Two's Complement - Slightly Less Terrible Tech Interviews

Episode Date: February 17, 2023

Ben and Matt descend like Orpheus into the horrifically awful world of tech interviews, to try and extract some sort of humanity from the process. They fail, of course, but discuss some interesting ideas along the way.

I'm Matt Godbolt. And I'm Ben Rady. And this is Two's Compliment, a programming podcast. Hey, Ben. Hey, Ben. Hey, Matt. So there's a lot of things going on in the world right now, in the tech world particularly. Some of the FANG companies are downsizing, and we are the little company we work for, one of the few places that are actually hiring at the moment.

And this is not officially supported by our company in any meaningful way but we have definitely not an advertisement this is definitely not an advert yeah it's not an advert but you and i've been doing a lot of uh well i say you and i you have been doing an awful lot of resume filtering and uh interviewing and then interviews i seem to be the end of the interview pipeline which means that i get the the sort of the the that have already been filtered through, the folks that have already passed a whole bunch of other interviews. So I get one view. You're doing a lot of earlier stage interviews. But I figured we should talk about that a little bit. And I know you have opinions and thoughts, seeing as all you seem to do is read resumes these days.

Yeah, read resumes and interview people. It's like a good third of my job these days, which is not where I want it. But it's sort of like we are in this very fortunate position of having a company that is looking to hire. And the rest of the world is not like that. And sort of that creates some opportunity for us to maybe – because my perception – I've never worked, you've worked for Google, I've never worked for a big tech company with tens of thousands of employees and stuff like this. But certainly my perception of these layoffs is that if you're going to lay off 10,000 people and you're going to make the decision to do that and execute it in like a couple of months which is it sort of seems to be the timeline yeah

like you're not making really fine grained decisions about which people you're letting go and which people you're not you know you're just going to cut whole departments and you're going to be like there's going to be some great people in here and maybe we could have retained them if we wanted to do this exhaustive re-interview process or some other

sort of thing but we're not going to do that by and large they have to use broad strokes to yes yeah right right which is why you get some of these terrible stories about folks who've been there a long time or they were like uh in the labor ward at the time when they discover that they've been cut which means that like no one really thought about it because i don't believe that even in the most capitalistic society anyone is that horrible to humans it just is how it came out because there's it it's big swathes of companies and without the personal touch that you would otherwise hope to have especially after a long time in the company but right nevertheless that's where we are yes and that is what's happening right now uh and so you know this is a sort of brief moment in time for us where while all of these layoffs are happening, some of which might be kind of arbitrary and therefore laying off like very talented and experienced people.

At the same time, we are trying to grow and sort of there's this like brief window where it's like, oh, well, we might have an opportunity here to get a whole bunch of great people. And so that's why I'm spending a third of my day reading through resumes and doing interviews and other things, because I fully expect that, you know, six months from now or whatever, when the market has kind of settled out a little bit, that it will sort of be back to normal. And we'll be, I mean, let's hope so for the wider economy. Let's hope so, even though it's lovely to have the choice right now for us i certainly i think would be wise to operate under the assumption that this is going to sort of return to the way it was maybe not six months ago or a year ago when it was particularly hot but like you know the way it was like two or three years ago right like when we we would still sort of have to look pretty hard

to find we didn't have this huge influx of candidates um you know take advantage of the opportunity where you can so it has definitely been very top of mind for me. I've been doing a lot more interviews. I've been setting up new interview pipelines and trying to figure out how to do that. Talking with recruiters about how to, you know, get the best candidates and how to filter them effectively while also trying

to keep in mind that like we have other jobs to do. We have a bunch of stuff to build and um everyone involved in this process is also doing those other things so everything we do is a trade-off here yeah yeah it is but yeah it's it's i mean there's even the old trade-off of like you know hiring another person i think you said it well when someone said uh to you can we just hire some more people and then it'll go faster and you're like no i can show you a book that will tell you exactly why the opposite thing will happen so you know there's that to balance as well right you know the time that we take And then it'll go faster. And you're like, no, I can show you a book that will tell you exactly why the opposite thing will happen. So, you know, there's that to balance as well, right?

