I never understand answers of this format: "status quo has flaw of some known, finite impact" time to "completely ridiculously overcompensate, overreact, and make arbitrary move?"
I can't even fathom in what ways you think "time to hire more, and fire fast?" is more "effective and equitable"? You just shove even more risk onto individuals who might be getting their footing still.
You're just turning a 8-9 hours commitment to an interview into a 6 month commitment. Sure, you get paid but you also have to deal with churn and burn.
I mean, did you think stack ranking was a good idea?
The response is to the needless growth in complexity of the hiring process; advocating for reducing that complexity is appropriate.
You're tacitly expressing a concern that a fast hiring commitment would be riskier; but that's not necessarily so. A minimal set of filters are meaningfully effective: resume, references, and meet the team. Anything beyond that doesn't have just diminishing returns, it can negatively impact the company by narrowing the field of viable candidates too far.
I guess I don't think 2 phone calls and 5-6 hr onsite is that complex. Maybe the onsite could be 3 instead: 2 code + behavioral, but I can't imagine wanting to do less than that.
5-6 hr onsite is a strong filter against folks who are presently employed; particularly those who cannot spare personal days or unpaid days for every interview.
I don't think that argument is particularly relevant in the tech industry. It's not that hard to find a "sick" day, even if you don't have unlimited PTO. And especially during COVID, where going missing for a day might go unnoticed for a lot of people.
Well... yes. I think that for most HN commenters, who work for a non-hourly salary and provide hard-to-quantify value in a seller's market for labor, it's generally possible to get a day off if you need it.
Many tech companies have gone to "unlimited" PTO, so there's no cost to taking a few days off. But even outside that, almost no managers are following the letter of the law. Last time I changed jobs, my employer at the time had explicit PTO time, but unlimited sick leave, and in practice during COVID (and especially near any holiday) was pretty lax with accounting for "I need to be out on Friday afternoon" as long as work was getting done and you were somewhat responsive to email/pings on the day in question. I wasn't hunting very actively, so it was just the one day of interviews with one potential new employer - I concede that if you needed to do many full-day interviews, it would eventually become conspicuous.
Nor do I. But I'm the cases we seem to be talking about here, normally it's not like that tho. It's multiple rounds: 5-7 interviews. Especially since remote.
I'm not advocating for hiring literally anyone. If they pass your credential requirements, reference checks, and team meet then they're already passing through significant filtering.
Resumes aren't really credentials. They're lists of things provided by the individual themselves and are almost always inflated in some way. Reference checks are just "I got someone you don't know (and shouldn't trust) to say good things about me", and meet the team is just "I can talk to people and sound smart for about an hour or two".
There are a very large number of idiots who can do those things. I strongly disagree that this is a significant filter.
Those who lie on their resume in a harmful way are immediately apparent upon hiring, and so are quick to fire. Those who do not, are not, and aren't fired.
It's really not the risk folks seem to think it is.
It's not easy to find liars. It's easy to find who are underperforming. There's a difference between the two.
Resume, references, and team meeting filters out almost everyone who needs to be fired. Folks who lie on their resume, who arrange dishonest references and who defraud their way through a meet and greet are _exceedingly rare_. It's such a vanishingly small segment of possibility that it's not worth troubling oneself over.
The reality is that companies use complex and obtuse hiring practices to cover for poor internal practices. They recognize an inability to deliver and perform on their teams, and consider it a hiring failure; but the reality, most of the time, is that it's a structural or management failure. Most hires, most of the time, are sufficiently able to deliver on their desired roles; but often, management is unwilling and unable to identify that they are responsible for poor performance. And so they blame the candidates, the new hires, to their teams. Not themselves.
I don't think folks are saying that outright lies are happening very often. What is happening is resumes being written to sound impressive (obviously) and perhaps inflating the difficulty/contribution/impact of past work. Exact same thing with referrals and meet and greets.
Honestly all three of those things test the exact same thing, the person's ability to sell themselves. Which is why I would not work anywhere with such lax interviews. I don't want to work somewhere that only values likability and talking oneself up.
The dirty truth is that if a candidate thinks they can perform well in a role then, most of the time, that's true. It is exceedingly rare that people apply for roles that they know they cannot deliver upon.
It's dirty because we like to believe that our technical proficiency and ability is elite and rare, but the truth is that with a little training, with a little on the ground experience, many people can do what we do.
You don't want to work somewhere where that's proven possible.
I think that's probably right, although not always, and there are other problems associated with firing these people as others have pointed out.
