Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by keiran01 1505 days ago
Appreciated the article, but I felt that it ignored the role of companies' hiring cultures. The software is unambiguously bad, yes, but the general approach is dumb too.

Hearing the way peers talk about job candidates actually makes me feel ill sometimes. It's gotten so inhuman. People just revel in the power to reject anyone who doesn't meet an impossible standard of obsequious perfection.

I would love to see some experiment if it were possible, where you compare the performance of a team built from interviews against the performance of a random selection of rejected candidates. I'd bet there's a negligible difference.

2 comments

On one hand, I agree. I've heard people on my past teams talk like we were an ace team made of the best there is, when the reality is we were probably thoroughly average compares to any other team out there

On the other hand, I've been a part of interview processes where candidates absolutely were rejected with good reason, because it seemed their technical skills would absolutely not be up to our expectations. I think a lot of us have seen that. It's more common than we think.

The classic example is a Google hiring committee who rejected all of their own anonymized hiring packets.