an engineer's perspective on hiring
2 days ago
- Most companies fail at hiring by wasting time with lengthy interviews, chasing trendy skills, and treating all programmers as interchangeable.
- Good interviews should differentiate skills, reflect actual job duties, think long term, be time efficient, respectful, and assess 'taste' in engineering.
- Common methods like live coding, take-home tests, and architecture design often fail on key criteria like differentiation, applicability, or respect.
- Code review interviews reverse time asymmetry, allow assessing collaboration and taste, and are highly efficient and applicable.
- A better process combines code review with live discussion of work samples, plus a meeting with the future manager.
- Measuring interview effectiveness can include red-teaming with existing employees and regret analysis of rejected candidates.