Comment by tptacek
16 hours ago
The gold standard in hiring qualification is work-sample testing. It works fine. You do not need to "make hiring a profit center" or "provisionally hire" or do internships. Work samples done correctly demand less time from candidates than interviews and scale better than interviews. They are standardizable and iterable.
What I feel like I'm reading here is someone who has been poisoned by FAANG hiring practices --- and they are terrible --- and has missed most of the work that's been done (outside of Google's admirable work in debunking their own processes).
I appreciate the "kitchen confidential" here, but with respect to Yegge, I think he's been working at the Olive Garden this whole time. Go stage at Gramercy Tavern! They're working at a different scale, yes, but you'll at least get a different perspective on the "gold standard".
I'm a little bit more on the fence with the work sample interviews having designed them and also interviewed through them. I've also done my fair share of "traditional" tech interviews, all at startups, never FAANG.
As an interviewer, I much prefer the signals generated through a work-sample interview. I'm much more confident in the hiring recommendation than I get from a 1 hour zoom session. However, if I look at teams that were built through the work-sample and zoom interviews, I'm not sure the outcomes were that noticeably better.
As an interviewee, I think I understand the frustration being on the other side has. With an in-person interview, I often have a good sense that I bombed the interview or something to improve on or replay in my head, less surprising outcomes. On the work samples it's harder to know whether you're making mistakes, or are being out-competed by someone putting in 4 times the effort to polish the solution beyond what their regular work product would be. Although I had one really good outcome where the work-sample interview really flagged the internal dysfunction of a company.
And then with both interview processes, I still think there is a really big unknown on what the false no-hire rate is, how much effort is getting wasted rejecting candidates that would actually fit the team.
So having to choose a process as an interviewer, I'm with you and would always choose a work-sample interview. On whether it should be considered the "gold standard", I'm much more hesitant, I think there are some limitations that are still hard to control for.
I do wish Starfighter/Stockfighter model had gained more traction, would've been interesting to see a recruiting company specialize in this and then seeding the interview results to multiple companies model work out.
As a recent interviewee, I much more prefer work samples. Less stressful, more in my control and less bound to whether I got lucky and clicked with the problem in a live interview. It's also just much more akin to what work is like, and therefore requires far less studying. The fact that live interviewing is a completely different skill to actual work is a really bad smell.
> I'm not sure the outcomes were that noticeably better.
It's not just you. At the end of the day interviewing has been demonstrated to be close to a crapshoot in the best of circumstances, and very few interview schemes are the best of circumstances. Work samples are part of the optimal strategy [1] but even then the signal is quite low.
[1] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1998-10661-006
Work sample interviews don't have to be take home. We ran our technical interviews as close to work samples as possible and in person.
It would be nice to have portfolios, but systems are broken enough that that becomes hard to see. I suspect one of the reasons for the bias to hiring PHds in fields where it really isn't necessary is at least you have a work portfolio.
Why do I care about your portfolio if I can just see how effectively you do the actual work?
The problem with work-sample testing (which is commonly administered as a take-home problem for the developer candidate to solve) is two-fold:
a) it discriminates against people who cannot spare 4+ hours of focused time on evenings/weekends to work on the problem. People with multiple jobs, single parents, etc.
b) in the age of AI it is no longer a reliable measure of someone's skill, for obvious reasons
Unlike Yegge, I haven't worked at FAANG, but the companies I have worked at all followed the same hiring practices and suffered from the same problems as he describes.
Provisional employment (or, if that's not possible, then well-paid internships) solve all of those issues. The candidate gets 3-6 months of stable employment, you as the employer get a large number of work-sample tests, and you can see how they use AI and how much.
I think a very real problem is that these take home problems are often way more than 4 hours. And to that they often add the traditional 4-6 hour interview loop.
Provisional employment doesn’t work for most cases, though. It might attract people who have no job and it might attract people who have so much saved that they are okay with potentially being let go after 90 days. But I imagine the vast majority of the potential employment pool are not willing to quit their current job to accept a “maybe” job from another company.
Adding take-home problems to a traditional 4-6 hour interview loop is odious.
But the "way more than 4 hours" thing smuggles in a premise: that every candidate should be able to finish the challenge in the allotted time. But candidates with greater aptitude or conversance with the problem domain will complete work sample tests faster than candidates without, and selecting for those candidates is the point of hiring qualification.
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A standard interview loop kills an entire work day, and is preceded by phone interviews that eat several hours. Properly budgeted work samples are strictly better from the candidate's time perspective, not to mention that you can do them from your couch rather than under flourescent lights in a confeence room.
The AI thing is an interesting problem, but a solvable one. We continue to hire resume-blind.
The question is whether companies would tolerate their own process if their employees did that recruiting process at a different company. They obviously do to some extent via plausible deniability; I have a 1 hour "doctors" appointment this afternoon, or I'm taking leave on Monday. Using it as cover to attend an interview.
Would this company permit an employee taking 3 months unpaid leave to provisional hire somewhere else and have free choice whether they stay or go at the end of it.
I feel like you could get around the AI bit by asking about components and what they do, rationale for decisions, etc. If someone can't speak to it, it should be a clear tell.
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>> A standard interview loop kills an entire work day, and is preceded by phone interviews that eat several hours. Properly budgeted work samples are strictly better from the candidate's time perspective, not to mention that you can do them from your couch rather than under flourescent lights in a confeence room.
Yes, standard interview loops also discriminate, and the more time they take, the more discriminatory they are. Any on-site requirements compound the issues.
Like Yegge says: provisional employment/internships solve all of these issues. You get the best of all worlds: stable employment for the candidate where they get paid a regular wage and aren't under a stressful interview setting, and lots and lots of work samples for you, the employer. It's not perfect. For example, it can be difficult to entrust the provisional employee/intern with anything impactful if you don't know whether they'll be employed at the end. But it is significantly better than the alternatives in most contexts.
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We do all our work samples in person at a our offices as part of the in person interviews. Takes 2-3 hours, never been a problem so far.
If you are going to take a day off to do 3-4 in person interviews at a company then this slots in well.