Another day, another HackerNews discussion about hiring being broken. The most recent one I saw was triggered by a blog post by the formidable Aline Lerner (disclaimer: Aline is a friend and we collaborated on a hiring book last year). Now, I 100% agree that hiring is broken, and Aline’s post is really thoughtful. In fact, a lot of “hiring is broken” articles are thoughtful.
But the discussion threads are something else—they miss the point of the article. The discussion threads are even more broken than hiring. And they’re really repetitive. They always do contain grains of truth, but inevitably have us reaching conclusions that are simplistic, and in my opinion, create a pretty bad attitude in the tech industry.
Conclusion #1: “Hiring sucks for candidates, but hiring managers can do what they want“
The truth is that hiring is hard for everyone. There’s no question about it. It’s hard for both candidates and for hiring managers. Sure, FAANGs and the startup-du-jour might have a leg up, but most people who are hiring are trying to hire at a non-FAANG, non-sexy company. If you’ve never done it, you should try it at some point in your career. It’s an incredibly humbling experience. Or, at the very least, find a friend who’s spent time on hiring, and ask them for their favorite battle story. They’ve been ghosted by candidates. They’ve spent hours trying to convince people to talk to them. They’ve spent even more time getting candidates to the offer stage, only to lose out to the FAANG / startup-du-jour.
And yes, on the balance, power and information asymmetry work out in favor of the companies hiring. And that asymmetry is much larger with FAANGs. But even FAANGs have to invest a tremendous amount of time and energy into hiring. It’s not really easy for anyone.
Especially if you want to do it well. Ask any successful leader (entrepreneur, manager) what they spend most of their time on, and it’ll either involve a large chunk spent on hiring (if they appreciate the problem and give it the attention it deserves) or dealing with the consequences of bad hiring (if they don’t).
Conclusion #2: “Hiring is a crap-shoot—it’s a roll of the dice“
I strongly disagree with this one. When writing the Holloway Guide to Technical Hiring and Recruiting, I got to interview dozens of really thoughtful hiring managers and recruiters. They were really good at their jobs. And there were some common themes. They were thoughtful about every step of their process. They kept their process balanced and fair, holding a high bar but respecting candidates and their time. They didn’t chase the same pool of candidates everyone else was chasing—instead, they found non-traditional ways to discover really talented and motivated people who weren’t in the pool of usual suspects. They were thoughtful about what signals they were looking for and how best to assess them. And, they deeply understood their team’s needs, and candidates’ needs, and were really good at deciding when there was or wasn’t a fit. But most of all, they were effective: they built really talented teams.
There are a handful of companies that have built amazing hiring engines, and the proof is that they’ve been able to put together really strong teams. You can generally tell that if a person worked at a certain company at a certain time, that person is probably incredibly intelligent and incredibly motivated (some examples are Google, Facebook, Stripe, Dropbox at different points in time). There will always be noise. Even the best hiring managers will sometimes make hiring mistakes. And of course, even the best engineers may not be a fit for every role or every company.
Again, hiring is hard. But there is not a shred of doubt in my mind that if you are thoughtful about it, you can hire well. And really, you don’t need to be perfect at it. You just need to be better than the rest.
Conclusion #3: “FAANGs suck at hiring”
This one has some truth to it, but it’s a lot more subtle than “FAANGs suck at hiring”. Because let’s face it, they do hire really smart people. Some of the smartest people I know are at FAANGs right now. So let’s decouple that statement a little more.
FAANGs do suck at parts of hiring, like their candidate experience. They can be really slow at making hiring decisions. Their hiring process might be tedious and seem arbitrary. But they usually can get away with it, and you probably can’t! They’ve got a strong brand, interesting technical challenges (interesting for some people, at least), and a lot of money. In fact, one FAANG VP of Engineering told me: “our process is what we can get away with”. To the point that they can even play it off as a positive: “our process is slow and long because we are very selective”.
And look, I’m sure FAANGs lose some talented candidates who get turned off by their “you’d-be-blessed-to-work-with-us” attitude. They definitely have a lot of room for improvement. But at the end of the day, they’re operating a process that’s delivering large quantities of really smart people at scale. In fact, I’d argue their internal processes around strategy, performance management / promotions, etc cause incredibly more damage to them than broken hiring—if you lose out on hiring one talented person when you have thousands applying to work for you, that’s one story, but if you hire someone really talented and driven, and they work for you for 6 to 12 months but don’t meet their potential and leave in bitter frustration… well, that’s a subject for another post)
“But”, people go on, “FAANGs also don’t know how to interview!” Which brings me to trope #4.
Conclusion #4: “Whiteboard and algo/coding interviews suck”
Again, this one has some truth to it, but if you just stop at the above statement, you miss the point.
Algo/coding interviews are one of the primary hiring mechanisms used by FAANG companies. And they are incredibly unpopular—at least in discussion threads. But big companies have spent years looking at their hiring data and feeding that back into their hiring process (coining the term “people analytics” along the way).
