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Comment by ndjdbdbnms | Hacker News Reader

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Of course there is a better interviewing process that we know of. The US military has been using it for like a century.

If the US military has such a good interviewing process then how do we keep ending up with generals who lose wars? Back during WW2 they fired or promoted officers based primarily on battlefield performance, which eventually worked pretty well for eliminating the incompetent.

Promotions and demotions are not the result of an interview process. To make general you need decades of military experience and decisions are highly political. Because war is highly political. Generals can't win if the politicians demand the impossible i.e. use guns to turn Afghanistan into a feminist non-tribal nationalist democracy without settling large numbers of Westerners there. Any educated and ethical general would resign before committing to take on such a mission for the president.

Could you describe (or provide a link to an explanation) that process?

I think he means aptitude tests like the ASVAB.

> It doesn’t work so we keep doing it because we can’t try anything different because what we are doing doesn’t work.

Saying it “doesn’t work” is a stretch, no?

The large tech companies all give similar technical interviews for software engineers. Today, most people hired through this process are probably “good enough”.

And by what metric do I mean good enough? These companies are mostly demonstrating some acceptable level of growth. At the end of the day, that’s all their shareholders care about.

We won’t have meaningful change unless there’s an incentive. You think something is broken, but the key decision makers don’t agree.

Source: 10+ years in big tech

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