8 ms·

The "well-calibrated interviewer" curse

151 points by chuhnk 14y ago

nanook 14y ago
Is the website not accessible for anyone else? It always happens to me with this website.
- sp332 14y ago
  Seems fine, does this link work better? http://rachelbythebay.com.nyud.net/w/2013/01/04/cal/ http://rachelbythebay.com.nyud.net/w/2013/01/04/cal/
- JoachimSchipper 14y ago
  This site did and does work fine for me - are you behind a miscalibrated filtering proxy or somesuch?
fbuilesv 14y ago
For those unfamiliar with the company in the article, Rachel's talking about her experience at Google. One problem I've seen in big tech. companies (especially Google) is that most employees hate doing interviews, they think it's worthless and a waste of their time. They don't seem to realize that this is a necessary part of the job (especially with a company that went from 20 to 20000 in such a small amount of time). In the end, would you rather have your co-workers be interviewed by yourself (or another technical fellow) or by an uninformed HR department? Having said that, I would've loved to work with Rachel. I have a deep fascination and respect for responsible and involved people who can pull the weight of an entire team when everyone else ain't doing shit.
- tptacek 14y ago
  Another problem is the disconnect between "recruiting is extremely important to the company" and "the interview process should be as thorough and regimented as possible", as if the latter followed from the former. Everyone in software management is familiar with the concept that good employees are worth Nx more than average developers. But a good chunk of them have also attached themselves to the idea that employee quality scales continuously from average to good, and so there's significant incremental value to sussing out everything you can about a candidate. I don't believe this is true. I believe there are "average" (meaning, in reality, "bad") candidates and there are "good" candidates, and you need to find out which of those two buckets people are in, do some extra checking for culture/work habits/communications skills, and then stop. Instead, the formal interview processes I've seen are gauntlets of trivia and case studies and successive whiteboarding exercises that exhaust everybody. They don't generate value proportional to their cost. And they're unsustainable, so that whatever marginal effectiveness they have is compromised totally within a year when everyone who participates gets sick of it and starts phoning things in. Tangential point: some people just can't interview effectively, and you need to keep them away from your interviewing process. You're probably not going to be able to perfectly balance the recruiting load across your team.
  - nbm 14y ago
    I would be interested to hear what you think a good number of interviews would be and their composition, to ensure a high hiring bar but also not too heavily incurring false positives, and taking into account travel costs (assumed to be paid for by the company) and time cost to the candidate. As a candidate, I found the Facebook and Google interviews to be fairly daunting by description, but even with 10 hour timezone difference in jet lag, I did not feel I was being overworked, that the interviews overlapped dramatically in their content, or that I was being asked anything unnecessary (well, there was one interviewer...). In both cases, I felt I had an opportunity to show off some depth in a number of areas, and that I may have been less likely to succeed if my best interview was discounted. That said, I had a decade of experience before going through those gauntlets, and I am well aware that my experience of these things will differ to others. As an interviewer and candidate evaluator, sometimes it is fairly clear from just a subset of interviews that a candidate is one we should make an offer to. But sometimes there are one or two interviewers who just did not get enough signal to be comfortable to hire, but the remainder made up for that. Improving that situation is something I am trying (in my own, admittedly limited, way), so any insight would be appreciated.
    - tptacek 14y ago
      Answered above. Would love feedback. This is the most important part of my job.
  - btilly 14y ago
    Another problem is the disconnect between "recruiting is extremely important to the company" and "the interview process should be as thorough and regimented as possible", as if the latter followed from the former. There is a reason for the regimented process that you're talking about. The challenge for any large company is to delay, for as long as possible, the inevitable reversion to hiring the mean. Under normal circumstances, different teams will have different standards, and by the time you realize this you'll have a lot of teams whose standards have slipped, and you will have a lot of marginal employees. Therefore smart large companies try to create a minimal process that aims to create uniform process across the whole company. The process tries to be lightweight as possible on individual people, but fights the good fight against entropy. Unfortunately for Rachel, Google's process centers around the idea of having well-calibrated interviewers whose interview characteristics had been so well tested against others that hiring committees know exactly what to make of their interview feedback. (What absolute scale you grade on does not matter much. How your scale compares to everyone else, and how well it predicts everyone else, does.) Once an employee winds up as a well-calibrated interviewer, HR would like to use that person as much as possible (and each use does a better job calibrating the employee, and increases their desirability as an interviewer). This is inconvenient for the employee to whom it happens. But, on average across all developers, the process is quite light-weight. Instead, the formal interview processes I've seen are gauntlets of trivia and case studies and successive whiteboarding exercises that exhaust everybody. They don't generate value proportional to their cost. And they're unsustainable, so that whatever marginal effectiveness they have is compromised totally within a year when everyone who participates gets sick of it and starts phoning things in. Google's process has been sustained company-wide for a number of years now. There is much that is imperfect about it, but evidence suggests that it is sustainable.
- rm445 14y ago
  Even if you buy into it from a business perspective, putting 10(+)% of your time into interviewing is quite a change of role. It must really bite when you're busy, especially if, as in the article, your team-mates aren't doing interviews.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  One problem I've seen in big tech. companies (especially Google) is that most employees hate doing interviews, they think it's worthless and a waste of their time. In a closed-allocation company (which Google is) you don't work for the company. You work for a manager, who decides whether you get to have a career there. This means that citizenship is worthless from a career perspective, unless the manager makes it a priority, which is unlikely (because what does a middle manager gain from citizenship work?). With Google's blind matching in addition, the people you interview are unlikely to end up on your team. Companies get exactly what they deserve when they create perverse incentives and then wonder why 9 in 10 people are playing politics instead of doing what's good for the company. If you let the manager unilaterally wreck a report's career, then people are going to work to play their managers rather than doing what's best for the company. So you get political behavior. Having said that, I would've loved to work with Rachel. I have a deep fascination and respect for responsible and involved people who can pull the weight of an entire team when everyone else ain't doing shit. I agree. Losing her was a huge loss for Google, and I hope her current venture does well.
rheide 14y ago
Company pays you money. You work for them. They ask you to do something you're good at. Sounds good to me.
- esperluette 14y ago
  It's a ROI question: all that time, week after week, for two hires, one who lasted a year? That's not a great ROI for a good engineer's time.
  - Steer 14y ago
    I think that's the wrong way to look at it. The time she put in also meant that some people that could potentially have been a bad fit were not hired which was good.
    - JoachimSchipper 14y ago
      Note, however, that this may not be what the good engineer wanted to be doing. (Also, just not putting bad candidates on the good engineer's plate would be more efficient.)
    - kator 14y ago
