> Videoconferencing and phone calls can take care of not all but a large measure of the personality issues that can crop up.
You seem to be making large assumptions and arguing straw man issues. What makes you think that both the author and I don’t use videoconferencing or phone calls? I didn’t say anything about it, and the article mentioned screening calls right at the top; literally the 4th sentence.
> I find it odd how the wrong six-figure hire is bandied about but the existing 2-six-figure manager
Please explain. What’s “wrong” about my suggestion that an engineer will “probably” make something near six figures? Average salary for all engineering in the US is north of $85k. The average engineering manager salary is around ~$130k.
> spending half his workweek interviewing nonhires instead of working
You seem to be assuming that the manager is always interviewing, as opposed to, say, filling a few positions, working without hiring for a few months, filling a few more positions.
The guy in the article is a recruiter, so recruiting is his full time job. If a normal engineering manager has other work, then recruiting isn’t their full time job, and they might not be hiring at all times. I haven’t ever worked in a department that was constantly hiring, neither in startups nor in huge global companies. Have you?
Suggesting that the cost of interviewing a dozen people is larger than the cost of employing one not-so-great engineer seems, from my perspective, to be off the mark.
> What makes you think that both the author and I don’t use videoconferencing or phone calls?
Maybe it would help if you understood it as "use [enough] videoconferencing or phone calls".
Answering that question:
For the author, the aforementioned 5X ratio. For you, your apparent insistence that a) you have to talk and listen to them, but b) this somehow has to take place in person to get to 50% confidence. Maybe that's true for you, but I doubt it's universally so.
> What’s “wrong” about my suggestion
I think you parsed my sentence incorrectly. "wrong" modified "six-figure hire", as in, the wrong guy who costs six-figures.
> I haven’t ever worked in a department that was constantly hiring, neither in startups nor in huge global companies. Have you?
Oh yeah. It's more like everyone had two full-time jobs, and one of them was 30 hours a week of interviewing.
> Suggesting that the cost of interviewing a dozen people is larger than the cost of employing one not-so-great engineer seems, from my perspective, to be off the mark.
Let's try from my perspective. Say you hire a not-so-great engineer, who's maybe worth $100k, for $90k. A great engineer would be worth $1M, for $90k. Both are wins.
O that it were only a dozen people. Say it was 5 hours a week of wasted interviews, for 50 weeks, and the interviewer earns $100k. This puts a loss of >$10k onto your bottom line, neglecting the "real work" the interviewer could be doing, and the other employees also doing the same thing.
> Maybe it would help if you understood it as “use [enough] videoconferencing or phone calls.”
Again, what makes you think the author isn’t using enough? Why are you so certain you have an important point here that anyone else who’s hiring doesn’t already know? I think you’re making an incorrect assumption that the author is being unreasonable.
> the aforementioned 5x ratio
That was the ratio of candidates to jobs. It doesn’t say anything about how much screening was involved. Interviewing 5 candidates for a job seems completely reasonable to me, and not out of the norm of hiring for any company I’ve ever worked or hired for. I might screen 10 or 15 before interviewing 5 on-site.
> I think you parse my sense incorrectly.
I did, thanks for the fix.
> Say you hire a no-so-great engineer, who’s maybe worth $100k....
I already mentioned I’ve seen people lose companies millions. Engineers who are great on paper, and great in interviews. The bottom end here is not a small but positive win, it’s an enormous loss.
> A great engineer would be worth $1M
Where does this number come from?
> Say it was 5 hours a week of wasted interviews, for 50 weeks, and the interviewer earns $100k. This puts a loss of >$10k onto your bottom line.
This thinking still seems like penny-wise and pound-foolish to me. I don’t consider any interviews wasted. I’m learning in all of them, and I’m comparing the candidates. All samples are valuable. Also, you’re talking about the cost of 125-250 interviews over the course of a year, if I assume it takes 1-2 hours to interview and give feedback. If we use the author’s 5x, that means you hired 25-50 people. You’re comparing a measly $10k to the cost and value of more than 25 people. Spending $10k to hire 25 people is nothing. Companies pay more than $10k for a single hire, all the time.
> O that it were only a dozen people.
A dozen people per job is what I was talking about, just to be extremely conservative... more than the 5x the author mentioned. And with a dozen people per job, I’m saying the cost of interviewing is far less than the cost (or value) of employing them, so it doesn’t hurt to interview that many.
I would think of hires as compound interest, where interviews are linear cost. Comparing them already isn’t apples to apples.
In 2017, Apple's revenues were $229B. Apple had 123,000 employees. This means the average employee at Apple pulled in $1.86M, not in salary, but in value to the company.
Check out Paul Graham's wit and wisdom with regard to only seeing the positives of interviewing en masse.
> The bottom end here is not a small but positive win, it’s an enormous loss.
You used the term "not-so-great", not "bad". You're not going to spot all the bad ones. And you can fire bad hires, limiting your downside.
Consider two possibilities:
•Hiring managers genuinely do select the top talent, which means that now the only people they have left to interview aren't qualified to hold the jobs, and thus they're wasting their time.
•Hiring managers don't know everything, try to make the best decisions, but often hire poor performers, and this means that their role in hiring is not as some kind of highly skilled "nerd whisperer" who can divine good candidates from bad candidates, but merely a utilitarian cog in the corporate machine, that tends to overestimate both its skill and its importance. If this were medicine, it would be institutional quackery.
You seem to be making large assumptions and arguing straw man issues. What makes you think that both the author and I don’t use videoconferencing or phone calls? I didn’t say anything about it, and the article mentioned screening calls right at the top; literally the 4th sentence.
> I find it odd how the wrong six-figure hire is bandied about but the existing 2-six-figure manager
Please explain. What’s “wrong” about my suggestion that an engineer will “probably” make something near six figures? Average salary for all engineering in the US is north of $85k. The average engineering manager salary is around ~$130k.
> spending half his workweek interviewing nonhires instead of working
You seem to be assuming that the manager is always interviewing, as opposed to, say, filling a few positions, working without hiring for a few months, filling a few more positions.
The guy in the article is a recruiter, so recruiting is his full time job. If a normal engineering manager has other work, then recruiting isn’t their full time job, and they might not be hiring at all times. I haven’t ever worked in a department that was constantly hiring, neither in startups nor in huge global companies. Have you?
Suggesting that the cost of interviewing a dozen people is larger than the cost of employing one not-so-great engineer seems, from my perspective, to be off the mark.