
Hiring Is Broken and Isn’t Worth Fixing - daigoba66
http://www.daedtech.com/hiring-is-broken/
======
ryandrake
> Start by telling recruiters, up front, that you don’t do trivia interviews
> and the like. Be firm and explicit about this, as in, “if they start asking
> me to describe merge sort, I’m going to thank them for their time and tell
> them I need to go.”

Wow, OK. I suppose this is fine for someone who doesn't actually want a job,
or in those rare times when the hiring market favors candidates. But in most
cases, the company will just move on to the next resume in the pile. Why
bother with this kook when there's a line of people outside eager to have a
shot?

>“Hmm… you know what? I’m really sorry, but I think maybe we got our wires
crossed somewhere here. I’ve had experience on the hiring side of this sort of
interview style in the past, and I’ve seen it result in some really sub-
optimal matches, so I’ve adopted a policy of having certain deal breaker cues
in the interviewing process. So at this point I can safely say I’d be unlikely
to accept an offer, and I really wouldn’t want to waste any more of your
time."

Expected response: "Well........ Bye."

I appreciate the effort put into wording that nicely, but really all you're
saying is, "Company, you need me more than I need you, and I expect YOU to
jump through MY hoops." This is only true when you're a one-in-a-million
talent. It's not going to work for the other 999,999 people.

~~~
mindcrime
_Wow, OK. I suppose this is fine for someone who doesn 't actually want a job,
or in those rare times when the hiring market favors candidates. But in most
cases, the company will just move on to the next resume in the pile. Why
bother with this kook when there's a line of people outside eager to have a
shot._

The thing is, not all companies do this. And there a LOT of other companies
besides Google and The Usual Suspects. Heck, there are a lot of companies that
aren't "tech companies" but they still employ developers. And they are
probably less likely to do the whole "grill you on Data Structures 101" thing
than Google. It's something to consider...

~~~
busterarm
I'm at one such company. I'm one of a 4-person dev team in the marketing
department of a major lawfirm. My interview consisted of a conversation with
another developer about code, both my github/portfolio and how we see
development in general.

I had an offer an hour later and this is a fantastic place to work.

I actively avoided places with broken processes and it paid off in spades.

~~~
chris11
Is the compensation competitive? I've gotten the general impression that
sometimes hiring is more broken than other parts of the company, and that the
more competitive positions can sometimes have more frustrating interviews.

~~~
busterarm
Not really, but I also put in a sub-40 week and the only thing that matters is
that I get my work done.

I'll make the Work-Life Balance > Compensation choice every time.

------
cjcenizal
The message I get out of this post is: "Know what you want, and be
uncompromising in your search for it." If a company is interviewing you wrong,
then the company is disqualified from your list of places you'd like to work.
You can draw up a similar list of criteria (e.g. has an open source presence,
has a remote-first culture, uses JIRA, doesn't use JIRA, has low technical
debt, has high unit test coverage) with which you can assess culture/role fit.

If you find the companies you're interviewing with consistently fail your
test, then bring your pattern-identifying skills to bear and figure out why.
Maybe all of the companies you're interviewing at have something in common
(they're all startups, they're all Fortune 500s, the CEO isn't technical, the
roles are too senior/junior). In which case you should break the pattern and
apply for work at different types of companies.

Or possibly the pattern lies within yourself. Do you consistently fail the
same kind of technical tests? Does your answer to a specific question ("Can
you show us a large codebase you've worked on? Oh, you can't?") tend to elicit
the same negative answer? Then maybe you should focus on strengthening those
weaknesses.

------
nostrademons
"Rather, what if you simply placed a creative constraint on the organization
that it could not grow by hiring strangers or unknown commodities?"

So...make tech even more of an old-boys club than it already is? Because
that's what people will be complaining about if the only way to get a job is
to know someone or be known.

Really, there isn't a solution here. Any system you use to allocate desirable
jobs to an oversupply of applicants will result in folks who believe they were
unjustly excluded. What _would_ fix the problem is for people to define
"desirable" in different ways, with a bias toward "the place that I actually
ended up at". Love what you do, don't do what you love.

~~~
mazelife
I think that's a bit of an uncharitable reading. He anticipates a similar
objection with, "You’d lose out on entry level talent! Maybe, or maybe _part
of your operations would be getting to know college kids_." (Emphasis mine.)
What I took away from the article is that he's suggesting that your company
find other ways of developing relationships with outside people, rather than
putting out a call for strangers to line up and jump through hoops when they
need to hire someone. Another example: So many companies rely heavily on open
source software, but how often do they take the opportunity to form
relationships with the people who build and maintain it?

When you say, "What would fix the problem is for people to define 'desirable'
in different ways, with a bias toward 'the place that I actually ended up
at'," that seems to me very much what he is suggesting.

