To the author - this is the best/most realistic (and funny) depiction of how things actually work in medium to large organizations. Also nailed the part around how small companies with “lax” technical hiring standards but strong cultural components triumph over their bigger counterparts. Because people working there actually care and they can see the impact of their work. It is real to them vs. some made up KPI metric to sound progressive.
As an aside, I’ve been lucky enough to have sufficient influence at all my employers for removing unnecessary layers of interviews. Anecdotally, most average engineers would be at least half as productive at most jobs out there. A couple of interviews at most would increase the odds significantly in the employers favour. Google scale could be an exception, but for 90% startup and mid sized corporations, the 3-4 technical interview rounds and algorithm problems are an absolute overkill.
From my experience, those extra rounds and puzzles don't improve the quality of hires. But they:
1. Create objective consensus. In a small company, you can hire based on intuition - talking to a candidate once (and ideally seeing any kind of work sample) are mostly sufficient for me right now. In larger organisations, I had to _defend_ hiring decisions, so you need to create evidence of objectivity.
2. Filter a prohibitively long list of candidates. Gotta have _some_ way to do it, even though I'd argue selecting for those most likely to hang in there for a long hiring process isn't the best way.
3. Create a (usually faux) narrative that you rigourously assess candidates and therefore only the best work with you.
Now, I won't say there aren't some benefits to more exposure to a candidate and their work, whatever it is. But in my experience, extensive hiring processes are really more about the stuff I listed above, even if nobody involved would think of it that way.
Thanks for your kind words! In terms of what I think & meant to say - I'm pretty sure that incompetent management (or incompetent at least in some key areas) can scale to fairly large org sizes, and that eventually competent management will evolve for the org to survive. I used "competent" and "incompetent" unironically, not as proxies for big & kafkaesque vs small & nicer places, but as in can/can't set and achieve goals, which is something you will need to be able to do to survive eventually.
Sadly a lot of the KPI driven madness has trickled down into smaller and smaller orgs. I've seen it even in ~200 person engineering orgs these days.
Always because management is some guy that's never been in the hot seat himself and doesn't know how to talk to users/customers. So he needs a pretty dashboard with green lights and KPIs he can shout about.
I worked at a 6 person startup with 2 hour weekly all hands where we went over dashboards, metrics, and KPIs. We had over a million in funding and less than 30 users. It was hilarious. I put in my 2 week notice 6 weeks in.
As an aside, I’ve been lucky enough to have sufficient influence at all my employers for removing unnecessary layers of interviews. Anecdotally, most average engineers would be at least half as productive at most jobs out there. A couple of interviews at most would increase the odds significantly in the employers favour. Google scale could be an exception, but for 90% startup and mid sized corporations, the 3-4 technical interview rounds and algorithm problems are an absolute overkill.