5 ms·
My spiciest take on tech hiring
- gia699633 2y agoAll you need is to hire an expert to help you accomplish that. If there’s any need to spy on your partner’s phone. From my experience I lacked evidence to confront my husband on my suspicion on his infidelity, until I came across spyrecovery36 which many commend him of assisting them in their spying mission. So I contacted him and he provided me with access into his phone to view all text messages, call logs, WhatsApp messages and even her location. This evidence helped me move him off my life . I recommend you consult spyrecovery36 @ gmail com if you need access to your partner’s phone
- zephyra334 2y ago[dead]
- BELLA_MANDY 2y ago[dead]
- jeromerebecca53 2y ago[dead]
- tptacek 2y agoThis is not a very spicy take. A spicier take is that you can hire people without administering any interviews at all. Hire like an orchestra: through an audition process, which, in a work setting, is also known as "work-sample testing". It works a treat.
- cageface 2y agoDo you do this on-site? If not how are you sure they did the work?
- PhasmaFelis 2y agoThe one place I interviewed that did this had me email my program for them to run, then come in and answer questions about it and describe which parts I was proud of, which could use improvement, etc.
- wetpaws 2y ago[dead]
- throwaway42668 2y agoJust have people pair with people doing actual work. It's better signal for the candidate, for the existing team, and for the organization.
- nertzy 2y agoThis is the only correct answer. I interviewed dozens of people this way over more than a decade. Hiring was never difficult to get right. Bonus: we self-selected for people who don’t like to pair. We paired 100% of the time.
- ido 2y agoYou’re not but it already reduces the sample size by a lot. There is no 100% effective way to detect liars. I’ve been a hiring manager in multiple companies (including currently) and fortunately for me they were so far rare (maybe because Germany isn’t attractive enough as a job market for programmers to get the bulk of people putting a lot of effort into fraudulently getting a job). Either way it is customary to start new hires with a 6 month probation, and their long term contract only kicks in after that. That’s long enough to detect if someone is incompetent (I’ve had to fire people during their probation when finding out they weren’t actually capable altho I don’t think they outright lied).
- Liquix 2y agomaybe a balance can be struck? audition/take-home to select potential candidates, a follow up interview with each to confirm they wrote the code and are a good team fit.
- busterarm 2y agoI had a great experience with work-sample testing once until I had to work with the founder's wife who was an absolute nightmare to work with and was forced to sit in on zoom calls with the investors just because they wanted to be face to face with who they were paying for. It was only then that I realized that my performance didn't mean shit and I was playing an optics game. The problem isn't the process. It's just like dating. Everyone is lying and pretending to be their best self. Hiring process can't fix that -- you fix it by making employing people and taking employment low risk. Give a generous evaluation period and the option to take walk-away money/severance. You can never see how terrible a company's culture truly is until you've been there 3-6 months.
- sublinear 2y agoI agree. If your organization has the resources for it, go contract-to-hire. 3 to 6 month contractor and then make your decision bringing them on as a full employee.
- busterarm 2y agoIn practice this almost never happens. Most contract to hire roles don't appropriately pay you like you're a contractor (really should be at least 3x salary) and get worse/desperate candidates who will take an unsecure job with no benefits for 3-6 months. Real human beings with real responsibilities are usually looking for fulltime work or they're running their own business and charging you for services.
- ilaksh 2y agoI would like to be running my own business.. have a few times in the past.. but usually run out of money before the next SaaS attempt or whatever is ready and have to find a contract on short notice. I guess I'm not a real human being.
- busterarm 2y agoNo, you just have a higher risk tolerance than most and also probably a spouse that really believes in you. You are blessed.
- sublinear 2y agoMany contractor orgs provide benefits during the contracting period and pay at least 1.5x salary before the employee comes aboard as a full employee. Also, as so many others have stated on this site, many people just as talented or better than in silicon valley aren't looking for 500k+ a year because they don't live in a hyperinflated shithole, but that's another topic altogether. All I can say is salary is relative and nobody should let that go to their head. The economy in the USA, but especially on the west coast has never experienced inflation like we currently have and are in for a rude awakening soon.
- foobiekr 2y agoWhat senior person wants to do this?
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoThat's the problem with so many attempts to "correct" hiring. Especially for more senior roles, the best people you want to hire usually already have jobs, or they have a pick among different companies. Make the hiring process too onerous and you end up selecting for the most desperate people. I don't know how you'd get a good signal from a "work-sample test" in under a week or so, in which case you've basically weeded out most of the people you want to hire.
- LVB 2y agoI’ve never tried it, but it doesn’t sound terrible. As I approach 25 years in industry, what does sound terrible is more rote studying for interviews, and I don’t mean just leetcode. The idea of just giving the work a go in situ, and we either like each other or not, sounds sort of refreshing should I find myself job shopping.
- foobiekr 2y agoI don't know your life circumstances, but as I am slightly beyond 25 YOE, it has been over two decades since I found myself job shopping, just job choosing. There's no way I'd be working my current job and also doing whatever weird contract-to-hire gig some company that can't vet employees would ask. For most senior people, a new job is leaving an existing cushy job. We're not going to do that for some nonsense like this.