~~~
st3v3r
While that's possible, I think we all know that most companies would not do it
that way.

~~~
nostrademons
Also, some companies _do_ do it that way and are widely decried as elitist for
it. I went to a pretty elite school, and every fall, companies like Lehman
Brothers, Bear Stearns, Monitor Group, Bain Capital, etc. would descend upon
campus. They'd build relationships with professors, ask about who the top
students in classes were, and oftentimes arrange private dinners with those
students to get to know them. Rumor on campus was that if you were a top 25%
student in the econ department, you had a job waiting for you on Wall Street;
if you weren't, well, you had to fight for careers like everyone else.

Problem is, "building personal relationships with promising talent" doesn't
scale, and so the companies that do it have to pick who the promising talent
is. They usually do so through _other_ markers of status (where you went to
school, who you know, who your parents are, etc.), which just perpetuates
existing inequalities. Everybody thinks that they are the beautiful unique
snowflake that hot companies will want to know, but when they find out that
those beautiful unique snowflakes are _other_ people, they cry foul.

(Interestingly, 3 of the 4 companies mentioned above imploded spectacularly,
while companies with noticeably impersonal and impartial application processes
- like Google or YCombinator, for example - are still going strong. That might
be an indication that the "treat everybody as a cog, but at least treat them
fairly" approach tends to work better.)

------
db1024
I recently interviewed at Google and one coding interview had the most
adversarial interviewer that I've ever encountered. It started with the
interviewer complaining that he was busy. Everything from the language I chose
to each line I wrote received complaints. By time we got past the first
question, I thought maybe this was actually a behavioral interview in disguise
to see how I'd deal with adversarial coworkers.

I got an offer from them, but I declined without hesitation. I interviewed at
Facebook and that process was great. At least one of my coding interviewers
_did_ read/skim my github code beforehand. Woo, keep it up!

~~~
Benjammer
A big part of dealing with adversarial co-workers is team structure and
managerial support, how does a 1 on 1 conversation with someone you've never
met even really test your ability to work with "difficult" people? It seems
more like seeing how much bullshit you can put up with at that point (this is
NOT the same to me as "dealing with an adversarial co-worker").

There's already a baseline of bullshit to deal with everywhere anyway, it's
part of almost any job. If a company thinks there's so much bullshit and/or
difficult people to deal with that they need to screen for it during
interviews, that seems like a HUGE turnoff to me wanting to work there.

~~~
vonmoltke
It's the same as companies that purposely make interviews more stressful than
they need to be "to see how you work under pressure". They fail to realize
that not all stress is the same and that interview stress is different, in
some cases very different, from on-the-job stress.

~~~
bluetomcat
I am very fed up with the whole "ability to work under pressure" expectation.
Companies that emphasize this almost always have a totally broken work
organization process.

At the end of the day, programmers are not emergency workers and need some
rest and calmness to do their work efficiently.

~~~
ChemicalWarfare
That + the fact that no matter how strong the candidate is unless we're
talking some well-known genius, the personal dynamics of the interview is the
candidate wants something (the job) the interviewer "has" so it's skewed from
the get go.

------
pklausler
So many "hiring is broken" stories lately. I sympathize. Interviewing is
typically not fun.

However, I'd like y'all to consider the problem from the other side of the
table. I conduct a lot of technical interviews. I desperately want to avoid
bad hires. How do I avoid the bad hires? It's a really hard problem and there
are consequences from both false positive and false negative signals.

Google asks "big-O" type questions not because they're shibboleths or useless
trivia. It's practical knowledge in an environment where things often have to
scale up to absurd degrees. Most candidates haven't had experience in that
kind of environment, so interviewers are looking for signs of aptitude.
Knowing which kinds of algorithms can scale up is a sign of that aptitude for
those kinds of problems.

Lately, I've been asking more questions from the domain of what I call
"programming in the small" \-- the kinds of things that crop up when actually
writing or reviewing or debugging code. I do this because I've learned that
the ability to construct an airtight Boolean predicate expression to test for
a well-defined condition is a survival skill for good programmers.

If you're a good candidate, then I'm sincerely sorry that I waste some time
(for both of us!) talking with you about some basic stuff rather than having a
more interesting technical conversation.

