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.
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.