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Comment by starkfist | Hacker News Reader

In the OP's defense, this is how Google interviews, and they've done ok.

I think it was in Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational book that the story of some branch of the Israeli military came up. They only accept the absolute best applicants, but then they also accept a few that fail the admissions process. The reason is to provide a check on the process; if those admitted 'failures' work out in real life, there's something wrong with the selection process that needs to be corrected.

Once big difference is that they require a certain amount of manpower, so they can't afford to throw away good material due to an inaccurate screening process. I guess in contrast Google can (probably?) afford to be wasteful.

If you can believe Peter Norvig maybe they do ok despite their interviews, not because of them:

"One of the interesting things we've found, when trying to predict how well somebody we've hired is going to perform when we evaluate them a year or two later, is one of the best indicators of success within the company was getting the worst possible score on one of your interviews. We rank people from one to four, and if you got a one on one of your interviews, that was a really good indicator of success."

http://gawker.com/5392947/googles-broken-hiring-process (The first quote)

Google can afford to be ridiculous. Practically everybody would like to work for Google, so they can afford to have a high false negative rate — even if they reject 99% of good candidates, they can probably still fill their staffing needs. RandomCompanySoft, on the other hand, might only get five good candidates for a given position — so if they only recognize one out of every 10 good programmers, they can't find anybody with any skill.

I disagree. Google can afford to hire duds because they have infinite money. A small startup cannot afford to hire anyone they don't need. It's better to hire nobody at all than to hire someone who isn't going to work out.

If you are a startup, you can't afford to be NOT be "ridiculous"

Possibly nothing is worse for a new tech venture than a bad hire. I've lived through a few at various startups. It's horrible. It's the worst kind of death because its often slow and painful and you're bleeding capital.

Also realize that a bad/incompetent programmer is a NET NEGATIVE.... not just net 0!

(obviously being 'ridiculous' is subjective, and highly dependent on the roles and responsibilities of the job).

Google on the other hand actually could afford to be less ridiculous.. they just choose not to.

This isn't about rejecting bad programmers — it's about rejecting good ones. If you can't afford a bad hire, that means you should spend more time and care trying to determine accurately whether somebody is good rather than relying on a rough heuristic with a strong negative bias — especially if you find that your heuristic is rejecting everybody.

you make a valid point, and i completely agree. It's about more efficiently honing in on the best candidates. And the trick is to do that early in the process, especially when the hiring process is typically front-loaded with mostly crap candidates.

I've thought A LOT about this problem... so much so that my web-startup is attempting to solve one aspect of this problem (see my HN profile for the link).

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