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Tech is very cargo cultish, which comes from having a young average age, and a strong survivorship bias in the media. Remember the Google brainteasers? Fizzbuzz

Tech is very cargo cultish, which comes from having a young average age, and a strong survivorship bias in the media. Remember the Google brainteasers? Fizzbuzz? "Culture fit"? Tech companies have the lowest infrastructure costs of any industry, and so they have no place to hang their risk aversive paranoia except on personnel (the safer you are, the more trivial the things you fear). There's nothing logical about it, but since they have to fear something, it'll be whatever some douchebag with a following puts in their next "XYZ considered harmful" blog post.

grapeskin 5y ago
All we need is a “3+ interviews considered harmful” post to hit HN a few months in a row and we can finally solve this problem. That, or we’ll have some representative from the big 5 saying “Hey guys, Jayden from (x soulless Silicon Valley company) here. Not speaking on behalf of my employer but actually at X Corp(tm) we’ve found that anything less than 37 interviews (+tip) isn’t enough to let the real stars shine through. We’re all about finding the true team players who are a good culture fit” within 2 minutes of the post going up.
- that_guy_iain 5y ago
  > All we need is a “3+ interviews considered harmful” post to hit HN a few months in a row and we can finally solve this problem. I'll get cracking on it. It'll be my next hit after my last blog post about tech hiring "Hiring Developers: How to avoid the best" - https://www.getparthenon.com/blog/how-to-avoid-hiring-the-best-developers/ https://www.getparthenon.com/blog/how-to-avoid-hiring-the-be...
- hiyer 5y ago
  Well, it's not only big SV corporates that are doing 5-7 rounds of interviews. In my experience even 3-4 year old startups with under 100 employees do at least 5 rounds - 2 coding, 2 system design and one hiring manager. The most common 6th round is either "culture fit" or "bar-raiser" but small startups usually don't do this.
- 0des 5y ago
  Its always a Jayden.
  - _dain_ 5y ago
    living in fear of my name becoming a byword for some unpleasant stereotype person in 20 years no i'm not telling you what it is :(
- jasd 5y ago
  Quite the opposite actually. At one of the big techs that I was part, they ran some analysis and found that anything more than 4 interviews didn't add any value in assessing the chances of an individual succeeding at the company. I never read the details of the tests they ran but I'm glad they came to that conclusion.
orzig 5y ago
If you can't calculate the optimal design (for hiring, in this case) from first principles, what option do you have but empirical observation? And when steady-state performance takes at least 2 years to obtain, is it unreasonable to have fads at roughly that frequency? Resumes suck, take-homes suck, interviews suck, nepotism sucks; yet people still need to invest $x00,000 based on something. I don't have the answer, but let's not pretend it's not a hard question.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  If you are hiring someone with 10 years experience it becomes a lot easier. Just try them out, 9/10 will succeed.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    I believe there is at least a factor of 2* in performance among qualified/not-outright-failing software engineers. If that's the case, anything you can spend less than 100 hours on to increase your chance of hiring someone whose performance at your company will be on the right half of that distribution is worth it. * I think the actual factor is higher, but I think most people would agree to a factor of 2 without much debate.
    - scarmig 5y ago
      There are just different skills, and a balance of different individuals is often the most effective. There are definitely 10x (and even 100x) engineers, but throw five 10x engineers together and you will get substantially less than 50x results. There's always mundane but time consuming shit that can best be handled by a 1x. And a bigger issue is that no company can hire a team of 10x engineers, because it's very expensive, 10x engineers are relatively rare, and dedicating more resources to the interview process gets diminishing returns in terms of identifying and hiring them. Not even companies with effectively infinitely deep pocketbooks manage to succeed at that. It's best to design systems optimized for the 1x case, focus a lot on avoiding the -1x candidates, and grab the exceptional candidates opportunistically when you get the chance, usually by working outside the process. Which seems to be what the industry has defaulted to.
geeky4qwerty 5y ago
This is incredibly insightful, thank you.
- kjeetgill 5y ago
  I think the OP has a clever concept, and in online discussion that can make an idea unduly appealing to me, but is it really more right? The straightforward, obvious answer of: maybe it makes more sense than you think has no appeal to it, but I think it's closer to the truth. I'll let you answer for yourself if the answer had insight or appeal. Both tickle that novelty button, but only one has (elements) of truth.
greggman3 5y ago
Is FizzBuzz cargo cult? I had my own company in 1995. We tried to hire programmers. The candidate would come in and we'd spend an hour interviewing. 9 out of 10 could not program at all and effectively wasted our time. So, we switched to "here's a short test, go in this room and do the test". Then we'd look at their answers. If the answers were wrong/poor we'd thank them for their time and excuse them. This way, less of our time was wasted. That test included an extremely small task like FizzBuzz. If you can't answer it you can't program, period! It filtered out the 9 out of 10 applicants who should never have applied in the first place and saved us a bunch of time. At a big company the phone screen is supposed to do that but phone screens still take a hour or more of some engineer's time.
