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Same here - You can tell immediately within 10-15 minutes if a person has "the right stuff". Anything above that is just you sucking tiny milliliters of juice o

by zo1 3y ago

Same here - You can tell immediately within 10-15 minutes if a person has "the right stuff". Anything above that is just you sucking tiny milliliters of juice out of a carrot hoping that "maybe" they'll work out and you can get "some" productivity out of them down the line or "maybe" they're secretly a really good developer. Either that, or the amount of time you subject potential hires is just a "signal" of your power and a filter for the needy, desperate and intellectually invested. I guess some companies are looking for that.

prox 3y ago
Isn’t the portfolio they came with a huge indicator? Like did this person do well at X or Y. Even when fresh out of school one should see what someone is capable of.
- dustymcp 3y ago
  Not necessarily, chemistry is such a big part of the selection aswell, you might have the criteria's for working somewhere, but do you also fit with culture? Many i have worked with would much prefer a person with less criteria and better culture fit, since with good fit you can easily learn the person what they need, and regardless of codebases most people will need some sort of onboarding for a new position anyway, good culture fit makes this transition much faster. I would filter out the ones that have the criterias, and then see how they fit with current culture rather than roasting them with tests. Like you do in any other business setting..
naavis 3y ago
> You can tell immediately within 10-15 minutes if a person has "the right stuff" I do a lot of interviewing for our company, and I used to think this too. But I've been totally wrong a few times. Sometimes someone I've been 100% sure about has been let go after a few months, while some I've been very iffy about have turned out to be excellent coworkers.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway6734 3y ago
  Agree. It's not entirely a crapshoot but a good bit of the "hire"/"no hire" is vibes based.
- mehh 3y ago
  Yup, the danger of the suss them out in 10 mins, is you won’t get diversity (I don’t mean race and all that bandwagon), you’ll miss some exceptional outliers imho.
- slyn 3y ago
  I used to be in restaurant management and I recently got a job in entry level IT for the first time in 15+ years for work/life balance. The best 2-3 hires I ever made as a restaurant manager I knew they would be great within minutes of starting the interview. Other than those outliers I would say a great hiring manager was about twice as likely to have a productive hire as a bad hiring manager. Great hiring managers were batting around 0.600, almost regardless of if it were a relatively “technical” position or not. At some level it was just a crapshoot.

by zo1 3y ago

prox 3y ago

Isn’t the portfolio they came with a huge indicator? Like did this person do well at X or Y. Even when fresh out of school one should see what someone is capable of.

dustymcp 3y ago
Not necessarily, chemistry is such a big part of the selection aswell, you might have the criteria's for working somewhere, but do you also fit with culture? Many i have worked with would much prefer a person with less criteria and better culture fit, since with good fit you can easily learn the person what they need, and regardless of codebases most people will need some sort of onboarding for a new position anyway, good culture fit makes this transition much faster. I would filter out the ones that have the criterias, and then see how they fit with current culture rather than roasting them with tests. Like you do in any other business setting..

naavis 3y ago

> You can tell immediately within 10-15 minutes if a person has "the right stuff" I do a lot of interviewing for our company, and I used to think this too. But I've been totally wrong a few times. Sometimes someone I've been 100% sure about has been let go after a few months, while some I've been very iffy about have turned out to be excellent coworkers.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
throwaway6734 3y ago
Agree. It's not entirely a crapshoot but a good bit of the "hire"/"no hire" is vibes based.
mehh 3y ago
Yup, the danger of the suss them out in 10 mins, is you won’t get diversity (I don’t mean race and all that bandwagon), you’ll miss some exceptional outliers imho.
slyn 3y ago
I used to be in restaurant management and I recently got a job in entry level IT for the first time in 15+ years for work/life balance. The best 2-3 hires I ever made as a restaurant manager I knew they would be great within minutes of starting the interview. Other than those outliers I would say a great hiring manager was about twice as likely to have a productive hire as a bad hiring manager. Great hiring managers were batting around 0.600, almost regardless of if it were a relatively “technical” position or not. At some level it was just a crapshoot.