First: we no longer trust the hiring manager alone, because probably they aren't a strong developer. We instead trust strong developers that are well trained at evaluating good devs. At the same time, we don't want to thrust a dev onto a hiring manager, so they also need to interview you too and have a say.

Second: Is it really fair to have just one or two developers evaluate you? When I first was an interviewer, I liked everybody! I would have hired them all. So getting multiple data points matters. Best to have at least a couple dev interviews.

Then there's the whole problem of needing to evaluate you on multiple dimensions. Can one interview really tell if you're good problem solving, coding, algorithms/data structures, and any specialization the role has? What about the soft skills aspect? We're going to need to have at least 3 or 4 interviews to cover all these aspects. These roles pay a huge sum of money, so there's a lot of worry that someone will be hired who doesn't really meet the bar, you know?

But now we have a bigger problem: if we're going to invest 4+ people to spend an hour of time with you each, we'd better have some data points that you're worth that investment. So maybe we need one or two initial interviews ahead of time to weed out any obviously unlikely candidates.

After that, it's every other company going "Oh shit, Amazon does 6 interviews? We should do that too!".

Scaling any process to thousands of people is always hard.

Is it annoying for candidates? Yeah, but we pay you a lot of money, and it does actually work for us. Is it perfect? No, but it does work.

“Hire and Fire fast” doesn’t actually work well if you want to give people a chance to succeed. Also people tend to keep low performers around too long. Best to avoid this as much as possible.

Compared to what? I don’t think anyone is claiming this process is perfect. Just that it’s better than alternatives.

People will always get PIP’d and fired. But the goal is to reduce that as low as possible.

And it shows, barely anyone in my entire career has ever been fired. I only personally have been close to one.

I knew a guy at a FAANG who earned himself and his report a PIP for the grave sin of choosing the wrong deputy to send upstairs while he was on vacation. The deputized person went to one meeting and ran his mouth (arguably, told the truth). Both are no longer at the company.

PIP politics are absolutely routine in FAANG and if you’re arguing the other side you don’t know. FAANG is actively trying to fire or replace you at all times. I’ve worked at two so I can’t speak for three, but I’ve also worked for the two in that older acronym that you’d think of as the “nicest”. People read that that and probably hear me saying “giant evil entity is out to get you”, but it’s really middle managers cosplaying Kings Landing in the office, mostly unchecked, that does it.

Seriously; people want to work at a FAANG/MAMAA or whatever so they often assume it’s good. I had someone ask me if I noticed how light my calendar was now that the org considered me irrelevant. There’s an idea that FAANG is a bunch of nerds with glasses cooking up cool shit in a Zen commune with ambient drone music but it’s honestly some of the worst office politics I’ve ever seen across what is now two careers, and the PIP process is a big tool in that kit.

I went from long time IC to manager at a faang adjacent company. It was eye opening to see who was on a PIP and go through calibrations.

There were well liked, competent people who others on the team got along with but they just were not delivering at the expected level. Sometimes the problem was lack of motivation or bad role fit.

Another i think is when management doesn't understand that someone is, in your wording, a "well liked, competent person", doesn't adequately understand what they bring to the team. Performance reviews, especially of ICs but not exclusively, have a bias towards perceived individual contribution and against teamwork.

So is the 7 interview gauntlet. But I guess it just shifts the burden on the candidates and externalizes cost.

People who put up with anything are expensive. They keep billing you hours for tasks that could have been reduced to minutes by someone with a lower tolerance for BS.

Where do you people work because I'd like to (a) avoid it and (b) poach people because your world view sucks and I can only assume that's a direct response to a shit environment.

To put it into perspective, my first 1:1 with everyone on the team includes questions like "what have previous managers done to help you be successful?" Managing people can be difficult but managers shouldn't be.

My current company ambushed me with a full interview panel, Gilligan's Island style, when a former coworker invited me to come in for a 3 hour tour. I took it in stride and had fun, and it gave me some additional leverage while negotiating compensation. I remember writing an architecture doc and unit tests when they asked me to code something in an hour and a half. I've been there 6 years and it's been most rewarding for me and my family.

My first job out of school was a solid 8 hours of interviews, and I had a lot of fun during that interview too. I got to work on space ships, and in time made a fortune in equity. I remember preparing a presentation slide deck completely in valid C++ syntax. I also remember taking a red-eye after that interview for another 8 hours of interviews at another company, which I also enjoyed despite having only had 4 hours of sleep.

The 2nd company I worked for decided last minute to interview me for two different roles. That was like 11 hours of interviews. I actually ended up taking the 2nd role because it was a significantly better fit. I brought a large cast iron skillet to that interview, which was a nice ice breaker.

It's true that I put up with a lot of frustrating tasks without complaining, but I personally have zero tolerance for BS. It turns out that the more I push back on BS within an organization, the more I tend to get paid, so in that sense I suppose I am expensive!

Going through TSA with a cast iron skillet in your carry-on is actually pretty fun because it's impossible for the screener not to giggle. I've also gone through airport security with a 20lb printed circuit board with about 90% copper fill, which surprisingly got less scrutiny.

Having something fun to make your interview memorable seems to go over well. I got selected for an internship because I showed up to the "interview" in a Hawaiian shirt. Apparently every other candidate showed up in a suit. We were meeting at a coffee shop on a college campus, so I just dressed for the environment.

I mean, maybe their other job isn't doing great, because they clearly have all this time to interview, wonder what is going to happen when they join your company...

Similarly, someone with a flexible, relatively good job is more easily able to look around and find an even better opportunity.

On the other hand, it takes some courage and risk tolerance to step out from the day to day grind and find something better, even if it could ruffle some feathers. That's not something that comes naturally to most people. Break some eggs to make an omelette.

It's expensive for the company too. All of the people involved in the interview process are still getting paid while they are interviewing the candidates. They aren't working on their projects that they have to complete. The company probably has a recruiting or talent acquisition team and the people on that team don't work for free. The company might also work with outside agencies or external recruiters. If you hire one a candidate from one of these sources, you have to pay them too.

It's really expensive in terms of time and money to hire people. It's really hard to build a great team.

Except the interviewee.

Even if there weren't, then 10% of the extra compensation vs. an easier-to-hire company with your discount horizon applied would also count as payment.

I clearly live in a different labour market to this conversation. How many places in the world is this common?

Picking numbers from a hat say 15 * 7 * 20 = 2,100 unproductive hours to avoid a subpar employee that still actually gets something done in the ~3,000 hours before being fired. That could easily be a net loss depending on how much onboarding time is needed and how unproductive they are on average.

Honestly, I think those numbers may be overly generous to long onboarding processes.