You know, the time that we take to interview folks is lost time in some way if they don't work out. It's important time, but it's not time that you're building stuff. on you for a while while they come up to speed and while you get them the opportunity to to grow and become more of a net positive than somebody who is asking like where's the bathroom i don't even know where how do i go how does the coffee machine work ah right yes and so on well and our coffee machine is particularly complicated right um the uh yeah i mean and I think one of the things that everyone looks at when they're looking at these, like a potential candidate, is sort of like how long it's going to take you to get them up to sort of that net positive level. Right. And for somebody that's right out of school, like you're making more of an investment in them. Absolutely. And it's going to take a longer period of time. But for somebody with more experience, like, you know, part of the reason you're hiring people with experience is that you don't have to teach them as much.

And they should hopefully get to that point sooner. But it's true for pretty much every – I've never had someone that joined a team that I was on and, like, day one, it was like, oh, we're getting more out of you than we're putting in. Like, that just – It just doesn't happen. I've never seen that. You know. Right? Sometimes it's only, like, weeks, but it's never like the first day so um you know and and then with

with people who are right out of school like i expect that process to take months and sometimes even years to really truly get to the point where it's like you are producing the level of quality that i would want and expect for this particular type of project and can vary um and and you're doing it uh you know at a level that means that you know for every two hours of guidance and instruction and peer review and all the other forms of input that i'm possibly giving you i I'm getting more than two hours out, right? That can easily take months to get to that point with somebody who's right out of school. Right, understandably.

I mean, there are whole processes that vary from company to company. I mean, you and I are quite lucky that we've found company, well, we've worked at the same companies, and so therefore we've brought the practices that we know and love with us. So we kind of like, hey, this is a familiar is a familiar process i wonder why oh because we invented it in

the last company but like for somebody who's just fresh out of school um just even like doing poll requests and understanding how that process works or right you know how do you design things in a way that is or what are the things that are important in a piece of software that you're not just going to hand in at the end of a semester and never have to look at again but it's going to haunt you for the next six years you know what do you how does that change the way you write software and all of the things in between there so yeah yeah so what kind of i mean how does one go about for say let's say a mid to senior person not the the new grads that we just talked about because i think we can all see the shape of what that looks like and we all understand some of the things that

they're gonna perhaps not have been exposed to but um you can get somebody who's been working for three four five years um and then how do we look for the things that are going to say it'll be weeks rather than months before you are uh we're getting more energy out of you than we're putting in. The fusion reactor of your brain will be positive. Exactly. I mean, so I think that we do it a little differently than a lot of other firms do it. I get a lot of feedback from people that have been through our interview process

and they were like, wow, this was really different. Like you guys didn't do the regular sort of like leet code, rank, whatever, silly, you know, I know. Those things are so gross. But it's like, you guys didn't do that. You did something very different. And it's like, yeah, like, you know, what we do, I think is actually kind of unique in that like our sort of,

you know, our process is pretty normal at the beginning. It's very typical at the beginning, you know, we have somebody call them up and we say like, hey,, where do you live and where do you want to work and what have you done? And just sort of, A, make sure that they're a real person because we've had that. We've found. And then just sort of generally get a sense from them of what they're looking for and use it for an introduction call. And then very soon after that, usually immediately immediately after that we send them a programming test and this programming test is open source it's on our public github we share it with everybody and part of the reason that we do

that and and i know i don't know if you've had the same experiences you know finance can be a little bit of a of a of an old boys club, right? Where it's sort of like, people know people, and you get these things of like, oh, yeah, the interview process over at Jump is like this, and they're going to ask you these kinds of questions. And that's like, I think, profoundly unfair. It's sort of like, you're just giving an advantage to the people that are already in the industry beyond their industry experience. Like this isn't industry experience. It's not like you have depth, you know, in-depth knowledge

of how equity markets work. It's just that you know Barry at whatever. And they say, you know, they said, well, this is what they asked me when I came in on the way in. And, you know, I mean, there are websites nowadays that share some of this stuff and information,

which is kind of another thing where it's like, well, if that's going to happen anyway, let's just put it out there in the open. And then we've leveled the playing field for everyone. Exactly, exactly. We're leveling the playing field for the people who might think that, like, you know,

digging into those things might be slightly, not dishonest, but just, like, circumventing the process. Right, right. And it's like, no, no, no, we're going to make sure that... I could imagine myself feeling that, like, well, I've noticed, oh, gosh, even like this, right? Oh, I just noticed that maybe they didn't know that their interview test is open source and publicly available. I won't look at it.

