4 ms·

They always tell you when you are interviewing you should never bitch or gossip about your old job. Articles like this are the inverse of that, the employeer is

They always tell you when you are interviewing you should never bitch or gossip about your old job. Articles like this are the inverse of that, the employeer is subtly bitching about every bad hire they've ever made. This is a giant red flag that whoever is doing the hiring sucks at their job. I've had a few interview process that have included some or all of these 6 steps, and I've turned down every one of their offers at the end. Not because I don't have the time to work on a sample project,or because I can't cobble together and isolate some sample code for them to take a look at, and not because I don't know how to play the interview game. It is because your interview process takes too damn long. One or more phone screens, one or more in person interviews, then a request for a sample project or source code, then a request for references, then a meeting with team, etc. That takes months, with weeks of down time in between. If you can't figure out if a person is a good fit socially and is a competent programmer in less time that, you suck at hiring and shouldn't be doing it.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
amcintyre 15y ago
I've started flatly turning down offers from one large company in particular because of this. It didn't help that they only wanted to conduct their two or more 1+ hour phone screens during banker's hours.
- gaius 15y ago
  7sm - 9pm?
  - dangrossman 15y ago
    9AM-4PM, give or take an hour either way. In other words, guaranteed to be during your working day at your current employer.
  - amcintyre 15y ago
    I wish; that would have been easy to accommodate. dangrossman has the right range: they wouldn't even go as late as 4pm, or as early as 9am, which suggests to me they're only looking for people that are out of work or otherwise desperate enough to take what they can get.
joshuacc 15y ago
While I can definitely see how it could take a long time, the last time I went through the hiring process, it included every step but #4 and was completed in about 1.5 weeks. I suspect that length of time it takes to complete a hire is probably a good proxy for measuring bureaucracy in an organization. A low-bureaucracy team (like StackExchange?) can get through all these steps pretty quickly if they want to.
scott_w 15y ago
It's probably a bit extreme to say he's "bitching". This sort of thing is quite useful to those of us who have an involvement in hiring, but don't have a lot of experience. I've been involved in hiring a couple of people, though the process I go through usually involves: a) Read a code sample, if available. b) Face-to-face interview (telephone if face-to-face is difficult). c) Hire/No-Hire The interview usually involves talking about our company and the interviewee talking about their previous experience. The hiring decision is usually based on "I like the feel of this guy", with some weighing up of their skill set, the job role, and also how interested they would be in working for us. I've found this works for the company I work for. We don't hire large numbers of people, so I don't think this approach could scale - as an example, the largest block of CVs for a position that I've seen is about 10. I don't know how it would work if we got 100 CVs.
- ChristianMarks 15y ago
  He's saying negative things about former employees. So much for symmetry. Interesting that employees cannot prudently make negative remarks about former employers even in general terms, but employers can make negative remarks about former employees. If a negative remark would lead a prospective employer to wonder if a candidate would eventually say the same things about him, why wouldn't a prospective employee think that a prospective employer who made remarks about bad hires would not eventually say the same things about him?
  - hippee-lee 15y ago
    I think it depends when and where you discuss a negative experience. Sure, not a good idea in an interview. But what about doing a personal reflection, say a blog post or something on your own time about the observations and lessons learned with regards to things like culture or development philosophy directly related to that company? As long as you do it in a way that doesn't break any non-disclosure agreements why should you be punished for it and do you really want to work for someone who would look negatively on you for expressing what you have learned from a bad experience? Even more important - perhaps the employer doen't know how bad the culture is inside or worse they do know and rely on you not ever saying anything to continue recruiting others similar to you? Then, during the interview you can find a way to bring a summary of the negative experience into the conversation without it looking like you want to trash or burn your former employer or manager. There are many opportunities for this, a common question one gets asked is to describe what you have learned from mistakes on the job. This is open and general and one could easily work programming specific or soft skill lessons learned into the discussion that do not paint your former employer in a positive light. And if your former employer has not earned the right to a positive reference you should not be required to give it to them just because you want to continue working.
kahawe 15y ago
More importantly: if you place so insanely high value on that ONE new programmer you are hiring and you can obviously abso-frakking-lutely not afford to have picked a single "bad apple" then that says a LOT about the situation of your company, your management and what state the projects are in. All these steps feel like bordering Stasi-methods (hey, why not lie-detector test the applicant while you are at it!) but I'm sorry, this is really extremely over-doing it in contrast to the other extreme, the "oh you have a cool tshirt and unwashed hair you must be a genius!" hiring that was done in the dotcom bubble. It's really not rocket science...
- mattdeboard 15y ago
  Er, for many, many employers (like mine) with very small dev shops -- I'm talking 2 devs here -- a single bad hire DOES have an extremely deleterious effect on everyone and everything else. Not everyone works at an organization with so many devs that they can afford to have an incompetent 10%. If you'd like I can regale you with my personal experience on just how damaging a bad hire can be. All steps SHOULD be taken to avoid bad hires, and ... I'm sorry I really just cannot believe I'm even having to say this. Where the hell do you WORK? What do you do for a living? I seriously can't imagine anyone I know holding the belief that it's no big deal to hire a bad programmer.
  - devs1010 15y ago
    If your company is that small then I agree you need to be more careful but you also need to find someone who basically wants to work at a startup, any company with just 2 dev's isn't a "normal job", even if its not technically considered a startup you would still need to approach hiring as if you are.
  - Spoom 15y ago
    I'll echo this. We also have just two devs currently (soon to be four!) and we are still finding issues that were caused by the previous third developer, who was let go several months ago. Some of these bugs have brought the production system down for one or more of our clients. I'm quite certain that if he has gone through Jeff's process he would have been filtered out prior to being hired.
kgo 15y ago
I know this is tangential to your main point but I actually like and expect some bitching when I'm interviewing someone, and frankly don't see how you could do an honest interview without some bitching. The supposed motivation for the no-bitching rule is that the interviewer thinks you'll complain about their company in two years. Well yeah, no shit, if you get fired or quit in two years, you're not going to run around telling people what a pleasure it was to work there, and that the breakup was mutual. The people who seem to say every place they worked was good, had a good team, had no problems, etc, always seem to be mediocre. The interviewee who's like "Oh my god, they didn't even use source control when I got there. I setup a subversion server on my desktop." shows that they take charge. Horror stories about bug tracker shenanigans are always good for a laugh. "Well 'critical' was getting used too much, so they created 'ultra-critical'. After all the bugs ended up at that status they added 'yesterday'." Funny, but also shows they understand the concept of prioritizing. The people who bitch, and (more importantly) take the steps to make things better are the people I want to work with. Of course it can be overdone, and I've had people who bitched so much or were so caustic that they got a pass. I guess maybe things would be different if I was working in Fortune 500 IT-land. Maybe then I wouldn't want someone who complains about Fortune 500 IT-land shenanigans, and just want someone who will just implement the code written by the Grand Architects on Mount High. But it's like the rule about wearing a suit and covering up any tattoos. I will never wear a suit to an interview again. If that's a pass, that's a company I don't want to work for. Same with an interviewer who would be outraged that you complained about the company you're actively trying to leave. Or that you had the gall to take a year off of your professional life to tour Europe.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

