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I agree, though this is not to defend coding interviews, which I'm terrible at, like the author. The fact is that all job interviews are poor indicators. There is no "good" interview technique. Taking an arbitrary snippet of an hour or two out of someone's life/career is going to give you a misleading picture. The best indicator of future performance is past performance, i.e., experience. Granted, it can sometimes be difficult to evaluate past performance, which is why hiring is always a gamble. Hiring managers seem to believe that they can take the risk out of hiring, but that's a delusion. The benefit of hiring based mainly on experience is this, which the author mentions: > It’s already problematic how much company resources are consumed by these interviews. Worse, consider that for every hire, there are plenty of candidates who get filtered out, meaning organizations are taking extra time from people who likely have little to spare. I often hear excuses for putting job candidates through the wringer, such as (1) it's difficult to fire people and/or (2) firing people is demoralizing to the team. However, (1) in the United States, with at-will employment, that's simply organizational incompetence, which is a bigger problem than bad hires, and (2) having to continue to work with an incompetent person is perhaps more demoralizing to the team than getting rid of the person. The most perverse aspect of the software industry's devaluation of experience — besides age discrimination, of course — is that long-tenured engineers and fresh college graduates are pitted against each other for the exact same jobs. This should rarely happen and is a sign of poorly defined job roles. It reeks of the belief that engineers are simply cannon fodder, warm bodies who can type code, replaceable cogs in a machine. I suppose this same attitude is reflected in the belief that engineers can be replaced with "A.I.". |
In the U.S. it's ridiculously easy to fire people (as pointed out above), once management has made the decision. What people seem to really mean is that it's sometimes difficult to get management to see the problem in the first place -- but by definition, this ultimately points to an issue with the management team, rather than the supposedly stealthily incompetent (or flaky/abusive) employee.
And also - when the right decision has been made, the team generally rejoices, and bemoans only the fact that it took so long. If the effect is seen as demoralizing -- it means the firing was likely political, or a result of team chaos / poor communication not specific to the employee. So again, the issue rests with management -- by definition.