      Exactly, and maybe the good ones did get hired and really knocked it out. That said it sounds like the quality of candidates sent to her were really low and the upstream recruiters should have been working to improver that.
    - georgemcbay 14y ago
      True, but based on her little "where are they now" aside, she could have just randomly selected 98%* of the candidates she interviewed for rejection and achieved nearly the same end result. (or whatever the actual percentage was, I don't know the total)
    - michaelt 14y ago
      While Google goes straight from application to a telephone interview, a lot of companies ask for a work sample test first - either by e-mailing them a problem and asking them to reply with a solution, or through automated systems like Codility. If you're spending a lot of employee hours filtering candidates who could have been filtered more easily through other means, I can understand feeling a bit indifferent about it.
esperluette 14y ago
Loved, loved the "I let him dig the deepest hole he could imagine by doing my best ditzy/derpy voice and just saying things like "they want me to ask about the load... average...?" bit. I do that too. Honestly, if you're patronizing me in the interview, you're gonna be insufferable to work with. The best candidates light up when they have a chance to explain something cool, no matter who is listening and get even more excited when you ask a question about a detail. Good candidates are patient and thoughtful and ask YOU check-in questions ("so now we have X, right?") Mediocre candidates get a bit lost, sometimes overshoot or undershoot the right level of technical detail, but muddle through and sigh in relief at the end. Asshole candidates try to dump a bunch of smoke and mirrors on you, say shit like "well, if you haven't taken an algorithms class ...," wave off your questions, and pretend they don't have enough time to answer the question "seriously." If you think in your engineering career you're never going to have to explain "how something works" in at least some detail to a semi- or non-technical person, you are not going to have much of an engineering career.
- kator 14y ago
  I look a lot like a "pointy haired boss" type. I used this to my advantage at times in interviews, I allow the candidate to think I don't know much about the topic at hand. It's nice to see how they can articulate something and you can smell the BS quickly. That said I am looking for Attitude, Aptitude and Fit. It would be hard for me to spend much time with someone who started the call like that, I would have most likely politely bowed out pretty quickly (i.e. you failed Attitude in the first 30 seconds).
- nerfhammer 14y ago
  I thought that was needlessly vindictive. If you don't like the guy that much, just stop the interview.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    Vindictive would be halting the interview immediately because the candidate made the (egregious) mistake. She's playing this part of the story for humor, but one imagines that a non-brain-damaged candidate could immediately correct for that boneheaded move. "Wow. I'm so embarrassed. I must sound like a complete tool. It's been a rough couple weeks dealing with HR teams. I'm very sorry, can we start over?" And, what she's saying is, predictably enough, most nerd candidates don't do this.
rdtsc 14y ago
One key missing element is to let member of the team interview their future co-worker as well. That way it doesn't seem like waste of time and it gets people invested. If they don't pick the right person they could end up stuck with someone dragging the team down and they'll eventually learn the value of having a thorough interview and being interested in it. The other side of the coin is that they should also be allowed to influence the type of offer and how aggressive the salary negotiation would be. I have seen a cases were a good candidate technically hasn't returned back because of presumably a low offer.
- mjmahone17 14y ago
  Letting a member of the team interview the candidate may be a best practice, when possible. However, someone else said Rachel worked for Google. Their hiring practices, at least for university recruiting, is basically find all the "right" candidates, hire them, then, after they've accepted an offer, match them with a team. I know other companies, such as Facebook, actually have you begin working, then have teams court you after about a month of work, then you choose which team you want to join.
  - nbm 14y ago
    I'm not aware of how many other companies have a "bootcamp" program like we have at Facebook. Basically all software engineers (including some whose titles aren't Software Engineer, and including managers) go through this six week process - first four weeks is mostly getting people up to speed through two or so presentations a week and doing real tasks (which may mean meeting up with some other engineers to understand enough context on how to proceed) that go through the same review and push process as everyone else, and the last two weeks is mostly learning about specific teams and a bit of a sell exercise through a set of presentations. All through this, you share a software engineer mentor with two other bootcampers who helps you navigate the code repos and also the company. At the end, the bootcamper decides what team to work on, with some background information like company priorities and maybe with some teams specifically reaching out to them. That's a fairly huge investment, so I'd love to know which other companies offer this sort of program.
blacksmythe 14y ago
Most companies hire by department, so a good manager is incentivized to do a good phone screen (or at least make sure a good phone screen is done), because it is their people who waste time on a plant interview of an unqualified candidate. Google's policy of separating the interview process from the job assignment breaks a lot of the incentives to interview that most companies have in place.
- fiatmoney 14y ago
  It also breaks incentives in the other direction - as a candidate you're interviewing for "a job" but not "a particular job", so you're taking it on faith that it'll align with your interests. If you're considering other offers as well, you're weighing a known quantity against a pure ethos play.
- nostrademons 14y ago
  That's intentional, because it also breaks many of the misaligned incentives of departmental hiring that result in pathological organizational behavior. Most managers, if given a choice between hiring a "good enough" candidate and hiring no one, will choose to hire. Particularly in a growing company, where everyone is overworked and there's a lot of grunt work that people would love to have a new recruit do. Over time this results in a degradation of overall employee quality ("A players hire As, Bs hire Cs") and a bunch of deadweight that were needed to solve a temporary staffing crunch but later end up holding the group back. It also tends toward fiefdoms and empire-building; when you're hired by the department, it can be very difficult to move between departments. One of Google's strengths is that transfers are pretty easy; I doubt that would be true if you were brought in by a department manager instead of assigned to the company as a whole.
  - greenyoda 14y ago
    From the corporate side, not having managers do their own hiring seems to make sense. But from the employee's side, it means that you don't get a chance to meet and evaluate the manager and team who you'll end up working with. I'm sure that Google is similar to most companies in that the quality of managers varies widely and different departments have very different work and environments. Not being able to evaluate the manager and team that I'd be working with if I were to accept a job at some company would be a deal-breaker for me.
fideloper 14y ago
I wonder why she ended up with such a large work load of interviews? Are they allowed to deny interview requests given to them?
- calpaterson 14y ago
  She explains in the text. They were using her as a first hurdle because she got a good reputation for interviewing. The rationale seems to be that if they put "well-calibrated" interviewers in first, they might weed out time-wasters earlier. I work at a company with a similar policy on technical interviews (though I don't do any), and here I think it's uncommon to decline a particular interview unless you have some very pressing engagement.
thinkling 14y ago
