I personally find some of the current (if I can call them) standards of tech hiring to be very narrow in which skills and capabilities they test. It presumes a lot—particularly that one has time and resources to commit to spending time studying enough of the spectrum of CS subjects in order to pass a given question from the rather large field. (By this I’m referring to the classic “white board a <somekindof>sort algorithm purely from memory” process that has become the de-facto standard)
What would you propose as an alternative?
I’ve been involved in training new engineering managers how to hire and interview. Everyone starts with the best intentions, but reality quickly forces some compromises.
The bottom line is that you only have a number of hours in which to evaluate the candidate. The longer and more comprehensive you make your interview processes, the stronger signal you get. However, the longer your interview process, the more you’ll find people dropping out of the hiring pipeline due to lack of time or willingness.
I’ve worked with companies that tried to implement week-long paid interviews where candidates pair with employees to solve real problems. It’s great! But only when it works for the candidate. You can’t realistically expect busy professionals to take an entire week off of their current job to spend time with a company that may or may not hire them. Monetary compensation only goes so far when you’re forcing someone to choose between spending a week of their vacation interviewing with your company or spending a week taking their family on vacation.
Easy. Just talk to people as would-be peers. They want to find a role they can succeed in. You want to find someone who can succeed in the role.
I interview by just talking about their past projects (based on resume). You can't fake your way through a friendly technical dialogue if you haven't done it. (Pre-requisite: the interviewer must be technically competent. This is where many companies miss. Algorithm puzzles won't make up for it.)
Also it is important to describe the role and expectations in detail. Nobody (really: nobody) wants to get hired in a role just to be let go in six months. There is no need for elaborate whiteboard algorithm dances which discriminate against everyone who doesn't have the time to memorize every possible question. Just be up front about the requirements and let the candidate decide if it's a match. They know themselves better than you ever will.
What troubles me is that people will say this allows all your biases to run wild, but my feeling most of the time is that these biases will find a way to express themselves unless you remove humans from the hiring process entirely.
I absolutely disagree with this.
I've interviewed people who seemed incredibly impressive, both in terms of showing me actual past projects, and in their explanations of them. I've then gone on to give them simple programming exercies, the kind that people with far less experience take, and they've gotten nowhere on them.
I'm talking a two hour, "here's a computer, here's internet access, here's a setup environment, code this simple thing, which you could probably copy-paste from Stack Overflow / documentation". And they couldn't do it.
And what's worse - I'm pretty sure I could fake my way through most technical dialogues. I mean, not literally everything, but I could probably fake my way through interviews about most technical topics, and given a bit of preparation time, fake my way through most things. I mean, I could probably get caught out if someone was seriously trying to do it - but to the depth that most interviewers get, I can pass as experienced on most things.
You can’t pre-correct for some things, but you can for others.
Having someone speak in detail about their experience isn’t easily faked.
Having someone speak about their experience in brief and then giving them a “skill-testing question” as if they won the lottery can be gamed.
I think a general chat about a broad problem and the interviewee's thought process of how they would approach it can tell you much more than whiteboarding some memorized algorithm.
Good tests, I find, are to give them a simple piece of code with minimal comments. For example, some non-standard special purpose container implementation. Then ask them to explain what the purpose of the code could be as simply and short as possible.
Either - They'll start literally explaining each line of code without understanding the whole. - They completely miss the point. - They at least figure out it's a container of some sorts. - They'll explain technically what it literally does. - They'll give you the academic term for the concept it implements. - They'll actually explain the purpose briefly in simple words.
Those last three are good, in different ways. The better ones will also spot the bugs or performance issues in the code.
I mentioned to a colleague that what I value most is someone who is creative. There are many candidates out there who know all the buzzwords or can discuss features of a programming language purely from memory, etc.
This can make for some impressive interviewing, but it tells nothing of their ability to use that knowledge to solve real problems, or their creativity in how they use their skill and expertise when faced with new dilemmas.
Sure, you could contest that the creative side isn’t necessary for certain levels of engineering, or that only tech leads require this as a mandatory trait, but I would argue that it is far more important than what most interviews test - rote memorization.
I've always tried to do that... until recently.
With a new recruit, this is the fastest way to nightmare discussions. He always emphasizes the cons of my proposals, and never admit that his proposals also have cons. To be honest, I really think he believes what he says, he seems to not see ahead of time where the blocking points will be.
