[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.