Some people are good at interviewing, and in particular at filtering, and some are not. If you're good, and you do more than your regular share, you're doing the company a huge service. I've heard of this function being applied at the other end of the interview loop. Microsoft has its "as appropriate" addition to the loop at the end. (Senior person isn't bothered to interview you unless previous people liked you.) Amazon has their "bar raisers", seasoned interviewers added for quality control, at least one on each loop. Doing this up front seems to make more sense, as you waste fewer employees' time. At the same time, as Rachel indicates, it's less satisfying to the valued 'well-adjusted' interviewer, as they see few of the people they interviewed get hired. Are there other models that solve that problem?
kator 14y ago
LOL two interviews a week.. I do about five to six a week and had three in a single day! My goal is to get four in one day... When you're growing staff by 100's of percent year over year recruiting has to be one of the most important tasks you can put energy behind. You want the right people on the right teams and you don't want a random non-tech person making the determination. I see engineers over-worked, up to their ears and always complaining about interviewing. I often wonder, we're in a rational, problem solving industry but we can't see the simplest problems. You're over worked and up to your ears because the team doesn't have enough people on it or the "right people" in it and you're slammed. Does it make more sense to just keep working your backlog or take time to get quality people on the team so you can double your velocity on your next sprint? Why is this so hard for people to see? You have to kiss a lot of frogs to find the right people for your team. It's a numbers game, perhaps it's hard for programmers to understand that the hiring process is a lot like debugging, most people don't like doing it but if you don't things will break and stay broken. All this said I do think companies have a hard time figuring out how to balance this. I'm consulting right now with a company that has a very large recruiting team and crazy hiring goals. Meanwhile they were sending a lot of "questionable" candidates to the engineering teams. Engineers were bitching about this to me over lunch in the hallways etc. My response, simple, I swam up stream. I started meeting with the recruiting team, reviewing as many candidates as I can and helping them develop a better process. We're setting goals and measuring our rejection rates and getting feedback on each one even if it went bad. Recently I told them that if we're cutting someone on site to let me do it. I want to meet these people before we cut them to understand what went wrong, did we do something wrong? Did we cut the wrong candidate? I want to give everyone the benefit of doubt and figure out how to improve the process. Could we have avoided wasting their time and ours? In the OP's case perhaps upstream should have been measured by how many she rejected. They should have been incentivized to improve their own "quality score" instead of burying people on the "well-calibrated interviewer" list. You can sit there and bitch about something that is broken.. Or you can choose to fix it.. Which will it be!?
- aaronblohowiak 14y ago
  I think the problem was really that the author was doing two a week when others were doing one a quarter -- for something that was supposed to be a shared responsibility. I agree that your people are your product, but it is bad management to overburden someone with a task they dislike (though they excel at it.)
josh_fyi 14y ago
You need a graduated system of interviewing. Start with quick-screening questions online, then a phone interview, then more in-depth online testing (nothing too burdensome on the candidate, say an hour's worth), then several hours of interviews (perhaps all on one day) by various interviewers. You should also gather candidate's expectations/requirements in compensation, corporate culture, etc as early in the process as possible, to avoid disappointment. At any point in the process you should be willing to stop, politely but decisively, whether for jerkiness or for technical incompetence.
nbm 14y ago
I'm a "well-calibrated interviewer" at Facebook for my role (Production Engineer), and some things from the post sound fairly similar. I consistently do two-ish phone interviews or on-site interviews a week. I'd say 2 hours is a little on the high side for average time per candidate (probably around 1.5 hours), but it does happen. I am sometimes called in to do tiebreaker interviews (before or even after on-site interviews), or requested for particular candidates. I occasionally help other groups (capacity engineering, software engineering, operations engineering) with their interviews on top of my usual load. I've flown overseas for people who can't easily get US visitor visas. I'm in the top 5 interviewers by quantity for the role (which isn't too hard, admittedly), and in the top few percent of the company (I even got some ice cream as thanks!). In addition to interviews, I also spend an hour a week in a recruiting meeting trying to improve our recruiting process (including giving feedback to our interviewers on how to improve their interviewing and feedback). And I've done non-interview recruiting at universities (manning booths at career fairs, mentoring at hackathons) and conferences (at Velocity, SCALE, Surge, PyCon just in the last year). My feeling about spending 4-6 hours a week on interviewing and recruiting activities is that it is some of the most valuable work I can be doing. Avoiding a false positive - ensuring we maintain a consistent high bar - is going to save people in my group (and others in the company) potentially hundreds of hours. Making a great hire is going to add thousands of hours of productivity to my group and the company. And we're a small enough group (and even a small enough company for the non-PE hires I've helped with) that I can easily keep track of the people I've helped hire and it is supremely fulfilling.
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  Somewhat tangential question- when you have people who conduct interviews so regularly, have companies ever tried measuring the performance of said interviewers via the ratings of the people they brought on board?
  - kator 14y ago
    At least in our environment the "next step" are loops with multiple people. The goal is to help get more people a chance to see the candidate before they join etc. It might be interesting to track the number of screens -vs- cut-offs on-site.. :) Also I am measuring the number of screens that fail as a quality indicator for the recruiting team. Think of it as a pipeline from the first contact all the way through new-hire and 1yr review. How are we doing at each step and what can we do to improve each step for everyone involved including the candidate.
kabdib 14y ago
I love interviewing people. I've done hundreds of interviews in the past few decades, and learn something new every time. From the superstar who you really want to start working with right away, to the bozo who can't code their way out of a paper bag, I can't say that a single interview was a waste of time. The bad ones teach you how to ask questions, the good ones keep you on your toes (and during the "sales job" part of the interview, make you introspect a little on your current job, which is always good). [I wouldn't have failed the guy immediately for the "I thought this was going to be a technical interview." Then again, maybe it was the tone of his voice? He'd probably been dealing with a bunch of HR / recruiter nonsense]
frozenport 14y ago
I wonder if Google has an analytical models to try to understand what makes candidates successful in their company. 1 of 2 new hires leaving is a problem.
- greenyoda 14y ago
  You can't really draw any valid conclusions from a sample size of two. The fact that this happened with the two employees who Rachel interviewed doesn't give us any information about what the attrition rate of new employees at Google is.
  - nerfhammer 14y ago
    You can draw valid conclusions. You just need a very wide confidence interval. If p=.05, we can assume that the real attrition rate is between about 2.5% and 97.5%.
gruseom 14y ago
I hate job interviews so much that I want (someone) to figure out how to build a company entirely without them.
- mjmahone17 14y ago
  There's a good reason many job openings are never posted, and having good connections can lead you to getting a job that doesn't, from the outside, appear to exist. However, not having interviews at all would seem to imply building a very insular company, because you'd need an intimate knowledge of how strong somebody is as an employee. And the only way to get that is either to look at their past work, similar to published papers in academia, or to know that person well. And even in academia, to my knowledge, professor hires still get interviewed, even if they're a nobel prize winner, to make sure they'd be a good cultural fit, and so that they know whether they'd want to work for the interviewer.