I am now forced to only submit the pros, and prepare an argument for the cons, which is rarely needed. This is not a way to have good technical decisions.
This is not how it works! There are over 1000 problems on leetcode. Sure, many of them are solved using the same techniques but there is usually a twist and you often need to combine multiple approaches or come up with something new (to you). And then there is usually a very problem-specific way in which the problem can be solved 10 or 50 times faster. Often these insights are very difficult to come up with. The people who created these questions are actually very smart and excepting some of the questions at the easiest level it's usually a far cry from simply implementing Dijkstra from memory!
The problem with leetcoding in interviews is that it is easily measurable but not an important metric. Focusing on someone's aptitude at skills they never use at their job means good developers get tossed aside or are forced to waste energy jumping through hoops needlessly.
In my company (totally remote) we decided to automate hiring (also remote) as most as possible and we are happy with the results. We also value the candidate's time very much so we made the hiring process very straightforward. It works like this:
- First the candidates must do some online tests, which are mostly multiple choice questions. The subjects are logic, english and a specific test for the coding language. All of these tests were hand made to us and customized to our needs. The candidates spend about 2 hours in total doing theses tests, and they know immediately their score in the parts of the tests that can be accessed automatically (which are the most part)
- The candidates approved in the theoretical tests - about 10% of the candidates that applied for the job - do a practical coding challenge that was also made from scratch by us. We have looked at the available solutions in the market and thought they are too focused on textbook algorithms that are rarely used in the job market. So we made our own tests that contemplate practical problems a programmer has to solve daily in our company. The questions are NOT too complex. The objective of this step is to weed out the candidates that can't code in the language, not to get the best. We design this challenge to take about 2 hours. The implementation was a lot of fun: we use the Docker API to run the candidate's code against the automated tests we made and the score is calculated as the number of tests that passed. Using Docker means we can work with any language that runs on Linux. So far we have made tests in Javascript, Typescript, Ruby, Postgres and Elm.
- The candidates that are approved in the previous step - about 2-4% of the candidates that applied for the job - are called for an interview. Now is the time when we take a look at the candidate's resume and look at the human side of things. Given that we have very few candidates to look at and we know they all meet some minimum skills we are very confident when conducting the interviews. By now we usually have a very clear signal to tell who the best candidate is even before we conduct the interviews. So in practice the interviews are NOT used to select the best candidate. They are there just to see if a red flag doesn't show up.
We are very proud of our coding challenges app. If someone wants to collaborate on it just drop me a message. It's a Rails app on GitHub, but it probably not good enough for an open source project yet - one needs to know a lot about Docker and Rails to make it work.
Also, from experience, I've never come across a two hour takehome that actually takes two hours. Everyone always says not to spend more than two hours on it, but I can't exactly turn in an incomplete assignment.
I'm glad it is working for you, but it's not something to be proud of. Essentially what you've done is replace the standard 30 minute intro phone interview with a 2 hour SAT.
4 hours over two steps to get to the human part? I wouldn't mind it. Last company I successfully interviewed, I spent about 2 hours on the phone with different people + a lot of e-mail exchange, before I got to 4 hours long on-site.
That's asking for too much upfront before the candidate can even decide if the job is a good fit. Job descriptions alone don't tell you much. That's where the phone interview comes in. It's a two-way street.
I think when your company comes up with a hiring scheme, they need to analyze it, understand and be cool with the kinds of applicants their system is screening out. In my view, most SV tech companies' practices tend to screen out the "skilled professional who's currently semi-comfortable at her existing job" and filters in the "desperately needs a job and will jump through hoops and put up with whiteboard hazing to get one." Which class of applicant does your company want to court?
[^]: I consider myself "reasonably-competent" and the 100:10 ratio was about what my last job search was like a few years ago.
I understand this was the goal. You can either waste your company's time or the candidates' time. I don't think there's a way to preserve both. Given that your goal is helping your employer, this seems like the sensible thing to do.
If as mentioned previously wasting candidates' time filters out the most competent people, then you're not helping your employer.
Also, I object to thinking that someone's time needs to be "wasted".
But probably a lot of people that don't make it into your company just can't be bothered to do 2 sets of technical tests with zero human contact. I can tell you that my most "successful" interview processes (there is, the ones with offers/acceptances or just the ones I can even remember the name of the company) were the ones that focus on me as a human and as a professional, the ones that looked less automated and that seemed to have taken more time trying to know ME rather than just my skills.