And so, every time I go in a section of code to fix a bug or adjust a feature and I see his name in git blame... I spend another few hours to make sure that I'm not breaking some of the twisted framework code that he had and possibly fix it up a bit and adding a unit test for the functionality before I touch anything to assure myself that I know what it is doing.

An unproductive poor employee is bad... a productive bad employee is where the real problems are for years and years to follow.

In your case code reviews could have caught the issue early before it became such a problem. Though obviously they also have a cost.

I've been a hiring manager before, and hiring good people is a huge time investment. The reality is that something like 99% of applicants aren't qualified, and the majority seemingly lack enough self-awareness to know it. The really good people also tend to be bad at marketing themselves. I don't think of interviews as a waste of time, though, even when it's a no-hire.

You also need to factor in the odds of this whole process working.

There’s not a whole lot of empirical research that measures the correlation between the interview process and employee performance.

And of course, employee performance measurement is as dubiously effective as ever.

I know multiple FAANG companies that track this data.

Well maybe thats the actual problem the company should be fixing?

Humans are prone to group think, belief in words of power, sigils; why believe in unfalsifiable value assessment when it comes down to tried and true ownership?

If traditional politics win at the end of the day why the belief this matrix of value isn’t just another cognitive boondoggle?

There's very little science in interviewing, and it is indeed heavily based on heuristics. The whole point of lots of interviews is to reduce bias. Unfortunately, it's possible for candidates to mistakenly think an interview went poorly because they didn't get the answer right away, when from the interviewer's point of view it was one of the best answers they've heard because of the process by which the candidate arrived on the answer.

A popular metric for whether a candidate is likely to be able to solve practical problems is whether or not they've shipped products before. A lot of people pad out their resume with collective achievements, though, and so it's something that needs to be dug into. It's unfortunately not uncommon for folk to not understand the stuff on their own resume.

I never consented to this culture. I see little different here than a church, meat based tape recorders thinking the noises they emit are “the way” with little proof except “feudal capitalism” continues to “work”.

We don’t owe deference and agency to CEOs, VCs, and founders. The syntax is different but the LARP of being sheep for “wise men” is the same.

Only 13% of the country has an advanced degree (mine is MSc in math earned in the 90s; I’m old) and knowledge is not locked away in those heads. Education does not make people infallible and omniscient.

This is a result of traditional political memes; owners rule, everyone else drools. The filtering and sorting inside that cognitive bubble is just the proles making proles dance like jesters. No scientific theory makes this the one true way of organizing effort.

Memorizing semantics is not proof they’re correct. If GME can be shorted to the extent it is despite that being illegal, our institutions are built on deference to BS, since that system is the bedrock used to prop up tech VCs.

Shorting is only illegal if it's naked. When I ask people who say this what they mean, the answer is usually that the shorting must be naked because so many shares are being shorted. But that isn't how that works. If you have other evidence though, I'd certainly be interested.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/01/28/yes-a-stock-can-ha...

Worked for me.

I know how the boring numbers game works and optimized for it. I’m being honest instead of equivocating in Anglo-babble reasons why a process is an acceptable measure for filtering some people. To see poetry in this is a bit weird. It’s the same old fundamental arithmetic operations applied to different geometry. Pretty routine for us been there done that’s.

I enjoy living in and participating in a society. Thanks to the productivity gains of specialization and free trade, technology has been developed to the point that I spend my days designing embedded software to fly autonomous aircraft. Those aircraft deliver medical supplies, primarily in developing countries with poor road infrastructure. At least a few people a week don't die specifically because a UAV I helped make was able to deliver them a blood transfusion. The company is for-profit, and in exchange for my work I am compensated in salary and in equity. The better the company does, the more people have access to life saving medical care, and the more money I personally make. The UAV system also requires people to operate them, and so the company employs hundreds of people in those developing countries. One of the earliest and most tenacious in-country employees quit a couple years ago because they got accepted to a robotics program at Stanford.

The last employee I personally managed the hiring of only had a couple years of community college experience and self-proclaimed ADHD. Despite my intent for them to only spend 6 hours or so on the interview process, they spent probably 16 hours because they found the interview process itself personally rewarding.

The company CEO drives a crappier car than everyone else at the office. By coincidence, I had a serious problem last week that required intervention, and I quite literally made the CEO dance like a jester for me in order to make a point. There was no scientific theory involved.

I'm right there with you regarding the corruption of most financial and government institutions. I don't think it's as black and white as "capitalism bad", though.

It’s very difficult to quantify individual performance, and even harder to put a dollar figure on it.

Last week I had fully intended to spend at least 20 hours heads down coding, but instead I spent the entire work week writing and updating an architecture document. It was the best use of my time, though, as it allowed two other people to be heads down coding instead. Now this week it's three of us frantically writing code instead of just me, and we all know the final result will work and be boring. We're replacing a 7 year old piece of critical infrastructure.

The more competent people weren’t necessarily the ones getting more things done, or the most visible, but were those engineers who understood the long term implications of what they were building, how it related to the business, and their relationship to other teams and customers. It’s trivial to be a good “performer” toiling away on a feature or system that shouldn’t exist. It’s exponentially harder to have the awareness to identify where the real problems are, and make sure you’re investing effort where it actually needs to go.

So I think I'd rather have a candidate spend 7 hours interviewing if it could save months of pain for multiple people later.

(This does assume, of course, that the 7-person interview panel actually does decrease the incidence of hiring-the-wrong-person enough to be worthwhile. I don't know if that's actually the case.)

Out of all the things I think are wrong with tech jobs -- and with employment in general -- I don't think "I have to interview with 7 people instead of 1 or 2" even cracks the top 50.

Maybe it was always that way though

Granted, I've only ever taken and given interviews, never given (or, fortunately, been under) a PIP or firing. But interviewing is just a few weeks or so of preparation and then a day or two, and the preparation is often fun, and so are some of the interviews. Nobody thinks PIPs and firings are fun.

The point is that there is little, if any, evidence that a given interview process does this.

I make half-ish of a FAANG salary, but it's enough to comfortably support a family and I'm generally pretty happy and get to work on cool stuff. The only challenge I never get at work are problems that have huge scale components.

If you're early in your career, they probably matter and it might be worth it, but for me it's not.

Maybe it'd be different in Silicon Valley, but in London they just aren't willing to offer enough over and above the kind of jobs I've had elsewhere to be worth the misery (with the big caveat that I'm at the high end of non-FAANG London market rates; for someone who is not, FAANG may be worth it here too)

Other interviews back then and more recent were pretty much the same. Max. 3 x 1h-ish meetings. I do have a bad habit of asking the interviewer to sell me the job on the first face 2 face meeting though. This does offend some of them and we drop it there. No point beating around the bush and wasting time if they think the interview is a one way street.

I also tend to make it clear from the outset I will not come cheap, in a "are you sure you can afford me?" kind of way. Not mentioning specifics, but making it clear I know my market value and won't consider low offers.

