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Comment by ahelwer | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en

How exactly could a PM interview process (which is just asking you to walk through a bunch of design scenarios) give a stronger hiring signal than having developed a product the company wanted to acqui-hire? Honestly somewhat insulting that they made him go through a full external interview loop. At most it should have been some informal chats of the sort you get when transferring teams internally.

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I think the reason this process was used is because if you are some random employee at Microsoft, you don't have the ability to just acquire a company. You probably don't even know who to look for to ask for such a thing. But what you can do is create a req for a position and refer someone you know for it.

I am guessing that the average "higher up" at Microsoft does not know what AppGet is, or even what the priorities for package management in Windows are. It's just not a high level strategy thing, it's a low level engineering thing.

> Honestly somewhat insulting that they made him go through a full external interview loop.

Wait, what? So if someone is a "name brand" celebrity, they should get to jump the queue and coast by with an "informal chat?" How is that fair? I don't care if I'm interviewing John Carmack, he's getting the same evaluation process I would give to any other senior candidate. Software Engineering's got enough problems with interviewing--it doesn't need an aristocracy that gets special treatment.

Technical interviews aren't a hazing ritual that we should all suffer equally out of some misplaced idea of equality. They're just one way of informing the decision of whether to hire someone.

I find it unlikely that even large companies put their superstar famous hires through the same hiring process.

They don't for sure given a certain point. It is known. Have you ever heard of a formal interview process for execs.. No.

Actually there are processes for execs too, the board has to justify appointments. But yes, they can be a formality.

That's absurd. What he has built literally demonstrates he has the ability that the role requires - which is entirely what the entire interview loop is trying to ascertain. If you can ascertain that a person has a skillset without that loop, it is completely unnecessary.

Perhaps the role actually required skills other than those used to build Homebrew?

That is simply not true, he wrote the package manager as a side project, that says nothing about if he is a good cultural fit for Microsoft.

The point of an interview is to figure out the capabilities of a candidate. If they are already known, it makes most of the interview process pointless.

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