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You think people that pass technical interviews can’t be false positives?

I think they weed out a few, but completely ignore practical development skills, work ethic, soft skills, design and architecture skills, etc.

Of course maybe this explains why most of the big tech companies have seemed pretty stagnant for the last decade, largely failing with products and decisions that have poor execution and market fit outside of the products that made them big in the first place.

Has anyone actually studied the best way to hire devs? Like a real, independent study that measured and compared results across, perhaps, a wide array of metrics?



> Has anyone actually studied the best way to hire devs? Like a real, independent study that measured and compared results across, perhaps, a wide array of metrics?

I don't know how you would ever strive to do such a thing when people can't even agree how to measure productivity.

> Of course maybe this explains why most of the big tech companies have seemed pretty stagnant for the last decade, largely failing with products and decisions that have poor execution and market fit outside of the products that made them big in the first place.

In most large companies these things have nothing to do with programmers; the decisions are made by management and products are designed by PMs. Hell, you can't even necessarily blame buggy products on programmers: I've been on projects where everyone realizes things suck but if you don't get funding or agreement to work on infrastructure projects what can you do?


> I think they weed out a few, but completely ignore practical development skills, work ethic, soft skills, design and architecture skills, etc.

This is the whole point of the non-coding portion of the interview, and while it’s not possible to get a full picture of this in the short amount of time allotted, it is generally enough to throw out the obvious ones.

> maybe this explains why most of the big tech companies have seemed pretty stagnant for the last decade, largely failing with products and decisions that have poor execution and market fit outside of the products that made them big in the first place

I think this is unrelated to hiring and more a result of corporate policy.


> I think they weed out a few, but completely ignore practical development skills, work ethic, soft skills, design and architecture skills, etc.

Tech interviews are not solely whiteboarding. Even at FAANGs there are system design and hiring manager interviews designed to ask about those sorts of things.




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