🔗 An engineer's perspective on hiring

Most companies suck at hiring. They waste everyone’s time (I once had a 9-round interview pipeline!), they chase the trendiest programmers, and they can’t even tell programmers apart from an LLM. In short, they are not playing moneyball.

Things are bad for interviewees too. Some of the best programmers I know (think people maintaining the Rust compiler) can’t get jobs because they interview poorly under stress. One with 4 years of Haskell experience and 2 years of Rust experience was labeled as “non-technical” by a recruiter. And of course, companies repeatedly ghost people for weeks or months about whether they actually got a job.

This post explores why hiring is hard, how existing approaches fail, and what a better approach could look like. My goal, of course, is to get my friends hired. Reach out to me if you like the ideas here.