Can I just say that this is extremely impressive work for a master's level thesis. Incredible work and I hope you manage to continue fulfilling your fantastic potential in your career!
But would it actually help. More employees means more communication and overhead. Lean organisations can move much quicker. Part of why valve can do what valve does is how lean it runs.
You can usually find a way to get it for free or cheaper through a library, other institution or your employer if working in the financial sector or education.
Note that in the EU and UK mid-size has a definition:
"fewer than 250 employees and a turnover of under €50 million (or a balance sheet total below €43 million)"
Thus by definition that company wouldn't be mid-sized over here anyway.
edit: in-fact after checking even in the US, the IRS for example declares a large business as one with more than 10 million in assets, though there is no set rule like in the EU to be used by other gov orgs.
The main problem is good engineers have no need to sit through your 12 step process. It actively selects only for the most desperate or money driven people (if you pay very well).
Where are these jobs paying $500k/yr that I can skip these interviews? I haven’t seen them yet. I hear about jobs paying below $100k/yr that do this but that’s not getting us anywhere in SF.
I mean we know the answer to this. As you go up the seniority ladder interviews become less and less onerous and at some tipping point are not required. Aqui-hires such as Alexandr Wang at Meta for example. Non aqui-hire we have for instance when Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic. I somehow doubt they went through as many round as those below them.
Apart from that when lower down in seniority generally start-ups. There are many founders who get funding, know good people, and will hire them without many interviews. Having a good network is critical for exploiting all of these, as the interviewer has already effectively judged your skills over many years or decades.
I don't think your examples are even remotely scalable nor do they pay well. Joining a startup at an early stage where you know a founder and can bypass interview steps is notoriously low compensation.
Acquisition based hiring isn't a real methodology. That's being a founder of a very successful startup and getting acquired. That's like saying "want a new job? Get your company acquired by a new one."
Start-ups can pay very well, I'm not sure why you would think otherwise? Given a series A can be around the ten million mark, there is more than enough capital to pay competitive rates and still be small enough to have the flexibility to hire out of their network.
Making interviews efficient and making them easy are orthogonal. It depends on what attributes your organization is trying to select for.
To select for people who are willing to commit to a slow bureaucratic organization, make them go through repetitive interview rounds spread over many weeks.
To select for people who do well under pressure, make the interview stressful.
To select for people who can solve challenging problems, make the interview challenging.
There's no right answer as long as your hiring process is tailored to select for the attributes your company needs.
> an employee who gives so little of a shit that they refuse to use their brain to get a job?
Many many folks are the type that is willing to hard grind/suffer short-term to get through a hoop, but as soon as they are inside they turn that 'optimizer' mindset towards 'how can I do the minimum necessary to coast and collect my paycheck'.
And many many folks who are highly motivated to work hard every day at their job are not highly motivated to prepare for jumping through a hoop like a circus clown.
For your first paragraph, that’s just a risk of hiring employees that has nothing to do with the interview process. You can possibly surface some of that during behavioral interviews.
If you as a manager can’t detect your employees coasting that’s a you problem. Understanding how to motivate your current employees is not in the scope of the interview process.
For your second paragraph, we can use a cynical attitude calling this “jumping through a hoop like a circus clown” but do you really want to hire someone with such a cynical view of the minor inconvenience of interviewing?
A lot of candidates are very accepting of the fact that interviews will take some work to complete and don’t take a cynical attitude to it.
I don’t have any interest in hiring someone who thinks 2-3 hours of time for a short list candidate interview after the screening process is unreasonable.
If you have made it to my 2-3 hour interview process, you are only competing against 2-3 people for the job. This isn’t some kind of unreasonable waste of time, I’m offering salaries multiple times the median salary, sign-on bonus, equity, generous PTO and free healthcare plan, etc. Having a chance to get all that is definitely worth 3 hours of interviews.
I don’t really need to hire the person who has $10 million in their bank account and refuses to lift a finger to get a job. That person can enjoy their life and do something else.