  - gruseom 14y ago
    not having interviews at all would seem to imply building a very insular company Why? Job interviews aren't the only way to connect with the outside world. It's a failure of imagination on our part to believe that bureaucratic grotesque is the only way to build up a shared endeavor. Open source work is one example of people coming together that has nothing to do with job interviews. Other disciplines have other approaches – e.g. auditions. Conferences are a way for people to meet who otherwise might not. There are many avenues. I say we haven't noticed yet what an inhumane thing the job interview really is. We'd never inflict it on our friends. Why inflict it on prospective colleagues?
  - martinced 14y ago
    +1 Last consulting gig I told I was willing to help them for a few months. I sent them a CV and they saw I meant business. Got an email saying: "you're starting next monday if it's okay for you". Quite an efficient process ; ) (I don't know which part of my CV they did background check that said)
    - 14y ago
interviewer 14y ago
I'm also a "well-calibrated interviewer" at Amazon. I'm an engineer and a 'bar raiser' with 700+ interviews. My thoughts are: 1. Interviewing and evaluating a candidate has very, very little to do with engineering. Yes, you have to be able to evaluate code but this just scratches the surface of what needs to happen during an interview. 2. As a corollary to #1 - just because you are a good engineer doesn't mean that you will be a good interviewer. Never mind whether or not you want to interview. It is just a different skill set. 3. Interviewing can take a lot of time. But it also has high value for the company. If you are passionate about the people that work with and really want to shape the company, then get involved in interviewing. There are very few activities that will influence things more. 4. A lot of the time that I spend in 'interviewing' is actually time that I spend with co-workers to make them better interviewers. For in-house interviews the breakdown is 15 minutes preparing, 45 minutes interview, 30 minutes writing debrief feedback, 30 minutes attending the debrief, and then 60 or more minutes working with the other interviewers on the loop or helping the hiring manager understand what they should be looking for. 5. In some ways the interviewing process is no different than any other process employed by a company. In particular there is almost always room for improvement. As an employee of a company you can spend time complaining about the process ('it is broken', 'it is unfair', 'it is too heavy weight', etc) or you can spend time fixing it. If you are working at a company where you are not empowered to fix things like this then you should consider working for a new company. 6. I like lists!
zomgbbq 14y ago
I'd like to talk about this from the other side of the table - the interviewee. I think interviewing is broken but I really don't know the answer how to fix it so I have to just "play the game". I'm pretty good at "playing the game" but I am feeling the same level of interview burnout while looking for work as interviewers do looking for candidates and I can't help but think it hurts the industry overall as engineers don't look for new jobs just to avoid the hazing process of interviewing. Without trying to sound like I'm bragging, I consider myself a senior level, talented engineer. Recently, however, the startup I have been working at ran out of funds and I have been pounding the pavement looking for work. The problem is that I don't feel like any interview I have been doing, or for that matter, have ever done, is really a measure of how good I am as an engineer. It's more a stamina test to see how well I can be tortured and hazed and it makes me reluctant to take on more interviews. Most interviews are about being quizzed on the minutae of a language or about solving a programming quiz in 60 seconds while the interviewer critiques thought of every line. I just don't see how these interviews are actually filtering out bad candidates or measuring good candidates. They are measuring how someone performs in a very specific, non-realistic situation that does not emulate how every day work would occur. The worst example of this are the horrible SHL/Brainbench tests that seem to measure memorization more than skill. I do quite well on those silly tests, but I'm not sure they really measured anything accurately. I was the happiest when I got homework assignments as my tech prescreen or was asked to walk through examples of my own code with their engineering team. I feel these are less stress on the interviewee because it is code you are familiar with and are a closer exemplar of what goes every day at work. Or maybe I'm just a wimp.
- nbm 14y ago
  I've been hired on bravado, reputation, pointless trivia contests, and other ways of interviewing, and it scares me that companies are willing to take on a risk without verifying skills in some way. I've also been on the receiving side of delightful trivia questions like "What are all the ways the character '*' is used in Python?" and puzzle questions that test "creativity"/"ingenuity", whose value are totally alien to me. (I've also done online quizzes/tests, including personality ones(!)) I would like to think there's a broad middle ground in between, but that there isn't a single process that is going to be effective for all companies or for all candidates. In the past, I've used "homework" as a final step in a hiring process, which worked for some (it certainly washed out a few candidates who got passed less strenuous interviewers), but which others weren't interested in doing - including two that we hired anyway and who ended up being great coworkers. I imagine I would feel a bit put out if a startup wanted me to spend 2-4 hours on something before they allowed me the opportunity to get to understand the position and the company (especially since I would hope the startup would look at my open source contributions in lieu of the homework). New grads might have a bunch of opportunities, and they might decide on skipping something with that sort of requirement.
michaelochurch 14y ago
In a typically managed, closed-allocation company, your job is to suck up to your boss-- not to do what's best for the company. Rachel's ex-company is one where your career rises and sets on "calibration scores" set unilaterally by the manager. (You need good peer reviews to get a promotion, but transfers and firing are based on the scores, and you need good projects to get promoted.) If your manager doesn't think interviewing's important (and most don't) then it hurts your career to spend time on it. It's also sub-optimal, from a career perspective, to work on long-term projects. Those are the first projects to be cut, and in the modern asshole corporation, a project being cut usually means your job is over (because no one will take a transfer from a failed project, especially because managers tend to blame project failures on the people below them and have months of lead time before shit goes down). Recruiting is the ultimate in long-term projects. It's extremely important for the company, but very hard for someone who's good at it to get personal credit. Most of your time is wasted on horrible candidates, and the good ones have a lot of great options, so it takes a long time to get a successful hire: 6 months to find the first, plus 12+ months for that person to be successful at the organization (at which point, it reflects on him, not on you for hiring). Companies rely on good citizens like Rachel who keep the place going, but rarely reward them.
- fizx 14y ago
  If you like to travel and you're a good interviewer, you might get some free flights and a week of additional vacation as you help with foreign interviews.
  - michaelochurch 14y ago
    This is different, because if a company is buying in to you enough to send you to foreign countries, you probably don't have to worry about getting "perfed" by your manager. However, most of the traditional closed-allocation companies view (despite their claims to the contrary) non-executive recruiting as undignified grunt work (you're associating with people, most of whom the company won't hire) and don't reward it. It just leaves you with one less hour per day to serve your boss's political needs.
Sherrilbfx 14y ago
I didn't really get the gist of the article: so she was doing more interviews than everyone else and not finding candidates?

