how is it better than alternatives? this seems like a huge straw-man given almost every company that hires developers thinks they’re a large tech company and mimics their hiring process. it doesn’t seem like serious alternatives have been explored.
PIPing and firing is a huge time and emotional energy suck, and it sucks for people on both sides. To reduce the amount it happens is worthy. You can’t in practice just say, “this guy sucks, lets fire him next week”
And it shows, barely anyone in my entire career has ever been fired. I only personally have been close to one.
So you’ve been close to one person getting fired? How do you have an opinion on the PIP process or firing at all if you have next to no experience with it?
I knew a guy at a FAANG who earned himself and his report a PIP for the grave sin of choosing the wrong deputy to send upstairs while he was on vacation. The deputized person went to one meeting and ran his mouth (arguably, told the truth). Both are no longer at the company.
PIP politics are absolutely routine in FAANG and if you’re arguing the other side you don’t know. FAANG is actively trying to fire or replace you at all times. I’ve worked at two so I can’t speak for three, but I’ve also worked for the two in that older acronym that you’d think of as the “nicest”. People read that that and probably hear me saying “giant evil entity is out to get you”, but it’s really middle managers cosplaying Kings Landing in the office, mostly unchecked, that does it.
Seriously; people want to work at a FAANG/MAMAA or whatever so they often assume it’s good. I had someone ask me if I noticed how light my calendar was now that the org considered me irrelevant. There’s an idea that FAANG is a bunch of nerds with glasses cooking up cool shit in a Zen commune with ambient drone music but it’s honestly some of the worst office politics I’ve ever seen across what is now two careers, and the PIP process is a big tool in that kit.
I worked at a FAANG for 3 years and I'm pretty sure no one I worked with was on a PIP. A PIP is extreme. It's sufficient to simply not give people raises, most people can and will easily find another job earning 10% more.
How would you really know? People don't usually talk publicly about their PIP.
I went from long time IC to manager at a faang adjacent company. It was eye opening to see who was on a PIP and go through calibrations.
There were well liked, competent people who others on the team got along with but they just were not delivering at the expected level. Sometimes the problem was lack of motivation or bad role fit.
> but they just were not delivering at the expected level. Sometimes the problem was lack of motivation or bad role fit.
Another i think is when management doesn't understand that someone is, in your wording, a "well liked, competent person", doesn't adequately understand what they bring to the team. Performance reviews, especially of ICs but not exclusively, have a bias towards perceived individual contribution and against teamwork.
Sure, but that doesn't give you any information about your particular company or team. In my experience, how aggressive companies are about "performance management" (using PIPs but this can also include other strategies like layoffs and outright firing) varies quite a lot.
I've worked at a FAANG for almost 5 years. I know probably a dozen or two people who have been PIP'd. I even know one guy who was PIP'd twice and then left when he was given his third PIP.
Been at one of FAANG for a few years. Never saw this play out. Sounds like something that is more likely to happen on the management side than it is the IC side…
Most ICs are pretty well insulated from this, because if they understood what went on at calibration a lot of good contributors would become pretty bitter.
I had a lot of managers and higher level ICs explain calibration and rage quit (although it was long overdue) after an unfairly low review. There were extreme politics happening at the time that the current ED laid out to me in an exit conversation, and most of it came into play. I should have made way more money off of my contributions than I did but didn't play politics, and honestly, given my role and position could not. I was a resource and not a player:)
Thank goodness ICs never see the top-level calibration with the executives. It's the most insane, ill-informed drive-by management I've ever experienced.
It also selects for people who will put up with anything, which to a cynical manager might sound like a good employee, except that our job is to replace labor with machines.
People who put up with anything are expensive. They keep billing you hours for tasks that could have been reduced to minutes by someone with a lower tolerance for BS.
I swear some of you have had terrible work experiences. I've been an engineer for the last 20 years. The first time I tried being manager, I sucked and it sucked. (I definitely sucked more because the place sucked but I wasn't great.) That was a decade ago though and I've gradually stepped back into management because I've had great leadership and learned a ton along the way. My primary goal as a manager is to ensure the team is happy and healthy, so that they are able to work effectively. Our hiring process supports this by ensuring we're not hiring dead weight, toxic people or engineers that can't provide value and drag the team down.
Where do you people work because I'd like to (a) avoid it and (b) poach people because your world view sucks and I can only assume that's a direct response to a shit environment.