~~~
bluetomcat
Google probably needs algorithmically savvy people, but that is surely not the
case with most of the companies asking similar questions. If a company
developing CRUD apps asks me to reverse a linked list, it is a sign to me that
they are clueless.

If I have provided a GitHub account with some interesting code, then sure as
hell I have demonstrated that I am able to compose "airtight" boolean
expressions.

Just like I have to be informed about your company before interviewing, take
your time to inform yourself about me.

~~~
ubernostrum
_Google probably needs algorithmically savvy people, but that is surely not
the case with most of the companies asking similar questions. If a company
developing CRUD apps asks me to reverse a linked list, it is a sign to me that
they are clueless._

The amusing thing about this is, from what I can tell, Google actually only
needs a small number of people with the deep knowledge. Much of the work there
still involves things like "developing CRUD apps", just on top of the
platforms and infrastructure the smaller group developed for it.

Which led to a characterization I once heard from an ex-Googler of the company
as a place where "they hire top CS Ph.Ds to do incredibly boring code-monkey
work".

------
brianbarker
Like standardized testing, interviewing is a bullshit measure of what you
really know.

Like standardized testing, the way to win is to get good at taking the tests.
Even if you disapprove, this is how you get a job. I've accepted this.

~~~
FussyZeus
I think it's worth noting that the reason you have the degree isn't to show
knowledge, it's to show you're willing to complete a process that's out of
your control, but you do it anyway because that's what is expected.

The ideals are always nice to have, but if I have to fight with a new hire
over every built-in process because he doesn't immediately see the value in
it, I'm going to get irritated at him.

~~~
alanwatts
What if that built-in process is counter productive, obsolete, or doesn't have
the value you really thought it did anymore, like that of many college
degrees? Mindless adherence to group think and legacy processes in the long
run is a recipe for disaster.

~~~
FussyZeus
I'm all for constructive criticism, and if a process is burning more money
than it is generating I'd speak my mind too. But many of our new fish (at
least around here) don't like how much of a stickler I can be for proper
documentation, good naming conventions, using the bug tracking system etc.
They see it as pointless bureaucracy because they don't report to our boss,
who when he asks "how are things going" likes to hear and see more than me
just saying "good."

While there are plenty of processes out there that likely don't need to be,
there are I'd venture a lot more where the value generated isn't necessarily
obvious to the guys in the trenches. I'm happy to explain this to anyone who
asks (and have) and we occasionally even have an issue crop up where hey, look
how useful this "busywork" you did earlier is right now, but the point is to a
certain degree you should expect to simply obey the stated rules even if you
don't IMMEDIATELY see their value. It's just respectful.

I'd also say it's far too easy to conflate "mindless obedience" and
"respectful behavior" these days.

~~~
cableshaft
If they think proper documentation, good naming conventions, and using a bug
tracking system are 'pointless bureacracy', then they're too green or belong
in a more fast-paced environment, like a startup, because all of those are
perfectly reasonable and should be considered a bare minimum for a team of
more than a handful of people (and proper naming conventions should be done
even with just one person).

------
beat
Reminds me of something a former co-worker told an incoming revolving-door
CTO. He said there are only three things an employer can offer to recruit
great technical talent - a great work environment, really interesting work, or
lots of money. (Our former employer had a crap environment and dull work)

If you need to recruit, you need to offer at least one, preferably all three.

------
emodendroket
> Rather, what if you simply placed a creative constraint on the organization
> that it could not grow by hiring strangers or unknown commodities?

Excellent. As we all know, the tech industry's biggest problem is a lack of
insularity and out-of-control diversity and this strategy is sure to help.

------
loserpenguin15
One thing that I think is commonly missing from these discussions about hiring
is the fact that most hiring processes (especially at these large companies)
are not designed around letting all qualified applicants in. They are designed
to ensure that unqualified applicants don't get in, even at the cost of
passing up good candidates.

The negative cost associated with one bad hire can often outway the gain from
one great higher. So if a company has to pass up on some great candidates in
order to maintain quality they are going to do it.

Are there better ways than trivia questions and whiteboard coding to prevent
bad hires? Of Course. One of my co-workers brings up the hiring practice at
his old job. They would fly all potential candidates out to their office and
have them work (paid) with the team for one day. From there, they would take
their top picks and have them work (paid) for a week. From that group they
would choose who to hire. My co-worker always remarks about how great of a
process it was. However they were also only ever hiring for one or two
positions a year. When you're trying to hire as many qualified applicants as
possible, these kinds of in depth interviews just aren't efficient enough.

So the negative cost of hiring a bad applicant, in addition to the problem of
trying to hire as many people as possible with minimal cost leaves us with
interview techniques that don't cater to everyone. But they do do a good job
of weeding out bad applicants, even if that does mean passing on good
applicants.

Now I'm not saying this is the right way to interview, I just think this
aspect is commonly left out of these discussions.

------
mixmastamyk
Spot on, I've independently decided that I won't submit to brain-teasers and
white-board coding (diagramming yes) any longer.

A company can look at my online work, read my written communication, have a
nice chat on the phone, and then perhaps can hire me for a short contract to
write a component to see how things work out. If they don't they don't have to
pay.

I'm also considering not allowing video on the calls also, and will experiment
with that. For the last five years I haven't gotten any work from startups
(even though I specialize in python and javascript) and wonder if it is due to
the fact that I don't dress like a lumberjack and am not as young as I used to
be.

