11 ms·

I don't know, hiring seems inherently broken. Not just the algorithmic part, even the part leading up to it. You have to impress a recruiter or an HR drone by

I don't know, hiring seems inherently broken. Not just the algorithmic part, even the part leading up to it. You have to impress a recruiter or an HR drone by listing all the buzzwords that are currently trendy. Then, even after the algorithmic questions and interviews where you prove you can DO the job, you get rejected. Every company I've worked for had trouble hiring. I'm working for a company that also has trouble hiring right now. Last week, the person interviewing our latest candidate told me that despite the candidate doing perfectly fine, he couldn't come up with something that he felt excited about doing in his current job, which was a red flag for him. I tried explaining that perhaps that's something you shouldn't expect from someone who's at that point switching jobs. We're still discussing how hard it is to find good people. Most of the companies I've interviewed for also have trouble hiring, yet I've been rejected for the most asinine reasons. These companies have the same positions open years later and not due to growth. All this rant is to say, we're mostly doing this to ourselves. I don't have a better way of doing things, but I can't just blame a handful of big corps for this, as if their technical interviews weren't designed by technical folks themselves.

valleyjo 7y ago
Total catch 22. I’ve told recruiters something I’m excited about with my current role before and they’ve said “seems like you really like your team are you even serious about switching jobs”.....
lainga 7y ago
Sounds like the problem is low trust. It's a marketplace (for labour) where no transactions are taking place, because the buyers and sellers are afraid to come out to the town square. What do your counterparts at the company think the source of their hiring difficulties is? If not flawed process?
- inertiatic 7y ago
  It's almost always attributed to the lack of quality candidates. But when you reach the final stage with 3 people who you know can pretty much do the job, who you know have successful careers working in successful companies, and you drop them because they didn't exactly behave the way you would prefer them to in a high stress scenario, and keep looking, I think you effectively forfeit the right to claim that's your problem with hiring.
  - omar_a1 7y ago
    So much this. Every place I've interviewed at wants cookie-cutter candidates. I didn't think of the solution you had in mind, because I've identified another problem that you didn't consider. And somehow that takes me out of the running. Good luck with that. Not to mention the nebulous and vaguely discriminatory "cultural fit" problem. So, even if I manage to ace the technical, I still fail.
castratikron 7y ago
I once worked for a company that build industrial machinery. Because we were an "engineering" company, the director of our department would only hire software engineers if they had an "engineering" degree. Literally. Many dozens of applications thrown out that only had "computer science" degrees and not electrical engineering, computer engineering, etc. Needless to say that company had a lot of problems with technology. But they seemed to be good at making money strangely enough.
alfiedotwtf 7y ago
Another reason for companies that can’t find people, is to show proof that they’ve been looking for a while so they can apply for overseas worker visas.
- SomewhatLikely 7y ago
  But the same situation exists at numerous companies that don't sponsor visas.
  - itronitron 7y ago
    It's also due to internal politics, if they have an established hiring team they want to keep them busy and it helps maintaining the front to upper management ... 'it's really hard to find candidates as awesome as we are!'
PragmaticPulp 7y ago
> I don't have a better way of doing things This is my least favorite part about discussing interview techniques. It's taboo to say anything other than "interviews are broken", as if there is some alternative perfect practice that companies are voluntarily choosing not to use. If no one, including the author of the linked article, can think of anything better, doesn't that mean that companies are already using optimal practices? At least from our current knowledge of interviewing practices. I always have my eyes open for new research, new suggestions, and new trends, but it's getting old to hear the constant chorus of "interviewing is broken" with zero attempt to suggest improvements. That doesn't mean current practices are perfect or that we should stop trying to improve them, of course. It does feel a bit like politicians going on record saying that they're "deeply troubled" by something without proposing alternatives, though. It's the safe thing to say.
- wbl 7y ago
  You can test skills relevant to the job. If you're mostly doing js /css do that, not algorithms questions.
  - dahfizz 7y ago
    The idea that JS developers don't do anything that needs algorithm knowledge is funny to me.
    - wbl 7y ago
      Frontend isn't going to require you to use union find and when it does you can look it up.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        That would be true if frontend people were just doing webpage styling, and not web applications that often don't even have a backend.
- m4x 7y ago
  > If no one, including the author of the linked article, can think of anything better, doesn't that mean that companies are already using optimal practices? Not necessarily, it might just mean that the more optimal approaches are not obvious. It seems extremely unlikely that the current approach is optimal.
biztos 7y ago
I worked at a company where the interview process was basically "ask them about their experience, successes, and failures, and do whatever technical screen you feel works." Other than asking about failures (not everyone does) it was just "eh, wing it, tell us what you think." The hiring manager had to then weigh the responses and convince his/her manager if it was a go (we once rejected someone on ethical grounds after they passed all the interviews). And the funny thing is, that got us a pretty good set of people. Even funnier: both the very best of them, and the absolute worst of them, eventually ended up at Google. I guess if you can spend what Google spends; have a ruthless hiring process; can afford to carry dead weight indefinitely; have a standardized engineering culture; and have an endless supply of projects covering every conceivable skill level and impact to the company -- then you can probably hire your way to whatever FAANG-like cohort you think will work. But if you have those things you're probably already a FAANG-like company. For everybody else, I am not convinced there is a better system than "everybody use your best judgement, and have people who give a shit do the hiring."