Not that there was no tests, there were and some went kind of overboard with the complexity, but in the end what I remmember about these companies was the conversations we had and how they were interested and knowing me.
So, like I said, if it's working for you than great, but I probably would forget your test in my inbox to be honest.
Half the interview process is about selling the company to the candidate. How can I know if I want to put up with your bullshit tests if I don't know whether I'm going to enjoy working with you?
The message you're sending with more automation is simple: you will be a cog in a machine here. We're not interested in what you have to say, we're only interested in whether you're smarter than the average bear.
Programming or the fancy name of Software Development has sort of become the new blue collar job.
How many hours do you spend assessing each candidate and how does that compare to how many hours you make them spend jumping through your hoops?
Depends what you mean by "use your gut" but that's not my experience. Currently at a well known public tech company in silicon valley and there isn't any standardized interview process. Every interviewer is free to approach it as they wish and the hiring manager gets to listen to all input and decide. This is a strength.
Perhaps (very likely) as a result, this company is also rated highly in diversity.
A standardized interview process will inevitably lead to a standardized employee pool, as only the candidates who fit the very narrow profile (willing to memorize endless algorithms they will never need or use in real life) can get in.
I should add that my current employer is not, in my experience, unusual. In my ~25 years in the valley, it's how it's always been. I have not worked (and never want to) for the companies which value conformity in hiring above all else (infamously, google).
And for the social justice aspect, we do have a very diverse group of engineers, especially for our size and location.
If so, how are they "objectively" evaluated?
Do chemists recite the periodic table backwards in interviews?
I don't pretend there's never any bias, but I'm still not convinced you get any less, or any better bias with the whole hoop-jumping algorithm day-long whiteboard thing.
As has been noted elsewhere in the comments here, ours seems to be the only industry that does this to itself.
I feel "just wing it" can lead to somebody talented from a non-traditional background getting a chance at a great career that they would be auto-rejected by google at the resume submit phase.
Which seems reflective of the underlying pool of applicants.
It would be interesting to see what their application/success ratio demographics are like.
1. http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/bayarea.htm 2. https://www.wired.com/story/googles-employee-diversity-numbe...
How many of them hold relevant degrees for job openings at Google?
There's even a sourced 2018 article about current hiring practices trending away from degree requirements for you to peruse:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/16/15-companies-that-no-longer-...
It's not about the degrees (relevant or otherwise).
Of course the most important thing is: out of minority applicants who are qualified, what percent are hired? Because we may expect a smaller proportion to be qualified due to systematic barriers that they face. Google is not necessarily in a position to fix those.
I'm willing to bet that Google's demographics hew pretty closely to CS graduate demographics. You need to look farther upstream.
Standardized processes don't mean unbiased processes. The SAT for example is pretty racist.
Is it equally racist now versus in the 90s?
What do you mean by this?
You want your company to be 50% women? Tell your teams that at least 50% of their hires must be women. That's it.
To me, formalizing the quota but keeping the overall hiring process looser makes a lot more sense than the other way around. A quota is dead easy, and a formal process is hard for all of the reasons discussed.
A quota is not "hiring people just because they're female/black/gay/etc"—it's a way to make us more effective by preventing us from overlooking good people. If we're naturally inclined to skip people who are black, then we need a process to counterbalance our natural tendencies. And of course, recognizing and taking advantage of an undervalued resource is good for business.
If there are legal issues with a quota (I'm legitimately not sure whether there are), then the law ought to be changed.
---
50% women may be the wrong number because of the demographics of computer science majors or what have you. It was just an example. Choose a number in good faith that you believe represents the potential population of good hires.
One simple solution might be to have your quota match the demographics of your job applicants. But this decision bares more thought than I'm qualified to provide.
That would be quite literally destroying the anti-discrimination laws which safeguard the exact thing that you think you're arguing in favour of. Quotas implemented the way you describe are the antithesis of equal opportunity. That 'instinctual negative reaction' you come across is people seeing the complete logical reversal going on in your claim.
This is a subject of entire books and hours long debates, but we can skip to the reductio ad absurdum with your line of reasoning: 99% of underwater welders are male.
