17 Feb 25

Fascination Street #6

Writing for the week of Feb 17, 2025

This week’s theme has been hiring in the tech industry. A lot has been written and posted to LinkedIn lately about how the tech layoffs have been happening, how data is showing a slowing of software engineering jobs, fake candidates, and how best to land an interview. TL;DR to no one’s surprise, hiring in the tech industry is a mess right now

There are stories of positions being posted and receiving thousands of resumes with in the first 24 hours. That’s a head scratcher. I know a lot of layoffs have happened and people are searching but I have to assume most of the resumes are being submitted by bots and the candidates are not qualified for the role. My sympathy goes to the new hiring managers that have to make sense of that tsunami of resumes. Without the experience of identifying the quality candidates, that could be overwhelming.

On the flipside, there are these catfishing scams where the person you think you hired isn’t doing the work. They are farming it out to other people. This is ridiculous but maybe a symptom of tech salaries being driven so high? I can’t explain that one. It seems so outrageous.

With regards to the process of finding a quality candidate, and to some extent the catfishing thing, I’ve always thought tech handled hiring incorrectly. I’ve interviewed hundreds of candidates for various roles. I’ve done pair programming. I’ve looked at portfolios. I’ve reviewed take home exercises. I’ve done whiteboarding. I’ve been subject to all of the above as well when I was the candidate. It all feels unnecessary.

My father was an accomplished automative engineer. He led teams whose accomplishments we all benefit from every day while driving our cars. He was responsible for hiring. One day, I asked if automative hiring had a similar process to tech where you vetted a candidate by making them perform in some fashion like sharing their screen and programming something. He found the idea laughable. No, they didn’t do that. He simply talked to candidates. He interviewed them. He obtained a sense of their knowledge but also how they communicated by simply talking to them. And he hired stellar teams.

Some of this comes down to who the interviewers are. Do they have the experience and skills necessary to determine if a candidate is bullshitting or really knows their stuff? I’ve talked with others who have been responsible for interviewing a lot of candidates and they agree. A take home test doesn’t tell me more than what I can get out of a conversation. Especially with today’s AI tools but I’ll get to that in a minute. I think the art of interviewing an engineer has been lost. Maybe because we’ve tried to automate it to the point we’ve eliminated the role of soft skills?

John Nunemaker talked about this on his podcast last week. During the conversation, he mentioned being able to determine if he’d work well with someone within minutes. I was nodding in agreement while running on the treadmill.

I spoke with someone else who said they could tell if someone was bullshitting by looking at their resume. I agree. I don’t need, nor want, an AI process to try and do that for me. But I get it with the sheer volume coming at hiring managers today.

Beyond the resume and first few minutes though, I’m hearing that candidates are having an AI running on a device during the interview and regurgitating the output. The AIs are fast enough now that the lag has disappeared. That’s interesting but is also as ridiculous as the catfishing scam. How did we get here? Not so long ago, the tech community used to talk of being a “craftsman” and being proud of your “craft”. Using an AI to pass an interview seems counter to that.

I don’t want to sound like a luddite and anti-AI. I’m not. I think some of the modern tooling can help engineers. But using it to fake your experience on a resume or using it to pass an interview makes me sad. Does it ultimately mean you don’t respect your craft? For those people who get very nervous and anxious during interviews. I hear you. I am the same way as the candidate and have really bombed some interviews I should have passed with flying colors. But don’t reach for AI.

One person I was involved in a conversation with was responsible for hiring technical authors. I assume these people would be responsibile for writing technical documentation. This person went on to detail the application process. It involved a question on the online application form. Sadly, he could tell from a large number of responses that candidates (or bots) had simply fed the question into an AI and pasted the response. He joked that hundreds of them contained the same answer, almost verbatim. Keep in mind this position was a position where you would be responsible for writing. These candidates couldn’t even be bothered to “write” an answer on the application form. You could visibly see how bothered this hiring manager was. In this particular situation, my summation was that hiring manager was really looking for originality and authenticity. I find it ironic and inspiring that, Anthropic, a leading AI company tells candidates not to use AI when applying.

Maybe that is the ultimate take away from the tech hiring disaster that everyone is facing. The chance to be original or authenticate has been stripped away. Hiring managers have to process a large volume of data so they are simply matching based on keywords and not able to qualify candidates based on merit and originality. Candidates are having to shotgun out applications because they are desperate to find something with time simply not allowing for being original on every application. Once landing an interiew, candidates are fearful of not knowing something and have to use AI rather than be vulnerable and admit they don’t know everything.

I don’t know how this mess will shake out. It’s genuinely overwhelming. I hope it does soon for the large number of people that have been laid off and simply want to perform their craft. More importantly, I hope originality and autheniticity start to be the norm. We were there once. At least from my experience.

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Links

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Music

  • Peter Murphy and Trent Reznor new track - Swoon
  • Horrors new EP - Ariel
  • False Figure album - Castigations
  • My son has been really into Peter Hook playing Joy Division live

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A couple of promotions each week. First, use my invite link to try Warp as your terminal. It’s fast and has some great features. I’m not affiliated with them at all, just really like it. Also, check out my project–Schemabook, especially if you work in an organization that wants to get organized around defining data through contracts and collaboration. Lastly, I’m writing a book about learning Rust if you are familiar with Ruby. Stay tuned. As always, you can connect with me more at https://mikekrisher.com.