Some get very taken back, but it sets a tone. I think you're absolutely right you need to make sure they know it's two way, and to give a clear impression they're chasing someone high value, and that they're not the prize, you are.

But if their pitch is all about "changing the world" but they're not willing to share the upside, I know I'm wasting my time, so I want to make sure they know that I expect my share too, not just fuzzy feelings.

E.g. I a while back came across a company that was very proud of how rapidly they were growing, but somehow thought that mattered to me when they were not willing to offer any shares or options. I was meant to be excited about making other people rich...

I pointed out to them I've not once taken a job on terms like that in the last 25 years and called off the process after the first interview. I also explained to the recruiter just how far off market they were for someone at my experience level.

If that had happened after 5-6 interviews I'd have been incensed...

FAANG recruiters in particular also seem to get confused when I insist on getting an indication of salary range and option/rsu amounts before being willing to agree to an interview. Several times I've had recruiters come back to me days later after digging up the information, as their first line seem to not even know, just expecting people to be all excited they're even calling. For my part I'm shocked more people aren't having that conversation. But that does explain leaked info some time back about how Facebook is dealing with high rejection rates once they actually give offers.

If you can't get someone up to speed with your internal processes fast enough to at least gauge if they're following along that indicates an internal problem.

The problem is, I think, that HR does not want technical staff to see the hires for (probably made up) legal reasons. So the decision is mostly made by people who can't actually gauge competency.

"Interview was weak. They don't know what they're doing."

"Aced the interview. Fired after two weeks. Leadership doesn't know how to hire or manage."

"Never seen a place with so much churn. In the last six months, I've seen at least half a dozen engineers exit after two or three weeks."

Know what raises the level of difficulty for finding candidates? Shit reviews about the company. You can have the best tech but if you have a toxic smell, you can't hire. To the outside, perception is reality and reviews are how you get that perception. You can't do the opposite though and say "J Smith passed interview but we let them go after two weeks because they couldn't do more than pseudo code on a whiteboard." and even if you could, you'd look like a shit company and you'd still have an impossible time hiring but for other reasons.

This idea of quick hire/fire is so bad that all you have to do it go one or two steps further to find the obvious problems. But hey, start a company and use that model. See how it goes. Prove us all wrong.

Not to mention the amount of technical debt high turnover causes for tech companies

The opposite is 7 interviews and shedding most of your applicants for trivial reasons. Most businesses can't support that, too much work would go undone and they would stop being competitive.

I was just talking about to implications of poor company chemistry which stems from lack of trust and job insecurity.

I think the best way to evaluate a person is just to talk to them about their experience and why they do what they do. Passion is a critical indicator

I can only say that: Oh my gosh do I not want to work for a company that "hires fast and fires fast". For many different reasons.

Most people except for a few outliers will be fumbling around the first month while they learn the code and the company.

The entire system makes absolutely no sense, precisely when looking at the numbers. You could do anything you wanted during the interview and that still won’t change the outcome that the same number of people will still be fired at the end of the day.

We make an effort to take up as little of the candidate's time as possible.

My response was in good faith, and yours is not.

Having had a fair bit of experience interviewing on the technical side, I've observed a huge variance in quality of interviewer. Sometimes you get someone who values communication, creative problem solving and asking good questions. Sometimes you get a whiz kid who gets off on playing gatekeeper and judging people as below their superior intellect.

Even a single person in the chain who falls into that latter group can completely derail a potential hire, leading to an overabundance of false negatives, IMO.

They were US startups and they've all tried to emulate what I think of as the FAANK process: so you have an initial call, a technical screen a couple of other rounds of technical screens, that maybe include system design, and fit/behavioral with people you might be working with. In practice the people who got hired endured 5 to 7 interviews.

It's interesting to see the statements here saying that the reason for the large number of interviews is to assess the candidate from a number of dimensions and perspectives. What I observed was that was not how it really worked.

My position as an outside contractor, as well as someone who loves chatting with people, made me sort of the ideal confessional for the engineers who directly participated in the hiring process.

The main dynamic that drives having such a high number of interviews is that the hiring process is less about assessing the candidate (beyond a certain point) and more about allowing to play out the implicit political power and conflicts of the people who are judging the candidate.

For example in the first startup we had this engineer who was identified by the CTO and co-founder (who formally stepped down as CEO) as being a good potential hire, and they excelled in the technical aspects of the interview but they received meh votes from one of the engineers who was lead on a significant project and had a bit of clout, at 3rd interview, and were subsequently rejected, after 7th interview.

So basically the feeling of the staff that I talked to was the reason there existed four more interviews after the consensus was to hire, was to allow the political player to promulgate their preferences and manufacture consent with the motion to reject. So through a careful orchestration of four additional interviews closely managed by the political player who asked doubt-casting questions in each debrief this lead was able to cultivate doubt where formally there had been consensus (besides his sole dissent -- he wouldn't have been working with a person anyway, heh :)). So basically it would have been intolerable for this politically clouted lead person to have "lost" to those other staff with less clout by having their preference denied. I felt really sorry for the candidate but I heard that when they got the 7th interview rejection that already accepted an offer at a FAANG, go figure. Heh :)

Observed a similar dynamic play out in another hiring process at a different startup. That stage we had the director of engineering identify candidate that was a good hire. And basically softly railroad them through the process which didn't prove difficult as everyone was mostly on board and the team was really desperate for high quality technical talent with the right skills and this person had that.

So what was interesting to observe was that the other candidates in the pipeline at that time were still taken through interviews even though this person was basically from the initial screen stage already being moved to be hired internally, and all of the other interviews were basically friendly get to know you sessions with super lightweight technical questions and a lot of I suppose you could call it confirmation bias but it's really just you know people being nice to someone they want to work with.

But all of these other poor candidates in the pipeline were still put through all these interviews with the idea that you know there was still a role out there for them being told the same things they would have been told were they you know actually under contention. Or maybe that was because we didn't know if the candidate was going to accept or not but they seemed pretty keen and the thing is I'm almost 100% sure the team wouldn't have hired any of the other candidates in the pipeline anyway.

But again I observe the dynamic where the debrief interviews about these non-starter candidates were basically role-playing games for politics in the organization where people projected their preferences into little power games against their colleagues to try to have their own preferences be the ones that win. Decidedly wasn't about those candidates at all because they had not even had any chance of being in the process. The only point of the subsequent interviews of all those non-starter candidates was to act as an arena for the staff to role play their sort of political status conflict games with each other but this was never exposed or stated it was just this sort of implicit thing.

So given that experience I wonder how much that is a dynamic driving these lengthy and in a lot of cases unnecessary interview processes across all of the tech hiring and organizations that are utilizing this type of process these days.

