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You can tell if someone knows what they are doing by talking to them and having them walk you through what they have worked on. Also, in the United States, you

You can tell if someone knows what they are doing by talking to them and having them walk you through what they have worked on. Also, in the United States, you could fire someone easily if they were really incompetent. Considering how much time and money people spend per candidate to interview, it's probably much cheaper and more efficient to hire faster and fire faster. Some companies are spending tens of thousands of dollars per candidate they interview! Hiring is a skill, and an overly long or drawn out process is a sign of bad hiring, not good hiring. The second part of the equation is to train people up and mentor them. Hiring is not enough. The second big part of good management is to actually get the most out of people and to help them learn and grow. Now if it were only the tech industry that had long, ridiculous hiring processes, maybe we could say that it is necessary, but many companies and many fields have similar processes. I believe that many people have mistaken length of interview process and time spent with rigor.

lowbloodsugar 9y ago
You really can't. There are some people who have a skill for talking about what they've seen others do, and for memorizing what others said. If that person has sat in a post-mortem for some failure, they'll be able to tell you all the things that went wrong, how "they" fixed them, and why. And yet they can't code. I'm not hiring people who can talk and not code. I'm hiring people who can code (and, ideally, talk). The only way to verify that they can code is to witness it happening.
- mratzloff 9y ago
  Well, in that case, what you definitely want to do is optimize your entire interview process around the 1% of people who can pull this off, instead of just firing them when they can't execute on the job.
deleted 9y ago
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BeetleB 9y ago
>it's probably much cheaper and more efficient to hire faster and fire faster. Reality is otherwise. Lots of paperwork involved (for both hiring and firing). And leads to a not-too-great work culture.
- pnw_hazor 9y ago
  Firing duds is the best moral booster there is. There is very little paperwork required to fire someone. If the employee is still on contract (ala contract-to-perm) just collect their badge and be done with it. If they are a W-2 employee with benefits, you hand them a few benefits notice forms and send them on their way. If they apply for unemployment, the company will get a notice that the former employee has applied for benefits.
  - mywittyname 9y ago
    I agree with you, but in reality, a large enough company could face (and lose) a wrongful termination lawsuit if they do this too often. The burden of proof for this is surprisingly low and engineering pays well enough that many of them can afford good lawyers. Plus there's the added risk of hiring "duds" that are also minorities. And letting too many of them go will make it look like formal discrimination. Which is a much, much more expensive mess. And then there's this issue of finding the duds. Easy for the people on the ground to spot, but less so for management and HR, which will require some form of reasonably accurate performance evaluations.
  - BeetleB 9y ago
    >Firing duds is the best moral booster there is. The Glassdoor reviews on Netflix suggest otherwise.

lowbloodsugar 9y ago

You really can't. There are some people who have a skill for talking about what they've seen others do, and for memorizing what others said. If that person has sat in a post-mortem for some failure, they'll be able to tell you all the things that went wrong, how "they" fixed them, and why. And yet they can't code. I'm not hiring people who can talk and not code. I'm hiring people who can code (and, ideally, talk). The only way to verify that they can code is to witness it happening.

mratzloff 9y ago
Well, in that case, what you definitely want to do is optimize your entire interview process around the 1% of people who can pull this off, instead of just firing them when they can't execute on the job.

deleted 9y ago

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BeetleB 9y ago

>it's probably much cheaper and more efficient to hire faster and fire faster. Reality is otherwise. Lots of paperwork involved (for both hiring and firing). And leads to a not-too-great work culture.

pnw_hazor 9y ago
Firing duds is the best moral booster there is. There is very little paperwork required to fire someone. If the employee is still on contract (ala contract-to-perm) just collect their badge and be done with it. If they are a W-2 employee with benefits, you hand them a few benefits notice forms and send them on their way. If they apply for unemployment, the company will get a notice that the former employee has applied for benefits.
- mywittyname 9y ago
  I agree with you, but in reality, a large enough company could face (and lose) a wrongful termination lawsuit if they do this too often. The burden of proof for this is surprisingly low and engineering pays well enough that many of them can afford good lawyers. Plus there's the added risk of hiring "duds" that are also minorities. And letting too many of them go will make it look like formal discrimination. Which is a much, much more expensive mess. And then there's this issue of finding the duds. Easy for the people on the ground to spot, but less so for management and HR, which will require some form of reasonably accurate performance evaluations.
- BeetleB 9y ago
  >Firing duds is the best moral booster there is. The Glassdoor reviews on Netflix suggest otherwise.