Maybe three days is enough for some code bases, but if you have millions of lines of code, agents aren't going to help you that much.

> One day, the recruiters gave us a special round of packets to review. In these special packets, we were able to read the interviewer notes and candidate responses. All personal details were stripped out, and we were told it was a “calibration exercise.” We had to do our regular voting job with these special packets, and see how it went. I think we may have assumed they were from another site, since cross-site calibration was common. Our group did our job, and voted not to hire about 2/3 of the packets. This was about par for the course. But surprise surprise, this time, those were our own packets from when we had all interviewed at Google. The recruiters had tricked us into reviewing our own interview packets, and we had voted not to hire most of our own group. For that brief moment, we all had a glimpse into how utterly broken our process was. The people-team had rubbed our noses in it.

Or maybe the company changed in the 10 years or so since everyone in that room was hired and the employee needed 10 years ago is not the same as the ones needed now?

> And then, importantly, each work item also counts once for the candidate: they walk away with a permanent, portable record of what they did and how well they did it, signed by you, whether or not you make an offer.

Why would this be useful signal?

I'll assert that you're in a professional environment of: dishonest posturing and oversized egos in startups, bureaucracy and butt-covering in established companies, and a culture of thin niceness veneer.

I'd think all of that would be barriers to a useful Permanent Record.

> This system is basically worth exactly what your honesty is worth. If you hand out gold stars to everyone, you’re just reinventing LinkedIn endorsements, which are worthless. Companies whose stamps mean anything will be the ones known for only handing them out for quality work. Being a hard, fair judge is an advantage for everyone.

What is the precedent of that working, in the environment I just characterized?

Given our current environment -- which isn't going to change easily; it works for the people who have most of the money now -- seems like a not very reliable new category of surveillance capitalism. But it gets worse... A lot of techbro founders will immediately see this as the next sketchy, hated tech company, which won't only charge companies a fee to participate, but the real business will be twisting it into off-label uses. For example, with whom and when a person has interviewed, and who which companies are interviewing, is valuable data to sell, no matter how useless the feedback. They could also see how close you could get it to a protection racket, by selling Pro individual memberships on the side.

So we get bad signal for the ostensible service, in exchange for additional techbro dystopia.

Mucho respect to the OP who was part of such elite fellowships as the "Bar Raisers" and "Hiring Committees" (and I'm sure he would totally have made it into the prestigious "As Appropriate" group at Micro$oft if he only applied for it).

My record is comparatively humble: I hired around 300 people in tech for small-to-medium size companies, in the small tech backwater of Vancouver, Canada.

My conclusions:

(1) Interviewing is an intractable problem. Start by recognizing that.

- You don't interview the best candidates, but the ones with the best resume.

- You don't hire the best candidates, but the ones that do best at interviews.

- Screening by HR (phone or zoom) is at best useless.

- Timed coding assignments are a waste of time. They are used because they're cheap + provide a [generally wrong] "quantitative signal". Noone's job will consist of solving 8 "leetcode" riddles/day.

(2) "Technology fit" is a dangerous illusion:

- It is very, very, very unlikely that any candidate will be able to pick up right away your tech environment. (ok; exception: you're hiring permanent an existing community contributor for your open source project)

- Your best new hires will be 0% productive in their first month (negative; training will use resources); 15% in their second; 50% in their third.

- Rejecting e.g. "Java" when screening for "C-sharp" is stupid.

(3) The interview process is about building relationships.

- People you don't hire will remember your company from the interview + disseminate.

- Someone you didn't hire today (one of your top rejections) may be super-attractive 2 months later, or next week if your top candidate accepted another position.

- Ownership of the process or at least buy-in from the team (vs. just the hiring manager + opaque "corporate committees") is the first step in a working relationship. Your "superstar" may end up being toxic in the team and you could find that out in the interview.

(4) Five simple rules:

- Treat phone/zoom screening like an advertisement for your company. Ideally do it yourself (hiring manager). Largely ignore feedback from HR :)

- Hire candidates who are: smart + hungry. Programming languages; frameworks; environments are secondary.

- Try to get a sense of the fit with the other humans in the team they'll be working with.

- Take "3-month probation" seriously. Explain it to the candidate + team. Sell it internally. Candidate compensation for a botched probation is reasonable + just money, after all.

- Treat candidates as humans: Send a personalized rejection (from you, the hiring manager _not HR_) to everyone who made it to the interview. Call or zoom everyone who made it to the final round. If you can, provide them actionable feedback on ways to improve their interview process. Leave a "human" door open.

Steve Yegge is the creator of gastown, a multi-agent workspace manager. It's an open source 21st century master piece of ai psychosis, slop, and most especially redundant processes, orchestration and code (MILLIONS OF LINES) I'm finding no surprise and even laugh-out-loud hilarious, that the author of such abomination is also the progenitor of the equally inane and psychotic hiring process of FAANGs like google and amazon.

What's with the fox performing phrenology on a sheep in the generated image captioned "The moment we realized it was us"?

This reads as if he's really struggling not to say "Now that the applicants are desperate we can begin to interview them properly mwahahahaaaa!"

The proposal does not make sense. Candidates do not benefit from accumulating and parading rejections until they reach a company that accepts them. If they have offers, they can and already do tell recruiters. Furthermore, this practice of spending days at a company is expensive in opportunity cost; you will have to burn your vacation time, and be able to interview at fewer companies. The proposal benefits companies, not candidates.

Most interviews are just referrals then confirming the bias, even if you fail some questions, you are likely in. If you came from no where, they are not gonna like you unless you get all the questions right.

If you want to know if someone is good at your company in 3-4 interviews, it’s tough, the best they can do is ask these technical questions. Talk to you about your past work, ask you technical what ifs. Most dumb ass companies will ask you to do trick coding leet code crap.

Very well thought and written. Provisional employee or intern. Or having the candidate to come and do real work for a couple of days. The challenge imo is the big company culture vs startups. Do the things move at the pace in big companies where the teams have the ability to evaluate? Startups are a different beast however.