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Comment by CogitoCogito | Hacker News Reader

> Weeding out poor candidates is not possible with 10-15 minutes informal chats.

You do realize you’re replying to a comment showing it _is_ possible right?

I don't realize that. We know that there was a short chat, and that it resulted in filling a position. We don't know whether it's an effective way to filter out poor candidates. Have you done it? What's your success rate?

If you can't figure out someone is a dud in 60 minutes you are doing it wrong. If you can't figure out someone is a dud in 60 minutes, 360 minutes isn't going to make a difference. Why waste the extra 300 minutes?

Merely knowing I'm doing it wrong isn't actionable. In addition, I need to know what to change to do it right.

You can ask for precise details about the implementation or the weirdest bug they had encountered.

Great tech guys are able to explain to you complex systems quite easily; not by making them overly complex, but quite the opposite, to keep them simple, and regarding the bug you can understand the depth of troubleshooting the person went through.

I do ask questions like this. You might be surprised to learn that there are a fair number of candidates who can answer stuff like this, but really struggle to write any code at all. I'm not totally sure how to account for it.

Different scales different approaches. You don't need to throw a distrubuted server to sort 100 objects.

I'm sure for a small and even medium sized company looking for a technical role it's fine to look at resumes, have a quick chat, and get them in. Not as safe to use when sorting through thousands of candidates at a FAANG.

Yes I have done it. My success rate has been fine. I can’t remember poor hires coming in this way.

That said I’m getting the feeling you’re more interested in confirming your world view than anything else here. Continue hiring however you wish. Continue believing it’s the only effective way of you wish.

The previous comment doesn’t show that - it just shows that there are companies without arduous interview processes.

It _does_ show that. It’s obvious that /u/intelVISA is presenting this as a success story. If /u/intelVISA decides the candidates were good enough then they were good enough. Who else is there to judge but the one making the hiring decisions? Who are you to second guess someone else’s hiring decisions knowing nothing of the role, the pay, the performance, or really _anything_ at all?

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