To put it into perspective, my first 1:1 with everyone on the team includes questions like "what have previous managers done to help you be successful?" Managing people can be difficult but managers shouldn't be.
Or it selects for easy going people with patience, grit or humility, which seem like positive traits. It is true that companies tend to only hire the suckers that complete their full interview process.
My current company ambushed me with a full interview panel, Gilligan's Island style, when a former coworker invited me to come in for a 3 hour tour. I took it in stride and had fun, and it gave me some additional leverage while negotiating compensation. I remember writing an architecture doc and unit tests when they asked me to code something in an hour and a half. I've been there 6 years and it's been most rewarding for me and my family.
My first job out of school was a solid 8 hours of interviews, and I had a lot of fun during that interview too. I got to work on space ships, and in time made a fortune in equity. I remember preparing a presentation slide deck completely in valid C++ syntax. I also remember taking a red-eye after that interview for another 8 hours of interviews at another company, which I also enjoyed despite having only had 4 hours of sleep.
The 2nd company I worked for decided last minute to interview me for two different roles. That was like 11 hours of interviews. I actually ended up taking the 2nd role because it was a significantly better fit. I brought a large cast iron skillet to that interview, which was a nice ice breaker.
It's true that I put up with a lot of frustrating tasks without complaining, but I personally have zero tolerance for BS. It turns out that the more I push back on BS within an organization, the more I tend to get paid, so in that sense I suppose I am expensive!
One of the interview sessions was with an industrial designer. Seemed silly to me as a software engineer but what do I know. Leading up to the interview, they asked me to bring in a photo of something I thought had elegant design. After brian storming for not very long I decided on my skillet, and I thought it would be more fun to bring it along. When they asked for my photo, I pulled it out and plopped it on the table. After the initial WTF moment, we had a lengthy and interesting discussion about the merits of cast iron cook wear. All the subsequent interviews started with, "why is there a cast iron skillet?"
Going through TSA with a cast iron skillet in your carry-on is actually pretty fun because it's impossible for the screener not to giggle. I've also gone through airport security with a 20lb printed circuit board with about 90% copper fill, which surprisingly got less scrutiny.
Having something fun to make your interview memorable seems to go over well. I got selected for an internship because I showed up to the "interview" in a Hawaiian shirt. Apparently every other candidate showed up in a suit. We were meeting at a coffee shop on a college campus, so I just dressed for the environment.
I would think the opposite is more likely.If you are employed, there is no pressure. You may go through 12 interviews for a 12 different jobs and be only so slightly offended.
For the unemployed, time is most likely ticking, if not financially, at least emotionally. A relative slowness at any step of the process affects the unemployed mindset. Stress alone lowers interview performance, especially on the soft skills side.
I would guess that more people in the employed pool make it through.
You do have time. those interviews are scattered across multiple weeks, if you work place doesn't let you take a couple of hours of working hours away for personal matters, you got to quit even before having a lined up job as you don't want to stay there for far more important reasons than inability to take even 5 interviews
True but being employed goes a long way to giving the perception that you are employable so in the cases that the decision is a toss-up between an unemployed person and an employed one I’d be willing to bet the employed one wins almost every time.
So what its a circle jerk of people putting up with BS, then going through BS again because they did so well the first time?
I mean, maybe their other job isn't doing great, because they clearly have all this time to interview, wonder what is going to happen when they join your company...
To some extent, perhaps it's analogous to poor vs. rich people buying boots. Someone living paycheck to paycheck can only afford cheap boots, so they wear out quickly. Someone with money to spare can afford the high quality boots, and they last years.
Similarly, someone with a flexible, relatively good job is more easily able to look around and find an even better opportunity.
On the other hand, it takes some courage and risk tolerance to step out from the day to day grind and find something better, even if it could ruffle some feathers. That's not something that comes naturally to most people. Break some eggs to make an omelette.
No kidding! The best people already have jobs and you want to steal them away from somewhere else. 5+ interviews? giant take-home projects or multiple coding assessments? Pass, they're not going to put up with it. "Our 7-interview process ensures we only hire the best" ... of the 10% willing to go through this nonsense.
It's expensive for the company too. All of the people involved in the interview process are still getting paid while they are interviewing the candidates. They aren't working on their projects that they have to complete. The company probably has a recruiting or talent acquisition team and the people on that team don't work for free. The company might also work with outside agencies or external recruiters. If you hire one a candidate from one of these sources, you have to pay them too.
