[TheLuddite]

I never understood why the hiring process in IT is so tedious compared to let's say...construction work or driving?

Can you imagine that if on hiring a new truck driver the company was passing him trough 50 different routes on snow, ice and wet road. Or forcing a construction worker to build a house or something.

Yet if one of these two professions fucks it up - people might die, if a coder fucks up - he'll be fired and someone will remove 10 lines of code boo hooo.

[badpun]

It's incomparably harder to judge the output of a coder vs a truck driver (where you pretty much have 100% visibility into work performance). Hence, companies are wary of hiring slackers or people of low talent, because they know that if they hire one, his low performance may never be detected afterwards. This leads to interviews checking for raw ability (whiteboard tests) and "passion" (show me your github etc.), as both are resonable insurance against hiring a dumbo or a slacker.

[ranci]

how in the hell would you "never detect a poor performer"? It's one of the most obvious things about the workplace if it is going on.

[badpun]

Colleagues can usually tell, tech lead less so, and manager is often clueless. Basically the only way to judge someone’s output is to work alongside him for a couple months, and only a few colleagues in the team do that. Maybe methodically reviewing someone’s commits every 6 months or so would also work, but that ignores one’s input into decision making, help and mentoring of colleagues etc.

[TheLuddite]

And what will happen if they do a bad work at this? Someone is going to die? No. Someones useless iPhone app will collapse on them? No.

[badpun]

Are you arguing that all non-critical work is meaningless?

[TheLuddite]

If you cannot detect a poor performer does it matter if they are a poor performer.