What you said is that those three things, including the resume, are significant filters. I am saying they are not and you seem to not have a rebuttal on my point about the resume.
4. I think there's also a potential cost to your future ability to recruit. Once people know you're quick to fire, candidates will view your offer less favorably if they also have an offer from a company with a longer interview process, but who doesn't have the reputation for firing quickly.
Basically everywhere in NA has allowances for probationary periods with at-will employment. Moreover, prospective hires could start on contract.
Morale is improved when team members feel like they have some control over their membership.
It seems like you're assuming that a great many people would be fired; why so? In my experience, having worked for several such companies, firing is rare because even minimal filters are effective.
Resume check, reference check, and meet the team. Done.
I’m not saying you’re categorically wrong, but this doesn’t match with my experience, at all. If you’re an HM and this works for you and your company, great, but the HMs responding here don’t agree.
The processes you are questioning scale to thousands of people with varying backgrounds. It’s not an accident all of these companies do this. Your process places extreme trust in one group of people. It’s just so risky.
Also, resumes are mostly bullshit, IMO. Reference checks are complete bullshit, IMO. I’ve worked with my buddies at startups (who get lofty titles) and just have them give me reference checks. Other references have asked me for call scripts.
Also keep in mind that most of these big tech jobs are highly competitive. Your solution eventually requires a coin toss if you have limited spots. There’s only so much data you can collect from the process you propose. The natural thing is to then assess each candidate a bit more until you’re confident you’ve picked the right one.
And then you’re here.
Truly bullshit credentialing is immediately apparent to teams that receive new hires. In some places, it's fraud and actionable by the company as fraud.
I don't think companies with billions in revenue really have a budget constraint on hiring; it's structural constraints that are holding them back. They can, and do, engage in mass hiring and construction of whole new departments when it suits their strategy.
That said, further constraints can happen at the credentialling level; I'm not advocating hiring literally anyone.
What's practically possible is always a subset of what's legally possible. I think probationary periods/contract-to-hire situations are extremely unlikely to work for anything beyond absolute entry level, for a number of reasons.
For one thing, it's a huge amount of uncertainty to put on the potential hire, which means you'll be strongly biasing your hiring pool towards people who don't have better options. It feels like in an effort to reduce the interview time, you've effectively expanded it to multiple months.
Second, how do you calibrate the "default" option? Is the expectation that everyone on a probation period will be hired unless proven otherwise, or is it that most will be let go unless actively vouched for? Is that expectation clear across the team? If there's a mismatch across team members, you have big problems. People who want to keep a prospect will be annoyed if they're let go, and vice versa. People who need to work with a prospect will have to figure out whether it's safe to actually trust them with anything - on the one hand, you have to give them enough work to prove themselves; on the other hand, you can't give them anything too important or with too long a horizon, because they might be gone before they get to launch.
And finally - how long does that trial period need to go on to be useful? The goal in designing a hiring process is to get a reasonable level of precision/recall (different companies will balance differently between those) with a reasonable level of investment. If you've increased investment without increasing precision, then you've done something wrong. Given how long it takes to ramp up a new hire and have them actually be productive, I don't think you're going to learn much in a ~6 month probationary period that you couldn't already tell in a day of interviews.
The default option is simple: did the hire add meaningful value to the team? Very few people fail that simple test, in my experience; and folks who would have failed technical screenings would have excelled in subsequent performance-enhancing evaluations. Someone who can't balance a binary tree might be the single best technical coordinator you're going to hire, after all.
I've worked at many companies, and those that hire fast, and fire fast, tend to be those that _fire least_. They have _lower expectations_ for performance, and so are more likely to be receptive to _training new hires_, rather than expecting them to hit the ground running as equally effective as their new team mates.
They can legally fire you on the spot, yes, but all that means is that the fired person can't sue their former employer. That doesn't mean it's actually a good strategy for the employer to do so frequently, because the employer's relationship with any given employee doesn't exist in a vacuum, and has effects on the employer's relationship with other employees and potential hires.
This is true but if it's well known that you fire, say, 30% of your hires after 6 months then you'll have a much harder time attracting the kind of candidates you want to be attracting. You can compensate for the devs' opportunity cost with, well, compensation, but you'll be competing with FAANG, whose high-turn reputation isn't even 30% bad (with the possible exception of Netflix)
Hire fast and fire requires even more effort and commitment from a candidate, I’m not sure how that would be an improvement. Firing fast would be like 3 months of interviews!
I’d also like to add that having multiple interviewers, if they have diverse backgrounds, is more likely to be equitable than a single interviewer.