I don't think it could apply everywhere I think there's probably places like Amazon where they are really doing something different. And like I said I don't have any of the data from the ZFAMG stuff.

But I'm reminded of something Peter thiel said which is you know in academia the battles are so fierce because the stakes are so small. But another side of that is everything so secure there and that's why the stakes are so small. Same thing is true in tech I mean once you score one of those 150k plus contracts and you're doing something that you basically love doing it is a great ride and everything really is so secure so how do people take out their natural ape brain competitive urges in that environment? I think as another commenter said, where can people project their risk-focused paranoia in such a low risk environment? and it's onto personnel.

So I think there's definitely the case to be made for maladaptive pathological psychological underpinning of these lengthy hiring processes as much as there is a case to be made for how they could be useful at getting data from from a bunch of candidates.

Personally I think the best types of hiring interviews are some sort of pair programming work emulation. The problem with that is in my experience companies are generally very terrified to open up their internal code base to the eyes of outsiders because they're basically scared that oh my God people are going to steal our code.

But it's always the case where after someone's hired and you start working with them that's something you end up doing and that's where you really get a sense you know if can I trust this person to deliver and do they match what people are being saying about them from the interviews.

So I just think those sort of work emulation tasks you where you're pair programming or talking through something with someone it really has more of a place than it seems to have been given so far in most of the places that I've seen and heard about.

i whole heartedly agree on the pair programming approach being practical and yielding good results. i think you can skip exposing the candidate to the internal codebase, and replicate an internal problem in a more generic and high level way.

This can be present even in non-FAANG interviews. Early in my career, I had an interview at a financial company and for a question about how do you style html pages, my answer was CSS and the interviewer expected something about ASP.NET webstyles. He was't ready to accept my answer saying you are a dotnet dev and should use ASP.NET functionality since it was more superior rather than CSS. I was like CSS is a web standard and anyone even designers can modify CSS.

So yeah, it depends on the maturity of the interviewer.

The thing is most big companies don't care about your burn-out or personal situation, they either have product launch deadlines to meet, or revenue targets or customers to please, and people in the trenches are considered replaceable so churn is something they account for in order to meet those commitments.

If you're lucky you might have an understanding manager, but he himself may have targets to reach for his bonus or promotion, and if you're dragging his team down and his bonus promotion with it, then ... it's nothing personal, it's just business, you will be let go.

I worked for a major European semi company and the churn there is insane, either they fire people or people leave by themselves within the first 2 years. All because managers are given near impossible targets, along with great bonuses and stock packages to incentivize them to use whatever means necessary to deliver on those targets, usually at the expense of people in the trenches which are treated as expendable commodities.

I have seen a couple of people get fired for cause; that was always clear. I’ve never seen an unambiguous PIP.

Generally, the more the company practices “hire fast, fire fast” the easier and more common it will be to PIP people.

The companies with 4+ stage interviews and entire departments devoted to recruiting and candidate evaluation tend to not have as many PIPs because they’ve studied their interviewing processes and prevented most of the underperformers from getting hired in the first place.

The most quick-to-fire company I ever worked for had barely a 1-hour interview process. They’d hire anyone who seemed remotely qualified and then they’d fire everyone who didn’t work out. It was terrible and now I’m actually suspicious of companies that don’t do much technical screening for applicants.

Lack of motivation and burnout maybe could be somewhat sussed out in an interview if it was obvious, but the people that I've been around that's happened to (and myself at one point in my career) were completely fine, but I'm skeptical of any interviewer that says they can reliably fish that out.

isn't output related with lack of tech skills?

In my experience in high performing tech companies, I've seen about 40 PIPs. There are 'utter tech incompetence' PIPs in the world, but as far as I've seen, they are far less popular than 'thoroughly uninterested in working' PIPs, 'disliked by new manager' PIPs and 'person has a work unrelated crisis' PIPs. Those tech related PIPs will normally have all the symptoms already in the first review cycle. If someone made it to their 2nd year in the company, tech incompetence is not really the issue. It's just unfortunate that nobody provides stats for this kind of thing, so we don't have to just rely on "you have seen" vs "I have seen" arguments.

In some cases, task assignment instead of task choice. Sometimes by unluck of the draw, you just get assigned to a shit project with no visibility. You could be Einstein, write entirely bug-free code, and you’re not going to get rewarded for the work.

I’ve seen really mediocre people brown-nose and schmooze themselves onto a rocket ship project that takes off despite their mediocrity, and they get promoted to the moon. That’s how some VP’s and Directors are made. Meanwhile, a literal genius languishes away improving the performance of InvisibleInternalTool by 500%.

The older I get the more I realize how much corporate tech performance evaluation has to do with politics and bullshitting and “being highly visible” and how little it has to do with performance.

There will always be burning mistakes, or people who lie or are otherwise hard to predict will be a disaster. What else would you propose?

If you're at the PIP stage, it generally means your boss and your superboss have decided that it's time for you to go, but for legal purposes, they need to look like they tried to give you a chance, so they work with HR to craft specific-but-typically-unattainable goals which would theoretically allow you to save your job if you hit them all. But with boss+superboss already wanting you gone, the likelihood that they'll agree you've hit an improvement goal that's usually a thinly-veiled form of "stop me from hating you anymore, lol" is pretty low.

If you get a PIP, in nearly 100% of cases, you should just take it as notice that your employment is going to end at the specified review date in the PIP. It's not usually worth trying to hit the goals. Focus on interviewing.

That said, I once managed an individual who had survived 4 PIPs by the time he reported to me. I heard that he was eventually fired about 2 years after I left, but not sure if it was his 6th or 7th PIP. He was a particular discrimination liability at a company that was very sensitive to that type of thing.

It rather stuck in my mind.

(I also did not, ultimately, end up exiting the company as a result of the PIP, just for completeness given the context of the thread.)

This means if an employee here were put on a PIP, it's usually (but not always) the first step towards them being fired.

https://cdn.n7.gg/pip/pip-1.png

https://cdn.n7.gg/pip/pip-2.png

Not every company is awful.

1) build a plan and make meaningful progress on a high impact, but stalled, project

2) communicate about progress and/or roadblocks to the team, and ask for help where needed to get past said roadblocks

3) be more proactive about finding and proposing high impact work, or areas where others could bring their expertise to help benefit my work or get it done faster

Details are confidential, of course.

The problem is that those are two highly correlated data points. Toxic bosses are eventually found but at that point they leave a track of dead bodies.

What I have seen sometimes is moving around disgruntled employees. It has its own problems but a lot of the times they are recovered and even become very productive again.

Agree, and this is often overlooked. There's a handful of people I used to admire whose tendency to readily believe whatever's being sold by their middling middle management chain has left me deeply disappointed.

Middle management is a necessary evil, but there's little hope if upper management fails to recognize and subvert its inherent incentive structure.

