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All Hiring Decisions Are a Gamble (and That’s Okay).

Matt Schellhas
Better Programming
Published in
10 min readAug 14, 2022

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Photo by DEAR on Unsplash

You wish it weren’t true.

In a just world, people would be hired on their merits. Skilled managers would know exactly what qualifications they needed for the team. Candidates would go through a rigorous (but humane!) interview process to assess the needed expertise without bias. Compensation would be transparent and fair regardless of your location or your ability to negotiate. In a just world, the objectively best candidate would win every time.

That is not our world.

In our world, hiring managers make bets. They plop down large piles of money for the chance of making even more money with this person’s help. And they do so based on imperfect knowledge. They don’t really know what the future holds for their team. They don’t really know how the candidate will perform in their environment. And they don’t really know that much about a candidate based on a few conversations — especially when the candidate is the only one is guaranteed to profit if the manager place that bet.

Nothing you can do can change that. You will never be able to tell the future. Trial periods are only a marginally better…

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Matt Schellhas
Matt Schellhas

Written by Matt Schellhas

Dour, opinionated leader of software engineers.

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