Tech companies are extremely risk adverse when it comes to hiring the "wrong" person. More interviews means more people to spread to blame over if a wrong hire happens. At seven interviews, if everyone signed off on the bad hire, that wasn't anyone's fault, it must have been that the hire was skilled at deception or some other deflection.
Curious, what is the "wrong" person? I've worked with some co-workers before that were clearly not a fit, but it was so obvious. One time I was asked to help a new hire with a project that was falling behind. He had spent 2 months trying to get some javascript (that he copied from a project I had done) working. He didn't even know what the web console was. As soon as I opened it and saw the javascript errors the fix was simple. But he spent 2 months just smearing random javascript around... Surely it would be easy to filter that person out during interviewing.
But on the other end... I've worked with some people that are pretty good at leetcode and very fast coders. But even though they write many pages of code every day and tons of commits, their code is absolutely horrible, full of bugs, impossible to read. They got stuff done, but it was at great cost in the future. That was mostly why I left my original job in the first place (looking for work now for 18+ months). We hired a couple of new people and they were pumping out so much code I couldn't keep up with all their commits. Bugs started rolling in and they were too busy working on the new projects to fix their old crap. Boss had me hunting down and digging through their garbage code while my projects were getting behind and I was the one "under-preforming". I started going insane, unable to get out of bed, staring out the window for 12+ hours a day unable to look at their code. Mostly walked out. Those new people all quit after I left as well but the company's market crashed due to covid so we would have all be laid off anyway.
If it’s tough to fire the obvious dead weight, just think how tough it is to fire your second category. Both seem “wrong”, unless the latter examples are being judiciously messy, e.g. build revenue first perfection later.
Where “wrong” person means “doesn’t want to subject themselves to a ridiculous amount of submissive hoop jumping” — which excludes a tremendous amount of the best possible hires.
Doesn't this seem like the (hopefully inadvertent) perfectly structured model for hiring sociopaths? I'm speaking semi-hyperbolic but seriously... An employee isn't a romantic partner or social club member. Some (most?) of the most brilliant and hyper-productive people I've hired and worked with were socially inept. In fact I once hired a guy whose resume was -barely- legible and horribly structured who turned out to be my top tech.
Sociopaths are frequently great employees. Psychopaths are bad news, but some of the best people I’ve ever worked with were total sociopaths whose goals aligned with the organization’s.
I actually there’s quite a few “ethical” sociopaths who don’t care about anything but success but aren’t willing to hurt people or break laws to do so. They don’t have empathy toward people but accept that not hurting people will advance their cause.
Funny enough it was actually my wife who suggested him. I had a large stack of resumes I had gone through and was complaining to her that I couldn't find a suitable candidate to even call in for an interview. She looked through the resumes and asked about him. His resume was so bad I hadn't even read it, I had glanced over it and just assumed it was someone on UI just making their weekly allotted resume drops. She had worked in retail management for years and horrifically written resumes are apparently pretty common in retail. Turned out he had the experience I was looking for.