151 points by chuhnk 14y ago

nanook 14y ago

Is the website not accessible for anyone else? It always happens to me with this website.

sp332 14y ago
Seems fine, does this link work better? http://rachelbythebay.com.nyud.net/w/2013/01/04/cal/ http://rachelbythebay.com.nyud.net/w/2013/01/04/cal/
JoachimSchipper 14y ago
This site did and does work fine for me - are you behind a miscalibrated filtering proxy or somesuch?

fbuilesv 14y ago

For those unfamiliar with the company in the article, Rachel's talking about her experience at Google. One problem I've seen in big tech. companies (especially Google) is that most employees hate doing interviews, they think it's worthless and a waste of their time. They don't seem to realize that this is a necessary part of the job (especially with a company that went from 20 to 20000 in such a small amount of time). In the end, would you rather have your co-workers be interviewed by yourself (or another technical fellow) or by an uninformed HR department? Having said that, I would've loved to work with Rachel. I have a deep fascination and respect for responsible and involved people who can pull the weight of an entire team when everyone else ain't doing shit.

tptacek 14y ago
Another problem is the disconnect between "recruiting is extremely important to the company" and "the interview process should be as thorough and regimented as possible", as if the latter followed from the former. Everyone in software management is familiar with the concept that good employees are worth Nx more than average developers. But a good chunk of them have also attached themselves to the idea that employee quality scales continuously from average to good, and so there's significant incremental value to sussing out everything you can about a candidate. I don't believe this is true. I believe there are "average" (meaning, in reality, "bad") candidates and there are "good" candidates, and you need to find out which of those two buckets people are in, do some extra checking for culture/work habits/communications skills, and then stop. Instead, the formal interview processes I've seen are gauntlets of trivia and case studies and successive whiteboarding exercises that exhaust everybody. They don't generate value proportional to their cost. And they're unsustainable, so that whatever marginal effectiveness they have is compromised totally within a year when everyone who participates gets sick of it and starts phoning things in. Tangential point: some people just can't interview effectively, and you need to keep them away from your interviewing process. You're probably not going to be able to perfectly balance the recruiting load across your team.
- nbm 14y ago
  I would be interested to hear what you think a good number of interviews would be and their composition, to ensure a high hiring bar but also not too heavily incurring false positives, and taking into account travel costs (assumed to be paid for by the company) and time cost to the candidate. As a candidate, I found the Facebook and Google interviews to be fairly daunting by description, but even with 10 hour timezone difference in jet lag, I did not feel I was being overworked, that the interviews overlapped dramatically in their content, or that I was being asked anything unnecessary (well, there was one interviewer...). In both cases, I felt I had an opportunity to show off some depth in a number of areas, and that I may have been less likely to succeed if my best interview was discounted. That said, I had a decade of experience before going through those gauntlets, and I am well aware that my experience of these things will differ to others. As an interviewer and candidate evaluator, sometimes it is fairly clear from just a subset of interviews that a candidate is one we should make an offer to. But sometimes there are one or two interviewers who just did not get enough signal to be comfortable to hire, but the remainder made up for that. Improving that situation is something I am trying (in my own, admittedly limited, way), so any insight would be appreciated.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    Answered above. Would love feedback. This is the most important part of my job.
- btilly 14y ago
  Another problem is the disconnect between "recruiting is extremely important to the company" and "the interview process should be as thorough and regimented as possible", as if the latter followed from the former. There is a reason for the regimented process that you're talking about. The challenge for any large company is to delay, for as long as possible, the inevitable reversion to hiring the mean. Under normal circumstances, different teams will have different standards, and by the time you realize this you'll have a lot of teams whose standards have slipped, and you will have a lot of marginal employees. Therefore smart large companies try to create a minimal process that aims to create uniform process across the whole company. The process tries to be lightweight as possible on individual people, but fights the good fight against entropy. Unfortunately for Rachel, Google's process centers around the idea of having well-calibrated interviewers whose interview characteristics had been so well tested against others that hiring committees know exactly what to make of their interview feedback. (What absolute scale you grade on does not matter much. How your scale compares to everyone else, and how well it predicts everyone else, does.) Once an employee winds up as a well-calibrated interviewer, HR would like to use that person as much as possible (and each use does a better job calibrating the employee, and increases their desirability as an interviewer). This is inconvenient for the employee to whom it happens. But, on average across all developers, the process is quite light-weight. Instead, the formal interview processes I've seen are gauntlets of trivia and case studies and successive whiteboarding exercises that exhaust everybody. They don't generate value proportional to their cost. And they're unsustainable, so that whatever marginal effectiveness they have is compromised totally within a year when everyone who participates gets sick of it and starts phoning things in. Google's process has been sustained company-wide for a number of years now. There is much that is imperfect about it, but evidence suggests that it is sustainable.
rm445 14y ago
Even if you buy into it from a business perspective, putting 10(+)% of your time into interviewing is quite a change of role. It must really bite when you're busy, especially if, as in the article, your team-mates aren't doing interviews.
michaelochurch 14y ago
One problem I've seen in big tech. companies (especially Google) is that most employees hate doing interviews, they think it's worthless and a waste of their time. In a closed-allocation company (which Google is) you don't work for the company. You work for a manager, who decides whether you get to have a career there. This means that citizenship is worthless from a career perspective, unless the manager makes it a priority, which is unlikely (because what does a middle manager gain from citizenship work?). With Google's blind matching in addition, the people you interview are unlikely to end up on your team. Companies get exactly what they deserve when they create perverse incentives and then wonder why 9 in 10 people are playing politics instead of doing what's good for the company. If you let the manager unilaterally wreck a report's career, then people are going to work to play their managers rather than doing what's best for the company. So you get political behavior. Having said that, I would've loved to work with Rachel. I have a deep fascination and respect for responsible and involved people who can pull the weight of an entire team when everyone else ain't doing shit. I agree. Losing her was a huge loss for Google, and I hope her current venture does well.

rheide 14y ago

Company pays you money. You work for them. They ask you to do something you're good at. Sounds good to me.