BUT, I’ve only ever seen the “unattainable goal” type.

The interview process asks a LOT of the interviewee and then does not provide anything that could help the person improve next time, so the entire process feels like a complete waste of time. In my case, I was also disrespected by the recruiter.

The next time they reached out, I failed the phone screen somehow by someone who sounded 20 years younger than me (which is frustrating when you have already passed these same steps before). I don't respond to Amazon recruiters anymore.

I am definitely a little pretentious for saying this but I get kinda peeved when I am interviewing for high-level roles and my initial tech screen is by a junior engineer. It's not so much that I think I am too smart to be properly evaluated by them or that they aren't worth being part of a hiring pipeline (they very much should be!), but my opinion is that junior engineers aren't properly tuned for what is and isn't a good engineer and if they are, they shouldn't be a junior engineer.

The other side is when I get reached out to interview for a high-level role then get talked down to about how I don't fit their criteria and I basically wasted the executive vice president of external internal engineering's time.

Presumably they aren't instructed to evaluate for that, but instead to identify glaring communication or other interaction issues.

1) Recruiters at these companies are under a large amount of pressure to bring candidates in.

2) There is only so much time in the day

3) They feel all of their time must be spent on potential hires because of #1 and #2

4) No one likes giving bad news

I don't feel like any of these reasons excuse you from being a considerate human being. Ultimately, it happens because recruiters are never rewarded for being considerate. People who fail the interview process are treated like legal liabilities.

Consider, possibly, that the mismatch is explained in this sentence.

I will absolutely give high weight to how the receptionist is treated by the candidate.

Nothing rising to the level of implying and certainly not implying rude.

Just, "I failed the phone screen somehow by someone who sounded 20 years younger than me" might be suggestive of something to self-examine.

But since you're confident that you are fully innocent in the interaction and the rejection is solely due to your interlocutor's naivete and inexperience, then it's no doubt true.

The truth is that nobody likes being interviewed. Getting tested and judged by strangers isn’t fun.

But developers also really don’t like being surrounded by unqualified developers who slipped through a weak interview process. They also don’t like having significant numbers of their teammates fired and replaced all the time because the company had “hire fast, fire fast” interview styles. It’s miserable and slightly terrifying to work at a company where nobody really wants to invest much time into building relationships with new hires because many of them are going to be PIPed out before the year is over.

So while the interviews may not be fun, the reality is that strong developers really appreciate the outcome of such a rigorous process. It also helps protect people from becoming false negatives because they didn’t mesh with a single interviewer or struggled with a single interview problem.

So now we’re at this weird equilibrium where devs simultaneously hate the interview process for themselves but appreciate it being applied to everyone around they (even if it’s not immediately obvious).

I do. It might be because I'm way better at performing in interviews than in the actual job. It's also way more exciting to do. I have also done interviews on the hiring side of the table, and that's not nearly as enjoyable. However, especially finding people to work with you is quite rewarding.

Not really. When I was at Google there were tons of candidates that would get passed on because of one of the interviews going badly.

I sort of do. It's fun problem solving, at least sometimes.

Only if we assume the managerial class doesn't use this extended process as a chance to do politics and if we assume a longer interview results in better matches.

My experience in casting actors (different field I know) is, that after a certain duration you will get diminishing results. You can tell most of the time within an 20 minutes or less of someone could do the job or not. The rest of the hour is needed to figure out how they work in different situations.

What I would never do is have my existing actors interview them. They can veto someone, they can tell me what they think, but why on earth would I let them interview someone?

I considered applying for Google at the time, but the combination of the famously arduous interview process, AFAIK both in terms of the time taken and difficulty (for which the recruiter recommended taking further studies in advanced data structures and algorithms) meant that attempting it would be silly.

That's what a "farm team" is for, developing folks with a growth mindset. Never thought of it as either miserable or terrifying.

Rarely have I ever seen a candidate be rejected by seniors or leads and still get the job even when the decision had to be argued until it was unanimous. Pretty much if a senior goes thumbs down, the decision has been made and the meeting is over.

Leads and CTOs especially have to be mindful of either not being part of the decision or being the last vote, as to not taint the results... which again, means that the most senior vote will flip a "yes" to a flat "no"

Discussing how many no’s it should take to reject a candidate is a worthwhile discussion. I can override specific no’s with good reason at my company, but not all companies have that.

My broader point is that this is a specific issue with the process we can iterate on. We don’t need to throw out the whole process.

And then on the flip side - if you are really a star, and you are interviewing at a small company you should want 5-7 interviews to gauge the caliber of people you will work with.

Case in point, all these FAANG companies which pride themselves in doing 6-7 interviews, they all are spitting out shitty product after shitty product (that is when they're launching any new products at all). Exceptions do exist, I know of that, and when do they show up everyone is so surprised (see Apple and M1 recently). The pay at these companies is also very good, that is correct, but it's not correlated with the quality of the people who work for them or to how their talents are put to work. More exactly, a company so immersed in bureaucracy that it needs this amount of work to hire just one person is sure to waste the talent that it already has at its disposal.

My expectation at this point is:

Pre-onsite:

- 15 minute with a recruiter, tell me a little bit about the role, spend the majority of the time telling me why I should join the company, and take a few questions

- 30-45 minutes with the hiring manager. Tell me about what you really want, scope, the challenges, and let's talk about how I might fit. Do enough Q&A both ways to feel comfortable, and then let's make a call right there as to whether we want to continue on. For my part, I always tell the HM at this stage whether or not I'd be excited to continue.

Up to now, I've invested an hour. This is reasonable. Maybe we both like each other, so presuming we do, when you call me about the on-site, we should work out acceptable comp ranges. These may move upward after the on-site based on what I learn about the role, but let's make sure we won't waste one anothers' time with the on-site.

Continuing to the on-site:

- 60-90 mins on whatever technical background is required for the role. I'm fairly senior in management, so this usually doesn't involve code, but should cover whether or not I have a clue how to lead it. For an IC technical role, if we're smart about it, we'll know enough without doing 5X leetcode and 3X design here. I can also evaluate whether I care about your problem space if we don't make the content entirely synthetic. In 90 minutes, it's perfectly reasonable to do a design exercise + picking something in there to write some code around. This is it, though. One technical round!

- 30 mins x 3-4 with key peers/stakeholders. Make sure my behavioral stuff works for you, that we can understand one another, and yeah, that we might actually like each other enough to work together. I like to talk, and so if the other person does, make it 45 mins.

- 60 mins with the HM again to dive deeper on the role with the context gained from the interviews. Heavy Q&A. Let's give each other enough to make a decision.

- If you want, 60 minutes with whatever executive (besides the HM) will be closest to the role. Whatever you want to talk about. Let's just see if we can communicate.