It's really expensive in terms of time and money to hire people. It's really hard to build a great team.
There's often a signing bonus. If there's a 10% chance of getting the job and a $50k signing bonus is common, then your EV is $5000 per interview.
Even if there weren't, then 10% of the extra compensation vs. an easier-to-hire company with your discount horizon applied would also count as payment.
If you do it right, candidates can leave with a positive impression even after being rejected. I've maintained correspondence with a few candidates over the years because they felt like they learned a thing or two about engineering during the course of the interview, and they wanted some additional mentorship.
The interviewee is usually interviewing on their current company's dime. It's even easier now with many folks working from home, you don't even need an excuse.
In my experience, it seems to take a company about 1-1.5 years to fire someone that's well intended but ineffective in their role. 15 or so "wasted" person-hours up front is well worth avoiding thousands of wasted person-hours, especially considering maybe 1 in 5 candidates that make it to a full interview are a good fit.
15 extra hours * N candidates per opening * M people onboarded per additional marginal employee discovered.
Picking numbers from a hat say 15 * 7 * 20 = 2,100 unproductive hours to avoid a subpar employee that still actually gets something done in the ~3,000 hours before being fired. That could easily be a net loss depending on how much onboarding time is needed and how unproductive they are on average.
Honestly, I think those numbers may be overly generous to long onboarding processes.
I am still fixing up the code of a developer from five years ago who was there for two years prior to me. He had ideas about how things should work and completely disagreed with the conventions of every framework.
And so, every time I go in a section of code to fix a bug or adjust a feature and I see his name in git blame... I spend another few hours to make sure that I'm not breaking some of the twisted framework code that he had and possibly fix it up a bit and adding a unit test for the functionality before I touch anything to assure myself that I know what it is doing.
An unproductive poor employee is bad... a productive bad employee is where the real problems are for years and years to follow.
I don't think a longer interview process is strictly necessary to avoid hiring unqualified people. Rather, a longer interview process helps to hire more people while maintaining high standards. Individual interview sessions go poorly all the time for silly reasons. If a candidate only had one interview session and botched it, they're probably done. If they had several sessions and botched one but showed excellence in another, they would still have a good chance of getting an offer.
shrug hiring the wrong person into an engineering role is incredibly expensive and painful for organizations with a long term outlook. It cancels out the productivity of at least one good engineer, and stresses out at least 3 people.
I've been a hiring manager before, and hiring good people is a huge time investment. The reality is that something like 99% of applicants aren't qualified, and the majority seemingly lack enough self-awareness to know it. The really good people also tend to be bad at marketing themselves. I don't think of interviews as a waste of time, though, even when it's a no-hire.
If someone is working hard and trying to make it work, the rest of the team is going to try and make it work too. A seemingly good rule of thumb is to start seriously considering firing someone the moment the thought enters your head. Typically by the time you're having those thoughts, the situation is likely irredeemable. In a generally positive work environment, folk aren't typically thinking about firing each other, and so it can take a while.
I'm not sure what you mean? Are you suggesting that companies shouldn't avoid hiring unqualified people that generate less value than their cost on average?
Research into who brings value, what technologies improve efficiency, has been inconclusive. The models end up with so many variables the conclusions are meaningless; any one parameter is insufficient, all the parameters needed mean no one parameter is greater than another. How can a value assessment being useful given all the required context that also has to exist? Is it a measure of value or traditional human bias?
Humans are prone to group think, belief in words of power, sigils; why believe in unfalsifiable value assessment when it comes down to tried and true ownership?
If traditional politics win at the end of the day why the belief this matrix of value isn’t just another cognitive boondoggle?
I think there's a bit of a misunderstanding in what interviewers are testing for. Interviewers at most companies aren't trying to evaluate or quantify a candidate's inherent value or general technical prowess. They're trying to determine whether or not the candidate can help solve immediate and real problems that the company has, while also trying to get a sense of whether the candidate has the potential to grow with the company long term.
There's very little science in interviewing, and it is indeed heavily based on heuristics. The whole point of lots of interviews is to reduce bias. Unfortunately, it's possible for candidates to mistakenly think an interview went poorly because they didn't get the answer right away, when from the interviewer's point of view it was one of the best answers they've heard because of the process by which the candidate arrived on the answer.
A popular metric for whether a candidate is likely to be able to solve practical problems is whether or not they've shipped products before. A lot of people pad out their resume with collective achievements, though, and so it's something that needs to be dug into. It's unfortunately not uncommon for folk to not understand the stuff on their own resume.
