That is a lot of interviews. What does that imply about the rejection rate - 90%, 95%?
> Every engineer must be equally skillful with code and colleagues.
I agree with this but feel it might be controversial here.
I think I’d rephrase this to say “every engineer needs a baseline level of skill with both code and colleagues,” rather than “must be equally skillful.” I don’t find the sentiment controversial in the least.
By my back of the conventional-wisdom calculations, each engineer is losing about a day's worth of productivity every week.
What is the cost of a bad hire, though?
I’ve been in a situation where we needed somebody right now to backfill someone who left, and the company agonized over who to hire, taking over a month and blowing through dozens of candidates, ensuring that the product schedule slipped and losing us an untold amount of revenue.
They ended up being pretty weak, having trouble shipping, eating large amounts of onboarding and management attention, as well as other engineers patching up their work to make it serviceable. They were just good enough to make it seem worth the slog too, so they sucked a bunch of extra labor out of everyone else for the better part of a year before they left.
In retrospect, I made the right decision with what I knew in the moment — but with 20/20 hindsight I should have waited.
The number of interviews by “seasoned interviewers” doesn’t say so much about the rejection rate as how much the company is attempting to grow and what proportion of engineers count as “seasoned interviewers.” If almost all people are seasoned then that’s a growth rate of 250%. If only 40% of engineers count as “seasoned interviewers” then that’s a growth rate of 100%.
Being skillfull on soft skills usually is a euphemism for handeling toxic and antisocial coworkers.
I have personally never thought that the would-take-beer-with rating is even remotely as important as technical skills. And being a corny coworker or a toxic one don't really correlate.
They are about communicating clearly and concisely, listening carefully, respecting the people you work with, tolerating differences, disagreeing constructively, handing decisions that don’t go your way gracefully, sometimes going with the tide and sometimes fighting it, and knowing when to do which.