Hacker News Reader

> IMO bite the bullet, over hire and then collect the cream based on evaluation

That sounds at the least unethical and perhaps illegal in some countries. You're messing with people's lives, their ability to pay their mortgages, support their children, and other commitments they might have. While hiring mistakes sometimes happen, you should not be using firing as a tool to make your hiring more cost effective.

And I also think word would get around pretty quickly not to apply to companies who did this. Per the article we are already making lists of who uses ineffective whiteboard tests. I very much doubt any company wants to be on the list of "hires you and then fires you instead of doing effective interviews".

Applicants should know what the process is; I'm not sure why you'd assume that would be kept from them? It's perfectly normal for hiring / firing sales, traders, and other performance oriented professions.

Nothing forces people to apply ... mortgages, children etc.

It really depends on whether as an employee you want a meritocracy or an easy time. Personally, I wouldn't be adverse to this sort of practice; and companies like Valve do something significantly more extreme.

> I'm not sure why you'd assume that would be kept from them?

Where did I assume that?

> nothing forces people to apply

Agreed. I already predicted that the reputation gained from this practice would have talented developers avoiding a company involved in such a shady way of hiring. I'm damn good at what I do and "we will fire the ones who don't work out to avoid doing interviews" is a huge red flag for me. You lose, not me. Companies are competing for developers; experienced developers don't need your company.

> it really depends on whether as an employee you want a meritocracy

A meritocracy is great. Your company just lost at it. There are far better companies I could work for where the interviewing process isn't based on laziness now and fire people later. Want to win in the meritocracy competition between companies? Learn how to interview. I know how. That's why I can hire great devs. Haven't had to fire anyone ever in my career. So that's who you are competing with in this meritocracy. Companies who get the hiring process right.

> IMO bite the bullet, over hire and then collect the cream based on evaluation of the total output and the teams impressions in the probationary period ...

That might work if you have 110 people applying for 100 positions. Just hire everyone and then fire 10 people. Over hiring 10 people probably isn't that much of a problem.

However that does not work if you have 100 people applying for 5 positions. This is the situation we found ourselves in and we had to filter somehow. We chose to do a very simple code challenge which ended up being a very effective filter.

Sure but you’re bound to say that ... Find me a hiring manager than publicly says anything else. That’s kind of part of the point.

I roughly recall google touting ~50% hiring success rate and that’s with a 4 interviewer, 10-15 man interview process, and undoubtedly a massive false negative rejection rate.

I think some undesirable attributes are observable in fairly short screeners ; sure screen away . But I bet you that you’d do at least as well if not better by just selecting at random past that point.

The reason why I say that it was an effective filter was that the majority of people flat out FAILED the coding challenge. We only send out the coding challenge to people who where successful in the first interview and still most people failed the coding challenge.

I am very sure that a random selection, even after the first interview, would have been disastrous.

Result is that we have not fired anyone for performance reasons since we established this hiring process. Which I would say is a success.

Here is the thing: We cant just over hire like you suggested. That would just waste money and as a startup we don't have much of that to waste. Also I think it would be incredibly shitty for us to over hire just to fire people a short time later. The majority of people would have to leave jobs and/or immigrate to this country. Hiring such a person when you are not 100% sure you want to work with them is fairly immoral.

There’s nothing immoral about it if you tell applicants. It’s basically how hiring for sales is done and no one is under any illusion that you won’t keep your job if you don’t perform.

The point here is more nuanced than the straw man you’re painting. Everyone that passes the interview process stays is a bad sign because it confirms something highly unlikely about the interview process: that it succeeds in generalising aptitude.

You’re right that startups can’t do it though other than through intern programmes. Lots of companies do it through intern programmes. Only the fit interns survive and get a job.

The ultra darwinian workplace is probably not a fun place to be. Also it sounds implicit in survival that there is some obviously fairer natural law that governs who survives. It's another judgement by someone with similar repeatability issues, albeit a judgement with more observation time (and more collateral damage to everyone else who is in fear of losing their job).

Well less repeatability issues actually ... since you can think about the counterfactual “what would we lose if they weren’t here” and the actual “what did we gain”. This information is available and you don’t need process to extract it.

As far as “darwinian” goes some of us relish a meritocracy and loathe being surrounded by duds. I understand “Valve” to do something just like this but to a greater extent and they are not having problems hiring.