You can cut this to half a day if you cut your most efficient interviewers down to 45 mins and don't overdo it with peer/stakeholder interviews, but I'd rather make it a full day with some breaks. This is because I need time to interview you, and that mostly happens after you've run through your things in each interview. We should all have enough information to decide here, and I'm not taking the on-site anyway if the first hour we had together didn't generate strong interest, right?

After this, call me within a couple of days, let me know if we're doing an offer or not. If we are, let's confirm expectations. The only things that will offend me at this point is if we're not in the ranges we previously discussed, or you want to do more rounds. I'm open to one more if there's a good reason for it (not wanting to use that person's time for the on-site is not a good reason). But we've had a day together. While one day is not necessarily enough to know for sure that things will work well long-term, even another full day isn't going to change anything about that.

Also, while the focus of the original post is mostly critical of the lengthy process and it being annoying to candidates, there's also the reality that the longer the loop, the fewer candidate throughput the hiring manager can have. There are only so many interview cycles per week before an interviewer burns out on it or can't get their job done as well. I'd argue that if you stretch these things out to a day, you will think harder about who you are bringing on-site.

If we agree for the most part that the time together wasn't nonsense and a headache, as you put it, that's a good indicator that we should work together!

tl;dr - I'm fine with 7 interviews if they're the right 7 interviews and planned thoughtfully.

As a candidate, I would also be wondering what it would be like to work for a company with a spread out interview process. I have been through multistage interviews, but decisions were always made quickly. Made it to the end of the phone screening, at the end of the conversation there is an offer to be flown out for a panel interview. Made it past an interview with the IT manager, then head straight down to someone else to discuss software development. Made it past the interview with the lead scientist, then head straight down to the lab to see the lab and meet the research team. Even though I was in my prime, I was by no means special and I only secured some of the positions I applied for. Yet I always knew one way or another within days. I was happy to work for those who I did get hired by and I would have been proud to be hired by those who declined.

Thankfully, I have never had to endure a strung out interview process. Because of that, I don't know how I would feel in such a situation. Yet looking at the prospect from afar, it leads me to believe that it would be difficult to work in such an environment: it would involve dealing with people who are more concerned about process than decisions, and with people who are not available when decisions need to be made (or even for process to be followed).

In my opinion this is a big problem. I wish there was a stronger culture of letting low performers go quickly in tech. This would reduce the need for exhaustive interview loops and ultimately make the industry more inclusive because you could afford to take a chance on someone without being chained to them for years to come.

I had to go through 8 interviews for a senior position at Facebook and ended up not getting the offer. I wasn't paid a dime and had to use a few vacation days at the job I had at the time in order to take the interviews. Technically I lost money interviewing at FB.

What pushed me over the bar for Google was probably making fewer mistakes on the technical loops but also having more people vouch for me on the inside (they like refs that work at Google).

The pay isn't Facebook-tier but is still pretty darn good, and I'm enjoying it a lot, which I'm not sure I would have at Facebook. It was probably the better path for me overall.

Since you have a chance of getting cut at each round as an interviewee you are left hoping not to run into: some esoteric corner of programming you could learn in 10 minutes but haven't seen before; an interviewer who always asks a pet question (even if told not to do this); a personal dislike that is illegal but not challenged (age, gender, race, etc., waved away as "a bad fit").

If multiple interviews were used only to strengthen assumptions about a candidate and each interview had a narrow intent, they COULD help companies avoid more bad hires. But after interview #3 you are probably just filtering reasonable or even exceptional candidates based on random chance.

On the other hand, this may be a fantastic method to strengthen a "hive mind" culture, but that doesn't sound like a worthy goal.

I can guarantee that you will never see me in one of your interviews. Would I be valuable to your company? Maybe, but we will never know because the process is too long.

On the other hand, I struggle with impostor syndrome. While fairly successful in my day-to-day, I will likely fail whiteboarding sorting algorithms etc. Imagining a series of five interviews stresses me out and I’m not even looking right now :)

What makes you think that the process provides an accurate representation of the skills needed for the day to day job? In my experience it simply tests whether the candidate has invested lot of time cramming for that very specific type of test. If I was running a small company I would much rather discuss a candidate's experience with them and leave them the time to build useful skills, not worthless ones for passing a test.

The best candidates can get jobs paying the same or more money with fewer interviews, so the very best aren’t going to pick you.

Not saying I am the very best, but I just didn't find opportunities for anyone to out earn by skipping the FAANG style loop. Unless you mean getting lots of equity and riding it to an outsized liquidity event, these places just tend to be not competitive to the top FAANG compensation; you would join for other reasons.

I've never been paid for interviewing. You mean you pay the successful candidates well, which is what? 10% of the people you subject to this obnoxious process?

Given that we are making a $200-600k+ decision and that the average candidate stands to gain tens of thousands of dollars or more, the 20-40 hours spent interviewing seems time well spent on both sides.

What does this mean? It seems unlikely that the average candidate succeeds at all.

Well, no you don't. You pay a lot of money only the people you hired.

I had more than one interview, where the things I discovered during the interview made me reconsider my options and go for another company. Not because I wouldn't have fit with the team or my skills were not there, but because this kind of thing tells me how processes are organized or not organized within your company, how people treat each other etc.

What candidates does a hiring process like this drive away? Are it specific character traits that pass through the sieve? If yes, how will that shape your corp and the culture in it in the long term?

I just want to highlight that this works specifically because there are a very finite number of these we pay you a lot of money companies competing for talent and that's the primary reason candidates put up with this [expletive deleted] treatment. And the result are beneficial for these companies, yes.

In a previous company we pair interviewed, 1/2 hour screen + 2 one hour slots. I liked that format a little bit better.

I've been interviewing people for about 40 years now, I was just reflecting on my first ever interview that I participated in when I was still a teenager.

I would say there are some factors that are not going to come out in any number of interviews. Conversely there are factors that are immediately noticeable.

I can tell in 10-15 minutes how strong someone is technically. At least I can tell the difference between "weak", "maybe", "strong" in 10 minutes.

Going back to my first ever interview. The guy was brilliant. He was technically good. He ended up being a not so good hire for reasons that would have been very hard to discover during the interview. It was partly the intersection of very smart without the experience to match and partly that he was just weird in some other ways. He was hired, he left within a year or so.

I think the science says the best predictor is an IQ test. The rest of our practices are not really evidence based. We tend to want to hire people that are like us, that know the things we know, we have all sorts of biases during the interview process, and throwing more people/time at it doesn't really seem to make a big difference.

I would say the most important thing you can do to get good people is to make your company a place that good people want to be. I.e. what matters is more what enters the pipeline then the interview process. I would bet that having 7 interviews vs. 3 has a difference that's completely in the noise and that at least there's no solid evidence that it gets you anything re: the quality of people working in a company. Every company says it has the best people. Mostly channeling Joel Spolsky here but I've seen this principle in action.

