False Negatives [Steve Yegge]

watch Steve Yegge's podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GurMGEDHUY

Transcript

[00:00:00] So this week we've been going through Steve yogis podcasts and his greatest hits his updated perspectives on the big clouds and what they're doing right. And what they're doing wrong. But the other thing that Steve is really well known for is his views on tech interviewing. And he's done in big tech interviews and quite a lot of them.  

And we all know they're broken in some way, but it's often in very stark reminder of how broken it is. I think there are two anecdotes here. I want you to look out for, which is the first, the one on Jeff Dean. Just look out for that name. And second, the one on them reviewing their own packets and applying too high of a bar saying too many nos. There's a lot of false negatives in the industry.  

Both false negatives and false positives. R a problem. Of course. And he's just some ways to handle them. But overall, I just think we, we deserve some reminder of how flawed it is when we do our own interviewing. I thought I had a bad run of it doing two interviews a week. And he did multiple a day, sometimes three at once. And i just think this is a fantastic story to go over 

So the thing about interviewing is it's a terrible signal. It's, it's better than a phone screen. And a phone screen is better than a resume screen. If you just look at someone's resume, how sure are you that they're good. I mean, in any, in any discipline, right? You know, you wanna, you wanna, you want an airplane, airline, pilot, you look at the resume. 

Will you just hire them based on the risk? Not usually. So the resume is, is your first filter. It's the first thing where you basically take a stack of resumes and there's an art to reviewing resumes and looking for people that are kind of trying to cover up, uh, things that, that, that, uh, they may not know. 

And they don't want you to know that they don't know. So they try to cover it up in their resume. So you can look for. Weasel words, and it's all kinds of things you need, but basically you're taking the resumes and you're, you're sorting them into two piles, right. That the keeps in the don't keeps and there's of course, the old running joke in the industry about how you want to take some resumes and just throw them in the trash can because you don't want to hire unlucky people. 

And so if you throw in the trashcan, that person was unlucky, but they do sort of the resumes into the I'm gonna follow up. And the ones that you just say pass. So writing a resume is really important. And part of, um, a book. Passing technical interviews would be on how to write a great resume. And this comes up again when you're writing your resume, so-called resume for what you've accomplished your company. 

When at time it's time to get promoted. So the art of resume writing never, never gets old. It never leaves you and is always an important part of your career. Being able to represent yourself. But that's a, that's just step one and it's a bad filter. You don't want to just base your decision on a resume. 

Would you marry somebody based on their race? Maybe, but probably you'd want to meet them first. Right? So the next step is a phone screen and everybody hates doing phone screens. I actually love doing phone screens. I, for some reason have, um, never really had an issue with them unless there's a bad connection or something, but a lot of people just hate talking on the phone and they even more hate having to ask people technical questions on the phone. 

So I often got stuck with phone screen duty at every company that I ever worked. Because you can actually do a pretty good job, not a great job, but a pretty good job of predicting whether they're going to pass their interviews based on my phone screen. Cause my phone screens would go for two hours if necessary to sort of, you know, get a comprehensive look at what this PR this candidate is good at because the general rule is like the longer you spend evaluating somebody than the better. 

Idea. You're going to have of whether they're going to work out. Long-term just like the longer you have a relationship with somebody before you decide whether to marry them or not the better you're going to know how that marriage is going to go. Most likely there is a point of diminishing returns and we'll talk about that. 

But by and large, The amount of vetting that we do in the industry today is nowhere near enough. And I'm going to, I'm going to talk about the consequences of that and how we, how we arrived at that conclusion. And so on in this, in this talk, but at a high level, I don't believe in interviewing anymore. I, I ha I'm a strong skeptic. 

I think that interviewing is so flawed. It's it re any company that really wants to get ahead of their competitors and succeed needs to spend some time re-inventing their interview process. And probably having people spend more time with candidates than they're spending today. It's, it's just not a very good signal. 

And I said that at Google once, uh, Google, I said it in, in an email, uh, replied on some public thread somewhere, um, in the early days, maybe 2008. And. Some director got mad at me and said, oh, we didn't like that. We didn't the [00:05:00] records in life that you said that you had, that you're a skeptic of the interview process. 

We were talking about a company that hires scientists. We're talking about a company that, you know, one of their models is speak truth to authority, and this director was an ass and, uh, he got what was coming to him eventually. At the time, you know, he was just like, well, everybody's upset because you're, you're, you know, you're questioning the sacred interview process. 

You farted in church is what he told me. And so, uh, and so I haven't really been able to tell people this for my entire career because they feel that it's undermining their, um, ability to attract the best. I guess, but the reality is if you marry somebody after dating him for four hours, you're probably going to get a surprise. 

Maybe it's a good surprise. Uh, but most surprises are not so good in that department. And interviewing is the same way. So if you're going to keep your interview. Uh, panels the exact same way that they've been doing it since Silicon valley was invented by the arse hole shot shot key. Uh, then, um, then you're going to need a better process for getting rid of people who are no good. 

You're you're going to need a, you're going to need to double down on your process for managing people out. That's actually how Amazon gets by and gets such great. They aggressively manage out under performance because they know that underperformers are gonna sneak in. And, uh, it's because the interview process is fluid. 

So it's just a best effort. The problem with the interview process is that it takes a lot of time. It's really miserable for engineers to do more than two or three interviews per week. And most companies try to cap it so that you're not talking to more than maybe two people per week. Okay. Or three, if they're really busy, uh, because it takes you. 

Uh, an hour out of your day to, to interview the person. And you may have a interview pre briefs where everybody gets together and maybe divides up what people are going to talk about. It's not recommended at some companies, but some companies do it anyway. And then you may have a post brief where everyone gets t...