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And what's your suggestion to make it better? Giving us the definition of complaining... well thanks. There is a correlation between these horrendous interview

by ctvo 7y ago

And what's your suggestion to make it better? Giving us the definition of complaining... well thanks. There is a correlation between these horrendous interviews and quality of candidates otherwise, if they were full of false positives, we would stop doing them. The problem is they produce false negatives and how do we go about fixing that? Is it even that big of a problem? These are all debatable. We haven't hit the point where hiring is SO expensive that we can't handle false negatives, we may in the future, then we'd work much harder at addressing the current situation.

learc83 7y ago
>if they were full of false positives, we would stop doing them. Or the alternate explanation. Hiring is incredibly difficult, everyone is bad at it, and the best solution people can come up with is to cargo cult Google's hiring process. From experience I know there are many companies that have absolutely no evidence to support their hiring process, they just do it because it's the current fad. And I assure you whiteboard interviews are full of plenty of false positives. Particularly now that people are spending so much time prepping for the interviews. You know the saying about metrics ceasing to he useful
Frost1x 7y ago
It will be a big problem if your false negatives become your competitors.
pellucidar 7y ago
But hiring IS crazy expensive because of the hours of effort spent by existing employees on the hiring side of the process, and the difficulty of finding "good" candidates who are willing to spend those hours plus even more of their own on the being hired side. In other industries people just don't talk about spending 6-8 hours a week every week interviewing applicants--not even in high-turnover industries. That's an incredible cost, but it's not counted as a line item, just yet another annoyance of the annoying hiring process.
- ctvo 7y ago
  Agreed it's expensive. My claim is it's not expensive enough yet for decision makers to actively explore alternatives. Will it get there as supply of quality engineers decrease? Maybe. Probably. In my experience the companies I worked at tracked it very well, and we knew exactly how many hours were spent on hiring related work and how much it was costing us. We still used the current industry standard whiteboard, full day approach.
  - pellucidar 7y ago
    Yes, but those hours aren't actually a line item when salaried employees do it, so the expense isn't as visible as other expenses. I think the perception of a lack of quality engineers in the market is just a symptom of the problem: the expense in time and annoyance of changing jobs and the risk (or experience) of becoming a false negative reduces job mobility and heavily slants the resume stack towards the true negatives rather than the experienced people who would be more actively looking around in a saner market. I haven't heard of a better explanation for the notion, seemingly unique to software, that so many people floating around the industry are so abysmally unqualified to work at another company in the same industry. There are historical factors, but they don't seem adequate to explain this perceived fraud problem.

by ctvo 7y ago

learc83 7y ago

>if they were full of false positives, we would stop doing them. Or the alternate explanation. Hiring is incredibly difficult, everyone is bad at it, and the best solution people can come up with is to cargo cult Google's hiring process. From experience I know there are many companies that have absolutely no evidence to support their hiring process, they just do it because it's the current fad. And I assure you whiteboard interviews are full of plenty of false positives. Particularly now that people are spending so much time prepping for the interviews. You know the saying about metrics ceasing to he useful

Frost1x 7y ago

It will be a big problem if your false negatives become your competitors.

pellucidar 7y ago

But hiring IS crazy expensive because of the hours of effort spent by existing employees on the hiring side of the process, and the difficulty of finding "good" candidates who are willing to spend those hours plus even more of their own on the being hired side. In other industries people just don't talk about spending 6-8 hours a week every week interviewing applicants--not even in high-turnover industries. That's an incredible cost, but it's not counted as a line item, just yet another annoyance of the annoying hiring process.

ctvo 7y ago
Agreed it's expensive. My claim is it's not expensive enough yet for decision makers to actively explore alternatives. Will it get there as supply of quality engineers decrease? Maybe. Probably. In my experience the companies I worked at tracked it very well, and we knew exactly how many hours were spent on hiring related work and how much it was costing us. We still used the current industry standard whiteboard, full day approach.
- pellucidar 7y ago
  Yes, but those hours aren't actually a line item when salaried employees do it, so the expense isn't as visible as other expenses. I think the perception of a lack of quality engineers in the market is just a symptom of the problem: the expense in time and annoyance of changing jobs and the risk (or experience) of becoming a false negative reduces job mobility and heavily slants the resume stack towards the true negatives rather than the experienced people who would be more actively looking around in a saner market. I haven't heard of a better explanation for the notion, seemingly unique to software, that so many people floating around the industry are so abysmally unqualified to work at another company in the same industry. There are historical factors, but they don't seem adequate to explain this perceived fraud problem.