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Amazon does things this way (the hiring team does the interviewing) but there are some major drawbacks to it as well. If your team is grossly shorthanded (say,

Amazon does things this way (the hiring team does the interviewing) but there are some major drawbacks to it as well. If your team is grossly shorthanded (say, 30% of seats open), you have your team doing a ton of interviews rather than covering for the headcount shortage, which means you're even more underwater or behind schedule. (And you might have to screen dozens of candidates to fill a seat.) Also, there's a strong incentive to just "fill the seat" so they can stop interviewing people, which Amazon does try to avoid by having at least one "bar raiser" on the interview circuit who is from another team. At a broader level, the problem with this is that the delays inherent in doing a lot of hiring and relocating people means that you can't have teams doing their own hiring and then waiting for people to arrive and come on-line - there need to be candidates in the pipeline before the exact seats open up. Otherwise you're talking about a 3-6 month delay from when a seat opens to when there's an engineer sitting in it, which sucks.

RogerL 13y ago
Okay, that just makes a ton of sense. I've never worked for a big company like that, and hadn't considered the latency issue that can be worked around by general interviewing. With that said, it doesn't change my opinion of it being a time waste for me. I have a career, I know, more or less, what I want to work on next, and I have no interest in devoting a month (seriously, Google recommended taking that long to come up to speed on interview questions) of study to interview for who knows what position, especially when the whole system is gamed towards rejecting false negatives.
r00fus 13y ago
> Otherwise you're talking about a 3-6 month delay from when a seat opens to when there's an engineer sitting in it, which sucks. Welcome to reality in most of large corporate america. I've seen insane 6-9 month interview processes at places like Cisco and that's not even a successful hire. Likewise at other large SV companies. If you can get it down to 3 months, it's below par and better than the competition.

RogerL 13y ago

Okay, that just makes a ton of sense. I've never worked for a big company like that, and hadn't considered the latency issue that can be worked around by general interviewing. With that said, it doesn't change my opinion of it being a time waste for me. I have a career, I know, more or less, what I want to work on next, and I have no interest in devoting a month (seriously, Google recommended taking that long to come up to speed on interview questions) of study to interview for who knows what position, especially when the whole system is gamed towards rejecting false negatives.

r00fus 13y ago

> Otherwise you're talking about a 3-6 month delay from when a seat opens to when there's an engineer sitting in it, which sucks. Welcome to reality in most of large corporate america. I've seen insane 6-9 month interview processes at places like Cisco and that's not even a successful hire. Likewise at other large SV companies. If you can get it down to 3 months, it's below par and better than the competition.