4 ms·
I think one thing the author fails to realize is how much worse it is to hire a terrible engineer than not hire a good engineer. I've seen a terrible hire cause
by cornellwright 12y ago
I think one thing the author fails to realize is how much worse it is to hire a terrible engineer than not hire a good engineer. I've seen a terrible hire cause more than $1M of damage in the year it took for him to get fired.
While I think that these sorts of people are rather rare within the population of engineers at large, they appear much more often in the interview process as they are more likely to need a job, and probably have to interview many more times before they find their way into a company.
That said, I do agree with the author that extremely deep technical interviews are also unreasonable. Variants of FizzBuzz are generally enough to weed out the terrible engineers and it's pretty hard to tell the good from the great until you've actually worked together.
- vonmoltke 12y ago> I've seen a terrible hire cause more than $1M of damage in the year it took for him to get fired. As I have said in these discussions before, that sounds like a process problem. What does it say about the competency of management and the maturity of processes if it took a year to figure this out? I don't think you can lay most, let alone all, of the blame on the engineer and the hiring decision.
- cornellwright 12y agoIt took a year for management to figure it out. It took much less time for his coworkers to figure it out. You're definitely right. "Blame" for the damage done falls mainly on management inaction. I definitely learned a ton from that job.
- namuol 12y agoIt's easy to blame this on hiring when in reality it's a complex combination of employee oversight, team building, scheduling, budget, "culture", etc...