amcintyre 15y ago

I've started flatly turning down offers from one large company in particular because of this. It didn't help that they only wanted to conduct their two or more 1+ hour phone screens during banker's hours.

gaius 15y ago
7sm - 9pm?
- dangrossman 15y ago
  9AM-4PM, give or take an hour either way. In other words, guaranteed to be during your working day at your current employer.
- amcintyre 15y ago
  I wish; that would have been easy to accommodate. dangrossman has the right range: they wouldn't even go as late as 4pm, or as early as 9am, which suggests to me they're only looking for people that are out of work or otherwise desperate enough to take what they can get.

joshuacc 15y ago

While I can definitely see how it could take a long time, the last time I went through the hiring process, it included every step but #4 and was completed in about 1.5 weeks. I suspect that length of time it takes to complete a hire is probably a good proxy for measuring bureaucracy in an organization. A low-bureaucracy team (like StackExchange?) can get through all these steps pretty quickly if they want to.

scott_w 15y ago

It's probably a bit extreme to say he's "bitching". This sort of thing is quite useful to those of us who have an involvement in hiring, but don't have a lot of experience. I've been involved in hiring a couple of people, though the process I go through usually involves: a) Read a code sample, if available. b) Face-to-face interview (telephone if face-to-face is difficult). c) Hire/No-Hire The interview usually involves talking about our company and the interviewee talking about their previous experience. The hiring decision is usually based on "I like the feel of this guy", with some weighing up of their skill set, the job role, and also how interested they would be in working for us. I've found this works for the company I work for. We don't hire large numbers of people, so I don't think this approach could scale - as an example, the largest block of CVs for a position that I've seen is about 10. I don't know how it would work if we got 100 CVs.