esperluette 14y ago
It's a ROI question: all that time, week after week, for two hires, one who lasted a year? That's not a great ROI for a good engineer's time.
- Steer 14y ago
  I think that's the wrong way to look at it. The time she put in also meant that some people that could potentially have been a bad fit were not hired which was good.
  - JoachimSchipper 14y ago
    Note, however, that this may not be what the good engineer wanted to be doing. (Also, just not putting bad candidates on the good engineer's plate would be more efficient.)
  - kator 14y ago
    Exactly, and maybe the good ones did get hired and really knocked it out. That said it sounds like the quality of candidates sent to her were really low and the upstream recruiters should have been working to improver that.
  - georgemcbay 14y ago
    True, but based on her little "where are they now" aside, she could have just randomly selected 98%* of the candidates she interviewed for rejection and achieved nearly the same end result. (or whatever the actual percentage was, I don't know the total)
  - michaelt 14y ago
    While Google goes straight from application to a telephone interview, a lot of companies ask for a work sample test first - either by e-mailing them a problem and asking them to reply with a solution, or through automated systems like Codility. If you're spending a lot of employee hours filtering candidates who could have been filtered more easily through other means, I can understand feeling a bit indifferent about it.

esperluette 14y ago

Loved, loved the "I let him dig the deepest hole he could imagine by doing my best ditzy/derpy voice and just saying things like "they want me to ask about the load... average...?" bit. I do that too. Honestly, if you're patronizing me in the interview, you're gonna be insufferable to work with. The best candidates light up when they have a chance to explain something cool, no matter who is listening and get even more excited when you ask a question about a detail. Good candidates are patient and thoughtful and ask YOU check-in questions ("so now we have X, right?") Mediocre candidates get a bit lost, sometimes overshoot or undershoot the right level of technical detail, but muddle through and sigh in relief at the end. Asshole candidates try to dump a bunch of smoke and mirrors on you, say shit like "well, if you haven't taken an algorithms class ...," wave off your questions, and pretend they don't have enough time to answer the question "seriously." If you think in your engineering career you're never going to have to explain "how something works" in at least some detail to a semi- or non-technical person, you are not going to have much of an engineering career.

kator 14y ago
I look a lot like a "pointy haired boss" type. I used this to my advantage at times in interviews, I allow the candidate to think I don't know much about the topic at hand. It's nice to see how they can articulate something and you can smell the BS quickly. That said I am looking for Attitude, Aptitude and Fit. It would be hard for me to spend much time with someone who started the call like that, I would have most likely politely bowed out pretty quickly (i.e. you failed Attitude in the first 30 seconds).
nerfhammer 14y ago
I thought that was needlessly vindictive. If you don't like the guy that much, just stop the interview.
- tptacek 14y ago
  Vindictive would be halting the interview immediately because the candidate made the (egregious) mistake. She's playing this part of the story for humor, but one imagines that a non-brain-damaged candidate could immediately correct for that boneheaded move. "Wow. I'm so embarrassed. I must sound like a complete tool. It's been a rough couple weeks dealing with HR teams. I'm very sorry, can we start over?" And, what she's saying is, predictably enough, most nerd candidates don't do this.

rdtsc 14y ago

One key missing element is to let member of the team interview their future co-worker as well. That way it doesn't seem like waste of time and it gets people invested. If they don't pick the right person they could end up stuck with someone dragging the team down and they'll eventually learn the value of having a thorough interview and being interested in it. The other side of the coin is that they should also be allowed to influence the type of offer and how aggressive the salary negotiation would be. I have seen a cases were a good candidate technically hasn't returned back because of presumably a low offer.

mjmahone17 14y ago
Letting a member of the team interview the candidate may be a best practice, when possible. However, someone else said Rachel worked for Google. Their hiring practices, at least for university recruiting, is basically find all the "right" candidates, hire them, then, after they've accepted an offer, match them with a team. I know other companies, such as Facebook, actually have you begin working, then have teams court you after about a month of work, then you choose which team you want to join.
- nbm 14y ago
  I'm not aware of how many other companies have a "bootcamp" program like we have at Facebook. Basically all software engineers (including some whose titles aren't Software Engineer, and including managers) go through this six week process - first four weeks is mostly getting people up to speed through two or so presentations a week and doing real tasks (which may mean meeting up with some other engineers to understand enough context on how to proceed) that go through the same review and push process as everyone else, and the last two weeks is mostly learning about specific teams and a bit of a sell exercise through a set of presentations. All through this, you share a software engineer mentor with two other bootcampers who helps you navigate the code repos and also the company. At the end, the bootcamper decides what team to work on, with some background information like company priorities and maybe with some teams specifically reaching out to them. That's a fairly huge investment, so I'd love to know which other companies offer this sort of program.

blacksmythe 14y ago

Most companies hire by department, so a good manager is incentivized to do a good phone screen (or at least make sure a good phone screen is done), because it is their people who waste time on a plant interview of an unqualified candidate. Google's policy of separating the interview process from the job assignment breaks a lot of the incentives to interview that most companies have in place.

fiatmoney 14y ago
It also breaks incentives in the other direction - as a candidate you're interviewing for "a job" but not "a particular job", so you're taking it on faith that it'll align with your interests. If you're considering other offers as well, you're weighing a known quantity against a pure ethos play.
nostrademons 14y ago
That's intentional, because it also breaks many of the misaligned incentives of departmental hiring that result in pathological organizational behavior. Most managers, if given a choice between hiring a "good enough" candidate and hiring no one, will choose to hire. Particularly in a growing company, where everyone is overworked and there's a lot of grunt work that people would love to have a new recruit do. Over time this results in a degradation of overall employee quality ("A players hire As, Bs hire Cs") and a bunch of deadweight that were needed to solve a temporary staffing crunch but later end up holding the group back. It also tends toward fiefdoms and empire-building; when you're hired by the department, it can be very difficult to move between departments. One of Google's strengths is that transfers are pretty easy; I doubt that would be true if you were brought in by a department manager instead of assigned to the company as a whole.
- greenyoda 14y ago
  From the corporate side, not having managers do their own hiring seems to make sense. But from the employee's side, it means that you don't get a chance to meet and evaluate the manager and team who you'll end up working with. I'm sure that Google is similar to most companies in that the quality of managers varies widely and different departments have very different work and environments. Not being able to evaluate the manager and team that I'd be working with if I were to accept a job at some company would be a deal-breaker for me.

fideloper 14y ago

I wonder why she ended up with such a large work load of interviews? Are they allowed to deny interview requests given to them?

calpaterson 14y ago
She explains in the text. They were using her as a first hurdle because she got a good reputation for interviewing. The rationale seems to be that if they put "well-calibrated" interviewers in first, they might weed out time-wasters earlier. I work at a company with a similar policy on technical interviews (though I don't do any), and here I think it's uncommon to decline a particular interview unless you have some very pressing engagement.

