> Imagine a person with a pilot's license refusing to fly tandem for an airline interview.
That’s not a great comparison since a pilot has already passed substantially harder tests to get that license and a flight is exactly what the job is. If you have a candidate with a pilot’s license you can assume at least a baseline level of capability which you can’t assume for a software engineer. That has pros and cons but it definitely means interviewing is a noisier process.
The other problem, however, is deeper: the job of flying a plane is exactly what’s tested to get a pilot’s license but what many places do for developer interviews is wildly unlike the actual job so it’s more like interviewing pilots based on trivia questions about the number of rivets on a B-52 and how well they can solve 3-D puzzles, and then being surprised when there isn’t much correlation with real world performance. For example, only at the most toxic companies will the interview be one of the least stressful parts because the rest of the job is a team effort. What makes the interview challenges stressful is doing it without your normal tools while someone else is looking for reasons to fail you, but in a normal job your coworkers are trying to help you succeed because even if you’re not friends you are all better off when your company succeeds. At a startup, trying to ding someone for trivia challenges is like hitting the iceberg to prove that the navigator made a mistake.
Go on youtube and watch NTSB / FAA investigation reports. If you think that a pilot's license demonstrates that someone is a competent pilot you are very very mistaken, and there are scores of counter examples.
Airlines very strictly test pilots and insist on check rides regardless of what official qualifications pilots show up with. They do this because they are professional organizations with decades of experience and it is necessary for safety. Giving someone the benefit of the doubt because they manage to meet the absolute minimum standard that makes operating an airplane legal is insane.
Yes, that’s what I was referring to with “baseline level of capability”. It doesn’t mean everyone is the same, or that they’re all super pilots, but anyone with a commercial license has at least 250 hours doing the primary job function and that makes it’s reasonable to ask them to do a test flight.
In contrast, we don’t have anything like real certifications for developers and many of the interviewing questions are very unlike the actual job. Hiring would be easier if we did have something closer to what a pilot’s license conveys, but that’d also slow the field down since programming has changed a lot more over the last 50 years than flying.
That’s not a great comparison since a pilot has already passed substantially harder tests to get that license and a flight is exactly what the job is. If you have a candidate with a pilot’s license you can assume at least a baseline level of capability which you can’t assume for a software engineer. That has pros and cons but it definitely means interviewing is a noisier process.
The other problem, however, is deeper: the job of flying a plane is exactly what’s tested to get a pilot’s license but what many places do for developer interviews is wildly unlike the actual job so it’s more like interviewing pilots based on trivia questions about the number of rivets on a B-52 and how well they can solve 3-D puzzles, and then being surprised when there isn’t much correlation with real world performance. For example, only at the most toxic companies will the interview be one of the least stressful parts because the rest of the job is a team effort. What makes the interview challenges stressful is doing it without your normal tools while someone else is looking for reasons to fail you, but in a normal job your coworkers are trying to help you succeed because even if you’re not friends you are all better off when your company succeeds. At a startup, trying to ding someone for trivia challenges is like hitting the iceberg to prove that the navigator made a mistake.