Right. And then that would be like my thoughts about the process. But no, we're doing it on a purpose. It's there so that everyone can see it ahead of time. So we have this very open process uh and the you know people ask people to do the problem they do the problem they submit it and then the follow-on to that is also i think pretty unique in that like a lot of what the follow-on interviews do are their focus on programming and the programming process so something that i that i see a lot with kind

of like technical interviews and programming interviews, especially like pair programming style interviews, sort of dysfunctional version of pair programming style interviews, is that you're basically just watching somebody code as quickly as they possibly can. It's like, how much functionality can you cram into a 60 minute or 90 minute or two hour, God forbid, programming session.

And they've got this like, you know, checklist of like, were they able to implement this? Were they able to implement this? Were they able to implement this? And if you get all the way through the checklist, then you pass the interview. And if you don't, then you're not fast enough and you fail. And it's like, well, if that's what this job is going to be like, well, then just fail me now because I don't want that job, right? I don't want to be writing code as quickly as I possibly can for two hours straight with somebody looking over my shoulder. I was going to say breathing down your neck the whole time.

It's just like that's not a normal way. I don't work that way. Yeah, right. So we do this sort of like, you know, pairing style, collaborative style programming interviews. But the purpose of that is to evaluate their process, not their result. Right. We're not looking at like how much code they can crank out. They're looking at like, how do you think about software design? How do you

think about testing? How do you think about performance? How do you think about data structures? Can you communicate these ideas to other people? Can you take your ideas and put them into code, right? Can you manipulate code in order to make your ideas real, and it's not about like oh yeah you implemented the three sorting algorithms but not the fourth one so you didn't make it right so i think that's pretty unique and i definitely think that gives us a good sense of like in those early days when someone has just joined a company and they're gonna like gum and they're gonna work with me and i'm gonna be like let's work on this problem together i'm going to probably know in the first day what that trajectory is going to be over the next few right i don't know if you've sort of had that

experience of sort of like yeah after the first day it's like yeah this guy might pick up a little slower or or you know that's uh it's definitely something i mean this is more an interview thing as i have often you've been they've been have often, you've been, they've been, by the time I see a candidate, they've been through the various filters that come naturally out of the programming side of the test, of the interview, I should say. But yeah, definitely something I like to do

is find something which is kind of on the border of something that somebody might know, but like, it's definitely not critical. So I don't know if they say they have Java experience. I say, oh, tell me a little bit about what it means to, you know, Java versus, say, a real compiled language. And I know like you could write a book on the answer to that question. Right. That's the thing. Right. But I want to push them until I get they get to like an obvious point where they don't know anymore and then if i know something i'll maybe say oh this is how that works now often it's you know some minutiae of the garbage collector or it's something

in python about how reference counting works or anything like that and i'll try and teach them something just two minutes two minutes you know nothing i mean obviously i like to do that anyway that's fun for me. But then I try and make it so that later on in the interview, I call back and I see whether or not they can extrapolate from the new information that they've been given. Oh, does it work the same way as the thing you just taught me over here? And I'm like, oh, it does actually. Yeah, great.

And that's a very good sign for me that they can pick up things on the fly. Now, obviously it's difficult because interviews are under pressure. So it's not necessarily an out that they don't, but it's a good sign for me that they can pick up things on the fly and obviously it's difficult because interviews are under pressure and so it's not necessarily an out that they don't but it's a good sign for me and it can contributes to a positive signal from a candidate amongst all the other things right but yeah it's difficult right and i mean interviews are just inherently a kind of process where you're just going to get a lot of things wrong, right? You hopefully err on the side of not hiring people who aren't a good fit and therefore reject people who might be. Like, that's the sort of smart way to do this. It's difficult.

