Slow news fortnight (post-funding-secured, pre-fall-launches), so a working dispatch from the interview trenches, where I’ve spent this quarter as loop lead for our next eng cohort — the #089 work-sample experiment, two years matured, with data worth reporting.
What’s held: work-sample auditions beat whiteboard algorithms by every measure we track — signal quality, candidate experience scores, and (the one that matters) six-month on-the-job correlation. What’s surprised me: the STRONGEST signal in the whole loop is the debugging session — we hand candidates a real (sanitized) broken service from our incident archive and watch them navigate. Not solve; NAVIGATE. Do they form hypotheses or thrash? Read logs or guess? Say “I don’t know, here’s how I’d find out”? Five years of this blog is essentially that skill journaled (#001’s reflog to #135’s rehearsals), and watching candidates perform it live has taught me it’s rarer than algorithmic fluency and vastly less practiced. The industry drills LeetCode; the job is 70% forensics. We interview for the drill.
Also logged: the US Open began this week with a roof on Ashe and Serena chasing the record books post-maternity; the group chat’s Fortnite receipts (#116, #136) have been formally framed; and Fantasy PL draft night concluded with Null Pointer Exception drafting, for the first time in six years, ZERO goalkeepers before the final round. Character development.
TIL: structured debriefs — interviewers write independent verdicts BEFORE discussing, or the first loud opinion becomes everyone’s memory (#132’s stale-cache lesson, for hiring). Consensus is a race condition; sequence your writes.