Summary

Yegge argues that technical interviews are fundamentally broken and have been for decades, drawing on his 35 years of experience as an interviewer at Amazon and Google. He recounts how Google's Hiring Committee once unknowingly rejected 2/3 of their own interview packets, proving the process is near-pseudoscience. He makes the case that provisional employment (internships, co-ops, contract-to-hire) provides vastly superior signal but has historically been impractical for senior hires. He proposes a 'campfire' model where candidates do real, paid work for a few days, walking away with portable reputation records whether or not they're hired, turning interviewing from a cost center into a profit center.

Key Insight

Technical interviews are unfixable pseudoscience that should be replaced by short stints of real, paid work—'campfires'—where candidates build portable reputation records whether or not they get hired.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 7

  Interviewing, it turns out, is a big game of darts. A 'do I like you' dating round.

• 9

  Those were our own packets from when we had all interviewed at Google. The recruiters had tricked us into reviewing our own interview packets, and we had voted not to hire most of our own group.

• 8

  I once challenged the interview process at Google in a public mailing list, and an Important Eng Leader took me aside and told me I'd 'farted in church.'

• 7

  We have all been using the same stupid, broken interview process since before most of us were born.

• 7

  Whiteboards, made-up design questions—it's all just theater, trying to act like it's real work.

• 4

  Pull up a log, build something together, see how it feels.

• 3

  Every stamp that you hand out, pass or fail, leaves a candidate richer than they showed up.

Tone

opinionated, conversational, irreverent