The sad truth is many startups and wannabe hot tech companies are going to read this article not realizing it's satire, and try these methods out and unintentionally alienate their entire pool of qualified candidates in the process.
Here Are Google, Amazon and Facebook’s Secrets to Hiring the Best People
71–80 of 109 posts
Re: Here Are Google, Amazon and Facebook’s Secrets to Hiring the Best People
#72This seems pretty pointless.
Re: Here Are Google, Amazon and Facebook’s Secrets to Hiring the Best People
#73Came here expecting many commenters to not get that it was satire. Was not disappointed.
Call it satire but I've had 1, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10 happen to me at one time or another. Regarding 10 (getting called 3 months later), they were smug and cocky about it and resented when I turned them down.
Re: Here Are Google, Amazon and Facebook’s Secrets to Hiring the Best People
#74"These top tech companies each receive over one billion resumes per year (source needed). So it’s safe to say they have a good process for choosing the best job candidates. "
nope -- its not safe to say that.
Re: Here Are Google, Amazon and Facebook’s Secrets to Hiring the Best People
#75I didn't even read the article because I know there is no secret. We don't hire the best people. We hire average people, some good people, some great people, some mediocre people, and some people who aren't very good at their jobs. Some of those mediocre and average people turn out to be great people after all. There's no secret to it. We like telling ourselves there is a secret because everyone likes to feel special…
> Go build some shit with people you like building shit with and stop trying to figure out how to make hiring objective. You can't.
Yes you can. It's quite easy, make people build something small to get hired, that eliminates 99% of submissions who are just lying about their skills and posing and with code in hand, it's quite easy to decide who's full of shit and who isn't. Resume's are useless, demand code, real programmers program.
Re: Here Are Google, Amazon and Facebook’s Secrets to Hiring the Best People
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a phone screen from Google I wanted to hang up on because I knew where it was going. They reached out to me for an SRE role in Australia. After a few unscheduled calls at poor times (at the DC doing work) we setup an "interview". It was just a screen where they ask you to rate your self on a bunch of random technologies; between never heard of it and wrote the book. Rated myself 4-6 on most haha. The " intervie…
I never understood the rate yourself bit. Is it designed to fuck with your head? "So you think you are good? We'll show you. How about this obscure trick question from C++17 spec -- see not as good as you thought"
Meh, I ask it on a couple technologies now and again but only for broad tech. It does two things for me. One is that for some of my positions, I need a candidate to be good at some but not all things my team does, like windows, linux or net ops. So it helps me focus my questions on what the candidate feels comfortable with. It's not a trick.
The other thing that you can often see with it is how much a person doesn't know that they don't know. I don't often get someone telling me that they are a 9/10 in linux but generally when they do, they can't set an ip from the CLI, or use top. I do want to see people who understand what they know and what they don't. I realize the question is pretty arbitrary so it's one data point in a set but it can be useful to understand how someone sees their own competency.
Re: Here Are Google, Amazon and Facebook’s Secrets to Hiring the Best People
#77I like telling my AWS interviewing story. They forgot to call the first time. Then they were "impressed" and invited me for an onsite. All seemed well, except they forgot about me coming that day or just people who were supposed to interview me were gone. Everyone asked pretty much the same "leadership principles" questions, which I refused to parrot back through my "life experiences" -- I guess it went against my ow…
You covered Situation, Task, Action, Resolution; you're hired!
Re: Here Are Google, Amazon and Facebook’s Secrets to Hiring the Best People
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never understood the rate yourself bit. Is it designed to fuck with your head? "So you think you are good? We'll show you. How about this obscure trick question from C++17 spec -- see not as good as you thought"
Meh, I ask it on a couple technologies now and again but only for broad tech. It does two things for me. One is that for some of my positions, I need a candidate to be good at some but not all things my team does, like windows, linux or net ops. So it helps me focus my questions on what the candidate feels comfortable with. It's not a trick. The other thing that you can often see with it is how much a person doesn't…
> I do want to see people who understand what they know and what they don't
Ok that's fair, I can see that point.
I usually just probe by asking details about the projects they've done etc.
Also found there is sometimes an inverse corellation between those who rate themselves high and their abilities and vice verse rate themselves low and their abilities (there is a name for this phenomenon, but I don't recall it). The idea is those who really know a lot, also know how much they don't know.
If someone asked me "how well you know the Linux kernel", I would say not at all. Because I had to read the source to some parts of it, had to tune it for realtime charactestics and have seen the depth of the rabbit hole so to speak, and realized I don't know anything compared to how much there is to know about it.
Re: Here Are Google, Amazon and Facebook’s Secrets to Hiring the Best People
#79Came here expecting many commenters to not get that it was satire. Was not disappointed.
Call it satire but I've had 1, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10 happen to me at one time or another. Regarding 10 (getting called 3 months later), they were smug and cocky about it and resented when I turned them down.
"It's funny because it's true" applies here pretty well
Re: Here Are Google, Amazon and Facebook’s Secrets to Hiring the Best People
#80i....laughed so very hard during this article, oh my. and it had very little to do with the beers meeting i had at 4:30 today in a Seattle building named after an Austrian physicist. seriously big laughs here, thank you, from a tech (my wife says 'retail') company worker. huge laughs, #5 was the best, dying over here.
laugh or cry i guess, consider this data point: my team had 23 loops for a particular role, all shot down because candidate clearly had not seen this article yet. Do RSU's factor into the hours spent by 8+ team members trying to fill 8 open out of 50 total headcount? Because on base salary alone we have already paid for like 3 headcount or something.