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by 78666cdc 3918 days ago
As a person that has interviewed for and gotten jobs at multiple Fortune 500s (whose tech departments varied from abysmal to impressive effective) and as a person that has been a part of the interviewing/hiring process several times, I appreciate the attempted formalization of interview metrics and see more than a little value in the metrics described in the article.

To me, though, there is one "metric" that trumps all the rest, and that is personality fit with existing employees. If you have two brilliant software engineers that just absolutely cannot stand each other, nothing will get done. The best interview experience I've had, personally, has been to be placed into a technical interview - "start programming application X that does Y" - with two existing employees looking over my shoulders asking me why I'm doing what I'm doing and why not something else.

The technical justification for my chosen solution to the technical interview question didn't matter much once it was clear I covered a base level of technical ability, but it was incredibly valuable that I and the employees looking over my shoulder didn't want to get into a fistfight after an hour - it meant that we could amicably disagree, support our reasonings for our arguments, and then not have sticks up our asses when the other person's proposed solution ended up being the right one, and then gracefully defer and say "thank you for the conversation and debate." That meld is immensely important.

That said, I do recognize that it becomes increasingly difficult to gauge this sort of interaction with increasingly large teams. My experience interviewing and being interviewed is limited to cases where it's been a team of 3 - 8 people. For larger teams, perhaps such a formalized approach makes sense. I do not have any experience that informs me as to whether it is or isn't.

But then I have to ask whether there should be a team of more than about 8 people without a dedicated manager. I don't have anything more than a gut answer to that question, but my gut says no.