- dharmab 5y ago
  Agreed, a team I worked with added a very short (few minutes) screener quiz because we had about 10-20% of candidates make it past phone screen who struggled to write a simple function.
- UncleOxidant 5y ago
  > So, we switched to "here's a short test, go in this room and do the test". Then we'd look at their answers. If the answers were wrong/poor we'd thank them for their time and excuse them. I remember about a dozen years ago taking one of these tests at an interview. Interviewer takes me to a room and says "We've got this little test, I'll be back in 2 hours.". I take the test. Guy comes back in and says ok, we'll look this over and let you know... Crickets. Didn't hear back so I figure I must've bombed the test. 2 years later that guy calls me up and asks if I want to come in for an interview. I say "I never heard back so I figured I bombed your test" He says "No, you did great, we just got kind of busy". I politely declined to interview with them again.
  - ratww 5y ago
    That says a lot about the company and nothing about the test. Also 2h is not exactly FizzBuzz territory.
- prepend 5y ago
tomc1985 5y ago
It pains me so much that we've gone from hiring a couple of supersmart ubernerds over a cool demo and setting them loose to... this. Now, everything sucks. People who only know the tech they trained for. Tools are written for idiots, and the only thing even more written for idiots than that is the code we're supposed to be producing. Teams believing whatever stupid fad some trendy consultant prepared for them. Way too much support staff when I used to be able to call the stakeholder up directly and square any issues, now I have to go through like 4 idiot nontechnical PMs. One of my previous managers compared us to a basketball team. Ew ew ew ew ew ew EW! Tech sucks now. Get the business and nontechnical people out! All they contribute is bloat and mediocrity. The only people who should be in charge are those that have been at this for life.
- Bayart 5y ago
  Mediocre people bring mediocrity. Business and management illiteracy among tech people is what allows snake-oil sellers to get a foot inside the door.
- nharada 5y ago
  I think part of the reason is also that tech has matured to the point where it's so complex that nobody can handle it alone or even in a small group. A couple of people (no matter how supersmart) simply could not build and maintain even a single product of a large tech company. Similar stuff happened with other technology too. A couple people could build an early airplane but a modern jetliner is so tremendously complex that you need years and a full company to get one out the door.
  - tomc1985 5y ago
    And how much of that complexity is truly needed? Or is that another one of the lies proferred by its financiers?
    - ratww 5y ago
      Yep. IMO the largest part of the complexity today is caused by the things you mention in your post: trend-chasing among engineers, especially inexperienced ones, and non-engineers constantly bending the process, trying to make themselves useful and pushing too hard for useless micro-features and nice-to-haves, to the point the architecture of applications is compromised.
angarg12 5y ago
Why do people simply assume big tech companies are dumb and they haven't thought their hiring process through? Amazon literally has a research team focused in hiring, and they run A/B experiments to continually improve the process. The current interview format is not a cargo cult, is a high refine process through the years. Is it perfect? hell no, but it isn't the mindless copycat people make it to be. They have actual data to back up what works and what doesn't, although it might take several years to happen (like when Google finally dropped brain teasers).
- 8ytecoder 5y ago
  How many formats have they tested? For AB testing to work, A and B should be at least distinguishable. Every single tech company has the exact same process. Sometimes even the same questions. And that applies even to any point in the ladder. And to every single role as well. (Only PM interviews are slightly different but in tech companies even they have to go through the same process until that differentiating round)
  - passivate 5y ago
    When people complain about hiring practices, often, but not always, the concern is a false negative - missing out on hiring a talented and qualified candidate. Ultimately, if the point is "you guys are doing it wrong", they're going to look back at their financial success, shrug and say "seem to work for us". They have had problems with treatment of employees and other issues, but I'm assuming we're talking about hiring in the context of people being hired to do a job that financially benefits the company. Just my $.02
- Redoubts 5y ago
  > Why do people simply assume big tech companies are dumb and they haven't thought their hiring process through? Amazon literally has a research team focused in hiring ... Well it's been a while for me, but "we just do what the other guys do" was the impression I got when I interviewed there. Except they added a lot more "here's a terrible workplace situation, how would you handle it". I'd love to know what their research is revealing, beyond questions like the latter case being emphasized.
mistrial9 5y ago
I just noticed a research paper called "A Silicon Valley love triangle: Hiring algorithms, pseudo-science, and the quest for auditability" Feb 2022 Mona Sloane,Emanuel Moss,Rumman Chowdhury