But it kind of sucks for everybody. It sucks if you're the candidate, right? It sucks if you're the candidate. You're like, well, I was on the fence. And I think we've all seen candidates that have either passed on and then have thrived outside. Or one has stuck one's neck out for somebody because you are the one person who gave them the five-star thumbs up, we have to hire them immediately. And everyone else is like, I'm not really sure. And you sit your neck out and then they get hired. And then it's like, oh, my gosh, it's amazing how we got on with before this person was hired

right and that's that's a nice feeling but then you but there's always like one quadrant of the right uh the thing that you don't get information on so you don't know about the unknown unknowns what about all those people that didn't interview very well at all no one stuck their neck out and then they didn't hear about them ever again but would have been amazing all right and right it's really really hard to get that right but you know ultimately you've got to protect the your the business at one level and also the working environment that you're going to be bringing a new person into and so you know although it's unfortunate for the candidates um maybe if you're a maybe it you you you know you have to round down and say well i'm sorry this

is not going to work out this time i yeah but it's never yeah i hate it everything about it is awful everything about it is awful i totally agree and and it does kind of work out sometimes to be this sort of like subtractive process where you're putting people through these various examinations and all along the way you're expecting sort of like yep yep this is good yep yep yep and you sort of get to the end and it's sort of like well we've ran out of tests so we're gonna hire you yeah and that's none you know nobody really wants to be like you didn't do anything wrong therefore we hired you but in a way i mean that's the again i'm at the end i'm typically towards the end of the interview

pipeline just because of the way things are set up. So I have a very artificial view of these incredibly great candidates that effectively that's how I feel. I feel like they've already come to me. I read through the notes thing um and i'm all the things that we just talked about in terms of their learning or whatever and then i'm just here to say yeah everyone else was right great let's let's bring them on board or whatever yeah um and i don't get a great way of calibrating how good that person is compared to all the other good people you know like if you've sifted out like 95 of the people and i'm always seeing the top five percent then i'm going am i just too lenient here are these people all great a great antidote to that phenomena that we're talking about here is this sort of yes but not for me right when you get feedback from people in an interview process or like i think this person would be a great addition to the company but i don't want to work with them right yeah like and that's kind of like rounds down to no in a way.

Now, that's not universally true. There are definitely situations in which you have like very specific fits for people that would work out better in one area and another area. But at least in my mind, when I'm sort of looking at that feedback from the group after the interview process is complete like there better be at least one person and hopefully multiple people that are like i would be happy to work with this person or even i would champion them you know if exactly yeah i would i would know somewhere along the line for this person yeah that's right exactly yeah yeah and if you don't have that you might have fallen into this trap of it's not that the person is actually a really great fit. It's just that all along the way, they were like, well, I guess good enough.

I guess good enough. I guess good enough. And at the end, it's sort of like, well, I guess we need to give them an offer now. I don't know. That's not a great outcome from that process. You need to have something, I think, a little bit more. You need to have an advocate at the end of the process to say, like, you know, this. If no one else wants this person i will gladly take

them please please please can they be on right and in fact i see a very on a recent candidate went through our pipeline you made that exact point which i thought this is so you're putting your money where your mouth is quite literally here yeah yeah that's true that's true um but yeah yeah i mean and i mean beyond that like one of the things that I think there's a lot of economic value in is making interviews both humane and really fun. Right. For certain. And especially engineers, like we're hiring them to be able to think, sometimes think very deeply about very complex problems. And an interview is not the sort of emotional state, hopefully, that you're going to be in when you're working at a job. And so, you know, like it's like a very well-known thing. You know, people under stress, their cognitive abilities drop.

They stop being able to think of more creative ideas. I myself, in my career, have had multiple situations in which I've had some ongoing production issue, and I log SSH into a box, and I just get dumber. I forget the names of commands. I start transposing things, and I have to double and triple and quadruple check the things that I would normally just be able to do without thinking. And that kind of stress absolutely happens in interviews and it can really distort your picture of a candidate. And so I think one of the things that's really important as a way to sort of create a little bit of an antidote for that, I mean, you're never going to be able to completely do it, is you have to think about your interview process and how you're going to make it interesting and fun and engaging and something that like is a challenge, but is also, you know, getting your

mind into that mode of solving interesting problems and talking about interesting things, as opposed to the like, oh my God, I'm making a fool of myself i can't remember the answer to this question i used to know this oh my god what's happening right yeah i know you want to set up a situation where you're like this is something i go to pains to say like you know we understand it's a stressful place so you know if you can't remember it exactly i you know just if you don't get the right term for this thing if you know it exists that's good enough for me i'm not here to test you on this and like especially if we're doing any kind of like that's good enough for me. I'm not here to test you on this. And like,

especially if we're doing any kind of like live code type stuff, I'm like, I'm not looking to see if you've remembered the semicolon or if there is the brackets are matched or whatever. That's unimportant here. I trust that you would, with an idea, you would actually do the right thing and tend to avoid those things anyway. But yeah,

it's, it's interesting. I think there's two things that go into that. There is the, first of all, as you say, humane. I like the idea of being humane. This is another human being who is stressed out and worried. And your job is to say, are they a good fit for our company?