You’re asking someone to quit their job to maybe get this new job. And you won’t know for months so all your other offers are gone. So if it doesn’t work out, you’re unemployed with no prospects. Sounds terrible.
If it takes months to determine that someone is a bad fit for a team then the team has internal issues that need to be resolved.
Moreover, if someone has the skills on paper, and the references to support that, then any tech screening is unnecessary. It just tests for ability to pass tech screens.
The problem is "skill on paper" is just that, words. There's tons of java developers but not all the same. References too are pretty easy to game. Alternatively if by skills on paper you mean open source projects, that's fair but most developers (and certainly most new grads) won't have anything worthwhile to show.
The tech screens can show a person's skill. Sure, lots of people are gaming that too and memorize solutions, but that's not most candidates.
There's only a very, very small difference between those two things though. I'm not hiring anyone based on either of those bulletpoints or similar ones; no matter how many there are.
It's so easy to inflate your role on a project and what you contributed and the people who are best at it are usually also able to talk, talk, talk.
The first interview question I ask is so easy that I don't think anyone should be paid to write software anywhere if they can't solve it. And yet, I have candidates with plenty of nice bulletpoints like your second one on their resume who can't solve it or take 30-45 minutes to solve it. Good candidates take less than 10 minutes, very good ones take less than 5.
Ah, you've got a gotcha bullet point question that you think is a killer technical ability question. But you're asking it in a completely abnormal situation, an interview. All you're testing for is the candidate's ability to answer your clever question in a scenario where their ability and personal value is actively being judged; which is wholly unlike any day-to-day challenge they are to encounter.
The question is not a gotcha. It is not trivia. It is not even a "killer technical ability" question. It's a question I considered not including because I thought it was too easy. Folks I've interviewed proved me wrong and I've come to realize that when I get any signal from it, it's the best question I ask.
If you know what a hash map or dictionary is then you can solve it. If you can't answer a problem because you're under pressure then that's a no hire signal on its own.
I think we should agree to disagree. We both seem to like our own process and see major flaws with the other’s. The best solution is to work at different companies.
FWIW, I was introduced to this method by others, and have used/been a part of this method at several companies now; and I find that each company where I have seen it employed has had remarkably low turn-over and high team morale. Much lower turn over, and higher morale, than the companies I've been at that have done otherwise. Also anecdotally, the companies that employ this method have been the same companies that seemed most willing to train and aid an under-performing employee, rather than simply let them go.
I think it's because the awareness of the need to ensure performance is baked-in to the process; rather than having an assumption that the hire should have a high level of performance. Employees aren't like other physical assets, like computers and other hardware, they're malleable human beings that are accepting of improvement.
But I don't know of any large studies on the merits of this approach, so perhaps I've simply been lucky to have had positive experiences.
In my point of view, most hiring requires a form of internship. No one drops on to an established team with full knowledge and experience with the internal tools, procedures and products.
And yes, I lament that internships are so maligned. It shouldn't be that interns are poorly paid; we should be able to hire someone with decades of experience in a tangentially-related field at a competitive salary, and consider them to be interning on an unfamiliar field.
Internships are probably the best way to hire, but they only work for people at that specific stage of life.
University students already have a three-month gap in their schedule where they aren't doing anything, so they are willing to take a temporary role to fill that gap.
Experienced people who already have a job aren't going to drop that to take on a temporary role unless they have an unusually high risk-tolerance or unless they are desperate.
I assume there is some level of exaggeration here?
If not, it might help to actually try this. Take an aggregate of 15 interviews in the next couple of months and you're bound to learn something. My hypothesis would be some new empathy for interviewees but maybe you find a better role at a better company in the process. If the worst case is that it is a colossal waste of time, then you again have found empathy for the interviewee.
Ultimately, you might be narrowing your pool of applicants to only those willing or unwitting to go through that process.
Look what that did to their reputation and company culture.
Netflix is a little more successful at this, but they have a much smaller eng footprint and much higher compensation in order to attract and retain top performers.
Where I am, in BC, Amazon is recognized as a challenging but rewarding employer; one that compensates better than most and expects consistently strong results.
I wouldn't consider that negative, really. Daunting, perhaps.
To be honest, it sounds like "the format with only 3-4 interviews wasn't effective and equitable, so we adjusted it to make it more so, resulting in the current 5-7 format..."
I’m not sure that’s feasible. Not sure what the roadblocks are, but every company I’ve ever worked for seems to have real reservations, usually at the HR level, with simply getting rid of bad eggs.
Sounds to me like the format isn't worth keeping; time to hire more, and fire fast?