grapeskin 5y ago

All we need is a “3+ interviews considered harmful” post to hit HN a few months in a row and we can finally solve this problem. That, or we’ll have some representative from the big 5 saying “Hey guys, Jayden from (x soulless Silicon Valley company) here. Not speaking on behalf of my employer but actually at X Corp(tm) we’ve found that anything less than 37 interviews (+tip) isn’t enough to let the real stars shine through. We’re all about finding the true team players who are a good culture fit” within 2 minutes of the post going up.

that_guy_iain 5y ago
> All we need is a “3+ interviews considered harmful” post to hit HN a few months in a row and we can finally solve this problem. I'll get cracking on it. It'll be my next hit after my last blog post about tech hiring "Hiring Developers: How to avoid the best" - https://www.getparthenon.com/blog/how-to-avoid-hiring-the-best-developers/ https://www.getparthenon.com/blog/how-to-avoid-hiring-the-be...
hiyer 5y ago
Well, it's not only big SV corporates that are doing 5-7 rounds of interviews. In my experience even 3-4 year old startups with under 100 employees do at least 5 rounds - 2 coding, 2 system design and one hiring manager. The most common 6th round is either "culture fit" or "bar-raiser" but small startups usually don't do this.
0des 5y ago
Its always a Jayden.
- _dain_ 5y ago
  living in fear of my name becoming a byword for some unpleasant stereotype person in 20 years no i'm not telling you what it is :(
jasd 5y ago
Quite the opposite actually. At one of the big techs that I was part, they ran some analysis and found that anything more than 4 interviews didn't add any value in assessing the chances of an individual succeeding at the company. I never read the details of the tests they ran but I'm glad they came to that conclusion.

orzig 5y ago

If you can't calculate the optimal design (for hiring, in this case) from first principles, what option do you have but empirical observation? And when steady-state performance takes at least 2 years to obtain, is it unreasonable to have fads at roughly that frequency? Resumes suck, take-homes suck, interviews suck, nepotism sucks; yet people still need to invest $x00,000 based on something. I don't have the answer, but let's not pretend it's not a hard question.

ipaddr 5y ago
If you are hiring someone with 10 years experience it becomes a lot easier. Just try them out, 9/10 will succeed.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I believe there is at least a factor of 2* in performance among qualified/not-outright-failing software engineers. If that's the case, anything you can spend less than 100 hours on to increase your chance of hiring someone whose performance at your company will be on the right half of that distribution is worth it. * I think the actual factor is higher, but I think most people would agree to a factor of 2 without much debate.
  - scarmig 5y ago
    There are just different skills, and a balance of different individuals is often the most effective. There are definitely 10x (and even 100x) engineers, but throw five 10x engineers together and you will get substantially less than 50x results. There's always mundane but time consuming shit that can best be handled by a 1x. And a bigger issue is that no company can hire a team of 10x engineers, because it's very expensive, 10x engineers are relatively rare, and dedicating more resources to the interview process gets diminishing returns in terms of identifying and hiring them. Not even companies with effectively infinitely deep pocketbooks manage to succeed at that. It's best to design systems optimized for the 1x case, focus a lot on avoiding the -1x candidates, and grab the exceptional candidates opportunistically when you get the chance, usually by working outside the process. Which seems to be what the industry has defaulted to.

geeky4qwerty 5y ago

This is incredibly insightful, thank you.

kjeetgill 5y ago
I think the OP has a clever concept, and in online discussion that can make an idea unduly appealing to me, but is it really more right? The straightforward, obvious answer of: maybe it makes more sense than you think has no appeal to it, but I think it's closer to the truth. I'll let you answer for yourself if the answer had insight or appeal. Both tickle that novelty button, but only one has (elements) of truth.

greggman3 5y ago

Is FizzBuzz cargo cult? I had my own company in 1995. We tried to hire programmers. The candidate would come in and we'd spend an hour interviewing. 9 out of 10 could not program at all and effectively wasted our time. So, we switched to "here's a short test, go in this room and do the test". Then we'd look at their answers. If the answers were wrong/poor we'd thank them for their time and excuse them. This way, less of our time was wasted. That test included an extremely small task like FizzBuzz. If you can't answer it you can't program, period! It filtered out the 9 out of 10 applicants who should never have applied in the first place and saved us a bunch of time. At a big company the phone screen is supposed to do that but phone screens still take a hour or more of some engineer's time.

