[tptacek]

Experience-based interviews are a fantastic way to select for candidates who have "failed up" through a long series of jobs. The underlying dynamic is that it usually takes more than a year to sever a technical employee; you can faceplant in a role and still wind up with a resume improvement.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

Sure, that's a risk, but that's part of the purpose of an interview - both to discover what they claim to have done, and to assess how accurate that is. This is the purpose of asking about decision making processes, alternatives, architectural summaries and deep dives, etc - if they really did everything they claimed then all relevant details should come rapidly and fluently.

The problems with the alternative - interviewing based on problem solving and coding challenges are:

1) For the most part it doesn't work. Companies like Google, that have reflected on and assessed their own interviewing success, have come to the conclusion that there is little correlation between how well people interviewed in this style do on the interview vs how well they perform on the job. This is a pretty low bar to beat!

2) If you are interviewing for 10-20-30 year senior with a track record of success and adding value, how can you possibly hope to assess that via problem based challenges, especially if conducted by a less senior developer who doesn't themself have the skill set and track record you are hiring for? How do you know if the person just talks a good game and can throw around high level concepts, or can actually deliver?

I do think there is some value to problem solving as a small part of the interview process, but certainly not if this comes at the expense of ignoring the candidate's actual experience and accomplishments which is the best indication of what they are capable of.

[tptacek]

I have zero confidence in the ability of interviewers to reliably and repeatable parse out subtle characterological details in candidates. Like I said, the interviews you're talking about are essentially random functions.

Google has notoriously one of the worst hiring processes in the entire tech industry.

[gilbetron]

Many people's understanding of "Google's hiring processes" is from a few articles over a decade ago. They had done numerous studies, switched things up, and now have a pretty solid approach to interviewing. This is one of the articles that was going around back then, and most of the conclusions are how Google still interviews: https://www.workforce.com/news/laszlo-bock-just-google-him

I work with many ex-Googlers that did a lot of interviewing and they process has been pretty consistent for many years now, and seen largely successful.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

> Like I said, the interviews you're talking about are essentially random functions.

Only if you are REALLY bad at interviewing !

And what's the alternative - you want to hire someone to head up your infrastructure modernization based on acing LeetCode challenges and drawing a few diagrams on the whiteboard ?

[tptacek]

Google invests huge amounts of money and time into their process and I am repeating a conclusion they arrived at about their own process.

[sanderjd]

What companies hire differently than them? Everyone seems to do the exact same thing.

[sanderjd]

I hear this a lot, but man, I just really don't think so. First of all, 1-year stints come off very poorly in this kind of discussion. (I would say that a bias against people with a bunch of short stints would be a failure mode of "experience-based interviews" rather than the failure mode you're describing.) But also, I have had these discussions with (in my judgement) both "failed up" candidates and "tons of valuable experience" candidates, and I just don't have this experience that it's difficult to differentiate.

I'm fully aware that according to the internet, there is an epidemic of bullshit artists who can go deep on the architecture and tradeoffs and their contribution to the things they worked on, without having actually contributed to those things, but I dunno, the narrative just doesn't jibe with my anecdotal experience.

My only uncertainty here is that I do think I have been very fortunate in the people I have worked with in my career, so I might just be getting lucky. But I have truly never worked with someone who is hired largely on the basis of a strong resume, but genuinely can't grok fizzbuzz, or whatever the contemporary equivalent of that is.

I also recognize that you ran a real company doing real work on this, so I'm generally inclined to defer to your wisdom...

You can tell that I'm very torn on this, because the conventional wisdom is so strongly against my perspective on it, and I generally put a good deal of weight on conventional wisdom. But man, I dunno, it all really feels like an inertia thing that I increasingly question the original foundations of. Sometimes the emperor actually doesn't have any clothes on...

[tptacek]

First, they're not "1 year stints". It takes about a year to manage someone out of a role once you've decided you need to do that. Nobody makes that decision on day 1 of a report's tenure.

Second, how well the "stint" comes across in the interview is a question of how skilled the candidate is at talking. You can make anything sound like anything in an interview. The interviewer has no reliable way of checking.

[sanderjd]

If someone has a multi-year stint where the last year was spent managing them out, I am not convinced that this demonstrates that they are an incompetent bullshit artist. Not every employee is valuable to every company forever.

I've written a bunch of words in this thread about how I'm skeptical of your second paragraph. I recognize that you and many people I know and have discussed this with are adamant about this being true, and yet I remain unconvinced. I have interviewed many people, some of whom attempted to talk up their previous experience unconvincingly, and some of whom were impressive but nevertheless unsuccessful after being hired, for various reasons. I still haven't come across this person who can go into depth about their previous projects, while being a total incompetent bullshitter. I'm certain such people exist. I'm unconvinced that they are as pervasive as all the discourse on this would have me believe.

[skydhash]

Experience as in numbers of years or project participation is flawed. But experience as in contributions and knowledge of some specific domains is good IMO.