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      This is the best article I’ve read about technical interviews in a long, long time.

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      I wrote a similar, yet much less rich post on the topic here:

      http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/2812

      But I really enjoyed this post. The hiring problem seems to me to have multiple dimensions:

      • it can be hard to test for what people will be doing at a job, because that may change once they are in a company
      • what is important at a job isn’t often conveyed in the job description or interview, it’s something candidates have to dig for and may be ill defined in the mind of the interviewer (“fit”)
      • most companies say they hire the best but aren’t willing to pay top salary (or can’t!). But theyy don’t make that trade-off explicit
      • interviewing by its nature is trying to get a lot of signal in a short period of time
      • it is relatively easy to quickly assess what a candidate knows and much harder to assess what they can learn
      • there’s a paralysis of choice and a desire to wait for the perfect hire because software engineer performance is hard to measure and because as a manager you aren’t seeing progress day by day
      • companies have more optionality (they have many employees but most employees have only one job) so of course more effort and risk gets pushed to the employee
      • candidates want to broaden their option pool, which implies learning things outside of their current skillset. This effort is required because something someone knew about a certain technology 3-4 years ago could be wrong now, but there’s only so much one can have used in the recent past
      • because of health insurance being tied to a job and disruption to their life, employees have much more risk she they switch jobs than companies do in hiring
      • as for all things that are sold, the lemon problem exists for those selling and buying labor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons-

      I think you could make the hiring process better by making it less risky for both sides. You can do that by fostering a culture of contract to hire, and making benefits more transferable so that candidates aren’t as impacted when they switch jobs (especially with health care). But it is a tough problem.