thinkling 14y ago

Some people are good at interviewing, and in particular at filtering, and some are not. If you're good, and you do more than your regular share, you're doing the company a huge service. I've heard of this function being applied at the other end of the interview loop. Microsoft has its "as appropriate" addition to the loop at the end. (Senior person isn't bothered to interview you unless previous people liked you.) Amazon has their "bar raisers", seasoned interviewers added for quality control, at least one on each loop. Doing this up front seems to make more sense, as you waste fewer employees' time. At the same time, as Rachel indicates, it's less satisfying to the valued 'well-adjusted' interviewer, as they see few of the people they interviewed get hired. Are there other models that solve that problem?

kator 14y ago

LOL two interviews a week.. I do about five to six a week and had three in a single day! My goal is to get four in one day... When you're growing staff by 100's of percent year over year recruiting has to be one of the most important tasks you can put energy behind. You want the right people on the right teams and you don't want a random non-tech person making the determination. I see engineers over-worked, up to their ears and always complaining about interviewing. I often wonder, we're in a rational, problem solving industry but we can't see the simplest problems. You're over worked and up to your ears because the team doesn't have enough people on it or the "right people" in it and you're slammed. Does it make more sense to just keep working your backlog or take time to get quality people on the team so you can double your velocity on your next sprint? Why is this so hard for people to see? You have to kiss a lot of frogs to find the right people for your team. It's a numbers game, perhaps it's hard for programmers to understand that the hiring process is a lot like debugging, most people don't like doing it but if you don't things will break and stay broken. All this said I do think companies have a hard time figuring out how to balance this. I'm consulting right now with a company that has a very large recruiting team and crazy hiring goals. Meanwhile they were sending a lot of "questionable" candidates to the engineering teams. Engineers were bitching about this to me over lunch in the hallways etc. My response, simple, I swam up stream. I started meeting with the recruiting team, reviewing as many candidates as I can and helping them develop a better process. We're setting goals and measuring our rejection rates and getting feedback on each one even if it went bad. Recently I told them that if we're cutting someone on site to let me do it. I want to meet these people before we cut them to understand what went wrong, did we do something wrong? Did we cut the wrong candidate? I want to give everyone the benefit of doubt and figure out how to improve the process. Could we have avoided wasting their time and ours? In the OP's case perhaps upstream should have been measured by how many she rejected. They should have been incentivized to improve their own "quality score" instead of burying people on the "well-calibrated interviewer" list. You can sit there and bitch about something that is broken.. Or you can choose to fix it.. Which will it be!?

aaronblohowiak 14y ago
I think the problem was really that the author was doing two a week when others were doing one a quarter -- for something that was supposed to be a shared responsibility. I agree that your people are your product, but it is bad management to overburden someone with a task they dislike (though they excel at it.)

josh_fyi 14y ago

You need a graduated system of interviewing. Start with quick-screening questions online, then a phone interview, then more in-depth online testing (nothing too burdensome on the candidate, say an hour's worth), then several hours of interviews (perhaps all on one day) by various interviewers. You should also gather candidate's expectations/requirements in compensation, corporate culture, etc as early in the process as possible, to avoid disappointment. At any point in the process you should be willing to stop, politely but decisively, whether for jerkiness or for technical incompetence.

nbm 14y ago

I'm a "well-calibrated interviewer" at Facebook for my role (Production Engineer), and some things from the post sound fairly similar. I consistently do two-ish phone interviews or on-site interviews a week. I'd say 2 hours is a little on the high side for average time per candidate (probably around 1.5 hours), but it does happen. I am sometimes called in to do tiebreaker interviews (before or even after on-site interviews), or requested for particular candidates. I occasionally help other groups (capacity engineering, software engineering, operations engineering) with their interviews on top of my usual load. I've flown overseas for people who can't easily get US visitor visas. I'm in the top 5 interviewers by quantity for the role (which isn't too hard, admittedly), and in the top few percent of the company (I even got some ice cream as thanks!). In addition to interviews, I also spend an hour a week in a recruiting meeting trying to improve our recruiting process (including giving feedback to our interviewers on how to improve their interviewing and feedback). And I've done non-interview recruiting at universities (manning booths at career fairs, mentoring at hackathons) and conferences (at Velocity, SCALE, Surge, PyCon just in the last year). My feeling about spending 4-6 hours a week on interviewing and recruiting activities is that it is some of the most valuable work I can be doing. Avoiding a false positive - ensuring we maintain a consistent high bar - is going to save people in my group (and others in the company) potentially hundreds of hours. Making a great hire is going to add thousands of hours of productivity to my group and the company. And we're a small enough group (and even a small enough company for the non-PE hires I've helped with) that I can easily keep track of the people I've helped hire and it is supremely fulfilling.

sliverstorm 14y ago
Somewhat tangential question- when you have people who conduct interviews so regularly, have companies ever tried measuring the performance of said interviewers via the ratings of the people they brought on board?
- kator 14y ago
  At least in our environment the "next step" are loops with multiple people. The goal is to help get more people a chance to see the candidate before they join etc. It might be interesting to track the number of screens -vs- cut-offs on-site.. :) Also I am measuring the number of screens that fail as a quality indicator for the recruiting team. Think of it as a pipeline from the first contact all the way through new-hire and 1yr review. How are we doing at each step and what can we do to improve each step for everyone involved including the candidate.

kabdib 14y ago

I love interviewing people. I've done hundreds of interviews in the past few decades, and learn something new every time. From the superstar who you really want to start working with right away, to the bozo who can't code their way out of a paper bag, I can't say that a single interview was a waste of time. The bad ones teach you how to ask questions, the good ones keep you on your toes (and during the "sales job" part of the interview, make you introspect a little on your current job, which is always good). [I wouldn't have failed the guy immediately for the "I thought this was going to be a technical interview." Then again, maybe it was the tone of his voice? He'd probably been dealing with a bunch of HR / recruiter nonsense]

frozenport 14y ago

I wonder if Google has an analytical models to try to understand what makes candidates successful in their company. 1 of 2 new hires leaving is a problem.

greenyoda 14y ago
You can't really draw any valid conclusions from a sample size of two. The fact that this happened with the two employees who Rachel interviewed doesn't give us any information about what the attrition rate of new employees at Google is.
- nerfhammer 14y ago
  You can draw valid conclusions. You just need a very wide confidence interval. If p=.05, we can assume that the real attrition rate is between about 2.5% and 97.5%.

gruseom 14y ago

I hate job interviews so much that I want (someone) to figure out how to build a company entirely without them.

