I must ask once again why we are having these 5+ round interview cycles and we aren't able to filter for qualities that the work requires of its talent. What are all those rounds for if we're getting engineers who aren't as valued for the team's needs at the end of the pipeline?
> I must ask once again why we are having these 5+ round interview cycles and we aren't able to filter for qualities that the work requires of its talent.
Hiring well is hard, specially if compensation isn't competitive enough to attract talented individuals who have a choice. It's also hard to change institutional hiring practices. People don't get fired by buying IBM, and they also don't get fired if they follow the same hiring practices in place in 2016.
> What are all those rounds for if we're getting engineers who aren't as valued for the team's needs at the end of the pipeline?
Software development is a multidiscinary field. It involves multiple non-overlapping skill sets, bot hard skills and soft skills. Also, you need multiple people vetting a candidate to eliminate corruption and help weed out candidates who outright clash with company culture. You need to understand that hiring someone is a disruptive activity, that impacts not only what skill sets are available in your organization but also how the current team dynamics. If you read around, you'll stumble upon stories of people who switch roles in reaction to new arrivals. It's important to get this sort of stuff right.
Well I'm still waiting. Your second paragraph seems to contradict the first. Which perfectly encapsulates the issue with hiring. Too afraid to try new things, so instead add beuracracy to leases accountability.
> Well I'm still waiting. Your second paragraph seems to contradict the first. Which perfectly encapsulates the issue with hiring. Too afraid to try new things, so instead add beuracracy to leases accountability.
I think you haven't spend much time thinking about the issue. Changing hiring practices does not mean they are improve. It only means they changed. You are still faced with the task of hiring adequate talent, but if you change processes them now you don't have baselines and past experiences to guide you. You keep those baselines if you keep your hiring practices then you stick with something that is proven to work albeit with debatable optimality, and mitigate risks because your experience with the process helps you be aware of some red flags. The worst case scenario is that you repeat old errors, but those will be systematic errors which are downplayed by the fact that your whole organization is proof that your hiring practices are effective.
>Changing hiring practices does not mean they are improve.
No, but I'd like to at least see conversation on how to improve the process. We aren't even at that point. We're just barely past acknowledging that it's even an issue.
>but if you change processes them now you don't have baselines and past experiences to guide you.
I argue we're already at this point. The reason we got past the above point of "acknowledging problem" (a decade too late, arguably) is that the baselines are failing to new technology, which is increasing false positives.
You have a point, but why does tech pick this point to finally decide not to "move fast and break things"? Not when it comes to law and ethics, but for aquiring new talent (which meanwhile is already disrupting heir teams with this AI slop?)
>those will be systematic errors which are downplayed by the fact that your whole organization is proof that your hiring practices are effective.
okay, so back to step zero then. Do we have a hiring problem? The thesis of this article says yes.
"it worked before" seems to be the antipattern the tech industry tried to fight back against for decades.
> No, but I'd like to at least see conversation on how to improve the process. We aren't even at that point. We're just barely past acknowledging that it's even an issue.
The current hiring practices are a result of acknowledging what they did before didn't work. The current ones work well enough that people don't wanna change it, the only ones who wanna change it are engineers not the companies.
Nit (not directed at you) : I don't appreciate being flagged for pointing out the exact issue of the article and someone just dismissing it as "well companies are making money, clearly it's not a crisis"
This goes beyond destructive thinking. Again, I hope the companies reap what they sow.
There's no fix for this problem in hiring upfront. Anyone can cram and fake if they expect a gravy train on the other end. If you want people to work after they're hired, you have to be able to give direct negative feedback, and if that doesn't work, fire quickly and easily.
>Anyone can cram and fake if they expect a gravy train on the other end.
If you're still asking trvia, yes. Maybe it's time to shift from the old filter and update the process?
If you can see in the job that a 30 minute PR is the problem, then maybe replace that 3rd leetcode round with 30 minutes of pair programming. Hard to chatGPT in real time without sounding suspicion.
