[stegosaurus]

I think this makes sense if you consider an interview as extending a hand to a poor, down-trodden vagrant, rather than an exchange amongst equals.

The article might go over the top a bit with self-pity, but personally I just see it as suboptimal behaviour.

http://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/ - Dan Luu explains better than I can.

I think fundamentally the idea of paying developer X 40K and developer Y 80K (because developer Y has been twice as effective in the past) is broken, because it negates the impact of environment.

If you pay someone 150K GBP in London they can live next door to the office, have TaskRabbit like services perform all household tasks for them, and spend their time exercising and reading 24/7. They will kill it.

Pay them 30K, and regardless of pedigree, they're going to struggle.

Somewhere in there is a balance and I argue it's far less to do with certification and more the circumstances of life which as an employer you have huge discretion to influence.

Basically, it's about steelmanning. Why is someone bad? Is it that they're inherently genetically dysfunctional? Or is it that they haven't been coached well or have a difficult environment?

Given good faith, most of the developers I know have the ability to be amazing. I include myself in that (am I that good? dunno, impostor syndrome innit). But they are stifled by needless nonsense. Management, open office, low pay, commute, stress, basically. Kill the stress and you get your '10x engineer'. Keep the stress and your '10x engineer' turns into a chocolate mousse.

[bad_user]

Are you sure you replied to the right comment? :-)

From my point of view, an interview really isn't an exchange between equals, but a meetup where two parties meet, state their demands and evaluate each other. It works in both directions of course.

[stegosaurus]

Yes, I am.

>> From my point of view, an interview really isn't an exchange between equals

If you design it that way, sure. It doesn't have to be like that.

The whole principle here is that there exists a growing portion of developers who can't be bothered with interview ping pong.

If you don't want them, great! Everyone wins. You don't need to convince us, we won't be working at your company anyway.

[bad_user]

So first of all, I'm not hiring :-P I see your point though and I don't agree.

First of all, the point of the interview isn't to determine whether somebody is bad, or improperly couched. Surely interviewers would love being able to do that, but it's not possible to do it in a couple of hours.

During the interview all you get to do is to apply a noise filter to get rid of the incredibly bad ones. Because without that filter you can get people that are a very bad fit and that can cost you the project and the morale of your existing employees. It's incredibly taxing to fire somebody. Every time it happened to see a colleague being fired, internal discussions, personal attacks and bad feelings happened internally, every single time and not just at one company. And then in big corporations, because of the risks involved in firing people, you get an even worse effect - you see them "promoted".

And with a noise filter you can naturally have many, many false negatives, as in people that are in fact good, but won't pass the test and interviewers are willing to have that risk, instead of risking false positives.

Of course, from what you're saying, I think you believe everybody can be great. Well, yeah, I think everybody can be great at something useful, but not everybody can be great at something specific. We software developers are too idealistic at times. I don't see surgeons going around telling other people that everybody can be a surgeon. That would be a preposterous thing to say.

On the other hand I do think that if companies want good people, they should invest in education.

> The whole principle here is that there exists a growing portion of developers who can't be bothered with interview ping pong.

I can agree with that. I'm not into interviewing myself. I'm not into switching jobs that often either. I can't be bothered with that because I've got satisfying things to work on already. Capitalism and the free market cuts both ways, right?