Trying to 'represent' females in that occupation and push the gender ratio to 50/50 would harm all parties involved and result in a measurable number of deaths. Protected attributes are not uniformly distributed in terms of fit for job, and trying to hit a uniform quota across those attributes is naively idealistic, at best.
A less generous interpretation is that you are actually totally cool with discrimination as long as it's in the 'right direction', whatever that personally means for you. In which case you are exactly the force that you claim to be fighting against.
The notion of reverse racism is something that requires religion-like amounts of self delusion and selective consumption of facts. The flaws of the notion are just too glaring for any rational individual to overlook even at first examination.
Not only that, but it's blatantly hypocritical since you don't spend your money based on the demographics of a company, you spend it based on performance.
Edit: This leads to a much more interesting line of discussion that can be summed up as "discrimination (and similarly bias) isn't always bad".
They're useful tools and we should be careful about practicing them, but the idea that because discrimination is sometimes bad it is always bad doesn't follow. (or an alternative way of looking at this is that discrimination often includes the qualifier "unjust". Bias in favor of some group in the pursuit of greater justice therefore isn't discrimination).
Profound injustice in favor of averages is not an acceptable social trade off. This is why countries enact general discrimination laws, making it illegal to judge people based on single bits like gender and race.
For example, in most places in the US it's okay to discriminate based on political party, and I don't know of any jurisdiction where you aren't allowed to discriminate based on someone identifying as a racist.
Political affiliation, political views, political association, all those are protected.
The state can step in if it is in the interests of national security or to preventing of crime, but it is just as wrong to discriminate someone who identify as a feminist as someone who identifies themselves as a racist.
It should also be noted that where I live, Sweden, the right of political association is particularly cemented in our constitution. The same protection that is given union members are given to political members, including racist political groups. People talk about changing the constitution whenever neo-nazists goes around and demonstrate, but that kind of talk usually dies down when people realize that life goes on even if a handful of people believe in something which the rest of the nation consider crazy.
It appears that you're conflating government nondiscrimination with government mandates on individual nondiscrimination. Those aren't equivalent.
Here in Sweden, yes. The law is very clear that you can not deny service because you disagree with someones political, religious, or world views.
Government nondiscrimination is a US technicality of the first amendment. European Convention on Human Rights is not limiting to government behavior. Everyone has to follow it.
I think you should speak with a lawyer, because you're not correct.
The report also note that current law does not protect children that get discriminated based on their parents political activity, which the FN convention of children rights says they should be protected against.
The report goes on to basically say that the EU convention of human rights extends the Swedish anti-discrimination law to include, among other things, political and other world views, class, and social status. The report then goes on that courts must already follow those extensions.
There were also a specific case a couple years ago where a politician was kicked out of a restaurants based on his political affiliation. A Judge commented on that case noted that while the Swedish anti-discrimination does not make it illegal, there is a case to be made under the EU human rights declaration.
So there. The government report, and a judge, both saying the same conclusion.
Genuinely asking. My morality follows from basically “discrimination based on immutable personal characteristics is always bad” (with the possible exception for family, bwcause that’s just cruel), from which I cannot conclude for example that discrimination is bad if it’s agains blacks but good if it’s against whites.
I fear that by dropping this principle, while allowing for “positive discrimination” (e.g. preferential hiring / admissions of blacks/women), you also allow e.g. White Nationalists to argue that it’s OK to discriminate for whites. How would you convince a White Nationalist that such discrimination is bad while leading by example that other kinds of discrimination are just fine?
> My morality follows from basically “discrimination based on immutable personal characteristics is always bad”
As a bit of an aside, are you saying that this is your base moral precept from which all other decisions about what is or is not ethical follow? This would be a very strange ethical framework (for example, it follows that murder is ethical). Usually moral and ethical frameworks follow from very high level principles "optimize happiness/utility" (utilitarianism), "do good things" (deontology), etc. It seems like you might be coming from a rights based ethical framework, but it's not clear.
> How would you convince a White Nationalist that such discrimination is bad while leading by example that other kinds of discrimination are just fine?
I don't generally waste my time arguing with people who are engaging in bad faith[1]. In this day and age, I don't generally believe that a white nationalist is going to be convinced by facts and logic, or really anything else. I'm more concerned about appealing to the majority of people who aren't white nationalists, because ultimately I believe that discriminating against white nationalists is okay[2].