That approach to interviewing will cause a lot of false negatives. Many developers, especially juniors, get anxious when thrown into a pair programming task with someone they don't know and will perform badly regardless of their actual skills.
I understand that and had some hard anxiety myself back then. Even these days I may be a bit shakey when love coding in an interview setting?
But is the false negative for a nervous pair programmer worse than a false positive for a leetcode question? Ideally a good interviewer would be able to separate the anxiety from the actual thinking and see that this person can actually think, but that's another undervalued skill among industry.
I don’t know why people are so hesitant to just fire bad people. It’s pretty obvious when someone starts actually working if they’re going to a net positive. On the order of weeks, not months.
Given how much these orgs pay, both direct to head hunters and indirect in interview time, might as well probationally hire the whoever passes the initial sniff test.
That also lets you evaluate longer term habits like punctuality, irritability, and overall not-being-a-jerkness.
Not so fast. I "saved" guys from being fired by asking to be more patient with them. The last one was not in my team as I moved out to lead another team. Turned out the guy did not please an influencial team member, who then complained about him.
What I saw instead was a young silent guy, given boring work and was longing for more interesting work. A tad later he took ownership of a neglected project, completed it and made a name of himself.
It takes considerably more effort and skill to treat colleagues as humans rather than "outputs" or ticket processing nodes.
Most (middle) management is an exercise in ass-covering, rather than creating healthy teams. They get easily scared when "Jira isn't green", and look someone else to blame for not doing the managing part correctly
Sunk cost. You've spent... 20 to 100 hours on interviews. Maybe more. Doing it again is another expense.
Onboarding. Even with good employees, it can take a few months to get the flow of the organization, understanding the code base, and understanding the domain. Maybe a bit of technology shift too. Firing a person who doesn't appear to be preforming in the first week or two or three would be churning through that too fast.
Provisional hiring with "maybe we'll hire you after you move here and work for us for a month" is a non-starter for many candidates.
At my current job and the job previous it took two or three weeks to get things fully set up. Be it equipment, provisioning permissions, accounts, training (the retail company I worked at from '10 to '14 - they sent every new hire out to a retail store to learn about how the store runs (to get a better idea of how to build things for them and support their processes).
... and not every company pays Big Tech compensation. Sometimes it's "this is the only person who didn't say «I've got an offer with someone else that pays 50% more»". Sometimes a warm body that you can delegate QA testing and pager duty to (rather than software development tasks) is still a warm body.
It's really not obvious to calculate the output of any employee even with years of data, way harder for a software engineer or any other job with that many facets. If you've found a proven and reliable way evaluate someone in the first 2 weeks you just solved one of the biggest HR problems ever.
What if, and hear me out, we asked the people a new employee has been onboarding with? I know, trusting people to make a fair judgment lacks the ass-covering desired by most legal departments but actually listening to the people who have to work with a new hire is an idea so crazy it might just work.
> I don’t know why people are so hesitant to just fire bad people.
"Bad" is vague, subjective moralist judgement. It's also easily manipulated and distorted to justify firing competent people who did no wrong.
> It’s pretty obvious when someone starts actually working if they’re going to a net positive. On the order of weeks, not months.
I feel your opinion is rather simplistic and ungrounded. Only the most egregious cases are rendered apparent in a few weeks worth of work. In software engineering positions, you don't have the chance to let your talents shine through in the span of a few weeks. The cases where incompetence is rendered obvious in the span of a few weeks actually spells gross failures in the whole hiring process, which failed to verify that the candidate failed to even meet the hiring bar.
> (...) might as well probationally hire the whoever passes the initial sniff test.
This is a colossal mistake, and one which disrupts a company's operations and the candidates' lives. Moreover, it has a chilling effect on the whole workforce because no one wants to work for a company ran by sociopaths that toy with people's lives and livelihood as if it was nothing.
The bar for “junior” has quietly turned into “mid-level with 3 years of production experience, a couple of open-source contributions, and perfect LeetCode” while still paying junior money. Companies list “0-2 years” but then grill candidates on system design, distributed tracing, and k8s internals like they’re hiring for staff roles. No wonder the pipeline looks broken.
