Comment by halbritt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by halbritt | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

To say nothing of the ethics of cheating, I think this behavior speaks to the value of the interview process. If it can be gamed so easily, it's likely not a great measure of the quality of the candidate and the companies that have implemented deserve the hires they make.

It'd doubtful the folks at the company actually mind that the interviews are being cheated. If the candidates appear to be qualified and appear to be fill the role for which they were hired and appear to be competent in that role, that's sufficient for most corporations and one of the problems working in "tech". That is to say, there are plenty of people in it that appear to be doing a thing, but aren't actually capable.

Somewhere in this thread a poster mentioned woodworking, which is a nice contrast. If you hire a carpenter, it becomes obvious pretty quickly if the carpenter is competent.

the problem is that its a zero-sum game, you can only compare performance across a cohort. if the majority of your cohort cheats, and cheating hurts performance, then they'll all be low performance and you'll still end up promoting some of them (because thats just what happens)

> you can only compare performance across a cohort

I can't accept this premise. Optimally the persons responsible for managing engineering staff should be able to independently determine whether the work being produced was of sufficient quality or not regardless of the cohort.

At issue here, I believe is that this is a difficult thing to cultivate consistently in many corporations and so there's some desire to create standardized metrics for performance against which a cohort is measured. Regardless, most large tech firms have some kind of well defined rubric against which the engineers are measured.

what do you mean sufficient? I think the premise is that all these people can get the job done, but some of them can do it better and faster. In the big tech scene its not about being sufficient, its about being the fastest (faster than the competitor)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com