ChristianMarks 15y ago
He's saying negative things about former employees. So much for symmetry. Interesting that employees cannot prudently make negative remarks about former employers even in general terms, but employers can make negative remarks about former employees. If a negative remark would lead a prospective employer to wonder if a candidate would eventually say the same things about him, why wouldn't a prospective employee think that a prospective employer who made remarks about bad hires would not eventually say the same things about him?
- hippee-lee 15y ago
  I think it depends when and where you discuss a negative experience. Sure, not a good idea in an interview. But what about doing a personal reflection, say a blog post or something on your own time about the observations and lessons learned with regards to things like culture or development philosophy directly related to that company? As long as you do it in a way that doesn't break any non-disclosure agreements why should you be punished for it and do you really want to work for someone who would look negatively on you for expressing what you have learned from a bad experience? Even more important - perhaps the employer doen't know how bad the culture is inside or worse they do know and rely on you not ever saying anything to continue recruiting others similar to you? Then, during the interview you can find a way to bring a summary of the negative experience into the conversation without it looking like you want to trash or burn your former employer or manager. There are many opportunities for this, a common question one gets asked is to describe what you have learned from mistakes on the job. This is open and general and one could easily work programming specific or soft skill lessons learned into the discussion that do not paint your former employer in a positive light. And if your former employer has not earned the right to a positive reference you should not be required to give it to them just because you want to continue working.

kahawe 15y ago

More importantly: if you place so insanely high value on that ONE new programmer you are hiring and you can obviously abso-frakking-lutely not afford to have picked a single "bad apple" then that says a LOT about the situation of your company, your management and what state the projects are in. All these steps feel like bordering Stasi-methods (hey, why not lie-detector test the applicant while you are at it!) but I'm sorry, this is really extremely over-doing it in contrast to the other extreme, the "oh you have a cool tshirt and unwashed hair you must be a genius!" hiring that was done in the dotcom bubble. It's really not rocket science...

mattdeboard 15y ago
Er, for many, many employers (like mine) with very small dev shops -- I'm talking 2 devs here -- a single bad hire DOES have an extremely deleterious effect on everyone and everything else. Not everyone works at an organization with so many devs that they can afford to have an incompetent 10%. If you'd like I can regale you with my personal experience on just how damaging a bad hire can be. All steps SHOULD be taken to avoid bad hires, and ... I'm sorry I really just cannot believe I'm even having to say this. Where the hell do you WORK? What do you do for a living? I seriously can't imagine anyone I know holding the belief that it's no big deal to hire a bad programmer.
- devs1010 15y ago
  If your company is that small then I agree you need to be more careful but you also need to find someone who basically wants to work at a startup, any company with just 2 dev's isn't a "normal job", even if its not technically considered a startup you would still need to approach hiring as if you are.
- Spoom 15y ago
  I'll echo this. We also have just two devs currently (soon to be four!) and we are still finding issues that were caused by the previous third developer, who was let go several months ago. Some of these bugs have brought the production system down for one or more of our clients. I'm quite certain that if he has gone through Jeff's process he would have been filtered out prior to being hired.

kgo 15y ago

I know this is tangential to your main point but I actually like and expect some bitching when I'm interviewing someone, and frankly don't see how you could do an honest interview without some bitching. The supposed motivation for the no-bitching rule is that the interviewer thinks you'll complain about their company in two years. Well yeah, no shit, if you get fired or quit in two years, you're not going to run around telling people what a pleasure it was to work there, and that the breakup was mutual. The people who seem to say every place they worked was good, had a good team, had no problems, etc, always seem to be mediocre. The interviewee who's like "Oh my god, they didn't even use source control when I got there. I setup a subversion server on my desktop." shows that they take charge. Horror stories about bug tracker shenanigans are always good for a laugh. "Well 'critical' was getting used too much, so they created 'ultra-critical'. After all the bugs ended up at that status they added 'yesterday'." Funny, but also shows they understand the concept of prioritizing. The people who bitch, and (more importantly) take the steps to make things better are the people I want to work with. Of course it can be overdone, and I've had people who bitched so much or were so caustic that they got a pass. I guess maybe things would be different if I was working in Fortune 500 IT-land. Maybe then I wouldn't want someone who complains about Fortune 500 IT-land shenanigans, and just want someone who will just implement the code written by the Grand Architects on Mount High. But it's like the rule about wearing a suit and covering up any tattoos. I will never wear a suit to an interview again. If that's a pass, that's a company I don't want to work for. Same with an interviewer who would be outraged that you complained about the company you're actively trying to leave. Or that you had the gall to take a year off of your professional life to tour Europe.