We need to rethink tech hiring..
Is our process too influenced by FAANG
Reading this made me think, are we really hiring in the right manner? From where did this practice of asking hard algorithmic questions came into being? (remember Max Howell’s inverting a binary tree incident at Google?). Is it useful or is it just a cultural phenomena which is now being blindly followed? How many times does a developer, during normal course of his/her work, has to write a sorting algorithm?
What I think is, it might make sense for FAANG and other big players to ask these questions as they might be looking for very precise skill sets ( or maybe just following the process) but does it make sense for a startup building a credit lending platform? It all boils down to context.
Hiring process has to be contextual. Hiring managers must ask the question, who I want to hire and what are the skills am I looking for? It might be an unpopular opinion, but I believe that passion, sincerity and dedication should be way higher in evaluation criteria than raw talent and skills. This is derived from yet another unpopular opinion - most of the work that we do on a day to day basis does not really require high amount of raw processing power. What it requires is dedicated effort over long durations of time.
And for challenging and complex problems, I have found that discussions are way better way of solving them than relying on a single person’s intelligence. This adds another dimension to the evaluation criteria - social skills and team work.
So next time you are hiring, don’t just think what you will ask.. also think why..
Happy Hiring!!
PS - will soon share follow up article on my hiring strategy ..