alt Hacker NewsSteve Yegge is one of my very favorite authors I love his work. But lots of things to say here.
FIRST - is that before you get to campfire anyone, you have to have done some sort of interview process to boil it down to the one person to do the campfire - so how does that work eh?
SECOND - campfire is deeply invasive to the candidate's life and time.
THIRD - you have to pretty damn sure someone is a hire before doing a campfire. You CANNOT do campfire as an evaluation step, after which there are more interviews.
FOURTH - this is effectively just a really really long version of the take home work test which is absolute bullshit.
FIFTH - there's STILL no science to the campfire. Don't give anyone a fucking test if you don't actually know how to scientifically evaluate the results. And campfire does NOT result in a scientific outcome, it still results in an arbitrary opinion.
SIXTH - any company that wants me to do a campfire - to commit days or even weeks of work as part of them trying to decide to offer me a job - can fuck off. Sorry, the party got spoiled by all the other companies who asked me to do something as part of the interview process and then either ghosted me or gave me some bullshit outcome like "they didn't like your work".
I can tell you how to recruit people and it does not require campfire.
You TALK to people about software development - you engage them in extended conversation about what they have done, what they know, what their interests are, what they have built, what projects they worked on, what went right, what went wrong. You look for people who have BUILT STUFF - this was true before AI and is 100X more true now - anyone who has not built anything today is not worth employing and anyone who has built something must be able to talk about it in depth. This interview processes worked before AI and it works after AI. And finally, you accept the limitations of recruiting which is that people are people and you won't find out how well someone performs until they have been on the job six months - live with it.
Sorry Steve - I love your work but I'd never work for any company that wanted me to do a stupid campfire because they don't know how to actually work out if I can do the job or not.
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This sandwich is huge but the bread layers (top and bottom) are moldy, love the empathetic writing style though. Agree on your TALK paragraph - mostly - as well. Make sure to consider juniors in that lumping too though, we can't have systemic failure over time. AI-outcomes are not guaranteed.
You CANNOT do campfire as an evaluation step
why not? to expensive? candidates don't have the time? i'd love to do that because it also gives me insights into the company. how they work, etc...
I can tell you how to recruit people
why is interviewing broken then?
You TALK to people about software development
didn't we try that and find out that the sweet-talkers master this and are able to fool everyone? or didn't we find that this leaves out good people who don't do well when questioned like that?
btw: my personal preference for a tech interview is 1 hour of pair programming. (not just live coding)
I think you're largely right - but there are some challenges.
Talking requires that the interviewer be competent and care. Which seems like a low bar, but it easily degrades. When an engineer is burned out, or is interviewing for a project they have less stake in, or has business requirements forcing them to hire someone fast, the bar lowers. Those engineers now are the gatekeepers, and they let in even weaker engineers.
Even worse, any utility from this is predicated on the founder making good hiring decisions. If they don't understand how to hire a competent engineer and make them care about the company, then it's dead from the start. And a lot of founders or execs in general are awful at this.
Companies that maintain an excellent work culture such that engineers deeply care about the team and have stake in any project they conduct interviews for will do well with this model. I hope we see it used by them.