SkipTheInterview.com was Not the Absolute Worst Idea Ever
A lukewarm defense of a "techbro mindset"
Almost exactly a year ago, SkipTheInterview.com was launched. Today, that URL is defunct for a reason. The response was... what Steam might call "Overwhelmingly Negative".
A new level of hell has been reached:
https://skiptheinterview.com/
Now, there are some glaring real problems with this idea, as Reddit helpfully notes:
There are coworkers I would toss a $20 to make them go away.
Holy shit, now we’re normalizing crowdfunded bribery
[Employees who referred you] only if you survive their trial period. Bet none do.
But some of the criticisms seem... less than sympathetic.
It unbalances access to jobs by family wealth and creates yet another skip annoying thing if you are rich enough and/or have enough friends who are rich enough. ... The anger is justified, such systems can not be allowed to exist.
They're a Y Combinator company? How did no one there point out how stupid this is? Peak tech idiocy
I think, to some degree, people have failed to decouple hard enough. They see an industry of smug techbros with a first-world problem ("ugh, I have to use people skills to interview for a job"), trying to throw money at it and make it go away (but only for themselves, not Systemically™). But I believe these people are mixing up their outrage priorities a tad, hence this post.
In getting a job, you must first learn the skills needed, then signal the fact that you have them. In a perfect world (well, as perfect as it can be while still having jobs at all), that "signaling" step wouldn't be hard at all. The employer would do some cheap-yet-accurate tests of your technical and nontechnical skills, and then you'd just walk in and start working if your skills meet the threshold.
Unfortunately, we live in a reality where that's not the case. This imposes costs: in addition to working to learn things, you also have to work on projects outside of class, just for a shot at The Good Tech Jobs. I'm not saying employers are wrong to expect this sort of thing, just that, by the nature of signaling, we'd expect it to get increasingly hard to stand out.
Here's something else tech workers complain about: the tech interview process itself.
Given all this, the impulse to just pay money and skip the talking-to-humans part, is understandable. Especially for people who really just want to do technical work, and don't do a lot of people-interfacing in the desired position. (And even when your social skills do matter, many tech interviews are too artificially-structured to test them well.)
Ask HN: Why is machine learning easier to learn than basic social skills?
Let me be clear: the lazy independent-minded impulse to try and avoid signaling costs is valid. The techbro impulse to solve a hard problem with a harebrained mechanism design scheme is good.
Now, the obvious counter: "By letting people pay to bypass effortful signaling, you're just handing jobs to whatever rich idiots can pay the fee. It perpetuates wealth inequality explicitly."
But consider: I've heard (probably on 80,000 Hours an/or LessWrong) that high-stakes career moves should theoretically command high investments of time and/or money.
Taking a $5,000 class on negotiating for a raise seems excessive, but the raise could be $30,000. If the class improved your P(getting the raise | you asked for it) by, say, 30 percentage points, the class gave you $9,000 of expected value for a cost of only $5,000.
If that's the value of small career boosts, what about bigger career boosts? What do you think already-existing rich idiots pay to secure that job?
(Trick question: they get in through connections and class performance, which also perpetuate privilege.)
Look, tech hiring is kinda broken. Hiring is often based off trends and personal biases and information problems. The interview process can be bullshit. Even the skip-the-interview solutions that have gotten off the ground, can secretly be bad. SkipTheInterview.com had an idea for people to pay money to fix or bypass this broken hiring. Let's fault the idea's specific flaws, and the systemic problems behind the whole mess, not the mindset of wanting to bypass the problem in the first place.