Stop the Interviews

> What an incredible waste - of the candidate's time, of the company's time. Oh, and they didn't offer him the job.

Perhaps the job's criticality justified that extra diligence?

This part of the essay makes me feel moved by the author's situation.

> I am sitting down after a long walk outdoors. It should have been relaxing, but I was processing - processing another interview pipeline that has fallen through. I'm in my 6th month of unemployment, despite job hunting 40 - 60 hours a week, starting literally the day I was laid off - because the company needed to make cuts and remote workers were top of the list.

That sounds really tough, and I'm sorry the author finds themselves in this situation. Six months sounds grueling.

I think the interview process is likely to be completely overhauled in the age of AI. I don't really know what will happen. I used to be in favor of the standard code-at-a-whiteboard approach, but nowadays the actual work is even further from that. But I haven't seen an AI-aware interview process yet that seems like an improvement.

At any rate, these systematic changes are likely to come too late for the author. Hang in there. Maybe it's time to consider a bigger change, like moving cities and looking for in-person work. I like working remotely but it's harder to get a remote job, and the in-person stuff does have upsides. Good luck out there.

Another piece on the subject that starts out great but then fizzles out.

I think the solution that is alluded to is to let several qualified folks work as contractors for a bit. But companies are unfortunately set in their ways, refuse to think, and continue their incredibly expensive charade. Because google does it, or some other nonsense. As Joel told them to, but most of these folks are not old enough to know Joel or what exactly he advocated. Like “agile” metastasized into something pernicious as directed by B and C players, so have interviews.

The solution is simple. — make prospective employers pay for the time of the people they’re interviewing.

We can argue the rate and which industries it should apply to, but if companies had to pay even a moderate amount out to even just some people to interview them you’ll fix this problem almost overnight.

> I discussing this with a friend who is an surgeon, he said he has never had to prove his technical skills in an interview. Why? Medical candidates have licensure, continuing education requirements, a case history, and (potentially) litigation history ... In contrast, Software Engineering has largely ignored certifications, has no uniform system for gauging continuous learning, and the vast majority of candidates' professional work is closed source.

Every time someone brings up the possibility of licensing or certification to software engineering, the response is collective shrieks of outrage and insistence that It Couldn't Possibly Work For Us, as if we're so fucking special. I've seen this since the Slashdot days twenty years ago. And so, we got this instead.

There are a lot of problems in the industry which can be blamed on corporate culture and clueless management, but I think this is one case where we pretty clearly did it to ourselves.