How much longer must hiring managers and job candidates tolerate the archaic and inept interview process that pervades the tech industry?
We strongly believe there's a link between the high rate of turnover in the tech industry and poor interview quality. While this makes staffing agencies and recruiters very rich, it does little good for engineers, interviewers and employers. Why is such a common ritual made to be so onerous? Why do companies struggle to find and keep the right people? Is it any wonder that a terrible process leads to terrible results?
We hope you might see this blog as something of a sequel to that great industry classic on team management, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams. At the very least, we attempt to build upon those foundations. The magic of that book is its unrelenting commitment to the idea that software developers are people, not machines, and should be handled as such. The authors recognize that the human factors trump everything else - yes, even in tech work - and we continue that commitment by coaching an interview design plan that focuses more on persons and less on procedural rigidity. The subtitle for this blog might have been “Becoming a Productive Interviewer in the Peopleware Way”.
For decades, as new college graduates have entered the tech workforce, they have been subject to poor interviewing practices that result in questionable hires and high turnover. Since it's all they know, they perpetuate a cycle of abuse by using the same poor practices on their own interviewees later. The result is an entire industry doing things in an old, broken way because it's all the workers have ever known. No one has bothered to coach them down a better path. But employees and employers agree that we'd all be much happier (and more profitable) if we could somehow get the right engineers in the right place.
For those determined to read on and learn the good, bad, and ugly of engineer interviewing, much of what you find in here may strike you as simply common sense. Alas, as we are continually reminded through our interactions with other humans, common sense is anything but common. Congratulations if you find large portions of this guide mundane or repetitive. You should take that as a sign that you “get it” and don’t need the primer so many others never received. We ask that you share what you've learned and help us break the cycle of abuse.
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