Ok, now back to your actual question: in what cases is it okay to discriminate? I'm approximately utilitarian, so the simple answer is "when the expected value across society is positive." For me, I don't think optimizing for strict utility is the right goal, instead I personally think that we should maximize agency (possibly median, possibly total, unclear exactly), which is something like each individual's ability to make meaningful decisions.
This sidesteps issues of de jure rights. It leads to conclusions that we should do things like lift up the least fortunate and provide social safety nets, since a destitute person has less agency than a person capable of getting by. Similarly, it addresses questions of when regulations on personal liberty are ok. If allowing some action has a reasonable possibility of reducing agency of some other group, we should give it less protection than another action which does not.
So for example, when you have two groups, racists and some racial minority, it makes sense to provide the racial minority more protection than the racists, since the racists want to reduce the racial minority's rights more than the racial minority wants to reduce the racists rights. That is, the minority would prefer it if the racists weren't allowed to be racist. The racists would prefer it if the racial minority weren't allowed to live in the same area, or use the same water fountains, or what ever.
That's an extreme, but illustrative example. So back to the less extreme position: Discrimination is okay when it's done explicitly to counteract a gap between what the law (or more broadly society) intends and where society actually sits.
Society intends for hiring to not discriminate based on race. But it did for a really long time. The put (and continues to put) the subjects of discrimination at a disadvantage. If you're deontological, then "nondiscrimination" is the rule and that's that, but if your goal is justice or utility, then discrimination to bridge the gap between intent and reality is ethical. It should be done carefully of course, but it's alright.
If you want to see a fun set of examples of this, voting district and gerrymandering law in the US is full of weird examples of trade offs between the need (under the Voting Rights Act) to allow racial minorities to elect representatives of their interests, with the current opinion of the USSC that any districts can't be drawn based on racial lines (except in very specific circumstances)[3]. In other words, States must draw districts to preserve the interests and representation of minority groups, but can't draw districts based on where those minorities live. It's weird.
[1]: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Sartre#Anti-Semite_a...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
[3]: https://www.ncsl.org/research/redistricting/redistricting-an...
> If you're deontological, then "nondiscrimination" is the rule and that's that, but if your goal is justice or utility, then discrimination to bridge the gap between intent and reality is ethical.
I'm definitely pro-justice, it's just that I see it principles based (e.g. free speech even for (especially for) speech I don't like), not "utility" based. The flaw of your philosophy, in my view, is that you're just sweeping the tricky parts under the carpet by introducing concepts of "utility" and "right goal" and "society intends". You're even conflicted about that yourself, introducing another concept of "maximizing agency" (sounds like pro-freedom); a good moral system would somehow maximize (or balance) both in some way.
I don't think that's a good view, because those are fundamentally non-reconcilable goals. Should a billionaire be able to spend $1m for the health of his/her child (maximize agency / freedom), or should the society put that money to "maximum utility" and spending it to help several (poorer) children (with illnesses that are less expensive to treat but still life threatening).
Sure, picking the "right" utility function is one of the hardest parts of utilitarianism. FWIW, I don't think maximizing agency is a different concept so much as a specific utility function that avoids some of the common pitfalls of strict utilitarianism (utility sinks: the person who gets enormous happiness from cannibalism). In other words you could imagine Agency as the "reasonable person" standard applied to the value of a choice. This still has flaws, but, IMO fewer than many other framings.
Some people might also find this to be similar to optimizing for the most "positive rights" across society, but I dislike that framing because the idea of positive vs. negative rights is silly, any right can be framed as positive or negative.
> Should a billionaire be able to spend $1m for the health of his/her child (maximize agency / freedom), or should the society put that money to "maximum utility" and spending it to help several (poorer) children (with illnesses that are less expensive to treat but still life threatening).
Note that giving a poor person money such that they can choose to treat their child's disease also increases agency! If you want to dive deep into this, I think that the marginal value of a dollar is probably logarithmic, or at least inverse quadratic or something, so a tax scheme modeled to tax top brackets in such a way that then improves the situation of those less off (pick your method: national healthcare, UBI, etc.) increases overall agency.
I think most people making a case for 'good' discrimination don't realize that the existing 'bad' discrimination originated exactly the same way.
We need to strive to eliminate discrimination, not perpetuate the swing of the pendulum that's been going back and forth for hundreds of years. Pushing down on some demographics to uplift others is not going to solve anything, it's just a no-op perpetuation of what's already going on.
