+1

heh, I got hired not knowing the primary language. though, it seems that many Java ppl are hired for C# positions.

This seems dysfunctional. Were you with an interviewer the whole time or were you left alone waiting or solving a problem alone for a bulk of it? I had 8 "full-day" interviews last time around and the longest was 6.5 hours (of which 1.5 was for lunch). Big companies have these kinds of things standardized - it's pretty clear what the industry standard is when you interview at a bunch of places, many of them well-known, at the same time - and small companies don't have enough interviewers to fill an 8-hour schedule for everyone. I've once done 2 full-day interviews on the same day - like 9 hours combined - and I don't think forcing that on candidates is a good idea.

I have had 2 cases in recent memory where they left me alone to code for an hour or 90 minutes but that's about it. And in one of those cases the guy was actually there in the room doing his own thing in case I had questions. In the other the interviewer was watching me code from a remote screen.

Usually these are like 5+ interviewers. In at least one interview every single one of them was asking me algorithm questions and that was a ****ing hell of a day. Hey, you: think really hard with a lot at stake for 8 hours straight for no pay an with little feedback on how you're doing. It'll be great!

You know I was walking to the store just now and I thinking about hiring.

The places that I've interviewed with the toughest hiring practices had a few things in common

1. they were very proud of the quality of their engineers - mostly rightly so.
2. this means they turned down lots of qualified people - their process had many false negatives
3. they were *terrible* at firing people

#3 is the kicker here. I think the reason some places have these gauntlets to run re: hiring is that they can't bring themselves to fire anyone so they get paranoid about hiring people they won't have to fire.

I worked some place with a brutal hiring process, and most of the people there were great, but there were some severe underperformers who hung around for *years* after everyone knew they kinda sucked. I only saw one person legit fired in the 5 years I worked there and I think he kinda produced nothing at all for nearly a year.

Part of this is that people take being fired very personally, but it's a catch-22 because the reason it's so personal is that it's so rare. No one gets bent out of shape when I fire my job by quitting, i.e. "it's not working out, time to try something else."

I think if that was more common then you could hire more laxly, see who works out, and let the others go.

Maybe this is actually crueler? I don't know. But I think a lot of false negatives I mentioned before would be able to show their worth.

If you have a candidate that isn't local and they relocate to accept the job it probably is.

Interesting.

It was either 4 or 5 interviewers at every single place and I think every single interview (like 40 of them) was either 45 minutes or an hour, with timing strictly enforced. One of the full-day interviews I was even allowed to split it across two days because I had schedule constraints. I would definitely think less of any software company that is considerably less candidate-friendly than this because IMO, it's a sign that they're not aware of what's going on in the industry and probably don't hire from the same pool as top employers. Overall I was pretty impressed by the uniformity of the process across different employers and the general candidate-friendliness of the process.

Hahaha. Personally speaking though, after 8+ hours, I'd rather be answering algorithm questions than be grilled about my management style, what I love about the company and how I plan to help with their career development and answer a series of "talk about that one time you had to deal with X" type of questions. What's most draining to me about a long day of interviews isn't solving technical problems, but having to put a positive spin on everything.

I think the problem with easy-come/easy-go is that you can't do this without also having a very judgmental, review-driven culture that's centered around management, which itself is not something top technical people want to deal with. I don't think it's about feelings of people. It's just that in order to fire people easily, you need one or more likely both of these things: 1) more bureaucracy to ensure that individual contributions are accounted for, cross-checked and reviewed constantly and 2) significantly more power for managers over their reports. Both of these things make your organizational more political and territorial.

More practically speaking, the high-bar hiring practices are significantly correlated with firm-level hiring as opposed to team-level hiring - it's much easier to fire people in a team-level hiring organization because if you're fired if the team or the manager doesn't want you. In companies that practice firm-level hiring, you were approved by the broader engineering organization and individual teams don't have this kind of discretion.

Hiring primarily for cultural fit is idiotic. Cultural fit is one of the least relevant consideration s when hiring.

And unemployed people

This.

Vehemently disagree.

I think unemployed people qualify as desperate for a job

I've heard a lot of leadership/management trainers and training that would disagree with you pretty hard on this.

I've heard a talk by someone that literally said they could pivot their entire business model because they hired people that fit so well together they could train them to do almost anything reasonably adjacent to their current business.

This seems pretty relevant re: culture fit, etc:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/ma...fect-team.html

I think the focus on culture fit, depending what they mean by "culture" can be toxic but certain cultural values and even personality traits can certainly contribute to establishment of group norms that are counterproductive.

