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We only hire the trendiest

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Re: We only hire the trendiest

#521

Post by emcq »

knappe wrote: post #431
awinder wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the rationality point, I've definitely been one to talk openly when asked about times I've failed / would have done something differently. I've looked at it as a no-loss scenario: if I'm talking with a company and they can't accept that no one is perfect, then I'd rather not work for that company anyways. Interviewing in a sense is kinda like dating, one way to really screw things up is if you're both looking for…

There is one rather big key difference in dating versus interviews. You only get once chance to find out _everything_ about a company during an interview. Whereas dating has many "meetings". This is the real problem with interviews. They're an all or nothing.

Many selective companies have many phone screens and coding projects, plus hours of on site interviewing. Google's process notoriously takes months. Some companies interviews likely take 10+ hours all in all. That's more like 3rd date territory in terms of hours spent together, and plenty of time to evaluate a hire, not some one shot thing.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#522

Post by tamana »

coliveira wrote: post #226
minikites wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the compensation like for 10+ hours of work?

Great answer. When I see these ideas floated around, I always think that these companies will never hire people who value their time and have at least a decent job. When a company comes to me with these great "deals" the first thing I say is thank you very much and move their emails to my spam box.

And that saves them the hasle of extending an offer to someone who doesn't want the job because it doesn't offer enough life improvement. Win/Win

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#523

Post by tamana »

grandalf wrote: post #410
Arainach wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>- desire to grow -- does this person have clear career growth goals. Ideally these are not tied to titles or bossing others around, which are negatives. Can you give an example of what you WOULD like to see here? There's some selection bias among the kinds of developers who tend to hang out on online technical communities and learn new things, but what IS the right long term goal, and how is this different from "des…

Well, I ideally like to see some interests that are on the edge of the candidate's current skill-set which indicate that he/she is aware that technology is changing and that we must all plan ahead a bit to remain relevant and employable in 5 years. Not trend-tracking, but deepening and broadening the skill-set.

Why do you care how good a candidate will be at getting a new job after yours?

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#524

Post by pklausler »

nommm-nommm wrote: post #515
digler999 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see HR's desire to follow some sort of procedure though. If you let any manager hire anyway they so desire, it could open the company up to discriminatory hiring practices. By having a codified (if ineffective ) "procedure", they can use this as a defense in a lawsuit and say "look, see ? Everyone gets hired the same way at this company, and the plaintiff was subjected to the exact same scrutiny as everyone els…

The doesn't actually work if your hiring procedure is actually discriminatory. There is a concept called disparate impact in US employment law. That means your employment process can't have a disproportionate adverse impact on a protected class, unless there is an actual business requirement that causes the disparate impact. An example would be: if your job requirements is "must be able to lift 70lbs" it probably wil…

"Bad computer programmers" must, I hope, never become a protected class.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#525

Post by marktd »

tptacek wrote: post #262
rorykoehler wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you ever consider the candidate in all of this?

Yes: like I said, the goal was to get results back to candidates faster. The biggest complaint we'd been getting from candidates before work samples was that our process took too long. Our goal became to get the entire process done under two weeks (from its worst point, a month or two earlier, of 1.5 months, when someone finally posted an anonymous complaint to Glassdoor about us). After iterating a couple times, we…

As a candidate, I would be a little wary of this process. You're asking me to put in multiple hours of work, but you only put in 7 minutes. So the incentives are misaligned: you are incented to give these challenges to many people, even if they have a low chance of passing through. But as a candidate, I don't want to sped multiple hours if I have a low chance of passing through. This is one reason why full-day on-site interviews aren't so bad - if I've gotten to that stage, I'm probably pretty likely to get an offer.

What do you do to ameliorate this concern?

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#526

Post by pklausler »

bjourne wrote: post #476
grandalf wrote: post #345

I've found that the best predictors of a good hire are indications of the following characteristics during the interview/vetting process: - adaptability -- can this person deal with situations that are spontaneous and unplanned without losing his/her cool. - openness -- is this person instinctively scornful of new concepts/ideas or energized by the chance to be exposed to something potentially interesting. - resource…

It's telling that in your list you never once mentioned "Actually possesses the technical skills required to do a good job."

Skills become obsolete. Aptitudes don't.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#527

Post by throwyactttt »

I have been in a similar frustrating position. I have a degree in marketing. I taught myself to code and spent five years building a huge variety of native and hybrid Android and iOS applications. At one point I eould have rated myself as a 9/10 at iOS and Objective-C at a time when these skills were in severe demand. Unfortunately all recruiters saw is my marketing degree.

Part of me, a large part, wanted to simply tweak my profile to say "computer science." If I had done that I am certain I would have been making $150k years before I finally got there. No one would have known or bothered checking. I was able to blow through fairly technical interviews at smaller companies who weren't as picky including answering all manner of algorithms, data structures and sorting questions on the whiteboard. I actually bothered to back fill on all the knowledge I had missed by reading college text books in my own time. Yet...marketing degree. I was even told that I wasn't technical enough after absolutely acing a particular interview which blew me away.

The filtering system is corrupt and broken, if they are going to discriminate against me based on wrong indicators, why should I have to play their game? Unfortunately my feelings of ethics prevented me from doing what seemed logical. I made it on my own time the hard, boring way. Maybe I am the dumb one for not cheating.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#529

Post by tamana »

smellf wrote: post #381
ambicapter wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you offer some advice to people who are low-openness and don't see why that's a problem?

The reason why it's a problem is because when a coworker is always in his or her own little bubble and you know nothing about them it is harder to get along with them and thus harder to work with them. And by the same token, if you like and get along with the people in your environment, then you'll be happier and thus more productive.

This attitude is why so many people bemoan the "frat house / in-group" culture of companies. Why can't you have a pleasant conversation about the problems you are trying to solve at work?

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#530

Post by balls187 »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #508
balls187 wrote: post #503

Overall, I get the gist of the article, and it makes sense. Some counter-points: > Mike has worked on systems that can handle multiple orders of magnitude more load, but his experience is, apparently, irrelevant. Did Mike build/architect said system, or was instrumental in said system reaching massive performance? As an MSFT contractor, it seems doubtful. Our team had a "Principal Architect" that did that sort of hea…

> there is a lot of stigma on A- employees, FYI, contractors are v-.

They're both.

a- for agency employees (working for companies like Volt). These are contingent staff (CSG), usually hired to augment teams of FTE.

v- for vendor employees (like nvidia). These are typically are partners working along side MSFT to accomplish a shared goal.

From my myopic viewpoint vendor employees seemed to get more respect than agency employees.

Regardless, I did think it was generous of MSFT to allow contractors to partake in the free soda system.

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