The response is to the needless growth in complexity of the hiring process; advocating for reducing that complexity is appropriate.
You're tacitly expressing a concern that a fast hiring commitment would be riskier; but that's not necessarily so. A minimal set of filters are meaningfully effective: resume, references, and meet the team. Anything beyond that doesn't have just diminishing returns, it can negatively impact the company by narrowing the field of viable candidates too far.
I guess I don't think 2 phone calls and 5-6 hr onsite is that complex. Maybe the onsite could be 3 instead: 2 code + behavioral, but I can't imagine wanting to do less than that.
5-6 hr onsite is a strong filter against folks who are presently employed; particularly those who cannot spare personal days or unpaid days for every interview.
I don't think that argument is particularly relevant in the tech industry. It's not that hard to find a "sick" day, even if you don't have unlimited PTO. And especially during COVID, where going missing for a day might go unnoticed for a lot of people.
Well... yes. I think that for most HN commenters, who work for a non-hourly salary and provide hard-to-quantify value in a seller's market for labor, it's generally possible to get a day off if you need it.
Many tech companies have gone to "unlimited" PTO, so there's no cost to taking a few days off. But even outside that, almost no managers are following the letter of the law. Last time I changed jobs, my employer at the time had explicit PTO time, but unlimited sick leave, and in practice during COVID (and especially near any holiday) was pretty lax with accounting for "I need to be out on Friday afternoon" as long as work was getting done and you were somewhat responsive to email/pings on the day in question. I wasn't hunting very actively, so it was just the one day of interviews with one potential new employer - I concede that if you needed to do many full-day interviews, it would eventually become conspicuous.
Nor do I. But I'm the cases we seem to be talking about here, normally it's not like that tho. It's multiple rounds: 5-7 interviews. Especially since remote.
I'm not advocating for hiring literally anyone. If they pass your credential requirements, reference checks, and team meet then they're already passing through significant filtering.
Resumes aren't really credentials. They're lists of things provided by the individual themselves and are almost always inflated in some way. Reference checks are just "I got someone you don't know (and shouldn't trust) to say good things about me", and meet the team is just "I can talk to people and sound smart for about an hour or two".
There are a very large number of idiots who can do those things. I strongly disagree that this is a significant filter.
Those who lie on their resume in a harmful way are immediately apparent upon hiring, and so are quick to fire. Those who do not, are not, and aren't fired.
It's really not the risk folks seem to think it is.
It's not easy to find liars. It's easy to find who are underperforming. There's a difference between the two.
Resume, references, and team meeting filters out almost everyone who needs to be fired. Folks who lie on their resume, who arrange dishonest references and who defraud their way through a meet and greet are _exceedingly rare_. It's such a vanishingly small segment of possibility that it's not worth troubling oneself over.
The reality is that companies use complex and obtuse hiring practices to cover for poor internal practices. They recognize an inability to deliver and perform on their teams, and consider it a hiring failure; but the reality, most of the time, is that it's a structural or management failure. Most hires, most of the time, are sufficiently able to deliver on their desired roles; but often, management is unwilling and unable to identify that they are responsible for poor performance. And so they blame the candidates, the new hires, to their teams. Not themselves.
I don't think folks are saying that outright lies are happening very often. What is happening is resumes being written to sound impressive (obviously) and perhaps inflating the difficulty/contribution/impact of past work. Exact same thing with referrals and meet and greets.
Honestly all three of those things test the exact same thing, the person's ability to sell themselves. Which is why I would not work anywhere with such lax interviews. I don't want to work somewhere that only values likability and talking oneself up.
The dirty truth is that if a candidate thinks they can perform well in a role then, most of the time, that's true. It is exceedingly rare that people apply for roles that they know they cannot deliver upon.
It's dirty because we like to believe that our technical proficiency and ability is elite and rare, but the truth is that with a little training, with a little on the ground experience, many people can do what we do.
You don't want to work somewhere where that's proven possible.
I think that's probably right, although not always, and there are other problems associated with firing these people as others have pointed out.
What you said is that those three things, including the resume, are significant filters. I am saying they are not and you seem to not have a rebuttal on my point about the resume.
You're tacitly expressing a concern that a fast hiring commitment would be riskier; but that's not necessarily so. A minimal set of filters are meaningfully effective: resume, references, and meet the team. Anything beyond that doesn't have just diminishing returns, it can negatively impact the company by narrowing the field of viable candidates too far.