I’ve rejected someone on their 4th round before—1st round with me. That candidate had managed to convince the recruiter that they had the chops for a staff engineer (>$200k/yr!) and passed two coding rounds before mine, testing knowledge of relevant techs on our stack—at this level of role, you have to know this coming in; table stakes.

I was giving the systems design round. Asked them to design something that was on their resume—they couldn’t. They’d grossly misrepresented their role/involvement in that project and since they were interviewing for a staff level role, high-level design is going to be a big part of it and will impact the product and development team in significant ways. No doubt they’d been involved in implementing, and can code—but it was very clear that they didn’t understand the design decisions that were made and I had no confidence that they would contribute positively in our team.

Sucks for them to be rejected, but one criteria we look for is someone who will be honest when they don’t know—and we do push to find the frontiers of their knowledge. We even instruct them to just say it when they don’t know and we can problem-solve together. But a lot of people have too much ego to accept that, but we don’t have time for people like that on the team either.

Look, I get what you’re saying and clearly I’ve been on the wrong end of it too, but if we make a bad hiring decision, it costs not just the candidate their job but also the team and company they work on can get into a bad place too. What would you do in that situation? Just hire them anyway and risk the livelihood of everyone else on the team? That’s a non-starter; try to see a bigger picture.

You can find The Truth^TM at TRUTH SOCIAL. See, it’s right there, in The Name. The Bigliest Truth you’ll find anywhere it’s great!

I don’t know if I agree with that. Having been on the hiring side of the table more than a few times.

Hiring a new employee is a risk; especially when you’re hiring at a senior enough level where the wrong decisions are amplified as the complexity of the software grows—and it becomes far more expensive to un/redo bad architectural decisions.

And the amount of time it takes for even an experienced engineer to learn their way around your existing stack, understand the reasons for certain design decisions, and contribute in a way that’s not disruptive—that’s like 6 months minimum for some code bases. More if there’s crazy data flows and weird ML stuff. And if they’re “full stack (backend and frontend) then it’s gonna be even longer before you see how good of a hiring decision you really made. For a $160k+/yr senior dev role, that’s $80k (before benefits and other onboarding costs) before you really expect to see anything really significant.

So you schedule as many interviews as you need to get a feel for what they can do, because false negatives are way less expensive than false positives.

Sometimes people can be cunning: charm, wow annd woo their way past even the savviest of recruiters with the right combinations of jargon patterns.

Sometimes they can even fool a technical round interviewer.

4-5 interviews (esp. if the last is an onsite in which you’ll meet many) seems to be about the norm in my field. Even if it kinda sucks for the person looking for the job.

… come to think of it now, I would have played ball with them if they’d just been transparent about the situation upfront. It was good interview practice and in retrospect prepared me well for the interviews at my current role. And I’m way happier with this company than I would’ve been there.

The Universe does funny things.

I took an interview like this before. I checked the vast majority of the boxes of technologies used, and experience in a specific type of processing models prior to deployment. Thought it was bagged and tagged mine. 4 rounds of interviews, two technical rounds and a system design.

Asked me some hyper-specific question about X and wanted a hyper-specific implementation of Z technology to solve the problem. The way I solved it would have worked, but it wasn’t the X they were looking for.

Turns out the guy interviewing me at the second tech interview round was the manager of the guy he wanted in the role—and the guy working for him already was the founder of the startup that commercialized X, and they just needed to check a box for corporate saying they’d done their diligence looking for a relevant senior engineer.

That fucking company put me through the wringer for that bullshit. 4 rounds of interviews.

Never again.

The funny thing here is that there are many good distributions that are based on Ubuntu. I’m a Pop!_OS fanboy, many of my colleagues enjoy Mint. Yet, almost everyone I know in the Linux world despises Ubuntu.

Fun fact: the scientist’s name was Adam, and the soup was primordial.

If I want to wear my sunglasses while I’m watching a movie in the cinema because I have a light-sensitivity condition—usagenof the sunglasses alters my perception of the film without changing the permanent media storage of the film—am I cheating and subject to copyright infringement action?

Check your pocket for the fourth time. Might actually be there this time.

Kneel dat Ass, my Son

Reminds me of this trad classic in Lumpy Ridge @ Estes Park, CO: Magical Chrome Plated Semi-Automatic Enema Syringe

The novelty of the view is more fun than the climb/crux itself but the overall route is fun and worth doing.

It’s Hammer time!

Some say we’ll see Armageddon soon

Stop giving me Thermo nightmares; I lived through that shit already I don’t need to sleep through it too.

I need you to understand that most people just don’t go around talking about other people’s dissertations to other people.

Still not working for me. Anyone got a mirror?

Shouldn’t the votes from the last iterations count? It is a recursive function.

How are you planning on handling the induced phase shifts due to the rapid polarity reversals that occur in the transgravitational electron flux arrays? I mean, this is a nonstarter if you can’t get that to work—the electropositron fields are going to decay too quickly to be useful otherwise and the quite-expensive phosphokinesis-generator will be wasted.

That’s no reason to be colorist. We need to get community engagement up not by being exclusionary.