[jacquesm]

Your typical interviewer, if he or she does not have relevant knowledge is just as likely to throw out the baby with the bathwater as they are to select the right candidates. There is no reason not to have the team do the pre-selection. I know this is all terrible news for recruiters and HR people alike but really there is nobody better qualified to determine who they want to work with on a particular problem than the existing team. The only situation where you would be better off with other people making that decision is when there is no team yet.

One thing I used to totally loathe during my brief stint as a programmer employed at a large organization is that when new people showed up that were already hired it was then up to us on the floor to make the best of a whole series of bad decisions preceding that moment.

So, let's involve the team in the messaging and pre-selection as well as giving them the final say.

Think about it this way: if you believe that the team you employ is the best possible group to do the work, don't you feel they are also the best possible group to determine how to expand the group?

[35bge57dtjku]

> Your typical interviewer, if he or she does not have relevant knowledge is just as likely to throw out the baby with the bathwater as they are to select the right candidates. There is no reason not to have the team do the pre-selection.

What are you talking about? The interviewers are almost always from the team.

> Think about it this way: if you believe that the team you employ is the best possible group to do the work, don't you feel they are also the best possible group to determine how to expand the group?

Yes, and that's why most companies have their devs do interviewing.

[Paul-ish]

What do you do when tons of people apply for a position?

[jacquesm]

Find a better way to reach your target audience. Getting people to self-select is the very best way to reduce the load from interviewing.

[Paul-ish]

How would you do that? Also, saying there will be a coding interview up front does cause people to self select.

[jacquesm]

It would definitely take up some team resources, but it's not more complex than the work they're already doing. So 'how would you do that' is the wrong question. The question should be 'how would they do that?' and the answer I don't know but I'm sure if you ask a team they'll be more than happy to explain, after all it is their (and not my) future that is at stake and given the fact that they are involved they'll do the best possible job to make sure they have to go through it the minimum number of times with the largest chance of success.

This is still far less effort than a wrong hire would cause. Anyway, I can see that my methods are not acceptable (yet), maybe in another decade or so?

Trust is hard. Even companies that trust their tech people with the corporate crown jewels still have a hard to impossible time trusting them with such everyday decisions such as who they want to work with. It's counterproductive to say the least but that's how we've been doing it for the last 40 years, so I don't expect any major changes in the near future.

[Paul-ish]

Fair enough. I think without coding interviews networking would become even more important than it is now, and it is already very important now. Moving more towards a "networking" world would mean things are less a meritocracy. It would not be about what you know, but who you know. Personally I find that unappealing because it doesn't seem fair, but I know some people aren't interested in "fair" anyways.

Instead of people complaining about coding interviews on HN, you would have a lot of programmers complaining that they are introverts who are just good at their job, and don't think that they should be punished for not being a people person.

[jacquesm]

I don't think teams should be penalized for not hiring people that aren't team players. There are good spots for introverts in IT but teams usually (though not always, I've seen some interesting exceptions to this rule) are not too welcoming to that sort of person.

If the world were gamified to the point that your skills are all that matters then yes, a solely merit based approach would work. But in the world we live in today people skills matter (a lot, actually). On a personal note, this was a very hard lesson for me to absorb, the first years of my career introvert would have been too friendly a description, anti-social probably would have been a better one. But over time I got a bit better at working with others.