First things first… I’ve hired and fired plenty. Hired way more than I’ve fired; firing is definitely more stressful. One of the worst positions I’ve had was a manager for a department that had a policy of *not* firing low-performers! Talk about having to get the hiring decision right! Along the way, I’ve made plenty of exceptional hires, and I’ve made some doozies. I’ve hired to ramp up a staff quickly, and I’ve interviewed to replace. (You try hiring 12, which became 15, people, in a competitive market, to build a competent staff in less than 6 months! Now add in the many consultants and other short term hires you need to get the job done…) One or two hires I’ve had to fight tooth and nail to bring on board; one or two I’ve had fight to not hire, despite my boss liking them. But yeah, I’ve hired plenty.
Interviewing is stressful on both sides; it’s easier for you, the interviewer, because you control the conversation and have done it plenty of times. For the interviewee, it’s all a matter of trying to figure out what the hiring manager wants. Tossing in an arbitrary academic exam, something Sahat justifiably complains about, into the middle of an interview is *not* a guide to someone’s abilities. It’s not even going to test their ability to operate under pressure! It will flummox them, it will stress an already stressed out person and it will lead to a poor performance *most* of the time. Hell, it doesn’t even test their ability to operate under pressure or how they cope with failure! All it does is replace a potentially positive human interaction with an artificial, hostile data point.
Want to know how someone does? Give them time-limited homework to do. Give the person hypothetical scenarios during the phone interview and ask how they’d go about solving the problem. Get the person into their comfort zone, not yours. You can give them the technical test/homework — a real world test, not some academic algorithm you have down pat because you’ve asked eleventeen people the same question — after the phone interview. You can ask them about their solution once they’ve returned it. You can develop the hypothetical scenarios into real problems later.
Sahat, in his original article, states — without using the exact words — that he thought working hard on a few open source projects might be a good thing. You clearly indicate that’s not a reasonable expectation. How is he to know that the interviewer doesn’t actually care about such things? It’s in many-a blog post, “we use GitHub as a hiring tool”, “we use StackOverflow…” People have come to expect such things; indeed, there’s more than a few HR-oriented blog posts noting that resumé’s are on the way out for coders and few others! It’s a common expectation and it’s not an unreasonable one.
He is absolutely justified in being frustrated because the people he was interviewing with replaced human interaction with that arbitrary, hostile data point. And, as always, it seems they didn’t communicate what they wanted — they probably didn’t exactly know — and didn’t provide any feedback. They gave him academic tests. Who needs to know certain algorithms, anyway? As I’ve stated, those technicals test nothing but the interviewers penchant for stock answers to be derived in ridiculous situations, all done under a high degree of stress, just to make things interesting?
The job of an interviewer is to figure out if there’s a match between what the interviewee brings to the table and what is needed. There’s a basic, and needed, assumption that it is known what is needed! Over the many hires I’ve made, there have been a few, very few, times when I’ve looked at a candidate and decided I need to redefine the job in order to bring that person into the team. And there have been times when I’ve had to reject a candidate because their technical knowledge was good but they came with an attitude and yelled at the security person downstairs, or the receptionist. (Always make it a point to be friendly with the people in charge of the gates… They know things you don’t. Besides, most of ’em are nice people with interesting stories.) Or have been drunk… That happened once. The job of the hiring manager is to figure out the fit; being a stress-inducing barrier, or an exam proctor or what-have-you is not a part of that job description.
Your clarification provides a context that entirely absent from your original comment. You didn’t have to state that it was a privilege being interviewed by you; it was entirely evident in your words. It still is: “You are not special. You’re not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else”. That’s not a sentiment, that’s an insult. (I’ve no idea who Palahniuk is, and if he or she is full of nonsense like that, no desire to know, either!) People are special. They are unique. They bring different skills, insights and knowledge to the table. They bring themselves. Regarding a person as nothing more than a dead body walking is, well… You work for a firm that makes a ton of money from valuing everyone being different and alive.
