Technical people are really bad at hiring because they expect that what they know is “general knowledge” and what anyone else knows is some special case.
When in reality, the technical world is so broad that nearly everything is a special case.
I’ve been to a good number of interviews lately and most interviewers are like this. It’s usually some irrelevant trivia questions covering what the interviewer has worked on most recently, thus what they consider “general knowledge,” with nothing of substance on which any decision should be made.
When I conduct an interview, I generally shock candidates by asking no technical questions at all. They are irrelevant. If I can’t tell that you’re technical in a regular conversation about the field and the work, then asking trivia questions won’t help.
Interviews are a terrible way for deciding who to hire anyway, but most people make them less useful than they could be.
I don’t really have a good solution that most businesses would accept since random hiring after some minimal qualification evaluation seems too risky, but I’d like to try that in the real world sometime.
So if technical people are bad at hiring because they think that their area of knowledge is general and HR people are bad because they have no idea about developers (hence weird requirements like 30+ years of JavaScript knowledge but not being to remember anything before 1995), what is a good way to gauge knowledge? Do you just test people? Look at people on StackOverflow? Talk to Gild?
(I have literally no clue as you can tell.)
I thought interviews were for figuring out whether you could stand someone.
Yeah, a very minimal interview might be needed. Not sure. People present themselves really differently than they actually are in an interview, so not sure how valid even that basic screen is.
I’m betting that something like a thirty-second conversation with someone will be statistically no different than a two-hour conversation for ability to determine fit, etc., given what professor reviews show in that regard.
I really do like the idea of random hiring with some very minimal qualification screen, such as a call to make sure they are alive and don’t think they are Jesus or aren’t actually in Syria and things like that.
An interview I did recently one of the interviewers kept harping on asking me to tell the difference between two virtualization products, one of which is rather old and that I hadn’t used in quite a few years. Eventually I started pushing back and told him, “Look, I haven’t used version 4 in about four years. I don’t know the differences. I could look this up rather easily. And that’s exactly what I’d do in the real world. It’d take me 10 seconds. I know you just did a big conversion from that product, but for someone who did that long ago the knowledge is pretty irrelevant.”
Yeah, don’t think he liked that. I got rejected by that company, and then later on called back and offered the job as I assume he was overruled by management or something as I nailed all the other interviews.
I turned down that job.
Ha, went off-topic a bit. But kind of a real-world example of how that plays out I guess.
That link is supremely depressing, and probably accounts for a lot of hiring bias because there’s no way in hell you’re not using your unconscious biases in 30 seconds. But if you’re interviewing for too long it wastes everyone’s time. Two hours at any one stretch is far too long. Fifteen minutes seems to me a good length. An hour I think is a hard limit.
I’m terrible at projecting eager professional servility. That same exchange coming from me would read as “asshole” to most employers especially in this state. One place I interviewed with hated that I told them that they needed to change their passwords to something more secure than “password.”They also hated that I had another job offer (they were only offering me part time and two different 1099s).
Randomization is the only known antidote to bias. Since apparently it’s a crapshoot with all the tea leaves and phrenology and the like, it should be pure savings. Certainly anyone who has successfully applied for a civil service job or skilled trades apprenticeship in the last 40 years or so likens it to winning the lottery. Extrapolate current trends and you’re talking about jobs in general, I’m quite sure.
I’d even be OK with employers going with maximal qualifications instead of minimal for eligibility for the big drawing. After all, it’s conceivable that sometimes you actually need a purple squirrel. There should be an implied contract in that, though. Stated preliminary requirements should be enforced literally, and if that means they’ve narrowed their purple squirrel pool down to zero, that’s their problem.
This could help with the paradox of an economy too automated to make full employment possible, but not fully automated enough to make post-scarcity and universal leisure possible. If your lottery number comes up then I guess you’ve been “drafted” into what’s left of the workfarce. If you’re totally indispensible, expect to get drafted more often than most. If you want to change that, become a “professor” of some sort and allow your brain to be picked (publish or perish, baby) for all the trade secrets and proprietary knowledge that makes you such a special snowflake. Not only is there the incentive of fewer dispatches to the trenches, but the admiration of your fellow citizens for helping advance the state of the art a little farther in the direction of post-scarcity…