Which unfortunately puts you in a slightly antagonistic position in a way. Yeah. But there's a sort of second point here, which is like the vast majority of people that want interviews. I mean, certainly, I mean, again, my own position in the pipeline, notwithstanding, but the vast majority won't pass the filter at some point along the way. And then, you know, the HR department is going to have to make the awkward call to say thanks very much. But it's not a fit for us or however they do it. I'm sure they're much better than I am phrasing bad news to people but yes i think it's it's great another part of that

humanity the humaneness i think uh is to make sure the person who's been into felt that everything went fairly for them and that they come away feeling like it was a good conversation that was okay actually even though i didn't get it maybe it was just a cultural thing maybe i didn't quite understand the thing maybe the role wasn't a fit for me not like oh my god those people are awful you know nobody wants that to happen on either side and that's that's a difficult thing to pull off when you are in this sort of antagonistic situation you know you want people to kind of walk away and say oh well maybe next time or that kind of feel or something like that they're feeling still positive about their experience yeah um and so being interviewing humanely is a great way of

of uh allowing that to be well giving an opportunity to to have that experience um have the candidate have that kind of an experience i mean i've seen things before i've i've sat in other people's interviews not at this company but at one a couple ago uh where somebody asks a question and then they will sit sort of silently just staring out the candidate and i felt awkward as the sort of like like the other person in the interview like learning how to interview i'm like give them give the guy a break now i'm probably more likely to step in and say oh maybe i can help you a bit early and that's something that's on me to learn and whatever but like it feels extremely like i'm looking for the cheat the the the one word

phrase that is the exact answer for me and i'm just sort of gonna wait for you to say it and i think that's that feels too yeah you know i maybe this is just my own personal opinion, but the time that you have in interviews with candidates is precious. You're using their time and you're using your time. And the question, as we said at the very start of this conversation, is I need to get a sense of what their process is going to be like in the first few weeks and months of the company. As they're coming on, as they're ramping up, as they're getting to a point where they're valuable and useful and making a positive contribution, what is that going to be like and how long is it going to take? And for me, that precious interview time, I want to simulate that as much as I possibly can.

And I certainly don't plan when they start of asking them very one-sided questions and then sitting in silence with my hand on my chin going like, what is the answer to this? That's not how their first few weeks are going to go. It should be a collaborative thing. Right. So I want to try to make that as realistic as I can, as collaborative as I can,

and as close to I can as the first few months. And I am trying to do some things to basically like compress that time, you know, compress like weeks of that collaborative time into like an hour by doing a little bit more things that are a little bit more directed and a little bit more pointed just to like try to get as much information as I can.

But the goal remains the same, which is, you know, in those first few weeks and months, what is your trajectory going to look like, right? Because if it looks like very positive, goal remains the same, which is, you know, in those first few weeks and months, what is your trajectory going to look like? Right. Because if it looks like very positive, then you're probably going to be a great fit. Yeah. I don't know.

I mean, this is, as we said before, this is just one of those things where you're always going to be able to look back and sort of be like, yeah, you know, it's hard to get this right. And I don't think we got it right on this candidate or that candidate. And as a result, I would hope, I would hope that anyone who has done this for long enough sort of has that understanding in the back of their mind and sort of knows. It's like anyone that would tell me,

it's like, oh, we have a perfect interview process and we only get the best of the best. It's like, no. It's like someone telling you that they're a c++ expert you're like nobody can say that no the dunning-kruger effect means that if you know if you think you're an expert you're absolutely you're right here on the dunning-kruger curve right yeah right yeah so um that's a i mean i've seen some very alternative approaches to hiring interviewing and hiring um i think i can't remember the name of the company but somebody who we got in at a previous company somebody we got in as a i think originally as a penetration tester you know like a

