It is complicated at scale and over time though. Look at Saas infrastructure: How you do it as you grow constantly changes the results of any evaluation.
How often do you build in house tooling or applications that have no ongoing operating commitments?
It's upfront capital investment plus generally unpredictable maintenance vs. More predictable but maybe higher operating expenses
I don't know if more predictable is all that accurate. SaaS providers change functionality and UX regularly and that often breaks workflows. Then you have the ones that shut down or get bought out and then substantially change their offerings. Then there are those services that would have been private to an intranet, but are now public, and they get compromised.
I don't think it's clear-cut. Some SaaS has worked out remarkably well for me and others I wish I had just built the thing in-house. Also, few providers give a way to actually get your data back out in a usable fashion, so you tend to get locked in without substantial cost to back out.
Your approach doesn't save any time or effort for the hiring company though. It's the in depth interviews that take up so much time.
You may not like it but this is their motivator, not being nice
Sure if they don't know how to interview, they're going to waste their own time and still not get good candidates (or if they don't have much to offer as most companies don't). Our interviews were an initial phone screen of I think half an hour followed by an interview with the team for one hour followed by the take home test followed by another half hour to an hour interview to discuss the code and allow for further candidate questions. All interviews are conducted over a conference call with screen sharing for the code review.
You're right. I don't like it because what you're describing is generally how shitty companies operate. Often they won't even look at the coding test. Those companies deserve to get the worst of the worst candidates that they're optimizing for. They fit into the category above: nothing of value to offer the candidate.
The ideal is for the company and the candidate to have an equal investment in the process.
If I spend two hours coding some toy project, I expect the company to spend two hours talking to me. Either interviewing or constructive feedback relating to their rejection.
A company that wastes 1000 people's hours and then ghosts 990 of them should be embargoed by some kind of a computing and technology service workers' union. (You know... the folks who can herd CaTS.)
If the company feels justified in wasting a lot of your time in order to save a little of theirs, before the interviews even start, imagine what they will do after hiring.
This is better for sure, but if you're trying to get someone really good to leave their current job (hint: They always have a job) it's as much the time as money so it still doesn't work well
This is true for a lot of important drugs that don't have massively lucrative markets to recover their investment. This means fewer new antibiotics for global issues and more penis pills.
So companies don’t do this, because there is no profit in it? Perhaps, that is the problem with late stage capitalism itself? Everyone wants to become a rent-seeking landlord.
What about a societal need? What about for the survival of the human race?
This is like arguing that humanity can’t muster up the ingenuity to solve something to save the human race, just because there’s no profit in it.
Necessity is the mother of all invention. If there are fewer antibiotics, then maybe this just means that it is not necessary.
Sorry folks! You’re just going to have to take your chances with the Grim Reaper! My bank account can’t be bothered to find a cure for you.
I suspect the economics for this only work because all drivers are contractors. The founder spent a lot of time highlighting the factors that support the contractor story but with recent changes in specifically California I'd be wary; it's becoming harder to justify the contractor narrative when the market maker controls the entire supply side, ie if they set the prices and the wages ahead of time (and it sounds like they do) it starts to look an awful lot like regular part time shift work.
I'm not sure I see the justification problem here. It's not harder to justify contractors, the reasons for using them are still the same, California simply decided it knew better than the contractors and changed the law to force them to become proper employees. The problem is wholly political and not a case where it makes sense to say one side is more justified than the other.
I agree. My 1:1 invites explicitly frame them as an opportunity to point out where I'm failing in supporting your goals, things you want to accomplish and questions you have about anything from the trivial to the strategic.
I don't use a formal agenda but our 1:1's do produce explicit action items with one of us assigned and a due date
As a manager i would fight this approach because the 1:1's i schedule are for an exact flip of the relationship you describe. I certainly appreciate and encourage these feelings across all my teams, but unlike ICs it's my job and I'm given the time and resources to make these changes, it's not fair to expect someone to both execute well and put all the required effort into pushing for organizational improvement
The only reason I'm in the organization is to push for organizational improvements. That's why they hired me over somebody else. That's the source of momentum in my career path and the best thing for me as well as the org.
If that isn't the case, then I'm a cog in a feature factory and that's not the job that I want to be in. I know that some companies/teams/managers approach work that way, but that's a very strong counter signal to me.
When I'm going on to my next job, do you think they want to hear what my responsibilities were or what I did at the company that made it succeed? This ties into why I think hiring is broken -- we hire for one set of skills and tend to expect delivery of another.
Every time some failing startup does a large layoff round, there's always questions of "why does X need Y many engineers?". Too many cogs in a broken organization is just burning dollars and electricity.
Your concern makes sense if it's all they do. Status updates and talking about your managers needs would be a crappy 1 on 1 if that was every time. It's supposed to be the employee's meeting.
However, if you mix up what you talk about a lot, then spending some of it on managing up would be pretty smart, just like you likely only talk about their long term career sometimes.
I love how everyone immediately goes to "you were doing it wrong". Gee thanks. It could also be you perform at a very high level and your body is aging, you have an underlying condition that had never had a chance to fully heal, or many other nuanced reasons.
So, in other words... he's doing it wrong. Perhaps "wrong" is "pushing too hard given age or some underlying condition", but the fact is that exercise and stretching should never make you worse off... assuming you're doing it correctly.
It was probably a back strain/sprain. Before going through that, I expected that a deadlifting injury would be debilitating and would take months to heal from. The reality was... different. That's my point.