EDIT: Another random thought is that there are other factors that influence whether someone is going to be successful in a given role. Even the best software engineer can fail if the conditions for him to be successful aren't there.

Filtering early is best for everyone. If that means more rounds of interviews to be sure, that's what I'm going to do. I do my best to schedule around candidates and I'm forthcoming about the process during the first call but we try hard to be thorough because we want this to work well for everyone. Would you rather be hired and then fired quickly because we didn't realize there was a misalignment? I wouldn't.

The fact that your knee jerk reaction to a misalignment is firing someone rather than mentoring them and aligning them with the org speaks volumes about your management style… And managers wonder why they have such a hard time hiring or retaining people right now…

This is of course when they're not busy abusing someone on a visa to make them do more work than a human should have to do.

Mentoring is not something that's only done for new grads and juniors.

Wherever there are skilled people in the company interested in learning more about the systems around them and how to work with them well, it's generally a good idea to figure out some way to mentor/grow them. Whether officially, nor unofficially.

For non-technical roles it's likely a good idea to do the same in ways that suit there as well.

I definitely spend less time per person, trying to find juniors. You have to because t What you're looking for is different. My only goal for hiring junior engineers is to find out if they know enough to not drown and if I think they're willing and able to learn fast. That takes less time and the risk is generally less because my expectations are lower and so is the compensation.

It's been a while since I hired junior people though. The roles I take are always in early phase startups and I don't have budget for people who need on-the-job training.

Either you work at startups or you thoroughly vet candidates, not both.

Interviews may be the best tool available while searching for unknown talent, but that does not mean they are a good tool. The process is artificial, no matter how much effort is put into framing it otherwise. Even the most honest interviewee will have difficulty behaving as they would in a normal working environment, while many are more than willing to be actors playing a part. Likewise, interviewers are interacting with the interviewee in an unnatural way and are making judgements about the interviewee in a fashion different from making a judgement of a colleague.

Even if one could somehow get beyond that artificiality, what sort of impression does it leave the candidate with? There is a world of a difference between working for a company that is careful and one that is bureaucratic, one that is focussed upon making sound decisions and one that simply follows process. It can also leave the impression that key decision makers are difficult to access, making it more difficult to get the actual meat of the work done.

As for competing for the best employees, a drawn out process doesn't benefit anyone and is the least detrimental to companies that offer a genuine competitive advantage. Keep in mind, that candidate may already be part way through the interview process at another company (or even offered a position) by the time an they are offered the first interview at your company. While both parties form impressions of the other during the interview, the candidate will gain more insight about the company's functioning in how they handle the hiring process than the other way around.

Hired and fired quickly is better because when I have to dedicate weeks or a month of unpaid, uncompensated time to your process then I'm the one losing. You are already getting paid for putting in the work of interviewing me. If your team is stretched so thin that you need to put your time at a premium, that's a problem with your process not having enough throughput.

How many people do you reject to fill one position? How many are "filtered" at later stages to fill one position?

I hire in APAC too. Indian engineers are giving 60-90 day notices now and that's contractual. Two candidates, using your model, could easily take up a year. (Hiring in APAC take a long time already.)

I can only assume you've had some bad experiences lately but your personal bias has created a really bad mental model for you that would be a net negative for everyone.

is not responsive to

> I have to dedicate weeks or a month

If it takes longer, it's always an issue with coordinating with the candidate schedule. (this is my experience with my hiring process)

When I interview I don't even mention code or technical stuff (that is for someone else to ask) and I am able to learn quite a bit about a person and if they would be a good fit. Just because you can't doesn't mean other people can't.

If the company in question is growing its business and the employees and customers are happy, then whatever they are doing is working, at least for now. I'm not sure there is a much better way to measure it.

When I joined NVidia they had me through two phone screens (although they originally planned for three), followed by an onsite with seven different interviewers back to back on the same day. It wasn't fun, but it wasn't the end of the world either.

When I was a hiring manager at Qualcomm we would typically do a phone screen followed by an onsite with maybe four one-hour interviews back to back and there was rarely any disagreement on whether the candidate made the cut or not, so I would argue that it was sufficient.

If a less prestigious company with worse compensation tries the same thing, then they will quickly discover they can’t hire anyone. It will be self-correcting.

Yes..it's why people do jobs.

In the 90s people getting a big software job where thrilled because they were going to change the world. My mom’s friends used stuff that ran my code. Now it seems like people want FIRE or multiple houses or lambos.

This is a huge problem IMHO. I topped out at L7 on the FAANG EM track, but that’s dozens of ICs and a few EMs in your org and I still think you need to be able to build the software and review diffs and write serious ones now and again. Clearly this is now only part of your job, not the focus of it, but it’s very difficult to manage a process that you don’t understand with some sophistication.

In everything from law to management consulting to steel fabrication: the person in charge is the most knowledgeable person. Carmack is the best hacker, Mike Krieger wrote code. Hell pg wrote this site and the language it’s written in while building the most successful early-stage investment firm in the world.

Obviously directors and VPs and CEOs are delegating the details at same point, but this idea that an L6 manager shouldn’t need to seriously understand the subject matter seems wrong to me both in principle and based on watching it go to hell countless times.

If an L6 manager could keep all of the details of all of the things all their reports are working on organized, they aren't handling enough scope. Imo that's the difference between 5 and 6. You can no longer track all the details in one person's head.

Someone who can review diffs and even write a serious change every now and again isn't the most knowledgeable person on the team. The person who is writing and reviewing all of the serious diffs is. And for many L6 EMs, you'll have three of those people reporting to you, they're all working on different projects, each of which you have partial but imprecise knowledge of (and sometimes, very little because L5s and FAANG are expected to be able to operate mostly independently). So you spend your time ensuring that everyone on the team has career growth opportunities, and that your less experienced people have mentorship, and hiring and arguing about headcount allocation and prioritization, which all matter, but which are all things that most engineers don't want to touch!

Yes, managers should still have engineering experience (at least up to like director/vp levels, where IDK maybe they don't need it) but having a baseline knowledge of how to do a software is not the same as being the most knowledgeable person on the team.

The second paragraph, the one you seem to have an issue with, a combination of 2 things:

- a few examples of extremely senior, extremely successful engineering leaders who stayed at or near the top of the game technically, and those are but a few examples from a very long list

- an observation that in other fields, law for example, they call in the highly-knowledgable, highly-expensive, person capable of solving problems few in anyone else in the organization can and that this person carries titles like "partner" and makes the most money.

