5 ms·

It's sad this is the reality of hiring now. It's byzantine and wasteful and I'm surprised that companies are willing to burn money this way. There are great can

It's sad this is the reality of hiring now. It's byzantine and wasteful and I'm surprised that companies are willing to burn money this way. There are great candidates who may not perform well in an interview and there are a lot of serious clowns that can waltz through this process. The questions being asked are not likely going to yield useful information and the whole thing seems designed by pick-up artists to neg candidates into accepting bad offers. Why stop at 6 interviews?

zizee 3y ago
What is a better alternative?
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  Certifications should mean something, not be a sales channel for AWS
  - hedora 3y ago
    That sound terrible. Most jobs are for specialty positions, so you'd need 10,000's of different certifications tracks. A written engineering competency test (basically, an industry-standard set of whiteboard questions) sounds good, but, having hired credentialed-but-incompetent engineers from other fields, I can definitely say it helps a lot less than you'd think.
    - wyclif 3y ago
      There is no reason why we can't have that, and I don't think you'd need that many tracks. Even something as narrow as cybersecurity has several different (ISC)2 tracks. They could have a different cert for each major programming language, for instance.
      - hedora 3y ago
        So, I write mission critical software that sits behind narrow interfaces. In my field, security and correctness are basically synonyms. Other people manage large fleets of machines, and there intrusion detection is probably the best you can do. Still other sets of people write frontend software with 10,000's of dependencies, so dependency management is the name of the game. Still others deal with PII and credit card numbers, and in that space compliance matters deeply. I could list many more sub-disciplines of cybersecurity, but I'm already up to five (and haven't even mentioned cryptography!). None of the skill sets from the five I mentioned really translate well to each other. Also, what purpose would having a cert for a programming language serve? For things like C++ and JavaScript, there are so many sub-dialects that the cert wouldn't say much about whether you could write inside a particular code base. For things like rust and go, the certificate would need to expire every few years. Also, it takes an experienced developer a day or two to pick up a new language. Getting a certificate for a language would take longer than that. That lands us where we are right now, where such certifications exist, but they're simultaneously too much trouble to be worth it, and also not worth the paper they're printed on.
- speak_plainly 3y ago
  Reading and assessing resumes and having a single interview with HR and the hiring manager or a panel. And this process should fit within the larger operational framework and processes of a company.
  - FabHK 3y ago
    How can 2 measurements (CV + 1 i/v) be better than 8 measurements (CV + 7 i/vs, with different kind of questions, to boot)?
    - speak_plainly 3y ago
      This is a misplaced concreteness fallacy.
      - tourist2d 3y ago
        This is you deflecting a valid question.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - therealdrag0 3y ago
    Have you been involved in hiring software engineers much?
m3affan 3y ago
But that's the reality. Doing good on an interview does not guarantee the ability to do the job
hedora 3y ago
I understand your sentiment, but, having been on the other side of the fence, there are a lot of people that apply for jobs they're completely unqualified for, and they end up being most of your candidate pool. (Come to think of it, this would make a decent whiteboard question about reservoir sampling without replacement...) Another way to think about it is that these interview processes often have a ~ 1% acceptance rate, and the softball questions typically filter 80-90% of candidates. So, yeah, it sucks for a qualified candidate if they fail half their interviews, but they'll end up getting a job somewhere. That's much better for them than working at a company where 99% of the engineers can't perform basic coding tasks or explain how products in their industry segment are designed.
- sethammons 3y ago
  > this would make a decent whiteboard question about reservoir sampling without replacement Ah, the secretary problem: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
  - hedora 3y ago
    I was thinking of a variant where there's a finite pool of candidates, and everyone is implementing a similar algorithm. Each time a candidate is hired from the pool, a candidate with IID skill level is put into the pool. What does the average skill level in the pool converge to over time? (This might be too hard for a whiteboard problem.)

zizee 3y ago

What is a better alternative?

ClumsyPilot 3y ago
Certifications should mean something, not be a sales channel for AWS
- hedora 3y ago
  That sound terrible. Most jobs are for specialty positions, so you'd need 10,000's of different certifications tracks. A written engineering competency test (basically, an industry-standard set of whiteboard questions) sounds good, but, having hired credentialed-but-incompetent engineers from other fields, I can definitely say it helps a lot less than you'd think.
  - wyclif 3y ago
    There is no reason why we can't have that, and I don't think you'd need that many tracks. Even something as narrow as cybersecurity has several different (ISC)2 tracks. They could have a different cert for each major programming language, for instance.
    - hedora 3y ago
      So, I write mission critical software that sits behind narrow interfaces. In my field, security and correctness are basically synonyms. Other people manage large fleets of machines, and there intrusion detection is probably the best you can do. Still other sets of people write frontend software with 10,000's of dependencies, so dependency management is the name of the game. Still others deal with PII and credit card numbers, and in that space compliance matters deeply. I could list many more sub-disciplines of cybersecurity, but I'm already up to five (and haven't even mentioned cryptography!). None of the skill sets from the five I mentioned really translate well to each other. Also, what purpose would having a cert for a programming language serve? For things like C++ and JavaScript, there are so many sub-dialects that the cert wouldn't say much about whether you could write inside a particular code base. For things like rust and go, the certificate would need to expire every few years. Also, it takes an experienced developer a day or two to pick up a new language. Getting a certificate for a language would take longer than that. That lands us where we are right now, where such certifications exist, but they're simultaneously too much trouble to be worth it, and also not worth the paper they're printed on.
speak_plainly 3y ago
Reading and assessing resumes and having a single interview with HR and the hiring manager or a panel. And this process should fit within the larger operational framework and processes of a company.
- FabHK 3y ago
  How can 2 measurements (CV + 1 i/v) be better than 8 measurements (CV + 7 i/vs, with different kind of questions, to boot)?
  - speak_plainly 3y ago
    This is a misplaced concreteness fallacy.
    - tourist2d 3y ago
      This is you deflecting a valid question.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- therealdrag0 3y ago
  Have you been involved in hiring software engineers much?

m3affan 3y ago

But that's the reality. Doing good on an interview does not guarantee the ability to do the job

hedora 3y ago

I understand your sentiment, but, having been on the other side of the fence, there are a lot of people that apply for jobs they're completely unqualified for, and they end up being most of your candidate pool. (Come to think of it, this would make a decent whiteboard question about reservoir sampling without replacement...) Another way to think about it is that these interview processes often have a ~ 1% acceptance rate, and the softball questions typically filter 80-90% of candidates. So, yeah, it sucks for a qualified candidate if they fail half their interviews, but they'll end up getting a job somewhere. That's much better for them than working at a company where 99% of the engineers can't perform basic coding tasks or explain how products in their industry segment are designed.

sethammons 3y ago
> this would make a decent whiteboard question about reservoir sampling without replacement Ah, the secretary problem: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
- hedora 3y ago
  I was thinking of a variant where there's a finite pool of candidates, and everyone is implementing a similar algorithm. Each time a candidate is hired from the pool, a candidate with IID skill level is put into the pool. What does the average skill level in the pool converge to over time? (This might be too hard for a whiteboard problem.)