~~~
BookmarkSaver
>I'm also considering not allowing video on the calls also

I've never considered live video of me a requirement in any professional or
technical context a requirement unless I was actually doing something visual
that explicitly requires it. When on the job I've never even bothered asking
if it was ok to not have my camera on, and in interviews I've never thought
twice about letting the interviewer know that I won't have a video stream up.
Sometimes its because I genuinely can't (either poor internet or the fact that
I don't have a webcam for my desktop) or I just don't feel like it. It's not
about some high-minded principle regarding discrimination or a tactical
decision or anything, I just don't think that video conferences add anything
to audio in any situation except visual presentations or personal/emotional
contacts (GF or family). I've been in a LOT of live calls in a lot of contexts
and I've never noticed the other party having any issue with this, no
interviewer has detectably taken it negatively.

I'd also like to add that I don't always have my camera off, just that I don't
feel any pressure to justify myself when it is turned off, which is most of
the time.

~~~
mixmastamyk
On about 75% of my recent Skype sessions the interviewers turned on their
cameras immediately and requested that I do the same. Thought nothing of it
until reading claims of ageism here, only noting that I have personally
received zero offers from those companies. I'm not out-of-shape or
unprofessional-looking either if it matters.

Coincidence? I don't know.

~~~
BookmarkSaver
I mean, I'm young, fit (sorta), white, and male, so I suspect as far as biases
go they are all pretty much in my favor. I just don't like dealing with a
camera on me. It also took me a while to get an offer, even though I'm (not to
sound arrogant or something) statistically extremely hireable given my
background. (I did end up getting good offers in a reasonable timeframe
though)

------
skybrian
Maybe filtering out people who won't play the game is better for both sides.
After all, the company will be asking you to do other things you disagree
with. Getting things done often means compromising on stuff that doesn't
matter in order to do the stuff that does. It's an important job skill.

This is a clearer signal than "cultural fit" (whatever that means).

------
ChemicalWarfare
Looking at a github profile would take about the same amount of time as
walking to the conference room to conduct the interview. So I'm not buying the
"you're wasting interviewers time with that stuff" line.

Can also serve as a good source of questions - can the candidate answer
questions about his/her own code? Much more meaningful then some riddles or
BST traversal.

~~~
askyourmother
It cuts two ways - if the hiring company expects me to waste, sorry, invest,
my time reading their corp pages to make sure I have learnt all about them
pre-interview, they can damn well take the time to read my profile and code
snippets.

------
rm999
The current state of hiring reflects two facts:

1\. A single bad hire can do immense damage to a team and organization. I
never fully appreciated this until I saw the consequences of bad hires, and as
a hiring manager it's one of my biggest fears.

2\. Labor laws and HR exist. You can't just willy-nilly fire people, there's a
process in any well-functioning company to protect employees from management
and vise versa. As a hiring manager this will generally reflect poorly on you.

This has caused interviewers, who are in the position of power, to make the
process thorough and straining to protect themselves.

In many ways my philosophy has been shifting to the article's, which is to
grow much more slowly and carefully. I don't think this scales well, but it
leads to a personal process I can feel good about. I've been networking to
meet people within the community, and I hope my future hires either come
through personal knowledge of them or vetted referrals.

Google is actually capable of this kind of interview, but it's rare. I was
referred to a manager a few years ago by an ex-coworker, and the whole process
was great. I met the whole team, I went to lunch with the manager, he told me
I could contact him if I had any questions, etc. I didn't end up joining, but
I left with a very positive opinion of the manager and team.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Some percentage of bad hires are inevitable. I think a better solution is to
fire them quickly rather than torture all candidates.

Most dev jobs are at-will, no?

