Of course people know interviews aren't the greatest, but it's the best tool they have right now. What people are pushing back against is criticism without solutions.

There are a bunch of other testing methods that are illegal in the USA too, such as IQ tests.

When users of code I've written complain that something sucks to use, I don't demand they come up with a better solution. Probably I don't even want to know what they think the answer is—unless they design user interfaces for a living, odds are their answer will be terrible and they won't even be happy with it if I build it.

This is as it should be—I'm paid to solve problems.

Why is this different?

The more I read about interviewing, the more I realize too many people think they have this problem solved—their amateur psychology is impeccable and their technical screens test for exactly the right things, no more and no less. Did they do a bunch of controlled studies to convince themselves of this, or are they taking sounding good, or intuition about the statistical outcomes of different techniques, to be equivalent to truth?

Maybe the first step is to collectively realize we have close to no clue what we're doing, and are being asked to solve a hard problem: individually, to talk to someone for an hour and make a hiring recommendation. In aggregate, to make the decision based on a handful of these one-hour conversations.

Maybe the first step is to realize this is a problem worth trying to solve.

Maybe the first step is vocal non-acceptance.

> What people are pushing back against is criticism without solutions.

Which is bullshit. It's perfectly reasonable to criticise something without proposing an alternative. It's especially ridiculous to reject criticism provided without alternatives, when it's literally your job to do the work being criticised.

"Hey the way you're doing this part of your job produces results no better than random selection."

"Bring me solutions, not problems!"

Solution: toss a coin or take n first applicants for the trial period. Same effectiveness, much cheaper. No need for the interviewer.

I still don't understand why employers can't simply set up a two week "trial contract" where as promising candidates simply work for two weeks so everyone can actually see and judge, with real world empirical data, how well the person does in the environment at the actual job.

Yes yes..of course I know this could be gamed as well, but no matter...you can't really argue that this wouldn't be magnitudes better then the typical current/broken interview process.

This will get you the most desperate employees, not the ones you want. I've got a home loan to pay, I'm not switching jobs if you can only guarantee 2 weeks of employment. And if there are multiple offers around, I'll take the 3 month or full time position, even if I'm half way through the 2 week contract.

Also, not all jobs/codebases lend themselves to being productive in 2 weeks, I'd argue they should be, but they aren't.

The concept of a two week trial contract is interesting, but also as flawed as anything else.

I switched roles to a new team, and the first 2 weeks were a trainwreck. It was almost of no predictive quality on how I would do.

Now, there are many reasons why that was the case, and perhaps those underlying issues should be addressed, but from all the role changes I've had, the first two weeks shows how well the group you're going into can onboard, more than it shows how productive the individual will be in the long term.

You would need a longer trial period, a few months is fine with a clause that allows earlier termination.

Yes, because it would be magnitudes worse. So do you give the assignment to? You have several hundred applicants, do all of them get the 2 week assignment? Who watches over them and answers their questions? After spending that much money, is the answer you get any better than a set of interviews On the other hand, assume I am in a job and want to change positions, for any number of reasons... How many two week jobs do I have to take? Or should I quit my job first?

In the 2004-2007 timeframe, the company I worked for hired software engineers via a staffing company for three-month contracts. We interviewed the candidates with the intention of making a full-time hire. As the contract term approached, the management team did a 360 review, the decided to offer a full-time position or just not-renew the contract. This had some downsides, but overall I found it to be better that alternate approaches I've tried before or since. It stopped being viable once software engineering became a sellers market.

This seems to work ok for companies working on green field stuff, though you'd still probably struggle to entice people to leave their jobs for you. For other companies though, where technical debt and poor management is everywhere you look it doesn't. It gives employees a chance to see what they're really dealing with and to look for work two months later.

If someone is currently employed it makes that arrangement difficult.

Indeed, though any kind of arrangement is difficult. You might end up in a dead end job, not matching your skills or otherwise soul crushing regardless of the method.

I took a job half a year ago. I'm still "learning the ropes" so to speak. I remember the first two weeks. Nothing would have been gleaned from them.

In most countries that don't have employ-at-will I.E you could just fire them anyway, this is a real thing that actually happens

Yet, literally every professionally employed person is in their current gig via that process.

It works good enough.

Counterexample: I did not apply to, nor interview for, my current gig, and I'm not cheating by working for myself.

And I bet almost everyone reading this has worked with at least one person they think shouldn't have survived the interview, and that person was making a boatload because they convinced the boss they're brilliant. Meanwhile 90% of their day was spent talking about how great they are, and 10% creating new bugs, and no one dared say anything because the thought of them being more "productive" was horrifying.

'It' mostly successfully matches employees to employers, but the quality of those matches may vary wildly.

Interview processes also vary wildly—you can't really say that it works without defining 'it.' Are we talking multiple technical screens that require writing code or a single fluffy buzzword-laden conversation with a C-level? Both have failure modes, but those failure modes sure are different.

> Interview processes also vary wildly—you can't really say that it works without defining 'it.' Are we talking multiple technical screens that require writing code or a single fluffy buzzword-laden conversation with a C-level? Both have failure modes, but those failure modes sure are different.

End of the day, everything evens out. People add the structure they need when they hire people. If your engineering interview process for some detail oriented gig is buzzword trivia with the CIO, the company will probably tank anyway. Conversely, if you do some nerd-fest whiteboard interview for a CTO in a bigger organization, you're probably not getting the right outcome either.

Did you read the article? People add the structure they think they need to interviews, but are clearly able to troll themselves into worsening their judgments by requiring steps that not only don't help, but actively hurt.

And this is a near universal phenomenon. Almost everyone wants to "get to know the candidate."

That's a syllogism and I'm not sure it tells us anything. If you replaced interviewing with a footrace across hot coals the same assertion would be (just as vacuously) true.

It's deeper than that.

Everyone hates the process, and companies have investing major dollars and hours trying to improve. End of the day, little has changed since 1917. You either acquire-hire, get a strong referral or interview a pool of unknown applicants.

The tests and quizzes are little different to how a city hired an accountant in 1917. The old boys network evolved. Then you're left with the rest.