4 ms·

Rigorous interviews are intended to reduce the number of incompetent colleagues and managers. All of those colleagues and managers went through interviews too.

Rigorous interviews are intended to reduce the number of incompetent colleagues and managers. All of those colleagues and managers went through interviews too. Sometimes candidates prefer rigorous interviews because it means the people inside the company all made it through those same hoops.

lapcat 4y ago
> Rigorous interviews are intended to reduce the number of incompetent colleagues and managers. All of those colleagues and managers went through interviews too. My point was that engineers get promoted to engineering manager without any kind of "manager test", so there's no assurance of competence at all. Also, I've heard of many cases where certain candidates are allowed to bypass the normal interview rounds, or get coached on the company's interviews, or get "softball" questions during those interviews, if the company wants to hire that person for some reason no matter what. Moreover, there's no guarantee that the current interview process is the same as the past interview process, especially for older companies. (Think Apple, for example.) Certainly the founders of a company never went through the process, and probably the initial employees didn't either. The founding of a company is almost always "informal", and only later is a more "rigorous" process imposed on newcomers.
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  > My point was that engineers get promoted to engineering manager without any kind of "manager test", so there's no assurance of competence at all. Of course they do - their entire experience with the company prior is the "manager test". A company that just promotes anyone to EM that just puts their hand up, despite demonstrating their not suitable, has other problems.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    > A company that just promotes anyone to EM that just puts their hand up, despite demonstrating their not suitable, has other problems. This is a straw man. It doesn't happen, and nobody believes that it happens. What does happen is that people who are good at engineering get promoted to engineering management, but writing code and managing humans are two entirely different skills. In fact it's especially true in companies with "rigorous" entrance exams that engineers employed by the company have focused on the coding aspect heavily in the past, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to pass the exams. So their people skills would have tended to be neglected or ignored entirely.
    - hnfong 4y ago
      You're missing the point. When an engineer gets promoted to engineering manager, a significant part of the management chain has to approve of the promotion, and they have had enough interaction with the newly promoted manager that they can reasonably assess whether the promotion is suitable. Sure, you might claim (as you seem to have, as a strawman) that before the promotion the would-be manager was merely an engineer with no management duties, but that's not exactly how things work. Sometimes it happens like you describe, but often the person being promoted gets assigned some light management or leadership duties before they take on the role officially. At any rate, the higher management already knows more about the would-be manager than any candidate you can interview in a 8 hour period.
      - lapcat 4y ago
        > When an engineer gets promoted to engineering manager, a significant part of the management chain has to approve of the promotion, and they have had enough interaction with the newly promoted manager that they can reasonably assess whether the promotion is suitable. What makes you think that people higher in the management chain are any better at managing people or even care about that aspect? Many tech companies were founded by college kids who were programmers and had no background or training in management. They were thrust into their roles by the circumstances with no preparation. It seems like people are living in a hypothetical magical utopia in these comments instead of reality. We all know that managers are incompetent. We're experienced it. You can find endless engineers complaining about it. Why are we denying the truth here?
        hnfong 4y ago
        That's a different thing. Your original claim is that managers are less competent because they didn't get interviewed as managers when they got promoted. The chain of replies was an attempt to refute that. If your claim is that (for some companies) managers are less competent because that's how it has been forever, then the sample logic can apply to engineers in the company. It's not that I dispute the conclusion, but the reasoning doesn't hold because it doesn't differentiate the two cases.

lapcat 4y ago

> Rigorous interviews are intended to reduce the number of incompetent colleagues and managers. All of those colleagues and managers went through interviews too. My point was that engineers get promoted to engineering manager without any kind of "manager test", so there's no assurance of competence at all. Also, I've heard of many cases where certain candidates are allowed to bypass the normal interview rounds, or get coached on the company's interviews, or get "softball" questions during those interviews, if the company wants to hire that person for some reason no matter what. Moreover, there's no guarantee that the current interview process is the same as the past interview process, especially for older companies. (Think Apple, for example.) Certainly the founders of a company never went through the process, and probably the initial employees didn't either. The founding of a company is almost always "informal", and only later is a more "rigorous" process imposed on newcomers.

madeofpalk 4y ago
> My point was that engineers get promoted to engineering manager without any kind of "manager test", so there's no assurance of competence at all. Of course they do - their entire experience with the company prior is the "manager test". A company that just promotes anyone to EM that just puts their hand up, despite demonstrating their not suitable, has other problems.
- lapcat 4y ago
  > A company that just promotes anyone to EM that just puts their hand up, despite demonstrating their not suitable, has other problems. This is a straw man. It doesn't happen, and nobody believes that it happens. What does happen is that people who are good at engineering get promoted to engineering management, but writing code and managing humans are two entirely different skills. In fact it's especially true in companies with "rigorous" entrance exams that engineers employed by the company have focused on the coding aspect heavily in the past, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to pass the exams. So their people skills would have tended to be neglected or ignored entirely.
  - hnfong 4y ago
    You're missing the point. When an engineer gets promoted to engineering manager, a significant part of the management chain has to approve of the promotion, and they have had enough interaction with the newly promoted manager that they can reasonably assess whether the promotion is suitable. Sure, you might claim (as you seem to have, as a strawman) that before the promotion the would-be manager was merely an engineer with no management duties, but that's not exactly how things work. Sometimes it happens like you describe, but often the person being promoted gets assigned some light management or leadership duties before they take on the role officially. At any rate, the higher management already knows more about the would-be manager than any candidate you can interview in a 8 hour period.
    - lapcat 4y ago
      > When an engineer gets promoted to engineering manager, a significant part of the management chain has to approve of the promotion, and they have had enough interaction with the newly promoted manager that they can reasonably assess whether the promotion is suitable. What makes you think that people higher in the management chain are any better at managing people or even care about that aspect? Many tech companies were founded by college kids who were programmers and had no background or training in management. They were thrust into their roles by the circumstances with no preparation. It seems like people are living in a hypothetical magical utopia in these comments instead of reality. We all know that managers are incompetent. We're experienced it. You can find endless engineers complaining about it. Why are we denying the truth here?
      - hnfong 4y ago
        That's a different thing. Your original claim is that managers are less competent because they didn't get interviewed as managers when they got promoted. The chain of replies was an attempt to refute that. If your claim is that (for some companies) managers are less competent because that's how it has been forever, then the sample logic can apply to engineers in the company. It's not that I dispute the conclusion, but the reasoning doesn't hold because it doesn't differentiate the two cases.