I never consented to this culture. I see little different here than a church, meat based tape recorders thinking the noises they emit are “the way” with little proof except “feudal capitalism” continues to “work”.
We don’t owe deference and agency to CEOs, VCs, and founders. The syntax is different but the LARP of being sheep for “wise men” is the same.
Only 13% of the country has an advanced degree (mine is MSc in math earned in the 90s; I’m old) and knowledge is not locked away in those heads. Education does not make people infallible and omniscient.
This is a result of traditional political memes; owners rule, everyone else drools. The filtering and sorting inside that cognitive bubble is just the proles making proles dance like jesters. No scientific theory makes this the one true way of organizing effort.
Memorizing semantics is not proof they’re correct. If GME can be shorted to the extent it is despite that being illegal, our institutions are built on deference to BS, since that system is the bedrock used to prop up tech VCs.
"If GME can be shorted to the extent it is despite that being illegal"
Shorting is only illegal if it's naked. When I ask people who say this what they mean, the answer is usually that the shorting must be naked because so many shares are being shorted. But that isn't how that works. If you have other evidence though, I'd certainly be interested.
Here’s my investment advice; go back to the late 90s, load up on tech, use the gains to dabble in btc, use those gains to retire by 40.
Worked for me.
I know how the boring numbers game works and optimized for it. I’m being honest instead of equivocating in Anglo-babble reasons why a process is an acceptable measure for filtering some people. To see poetry in this is a bit weird. It’s the same old fundamental arithmetic operations applied to different geometry. Pretty routine for us been there done that’s.
You seem extremely jaded, and the way you speak about religion is rather boorish in my opinion.
I enjoy living in and participating in a society. Thanks to the productivity gains of specialization and free trade, technology has been developed to the point that I spend my days designing embedded software to fly autonomous aircraft. Those aircraft deliver medical supplies, primarily in developing countries with poor road infrastructure. At least a few people a week don't die specifically because a UAV I helped make was able to deliver them a blood transfusion. The company is for-profit, and in exchange for my work I am compensated in salary and in equity. The better the company does, the more people have access to life saving medical care, and the more money I personally make. The UAV system also requires people to operate them, and so the company employs hundreds of people in those developing countries. One of the earliest and most tenacious in-country employees quit a couple years ago because they got accepted to a robotics program at Stanford.
The last employee I personally managed the hiring of only had a couple years of community college experience and self-proclaimed ADHD. Despite my intent for them to only spend 6 hours or so on the interview process, they spent probably 16 hours because they found the interview process itself personally rewarding.
The company CEO drives a crappier car than everyone else at the office. By coincidence, I had a serious problem last week that required intervention, and I quite literally made the CEO dance like a jester for me in order to make a point. There was no scientific theory involved.
I'm right there with you regarding the corruption of most financial and government institutions. I don't think it's as black and white as "capitalism bad", though.
Have you ever been in a job or taken a class with other people and not been able to see the different between the more competent and more incompetent people?
Yes, but I only see facets of their performance. And I’m only interested in specific areas, and might be blind to other talents or issues. They might be the brightest bulb in the training class, but spend all their day reading hacker news and creating memes.
It’s very difficult to quantify individual performance, and even harder to put a dollar figure on it.
Re: experience and working hard vs. working on what the project needs, that's definitely a trait of more seasoned engineers. I'd say it's a matter of learning strategy over tactics. I've gotten pretty good at that balance over the years. When I came into my current project I focused on aspects of the software that had been sorely neglected before me, and plenty of folk where skeptical for the first year or so. Now in hindsight the results speak for themselves, and it's apparently become a story of legend that my coworkers tell new hires.
Last week I had fully intended to spend at least 20 hours heads down coding, but instead I spent the entire work week writing and updating an architecture document. It was the best use of my time, though, as it allowed two other people to be heads down coding instead. Now this week it's three of us frantically writing code instead of just me, and we all know the final result will work and be boring. We're replacing a 7 year old piece of critical infrastructure.
This is one of those things I stupidly thought I understood when I was a Jr. Engineer, and now understand quite a bit differently after decades have gone by.
The more competent people weren’t necessarily the ones getting more things done, or the most visible, but were those engineers who understood the long term implications of what they were building, how it related to the business, and their relationship to other teams and customers. It’s trivial to be a good “performer” toiling away on a feature or system that shouldn’t exist. It’s exponentially harder to have the awareness to identify where the real problems are, and make sure you’re investing effort where it actually needs to go.