security consultant yes uh he ran for a long time uh thomas tachek i think his name is it just came to mind uh he ran for a long time some like uh newsletter with like like here here's like a sort of uh brain teaser style challenge of like can you hack this thing and then if you did you could email him the answer and he would send you the next one in the sort of the the chain and he did it i believe originally and i forgive me if he ever hears this and i've got it completely wrong but it's something like this he did this in originally as just like a this is a fun way to teach folks about security engineering and hacking and uh you know penetration testing all those type of bits and pieces but then he realized that by the end of it anyone who'd got

to like the 15th one was probably a very good security researcher type person and maybe he should hire them right whoever they are and so he started doing this and some of the best employees that they brought on were people who had just been through this and they were very non-traditional background people i think he said that there was one person who worked as like the it person for a library in the middle of a rural area in the middle of nowhere and again i'm paraphrasing everything from memory six seven years ago whatever and it's like there's no way that person without a degree who was just like fixing the computers in the library would have done would have gotten a job under the normal circumstances

of like the kind of interviews that would would bring somebody in or even bring them into contact with to even think that maybe i could apply for a job here no one gave him the permission to apply for that job and yet thomas sort of emailed him and said you're amazing do you want a job and it worked out brilliantly and i think that's lovely we all want the situation where um we can widen the talent pool that we can pull from and we can make it a more level playing field because like it's it's not who you know at all at that point i mean obviously there's a bit of like whether you've got access to that yeah i i love that it was an interesting story i love the idea and he set up i believe it set up a company to essentially uh uh productionize that approach

to hiring and he said literally their their final um interview process was someone would come in and the hr person would ask them like three questions only like what is your name where do you live got a very very straightforward and that was all the interview was was like are you a real human being is effective and i think that sounds great and i think it worked for him because so much of it was individualistic so much of it was um uh consulting work remote consulting work I still think there's a bit and this is unfortunately this is where now we're into the oh but there's a bit where you have to work with someone and you have to be able to right um interact with them on a personal basis and you want to make sure that

you're going to be productive as a unit of people working together perhaps you are going to be customer facing in which case you know you have to be able to deport yourself with a customer in a way that doesn't cause issues as well right so that obviously slightly takes the edge off of that approach but i like the idea yeah i like the idea in print in principle yeah i love that and i mean one of the things that is particularly compelling about that is not only does it work, which is the most important thing, but it has a nice sort of balance of cost. So one of the things that we, and we were just sort of saying this, think about a lot, is like all the people that are participating in this interview process also have their day jobs that they actually need to do and all of the time that we're spending on this takes away from that which is what we use to you know make payroll i mean you think six hours for an individual candidate could easily be taken up in all the things that happen yeah maybe even more than that yeah and that's a whole working

day for a human being at our company per candidate. That's not cheap. Right. Exactly right. And it's expensive for the candidates too, but especially when you have a lot of influx, the burden can sometimes disproportionately fall on the company, especially because there's deficiencies of scale there. the more candidates you have, the more, the harder it gets to organize any one candidate. If you have one candidate a week, you, they're loaded up in your head. You know who they are. They're moving through the pipeline. You're keeping track of them. The more you get, the more of those kinds of informal systems start to break down. And so the, the thing that I really like about this is that, you know, once he's got those problems, it's really easy to just be like, oh, I got a question from somebody. I'll check to see if their answer is right.

I'll give them the next problem. That's like a minute. Right. And it does sort of put a lot of the burden on the candidate to then solve the problem. Of course, which is another issue. Right. But that's sort of like if you're trying to design these systems to be able to handle this, you want to be able to have those tools in your toolbox where you can say, like, I'm going to take a minute to send you an email and you're going to work on it for an hour. And then I'm going to get a lot of signal back from that result, which then I can move you on to more higher touch processes. We're investing more time.

