even though there were no plans for such an arrangement to ever happen. I've seen interviewers fail a candidate because they couldn't solve a problem the interviewer (who is in a marginally related domain) was having trouble with last week and wasn't making progress on because google didn't have a copy paste answer. Interviewing is entirely subjective. Humans are humans. They only person that truely matters at the end of the day WRT interviewing is the hiring manager and maybe their boss. Edit: I forgot my main point, excuse the rant. The point is I don't see how the industry is going to overcome this hurdle when it's neigh impossible for a front line engineer to bring in good people who wouldn't already appeal to whatever processes/humans are in place--which clearly isn't working because they can't find good engineers.

purplezooey 9y ago
Agree. At all 3 of my previous companies, most hires we're often a buddy of the manager who usually wasn't very good or a fit for the role. There's usually no process. One thing you can do that's a low hanging fruit is just take a day with your interviewers and come up with 5-10 quality questions and a short way to make sure the same questions are asked to every candidate and nobody asks the same question. That alone will increase the quality of your interviews.
- dcow 9y ago
  I actually think we've had really quality interviews everywhere I've been. That's the weird thing. It's not the interviews that are the problem. It's the pre and post filtering that just feels so arbitrary.

by dcow 9y ago

purplezooey 9y ago

Agree. At all 3 of my previous companies, most hires we're often a buddy of the manager who usually wasn't very good or a fit for the role. There's usually no process. One thing you can do that's a low hanging fruit is just take a day with your interviewers and come up with 5-10 quality questions and a short way to make sure the same questions are asked to every candidate and nobody asks the same question. That alone will increase the quality of your interviews.

dcow 9y ago
I actually think we've had really quality interviews everywhere I've been. That's the weird thing. It's not the interviews that are the problem. It's the pre and post filtering that just feels so arbitrary.