Indeed. Experienced interviewers can size up a candidate in the first 10 minutes and fairly accurately predict how their debrief will go. The rest of the interviews are just building up confidence, and making sure there's enough redundancy to tolerate the occasional bungle or accidental awkwardness. Folk get hired all the time despite getting imperfect interviewer feedback. I've had interviews where the first 45 minutes were painful but then the candidate blew me away in the last 15 minutes.
Perhaps, but PIPing and firing is bad for the employee, bad for the manager, and bad for the PIP'd employees teammates. PIPs don't happen immediately; it might take a month or two before it's clear to a manager that a new employee isn't performing to the expected level.
So I think I'd rather have a candidate spend 7 hours interviewing if it could save months of pain for multiple people later.
(This does assume, of course, that the 7-person interview panel actually does decrease the incidence of hiring-the-wrong-person enough to be worthwhile. I don't know if that's actually the case.)
Out of all the things I think are wrong with tech jobs -- and with employment in general -- I don't think "I have to interview with 7 people instead of 1 or 2" even cracks the top 50.
Compared to PIPing and firing? Interviewing is probably way, way less of a time and emotional energy suck.
Granted, I've only ever taken and given interviews, never given (or, fortunately, been under) a PIP or firing. But interviewing is just a few weeks or so of preparation and then a day or two, and the preparation is often fun, and so are some of the interviews. Nobody thinks PIPs and firings are fun.
Speaking as a senior dev who has interviewed dozens (if not hundreds) of candidates, I assure you that the bulk of the burden is firmly on the interviewers, not the candidates.
I've worked and interviewed at dozens of companies and literally never experienced a company that had more than 2 interviews plus a discussion with a hiring manager or HR.
I make half-ish of a FAANG salary, but it's enough to comfortably support a family and I'm generally pretty happy and get to work on cool stuff. The only challenge I never get at work are problems that have huge scale components.
Interesting, I’ve interviewed at all of the FAANGs other than Netflix, plus maybe 10 or so much smaller companies. In general the smaller companies all seemed to want to emulate the FAANG hiring process with 4-6 rounds of interviews with engineers after an initial phone screen. I think only 1 or 2 of them limited their interview to just 2 rounds.
I've been approached by a couple of FAANG and told them to stuff it because of the recruitment processes. I'm in London, and here at least they're extreme outliers.
If you're early in your career, they probably matter and it might be worth it, but for me it's not.
Maybe it'd be different in Silicon Valley, but in London they just aren't willing to offer enough over and above the kind of jobs I've had elsewhere to be worth the misery (with the big caveat that I'm at the high end of non-FAANG London market rates; for someone who is not, FAANG may be worth it here too)
You're being kind. "Extreme" doesn't describe it from my experience. For me it was 1 phone call/online meeting and 2 face 2 face. That is about it in terms of interviews. And that is a Fortune Global 500 company that I'm still working for. I was put on a 6 months contract and after 3 they switched to perm.
Other interviews back then and more recent were pretty much the same. Max. 3 x 1h-ish meetings. I do have a bad habit of asking the interviewer to sell me the job on the first face 2 face meeting though. This does offend some of them and we drop it there. No point beating around the bush and wasting time if they think the interview is a one way street.
The part about expecting them to sell the job is a good point, and important. Don't think that's a bad habit at all.
I also tend to make it clear from the outset I will not come cheap, in a "are you sure you can afford me?" kind of way. Not mentioning specifics, but making it clear I know my market value and won't consider low offers.
Some get very taken back, but it sets a tone. I think you're absolutely right you need to make sure they know it's two way, and to give a clear impression they're chasing someone high value, and that they're not the prize, you are.
But if their pitch is all about "changing the world" but they're not willing to share the upside, I know I'm wasting my time, so I want to make sure they know that I expect my share too, not just fuzzy feelings.
E.g. I a while back came across a company that was very proud of how rapidly they were growing, but somehow thought that mattered to me when they were not willing to offer any shares or options. I was meant to be excited about making other people rich...
I pointed out to them I've not once taken a job on terms like that in the last 25 years and called off the process after the first interview. I also explained to the recruiter just how far off market they were for someone at my experience level.
If that had happened after 5-6 interviews I'd have been incensed...