Right. Which is a little bit. I mean, so now we're going all over the place here uh but like you mentioned like the leak coding yeah uh type thing that is sort of what that is trying to do there i mean in particular my understanding is that it's the kind of thing that companies might be tempted to do around campus recruiting time where there is a huge imbalance in power where if your company is well regarded enough to go onto a list somewhere that's on like a github of some college then maybe someone is just gonna throw their resume at

hundreds of companies right because it's cheap to do that these days you have to print it out and hand it to people you have to send it in the mail even you just email it and so you can make a massive list of companies you want to apply for and you can be like not even necessarily very committed to them you're just throwing a wide net and who wouldn't try that i i would yeah yeah so but but that means that as an individual company even one that's relatively small and and not necessarily as well known as ours gets thousands of applications from people that are graduating and it's not the case that every single one of those people wants absolutely to work at aquatic right that's not necessarily the case there it's maybe like they like i just want to work in finance or chicago or wherever right there's just like you some search term found you and why the heck not and then it's kind of incumbent on us to

filter them down to the few to say like well do we is this actually worth proceeding or were you just having a laugh right and having a laugh when you're looking for a job right but you're looking for a job and it makes sense and i mean certainly for those large companies like i totally understand why they use lead code and all of these other tools to do this filtering like it is kind of inhumane and i hate it but it's like i totally understand why they do it um it makes sense for them i'm not saying that they shouldn't do it um for me the solution but i say it's like it's it's a degree of scale compared to say the the the the process that i was just describing thomas attachek stuff you know like it feels a little bit like it's the same in in some ways you know you're making you're pushing the burden back at the candidate to say

you have to prove yourself a few times before I invest that little bit more time. And that can feel inhumane. It's very definitionally inhumane, right? Because it's almost automated. Was that sorry? Don't discount the fact that it just feels cooler, right? Like in his particular instance, the thing that he was doing was awesome, right? It's a security researcher.

I'm giving you this crazy puzzles you know you could do a thing where you like sort of like put some easter eggs in some places so you can find the email address like don't discount the value of awesome right like that is a very good point right that is a very good point filling out the like so many things facebook is not awesome no that is true yeah and these things also i mean like the the the solutions get posted and then you're back into the world of like, well, if you know where to look for the solution, then you can jump through the thing anyway. Right, right, right. So it's, I think recruiting is really difficult. It is really, really difficult.

On both sides, right? Yeah, it is. I know we're fortunate to be on this side of the recruitment conversation. Yeah, right now. But, you know, it's like we've both been in that world where it's like, you know, okay, I guess I'm going to do some interviews this week, see how that goes. Right. Yeah. Yeah, that's true.

Yeah. That was my personal anecdote. anecdote that was actually how I wound up at Dr. W. I was moving from Texas to Chicago and I had a whole week blocked off that I took vacation for to come back to Chicago and interview with a whole bunch of companies. That was a very stressful week. I bet. Yeah, this was back in 2010,

so obviously all these interviews were in person, and they were in offices, and it's very different than the way we do things now. We do things, yeah, right, right. I know I haven't really interviewed someone in person physically for a very long time, but yeah, 2010 also for me at DW, that was the end of 2010.

I had flown to canada because i was doing something for i was still working at google at the time and i didn't i was talking to dw but i wasn't really sure about it and i certainly didn't want them to pay for me to fly internationally from the uk where i was living at the time all the way over to to chicago and then like put me up in a hotel and everything that felt a bit much like i was committing to them you know like they were giving me something and then in return i would have to give them something kind of feeling and i was not sold on the whole idea but i was in uh toronto or nearby uh kitchen or wherever the heck the um google office was over there

for something and then it was felt like well it's just a little puddle jumper across the lake to get to chicago so all right i'll do it then and then yeah it was a whole day it was a friday which i was meeting a friend as far as google was concerned and i i spent chatting to a whole bunch of folks most of whom now are very good friends yeah you did literally everybody i interviewed with everyone i interviewed so nevin lieber uh oran miller oh my god uh all the people that we know and love and we still hang out with the different uh were in those interviews it would it was it was a fun time yeah so anyway uh that was yeah you started it with a personal anecdote made me have to say one so i think this is probably a place we should stop talking i think this is a great way to end it. I think this is a great way to end it.

Cool. You've been listening to Two's Compliment, a programming podcast by Ben Rady and Matt Godbold. Find the show transcripts and notes at www.twoscomplement.org. Contact us on Mastodon. We are at twoscomplement at hackyderm.io. Our theme music is by Inverse Phase.

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