alt Hacker NewsThe gold standard in hiring qualification is work-sample testing. It works fine. You do not need to "make hiring a profit center" or "provisionally hire" or do internships. Work samples done correctly demand less time from candidates than interviews and scale better than interviews. They are standardizable and iterable.
What I feel like I'm reading here is someone who has been poisoned by FAANG hiring practices --- and they are terrible --- and has missed most of the work that's been done (outside of Google's admirable work in debunking their own processes).
I appreciate the "kitchen confidential" here, but with respect to Yegge, I think he's been working at the Olive Garden this whole time. Go stage at Gramercy Tavern! They're working at a different scale, yes, but you'll at least get a different perspective on the "gold standard".
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I'm a little bit more on the fence with the work sample interviews having designed them and also interviewed through them. I've also done my fair share of "traditional" tech interviews, all at startups, never FAANG.
As an interviewer, I much prefer the signals generated through a work-sample interview. I'm much more confident in the hiring recommendation than I get from a 1 hour zoom session. However, if I look at teams that were built through the work-sample and zoom interviews, I'm not sure the outcomes were that noticeably better.
As an interviewee, I think I understand the frustration being on the other side has. With an in-person interview, I often have a good sense that I bombed the interview or something to improve on or replay in my head, less surprising outcomes. On the work samples it's harder to know whether you're making mistakes, or are being out-competed by someone putting in 4 times the effort to polish the solution beyond what their regular work product would be. Although I had one really good outcome where the work-sample interview really flagged the internal dysfunction of a company.
And then with both interview processes, I still think there is a really big unknown on what the false no-hire rate is, how much effort is getting wasted rejecting candidates that would actually fit the team.
So having to choose a process as an interviewer, I'm with you and would always choose a work-sample interview. On whether it should be considered the "gold standard", I'm much more hesitant, I think there are some limitations that are still hard to control for.
I do wish Starfighter/Stockfighter model had gained more traction, would've been interesting to see a recruiting company specialize in this and then seeding the interview results to multiple companies model work out.
It would be nice to have portfolios, but systems are broken enough that that becomes hard to see. I suspect one of the reasons for the bias to hiring PHds in fields where it really isn't necessary is at least you have a work portfolio.
The problem with work-sample testing (which is commonly administered as a take-home problem for the developer candidate to solve) is two-fold:
a) it discriminates against people who cannot spare 4+ hours of focused time on evenings/weekends to work on the problem. People with multiple jobs, single parents, etc.
b) in the age of AI it is no longer a reliable measure of someone's skill, for obvious reasons
Unlike Yegge, I haven't worked at FAANG, but the companies I have worked at all followed the same hiring practices and suffered from the same problems as he describes.
Provisional employment (or, if that's not possible, then well-paid internships) solve all of those issues. The candidate gets 3-6 months of stable employment, you as the employer get a large number of work-sample tests, and you can see how they use AI and how much.
Ime take-homes was a good way to purge all the good candidates with options from your pipeline as they would simply not turn anything in and go with someone else. Maybe with AI and so many layoffs it’s better now I haven’t tried in last couple of years though i doubt it