Regardless of rejection rate, that is just a brutal pace to keep up for engineers who are also supposed to be writing code. A lot of interrupts for prep + interview + scoring + team debrief. And for introverts like myself, an hour of talking to a stranger is itself draining and often kills my productivity for a little while afterwards (especially if it went poorly). The occasional week of 3 interviews is fine, but for that to be the baseline blows my mind. How do they get anything done?
> Every engineer must be equally skillful with code and colleagues.
I think I’d rephrase this to say “every engineer needs a baseline level of skill with both code and colleagues,” rather than “must be equally skillful.” I don’t find the sentiment controversial in the least.
I’d love to see a company actually quantify this, instead of just assuming it is large and letting the question paralyze them into being excessively conservative and picky.
I’ve been in a situation where we needed somebody right now to backfill someone who left, and the company agonized over who to hire, taking over a month and blowing through dozens of candidates, ensuring that the product schedule slipped and losing us an untold amount of revenue.
And to pile on the anecdotes, I've been in the exact opposite situation where we needed somebody right now to handle a new requirement, and we hired someone "pretty good" after already taking longer than the rest of management was happy with to hire.
They ended up being pretty weak, having trouble shipping, eating large amounts of onboarding and management attention, as well as other engineers patching up their work to make it serviceable. They were just good enough to make it seem worth the slog too, so they sucked a bunch of extra labor out of everyone else for the better part of a year before they left.
In retrospect, I made the right decision with what I knew in the moment — but with 20/20 hindsight I should have waited.
Suppose as indicated in the article that you want to do 500 interviews in a year and have about 10% success rate. That’s 40 candidates in a month, and assuming 6 person-interviews (3 interviews of 2 interviewers each) are needed per candidate, that’s 250 a month which could be split between 18 “seasoned interviewers” at about 14 interviews a month each.
The number of interviews by “seasoned interviewers” doesn’t say so much about the rejection rate as how much the company is attempting to grow and what proportion of engineers count as “seasoned interviewers.” If almost all people are seasoned then that’s a growth rate of 250%. If only 40% of engineers count as “seasoned interviewers” then that’s a growth rate of 100%.
It's written somewhere 50 engineers from 500 interviews. Plus the one sorted out from initial screening.
Being skillfull on soft skills usually is a euphemism for handeling toxic and antisocial coworkers.
I have personally never thought that the would-take-beer-with rating is even remotely as important as technical skills. And being a corny coworker or a toxic one don't really correlate.
Soft skills aren’t really about likability (though many will like you if you have them).
They are about communicating clearly and concisely, listening carefully, respecting the people you work with, tolerating differences, disagreeing constructively, handing decisions that don’t go your way gracefully, sometimes going with the tide and sometimes fighting it, and knowing when to do which.
That is a lot of interviews. What does that imply about the rejection rate - 90%, 95%?
> Every engineer must be equally skillful with code and colleagues.
I agree with this but feel it might be controversial here.