I'm not a corporate person. I haven't worked for a large organization in quite some time (decades). However, this article caught my eye because I'm curious how people handle these sorts of things.

The few times I've hired people, I've been lucky enough to have had a way to work with them before actually hiring them. But, I can't imagine what it's like hiring under pressure, where you need to build out a team fast. Seems like that could very easily end up just wasting most of your resources.

The fundamental process — a short series of 1-hour interviews — hasn’t changed in fifty years. We have all been using the same stupid, broken interview process since before most of us were born.

The outcomes from interviewing are statistically terrible. Google did wave upon wave of analysis over the years, and all the results were incredibly depressing.

To name just a few off the top of my head: interviewers barely agreed with each other. Put the same candidate in front of two of our sharpest people and you’d routinely get a confident “strong hire” from one and a flat “no” from the other. There’s no oracle interviewer, not even Jeff Dean.

And once people were actually on the job, their interview scores told you next to nothing about how they’d do — at least the way we ran the loops. Hell, some of our star performers failed their Google interviews four or five times, finally got in after 2+ years, and then outshone everyone else.

When you add it all up, and putter around with it for about 35 years, you ultimately find that interviewing, which aims to determine “can this person do this job,” is fundamentally unable to answer that question with any degree of reliability. It’s bordering on pseudoscience.

This sounds about right to my naive ears. Yegge believes that working with a person is probably the best way to decide whether they are a good fit:

Provisional employment is currently the best solution the industry has found for the problem of knowing reliably who to hire, before you hire them.

But not everybody is willing to work on a temporary basis. Yegge thinks this might be changing, and he thinks he has an idea for how to make a provisional "testing it out" kind of position more attractive: it's basically the star system.

each work item also counts once for the candidate: they walk away with a permanent, portable record of what they did and how well they did it, signed by you, whether or not you make an offer.

Every stamp that you hand out, pass or fail, leaves a candidate richer than they showed up. This attracts strong candidates to you, because even your rejections are worth something to them. Stamp honestly and generously enough and you stop rooting around through a trickle of identical AI-polished résumés, and start standing up a reserve: people who’ve done real work with you, can prove it, and will pick up when you call.

Give people work to do to test them out; pay them for the work; but also provide a recommendation of their work that carries the weight of your reputation. Kind of like AirBnB ratings, but with your identity more prominently attached. As a candidate, you may have not gotten the job because the best engineer in the world was also competing for it, but if you know that Steve Jobs is going to sign something evaluating your work, that might be valuable enough to throw your hat in the ring.

I'm speaking mostly out of ignorance here, but what do you think? Is the interview system dead and will we be able to route around it?