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Hire Literally Anyone

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Re: Hire Literally Anyone

#31

Post by pekk »

puredemo wrote: post #3

"Hire anyone with decent standardized test scores," would be my baseline after managing a large, technical support callcenter where many new hires were simply not able to learn the (imho fairly rudimentary) modem troubleshooting steps after weeks and months of on-the-job training and support. The people who seemed the sharpest in the first two weeks of training usually excelled, most others didn't. Some were simply u…

It is okay in the industry to discriminate employees based on whether they just graduated from a top tier school like Stanford. Or whether they have years of experience at a top tier company like Google. Or answer absurdly irrelevant puzzles, or implement red-black trees from memory on a whiteboard. Or whether they can answer aggressive questions demanding to explain their business value. Or whether they are a "culture fit" (too black, too old, too female, etc.) Or whether they have enough names of technologies you use in the resume. Or whether their resumes are well-formatted.

In short, throw people out for almost any reason you want, and HN will defend your right to do so. But suggest that we could ever choose employees based on measures of "intelligence" or academic performance, and you are obviously doing something horrible and nobody should see your post.

There's at least one good thing about standardized testing: at least it's standardized and objective rather than being based on vague emotional criteria - how well you can con the interviewers, or whether they think you're just like them, or whether you present social proof that you convinced sufficiently many other companies in the past, or whether you are literally a friend of an employee.

Re: Hire Literally Anyone

#32

Post by BinaryIdiot »

VeilEm wrote: post #25

That's fine, you do that, but I do not want to be an engineer at your company. I already have a junior engineer I'm working with and it's hard enough spending hours a week making sure their PRs get fixed, every PR has 20 to 40 comments in it. With someone who doesn't even know how to code? Forget it.

I think that's why the OP suggested a pay scale but obviously you wouldn't want to do this unless you can setup a system of on-boarding so you're not killing other developer's productivity.

If you can develop a system to where a few people are essentially "trainers" (or some degree) this could work out exceptionally well...or fail miserably, I'm not sure which yet.

Re: Hire Literally Anyone

#33

Post by pekk »

clarle wrote: post #15
puredemo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering I managed literally thousands of agents over a period of years, you would statistically be an extremely rare exception to a rather well-examined trend. Did you ever take the SAT / ACT?

Standardized testing doesn't measure the same skills needed to be successful at creative work. Please don't ever do this.

What does measure that? An interview where someone gauges whether you love Node.js and can spout dogmatic gibberish about MVC?

Re: Hire Literally Anyone

#34

Post by xiaoma »

>We represent ourselves as front-end devs instead of INTJ devs

This is a good thing. INTJ and other Meyers-Briggs types have no basis in science and they aren't related to what work a person can do for a business.

Re: Hire Literally Anyone

#35

Post by wai1234 »

There is no shortage of developers. There is a shortage of perfect developers that meet every preconceived notion of lazy companies that don't believe they have any responsibility to develop and grow people. There will always be a shortage of top performers in any field. If only top performers are acceptable to you, you will have a very tough time growing. I have to laugh when I see these posts where people have 'discovered' that you can actually train people to make them better. I saw one a few months back where the 'secret' to using bootcampers turned out to be 'provide a guided program to finish developing their abilities', as if no one ever heard of this before.

Re: Hire Literally Anyone

#36

Post by BinaryIdiot »

pekk wrote: post #31
puredemo wrote: post #3

"Hire anyone with decent standardized test scores," would be my baseline after managing a large, technical support callcenter where many new hires were simply not able to learn the (imho fairly rudimentary) modem troubleshooting steps after weeks and months of on-the-job training and support. The people who seemed the sharpest in the first two weeks of training usually excelled, most others didn't. Some were simply u…

It is okay in the industry to discriminate employees based on whether they just graduated from a top tier school like Stanford. Or whether they have years of experience at a top tier company like Google. Or answer absurdly irrelevant puzzles, or implement red-black trees from memory on a whiteboard. Or whether they can answer aggressive questions demanding to explain their business value. Or whether they are a "cultu…

> In short, throw people out for almost any reason you want, and HN will defend your right to do so

No way. All those reasons you mentioned above you've really seen people on HN defend those without being downvoted? I only ever see HN against many of those items of discrimination you mention...

> There's at least one good thing about standardized testing: at least it's standardized and objective rather than being based on vague emotional criteria

Except they're not objective but you're right they are standardized. This is not a good way of measuring people for many reasons. The more importance you put into standardize testing the more you get teachers teaching only the content contained within and you put more weight against a teacher's grading styles (which can vary wildly even on standardized testing when they're graded away from the school).

Standardized testing probably has its place but as criteria for employment is laughable at best.

Re: Hire Literally Anyone

#37

Post by ldd »

VeilEm wrote: post #25

That's fine, you do that, but I do not want to be an engineer at your company. I already have a junior engineer I'm working with and it's hard enough spending hours a week making sure their PRs get fixed, every PR has 20 to 40 comments in it. With someone who doesn't even know how to code? Forget it.

I know this is unsolicited advice, but what problems do you see in this person's code that you can share with us?

Re: Hire Literally Anyone

#38

Post by BinaryIdiot »

puredemo wrote: post #9
rdudek wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't count on it. I failed out of college due to my inability to take and pass tests, yet at work, I'm being promoted constantly to higher ranks due to my productivity.

Considering I managed literally thousands of agents over a period of years, you would statistically be an extremely rare exception to a rather well-examined trend. Did you ever take the SAT / ACT?

Source? It's all anecdotal but I know far, far too many great developers who never even took the SAT (or did horrible on them) and are wildly successful in their careers. I have a hard time believing this is "extremely rare" especially considering most colleges now don't rely on them to a large degree.

Re: Hire Literally Anyone

#39

Post by mjmahone17 »

VeilEm wrote: post #25

That's fine, you do that, but I do not want to be an engineer at your company. I already have a junior engineer I'm working with and it's hard enough spending hours a week making sure their PRs get fixed, every PR has 20 to 40 comments in it. With someone who doesn't even know how to code? Forget it.

There's a way to make this work, that a lot of tech companies already do with not-yet-technical freshman and sophomores in college: give a large funnel of people an actual training course a few months long. Give the best of this large funnel return internships. Again, give them some amount of training but this time more real-world experience. Those that actually helped the business, give full time offers to.

There's no inherent reason this model can't work with untrained, not-yet-technical non-interns. You just need to set up explicit expectations: this is a temp job (3-6 months long). The top 30% of people will be given a 3-6 month extension, during which they'll do real coding work alongside current engineers. The top ~30% of those to be given full time offers, at a "new grad" level, based on whether, by the end of the last month, they were operating at a "new grad engineer" level.

Re: Hire Literally Anyone

#40

Post by wai1234 »

mahyarm wrote: post #16

1. The industry interviews this through 'culture fits'. Personality is not something your can put on a resume very well, it comes out in culture interviews. You need to pass personality and a technical bars in most interviews. 2. We already hire 'anyone' by hiring people from 3 month coding boot camps which are usually pretty cheap in price and time compared to college. Passing a coding boot camp or showing self deve…

Like most interviewers are skilled judges of 'culture'. This is why most tech companies are filled with bros telling themselves how cool they are and how they are changing the world. Utter BS.
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