- PragmaticPulp 7y ago
  > I worked at a company where the interview process was basically "ask them about their experience, successes, and failures, and do whatever technical screen you feel works." I'm part of another online community that has a strong emphasize on social justice issues. These "just wing it" hiring practices are one of their biggest complaints about tech companies. There's a perception that the less well-defined and structured your interview process, the more likely it is to produce vaguely biased results. Whether that's true or not, it would be a tough sell to implement a "just use your gut" style hiring process at a major company in 2020. There is a strong push for standardized and repeatable interviewing processes, complete with sufficient documentation to support hiring decisions.
  - 52-6F-62 7y ago
    By standardizing the hiring process aren’t you then just optimizing for a very specific perception and/or perceptional ability? Isn’t that at the core of principles relating to diversity in the first place? I personally find some of the current (if I can call them) standards of tech hiring to be very narrow in which skills and capabilities they test. It presumes a lot—particularly that one has time and resources to commit to spending time studying enough of the spectrum of CS subjects in order to pass a given question from the rather large field. (By this I’m referring to the classic “white board a <somekindof>sort algorithm purely from memory” process that has become the de-facto standard)
amiga_500 7y ago
How old was the interviewer? This seems like a very immature question. I work for money, first and foremost. Is the amount of youth in tech part of the problem?
callinyouin 7y ago
My experience mirrors yours, with some exception. The company I recently accepted a role at was great throughout the interview process. A friendly, knowledgeable person from HR conducted my phone interview. The on-site interview was conducted by a manager and the development team I'll be working with in pretty equal parts. They asked thought-provoking questions to see how I approach problems and skipped the code golf/write a linked list from memory on a whiteboard type of questions. On the other hand, another company I applied to that seems really desperate for developers (no fewer than 9 open dev positions when I applied) completely dropped the ball. During the screening process they asked me to do an online test that took me about 2 hours. I got 100% on the test but it took the HR rep an entire week to respond. The response? The same canned email I received when instructed to take the test. From the same person. After a back-and-forth it was confirmed that they did receive my initial test score and I didn't need to retake it. About a month later and they never did get back to me. Sometimes I wonder if companies even want to attract good talent.
Swizec 7y ago
I see a lot of this at my day job. We've had positions open for over a year and somehow nobody makes it past the phone screen stage. The few that do make it to on-site interviews, we reject for one reason or another. Usually because they're okay but not great. We of course want great. Sometimes we find a unicorn and want to make an offer. They get hired by FAANG after our interview and before we send the offer. Wonderful. Contrast that to my side hustle where I sometimes hire folks to help out with coding so I can focus on other stuff. Go into 1 or 2 Slack/Telegram groups "Hey anyone need work?" Exchange 5 texts with 3 people. "Okay here's a project, how much?" Pick person. Get job done. If I like the way it goes, they get more jobs later. Whole process from search to hire takes 1 week. But at the dayjob we're a funded startup so we gotta be choosy and picky and make life all sorts of hard in the name of I'm not even sure what. We wouldn't even consider a part-time contractor because commitment is worth more than getting the job done. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
BurningFrog 7y ago
The good way to hire is to recruit people someone has worked with before and can vouch for. If you do good enough work at a job that your coworkers will want to work with you again, you've got it made and can choose between jobs for the rest of your career. If you don't impress coworkers that way, you need to go through this crazy stranger interviews talked about here. Do try hard to avoid that!
- inertiatic 7y ago
  In what universe is this true? In all the companies I've worked for, referrals for ICs meant that these people were prioritized for interviewing, not that they skipped the process. And no one, not even the manager of the hiring manager, had enough say in hiring someone that they could simply decide to skip the process
  - BurningFrog 7y ago
    One thing I've learned in this industry is that it contains many, quite separate universes!
UncleOxidant 7y ago
I suspect companies have trouble hiring because they really don't want or actually need to hire. I mean, yeah, hiring managers can complain that they really, really need to hire someone for some open position, but I don't believe them if they've had a req open for years as you suggest (or even six months). If they really had a pressing business need to hire someone then they'd try to make it work. They wouldn't reject someone because they didn't happen to have 1 out of a dozen technologies/buzzwords that were asked for in the job description. They'd realize that an experienced engineer who knows several programming languages can pick up a language in a few weeks and the surrounding libraries and ecosystem in a couple of months. But no, they seek perfection. And in seeking the perfect they end up passing on a lot of perfectly good candidates who could have been getting up to speed and working on their problem in the time it's taken to try to find that perfect candidate. Companies that really want to hire are flexible. Maybe they need someone to do Python but they've found a good candidate who has all of the other requirements except for Python - but they happen to be really experienced with Ruby. Well, OK, if they're really experienced with Ruby they'll be able to pick up Python in a month or so. Sure, they may not produce the most pythonic code for the first six months, but that's what code reviews are for. I've been in this game since the 80s. Back then companies weren't nearly so picky it seems (at least not in my memory). The second job interview I had out of college in 1986 at a startup in the valley went like this (it was an embedded/hardware job): Interviewer: We just got this new CAD system. I'm going to have you sit down and play with it for several minutes. When I come back I'd be really interested in hearing your opinion of it. What are the good and bad parts? And so I play with the CAD system for a while and when he comes back I give him my opinion. And he agrees with my assessment. Interviewer: I've got this schematic here and a breadboard, some parts, power supply and test equipment. Do you think you could hook the circuit up while I attend to some other business? I'll come back occasionally to see how you're doing. I wire up the circuit, get it going, look at the output on a logic analyzer. Interviewer comes back and seems happy. After this he asks when I can start. This took all of maybe 2.5 hours. In the 34 years since then I've only had a couple of other interviews that seemed that... I dunno how to put it, maybe "natural"? And both of those were in startups. They wanted to hire someone. They needed to hire someone.
