4 ms·

This debate will keep happening for years to come, but everyone's just repeating the same talking points over and over. I have to sum up my thoughts like this:

This debate will keep happening for years to come, but everyone's just repeating the same talking points over and over. I have to sum up my thoughts like this: I really don't think we're ever going to find a perfect hiring method. You will always have a nonzero chance of false positives and false negatives, and there will always be downsides that piss people off. So, pick a reliable hiring method(s) (talk about experience, solve whiteboard q's, do take-home projects, or whatever) and try to make it better over time. If you don't like it, you can switch to another method and start improving on that. Etc. But your method will always fail some good hires and pass some bad ones. It sucks, but we are still able to hire mostly good/trainable people, so we should stop worrying and move on. I hypothesize that there are a lot more interviewees than interviewers getting involved in the debate. I only have to tell the former group to keep trying and stop complaining. If you're not sure why you're failing interviews, that's a solved problem -- just do mock interviews with your friends or on interviewing.io. But stop blaming the process for your own failures.

deleted 7y ago
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ChuckNorris89 7y ago
> but we are still able to hire mostly good/trainable people Wow, you're actually training people? Kudos to you, I haven't seen that in a looong time. In my current area, everyone only looks for seniors or experienced devs. New grads without connections can suck it basically.
- oneepic 7y ago
  At this point my team mostly hires juniors. We train them on whatever they don't know that they need to know here. We hired a mostly self-taught engineer out of college a year ago (I started ~2mos ago). Had almost no idea about webdev, or C#/.Net, or web APIs, but we taught her on the job. I'm similar, since I had no experience with web APIs before joining but I had experience with C#.Net, Asp, etc.
AJ007 7y ago
We will see the debate go on as long as humans are working. The problem is hiring is reflexive. Hiring is a marketplace, not a static measurement. Human behavior changes in reaction to other human behavior. If someone found a foolproof method of hiring once it become widely known, it would no longer foolproof. Either employers would all try to hire the same employees or employees would find out which signals mattered and tried to game them. This already occurs to some extent with the Ivy League hiring approach. The general “college degree” part has already been over-gamed to the extent it is meaningless. What employers should be doing is measuring the long term success and failures from interviews and seeing if the interviewer even has an above random chance of selecting good employees. If it’s worse than random than the interviewer is probably just terrible at what they are doing. This would also require the employer to agree on what makes a long term successful employee, something I’m not sure many people even agree on. At minimum, I’m presuming you couldn’t make a judgement on a hire in less than 5 years.

deleted 7y ago

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ChuckNorris89 7y ago

> but we are still able to hire mostly good/trainable people Wow, you're actually training people? Kudos to you, I haven't seen that in a looong time. In my current area, everyone only looks for seniors or experienced devs. New grads without connections can suck it basically.

oneepic 7y ago
At this point my team mostly hires juniors. We train them on whatever they don't know that they need to know here. We hired a mostly self-taught engineer out of college a year ago (I started ~2mos ago). Had almost no idea about webdev, or C#/.Net, or web APIs, but we taught her on the job. I'm similar, since I had no experience with web APIs before joining but I had experience with C#.Net, Asp, etc.

AJ007 7y ago

We will see the debate go on as long as humans are working. The problem is hiring is reflexive. Hiring is a marketplace, not a static measurement. Human behavior changes in reaction to other human behavior. If someone found a foolproof method of hiring once it become widely known, it would no longer foolproof. Either employers would all try to hire the same employees or employees would find out which signals mattered and tried to game them. This already occurs to some extent with the Ivy League hiring approach. The general “college degree” part has already been over-gamed to the extent it is meaningless. What employers should be doing is measuring the long term success and failures from interviews and seeing if the interviewer even has an above random chance of selecting good employees. If it’s worse than random than the interviewer is probably just terrible at what they are doing. This would also require the employer to agree on what makes a long term successful employee, something I’m not sure many people even agree on. At minimum, I’m presuming you couldn’t make a judgement on a hire in less than 5 years.