Comment by jesse__

9 hours ago

I agree with your observation. My issue is (from experience) it's really hard to tell from the outside if a teams' values align with mine. Many teams talk the talk, but don't walk the walk, as the saying goes. It's just easier to not participate than it is to guess, and be wrong.

I also believe that running a broken interview process actively selects for qualities you actually don't want, so it's much more likely that teams conducting those interviews aren't teams I want to work on.

Edit: As credence for my claims, the best team I've ever worked on was a team I did 90%+ of the hiring for, and we didn't do any of the 'typical' interview bullshit most companies do.

What we did instead was sit people down and have deep technical conversations about systems they'd worked on in the past. The candidate would explain, in as much detail as they could muster, a system they'd worked on in the past, down to the lowest level details. Usually, they would talk to us for at least 20-30 minutes, then, we (the interviewers) would pose questions, usually starting with the form 'if we changed X, what effect would it have'. Doing interviews in this style make a few things immediately obvious:

1. Did the candidate have a deep, systemic understanding of the system they worked on?

2. Does the candidate have a good mental model for evaluating change in the system?

That's how I conduct interviews, and unsurprisingly, when I get interviewed like that, my success rate is 100%. I don't think I've ever done an interview like that which did not result in an offer.