mjmahone17 14y ago
There's a good reason many job openings are never posted, and having good connections can lead you to getting a job that doesn't, from the outside, appear to exist. However, not having interviews at all would seem to imply building a very insular company, because you'd need an intimate knowledge of how strong somebody is as an employee. And the only way to get that is either to look at their past work, similar to published papers in academia, or to know that person well. And even in academia, to my knowledge, professor hires still get interviewed, even if they're a nobel prize winner, to make sure they'd be a good cultural fit, and so that they know whether they'd want to work for the interviewer.
- gruseom 14y ago
  not having interviews at all would seem to imply building a very insular company Why? Job interviews aren't the only way to connect with the outside world. It's a failure of imagination on our part to believe that bureaucratic grotesque is the only way to build up a shared endeavor. Open source work is one example of people coming together that has nothing to do with job interviews. Other disciplines have other approaches – e.g. auditions. Conferences are a way for people to meet who otherwise might not. There are many avenues. I say we haven't noticed yet what an inhumane thing the job interview really is. We'd never inflict it on our friends. Why inflict it on prospective colleagues?
- martinced 14y ago
  +1 Last consulting gig I told I was willing to help them for a few months. I sent them a CV and they saw I meant business. Got an email saying: "you're starting next monday if it's okay for you". Quite an efficient process ; ) (I don't know which part of my CV they did background check that said)
  - 14y ago

interviewer 14y ago

I'm also a "well-calibrated interviewer" at Amazon. I'm an engineer and a 'bar raiser' with 700+ interviews. My thoughts are: 1. Interviewing and evaluating a candidate has very, very little to do with engineering. Yes, you have to be able to evaluate code but this just scratches the surface of what needs to happen during an interview. 2. As a corollary to #1 - just because you are a good engineer doesn't mean that you will be a good interviewer. Never mind whether or not you want to interview. It is just a different skill set. 3. Interviewing can take a lot of time. But it also has high value for the company. If you are passionate about the people that work with and really want to shape the company, then get involved in interviewing. There are very few activities that will influence things more. 4. A lot of the time that I spend in 'interviewing' is actually time that I spend with co-workers to make them better interviewers. For in-house interviews the breakdown is 15 minutes preparing, 45 minutes interview, 30 minutes writing debrief feedback, 30 minutes attending the debrief, and then 60 or more minutes working with the other interviewers on the loop or helping the hiring manager understand what they should be looking for. 5. In some ways the interviewing process is no different than any other process employed by a company. In particular there is almost always room for improvement. As an employee of a company you can spend time complaining about the process ('it is broken', 'it is unfair', 'it is too heavy weight', etc) or you can spend time fixing it. If you are working at a company where you are not empowered to fix things like this then you should consider working for a new company. 6. I like lists!

zomgbbq 14y ago

I'd like to talk about this from the other side of the table - the interviewee. I think interviewing is broken but I really don't know the answer how to fix it so I have to just "play the game". I'm pretty good at "playing the game" but I am feeling the same level of interview burnout while looking for work as interviewers do looking for candidates and I can't help but think it hurts the industry overall as engineers don't look for new jobs just to avoid the hazing process of interviewing. Without trying to sound like I'm bragging, I consider myself a senior level, talented engineer. Recently, however, the startup I have been working at ran out of funds and I have been pounding the pavement looking for work. The problem is that I don't feel like any interview I have been doing, or for that matter, have ever done, is really a measure of how good I am as an engineer. It's more a stamina test to see how well I can be tortured and hazed and it makes me reluctant to take on more interviews. Most interviews are about being quizzed on the minutae of a language or about solving a programming quiz in 60 seconds while the interviewer critiques thought of every line. I just don't see how these interviews are actually filtering out bad candidates or measuring good candidates. They are measuring how someone performs in a very specific, non-realistic situation that does not emulate how every day work would occur. The worst example of this are the horrible SHL/Brainbench tests that seem to measure memorization more than skill. I do quite well on those silly tests, but I'm not sure they really measured anything accurately. I was the happiest when I got homework assignments as my tech prescreen or was asked to walk through examples of my own code with their engineering team. I feel these are less stress on the interviewee because it is code you are familiar with and are a closer exemplar of what goes every day at work. Or maybe I'm just a wimp.

nbm 14y ago
I've been hired on bravado, reputation, pointless trivia contests, and other ways of interviewing, and it scares me that companies are willing to take on a risk without verifying skills in some way. I've also been on the receiving side of delightful trivia questions like "What are all the ways the character '*' is used in Python?" and puzzle questions that test "creativity"/"ingenuity", whose value are totally alien to me. (I've also done online quizzes/tests, including personality ones(!)) I would like to think there's a broad middle ground in between, but that there isn't a single process that is going to be effective for all companies or for all candidates. In the past, I've used "homework" as a final step in a hiring process, which worked for some (it certainly washed out a few candidates who got passed less strenuous interviewers), but which others weren't interested in doing - including two that we hired anyway and who ended up being great coworkers. I imagine I would feel a bit put out if a startup wanted me to spend 2-4 hours on something before they allowed me the opportunity to get to understand the position and the company (especially since I would hope the startup would look at my open source contributions in lieu of the homework). New grads might have a bunch of opportunities, and they might decide on skipping something with that sort of requirement.

michaelochurch 14y ago

In a typically managed, closed-allocation company, your job is to suck up to your boss-- not to do what's best for the company. Rachel's ex-company is one where your career rises and sets on "calibration scores" set unilaterally by the manager. (You need good peer reviews to get a promotion, but transfers and firing are based on the scores, and you need good projects to get promoted.) If your manager doesn't think interviewing's important (and most don't) then it hurts your career to spend time on it. It's also sub-optimal, from a career perspective, to work on long-term projects. Those are the first projects to be cut, and in the modern asshole corporation, a project being cut usually means your job is over (because no one will take a transfer from a failed project, especially because managers tend to blame project failures on the people below them and have months of lead time before shit goes down). Recruiting is the ultimate in long-term projects. It's extremely important for the company, but very hard for someone who's good at it to get personal credit. Most of your time is wasted on horrible candidates, and the good ones have a lot of great options, so it takes a long time to get a successful hire: 6 months to find the first, plus 12+ months for that person to be successful at the organization (at which point, it reflects on him, not on you for hiring). Companies rely on good citizens like Rachel who keep the place going, but rarely reward them.

fizx 14y ago
If you like to travel and you're a good interviewer, you might get some free flights and a week of additional vacation as you help with foreign interviews.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  This is different, because if a company is buying in to you enough to send you to foreign countries, you probably don't have to worry about getting "perfed" by your manager. However, most of the traditional closed-allocation companies view (despite their claims to the contrary) non-executive recruiting as undignified grunt work (you're associating with people, most of whom the company won't hire) and don't reward it. It just leaves you with one less hour per day to serve your boss's political needs.

Sherrilbfx 14y ago

I didn't really get the gist of the article: so she was doing more interviews than everyone else and not finding candidates?