Enterprise programmer bias? Could be higher salary expectations?
Who Y Combinator Companies Want
141–150 of 552 posts
Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want
#142Enterprise programmer bias? Could be higher salary expectations?
Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is definitely true. The filters that companies and recruiters use mostly trend in a meaningful direction. There are a higher percentage of good programmers among MIT grads than SUNY Potsdam grads. But this fact does nothing to help the good programmers who look bad on paper who everyone is ignoring. This is precisely the problem that we're trying to fix with Triplebyte. We want to make actual technical evaluatio…
The filters that companies and recruiters use mostly trend in a meaningful direction. There are a higher percentage of good programmers among MIT grads than SUNY Potsdam grads. Imagine how mistaken that would sound if you substitute "startup founders" for "programmers." The reason you feel company filters are anything except random noise is personal bias. It's disheartening that your article notices that company pref…
The cost of a real work test is much higher, both to the company, and to the applicant. Some companies take that approach (weebly for one), but it means that some of the best programmer will not apply, and it only makes worse the problem of having to aggressively pre-filter (based on credentials, or something else).
You are 100% correct that most research into interviewing has show it to be far less predictive than companies believe. However, I'll add that no one is doing the false negative studies that would really be required to show this. For example, Google has shown that among people who pass their interview GPA is not correlated with success. This does not at all mean that GPA is not correlated with programming ability. In fact, it almost certainly is. People with low GPA who pass google interviews have a lot of other things going for them. To really analyze this, you'd have to give a job to a random sample of applicants. No one has done this. My goal is for Triplebye to get large enough that I can.
Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want
#144> "We’ve seen that most engineers only have the stomach for a limited number of interviews. Investing time in the wrong companies carries a high opportunity cost." I suspect in addition to not having the "stomach" for an unlimited number of interviews, they don't have the vacation days to burn for them. Let's say you are working already and have 10 days a year vacation (pretty standard). With these ridiculous all-day…
"We’ve seen that most engineers only have the stomach for a limited number of interviews. Investing time in the wrong companies carries a high opportunity cost." Yet it's amazing how many companies treat candidates' time as basically worthless, and infinitely replenishable.
Yeah, the "two week trial period" (or one week, or week-of-evenings, or whatever) is a non-starter for the experienced programmer who doesn't really need a job. And these are the folks that you want to attract.
High bars can really turn out to be self-sabotage.
Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want
#145> "We’ve seen that most engineers only have the stomach for a limited number of interviews. Investing time in the wrong companies carries a high opportunity cost." I suspect in addition to not having the "stomach" for an unlimited number of interviews, they don't have the vacation days to burn for them. Let's say you are working already and have 10 days a year vacation (pretty standard). With these ridiculous all-day…
>> have 10 days a year vacation (pretty standard) Wait, what? Is it really this bad in the States?
It varies tremendously from company to company. 10 days is not unheard of, but for example at my job, new employees get 12 vacation days plus 15 holidays. I've been there 9 years and get 21 vacation days a year plus the same 15 holidays (my long-tenured coworkers and I often struggle to use all of our vacation; we tend to take a lot of Fridays off to stay under the six-week cap). By contrast, many low-wage jobs get no paid vacation.
Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want
#146> "To that end, we’ve spent the last two months doing detailed interviews with CTOs and lead recruiters at the top 25 Y Combinator companies."
How were you determining which YC companies were top?
Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want
#147"Two large YC companies (both with machine learning teams) have told us that they consider interest in ML a negative signal." I wonder why this is? Since ML/AI are currently "hot" those programmers may be trend followers? Or maybe interest in ML is correlated with being a junior programmer (those that are more senior specialized when ML/AI were not so cool and consequently are in different domains)?
Most likely because if you are doing ML and do not have a PhD (or previous experience), you are just looking at calling a library function that you do not understand. The majority of 'machine learning meetups' (not in the Bay Area), are attended by programmers that are looking to figure out how to call an R package to give them recommendations or similar items in a list (clustering).
edit I just read the other replies to this post. I believe that most startups with Machine Learning teams are doing more than just calling R-libraries; most development work that I've done for myself and teams has been for tooling and operationalizing data infrastructure (i.e. data engineering, not data science). However if you need a simple recommendation for an app then calling the library methods without 100% understanding may be enough (but calling library methods without underlying understanding is a bad trait in a programmer (e.g. calling the sort() function without understanding quicksort)).
Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want
#148> "We’ve seen that most engineers only have the stomach for a limited number of interviews. Investing time in the wrong companies carries a high opportunity cost." I suspect in addition to not having the "stomach" for an unlimited number of interviews, they don't have the vacation days to burn for them. Let's say you are working already and have 10 days a year vacation (pretty standard). With these ridiculous all-day…
>> have 10 days a year vacation (pretty standard) Wait, what? Is it really this bad in the States?
It's typical. Often you get 15 days/year with several years at a company. National holidays usually don't count.
I was at a start-up once where we got a new CEO who essentially canceled a week of "whole company time off" at Christmas. If you wanted that time off, it came out of your vacation. He didn't care . . . and soon after that, I didn't care, either :-)
[Didn't help that he was really scarce in the office that week...]
Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not only the applicants who have limited time. The startup founders are also time constrained. You can't found a successful startup if you spend 10+ hours a week interviewing potential employees. I suspect much of the initial bias and "hard line" preferences are due to a startup's unwillingness to spend inordinate amounts of time interviewing candidates to find that one diamond in the rough. Imagine 4 of every 1…
Interviewing is ridiculously important for any small company. The problem is most people have little idea how to do anything except look for people like them.
Precisely. It's a flaw (shortcut) in the human brain, with effects far beyond programming interviews. This is why structuring interview evaluation is so important
Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want
#150Hi Ammon/Harj, Thank you for that effort and laying it out. Very helpful.
Just so the readers don't miss the context: By definition, most companies referred here, I'm guessing, are startups. And startups will definitely want more product-focused engineers, in order to keep moving fast.
Interviewing in general, is closer to a date, than it's to a standardized test. The smaller the company is, the more pronounced that characteristic is. For even slightly larger companies, it's a different story.
When I was a Director of Engineering at Box, the engineering team was tasked with hiring 25 engineers in a single quarter. For several quarters. When hiring at that scale, it's hard to hire based on personas and elaborate preferences. At that point, process is more important. Anyone that meets a consistent process gets hired. There are always biases at resume selection, but those are only to benefit the later process, and not so much of a preference.
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