- ryandrake 7y ago
mnm1 7y ago
You may not have a better way, but one has existed for decades, maybe longer. Combine a personal interview with a company that's worth working for and you'll have no problem finding qualified candidates. This means one phone screen of about 30-60 minutes to both introduce the candidate and decide if they are worth a follow-up with the team followed by a one hour interview with the whole engineering team more focused on technical capabilities directly related to the job. Finally, just to be sure, a one hour take-home assignment that is simple just to make sure they are not bullshitting. This last one only goes to the top few candidates of which one will be chosen (assuming they can code the simple assignment). People have been hiring this way (ok minus the coding assignment) for decades, maybe even a century or more. And you know what? It works. Now on to the second requirement: having a company that's worth working for. That means a company that at least partially values its employees. The best way to do this if you don't have FAANG money? Remote work. Ideally for everyone. That guarantees your pool of hiring (even if limited to certain locations for artificial reasons) is much higher and the demand for the job will be huge. Other things that make a company worth working for: good salary, yearly raises, performance bonuses, 40 or less working hours a week, flexible schedule, decent managers who understand engineering, interesting tech, etc. Note that none of those is out of reach of any company, even the smallest small-business. So yeah, let's stop with this bullshit that we don't know or can't think of a better way to hire. That's idiotic and frankly, closed-minded. Let's stop pretending like there aren't a ton of qualified candidates just waiting to be hired when there are so many. Let's give people a chance for once to prove that they can do the job. Not everyone will work out, but you know what, in the US with at-will employment, that is not a big deal. Doesn't work out, fire them. Easy fucking peasy. If you can't do that, you shouldn't be leading a team/company. My company currently works this way and we have had NO problem hiring. Whenever we want a great candidate, we go from resumes to hired in less than a month. There is nothing special about us. We don't pay top dollar. We don't even have a lot of the perks I listed above, but we have enough of them that candidates love us and we have no problem attracting great talent (the top one being remote work, of course). If a company isn't willing to make itself desirable, I have no pity for them. It's like never showering or grooming and expecting to find a hot girlfriend. Highly unlikely.
- jlokier 7y ago
raverbashing 7y ago
> Last week, the person interviewing our latest candidate told me that despite the candidate doing perfectly fine, he couldn't come up with something that he felt excited about doing in his current job, which was a red flag for him. > I tried explaining that perhaps that's something you shouldn't expect from someone who's at that point switching jobs. Ugh. You are, of course, correct. They want "the best candidates" but when they get one that's evaluating new positions they go on about "why do you want to move", "candidates don't seem to enthusiastic about our company" well maybe because you're not enticing then to move, quite the contrary. Good candidates get hired (from an unemployment/"underployment" pool), excellent candidates get poached. Sports teams gets that but apparently if it was a software company they would ask Michael Jordan if he would be able to hit a 3 pointer
- SomewhatLikely 7y ago
  I like the three pointer analogy. I checked and his percentage was 33%. This is quite similar to how the hiring process works, you only get offers on the attempts where you hit the three pointer. You weren't any worse of a candidate on the other attempts, and there are 5% candidates out there taking 20 interviews and getting hired on the twentieth because they had a good day and hit a three pointer that day. Also, they spent the last three months practicing 3 pointers exclusively, and when they get hired their teamwork skills, strategic thinking, defense, and everything else you didn't test for are lacking.
rustybolt 7y ago
The thing I hate more than getting rejected is getting a very enthusiastic response accompanied by an offer that is slightly above minimum wage, when you have a year of work experience and masters in mathematics and computer science.
Aeolun 7y ago
In the interviews I’ve taken so far, I’ve generally asked candidates a very simple recursion question. Then I recently had an interview myself (thank god for no pressure) where I was asked to do more or less the same thing myself, and I totally blanked. It took that to make me realize it probably wasn’t a good problem. At the same time, pretty much all the candidates we’ve hired have worked out. I’m starting to think it might be easiest to just hire anyone that applies and doesn’t seem crazy.
Balgair 7y ago
And even when things are going great and both you and the company agree that you'll be a great fit, things still come in to screw everything up. I had a great job lined up, perfect fit for me and them. But my SO has a condition. The pill my SO takes everyday costs ~$1-5 per pill with most insurance companies. The substance is used in horse feed, just like how humans put vitamin D in milk, or iodine in salt, this substance is put in horse feed gratis. It does not appreciably change the cost the feed. When I looked into the health insurance for the new job, the pill would have cost us ~$100, so ~$3k/mo or ~$36k/year. I, obviously, had to turn the job down. That US healthcare is completely broken is not just contained to families, but it leaks out over our whole society. A perfect hire, ruined because of shitty healthcare.