~~~
btilly
The problem is that pissed off ex-employees are able to file lawsuits claiming
that they were fired for any of a number of reasons that you can't fire them
for. (Race, gender, religion, ...) Defending these lawsuits, even when they
are without merit, is an expensive PITA. And the process can turn up all sorts
of stuff in public that is a PR disaster.

This happens sufficiently often that HR has responded with policies to
carefully document exactly why people are being fired. Furthermore they often
try to get fired employees to sign contracts saying that they won't sue. These
policies make it considerably more difficult to fire people.

~~~
mixmastamyk
To both respondents:

Does this happen often enough to worry about? Moreover, how do google-style
brainteasers filter out litigious individuals?

~~~
btilly
According to every HR person I've talked about it with, it does happen often
enough.

The brainteasers won't reduce what fraction of hires would be litigious. But
they will reduce how many people you need to fire right away, which reduces
your exposure to that kind of litigation.

Also note that company's unwillingness to tell you WHY they didn't hire you is
another HR recommendation for avoiding lawsuits. The problem is that the more
you say, the easier it is for it to be quoted out of context and made to look
like you're biased against people based on age/gender/religion/etc, which
could be grounds for a lawsuit. A lawsuit that doesn't even have to be
winnable if it would cost more to win than to settle out of court...

------
emeraldd
The problem I see with his solution is on the other side. Alot of very
good/creative developers and technical people tend to be of a non-social sort.
As a result, restricting yourself to known people will inherently miss the
people who don't move into the "scene" (whatever that happens to be). This
just leads to a different set of problems and ultimately results in a "broken"
process as well, just a different kind of broken.

------
dominotw
Hiring is broken because people follow what google does.

Once google stops asking whiteboard, big o questions hiring will be "fixed".
As simple as that. This is the _only_ to fix it, we don't need endless
discussions every week about this.

~~~
yolesaber
That will never happen. Google is obsessed with their academic, whiteboard
coding procedure to a scary degree. It's a point of pride for recruiters to
mention how intense it is. I'm going onsite to interview with them next week
and they bombard you with training brochures, invitation to live interview
training exercises, links to books etc. It's part of their brand now.

Anecdata, but all the people I know who work at Google tell me the interview
is the hardest part. One of them spends their time fixing low-hanging bugs in
Python

~~~
dominotw
>That will never happen.

Interviews will never be fixed. case closed.

------
sharemywin
I don't think I have a problem with organizations like google that need to
filter candidates. For all I care roll dice. It's companies that have
positions open for 6 months waiting on the "one."

Great advice for hiring the first 50-100 hires after that your hurting your
self. You just need meat that point.

What do you think of our trash guy he has 4 phds and we pay him 400k a year.

~~~
jschwartzi
I bet he's got a lot to say about the organization's waste management
practices.

------
programLyrique
If you have no time, automate it.

If reading/skimming github repositories is too long, maybe developing
visualisation tools, machine learning tools would help for that.

I wonder why Google has not already done that, although they are known to
automate their system administration heavily, for instance.

------
golergka
The funny thing is, when people say things like "hiring is broken", they
usually mean different things. Hiring is very different in different markets
and parts of the world.

I'm desperately looking for competent developers right now. I don't ask HR for
help, and I don't really filter by CV: anyone who considers himself a "senior"
is going to get a skype call from me. But the first thing I give them is an
assignment, 4-8 hours of work for a candidate of desired skill level. I tell
candidates this estimate right away, and after sending it out several dozens
times already I haven't met a single one who would say "sorry, I'm to busy to
work on that for free". Before starting this process, I was sure this will
going to be a problem, and I was sincerely surprised that it didn't happen
once.

~~~
nat
That's because pushing back against a potential employer like that is the HN
version of Internet Toughguy Syndrome. You might also be surprised how few
people respond to a mugging attempt with a well-placed roundhouse kick.

------
known
Why interviewers are NOT formally trained to conduct interviews?

------
FLUX-YOU
Ugh, just let people choose their tech interview.

