Extreme Interviewing

A faster and better way to recruit: Extreme Interviewing

A quote from the article:

The results were stunning:

  • The new employees fit in quickly - How quickly? Well, when Menlo repeated the process a month later with a new interview team consisting of veteran employees and some new hires, the candicates could not tell the new employees from the old timers. Also, after just six weeks, a new hire was skilled enough in the practices to mentor a new employee just joining the team.
  • Low employee turnover - There was only one developer lost to attrition during the life of the team.
  • Reusing the process - Menlo hired fourteen developers within two months using this process and six more later using a smaller variant of the process. It is also used in non-IT departments of Menlo Innovations.
  • Making life easier - Managers at Menlo called it “a joy to manage and work with such a team”.

It’s a popular idea. Here some similar articles I’ve read lately:

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09 Oct 2006

Sergey Brin Presentation at Berkeley

The cofounder of Google, spoke to a class at Berkeley.

He made some interesting points:

  • They wrote their search engine as if they were developing it for a king. They didn’t worry about the limitations of computer power or scaling to billions of users. They wrote the best application they could for one user. When they were happy with it, they scaled it up. They try to take that approach with all of their applications.
  • They weren’t out to build a better search engine. They were just a couple of grad students mapping links on the internet. They accidentally discovered that using those links to rank the pages by popularity would give better search results.
  • It was a pretty low risk move for them to start the company. If it didn’t work out, they could just go back and finish their degrees. They are still on a leave of absence after 12 years.

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06 Oct 2006