The argument against them is usually a combination of:
- they really only assess pattern-matching skills (map a problem to something you’ve seen before)
- they only assess willingness to spend time preparing for these types of interviews
These are fair criticisms, but that doesn’t mean these interviews are actually terrible. I mean, they might be terrible for you if you’re interviewing and you don’t get the job. You’re probably a brilliant engineer, and I agree, these interviews certainly don’t fully assess your ability (or maybe you’re a shit engineer, I don’t know you personally). In any case, the leap from “this interview sucked for me” to “this interview sucks” is still pretty big.
If you’re a large tech co with a big brand and a salary scale that ranks at the top of Levels.fyi, you probably get a lot of applications. So a good interview process is one that weeds out people who wouldn’t do well at your company. To do well at a large tech company, you need to (and I’m painting with a really broad brush, but this is true for 90% of roles at these companies):
- Some sort of problem-solving skill that’s a mix of raw intelligence and/or ability to solve problems by pattern-matching to things you’ve seen before.
- Ability/commitment to work on something that may not always be that intrinsically motivating, in the context of getting/maintaining a well-paying job at a large, known company.
Hopefully you can see where I’m going with this. Basically, the very criticisms thrown at these types of interviews are the reason they work well for these companies. They’re a good proxy for the work you’d be doing there and how willing you are to do it. If you’re good at pattern matching, and are willing to invest effort into practicing to get one of these jobs, you’ll probably do well at the job.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that type of work. I spent several years at big tech co’s, and the work was intellectually stimulating most of the time. But a lot of times it wasn’t. It was a lot of pattern-matching. Looking at how someone else had solved a problem in a different part of the code-base, and adapting that to my use-case.
On the other hand, if you’re an engineer (no matter how brilliant) who struggles with being told what to do or doing work that you can’t immediately connect to something intrinsically motivating to you, that FAANG interview just did both you and the company a favor by weeding you out of the process.
So the truth is, there is no single “best interview technique”. In our book, we wrote several chapters about different interviewing techniques and their pros and cons. In-person algo/coding interviews on a whiteboard, in-person interviews where you work in an existing code base, take-home interviews, pairing together, having a trial period, etc all have pros and cons. The trick is finding a technique that works for both the company and the candidate.
And that can really differ from company to company and candidate to candidate. A VP at Netflix told me about how they had a really strong candidate come in, but when asked to do a whiteboard-type interview, informed them (politely) that they might as well just reject him then. He was no good at whiteboard interviews… But if they allowed him to go home and write some code, he’d be happy to talk through it. And since then, many Netflix teams have offered candidates the choice of doing a take home.
And really, any interview format can suck. It can fail to assess a candidate for the things a company needs and it can be a negative candidate experience. Which would you rather have:
- A whiteboard interview with heavy algorithms for a role where that knowledge (or ability to develop that knowledge) isn’t critical, delivered by an apathetic engineer who doesn’t care about their job.
- A poorly-designed take-home, requiring skills that you don’t have and won’t need for the job, and that you spend hours thinking through and working on, send in, and get rejected without getting any feedback.
Probably neither.
At my current startup (Monarch Money), we give candidates the choice of real-time CoderPad interview, take-home interview, or showing us and talking through a representative code sample. Most people choose the take-home, and we like that—based on where we are as a company (seed-stage startup), how we operate (distributed even before Covid), etc, it ends up being a better proxy for the work they’d do on the job. In either case, we do our best to only do this once we and they believe there might be a strong fit, and when we do it, we try to give people feedback so that even if they don’t get the job, they get at least got something out of it. Will we still do this at scale? Almost definitely not. Once we have multiple teams and hiring managers, we’ll probably have to rely on more standardization, which will probably push us towards more standard interviews (though I hope to resist it as long as we can!). And we’ll try to maintain the same principles (being respectful of people’s times, looking for a proper fit, etc).
So here’s what sucks about hiring
So here’s what actually sucks about hiring:
- Diversity. We really, really suck at diversity. We’re getting better, but we have a long way to go. Most of the industry chases the same candidates and assesses them in the same way.
- Generally unfair practices. In cases where companies have power and candidates don’t, things can get really unfair. Lack of diversity is just one side-effect of this, others include poor candidate experiences, unfair compensation, and many others.
- Short-termism. Recruiters and hiring managers that just want to fill a role at any cost, without thinking about whether there really is a fit or not. Many recruiters work on contingency, and most of them suck. The really good ones are awesome, but most of the well is poison. Hiring managers can be the same, too, when they’re under pressure to hire.
- General ineptitude. Sometimes companies don’t knowing what they’re looking for, or are not internally aligned on it. Sometimes they just have broken processes, where they can’t keep track of who they’re talking to and what stage they’re at. Sometimes the engineers doing the interviews couldn’t care two shits about the interview or the company they work at. And often, companies are just tremendously indecisive, which makes them really slow to decide, or to just reject candidates because they can’t make up their minds.
As a company, the best you can do is be thoughtful and fair with your process. It’s not easy, but it’s doable. And as a candidate, the best you can do is try to find and work with companies that are thoughtful and fair with their hiring processes if you have that privilege.
If you thought this post was insightful, we’ve got a book full of this type of thinking that I worked with a really awesome group of contributors on. Check out the Holloway Guide to Technical Recruiting and Hiring.
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