There’s a tonne of variance between software engineers. Even at the same level (junior, intermediate, senior, etc.), it’s not uncommon for a strong hire to be ~5x better than a weak hire. By this I mean more productive, better at helping others, writes fewer bugs, creates more maintainable abstractions, makes better architecture decisions, can tackle more difficult problems, etc. And at the same level, the strong and weak hires get paid roughly the same, so companies REALLY want the strong hires. This is not a McDonalds type situation, where anyone lightly competent will do, you’re trying to hire someone outstanding at their job every single time.
Firing sucks, but it’s hard to truly tease out quality during interviews. So most companies go for false negatives over false positives. Generally this means that of the 3-to-6 interviewers, all have to have strong positive opinions of the candidate for the hire to happen.
Because of this, as a candidate, it’s a bit of a number’s game. You can be a great candidate, but still not get hired on any individual interview, because companies heavily bias towards allowing lots of false negatives to avoid the odd false positive.
> hard to truly tease out quality during interviews
I'm not sure I agree here. I doubt most interviewers have actually given much thought to what they are actually trying to look for in a potential candidate. The widespread practice of over-focusing on algorithmic whiteboard questions is a symptom.
There's got to be better processes in assessing candidates' qualities beyond solving algorithmic puzzles (which perhaps is 5% of a software engineer's job at best).
I dunno, I’ve conducted about 100 dev interviews over the years. Have tried various combinations of whiteboarding, architecture/design questions, take home problems, talking about past projects/experience, and sitting down together with the interviewee and pair coding on bugs or small features. I don’t know that any approach was clearly more effective than another, and for all of them I think the ability of myself and other interviewers to predict performance at the company was decent, but far from excellent. The clearest signal is probably a super enthusiastic referral (from a highly trustworthy source), but it’s rare to be able to get that.
It’s just really tough to figure out in 2-3 hours how someone is going to perform in a given role over the next few years. Interviewing is an inexact art, not an exact science, and it’s very much my experience that companies compensate for this by favouring false negatives (not hiring possibly strong candidates) over false positives (hiring weak candidates).
The 5x engineer at my last job created 5x the features and 5x the bugs, and consequently caused 5x the number of job postings because we needed so many people to put out fires all day. I have to thank him because he is the reason I was hired.
Yeah, I don’t mean just 5x the LOC or features. More a combination of all of more productive, helps others more effectively, creates fewer bugs, can tackle a wider range of problems, makes better architectural decisions, writes more materials abstractions, etc. Basically I think it’s pretty common for a strong engineering hire to produce 5x the long term value of a weak hire, taking all of the above into account.
Firing sucks, but it’s hard to truly tease out quality during interviews. So most companies go for false negatives over false positives. Generally this means that of the 3-to-6 interviewers, all have to have strong positive opinions of the candidate for the hire to happen.
Because of this, as a candidate, it’s a bit of a number’s game. You can be a great candidate, but still not get hired on any individual interview, because companies heavily bias towards allowing lots of false negatives to avoid the odd false positive.