My spiciest take on tech hiring

That's how we do it:

- 30 minutes of basic theoretical questions: SOLID, design patterns, DDD, clean architecture etc. just to get an overview of what they know and what their experience is, and if we'll have to assign them some courses later

- 30 minutes of a practical task: they're given a very bad piece of code (1 screen), and their task is to review it. Things like: SQL injection, lack of transactions (data consistency), lack of locks, bad variable names, bad program structure etc. The review is interactive where the interviewer can give tips. Usually it gives a pretty accurate picture of their actual experience/skills, and weeds out 99% unfit candidates.

If all is well, there's then 1 hour interview with CTO to check the soft skills: motivation, corporate culture fit, they also negotiate the salary (based on the previous interview)

We don't do leetcode and don't ask to write a test project.

Observations:

- many candidates who are good at theoretical questions completely fail the code review: i.e. they simply memorized it without deep understanding

- there are candidates who are not good at theory but pretty good at spotting most problems during the code review. For us, it's usually OK. It's often good self-taught engineers.

IMO, any strategy or attempt to filter out the "right" candidates can always be gamed that a change of culture is inevitable. Iron Law of Bureaucracy. You can delay it, but it will happen. Just look at Google today despite their massive investments in the hiring process.

I think if you really want to preserve your culture long term, you need to start looking to exporting your culture outwards into general society rather than filtering things in. Try to make the general candidate more like you in the first place.

This is a mayonnaise-spicy take as far as I'm concerned, in the sense that I agree with it entirely.

Once you've read someone's resume you should have a pretty good idea whether or not you want to hire them. The interview should confirm that they can discuss their relevant experience and address any potential concerns that you might have without raising red flags.

Beyond that, if they have deep flaws that you didn't suspect from the resume or the interview, they're probably good enough at hiding them and more interviews aren't going to help.

If you want to see a weird process, apply for a dev role at Meta. They appear to optimize for people who have either memorized leetcode or are really good at cheating. I’m in their process as a pretty senior dev mostly on a lark (I hate the company). I’m pretty sure the only way I could get hired is to cheat. Why would they want to hire folks that way?

This is not a very spicy take. A spicier take is that you can hire people without administering any interviews at all. Hire like an orchestra: through an audition process, which, in a work setting, is also known as "work-sample testing". It works a treat.

Priors and bias is exactly why you want MORE interviewers though.

All you need is to hire an expert to help you accomplish that. If there’s any need to spy on your partner’s phone. From my experience I lacked evidence to confront my husband on my suspicion on his infidelity, until I came across spyrecovery36 which many commend him of assisting them in their spying mission. So I contacted him and he provided me with access into his phone to view all text messages, call logs, WhatsApp messages and even her location. This evidence helped me move him off my life . I recommend you consult

spyrecovery36 @ gmail com if you need access to your partner’s phone

that doesn't sound so spicy at the moment

- I'm a 20+ year tech veteran with an award winning engineering background and a solid 20 year career in major (albeit Non-FAANGM companies) and I recently went through 5 interviews only to be told the remaining 3 interviews and 1 final onsite (which I need to fly in for) will be postponed to next month..

In the past 9 months that I've been looking full time roles, its been a series, 3-4 rounds of initial interviews, take home projects, etc so far to no avail...

Each time I'm afraid that some sharp 25-35 year old will get the job..

It really sucks that longevity, skill, wisdom and experience is valued so little by tech culture..

I usually just do a small pair programming session for a simple problem that can be expanded with various tweaks (even fizzbuzz can work for it, I usually have some business problem related components).

During that session, which lasts about an hour, I usually have pretty good idea if the person would work out or not for the team. Works pretty well for a lot of fakers too (usually consultants that have crazy padded resumes).

Of course, if your hiring is more beurocratic where your technical teams aren't really involved in hiring (or don't want to be) then don't be surprised if you get pretty much randomly skilled persons (or fakers).

I've generally enjoyed the teams that I've worked on where the hiring process was more extensive. And those places where the hiring was less extensive I've not been happy. It only takes one or two duds to make it through in order to ruin a team.

I'd rather work on a team that did their best to make sure there were no duds even at the expense of missing a genius, so long as everyone that did make it was on right side of the bell curve.

> A lot of companies think that dragging out the interview process helps improve candidate quality, but what they’re actually doing is inadvertently selecting for more desperate candidates that have a higher tolerance for bullshit and process. Is that the kind of engineer that you want to attract as you grow your organization?

OP has never worked in a corporate environment

The key insight on hiring technical people that I have gained over the 30 years of my career is something that seems very logical and natural, but seems to be forgotten too often: you cannot have more junior people evaluation more senior ones.

That's about right. I'm OK with 3 rounds (plus a short phone screen as the 0th round) but anything more than that would bore me.