dharmab 5y ago
Agreed, a team I worked with added a very short (few minutes) screener quiz because we had about 10-20% of candidates make it past phone screen who struggled to write a simple function.
UncleOxidant 5y ago
> So, we switched to "here's a short test, go in this room and do the test". Then we'd look at their answers. If the answers were wrong/poor we'd thank them for their time and excuse them. I remember about a dozen years ago taking one of these tests at an interview. Interviewer takes me to a room and says "We've got this little test, I'll be back in 2 hours.". I take the test. Guy comes back in and says ok, we'll look this over and let you know... Crickets. Didn't hear back so I figure I must've bombed the test. 2 years later that guy calls me up and asks if I want to come in for an interview. I say "I never heard back so I figured I bombed your test" He says "No, you did great, we just got kind of busy". I politely declined to interview with them again.
- ratww 5y ago
  That says a lot about the company and nothing about the test. Also 2h is not exactly FizzBuzz territory.
prepend 5y ago

tomc1985 5y ago

It pains me so much that we've gone from hiring a couple of supersmart ubernerds over a cool demo and setting them loose to... this. Now, everything sucks. People who only know the tech they trained for. Tools are written for idiots, and the only thing even more written for idiots than that is the code we're supposed to be producing. Teams believing whatever stupid fad some trendy consultant prepared for them. Way too much support staff when I used to be able to call the stakeholder up directly and square any issues, now I have to go through like 4 idiot nontechnical PMs. One of my previous managers compared us to a basketball team. Ew ew ew ew ew ew EW! Tech sucks now. Get the business and nontechnical people out! All they contribute is bloat and mediocrity. The only people who should be in charge are those that have been at this for life.

Bayart 5y ago
Mediocre people bring mediocrity. Business and management illiteracy among tech people is what allows snake-oil sellers to get a foot inside the door.
nharada 5y ago
I think part of the reason is also that tech has matured to the point where it's so complex that nobody can handle it alone or even in a small group. A couple of people (no matter how supersmart) simply could not build and maintain even a single product of a large tech company. Similar stuff happened with other technology too. A couple people could build an early airplane but a modern jetliner is so tremendously complex that you need years and a full company to get one out the door.
- tomc1985 5y ago
  And how much of that complexity is truly needed? Or is that another one of the lies proferred by its financiers?
  - ratww 5y ago
    Yep. IMO the largest part of the complexity today is caused by the things you mention in your post: trend-chasing among engineers, especially inexperienced ones, and non-engineers constantly bending the process, trying to make themselves useful and pushing too hard for useless micro-features and nice-to-haves, to the point the architecture of applications is compromised.

angarg12 5y ago

Why do people simply assume big tech companies are dumb and they haven't thought their hiring process through? Amazon literally has a research team focused in hiring, and they run A/B experiments to continually improve the process. The current interview format is not a cargo cult, is a high refine process through the years. Is it perfect? hell no, but it isn't the mindless copycat people make it to be. They have actual data to back up what works and what doesn't, although it might take several years to happen (like when Google finally dropped brain teasers).

8ytecoder 5y ago
How many formats have they tested? For AB testing to work, A and B should be at least distinguishable. Every single tech company has the exact same process. Sometimes even the same questions. And that applies even to any point in the ladder. And to every single role as well. (Only PM interviews are slightly different but in tech companies even they have to go through the same process until that differentiating round)
- passivate 5y ago
  When people complain about hiring practices, often, but not always, the concern is a false negative - missing out on hiring a talented and qualified candidate. Ultimately, if the point is "you guys are doing it wrong", they're going to look back at their financial success, shrug and say "seem to work for us". They have had problems with treatment of employees and other issues, but I'm assuming we're talking about hiring in the context of people being hired to do a job that financially benefits the company. Just my $.02
Redoubts 5y ago
> Why do people simply assume big tech companies are dumb and they haven't thought their hiring process through? Amazon literally has a research team focused in hiring ... Well it's been a while for me, but "we just do what the other guys do" was the impression I got when I interviewed there. Except they added a lot more "here's a terrible workplace situation, how would you handle it". I'd love to know what their research is revealing, beyond questions like the latter case being emphasized.

mistrial9 5y ago

I just noticed a research paper called "A Silicon Valley love triangle: Hiring algorithms, pseudo-science, and the quest for auditability" Feb 2022 Mona Sloane,Emanuel Moss,Rumman Chowdhury