Monday, October 03, 2005

Consistent Technical Interviews

I guess in any organization of non-trivial size, it's hard for different groups to communicate any information at all. Also, even in the instances that information is effectively communicated it may very well be ignored. There's a lot of tribalism at large companies, especially those built through acquisition.

A recent incident of this came when a group close to mine interviewed people for a technical position. One of the candidates was underqualified so he didn't get the job. The surprising thing is that he then interviewed for a higher technical position with another group. In theory they would have found out that he had already interviewed here and gotten input from the group that had done the interview. In practice, they interviewed him and went ahead and hired him as an architect--even though he wasn't qualified to be a developer.

We've already got a company of angry developers and MIA architects that are grossly underqualified to do their job. A brilliant strategist would realize this and hire not just another inane architect, but one that the developers have dealt with directly in the past and for which they have no respect. This saves time. I don't have to go through a honeymoon period where I pretend they know how to do their job only to discover (after many weeks) that the most complicated thing they've ever designed is a PowerPoint presentation. I can start resenting them immediately. Think of the cost savings.

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