That approach to interviewing will cause a lot of false negatives. Many developers, especially juniors, get anxious when thrown into a pair programming task with someone they don't know and will perform badly regardless of their actual skills.
I don’t know why people are so hesitant to just fire bad people. It’s pretty obvious when someone starts actually working if they’re going to a net positive. On the order of weeks, not months.
Given how much these orgs pay, both direct to head hunters and indirect in interview time, might as well probationally hire the whoever passes the initial sniff test.
That also lets you evaluate longer term habits like punctuality, irritability, and overall not-being-a-jerkness.
It's really not obvious to calculate the output of any employee even with years of data, way harder for a software engineer or any other job with that many facets. If you've found a proven and reliable way evaluate someone in the first 2 weeks you just solved one of the biggest HR problems ever.
Not so fast. I "saved" guys from being fired by asking to be more patient with them. The last one was not in my team as I moved out to lead another team. Turned out the guy did not please an influencial team member, who then complained about him. What I saw instead was a young silent guy, given boring work and was longing for more interesting work. A tad later he took ownership of a neglected project, completed it and made a name of himself.
Sunk cost. You've spent... 20 to 100 hours on interviews. Maybe more. Doing it again is another expense.
Onboarding. Even with good employees, it can take a few months to get the flow of the organization, understanding the code base, and understanding the domain. Maybe a bit of technology shift too. Firing a person who doesn't appear to be preforming in the first week or two or three would be churning through that too fast.
Provisional hiring with "maybe we'll hire you after you move here and work for us for a month" is a non-starter for many candidates.
At my current job and the job previous it took two or three weeks to get things fully set up. Be it equipment, provisioning permissions, accounts, training (the retail company I worked at from '10 to '14 - they sent every new hire out to a retail store to learn about how the store runs (to get a better idea of how to build things for them and support their processes).
... and not every company pays Big Tech compensation. Sometimes it's "this is the only person who didn't say «I've got an offer with someone else that pays 50% more»". Sometimes a warm body that you can delegate QA testing and pager duty to (rather than software development tasks) is still a warm body.
> I don’t know why people are so hesitant to just fire bad people.
"Bad" is vague, subjective moralist judgement. It's also easily manipulated and distorted to justify firing competent people who did no wrong.
> It’s pretty obvious when someone starts actually working if they’re going to a net positive. On the order of weeks, not months.
I feel your opinion is rather simplistic and ungrounded. Only the most egregious cases are rendered apparent in a few weeks worth of work. In software engineering positions, you don't have the chance to let your talents shine through in the span of a few weeks. The cases where incompetence is rendered obvious in the span of a few weeks actually spells gross failures in the whole hiring process, which failed to verify that the candidate failed to even meet the hiring bar.
> (...) might as well probationally hire the whoever passes the initial sniff test.
This is a colossal mistake, and one which disrupts a company's operations and the candidates' lives. Moreover, it has a chilling effect on the whole workforce because no one wants to work for a company ran by sociopaths that toy with people's lives and livelihood as if it was nothing.
The same could be said for leetcode. Except leetcode doesn't test actual skills in 2025.
I understand that and had some hard anxiety myself back then. Even these days I may be a bit shakey when love coding in an interview setting?
But is the false negative for a nervous pair programmer worse than a false positive for a leetcode question? Ideally a good interviewer would be able to separate the anxiety from the actual thinking and see that this person can actually think, but that's another undervalued skill among industry.