Although I’m a product person (CPO) I’ve hired (alongside a CTO) maybe 100+ engineers in my time and I’m hoping my perspective is useful/helpful. The process t

Although I’m a product person (CPO) I’ve hired (alongside a CTO) maybe 100+ engineers in my time and I’m hoping my perspective is useful/helpful. The process that my CTO and I have found works best is as follows; A 20min phone interview (to screen for BS’ers). A technical test that’s based on the sort of problems they will be solving in their job. How would you do X in language Y, no boiler plate code, and it doesn’t have to be perfect. (So no fizz buzz, conways game of life etc.) We also stipulate to spend no more than 2 hours on it, and if their successful they get that time back. We even offer a discount (on the thing we sell) to unsuccessful people who don’t make it. The test serves as not only a good high level demonstration of ones skils but, more importantly, gives us all something to talk around. It also shows us how they approach key things like testing, deployment, maintainability etc etc. Then there is a 2 hours face to face interview. Ahead of this the test is peer reviewed by the engineering team (or part of it) The interview is made up of one one hour technical section with the CTO/Senior, and one with a designer/product manager. A joint decision is made. Then, if they are successful, we have a probation period where we (the candidate and us) work out if it’s all going as we’d hoped. If not, we part ways. You most likely wouldn’t marry someone before a first date. A job is the same. You both need time to see if you like each other and your profile pics match real life. It’s not perfect, but no system is. Sure we’ve hired a few people we’ve had to let go, but for the most part it’s a great system. We’ve managed to hire not just great engineers but also build a team and culture that fits and works. Hiring is time consuming, hard and at times emotional. There is no shortcut. I’ve interviewed and worked at big tech companies and they all think there is some secret sauce, a magic code to hiring. That is, if you ask super hard questions only the “best” make it through - utter tosh. Some of the most amazing engineers I’ve worked with would fail these type of stupid questions (for a while load of reasons) but quietly write amazing code. Also, and more importantly imo, to be an amazing engineer you need to be great (equally) at teamwork and communication, not just be super book smart. I read a while back (or imagined it?) that MSFT only hired people with Msc’s/PHd’s and that it created a probelem where there wasn’t any intellectual diversity. These tests cause this too. You get cookie cutter people who are smart but often can’t work in teams and can’t communicate well.