Ego Economics: How Interviewer Hubris Can Empty Company Coffers
I could probably do it better
Interviewer 2: He seemed like a really good fit for the role. He understands development really well and had a personality that I think would fit the team pretty well.
Interviewer 1: I don’t think so. He didn’t answer that closure question properly.
Interviewer 2: He actually did. He explained the setTimeout is browser API and how that works. He knew you had to wrap it in a closure and invoke it immediately.
Interviewer 1: He didn’t get the right output though.
Interviewer 2: He was off by one and it’s an interview. He was probably a bit nervous. He understands how Javascript and Browser API works.
Interviewer 1: Well it’s my call as lead and I wouldn’t have gotten that wrong. I think we should look at other candidates.
Interviewer 2: …
Why you’re interviewing
You’re interviewing for money. And we’ll come back to that.
If you’ve been in the tech industry for a while, you’ve probably been on both sides of the coin. You have likely interviewed candidates, and you’ve been interviewed. In your experience, you can remember the interviewers that you thought were good, and then you may remember the bad ones.
The interviewers who were good had a way of interviewing for the role in question. This means they understood the technical needs of the team and the cultural needs. They were looking for a person with a specific skillset or strengths and knew just what questions to ask. They didn’t have an ego and likely made you feel comfortable. It was a healthy balance of technical questions and questions of character. The interview did not feel like an interrogation.
The interviewers who were bad interrogated you. They asked you questions that had nothing to do with the role. They asked you questions about data structures and algorithms that you last used in school. They had an egotistical demeanor, and you couldn’t help but think, “Did you just google some interview questions that you didn’t even know the answer to before this interview?”
So back to the point: You’re interviewing for money. You’re interviewing to help make the company more money so that they can continue to pay you. You’re interviewing so that the company will continue to give you raises as the cost of living rises. It would sure be counterproductive to your goal of making money to not hire the candidate that will best help the company achieve its goal and increase market share, but rather hire based on your own ego.
What the numbers suggest
The tech turnover rate is 13.2 percent. The average turnover rate for other industries is 10.5 percent. There are many studies and pieces of literature to suggest that bad interviewing can lead to poor-fit hires, mismatches in expectations, and unsatisfactory onboarding experiences, all of which can contribute to increased turnover.
The Cost
What does turnover actually cost a company? This is a hard figure to nail down. But here are a few key areas:
- Recruitment: Advertising, paying recruiters, sifting through applications and initial screenings all come with a cost.
- Onboarding and Training: New team members take time to get acclimated and require mentoring, reducing productivity from key team members.
- Lost Domain Knowledge: When a person leaves they often take years of domain and industry knowledge with them. Team members have to scramble to fill these knowledge gaps.
- Administrative: Exit interviews, account terminations and other tasks take time away from HR that could be used in other efforts.
- Severance
- Lost Productivity
- Feature and Product Delay
According to some estimates, replacing an IT employee can cost a company anywhere from 3 to 24 months of that employee’s salary, depending on the role’s complexity and the time required to find and onboard a replacement. How much does a senior engineer make at your company?
1 in 5
Studies at Gartner show that 1 in 5 employees is actively seeking a new job. A 10 percent salary increase is all the incentive it takes for the average employee to move to a new position. In the tech industry, it is a bit higher, between 13 and 17 percent. While employing strategies for retention and quality management can mitigate these issues, how much are bad interviews contributing?
You deserve credit
If you are conducting interviews, you deserve credit. You’ve clearly worked hard and proven yourself as a senior or lead engineer. You spent countless hours reading documentation. How much time have you spent on feature development? How often have you had to meticulously debug defects and pore over observability platforms for logs? And of course, how many stack overflow posts asking why you’re asking the question rather than answering it have you read? You are good at what you do, and your work will show it. Your ego isn’t a requirement. Have empathy for the people you interview. Think about the greater goal of your organization and why you decided to become an engineer.
