Picking numbers from a hat say 15 * 7 * 20 = 2,100 unproductive hours to avoid a subpar employee that still actually gets something done in the ~3,000 hours before being fired. That could easily be a net loss depending on how much onboarding time is needed and how unproductive they are on average.
Honestly, I think those numbers may be overly generous to long onboarding processes.
I've been a hiring manager before, and hiring good people is a huge time investment. The reality is that something like 99% of applicants aren't qualified, and the majority seemingly lack enough self-awareness to know it. The really good people also tend to be bad at marketing themselves. I don't think of interviews as a waste of time, though, even when it's a no-hire.
You also need to factor in the odds of this whole process working.
There’s not a whole lot of empirical research that measures the correlation between the interview process and employee performance.
And of course, employee performance measurement is as dubiously effective as ever.
I know multiple FAANG companies that track this data.
And so, every time I go in a section of code to fix a bug or adjust a feature and I see his name in git blame... I spend another few hours to make sure that I'm not breaking some of the twisted framework code that he had and possibly fix it up a bit and adding a unit test for the functionality before I touch anything to assure myself that I know what it is doing.
An unproductive poor employee is bad... a productive bad employee is where the real problems are for years and years to follow.
In your case code reviews could have caught the issue early before it became such a problem. Though obviously they also have a cost.
Well maybe thats the actual problem the company should be fixing?
Other than fiat wealth generation, what gains are there to treating each other like this?
It’s very difficult to quantify individual performance, and even harder to put a dollar figure on it.
The more competent people weren’t necessarily the ones getting more things done, or the most visible, but were those engineers who understood the long term implications of what they were building, how it related to the business, and their relationship to other teams and customers. It’s trivial to be a good “performer” toiling away on a feature or system that shouldn’t exist. It’s exponentially harder to have the awareness to identify where the real problems are, and make sure you’re investing effort where it actually needs to go.
Last week I had fully intended to spend at least 20 hours heads down coding, but instead I spent the entire work week writing and updating an architecture document. It was the best use of my time, though, as it allowed two other people to be heads down coding instead. Now this week it's three of us frantically writing code instead of just me, and we all know the final result will work and be boring. We're replacing a 7 year old piece of critical infrastructure.
Humans are prone to group think, belief in words of power, sigils; why believe in unfalsifiable value assessment when it comes down to tried and true ownership?
If traditional politics win at the end of the day why the belief this matrix of value isn’t just another cognitive boondoggle?
There's very little science in interviewing, and it is indeed heavily based on heuristics. The whole point of lots of interviews is to reduce bias. Unfortunately, it's possible for candidates to mistakenly think an interview went poorly because they didn't get the answer right away, when from the interviewer's point of view it was one of the best answers they've heard because of the process by which the candidate arrived on the answer.
A popular metric for whether a candidate is likely to be able to solve practical problems is whether or not they've shipped products before. A lot of people pad out their resume with collective achievements, though, and so it's something that needs to be dug into. It's unfortunately not uncommon for folk to not understand the stuff on their own resume.
I never consented to this culture. I see little different here than a church, meat based tape recorders thinking the noises they emit are “the way” with little proof except “feudal capitalism” continues to “work”.
We don’t owe deference and agency to CEOs, VCs, and founders. The syntax is different but the LARP of being sheep for “wise men” is the same.
Only 13% of the country has an advanced degree (mine is MSc in math earned in the 90s; I’m old) and knowledge is not locked away in those heads. Education does not make people infallible and omniscient.
This is a result of traditional political memes; owners rule, everyone else drools. The filtering and sorting inside that cognitive bubble is just the proles making proles dance like jesters. No scientific theory makes this the one true way of organizing effort.
Memorizing semantics is not proof they’re correct. If GME can be shorted to the extent it is despite that being illegal, our institutions are built on deference to BS, since that system is the bedrock used to prop up tech VCs.
I enjoy living in and participating in a society. Thanks to the productivity gains of specialization and free trade, technology has been developed to the point that I spend my days designing embedded software to fly autonomous aircraft. Those aircraft deliver medical supplies, primarily in developing countries with poor road infrastructure. At least a few people a week don't die specifically because a UAV I helped make was able to deliver them a blood transfusion. The company is for-profit, and in exchange for my work I am compensated in salary and in equity. The better the company does, the more people have access to life saving medical care, and the more money I personally make. The UAV system also requires people to operate them, and so the company employs hundreds of people in those developing countries. One of the earliest and most tenacious in-country employees quit a couple years ago because they got accepted to a robotics program at Stanford.
The last employee I personally managed the hiring of only had a couple years of community college experience and self-proclaimed ADHD. Despite my intent for them to only spend 6 hours or so on the interview process, they spent probably 16 hours because they found the interview process itself personally rewarding.
The company CEO drives a crappier car than everyone else at the office. By coincidence, I had a serious problem last week that required intervention, and I quite literally made the CEO dance like a jester for me in order to make a point. There was no scientific theory involved.
I'm right there with you regarding the corruption of most financial and government institutions. I don't think it's as black and white as "capitalism bad", though.
Shorting is only illegal if it's naked. When I ask people who say this what they mean, the answer is usually that the shorting must be naked because so many shares are being shorted. But that isn't how that works. If you have other evidence though, I'd certainly be interested.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/01/28/yes-a-stock-can-ha...
Worked for me.
I know how the boring numbers game works and optimized for it. I’m being honest instead of equivocating in Anglo-babble reasons why a process is an acceptable measure for filtering some people. To see poetry in this is a bit weird. It’s the same old fundamental arithmetic operations applied to different geometry. Pretty routine for us been there done that’s.