[phreeza]

> Small and startup companies where leadership is still involved in the interview process can gauge candidates based on their own technical intuition. So it's false to say NOBODY has a proxy for good software engineering skills.

Is there any proof that this method actually works better though? I've heard plenty of stories of people in smallish (30 FTE or so) startups working alongside some really disastrous hires.

[mike_hearn]

Sure. I built a team of ~35 this way and it worked out pretty well. There were very few dud hires, and of those that happened on investigation it was always because the process I put in place wasn't followed (on one occasion it wasn't followed by me!). It got noticed; we had customers telling us they had to deal with us because they couldn't match the talent we'd been able to attract. We had employees leave and come back because they wanted to work in a good team again.

The process wasn't anything special and the questions weren't particularly hard. It was very heavily standardized though.

No system is perfect. You'll get bad hires no matter what, and miss good hires. The question is only how many.

[phreeza]

If it was highly standardized, was it really based on intuition as suggested by OP?

[mike_hearn]

Oh, rereading maybe I misunderstood the intent of the OP. What I meant is that small startups can also use highly standardised processes that avoid dud hires, you don't have to be big to do that.