valleyjo 7y ago

Total catch 22. I’ve told recruiters something I’m excited about with my current role before and they’ve said “seems like you really like your team are you even serious about switching jobs”.....

lainga 7y ago

Sounds like the problem is low trust. It's a marketplace (for labour) where no transactions are taking place, because the buyers and sellers are afraid to come out to the town square. What do your counterparts at the company think the source of their hiring difficulties is? If not flawed process?

inertiatic 7y ago
It's almost always attributed to the lack of quality candidates. But when you reach the final stage with 3 people who you know can pretty much do the job, who you know have successful careers working in successful companies, and you drop them because they didn't exactly behave the way you would prefer them to in a high stress scenario, and keep looking, I think you effectively forfeit the right to claim that's your problem with hiring.
- omar_a1 7y ago
  So much this. Every place I've interviewed at wants cookie-cutter candidates. I didn't think of the solution you had in mind, because I've identified another problem that you didn't consider. And somehow that takes me out of the running. Good luck with that. Not to mention the nebulous and vaguely discriminatory "cultural fit" problem. So, even if I manage to ace the technical, I still fail.

castratikron 7y ago

I once worked for a company that build industrial machinery. Because we were an "engineering" company, the director of our department would only hire software engineers if they had an "engineering" degree. Literally. Many dozens of applications thrown out that only had "computer science" degrees and not electrical engineering, computer engineering, etc. Needless to say that company had a lot of problems with technology. But they seemed to be good at making money strangely enough.

alfiedotwtf 7y ago

Another reason for companies that can’t find people, is to show proof that they’ve been looking for a while so they can apply for overseas worker visas.