The historical discrimination did not originate from people saying "yes discriminate against me in the interests of general equality". In fact, to return to the start of this thread: historically much discrimination was the result of bigotry. It's very unlikely that hiring quotas (or similar) are the result of bigotry.
Your conclusion also doesn't follow at all, at least not without some argumentative work that you haven't presented. Suffice to say that I believe that the best way to, in the long term, eliminate discrimination is to allow some specific forms now, with the intent of undoing past discrimination.
You haven't presented even a shadow of an argument as to why that isn't reasonable.
The way to create equality is to manipulate on levers that individuals can control, e.g. taxation brackets, education incentives, government investment into particular industries. Passing up the best candidate for a job because they didn't have some inherent unchangeable attributes that you're arbitrarily favouring is the opposite of creating equality.
I do not know what the costs, efficiency and employee happiness would be, but it would make for an amazing social experiment. Having 40% of the garbage men, sewer workers and construction workers being women, and 40% of the teachers, nurses, and social workers being men would make for a very different society than what we have today. There would be a lot of people trying to cheat the system in order to keep the work place gender segregated, but I wonder if that is a local maximum of happiness rather than a global one. Such study could shine some light and give us some final answers if quotas is a good idea or not.
(While there's a separate discussion to be had about why so few women choose to be engineers, that's not the company's problem to solve.)
There's no logical reason why "10% of engineers are women" implies "10% of every engineering team should be women" instead of, for example, "10% of engineering teams should be all women".
A number of teams could be 40% women even if the average were 10%, and there's also no reason why excess men have to be engineers just because they were educated as such. That's a thing that happens anyway, just like people without CS degrees go into programming.
1. I hit the wrong button :)
2. I'm a bigoted member of a majority, and am downvoting because I think minorities should be oppressed.
3. I don't think any questions of race/gender/etc. should ever be considered in a workplace, and and downvoting because I dislike the whole idea.
4. What I suspect is actually happening: Like (3) I think everyone should be considered on their own merits, and you can look at company-wide stats to see if bias is occurring. Its good for the company to act against it in sum, but acting on the basis of race/gender/etc. on an individual basis is shocking and unfair.
The problem with (4) is that you're trying to have some kind of emergent effect that magically appears. It's a goal without being a goal. Worse, its a global goal you want to be actively worked against locally.
Developers love to complain about clueless management that doesn't know what it wants. Guess what folks, it's a common trait. Our other favorite trope is to figure out a technical fix for a people problem. And the problem with that is of course a tech fix only takes care of specific situations and not the underlying problem.
For example, as a tech fix we might decide that all interviews are done in a pitch-black room with vocoder voice synthesizers. Great, no question of race/gender/etc. Except, of course, for selection bias in our candidates. And even after they are hired there's biased reactions (unequal success for equal quality). People just naturally favor familiar attributes, even if those attributes don't contribute to a correct outcome.
So to be consistent, there are really only three choices: a) don't care, let the chips fall where they may; b) have an actual goal to equally represent everyone; c) encourage playing nice, and hope the results aren't too far off.
What actually happens, of course, is d) encourage playing nice, hope the results aren't too far off, then someone actually looks at the results and complains, so flail around trying to avoid doing anything too unpleasant to fix it.
So, while I wholeheartedly agree that diversity inherently benefits teams and businesses (different experiences will lead to new and different approaches), it's just not a very convincing argument, because it feels "mushy". Here's one that I think is better:
If it's true that e.g. women have a harder time getting engineering jobs due to unconscious bias (and I'd posit that this is clearly the case), then that means female engineers are, as a group, undervalued. You should be able to hire a better female engineer for the same amount of money.
Harsh? Sure. But that's beside the point.
Cite this.
For the tech sector, in developed nations, this is nonsense.
The evidence for that is dubious
I'm part of another online community that has a strong emphasize on social justice issues. These "just wing it" hiring practices are one of their biggest complaints about tech companies. There's a perception that the less well-defined and structured your interview process, the more likely it is to produce vaguely biased results.
Whether that's true or not, it would be a tough sell to implement a "just use your gut" style hiring process at a major company in 2020. There is a strong push for standardized and repeatable interviewing processes, complete with sufficient documentation to support hiring decisions.