My personal opinion is that it's really bad when individual interviewers or managers are allowed to define what "culture" means when they are looking for "culture fit" because it can easily become a shorthand for people like me or people I'd like to hang out with. To the extent "culture fit" is actively used to screen people, it has to be based on organizational values that are designed to cultivate a culture of excellence that people can directly point to.

management trainers != real leaders. This sounds like guru talk to me.

Cultural fit is a very vague term. Of course it can be used as a reason to exclude anyone. On the other hand let's face it, there are folks that are dispuptive in a negative way that can decrease overall productivity and be damaging to morale.

Well the person I heard that from does training after they had so much success in their business with implementing business practices surrounding cultural fit.

I'm certainly not saying it's the most important thing, but it is much higher than the bottom of the list like you mentioned.

How many Prolog programmers does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Yes.

I enjoyed learning Prolog as a undergrad, and the associated logic theory. Never had a chance to use it professionally, but never a bad thing to be exposed to different programming paradigms.

Yeah same here. Team cohesiveness is one of the most important factors. Great programmers aren't productive at all if they're fighting each other all day.

I was lucky enough to be on a team where everyone legitimately liked each and socialized together regularly. Obviously I cannot quantify the productivity gains my company got out of us due to that, but I know it was huge. Off the top of my head:

• If people are working late or Saturday, then pretty much everyone does because they don't want to let the team down.
• There was no fear of someone pointing fingers if screw something up. I've been on teams where you spend more effort making sure you can cover your ass vs. actual programming. It's very counter-productive.
• People aren't afraid to admit when they don't know something.
• When some new task comes up, people don't jockey to get out of it. The best/least busy person generally steps up and volunteers.
• Socializing together makes conflicts go much more smoothly when they do come up, people are much less likely to blow up at each other.

I'm sure there are plenty more.

For us it was just as simple as developers interviewing the potential hire and giving their impression. Also we rarely hired straight to permanent. So worst case scenario someone is around for 3 or 6 months, then not extended.

this is a conversation that's hard to have in the abstract, but i want to add that "people like me" is not necessarily just an excuse for self-congratulatory indulgent hiring practices. in the workplace, especially with programmers, differences in preferences, coding philosophy, and personality can add a ton of unnecessary friction that will gladly eat up a significant portion of your teams productivity energy. trying to minimize that friction is a legitmate, and imo should be a major, consideration in hiring.

i think hiring the less technically competent of two people is often the correct choice from this point of view. obviously there are degrees of everything here -- likelihood of conflict, technical competence, etc, and you have to balance all the factors to make a good decision. my only point is that "like me" (when used as a proxy for "is going to work well with and be happy in this team") is a perfectly valid thing to consider, and shouldn't be dismissed as insular short-sightedness.

This doesn't scale though - we're not all owners of a small software shop with 5-10 engineers. Even if this led to higher team productivity - which I have doubts about - a large company absolutely cannot afford to hire carbon copies of a single archetype. Nor could any single interviewer possibly represent a large company well enough to have the "people like me" heuristic to be a meaningful measurement for how the interviewee will fit into the company at large. And we're not even talking about actually large here - this is already impossible at around 25 engineers.

If you want to avoid unnecessary friction due to differences in preferences, coding philosophy and personality on a larger scale, you want people that are flexible, adaptable and open-minded. You can sort of describe looking for that as "culture fit" and finding "people like me" but unfortunately, "culture fit" is a phrase that attracts the opposite kind. Open-minded people attract other open-minded people but they don't think of what they are doing as seeking people who are similar to themselves. This is just not how they view themselves. They like to challenge themselves with people who are different superficially even if on a higher level they still seek their own kind.

This is kind of what I mean - if by "culture fit" and "people like me" if we mean finding people who are highly open-minded, adaptable and flexible enough to work with people who are very different from themselves on a more superficial level, that's cool, but because of the way people use these terms, generally people who are attracted by talks of "culture fit" are those who are looking for similarities on a superficial level. The types you actually want, those whose tendencies and values are compatible with avoiding unnecessary friction due to superficial differences, tend to see what they are doing differently.

so, i'm agreed on almost everything you said. what i'm talking about won't scale unless taken with the broader interpretation you suggest. that said, i think, in many ways, i do mean "finding people who are highly open-minded, adaptable and flexible enough to work with people who are very different from themselves on a more superficial level." i could think of other things i also mean, in a small ideal setting, but that's a big part of it. some companies call this the "no *******" rule, which is ofc a term just as vague and flexible as "culture fit."

but the vagueness doesn't make it valueless. you and i might interview 20 people and diverge in our assessment of who among them is "open-minded, adaptable, and flexible." i think having one or two high-level managers providing continuity for those decisions would be valuable and would be more likely to create a fiction free environment even at a larger company. but i'll grant that's just my intuition and i don't have experience managing teams that size myself.