'Hoop-jumping' is an indication that the rest of the organization is inept at moving fast and being decision-oriented. I believe capable organizations can make good decisions on limited information and their interview process should be reflective of that.
If the interview process takes more than 3 steps and 3h, I'm out.
My interview process is very reasonable. If you’ve hit the point where you are required to do a 2-3 hour technical interview round with me, you’re a short list candidate and only have 1-3 competitors for a very lucrative job.
If that’s too much of a hoop for you, I’ll just take the sandwich, no fries with that.
“Oh, you don’t want to work for us? Well that’s a bullet dodged because not wanting to work for us means you suck (expressed in any number of ways, in this case you say I’m cynical) . We remain awesome!”
I mean, there definitely are bad companies that abuse that attitude.
However, on the other hand, a lot of keyboard warriors on here love to be edgelords about refusing to take any initiative, as if every single form of interview that makes you work the muscle in your skull is a violation of the Geneva convention.
Like I said, perhaps selfishly, I don’t want to work with people who are going to complain every time they’re made to do something while being paid very good money to do it. I’m not telling them to work a 996 or miss their kids’ dance recital, I’m just asking for a solid 4-6 hours of honest work per day.
I don’t want to put my future coworker through six rounds of interviews. If it takes more than three rounds + a phone screen to figure out if someone is a good fit then the process is broken.
Whether it's reasonable depends on the distribution, not just the duration.
A 2 hour onsite with the candidate being rapid-fire interviewed by six different different teams and a 20 minute call every couple weeks for three months are very different (and select for very different types of candidates) despite having the same overall duration.
> The main problem is good [doctors] have no need to sit through your 12 [years of school]. It actively selects only for the most desperate or money driven people (if you pay very well).
That's exactly quoted at the start of the article?
"Problem-based learning tends to do worse than traditional schooling in medical education. An influential meta-analysis by Albanese and Mitchell, for instance, found that students required more time studying, had worse exam scores and ordered more unnecessary tests compared to traditionally taught students. "
Problem-based learning is exactly the "figure it out" method.
> students required more time studying, had worse exam scores and ordered more unnecessary tests compared to traditionally taught students.
While I didn't do any additional looking into it -- this is often my biggest gripe. Is the _goal_ to have better exam scores and require less time studying or is the goal to be a better problem-solver holistically?
When faced with a novel problem that neither the problem-based learning group nor the traditional schooling group - which performed better and by what metrics?
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It seems silly to say "This group who was instructed to rote memorize material could indeed perform better on a direct memory recall examination." and then close the door on problem-based learning.
If you're doing a large-scale study, exam scores are basically the only way to get quantitative data.
And, exams aren't that bad! A well-designed exam can't be passed by merely recalling information, because it will give you novel problems that require reasoning with the material on a deeper level.
Also, explicit test prep—where you basically teach strategies for cheating the test—universally sucks, but presumably that's not what the study is measuring.
It seems to me that exam scores are a better metric of the underlying thing we care about, the ability to accomplish things in the world, than solution skill when faced with novel problems. Even if you're a very innovative person leading a project to do something entirely unprecedented, most of the tasks you need to do, text you need to read, etc. will not be novel.
I feel like many of the more alternative teaching methodologies have unclear learning goals. What is "holistic problem-solving"? How can we measure it? Do we know that conventionally taught students lack it? Is it hard to acquire? Is it even important?
When I first went into the workplace, it took me a bit of time to adjust to the non-academic setting. You think differently, you work differently. I discovered and learned problem-solving skills that I was not taught in school. Frankly, though, I'm glad I was not taught those skills in school, because they are easy to learn in the workplace, especially if you have a solid theoretical grounding (something which is a lot harder to pick up on the job).
To the extent that generalized problem-solving is a real thing, I think it probably boils down to the ability to quickly internalize information and draw connections, which conventional schooling already focuses on anyway.
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