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HarHarVeryFunny 2 days ago

There is no one-size-fits-all for software developers. Different companies are looking to hire people at different experience/pay levels, with different skill sets, etc. Just as with dating, most companies are also going to have some understanding of their own "attractiveness", and not try to date out of their league.

FAANG companies offering industry leading compensation packages and prestige are in a position to be able to hold out for the best (even if their interviewing practices may fail to achieve that), but most companies are just looking for someone that checks the boxes and seems like a good fit.

codr7 2 days ago | parent [-]

Employers trying to hire for fit and culture has resulted in the most inhumane and counterproductive processes I've witnessed. If that's what you really want to do, let the person work for at least a month in the team.

ghaff 2 days ago | parent [-]

Provisional hires (which often exist in theory but they're pretty much a formality in general) don't work for the most part. Lot of overhead for the company. And in many cases you're asking for the candidate to quit a job and possibly relocate on the possibility they'll get a new position assuming that they click in a short time interval.

codr7 a day ago | parent | next [-]

Who said anything about relocation? That has to be a tiny percentage of hires.

ghaff 19 hours ago | parent [-]

Relocation used to be pretty common for professional jobs. Don't know about today when there's more remote work. And maybe companies aren't as willing to pay for in general.

codr7 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

So, accept the overhead as the cost of hiring the right people?

ghaff a day ago | parent [-]

There's even more overhead on the people being provisionally hired.

Yes, sometimes things just don't work out. But, if someone quits a job and maybe relocates, that's a big personal cost. It's just the way things work in some limited contexts (e.g. professional sports) but it's not and shouldn't be the norm.

I suppose you can give a huge sign-on bonus with no claw-back provision, but that's never going to happen in most cases.

codr7 a day ago | parent [-]

I'm fully convinced the way to make better hires is to invest more, which will be more expensive. Which wouldn't be a problem unless we expected something else. It starts with quitting pretending the current process is working, or even close to optimal.

ghaff a day ago | parent [-]

Has hiring ever really worked, anywhere? Especially as roles and need evolve? I guess you could argue that it sort of did, apropos of a play I saw last night on the astronaut program--and maybe the military in many cases more broadly.

But, in many cases, I'm not sure how I, as a candidate for a tech job, would feel about a company offering me $200K--no strings attached--with the proviso that I statistically only had a 25% chance of making it through the next 6 months. (And is that really long enough anyway?)

There are tournament-style professions. But I'm not convinced most professional jobs are or should be among them in general.

codr7 a day ago | parent | next [-]

My first startup did one interview per person and then a trial period, all good.

trhway a day ago | parent | prev [-]

>Has hiring ever really worked, anywhere?

yes. Best place i worked at - we hired only by internal references and only people from our University. Up until the company grew around 200 people. We didn't do technical interviews, just a short talk. And we were among top employers, including salary-wise.

onemoresoop a day ago | parent [-]

When you have high trust a lot of other processes become unnecessary. When that trust is broken, and surely a lot of grifters BSed their ways into jobs, that’s when all kinds of barriers were added.