hiring engineers

I find our hiring process for software engineers pretty novel. It's based entirely on hiring committees; interviews are done by engineers, who write up feedback reports, and a committee meets to discuss the reports and make a decision on whether to proceed. Also, engineers aren't hired for a specific position or by a specific manager; they are hired first, and then allocated to projects by the engineering directors and VPs. Theoretically, this results in all engineers throughout the company being uniformly brilliant, with the added bonus that they have enough general knowledge to rapidly change projects and/or teams.

I've noticed a couple of possible drawbacks, though. Because all interview candidates get asked the same kinds of interview questions, we tend to hire applicants with breadth rather than depth of knowledge...maybe not always a good thing. I came in listing no C experience on my resume (yes I know, pathetic) but I got asked questions about memory allocation and differentiating between big-endian and little-endian machines. If I had known nothing, I probably wouldn't have been hired; luckily I managed to dredge up some vague knowledge that I had picked up years ago in college.

Also, because the hiring committee needs lots of feedback to work with, since they don't meet the candidates themselves, each candidate goes through a pretty grueling interview schedule. If I remember correctly, I myself went through one phone screen and three onsite days, for a total of 10 technical interviews. In addition, the hiring committees only meet once a week, since they are comprised primarily of engineering management; busy people with lots of non-recruiting responsibilities. The end result is that the overall process can take months, and some applicants just don't want to wait that long.

On a related subject, I seem to be doing interviews all the time. I've been at this job for almost six months now, and I've done 7 training interviews (paired up with a senior engineer) and 11 solo interviews, over the course of the last three months. I've heard from various sources that we have an unofficial policy that every engineering candidate must be interviewed by at least one female engineer. I've also heard that recruiters also make a special effort to have more female engineers on the interview schedule when the candidate is female. I've never confirmed it with HR, but I'm inclined to believe it, since no male engineer that I know has done 18 interviews in 3 months.

I'm also beginning to think that we must be trying very very hard to hire women engineers; 9 out of my 18 interviews have been for women, which is extraordinarily high, considering the normal ratio of male to female engineers. I guess this is a Good Thing, but I sometimes think that we're trying too hard, especially when I phone screen a woman who can't figure out the running time of a simple algorithm, or do an onsite interview with a woman who can't write a method signature in her preferred programming language. I wonder if the hiring committees base their decisions exclusively on feedback ratings and reports, or if they consider the gender of the candidate. I don't like thinking that I might have benefited from some bias; that I'm not as least as good as all the guys. Maybe I'll find out on Friday, when I sit in on my first hiring meeting.