[d23]

And if they do follow too many standards, it's a red flag. Or if they follow a mix of standards and non-standards. Big red flag there. If the person is wearing nice shoes, definitely a red flag. But you don't want them to be too normal, because that could be a red flag also.

This hypersensitivity goes in both directions. One company may be worse than another at hiring, despite having an equal or better engineering department. Sometimes, you might just get bad luck. Your interviewer might not have had their coffee that day. Or their dog may have just died. Or you may get a guy who just proposed to his now-wife and is having the best day of his life. Giving a reasonable benefit-of-doubt mixed with a bit of critical thinking is probably the way to go, rather than resorting to hard and fast rules that will end up just making you conclude no company is good enough for you.

[thaumasiotes]

> One company may be worse than another at hiring, despite having an equal or better engineering department.

I don't understand this. As far as I can see, the entire goal of hiring is to have good workers, so the company with a better engineering department is better, by definition, at hiring engineers.

It might be that their hiring prowess comes in part (or in whole) from factors largely outside the hiring process specifically, something like "you get to work for Elon Musk", but their hiring is still better.

[redblacktree]

Or they could hire a lot of people and quickly fire poor performers. I would class that as "bad at hiring," even though they manage to build a good team with the process.

[thaumasiotes]

Really? That's the only way to even measure your false negative rate. I'd call it an upgrade to what almost everyone does now.

[redblacktree]

Sure, but as the linked article emphasizes, these are humans you're talking about. I would never intentionally create a hiring process where we accept a large false-positive rate (I think you meant false positive? As in, we thought he was good, but he wasn't) with the expectation that we'll just fire the poor performers. It's inhumane.

[thaumasiotes]

No, I meant the false negative rate. Imagine you have a hiring process. It marks some applicants as "should hire" and some as "shouldn't hire". False negatives are marked "shouldn't hire" when really you should have hired them.

The only way to determine your false negative rate is to hire a bunch of "shouldn't hire"s and see how they work out.

Easy hire, easy fire is inhumane to people who believe that once you get one job somewhere your problems are over. Never-hire-because-we-never-want-to-fire is inhumane to people who interview poorly and do good work -- they're humans too. You can't win them all.