- psanford 2y agoYou have to take at least 1 day off for a standard tech interview, often more. I don't see how this is much different from a demand on your time.
- flappyeagle 2y agoPlenty
- wink 2y agoI suppose you've heard this argument a lot, so the short version: Can't compensate people in many countries, and probably some other legal problems when they are still employed, so what are they supposed to do? Take a vacation day? Does it even still count as an interview if you're doing real work? I'd love this, because I have a feeling I'm better at working with people than whiteboarding, but realistically unless I'm on furlow or out of a job it seems really hard to pull off, especially if it's longer than one day, even if I ignore the compensation, which would not be a pet peeve of mine, but I've heard it as a valid argument from others.
- kasey_junk 2y agoA common hack around this is to donate the “compensation” to a charity of the persons choosing.
- zippox 2y agoPriors and bias is exactly why you want MORE interviewers though.
- glumreaper 2y agoAddressed directly in TFA: "Drawing out the interview process is a thinly veiled attempt to launder this bias with a "neutral" process that they will likely disregard/overrule if it contradicts their personal preference. That doesn't mean that I think this sort of interviewing bias is good or acceptable, but I also don't think drawing out the interviewing process corrects for this bias either."
- s17n 2y agoYeah this part didn't make any sense to me - is he claiming that later interviewers will be heavily biased by talking to previous interviewers? If so, I think that's probably not as strong an effect as he's claiming, and its also easily correctable by just having interviewers not talk to each other. I do agree about the "you only need 15 minutes" part, but the solution there would seem to be replacing four hour long interviews with four 15 minute interviews, rather than with 1 hour long interview.
- AstralStorm 2y agoNo, the latter interviewers share the same biases already. Where do you get the varied interviewers really? Is it from the same biased hiring process?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- yablak 2y agoShe
- zooq_ai 2y agoExactly! Google famously did 8-10 interviews during their startup stage and they absolutely hired rock stars who helped them lay the foundation for Google's $2T company. People who haven't build sustainable, profitable organizations typically have no clue about hiring. Sure, they may be able to hire well for their little project. But, if you care about the culture of the company and how you want to shape it, you almost want all of your current members to have a say in the new member
- CommieBobDole 2y agoThis is a mayonnaise-spicy take as far as I'm concerned, in the sense that I agree with it entirely. Once you've read someone's resume you should have a pretty good idea whether or not you want to hire them. The interview should confirm that they can discuss their relevant experience and address any potential concerns that you might have without raising red flags. Beyond that, if they have deep flaws that you didn't suspect from the resume or the interview, they're probably good enough at hiding them and more interviews aren't going to help.
- throwawayUS9 2y agoIn the AI/ChatGPT world that we are in, cooking up a neat resume is not that hard. But I agree, you are going to interview someone who did at least that part good, and worked a little hard to prepare for it.
- denkmoon 2y agoCooking up a neat resume has never been hard. Templates, free advice, paid services, friends and colleagues existed well before GPT. The hard part of a resume is having the experiences to talk about. Either you've got it, or you lie, that hasn't changed.
- The_Colonel 2y ago> Once you've read someone's resume you should have a pretty good idea whether or not you want to hire them. I disagree. The experience in resume is basically a name-dropping, it doesn't tell you much about how much they know / what are their abilities. As an interviewer, what interests me is whether they have non-surface knowledge about something. I'm looking for a T-shape - getting a broad, but surface level knowledge is not that difficult (often just reading some tutorial suffices), but not everybody can get deep into the topic. So a major part of the interview for me is going through their resume and probing whether this is their deep topic and how deep can they go.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
- sfblah 2y agoIf you want to see a weird process, apply for a dev role at Meta. They appear to optimize for people who have either memorized leetcode or are really good at cheating. I’m in their process as a pretty senior dev mostly on a lark (I hate the company). I’m pretty sure the only way I could get hired is to cheat. Why would they want to hire folks that way?
- busterarm 2y agoIt's weirder than that. For Meta's interview, how well you do on preparing specifically for their interview and trying to max out the specific metrics that they're judging you on isn't just tied to whether you get an offer or not but where in the scale they pay you. They care a lot less about what you've done and where you are in your career, mainly because most of the what and how of the job is fairly unique to Meta. They want good Meta employees and people who thrive specifically in their culture and not necessarily people with a career trajectory and goals beyond the company. Turns out that there's a lot of over-achieving types out there whose sole desire in life is to be Good Germans. You will know immediately if this is or isn't you.
- geetee 2y agoIs it overachieving or seeing a shortcut to retirement?
- busterarm 2y agoEvery long-term Meta employee that I know has had their lifestyle grow to match their means and isn't any closer to their retirement than when they started. And in my circles we're talking people who've been there mostly in the 5-12 year range. In truth I really know just one retired FAANG engineer who put 12 years in at Microsoft until he was put on a team with a bad manager who had it out for him and stack ranked him out of the company. He's been happily working on side projects in the few years since that and sitting on his millions. It also doesn't hurt that his wife is also a Microsoft employee and is still there. Also I don't know if you've seen Meta offers in the last year or so since their layoffs but they've been absolutely lowballing the shit out of everyone they can justify doing so to.
