We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
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We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
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Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
#2Great post. "Try different approaches. Expand your horizons. Look beyond People Like Us and imagine what the world of programming could look like in 10, 20 or even 50 years – and help us move there by hiring to make it so."
We are helping companies to do that at https://stayintech.com/. In the future people who build technology should represent the people who use it.
Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
#3Happy to see someone calling out what is happening in our industry, namely: this morbid fear of "hiring the wrong candidate" is making people ... hire the wrong candidate!
A word to the hiring managers out there, look to the future, cast the vision, and onboard people who want to go there with you.
Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
#4I really agree with the sentiment of audition projects. The interviews I have enjoyed the most all involved some sort of take-home project, although I have never been paid for one. On that note, how expensive does it become for a startup to dole out many interview projects across a wide range of candidates? I think a better strategy would be to conduct preliminary interviews and then based on some granularity, assign projects. One more issue I have with take home projects is that it is not always possible to tell who did the work. When it comes to interviews at startups I doubt that there would be much cheating, but for large companies where candidates are more easily able to slip through the cracks, I image this may present an issue. Can anyone speak to this experience?
Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
#5Jeff mentions some studies of something known as 'Implicit Bias'. One of the leading Implicit Bias research institutions, out of Harvard, makes some of their tests available online. I highly recommend going through a few of them - https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html
Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
#6This might be an unpopular opinion on HN, but another example of this problem manifests in the sheer volume of companies that require a HackerRank screening test these days. Apart from the clumsy web editor, recording someone under a time constraint means nothing in the larger context of how a programmer's actual work happens. Sigh.
By using such automated tests, companies want to identify top talent by taking a shortcut and not investing any time on their side.
Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
#7tldr:
"The most significant shift we’ve made is requiring every final candidate to work with us for three to eight weeks on a contract basis. Candidates do real tasks alongside the people they would actually be working with if they had the job. They can work at night or on weekends, so they don’t have to leave their current jobs; most spend 10 to 20 hours a week working with Automattic, although that’s flexible. (Some people take a week’s vacation in order to focus on the tryout, which is another viable option.) The goal is not to have them finish a product or do a set amount of work; it’s to allow us to quickly and efficiently assess whether this would be a mutually beneficial relationship."
Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
#8I really agree with the sentiment of audition projects. The interviews I have enjoyed the most all involved some sort of take-home project, although I have never been paid for one. On that note, how expensive does it become for a startup to dole out many interview projects across a wide range of candidates? I think a better strategy would be to conduct preliminary interviews and then based on some granularity, assign…
While it is indeed possible to cheat on the project itself to have any value that project gets followed up with an interview in which its discussed, and I think most people would trip up quite quickly if asked to explain in detail the process of developing some software they didn't in fact write.
Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
#9tldr: "The most significant shift we’ve made is requiring every final candidate to work with us for three to eight weeks on a contract basis. Candidates do real tasks alongside the people they would actually be working with if they had the job. They can work at night or on weekends, so they don’t have to leave their current jobs; most spend 10 to 20 hours a week working with Automattic, although that’s flexible. (Som…
That sounds like it would scale well for the applicant.
Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
#10I really agree with the sentiment of audition projects. The interviews I have enjoyed the most all involved some sort of take-home project, although I have never been paid for one. On that note, how expensive does it become for a startup to dole out many interview projects across a wide range of candidates? I think a better strategy would be to conduct preliminary interviews and then based on some granularity, assign…
Here's a problem with audition projects: I would never be able to take part in one, since my current job contract has a clause forbidding me from simultaneously working for any competitor in the same field. (This is a German job contract; I don't know if such clauses are common in the US or elsewhere, too.)
So in order to work on an audition project, I'd have to be unemployed already.