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Sure the domain of the work matters a lot. But the concept of skill distribution applies to all domains. You can hire a 10x engineer in a basic web dev role th

Sure the domain of the work matters a lot. But the concept of skill distribution applies to all domains. You can hire a 10x engineer in a basic web dev role the same as you can hire a 10x in a distributed systems one. It's possible distributed systems work is inherently more difficult to assess, but I'm not sure. It seems the process just needs to be different to assess that skillset. If your best hire is somebody you had less confidence in, then it's a sign your confidence function is not fully tuned to what's causal to success. But you're right that you can't know everything after an interview. Work ethic cannot be measured directly as you stated, but usually it can be inferred with a reasonable level of confidence through behavioral cues of the candidate. A perfect correlation between hire confidence and performance on the job implies you have a perfect hiring process. Obviously impossible in practice, but you can get a lot closer than the average hiring process, or FAANG. Obviously to iteratively improve your hiring process, it's important to view it this way. Unfortunately most confuse and forget about what the relationship between hiring and on the job performance should be, and see hiring as a separate siloed game and view signals in the context of that game rather than the job. Finally, it's pretty bad for company culture and morale to have a high fire rate. It's worth going through more interviews to limit the bad hires. But obviously the tradeoff needs to be quantified and deliberately decided on. If your average tenure is < 2 years, there's something wrong

mlyle 4y ago
> If your best hire is somebody you had less confidence in, then it's a sign your confidence function is not fully tuned to what's causal to success. I think it's unreasonable to think that you can guess so well as to how performance will be over 6 months-1 year+ periods in several hours of measurement. > If your average tenure is < 2 years, there's something wrong My average tenure was much higher than that. But again, about 1 in 6 didn't make it a year. Turnover rate past that year was very low. I'm not sure why you think having 15-20% of people not working out in the first year (after which turnover drops) translates to an average tenure of less than 2 years. It implies one greater than 5 years. > If your best hire is somebody you had less confidence in, then it's a sign your confidence function is not fully tuned to what's causal to success. If I had a fully tuned confidence function, it would output 1.0 for candidates that would work out and 0.0 for candidates that wouldn't. This isn't realistic. Nor is it realistic for it to monotonically increase with candidate quality (in which case it could be transformed to the above function with a threshold). > Finally, it's pretty bad for company culture and morale to have a high fire rate. I don't think getting up to 1 in 6 (first year) freaks people out too bad. Rates across a broad variety of industries and employers are more than 1 in 3 quitting or being fired in the first 18 mos. I think one can do significantly better than this, but I also think 1 in 10 isn't attainable and question your numbers.

mlyle 4y ago

> If your best hire is somebody you had less confidence in, then it's a sign your confidence function is not fully tuned to what's causal to success. I think it's unreasonable to think that you can guess so well as to how performance will be over 6 months-1 year+ periods in several hours of measurement. > If your average tenure is < 2 years, there's something wrong My average tenure was much higher than that. But again, about 1 in 6 didn't make it a year. Turnover rate past that year was very low. I'm not sure why you think having 15-20% of people not working out in the first year (after which turnover drops) translates to an average tenure of less than 2 years. It implies one greater than 5 years. > If your best hire is somebody you had less confidence in, then it's a sign your confidence function is not fully tuned to what's causal to success. If I had a fully tuned confidence function, it would output 1.0 for candidates that would work out and 0.0 for candidates that wouldn't. This isn't realistic. Nor is it realistic for it to monotonically increase with candidate quality (in which case it could be transformed to the above function with a threshold). > Finally, it's pretty bad for company culture and morale to have a high fire rate. I don't think getting up to 1 in 6 (first year) freaks people out too bad. Rates across a broad variety of industries and employers are more than 1 in 3 quitting or being fired in the first 18 mos. I think one can do significantly better than this, but I also think 1 in 10 isn't attainable and question your numbers.