SomewhatLikely 7y ago
But the same situation exists at numerous companies that don't sponsor visas.
- itronitron 7y ago
  It's also due to internal politics, if they have an established hiring team they want to keep them busy and it helps maintaining the front to upper management ... 'it's really hard to find candidates as awesome as we are!'

PragmaticPulp 7y ago

> I don't have a better way of doing things This is my least favorite part about discussing interview techniques. It's taboo to say anything other than "interviews are broken", as if there is some alternative perfect practice that companies are voluntarily choosing not to use. If no one, including the author of the linked article, can think of anything better, doesn't that mean that companies are already using optimal practices? At least from our current knowledge of interviewing practices. I always have my eyes open for new research, new suggestions, and new trends, but it's getting old to hear the constant chorus of "interviewing is broken" with zero attempt to suggest improvements. That doesn't mean current practices are perfect or that we should stop trying to improve them, of course. It does feel a bit like politicians going on record saying that they're "deeply troubled" by something without proposing alternatives, though. It's the safe thing to say.

wbl 7y ago
You can test skills relevant to the job. If you're mostly doing js /css do that, not algorithms questions.
- dahfizz 7y ago
  The idea that JS developers don't do anything that needs algorithm knowledge is funny to me.
  - wbl 7y ago
    Frontend isn't going to require you to use union find and when it does you can look it up.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      That would be true if frontend people were just doing webpage styling, and not web applications that often don't even have a backend.
m4x 7y ago
> If no one, including the author of the linked article, can think of anything better, doesn't that mean that companies are already using optimal practices? Not necessarily, it might just mean that the more optimal approaches are not obvious. It seems extremely unlikely that the current approach is optimal.

biztos 7y ago

I worked at a company where the interview process was basically "ask them about their experience, successes, and failures, and do whatever technical screen you feel works." Other than asking about failures (not everyone does) it was just "eh, wing it, tell us what you think." The hiring manager had to then weigh the responses and convince his/her manager if it was a go (we once rejected someone on ethical grounds after they passed all the interviews). And the funny thing is, that got us a pretty good set of people. Even funnier: both the very best of them, and the absolute worst of them, eventually ended up at Google. I guess if you can spend what Google spends; have a ruthless hiring process; can afford to carry dead weight indefinitely; have a standardized engineering culture; and have an endless supply of projects covering every conceivable skill level and impact to the company -- then you can probably hire your way to whatever FAANG-like cohort you think will work. But if you have those things you're probably already a FAANG-like company. For everybody else, I am not convinced there is a better system than "everybody use your best judgement, and have people who give a shit do the hiring."

PragmaticPulp 7y ago
> I worked at a company where the interview process was basically "ask them about their experience, successes, and failures, and do whatever technical screen you feel works." I'm part of another online community that has a strong emphasize on social justice issues. These "just wing it" hiring practices are one of their biggest complaints about tech companies. There's a perception that the less well-defined and structured your interview process, the more likely it is to produce vaguely biased results. Whether that's true or not, it would be a tough sell to implement a "just use your gut" style hiring process at a major company in 2020. There is a strong push for standardized and repeatable interviewing processes, complete with sufficient documentation to support hiring decisions.
- 52-6F-62 7y ago
  By standardizing the hiring process aren’t you then just optimizing for a very specific perception and/or perceptional ability? Isn’t that at the core of principles relating to diversity in the first place? I personally find some of the current (if I can call them) standards of tech hiring to be very narrow in which skills and capabilities they test. It presumes a lot—particularly that one has time and resources to commit to spending time studying enough of the spectrum of CS subjects in order to pass a given question from the rather large field. (By this I’m referring to the classic “white board a <somekindof>sort algorithm purely from memory” process that has become the de-facto standard)

amiga_500 7y ago

How old was the interviewer? This seems like a very immature question. I work for money, first and foremost. Is the amount of youth in tech part of the problem?

callinyouin 7y ago

My experience mirrors yours, with some exception. The company I recently accepted a role at was great throughout the interview process. A friendly, knowledgeable person from HR conducted my phone interview. The on-site interview was conducted by a manager and the development team I'll be working with in pretty equal parts. They asked thought-provoking questions to see how I approach problems and skipped the code golf/write a linked list from memory on a whiteboard type of questions. On the other hand, another company I applied to that seems really desperate for developers (no fewer than 9 open dev positions when I applied) completely dropped the ball. During the screening process they asked me to do an online test that took me about 2 hours. I got 100% on the test but it took the HR rep an entire week to respond. The response? The same canned email I received when instructed to take the test. From the same person. After a back-and-forth it was confirmed that they did receive my initial test score and I didn't need to retake it. About a month later and they never did get back to me. Sometimes I wonder if companies even want to attract good talent.