FAANG recruiters in particular also seem to get confused when I insist on getting an indication of salary range and option/rsu amounts before being willing to agree to an interview. Several times I've had recruiters come back to me days later after digging up the information, as their first line seem to not even know, just expecting people to be all excited they're even calling. For my part I'm shocked more people aren't having that conversation. But that does explain leaked info some time back about how Facebook is dealing with high rejection rates once they actually give offers.
Almost every alternative you can imagine has been tried. Lots of interviews, few interviews, take home projects, pair programming, hire fast fire fast, trial periods and on and on and on.
Hire fast fire fast is by far the best one, should you really need it. A 20 minute technical conversation and then firing within 2-3 weeks if they do not seem self-directed has worked in my experience.
If you can't get someone up to speed with your internal processes fast enough to at least gauge if they're following along that indicates an internal problem.
The problem is, I think, that HR does not want technical staff to see the hires for (probably made up) legal reasons. So the decision is mostly made by people who can't actually gauge competency.
How do you handle the obvious problems of churn and reviews at places like Glassdoor? I can just see it now:
"Interview was weak. They don't know what they're doing."
"Aced the interview. Fired after two weeks. Leadership doesn't know how to hire or manage."
"Never seen a place with so much churn. In the last six months, I've seen at least half a dozen engineers exit after two or three weeks."
Know what raises the level of difficulty for finding candidates? Shit reviews about the company. You can have the best tech but if you have a toxic smell, you can't hire. To the outside, perception is reality and reviews are how you get that perception. You can't do the opposite though and say "J Smith passed interview but we let them go after two weeks because they couldn't do more than pseudo code on a whiteboard." and even if you could, you'd look like a shit company and you'd still have an impossible time hiring but for other reasons.
This idea of quick hire/fire is so bad that all you have to do it go one or two steps further to find the obvious problems. But hey, start a company and use that model. See how it goes. Prove us all wrong.
Yes but the damage that they’ll due to your reputation online will make you have to pay more for better talent. They are going to read the glass door and see your company environment as shit and say “I want an extra 20 grand”
Not to mention the amount of technical debt high turnover causes for tech companies
Not that many people actually get fired in a hire fast fire fast workplace. The whole point of hiring this way is allowing yourself to not overprepare in an aversion to hiring poor talent. When you get a poor performer, you just let them go, but the average is not that bad, and you end up filling your billets faster where another company may not at all.
The opposite is 7 interviews and shedding most of your applicants for trivial reasons. Most businesses can't support that, too much work would go undone and they would stop being competitive.
Indeed. I remember interviewing for several positions and could have done them with one hand behind my back. A ~year later they were still trying to fill the position but hadn't.
Working is one thing. What about when you need to get hired and don't have six months to waste? If it weren't for finding a quick place to give me a chance I'd be unemployed.
Fired after 2 weeks if they don't seem self directed? I have been at one place where I didn't even have my laptop in the first two weeks and multiple places where I did not have access to the codebase yet.
Most people except for a few outliers will be fumbling around the first month while they learn the code and the company.
this is rather terrible for people who leave a job to come work for you. Hire fast fire fast only really benefits the employer -and only if they successfully manage to pick up on toxic people that fast. It can take months for someones true colours to show and then in many countries you are past the point you can "fire fast".
All of these are used in the wild at various companies. Maybe these companies are entirely staffed by subpar engineers, but FAANG style whiteboarding is extremely gameable, especially if you know someone in the inside already, but even if you don't and leetcode enough.
I personally suck at pairing interviews but I still think they're some of the most relevant & illuminating- if the problem is easy and you're looking for how the candidate works and communicates.
How exactly do you reduce that number when it’s a fixed quantity at FAANG, big tech with their stack ranking, managing out and OKR’s that requires to put a certain number of people as “under performs”?
The entire system makes absolutely no sense, precisely when looking at
the numbers. You could do anything you wanted during the interview and that still won’t change the outcome that the same number of people will still be fired at the end of the day.
My company has a phone interview with a developer to ask some technical questions and then whoever passes that is invited in for a single in-person interview with a developer and our supervisor. It has worked for us - every developer we've hired this way has done their job well and stuck around for a long time.
We make an effort to take up as little of the candidate's time as possible.
Compared to what? I don’t think anyone is claiming this process is perfect. Just that it’s better than alternatives.
People will always get PIP’d and fired. But the goal is to reduce that as low as possible.