It's not only a big expense. It is a stressful, biased and highly ineffective process. There is very little (if any) correlation between performance in interviews today and work performance.
It's a hard problem that requires people to approach it seriously. And it is only getting worse with a high growth in number of people getting into tech.
That's awesome! I generally think that DP problems introduce more noise because they're relatively easy to prepare for. So you might easily miss a good engineer who is not prepared. I try to argue about that in the beginning of the blog.
However, they're a reality for many interview loops, so it's better to be prepared.
Btw, what are some things that your company tests for, if you don't mind sharing?
Yes, currently it is only available for people searching for jobs in the US. I would say the answer is yes long-term, but probably not over the next few months.
I agree. This blog is hosted separately from our servers so I went for a quick deployment of WP on google cloud. Learning: do not use google cloud VM micro instance, apparently it cannot support even moderate traffic.
Yes, you get to fast-track through interviews at multiple companies.
As far as the experience of the interviewers goes, we're pretty careful about it in our on-boarding process. Even more than the experience we look for open-minded engineers who are willing to question their evaluation and constantly work on improving the overall process.
Re: feedback at Google. It's hard for companies to give you access to feedback because of potential legal repercussions and also because it is very hard for them to deal with back and forth that would inevitably occur.
That's another big point that we emphasized early on that seemed like a crazy proposition - fully transparent interview process. That is, anything that a company would see, you see beforehand.
I'm a co-founder of Refdash. Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I largely agree with things that you said. I think that interviews need to become significantly less stressful and more objective.
One way in which we're approaching the stress of interviews is to strip away the bad outcomes and allow people to approach interviews as "there is nothing to lose". Another way is experimenting with different types of interviews such as group interviews or project based interviews. Sometimes the issue with those experiments though is that they're even harder to standardize.
I think that in addition to what you said, we need to get to a measurable level of improvement. We try to measure the repeatability of our sessions in two ways: 1) when the same session is evaluated by two different interviewers, the ratings across dimensions should be equivalent and 2) (this one is harder to experiment control) when the same person does two interviews, they should be evaluated equivalently on the intersection of sets of things that were evaluated.
By optimizing for these two ways of repeatability, we are hopefully going to move toward much more objective driven evaluations that capture the engineer's understanding of different areas and not just the spur of the moment.
It's a hard problem that requires people to approach it seriously. And it is only getting worse with a high growth in number of people getting into tech.
It's interesting to try to solve it.