[tptacek]

We're a work-sample culture here too, and one of the big concerns we have is asking people to do work-sample tests and then face a subjective interview. Too many companies have cargo-culted work-sample tests as just another hurdle in the standard interview loop, and everyone just knows that the whole game is about winning the interview loop, not about the homework assignments.

A rubric written in advance that would allow a single person to vet a work sample response mostly cures the problem you have right now. The red flag is the vote.

[alexk]

That's a fair concern. We don't have extra steps to the interview process, our team votes only on the submitted code. However, We did not spend enough time thinking about automating as many of those steps as possible as we should have.

For some challenges we wrote a public linter and tester, so folks can self-test and iterate before they submit the code:

https://github.com/gravitational/fakeiot

I'll go back and revise these with the team, thanks for the hint.

[tptacek]

The good news is, if you've run this process a bunch of times with votes, you should have a lot of raw material from which to make a rubric, and then the only process change you need is "lose the vote, and instead randomly select someone to evaluate the rubric against the submission". Your process will get more efficient and more accurate at the same time, which isn't usually a win you get to have. :)

[wdella]

Disclaimer: I'm a Teleport employee, and participate in hiring for our SRE and tools folks.

> A rubric written in advance that would allow a single person to vet a work sample response mostly cures the problem you have right now. The red flag is the vote.

I argue the opposite: Not having multiple human opinions and a hiring discussion/vote/consensus is a red flag.

The one engineer vetting the submission they may be reviewing before lunch or have had a bad week, turning a hire into a no-hire. [1] Not a deal breaker in an iterated PR review game, but rough for a single round hiring game. Beyond that, multiple samples from a population gives data closer to the truth than any single sample.

There is also a humanist element related to current employees: Giving peers a role and voice in hiring builds trust, camaraderie, and empathy for candidates. When a new hire lands, I want peers to be invested and excited to see them.

If you treat hiring as a mechanical process, you'll hire machines. Great software isn't built by machines... (yet)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_judge_effect

[tptacek]

Disclaimer: this comment ticked me off a bit.

If you really, honestly believe that multiple human opinions and a consensus process is a requirement for hiring, I think you shouldn't be asking people to do work samples, because you're not serious about them. You're asking people to do work --- probably uncompensated --- to demonstrate their ability to solve problems. But then you're asking your team to override what the work sample says, mooting some (or all) of the work you asked candidates to do. This is why people hate work sample processes. It's why we go way out of our way not to have processes that work this way.

We've done group discussions about candidates before, too. But we do them to build a rubric, so that we can lock in a consistent set of guidelines about what technically qualifies a candidate. The goal of spending the effort (and inviting the nondeterminism and bias) of having a group process is to get to a point where you can stop doing that, so your engineering team learns, and locks in a consistent decision process --- so that you can then communicate that decision process to candidates and not have them worry if you're going to jerk them around because a cranky backend engineer forgets their coffee before the group vote.

I don't so much care whether you use consensus processes to evaluate "culture fit", beyond that I think "culture fit" is a terrible idea that mostly serves to ensure you're hiring people with the same opinion on Elden Ring vs. HFW. But if you're using consensus to judge a work sample, as was said upthread, I think you're misusing work samples.

You can also not hire people with work samples. We've hired people that way! There are people our team has worked with for years that we've picked up, and there are people we picked up for other reasons (like doing neat stuff with our platform). In none of these cases did we ever take a vote.

(If I had my way, we'd work sample everyone, if only to collect the data on how people we're confident about do against our rubric, so we can tune the rubric. But I'm just one person here.)

Finally: a rubric doesn't mean "scored by machines". I just got finished saying, you build a rubric so that a person can go evaluate it. I've never managed to get to a point where I could just run a script to make a decision, and I've never been tempted to try.

I'll add: I'm not just making this stuff up. This is how I've run hiring processes for about 12 year, not at crazy scale but "a dozen a year" easily? It's also how we hire at our current company. I object, strongly, to the idea that we have a culture of "machines", and not just because if they were machines I'd get my way more often in engineering debates. We have one of the best and most human cultures I've ever worked at here, and we reject idea that lack of team votes is a red flag.

[Terretta]

Strongly agree with this, two key concepts in particular:

1. Using group discussion to make the principled rubric is incredibly respectful of everyone’s (employee and candidate) time, not just now but future time. Using the rubric is also unreasonably effective at getting clearer pictures of people quickly.

2. Systematic doesn’t mean automated, and that hiring should aspire to be systematic to the point it makes no difference who interviewed the candidate, and all the difference which candidate interviewed.

I’ll add one …

3. If you have a rubric setting a consistent bar, share feedback with the candidate in real time (such as asking to ‘help me understand your choice I might have done differently?’) as well as synthesized feedback at the end: “This is my takeaway, is it fair?”

Contrary to urban legend this never got us sued. Every candidate, particularly those being told no, said it was refreshing to hear where they stood and appreciated the opportunity to revisit or clarify before leaving the room. Key is non judgmental clear synthesis with, “Is that fair?”

[ibeckermayer]

You’re mistaken, we do have a rubric. All of the members of the interview team grade the interviewee according to the rubric, and the scores are then combined into “votes”.

[tptacek]

That's good. I'm responding to "Not having multiple human opinions and a hiring discussion/vote/consensus is a red flag". I think having combined scores is an own-goal, but having people vote based on their opinions is something worse than that (if you're having people do work samples).