This is why you never end up hiring good developers

The piece argues that many technical interviews overvalue current knowledge, whiteboard performance, degrees, famous employers, and personal familiarity. Instead, it says hiring should focus on whether a candidate can learn the job, keep improving, communicate clearly, and work well with others without bias.

Reading notes

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• It says interviewers often test irrelevant skills and should instead assess growth potential.
• It rejects obscure syntax questions, whiteboard coding, and memorized algorithms as poor hiring signals.
• It says degrees and brand-name employers are weak predictors of engineering ability.
• It warns against hiring friends and family because relationships create bias and obligation.
• It proposes two core questions: can the person do the job, and will they get better at it?
• It treats relevant experience as helpful but not decisive, and values learning speed and increasing responsibility.
• It highlights “smart and gets things done” as a useful hiring standard.
• It says engineers need both technical understanding and clear communication.
• It values honesty about what a candidate does not know and sees confident guessing as a bad sign.
• It frames the interview as a conversation, not an interrogation, and says stress makes answers less useful.
• It allows exceptions for very junior candidates, career changers, and highly specialized large teams.
• It says the real question is whether you want to work with the person, while warning against bias.
• It separates productive work relationships from friendship.
• It rejects jerks and says no amount of brilliance can justify poisoning team morale.
• It rejects “team fit” because it often disguises bias and sameness.
• It says lack of diversity is bad for a company because it usually means hiring has become narrow and self-reinforcing.
• It closes by saying better hiring is hard, slow, and worth the effort.