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I've been responsible for hiring 10 or so engineers in my career and everyone of them turned out to be a good hire from the company's perspective. I was always

I've been responsible for hiring 10 or so engineers in my career and everyone of them turned out to be a good hire from the company's perspective. I was always able to smell the BS pretty quickly during interviews and it's always surprised me that this seems to be such a difficult thing for some interviewers to recognize. The BS is exposed when asking for more and more detail about prior work and projects. What was the last project you worked on? What was your role specifically? Were you responsible for selecting any portions of the tech stack? If so, how did you make those decisions? What were the determining factors? And on and on. As an interviewer, if I could not get a good read on one's abilities in this way I'd question my qualifications to be conducting the interview.

sokoloff 8y ago
The BS artists might be 1 in 250 to 1 in 1000 candidates, so give it time and you'll run into a skilled one sooner or later. I have made several bad hires over 25 years and probably 100 direct hires and 500 total hires where I was on the panel. It happens. Most would have been difficult to ferret out in an interview, because an interview is an inherently spotty/lossy process. The worst hire I ever made had, in retrospect, been given the (business case) question ahead of time and had pre-written notes in his notepad. He theatrically took careful notes while I was stating the business case problem, asked if it was OK if he did some computations and composed his thoughts in his notebook before presenting the case at the whiteboard. He did just that and stood to deliver literally the most polished presentation on the case that I have ever experienced. 5/5 definitely hire. Shows up to the job and couldn't get water out of a boot if told the instructions were printed on the bottom. Flames out in a few months and moves on to his next gig. It was only after playing things back that I realized the only way he could have pulled that off was to have pre-seeded his notebook with the solution to the business case.

sokoloff 8y ago

The BS artists might be 1 in 250 to 1 in 1000 candidates, so give it time and you'll run into a skilled one sooner or later. I have made several bad hires over 25 years and probably 100 direct hires and 500 total hires where I was on the panel. It happens. Most would have been difficult to ferret out in an interview, because an interview is an inherently spotty/lossy process. The worst hire I ever made had, in retrospect, been given the (business case) question ahead of time and had pre-written notes in his notepad. He theatrically took careful notes while I was stating the business case problem, asked if it was OK if he did some computations and composed his thoughts in his notebook before presenting the case at the whiteboard. He did just that and stood to deliver literally the most polished presentation on the case that I have ever experienced. 5/5 definitely hire. Shows up to the job and couldn't get water out of a boot if told the instructions were printed on the bottom. Flames out in a few months and moves on to his next gig. It was only after playing things back that I realized the only way he could have pulled that off was to have pre-seeded his notebook with the solution to the business case.