This expresses a worried thought I've had in the back of my mind for a while.
Power interviewers do a lot of interviews. They can do them in their sleep and crank them out like an assembly line. But assembly lines aren't nuanced, I fear power interviewers lose the ability (or desire?) to assess candidates through their performance instead of strictly assess the performance.
Power interviewers concern me. I think they end up with too much influence over a company's hiring practices.
I've heard of people at big companies who conduct thousands of interviews a year. This gives them a lot of sway in company hiring practices and culture.
The problem, though, is these large companies are hiring at scale. Growth + attrition yields a lot of hires. Google itself just announced in their earnings call nearly 20k more employees in the past year. That means 100k+ interviews conducted. It's hard to have every interview stay personal an nuanced at that scale.
> I've heard of people at big companies who conduct thousands of interviews a year
I don't disagree with the rest of your thesis, but this seems off by an order of magnitude. They would have to conduct 4 interviews every working day to reach even 1000 interviews. Counting the time needed to write feedback for every interview, that person would be a full-time interviewer who occasionally writes software/does product management/project management.
Unless you're speaking of a small group of people who conduct disproportionately more interviews than everyone else (Pareto distribution) - a dozen interviewers could easily rack up 1000 interviews between them.
> I don't disagree with the rest of your thesis, but this seems off by an order of magnitude. They would have to conduct 4 interviews every working day to reach even 1000 interviews. Counting the time needed to write feedback for every interview, that person would be a full-time interviewer who occasionally writes software/does product management/project management.
I admit it's hearsay, but yes, I've heard that some people supposedly conduct 1,000+ interviews.
To be fair, I'm sure some of those are the online "solve this coding puzzle in 30 minutes" type that can be watched later at 3x speed and don't require human interaction. I don't know the ratio, maybe the power interviewers are heavily sandbagging with those.
> I fear power interviewers lose the ability (or desire?) to assess candidates through their performance instead of strictly assess the performance.
This is an interesting point, because I feel like that's how large companies treat employee performance in general. I often hear stories of talented engineers being treated as cogs or passed over for promotions, such as the classic protobuf maintainer example.
Perhaps the assembly line fashion of interviews is reflective of how large bureaucracies treat employees as a whole.
Power interviewers do a lot of interviews. They can do them in their sleep and crank them out like an assembly line. But assembly lines aren't nuanced, I fear power interviewers lose the ability (or desire?) to assess candidates through their performance instead of strictly assess the performance.
Power interviewers concern me. I think they end up with too much influence over a company's hiring practices.
I've heard of people at big companies who conduct thousands of interviews a year. This gives them a lot of sway in company hiring practices and culture.
The problem, though, is these large companies are hiring at scale. Growth + attrition yields a lot of hires. Google itself just announced in their earnings call nearly 20k more employees in the past year. That means 100k+ interviews conducted. It's hard to have every interview stay personal an nuanced at that scale.