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This all comes down to what the company is optimizing for. Everybody here seems to assume they are trying to filter for the good candidates...but what they are

This all comes down to what the company is optimizing for. Everybody here seems to assume they are trying to filter for the good candidates...but what they are actually trying to do with these kind of interviews is filter out the bad ones! Because the damage when hiring a bad candidate is much higher than the damage from missing out on a good one!

rossdavidh 8y ago
Truth, and also especially so for a company like FB or Google where they probably have an abundance of qualified applicants, for a variety of reasons. For most companies, copying what FB or Google (or Microsoft or whoever) is doing, is probably a bad idea, in tech interviewing or many other things.
vonmoltke 8y ago
> Because the damage when hiring a bad candidate is much higher than the damage from missing out on a good one! I get that this is the conventional wisdom in a subset of this industry, but in my experience this "truth" does not have as much objective support as the people who keep repeating it think it does.
- pishpash 8y ago
  In at least one aspect, the adage becomes facially untrue -- you can fire bad employees, but you cannot get back good candidates rejected by means of a degrading exercise. You probably lose them forever. In companies where opportunity cost and hidden losses are nobody's responsibility, this sort of mediocrity is well accepted.
  - rock_hard 8y ago
    At FANG good candidates tend to apply again a year or so later
  - sethammons 8y ago
    You can fire the bad ones, sure. After you document everything and cross i's and dot t's. Even if you don't CYA, you still lost team productivity while they onboarded the new person, and that time is lost. Plus the hit to team moral, and possible negative affects to team culture of dealing with an under performer or toxic individual.
    - vonmoltke 8y ago
      What's the cost to team morale when the team members have to put in extra time to meet deadlines because the team is shorthanded? What's the cost to the company when the team doesn't have the bandwidth to take on work and projects start slipping? How does team culture fare when someone on the team always finds some reason to reject every candidate they see, and this continues for weeks or months on end? What is the loss of productivity from having to conduct all these extra interviews until just the right person walks through the door? The answers to both sets of questions are very situational, yet some people treat them as if they have universal answers.
      - stale2002 8y ago
        > What's the cost to team morale when the team members have to put in extra time to Less than the cost of being perpetually afraid of being fired. If an engineer on my team got fired, no matter how much they deserved it, I'd probably start looking for a new job or team immediately. The fear of being let go isnt something I'd ever want to deal with.
      - rock_hard 8y ago
        Just to be clear the kind of strategy we discuss here only works at FANG like companies that have enough candidates applying so that missing a good one doesn’t hurt their hiring goals. Of course it sucks for the individual...but such is life
pishpash 8y ago
Nope. They're neither filtering in good ones or filtering out bad ones. They're filtering for people who find a way to hit whatever arbitrary metric the Company sets up as "success", and these people will have many more chances to practice this "skill" in subsequent self reviews and metrics hacking. They also end up running the Company and hiring more like themselves.

rossdavidh 8y ago

Truth, and also especially so for a company like FB or Google where they probably have an abundance of qualified applicants, for a variety of reasons. For most companies, copying what FB or Google (or Microsoft or whoever) is doing, is probably a bad idea, in tech interviewing or many other things.

vonmoltke 8y ago

> Because the damage when hiring a bad candidate is much higher than the damage from missing out on a good one! I get that this is the conventional wisdom in a subset of this industry, but in my experience this "truth" does not have as much objective support as the people who keep repeating it think it does.

pishpash 8y ago
In at least one aspect, the adage becomes facially untrue -- you can fire bad employees, but you cannot get back good candidates rejected by means of a degrading exercise. You probably lose them forever. In companies where opportunity cost and hidden losses are nobody's responsibility, this sort of mediocrity is well accepted.
- rock_hard 8y ago
  At FANG good candidates tend to apply again a year or so later
- sethammons 8y ago
  You can fire the bad ones, sure. After you document everything and cross i's and dot t's. Even if you don't CYA, you still lost team productivity while they onboarded the new person, and that time is lost. Plus the hit to team moral, and possible negative affects to team culture of dealing with an under performer or toxic individual.
  - vonmoltke 8y ago
    What's the cost to team morale when the team members have to put in extra time to meet deadlines because the team is shorthanded? What's the cost to the company when the team doesn't have the bandwidth to take on work and projects start slipping? How does team culture fare when someone on the team always finds some reason to reject every candidate they see, and this continues for weeks or months on end? What is the loss of productivity from having to conduct all these extra interviews until just the right person walks through the door? The answers to both sets of questions are very situational, yet some people treat them as if they have universal answers.
    - stale2002 8y ago
      > What's the cost to team morale when the team members have to put in extra time to Less than the cost of being perpetually afraid of being fired. If an engineer on my team got fired, no matter how much they deserved it, I'd probably start looking for a new job or team immediately. The fear of being let go isnt something I'd ever want to deal with.
    - rock_hard 8y ago
      Just to be clear the kind of strategy we discuss here only works at FANG like companies that have enough candidates applying so that missing a good one doesn’t hurt their hiring goals. Of course it sucks for the individual...but such is life

pishpash 8y ago

Nope. They're neither filtering in good ones or filtering out bad ones. They're filtering for people who find a way to hit whatever arbitrary metric the Company sets up as "success", and these people will have many more chances to practice this "skill" in subsequent self reviews and metrics hacking. They also end up running the Company and hiring more like themselves.