4 ms·

Indeed. I think tptacek's perspective on hiring is quite radical, certainly for established shops where doing things differently than the rest of the industry j

Indeed. I think tptacek's perspective on hiring is quite radical, certainly for established shops where doing things differently than the rest of the industry just adds friction elsewhere. My read on the approach is that it works very well for certain types of engagements, but other types, such as where you are trying to build a solid team of peers, requires something _closer_ to the traditional methods. That being said the Starfighter approach is probably right most of the time -- teams are almost certainly never stable, management usually treats ICs as fungible cogs and moves them around, in which case individual value should trump things like team fit or culture. But we're human. Appropaches like Google's work better (n.b. I am far from a proponent of what they do) because the interviewers are human and despite the whole blind-panel thing if the interviewer and interviewee can't get along the interview won't go well. So culture and team fit _is_ evaluated significantly more than something like Starfighter. People care a lot about that implicit bit, in my experience.

tptacek 3y ago
Fly.io is several solid teams of peers, built on resume-blind work-sample hiring.
- xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
  For sure! But the company was built that way. An existing 1000 person corp works differently. Everyone has to be on board for it to work, I'd wager.
wglb 3y ago
I used this approach at a company of about 750 folks, bending HR to bypass some of their stuff. E.g., they insisted on collecting resumes, but I generally discarded them. Instead, I did a one-on-one phone call for the purpose of them to ask me questions--not to grill them, and to ask them if they would like go to the next step and do a work sample test. I tailored the work sample test to the role. I did it for the compliance hires and for the project manager. The results were unexpectedly excellent. As a result of this process, and having a solid company culture, there are around ten or twelve folks that have a new career in the security field that would likely not have had another opportunity in the classical hiring scheme. I think the state of the industry with respect to hiring and evaluating folks is broken across the whole spectrum. It is like once someone becomes established in a field, they invent all manner of gatekeeping tests that they didn't pass to get where they are. The whole story of sabermetrics is another example.

tptacek 3y ago

Fly.io is several solid teams of peers, built on resume-blind work-sample hiring.

xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
For sure! But the company was built that way. An existing 1000 person corp works differently. Everyone has to be on board for it to work, I'd wager.

wglb 3y ago

I used this approach at a company of about 750 folks, bending HR to bypass some of their stuff. E.g., they insisted on collecting resumes, but I generally discarded them. Instead, I did a one-on-one phone call for the purpose of them to ask me questions--not to grill them, and to ask them if they would like go to the next step and do a work sample test. I tailored the work sample test to the role. I did it for the compliance hires and for the project manager. The results were unexpectedly excellent. As a result of this process, and having a solid company culture, there are around ten or twelve folks that have a new career in the security field that would likely not have had another opportunity in the classical hiring scheme. I think the state of the industry with respect to hiring and evaluating folks is broken across the whole spectrum. It is like once someone becomes established in a field, they invent all manner of gatekeeping tests that they didn't pass to get where they are. The whole story of sabermetrics is another example.