Swizec 7y ago

I see a lot of this at my day job. We've had positions open for over a year and somehow nobody makes it past the phone screen stage. The few that do make it to on-site interviews, we reject for one reason or another. Usually because they're okay but not great. We of course want great. Sometimes we find a unicorn and want to make an offer. They get hired by FAANG after our interview and before we send the offer. Wonderful. Contrast that to my side hustle where I sometimes hire folks to help out with coding so I can focus on other stuff. Go into 1 or 2 Slack/Telegram groups "Hey anyone need work?" Exchange 5 texts with 3 people. "Okay here's a project, how much?" Pick person. Get job done. If I like the way it goes, they get more jobs later. Whole process from search to hire takes 1 week. But at the dayjob we're a funded startup so we gotta be choosy and picky and make life all sorts of hard in the name of I'm not even sure what. We wouldn't even consider a part-time contractor because commitment is worth more than getting the job done. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

BurningFrog 7y ago

The good way to hire is to recruit people someone has worked with before and can vouch for. If you do good enough work at a job that your coworkers will want to work with you again, you've got it made and can choose between jobs for the rest of your career. If you don't impress coworkers that way, you need to go through this crazy stranger interviews talked about here. Do try hard to avoid that!

inertiatic 7y ago
In what universe is this true? In all the companies I've worked for, referrals for ICs meant that these people were prioritized for interviewing, not that they skipped the process. And no one, not even the manager of the hiring manager, had enough say in hiring someone that they could simply decide to skip the process
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  One thing I've learned in this industry is that it contains many, quite separate universes!

UncleOxidant 7y ago

I suspect companies have trouble hiring because they really don't want or actually need to hire. I mean, yeah, hiring managers can complain that they really, really need to hire someone for some open position, but I don't believe them if they've had a req open for years as you suggest (or even six months). If they really had a pressing business need to hire someone then they'd try to make it work. They wouldn't reject someone because they didn't happen to have 1 out of a dozen technologies/buzzwords that were asked for in the job description. They'd realize that an experienced engineer who knows several programming languages can pick up a language in a few weeks and the surrounding libraries and ecosystem in a couple of months. But no, they seek perfection. And in seeking the perfect they end up passing on a lot of perfectly good candidates who could have been getting up to speed and working on their problem in the time it's taken to try to find that perfect candidate. Companies that really want to hire are flexible. Maybe they need someone to do Python but they've found a good candidate who has all of the other requirements except for Python - but they happen to be really experienced with Ruby. Well, OK, if they're really experienced with Ruby they'll be able to pick up Python in a month or so. Sure, they may not produce the most pythonic code for the first six months, but that's what code reviews are for. I've been in this game since the 80s. Back then companies weren't nearly so picky it seems (at least not in my memory). The second job interview I had out of college in 1986 at a startup in the valley went like this (it was an embedded/hardware job): Interviewer: We just got this new CAD system. I'm going to have you sit down and play with it for several minutes. When I come back I'd be really interested in hearing your opinion of it. What are the good and bad parts? And so I play with the CAD system for a while and when he comes back I give him my opinion. And he agrees with my assessment. Interviewer: I've got this schematic here and a breadboard, some parts, power supply and test equipment. Do you think you could hook the circuit up while I attend to some other business? I'll come back occasionally to see how you're doing. I wire up the circuit, get it going, look at the output on a logic analyzer. Interviewer comes back and seems happy. After this he asks when I can start. This took all of maybe 2.5 hours. In the 34 years since then I've only had a couple of other interviews that seemed that... I dunno how to put it, maybe "natural"? And both of those were in startups. They wanted to hire someone. They needed to hire someone.

