[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.