Mucho respect to the OP who was part of such elite fellowships as the "Bar Raisers" and "Hiring Committees" (and I'm sure he would totally have made it into the prestigious "As Appropriate" group at Micro$oft if he only applied for it).
My record is comparatively humble: I hired around 300 people in tech for small-to-medium size companies, in the small tech backwater of Vancouver, Canada.
My conclusions:
(1) Interviewing is an intractable problem. Start by recognizing that.
- You don't interview the best candidates, but the ones with the best resume.
- You don't hire the best candidates, but the ones that do best at interviews.
- Screening by HR (phone or zoom) is at best useless.
- Timed coding assignments are a waste of time. They are used because they're cheap + provide a [generally wrong] "quantitative signal". Noone's job will consist of solving 8 "leetcode" riddles/day.
(2) "Technology fit" is a dangerous illusion:
- It is very, very, very unlikely that any candidate will be able to pick up right away your tech environment. (ok; exception: you're hiring permanent an existing community contributor for your open source project)
- Your best new hires will be 0% productive in their first month (negative; training will use resources); 15% in their second; 50% in their third.
- Rejecting e.g. "Java" when screening for "C-sharp" is stupid.
(3) The interview process is about building relationships.
- People you don't hire will remember your company from the interview + disseminate.
- Someone you didn't hire today (one of your top rejections) may be super-attractive 2 months later, or next week if your top candidate accepted another position.
- Ownership of the process or at least buy-in from the team (vs. just the hiring manager + opaque "corporate committees") is the first step in a working relationship. Your "superstar" may end up being toxic in the team and you could find that out in the interview.
(4) Five simple rules:
- Treat phone/zoom screening like an advertisement for your company. Ideally do it yourself (hiring manager). Largely ignore feedback from HR :)
- Hire candidates who are: smart + hungry. Programming languages; frameworks; environments are secondary.
- Try to get a sense of the fit with the other humans in the team they'll be working with.
- Take "3-month probation" seriously. Explain it to the candidate + team. Sell it internally. Candidate compensation for a botched probation is reasonable + just money, after all.
- Treat candidates as humans: Send a personalized rejection (from you, the hiring manager _not HR_) to everyone who made it to the interview. Call or zoom everyone who made it to the final round. If you can, provide them actionable feedback on ways to improve their interview process. Leave a "human" door open.
If you edit the post, maybe touch on how technology always promised liberation but only delivered more of the same class division, how luddites attacked the machines taking their jobs instead of attacking the social contract, how "art and entertainment" is available to a tiny privileged minority while all the rest are simulating/faking conspicuous consumption (including of art and entertainment) to maintain the illusion they were not felt behind ;)
All good points... I'll touch on some of them in future posts.
Planning a series of 8-16 on the future of software, incl. a call to action (2-3 months total).
Stay tuned.
The population at large, if they know what Twitter is at all, surely already know it is ruined, just as surely as they understand that Musk, despite his many abilities, is a capricious, petulant man-baby who is acting out.
Yes, he can. We're criticizing him for being an oligarch and a hypocrite, not calling for regulation or whining about the First Amendment rights of the UAW.
Removing the checkmark from the UAW's Twitter account is in no way regulating the institution itself. Musk even relented and put the checkmark back.
Don't get me wrong - the unchecked power of billionaires in a society converging towards military industrial oligarchy and centralized control of consensus reality through the media, full of easily controlled and manipulated voters pathologically afraid of effective government, is definitely a problem worth being afraid of. But this isn't an example of it. This is just another "rich babyman throws his toys out of the pram" moment for Musk.
My record is comparatively humble: I hired around 300 people in tech for small-to-medium size companies, in the small tech backwater of Vancouver, Canada.
My conclusions:
(1) Interviewing is an intractable problem. Start by recognizing that.
- You don't interview the best candidates, but the ones with the best resume.
- You don't hire the best candidates, but the ones that do best at interviews.
- Screening by HR (phone or zoom) is at best useless.
- Timed coding assignments are a waste of time. They are used because they're cheap + provide a [generally wrong] "quantitative signal". Noone's job will consist of solving 8 "leetcode" riddles/day.
(2) "Technology fit" is a dangerous illusion:
- It is very, very, very unlikely that any candidate will be able to pick up right away your tech environment. (ok; exception: you're hiring permanent an existing community contributor for your open source project)
- Your best new hires will be 0% productive in their first month (negative; training will use resources); 15% in their second; 50% in their third.
- Rejecting e.g. "Java" when screening for "C-sharp" is stupid.
(3) The interview process is about building relationships.
- People you don't hire will remember your company from the interview + disseminate.
- Someone you didn't hire today (one of your top rejections) may be super-attractive 2 months later, or next week if your top candidate accepted another position.
- Ownership of the process or at least buy-in from the team (vs. just the hiring manager + opaque "corporate committees") is the first step in a working relationship. Your "superstar" may end up being toxic in the team and you could find that out in the interview.
(4) Five simple rules:
- Treat phone/zoom screening like an advertisement for your company. Ideally do it yourself (hiring manager). Largely ignore feedback from HR :)
- Hire candidates who are: smart + hungry. Programming languages; frameworks; environments are secondary.
- Try to get a sense of the fit with the other humans in the team they'll be working with.
- Take "3-month probation" seriously. Explain it to the candidate + team. Sell it internally. Candidate compensation for a botched probation is reasonable + just money, after all.
- Treat candidates as humans: Send a personalized rejection (from you, the hiring manager _not HR_) to everyone who made it to the interview. Call or zoom everyone who made it to the final round. If you can, provide them actionable feedback on ways to improve their interview process. Leave a "human" door open.
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