Tech Hiring Problems

Having been on both sides of the table, where I have been rejected from consideration for no good reason, and also watched my organization turn down awesome candidates for no good reason, I have come to the conclusion that pay is only part of the story. Most places suck at hiring, and some of them even know this, but most don't suck the way they think they suck. If you have a hiring process that can start with 100 applicants, and whittle that number down to one, that doesn't mean you&#

In a nutshell: they aren't.The economics of it are that in many places in the world, it is extremely difficult to fire an employee. Getting rid of an underperformer can take time, effort, and exposes the company to liability if the termination can be construed as relating to the employee being in a protected class (e.g. can't fire someone because she's a woman). Let's assume that it's a SF startup willing to play a little fast and loose and they aren't concerned

Tech hiring is broken, more than likely they were right under your nose the whole time.

Hiring is all subjective (i.e. bs): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41049365

This question suggests that the devs in your target company have lost control of developer hiring.

The trick is these companies arent hiring top 1% talent, they're hiring top 1% interviewing talent.

I think it can be tricky. We know the process doesn't always work. Some companies, e.g. Google, believe that it's better to adhere to a tough hiring process and reject most people even if a certain number of those people who are rejected may be brilliant engineers. But what I think is important to remember is that the goal is to hire the right person for the job. The hiring process you use may or may not be an effective and efficient means of finding that person. But certainly having a very narr

Part of why it is so hard is that the hiring process involves so many people who don't know anything about programming. An older friend of mine is great at blowing smoke up your butt, and if HR or managers are doing the interviewing, he always gets the job. If technical people are doing the interviewing, he rarely gets the job. The buzzwords he uses sound all warm and fuzzy to the managers, but annoy other programmers so much they autoreject him. His biggest failure is his inability to keep up w

Hiring is broken if it weeds out people who don't interview well, rather than people who don't code well.

The market is hot, and because companies are hiring so much,they now have to rely on people (engineers) who in the past didn't have to conduct interviews; people who are not particular skilled in, or hired for their knowledge of conducting interviews. Hiring is one of those things that scales poorly.