Hacker News Reader

When you say they "couldn't even handle basic tasks" do you mean they were completely unfit to complete their assigned tasks, or that they were getting hung up on simple tasks, while otherwise being independent and capable? The other key question is whether you had to explain the same things to the same people again and again. Being ignorant is excusable, but being unwilling to learn isn't.

View on HN

> they were completely unfit to complete their assigned tasks, or that they were getting hung up on simple tasks

They were unfit to complete the tasks. But again was not their fault, I think was the hiring that failed.

One concrete example was the fact that our pipelines was quite straightforward for data engineers: packaged Ruby and Python CLIs that runs commands. The runtime was k8s. One of the biggest issues were when something broke in production, none of the people couldn’t go to the container, check the logs and understand the failure.

There’s one situation where I think makes sense to hiring without a test: if the company has the resources and money to provide levelling training for all new hires with no exceptions. I do not know how practical it is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com