ryandrake 7y ago

mnm1 7y ago

You may not have a better way, but one has existed for decades, maybe longer. Combine a personal interview with a company that's worth working for and you'll have no problem finding qualified candidates. This means one phone screen of about 30-60 minutes to both introduce the candidate and decide if they are worth a follow-up with the team followed by a one hour interview with the whole engineering team more focused on technical capabilities directly related to the job. Finally, just to be sure, a one hour take-home assignment that is simple just to make sure they are not bullshitting. This last one only goes to the top few candidates of which one will be chosen (assuming they can code the simple assignment). People have been hiring this way (ok minus the coding assignment) for decades, maybe even a century or more. And you know what? It works. Now on to the second requirement: having a company that's worth working for. That means a company that at least partially values its employees. The best way to do this if you don't have FAANG money? Remote work. Ideally for everyone. That guarantees your pool of hiring (even if limited to certain locations for artificial reasons) is much higher and the demand for the job will be huge. Other things that make a company worth working for: good salary, yearly raises, performance bonuses, 40 or less working hours a week, flexible schedule, decent managers who understand engineering, interesting tech, etc. Note that none of those is out of reach of any company, even the smallest small-business. So yeah, let's stop with this bullshit that we don't know or can't think of a better way to hire. That's idiotic and frankly, closed-minded. Let's stop pretending like there aren't a ton of qualified candidates just waiting to be hired when there are so many. Let's give people a chance for once to prove that they can do the job. Not everyone will work out, but you know what, in the US with at-will employment, that is not a big deal. Doesn't work out, fire them. Easy fucking peasy. If you can't do that, you shouldn't be leading a team/company. My company currently works this way and we have had NO problem hiring. Whenever we want a great candidate, we go from resumes to hired in less than a month. There is nothing special about us. We don't pay top dollar. We don't even have a lot of the perks I listed above, but we have enough of them that candidates love us and we have no problem attracting great talent (the top one being remote work, of course). If a company isn't willing to make itself desirable, I have no pity for them. It's like never showering or grooming and expecting to find a hot girlfriend. Highly unlikely.

jlokier 7y ago

raverbashing 7y ago

> Last week, the person interviewing our latest candidate told me that despite the candidate doing perfectly fine, he couldn't come up with something that he felt excited about doing in his current job, which was a red flag for him. > I tried explaining that perhaps that's something you shouldn't expect from someone who's at that point switching jobs. Ugh. You are, of course, correct. They want "the best candidates" but when they get one that's evaluating new positions they go on about "why do you want to move", "candidates don't seem to enthusiastic about our company" well maybe because you're not enticing then to move, quite the contrary. Good candidates get hired (from an unemployment/"underployment" pool), excellent candidates get poached. Sports teams gets that but apparently if it was a software company they would ask Michael Jordan if he would be able to hit a 3 pointer

SomewhatLikely 7y ago
I like the three pointer analogy. I checked and his percentage was 33%. This is quite similar to how the hiring process works, you only get offers on the attempts where you hit the three pointer. You weren't any worse of a candidate on the other attempts, and there are 5% candidates out there taking 20 interviews and getting hired on the twentieth because they had a good day and hit a three pointer that day. Also, they spent the last three months practicing 3 pointers exclusively, and when they get hired their teamwork skills, strategic thinking, defense, and everything else you didn't test for are lacking.

rustybolt 7y ago

The thing I hate more than getting rejected is getting a very enthusiastic response accompanied by an offer that is slightly above minimum wage, when you have a year of work experience and masters in mathematics and computer science.

Aeolun 7y ago

In the interviews I’ve taken so far, I’ve generally asked candidates a very simple recursion question. Then I recently had an interview myself (thank god for no pressure) where I was asked to do more or less the same thing myself, and I totally blanked. It took that to make me realize it probably wasn’t a good problem. At the same time, pretty much all the candidates we’ve hired have worked out. I’m starting to think it might be easiest to just hire anyone that applies and doesn’t seem crazy.

Balgair 7y ago

And even when things are going great and both you and the company agree that you'll be a great fit, things still come in to screw everything up. I had a great job lined up, perfect fit for me and them. But my SO has a condition. The pill my SO takes everyday costs ~$1-5 per pill with most insurance companies. The substance is used in horse feed, just like how humans put vitamin D in milk, or iodine in salt, this substance is put in horse feed gratis. It does not appreciably change the cost the feed. When I looked into the health insurance for the new job, the pill would have cost us ~$100, so ~$3k/mo or ~$36k/year. I, obviously, had to turn the job down. That US healthcare is completely broken is not just contained to families, but it leaks out over our whole society. A perfect hire, ruined because of shitty healthcare.