\- If they have public code, talk about that. Maybe ask them to add a feature
onto THEIR code.

\- If they have no code, give them the option of take-home work or a
whiteboard test or a live coding session.

\- If they have no code and don't want to do a take-home or whiteboard or live
coding session, and you are both senior level, then just talk about work. It
should be pretty clear whether they'll be a fit.

\- If they have no code, don't want to do a take-home or whiteboard or live
coding session, and are NOT senior level, you should probably pass.

People will probably feel better and do better in the interview when they feel
they can have a choice in how they are examined because they can plan to show
their strengths.

The only downside is that with this is it becomes a bit more difficult to
track how well your interviews go with a grading rubric or something.

~~~
k__
Often I ask myself, why do employers set up the interview?

I mean, both parties want something.

The best interviews I had (now I'm freelancing so I don't have to do them
anymore) were when the employer had no idea how to interview.

They asked me what I did and what they do and told me what they want from me.

I asked them how they work and what they have to offer.

The moment they tried to set up some interviewing process, with special
questions asked by people with no technical skills and strange tests,
everything went downhill...

~~~
bluetomcat
I've been to some of the most honest interviews when a small tech team needs a
new member with a slightly different expertise to theirs. Like, "we
implemented a major part of our system, but we need someone to help us in this
or that regard". It makes a ton of a difference in terms of mutual respect and
friendliness.

------
geebee
This was a good article.

I do think that the data structures and algorithms whiteboard exams amount to
more than "trivia" and I do think there is value in them (my problem with them
as I've posted on this board, is that because our industry lacks a proper exam
respected widely by our peers, we have to re-take this exam over and over. It
would be like an actuary having to demonstrate a knowledge of calculus and
linear algebra on the whiteboard over and over, throughout a career - no
wonder developers are eventually fatigued by it and stop wanting to play the
game).

That said, I like his solution. Just don't do it. I'll still take the
algorithm exam, but I won't do take-homes anymore, and I may have missed out
on some good opportunities because of it. I just won't do this, largely
because it's too large a time investment on my part without a comparable
investment from the company in evaluating my application.

Here's the problem - we don't work in a free labor market. I've done my 12
rounds on HN with people about this, but here it is again - we work in a field
where silicon valley employers have convinced congress that there is a
"shortage" of programmers. This has led to legislation that allows employers
to bestow the right to live and work in the US on employees, and the employer
retains that right for the duration of the employee's tenure. It is possible
to move from one job to another under limited circumstances, but by and large,
the visa terms don't really allow the worker to change fields, quit and start
a company, or pursue a different career path entirely.

Because it is generally difficult to immigrate to the US without family
reunification or a few other insider tracks, tech visas provide one path to do
this. As a result, high tech employers are in a position of amazing power over
their workforce. They really can say "we will allow you into the US if you
study what we say you should study, interview how we say you should interview,
work on the projects we say you should work on, live where we say you should
live, and accept the salary we say you should receive". Yes, there are a few
requirements on salary, but without the right to quit and leave (including
with no job lined up), the employee's bargaining power is greatly reduced.

Now, some of us are indeed free agents as individuals, but until _all_ of are
free to choose our own path in life, as long as substantial numbers of us are
not allowed to do this by law, employers will not have to make the adjustments
the market demands when all workers are free.

This is why I support general skilled immigration, but I oppose putting
corporations in control over a worker's right live in the US, including
determining the circumstances under which the worker is allowed to arrive
initially.

Nobody owes me a job under my conditions, and I accept that when I refuse to
participate in certain types of interview processes. But nobody owes a
corporation a worker under their conditions, and they really seem to be having
trouble with this idea.

------
askyourmother
This actually does work. If you do a little homework, there are employers who
eschew the googly-algo-cs-wanna-job bullshit, they talk to you as a person,
want to know about your experience, drives, values, and they are usually great
places to work.

The last two jobs I took were with companies that treat people with respect,
and I would now never go back to a big American megacorps HR drone hiring tech
test filter rubbish again.

~~~
mazelife
Second this. I'm in my 30s now, and I've realized that companies that treat
people with respect don't hire this way and that's the kind of place I'm happy
at. If that limits me to work for companies under a certain size, I'm OK with
that.

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draw_down
The point about turning the tables in a bad interview is an interesting one,
but this is mostly "Stop wanting to work for Google ya dummies!" OK, but the
problem isn't just how Google hires.

