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by johnnyanmac 105 days ago
That's a good part of why I want to stay in the IC track. I don't care about having the power to hire/fire people. That's a manager/lead skill in my eyes.

Maybe we have a small conversation with candidates, but I see no reason I need to be quizing people on their talents.
2 comments
dilyevsky 104 days ago
> That's a manager/lead skill in my eyes.

Every place i've seen where management fully usurped hiring had teams rapidly stacked with extremely poor performers. Not surprisingly so.

Moreover, the days when you as an IC can sit quietly in a corner and churn out code from coffee and jira tickets are rapidly coming to an end. I would highly recommend focusing on those other parts of the job if you're not planning to retire soon, and hiring is part of your job as an SME, misplaced humility notwithstanding.

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johnnyanmac 104 days ago
>Moreover, the days when you as an IC can sit quietly in a corner and churn out code from coffee and jira tickets are rapidly coming to an end.

It was never really like that for me in my domain. But yes, that ended almost 3 years ago for me. I don't think hiring is on my horizon, but I'm looking at long term means to be my own boss.

Just need a few more years first to prepare the jump and pay off debts.

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giancarlostoro 104 days ago
It's almost as if we're saying your resume means NOTHING. I have thought about how to solve this, and my brain comes up with some LinkedIn alternative specifically driven by developers vouching for other developers.
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dilyevsky 104 days ago
Your resume does mean nothing because anyone can just put anything on it. Sounds like you're basically reinventing reference checks from first principles
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johnnyanmac 104 days ago
Its almost like we have 3-5+ rounds of interviews for some reason.

Meanwhile, I'm sure a 20 minute conversation can weed out 90+% of fake resumes. If the resume was the problem when hiring practices wouldn't be so optimized around trying to find the perfect resume.

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dilyevsky 103 days ago
Two things here:

1. You still need resume filtering because any public req will receive literally thousands of resumes most of which are poor fit. And that's after HR software did its thing btw. Can't spend 20m on thousands of applications most of which are low effort slop sent by folks who aren't even committed / competent enough to read and follow the req. This was already an issue 10 years ago before AI so I imagine it's at least 10 times worse now.

2. Once you're past that point, at least in my personal experience conducting hundreds of these sessions, most people are pretty bad at going into any kind of depth on stuff listed on their resume so your best strategy (that is if you want to hire anyone at all) is to ask generic questions that are role specific. At best you can tailor some of them to what's in the resume.

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johnnyanmac 103 days ago
1. Of course. I'm not saying a basic filter isn't needed. But if you don't trust your basic filter, how is that going to go when you need to actually invest time interviewing the candidates? You're already off on the wrong foot because your looking for falsehoods instead of qualities.

2. It varies, but I don't think it's a lack of ability so much as liability. My industry is full of NDAs. I can't exactly give precise dates and timelines even for released products. So it's a weird dance of how much I can disclose and how much is a red flag to talk about (since inevitably, this place also probably had me sign an NDA as well).

I'm fine with generic role questions. It usually falls back to leetcode stuff, though.

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