What bothers me about tech hiring is that tech companies overthink it. To use a housing analogy, they act like they're signing a 30 year mortgage when they're only signing a 1 year lease. Engineers come and go all the time. At present, tech companies are laying off engineers by the thousands. Think of how much time, effort, and money was spent hiring those thousands of engineers! It's a giant waste. Premature optimization is the root of all evil, and that applies not just go writing programs but also to hiring programmers.
It's funny how they claim that a bad hire is devastating, and they can't rid of them easily, but somehow they can do mass layoffs and get rid of a bunch of engineers easily.
I wholeheartedly disagree! It takes months, sometimes even half that year for engineers to fully ramp-up on teams and integrate into the culture of a company.
Yes, you are expected to hit-the-ground running on day one, but no one will immediately operate at their full potential. Even with all the shared best practices in the world, the secret sauce is the part you have to learn.
As an employer it's very hard to know if the reason for someone's uneven performance is due to ramp-up or if they are just not a good fit. Without a rigorous interview process, so many months would be wasted waiting to get a clear signal on that person.
That also doesn't account for complete cultural mismatches that cause instability in teams and hurt the impact of your other employees.
Another implied reason, good engineers want to surround themselves with other good engineers. So knowing its hard to get into a company signals to each applicant that the other employees there made it through that process.
> It takes months, sometimes even half that year for engineers to fully ramp-up on teams and integrate into the culture of a company.
Maybe that's because companies tend to hire whiteboard-master generalists rather than subject-matter specialists who may not be great at standardized technical interviews. ;-)
Also, if the company culture is ultra-bureaucratic, maybe the company should fix that instead of wasting months on every new hire.
Seriously, if a new engineer can't commit code within the first week, that's a company problem, not an engineer problem. Of course their code shouldn't go directly into production, but that's true of any new code. Give them something small to start, like some bugs to fix.
> That also doesn't account for complete cultural mismatches that cause instability in teams and hurt the impact of your other employees.
Technical interviews can't determine this.
> knowing its hard to get into a company signals to each applicant that the other employees there made it through that process.
I realize that's a signal, but it's not necessarily a good or accurate signal. I think it's mostly PR and hype. Reminds me a lot of fraternity hazing. Google engineers believe they're the best, and some of them may be, but some of them don't impress me at all. And as I mentioned, engineers tend to move from company to company anyway, so if Google engineers are "the best", they're constantly losing the best too.
The best engineers I've seen tend to ramp up pretty quickly (1 month or less). Sure there are probably exceptions, but the ones I've seen that take 6 months to 'ramp up' end up with very low performance. I think there's just a strong correlation with learning quickly and doing a good job. It's probably less true the more senior you get, but the relative effect is still present.
> It's funny how they claim that a bad hire is devastating, and they can't rid of them easily, but somehow they can do mass layoffs and get rid of a bunch of engineers easily.
I hope you realized that this should answer your own questions. Layoffs may be (relatively) easy, but firing someone for "you're just not cutting it" is much, much, much more difficult.
First off, most companies are loath to do large scale layoffs unless there are strong economic reasons to do so - many of the FAANGs have never had layoffs as big as the recent ones. So if your only chance to get rid of bad hires is every 5-10 years or so when there's an economic downturn, that's a problem.
But more importantly, while it's generally straightforward to fire someone who's flat out bad (as there is usually plenty of data to emphasize why they're bad), firing someone for cause who is just kinda mediocre is nearly impossible in the tech world in my experience. For example, if someone can do the job, but say is 50% slower than your average programmer (I've definitely seen this), it can be extremely difficult to gather enough evidence to fire that person. And it usually sucks for everyone involved, because often times these people who are slow are hard workers, but they're just not as capable as their peers.
One of the reasons you see the behaviors you see in technical interviews is precisely because hiring a kinda-OK-but-at-or-slightly-below-par is basically the worst kind of hire you can make.
> firing someone for "you're just not cutting it" is much, much, much more difficult.
It's actually not. When upper management is motivated to fire people, they get fired fast. Whether that's an individual person or a large group of people. We've seen this happen over and over. Self-imposed bureaucracy is the only thing that prevents fast firing.
> it can be extremely difficult to gather enough evidence to fire that person.
You don't need evidence. There's no such legal requirement. It's at-will employment.
And I don't want to hear about potential lawsuits. These are ghost stories, designed to scare, but ghosts don't exist. Show me the lawsuits. Incompetent people who are suddenly out of a job don't have the time or money to file frivolous lawsuits (which could get them blacklisted from the entire industry). The ratio of lawsuits to firings is close enough to zero to be negligible, and certainly big tech companies can afford to defend themselves.
Yeah. In my experience mediocre hires never get fired and just kind of coast along forever. But they can be pretty harmful to team dynamics.
I've worked with 200+ engineers and I know of exactly four that were fired for performance. But probably another 40 were quite bad and we would have been better off without them, they just didn't exactly meet the bar for 'so bad we have to fire them immediately'.
Layoffs aren't that easy, and they are very expensive. A lot of the big tech companies paid the equivalent of 6-12 months salary (if you include the various stock etc). There's also the cost in organizing the layoff, which can be millions of dollars in consulting fees, the costs of decreased productivity and morale, etc.
I don't dispute any of that. I just mean that they can legally do it, and they don't have to justify it, they don't have to put employees on PIP, they don't have to give reasons why every employee was included. I mean, Elon Musk can basically walk into Twitter and haphazardly fire a ton of people. The consequences may be bad, but it's "easy" in the sense that he can just do it whenever he wants. Even more so for individual firings as opposed to mass layoffs.
It's funny how they claim that a bad hire is devastating, and they can't rid of them easily, but somehow they can do mass layoffs and get rid of a bunch of engineers easily.