I know this is a touchy subject and I've been trying to be less flamey on HN so I didn't go hard like the GP, but they're fundamentally right even if the language is a bit intemperate: there is a prestigious and important job track for people who are pretty damned technical/quantitative but not wildly hands-on and generally concerned as much or more with coordination and communication, particularly in cross-functional or externally-facing scenarios than software systems per se: product manager. As a wild oversimplification: when an EM becomes senior enough they end up as a CTO, and when a PM becomes senior enough they end up as a CEO. This is natural and healthy division of labor.

An EM is concerned first and foremost with the health, happiness, and therefore productivity of engineers. On the foundation of the trust and rapport and deep knowledge that comes from that kind of engagement with their team, they are able to also be concerned with how their team fits into the bigger business picture: is this the right team for the needs of the business, what hiring and performance management would be necessary to make it so if not, what is a realistic schedule for the work that needs to be done given the strengths and weakness of the team members both generally and at this moment in time?

When I'm wearing my hacker hat I have no interest in reporting to an EM who couldn't do my job in a pinch, I might respect that person on a lot of levels but I won't be interested in their opinion of how I should do my job. And at no time in my career has it been so easy to identify such managers: they are the "back to the office damn the torpedos" crowd. When the task tool, and the code review tool, and the oncall/incident situation, and the build wiki are not sufficiently comprehensible to an EM to form an opinion of who is doing a good job, the instinct to do "ass-in-seat" performance evaluation is strong, the instinct to be "visible" is strong, and narrative that there's value add looks very threadbare over Zoom.

This bloc is probably too big and too entrenched to dislodge, but WFH for 2 years working out just fine is the best chance we're going to get. IMHO.

But all of these are the exception, not the norm. You said you've been in a FAANG style org, so you've been able to view the org-chart. For every Jeff Dean or John Carmack, there's three-dozen directors and VPs who manage large orgs whose names you've never heard of and who haven't checked in code in half a decade. They're still usually very good managers.

(A reasonable opinion I've seen, btw is that if you're managing a team of say 5 or more people, if you have time to make regular code contributions,you probably aren't focusing enough on your other managerial responsibilities and are letting your reports down)

> - an observation that in other fields, law for example, they call in the highly-knowledgable, highly-expensive, person capable of solving problems few in anyone else in the organization can and that this person carries titles like "partner" and makes the most money.

This is pseudo-true. Partners are called partners not because they're capable of solving problems no one else can, but because they carry an ownership stake, and I'm not a lawyer (and presumably neither are you) but the impression I get is that law is far more delegatory than software, where a partner may call in some favors to address a problem, but will also have 20 Jr. associates investigate 20 different possible approaches and write 20 different briefs to then choose between.

> When I'm wearing my hacker hat I have no interest in reporting to an EM who couldn't do my job in a pinch,

Maybe we have different definitions here, but I've never, or perhaps once, had a manager who I felt could do my job in a pinch, and I was a new grad and he was the worst manager I've had at the time (although he very quickly got better as he learned to be more hands off). A manager who could do my job in a pinch is too micromanaging. Maybe you mean something different in that they could, given a week or two to turn-up on the project take over, but that's not really what I'd consider "in a pinch".

The chief of Air Force still flies the fighter jets just as well as the junior pilots. The head of surgery in a hospital still operate just as the junior surgeon. Why does tech have to be different?

> The head of surgery in a hospital still operate just as the junior surgeon. Why does tech have to be different?

Because the load we put on medical personal is abusive and we shouldn't copy it in tech?

Some people like the book "Coders at Work" (I do), some do not, but almost anyone would agree that the people interviewed are absolute luminaries [0].

There are 15 chapters comprising 15 interviews. You have to get to #6, arguably #7 before you find someone who at the time of writing wasn't both a world-renowned hacker and currently or at one time a demonstrably successful engineering leader. The first 5 being: jwz, Brad Fitzpatrick, Douglas Crockford, Brendan Eich, Joshua Bloch. It starts to get a little blurry in the second half because it's so thick with CS academics (who in a different way also do engineering management), but you've still got VP-types who still code like Peter Norvig. The ~50% who aren't demonstrated engineering leaders are super hard-core CS researchers like Donald Knuth. The book doesn't even interview Cliff Click, or John Carmack, or talk about the fact that Larry Page and Sergey Brin wrote the first version of Google themselves and continued maintaining parts of it well into hyper-growth. Eric Schmidt wrote `lex`. When Jack Dorsey was recruiting me for Square over lunch he made an incredibly eloquent argument about why he uses OCaml rather than Haskell for his personal hacking.

At the time I was an L7 EM, my L9 boss didn't have much time to write code, but asked probing questions about everything from the merits of various binary classifiers given imbalanced underlying Bernoulli distributions to the algebraic properties of the data structures we were using for distributed systems convergence.

I don't dispute that plenty of successful leaders in technical organizations have become rusty as hackers when they hit the mega-seniority, but the idea that some L6/L7 manager shouldn't be able to lift some of their team's serious code off the ground, let alone some undergraduate dynamic-programming interview question as was the original point of my original post is simply contradicted by a mountain of evidence both generally-available and anecdotal to numerous people in this thread.

You can get ahead as a mid-level EM without knowing the frib-frobs from that whatsits, but God-willing I'll never work for one again. That's a visibility game, it's a popularity game, it's a schedule-too-many-meetings game, it's a post-too-much-on-the-internal thing game. Fuck that game.

[0] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/coders-at-work/97814302...

I think this is the root of the disagreement. I want my managers to be technically capable with an engineering background. As far as I know, my entire leadership chain, arguably excepting my SVP and CEO (at Google) have such a background. Yes they should be able to pass a tech screening and certainly system design.

They should have enough knowlege to know why you're making certain technical decisions and be able to see that you're justifying them well. That's all true. What I'm saying is that a manager who is staying so deeply aware of the details of all of their reports work that they can drop in and take over in a pinch probably has too much context. I'm not making an argument on abstract technical ability or knowhow.

Like in the same way that my entire management chain has technical knowlege and background, practically none of them have submitted code at work in the last 3-4 years at minimum, for some that's their entire career at Google. I expect that, with enough effort they could all work on the projects I work on and make contributions, but they'd need to learn all of {language and codestyle, libraries and relevant tactical design patterns and norms, various technical constraints to the design that are important but nonobvious}, so in most cases it would be similar to onboarding someone who was a technical contributor from another team or an experienced new hire. I don't really consider some random employee of Facebook to be someone who could "do my job in a pinch" either, even if they're more technically competent than I am.

I've had some good managers that could do that. But the people management skill set is so much more important to their job. And it's a very different skill set to being an IC.

I wouldn't argue in favour of engineering managers with no technical skills at all, but I also don't think it's fair to demand they be masters of both the IC skills and the people management skills too. It's very difficult to be good at both.

I don't know that there's like one leading term, but I think everyone knows what "diff" means both literally and as a connotation that it's a rebase rather than merge workflow.