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Re:Don’t do interviews, do discussions by Consultant32452 on Monday November 08, 2021 @12:14AM (#29146294)
This is almost exactly how I hold interviews, except they are usually < 1hr. I ask a person to tell me about a recent project and then keep asking more detailed questions about things until one of us hits our limit of understanding. No gotcha questions or random trivia. I only ask questions about something they claim to have done. Occasionally I'll ask a category question like, "Have you done any work with multi-threading?" And if they say yes, I ask about that project.

I've found this technique to be extremely successful. It's possible I may have had some false negatives, but I've never had a false positive. Everyone I've recommended for hiring has been successful.

Re:Don’t do interviews, do discussions by onion2k on Monday November 08, 2021 @01:07AM (#29146489)
Everyone I've recommended for hiring has been successful.

It's possible you're good at spotting good people, and rejecting bad people, but it's also possible that hiring is just easier than you think it is, and most people are capable of doing the jobs you hire for. You have no way to tell if you'd have the same result just hiring people by picking random resumes. Maybe negatives are just rare.

Re:Don’t do interviews, do discussions by Consultant32452 on Monday November 08, 2021 @11:59AM (#29151322)
It's unlikely that hiring is easier than I think it is, because I think it's pretty easy. The people who think it's hard are the HN consensus and the large corporations we keep reading about coming up with these convoluted interview standards/metrics.
Re:Don’t do interviews, do discussions by vineyardmike on Monday November 08, 2021 @12:23AM (#29146316)
> I've found this technique to be extremely successful. It's possible I may have had some false negatives, but I've never had a false positive.

This is the impossible problem with hiring. Every interviewer wants to minimize false positives (they're expensive!), but every interviewee thinks they're a false negative.

Re:Don’t do interviews, do discussions by Jensson on Monday November 08, 2021 @12:42AM (#29146395)
Which is funny since I bet most who thinks they are a "false negative" also would claim to have "impostor syndrome". Anyone with impostor syndrome would view themselves as a true negative.
Re:Don’t do interviews, do discussions by vineyardmike on Monday November 08, 2021 @05:32PM (#29155144)
> I bet most who thinks they are a "false negative" also would claim to have "impostor syndrome"

I don't think this could be true? If you think you don't belong/deserve the job (imposter)... why would you think you deserved the job (false negative).

Re:Don’t do interviews, do discussions by lordnacho on Monday November 08, 2021 @02:08AM (#29146721)
Same here. I've never had a dud in terms of ability when doing a technical chat interview. People who don't know how things work will hit a wall in this format, it's not actually that easy to BS what your thoughts on the CPP memory model are.

The fear of BSers seems to be what holds people back from this approach though, and I can see that it wouldn't work for certain non technical fields.

Re:Don’t do interviews, do discussions by wiseowise on Monday November 08, 2021 @02:38AM (#29146859)
> I've found this technique to be extremely successful.

That's just survivorship bias waiting to explode. Also, they're successful by some arbitrary metric that is applicable only to your company.

Re:Don’t do interviews, do discussions by Consultant32452 on Monday November 08, 2021 @11:52AM (#29151223)
It's entirely likely I will one day hit a false positive.

I've been on the hiring team for every employer I've had for the last 15 years and have hired dozens of people.