When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re selling
A lot of this post seems pretty reasonable. But:<p><i>In my experience, it’s fairly easy to judge technical skill. A friendly conversation about technical interests and recent projects can often be enough.</i><p>Bullshit. Sounding credible in technical interviews is a skill, not the same skill as actually being a good programmer, and might even (statistically, in the large) be close to orthogonal to it.<p>We found this out the hard way. At Matasano, we started our work-sample hiring process[1] as a way of filtering out the smooth-talkers. Before work-sample tests, we&#x27;d spent loads of time on carefully designed interview questions; interview design was something close to a hobby for some of us.<p>Of course, it was only after we started doing work-sample challenges that we discovered that not only were a lot of excellent-seeming candidates actually not capable of delivering, but an even greater fraction of the candidates our &quot;friendly conversations&quot; were selecting out <i>were</i> in fact perfectly capable. It was a bad deal all around.<p>Whatever you do, don&#x27;t fast-path &quot;senior&quot; developers. Everyone should run the same process for the same job. Not only do you risk hiring people who won&#x27;t work out, but you&#x27;re also depriving yourself of the most important data you need to iterate on your hiring process.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sockpuppet.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;06&#x2F;the-hiring-post&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sockpuppet.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;06&#x2F;the-hiring-post&#x2F;</a>