I’ve interviewed dozens of actual juniors in the last six months. Most can ship features, write clean code, and learn fast, but they get rejected for not knowing the exact failure modes of Raft or how to tune JVM garbage collection on day one. The same companies then complain they “can’t find talent” and keep raising the bar instead of actually training people.
Real junior hiring used to mean taking someone raw, pairing them heavily for six months, and turning them into a solid mid. Now the default is “we’ll only hire someone who needs zero ramp-up” and then wonder why the market feels empty.
It's the cargo cult kayfabe of it all. People do it because Google used to do it, now it's just spread like a folk religion. But nobody wants guilds or licensure, so we have to make everyone do a week-long take-home and then FizzBuzz in front of a very awkward committee. Might as well just read chicken bones, at least that would be less humiliating.
And who would write the guild membership or licensure criteria? How much should those focus on ReactJS versus validation criteria for cruise missile flight control software?
You’re asking these rhetorical questions as if we haven’t had centuries of precedent here, both bad and good. How does the AMA balance between neurosurgeons and optometrists? Bar associations between corporate litigators and family estate lawyers? Professional engineering associations between civil engineers and chemical engineers?
> Professional engineering associations between civil engineers and chemical engineers?
One takes the FE exam ( https://ncees.org/exams/fe-exam/ ). You will note at the bottom of the page "FE Chemical" and "FE Civil" which are two different exams.
Then you have an apprenticeship for four years as an Engineer in Training (EIT).
Following, that, you take the PE exam. https://ncees.org/exams/pe-exam/ You will note that the PE exams are even more specialized to the field.
Depending on the state you are licensed in (states tend to have reciprocal licensing - but not necessarily and not necessarily for all fields). For example, if you were licensed in Washington, you would need to pass another exam specific to California to work for a California firm.
You have to take 30 hours of certified study in your field across every two years. This isn't a lot, but people tend to fuss about "why do CS people keep being expected to learn on our own?" ... Well, if we were Professional Engineers it wouldn't just be an expectation - it would be a requirement to maintain the license. You will again note the domain of the professional development is different - so civil and mechanical engineers aren't necessarily taking the same types of classes.
These requirements are set by the state licensure and part of legislative processes.
So what you’re saying is that it’s a solved problem. If we can figure out how to safely certify both bridge builders and chemical engineers working with explosives, we can figure out a way to certify both React developers and those working on cruise missile flight control software.
I'm saying the idea that you can do one test for software engineering and never have to study again or be tested on a different domain in the future isn't something that professional engineering licensure solves.
Furthermore, licensure requires state level legislation and makes it harder for employees (especially the EIT) to change jobs or move to other states for work there.
Licensure, the way that people often point to it as a way to solve the credentials problem vs interviews, isn't going to solve the problems that people think it would.
Furthermore, it is only something if there is a reason to do it. If there isn't a reason to have a licensed engineer signing off on designs and code there isn't a reason for a company to hire such.
Why should a company pay more for someone with a license to design their website when they could hire someone more cheaply who doesn't have a license? What penalties would a company have for having a secretary do some vbscripting in excel or a manager use Access rather than hiring a licensed developer?
Guilds and licensure perform gatekeeping, by definition, and the more useful they are at providing a good hiring signal, the more people get filtered out by the gatekeeping. So there's no support for it because everyone is afraid that effective guilds or licensing would leave them out in the cold.
Yeah, I'd be more than fine with licensing if I didn't have to keep going through 5 rounds of trivia only to be ghosted. Let me do that once and show I can code my way out of a paper bag.
I can understand such process for freshman, but for industry veteran with 10+ years of experience, with with recommendation from multiple senior managers?
I’ve started using ChatGPT for their take home projects, with only minor edits or refactors myself. If they’re upset I saved a couple hours of tedium, they’re the wrong employer for me.
And I’m being an accelerationist hoping the whole thing collapses under its own ridiculousness.