- corimaith 2y agoIMO, any strategy or attempt to filter out the "right" candidates can always be gamed that a change of culture is inevitable. Iron Law of Bureaucracy. You can delay it, but it will happen. Just look at Google today despite their massive investments in the hiring process. I think if you really want to preserve your culture long term, you need to start looking to exporting your culture outwards into general society rather than filtering things in. Try to make the general candidate more like you in the first place.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoYour solution is "change society" because you think that's easier than fixing your hiring process???
- passion__desire 2y agoIn order to make an apple pie, first invent the universe.
- tylerchilds 2y agoThat's roughly how Apple became Apple. Computers as a lifestyle. Google could have made the world googley, but they kept the googley to themselves.
- busterarm 2y agoEvery single successful Google product except Search, Gmail and Chrome was an acquisition. The last two almost didn't even get released and the third relied on poaching a bunch of Firefox engineers. Google can't build anything, only buy.
- tylerchilds 2y agoand when they can build things, like google inbox, the project gets shut down for being too productive, decreasing time on site and negatively affecting revenue.
- AIorNot 2y agothat doesn't sound so spicy at the moment - I'm a 20+ year tech veteran with an award winning engineering background and a solid 20 year career in major (albeit Non-FAANGM companies) and I recently went through 5 interviews only to be told the remaining 3 interviews and 1 final onsite (which I need to fly in for) will be postponed to next month.. In the past 9 months that I've been looking full time roles, its been a series, 3-4 rounds of initial interviews, take home projects, etc so far to no avail... Each time I'm afraid that some sharp 25-35 year old will get the job.. It really sucks that longevity, skill, wisdom and experience is valued so little by tech culture..
- tomalaci 2y agoI usually just do a small pair programming session for a simple problem that can be expanded with various tweaks (even fizzbuzz can work for it, I usually have some business problem related components). During that session, which lasts about an hour, I usually have pretty good idea if the person would work out or not for the team. Works pretty well for a lot of fakers too (usually consultants that have crazy padded resumes). Of course, if your hiring is more beurocratic where your technical teams aren't really involved in hiring (or don't want to be) then don't be surprised if you get pretty much randomly skilled persons (or fakers).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kgeist 2y agoThat's how we do it: - 30 minutes of basic theoretical questions: SOLID, design patterns, DDD, clean architecture etc. just to get an overview of what they know and what their experience is, and if we'll have to assign them some courses later - 30 minutes of a practical task: they're given a very bad piece of code (1 screen), and their task is to review it. Things like: SQL injection, lack of transactions (data consistency), lack of locks, bad variable names, bad program structure etc. The review is interactive where the interviewer can give tips. Usually it gives a pretty accurate picture of their actual experience/skills, and weeds out 99% unfit candidates. If all is well, there's then 1 hour interview with CTO to check the soft skills: motivation, corporate culture fit, they also negotiate the salary (based on the previous interview) We don't do leetcode and don't ask to write a test project. Observations: - many candidates who are good at theoretical questions completely fail the code review: i.e. they simply memorized it without deep understanding - there are candidates who are not good at theory but pretty good at spotting most problems during the code review. For us, it's usually OK. It's often good self-taught engineers.
- anon22981 2y agoI’d love to see an example on the bad code and also the ”correct” notes. I have a couple years of experience and it’d be nice to see what I can spot. Anyone know a good resource for something like this?
- jaymzcampbell 2y agoI've found the Code Review Stack Exchange to be pretty good for this sort of upskilling: https://codereview.stackexchange.com/?tab=month https://codereview.stackexchange.com/?tab=month
- markus_zhang 2y agoThat's about right. I'm OK with 3 rounds (plus a short phone screen as the 0th round) but anything more than that would bore me.
- BerislavLopac 2y agoThe key insight on hiring technical people that I have gained over the 30 years of my career is something that seems very logical and natural, but seems to be forgotten too often: you cannot have more junior people evaluation more senior ones.
- anal_reactor 2y ago> A lot of companies think that dragging out the interview process helps improve candidate quality, but what they’re actually doing is inadvertently selecting for more desperate candidates that have a higher tolerance for bullshit and process. Is that the kind of engineer that you want to attract as you grow your organization? OP has never worked in a corporate environment
- kreetx 2y agoYeah, in a way this "spicy" take is somewhat idealist (naive?). Bigger companies, even the ones that are not all that bad, can have quite a lot of process due to the fact that there are non-technical people involved, often in controlling positions for the hiring process. Although I can't say I enjoy it, I actually don't mind it that much either.
- ZaraHabib 2y ago[dead]
- sandywaffles 2y agoI've generally enjoyed the teams that I've worked on where the hiring process was more extensive. And those places where the hiring was less extensive I've not been happy. It only takes one or two duds to make it through in order to ruin a team. I'd rather work on a team that did their best to make sure there were no duds even at the expense of missing a genius, so long as everyone that did make it was on right side of the bell curve.