Ask HN: Can the “Who is Hiring?” post include a bit about the interview process? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Can the “Who is Hiring?” post include a bit about the interview process?

#91

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 8:29 PM UTC

crdb wrote: post #45

mlashcorp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah... Have actual machine learning experience as well, never heard the term leverage as applied here. Sometimes the nomenclature can confuse people, and I guess the original point about more in depth interviewing processes was related to discerning whether the fundamental knowledge and team fit are there, not whether the candidate is aware of the particular subset of CS trivia the interviewer is currently intereste…

What do you call high leverage observations then?

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Can the “Who is Hiring?” post include a bit about the interview process?

#92

Post by delecti » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 8:41 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #86

delecti wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a pretty low bar to write an extra sentence or two about the interview process when they already a paragraph about how they're changing the world with their revolutionary JS framework.

I think that's an uncharitable way to describe the overwhelming majority of those posts. Let's get out of the habit of heaping snark on others in discussion threads. It feels amusing for a little while, but corrodes the qualities we most want here. Not a good trade.

You're right, I was unfairly snarky, but quite a few jobs on every month's post try and describe themselves with overly grandiose language without really saying what they do. I just think that job posts on this site reach a fairly narrow and high quality audience (certainly more so than most job sites), and in return it's not asking too much for a grounded, concrete description of what to expect both from the company, and the interview process.

The Javascipt framework part was purely a joke, and I think was probably recognized as such by most people, though again, was probably not helpful.

Re: Ask HN: Can the “Who is Hiring?” post include a bit about the interview process?

#93

Post by SFJulie » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 8:59 PM UTC

wages, interview process, financial structure, link to SEC report or anything relevant according to national law, legal structure, owners, involvement in legal action either as a defender or as an offender ...

It could be nice to have the information that are hard to gather otherwhise.

It is as true for workers as for companies that a new position is a risk, but, while companies can ask for references, workers have no ways to ask for "references" themselves. This asymmetry benefits companies much more than workers, it would make workers more "trustful" if companies were showing good will in evening the gap.

Re: Ask HN: Can the “Who is Hiring?” post include a bit about the interview process?

#94

Post by greglindahl » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 8:59 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #7

It's a good idea but I'm a bit worried about making those threads even more top-heavy than they already are by asking people to include even more info in their posts. It might also be hard to explain what we're asking submitters to do in a way that makes sense to everyone, especially the ones who don't post on HN except in those threads. We'll think about it. There's a couple days before the next thread. Edit: ok, I…

If someone has what they think is a super-awesome interview process that might attract more candidates, by all means they should mention it.

But there's not much point in getting the rest of us to add nearly-meaningless handwaving because our employers don't have a standard interview process!

Re: Ask HN: Can the “Who is Hiring?” post include a bit about the interview process?

#95

Post by p4wnc6 » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 9:28 PM UTC

crdb wrote: post #45

mlashcorp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah... Have actual machine learning experience as well, never heard the term leverage as applied here. Sometimes the nomenclature can confuse people, and I guess the original point about more in depth interviewing processes was related to discerning whether the fundamental knowledge and team fit are there, not whether the candidate is aware of the particular subset of CS trivia the interviewer is currently intereste…

What do you call high leverage observations then?

This is similar to "multicollinearity". I have two graduate degrees in applied statistics and machine learning, and did math as an undergrad, but I did not ever even hear the term "multicollinearity" until I got my first job after grad school in a place that used a lot of regression models.

I had studied "spurious correlation" in some machine learning courses and in some research, but almost all of the methods I ever studied or worked on were meant to use data-driven methods to account for spurious correlation, or dimensionality reduction to find subspaces in which the data's natural structure was best preserved without correlation-caused redundancy. Literally none of them ever even mentioned the phrase "multicollinearity" -- which seems to be more popular to people coming from classical statistics or econometrics programs.

If I had been asked to describe "what is multicollinearity" during the interviews, I would have been rejected, yet after they told it to me, I learned about it in about 2 hours on Wikipedia, and within two months I had actually done a research project for them where I showed them how you could use ISOMAP or randomized PCA to effectively handle regression multicollinearity better than their ad hoc covariate-averaging techniques.

This kind of trivia stuff is useless for hiring. All it does is let the interviewer feel smart and tout their favorite particular buzzwords to see if the candidate is in the same "club" as them.

I can imagine some diehard frequentist caring a shit ton about "consistent estimator" or various special tests like Kolmogorov-Smirnoff or F-test or likelihood ratio test. If you say, "I always do Bayesian stats... those test thingies are stupid junk" then it means "This person is not in the Frequentist Club, let's reject their lame ass and tell them it's cause they are 'just not a good fit.'"

Same would be true in reverse if some Bayesian diehard interviews a frequentist person.

Same for someone who sees deep learning as the hammer for every nail. Etc. etc.

People don't want to admit they treat these things kind of like baseball trading cards, and it's more about your cool-kid status than your actual tech skill.

Re: Ask HN: Can the “Who is Hiring?” post include a bit about the interview process?

#96

Post by Geekette » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 11:24 PM UTC

In addition to details on the interview process, postings would definitely be more useful if they also included:

- Expected duration of interview(s). 1-2 hours differs drastically from all day.

- Salary within 10k. If hiring for multiple positions or skill ranges (e.g. mid-to-snr engr), then state salary for each case. Companies complain about noise in hiring process, yet won't do one key thing that would improve quality by getting applications from only those interested in X job at Y wage.

- An honest estimate of hiring timeline. Don't waste people's time by saying "yesterday" only to drag it out by months. Applicants can also address this by asking companies who they hired last and how long it took to do so.

Re: Ask HN: Can the “Who is Hiring?” post include a bit about the interview process?

#97

Post by mooreds » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 11:36 PM UTC

p4wnc6 wrote: post #82

mooreds wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I hired a few times and rapidly learned not to promise the candidate a fixed amount of time. Why waste everyone's time doing more interviewing if the first interviewer finds out something that reveals the candidate is not a fit?

Because if they took the time to prepare for the interview and budget for an upper bound on the time range, then it is only professional and courteous of you to give them a full review. If you reject them based on their performance during hour 1, and you don't even give them the chance to show you more about themselves during hours 2, 3, and 4, it sounds like (a) your hiring process is kind of dumb and you're way too…

> Because if they took the time to prepare for the interview...

That's very charitable of you.

I dont know if it was my inability to phone screen properly, my inadequate job posting, my desperation to hire at the salary my boss allowed me, or my optimism, but I had far too many candidates that didn't pass even the above low bar. I don't even want to talk about the candidates that didn't make it through the phone screen.

If it matters, the timeframe wasn't 1-4 hours, but rather 1-2, and the position was junior.

Re: Ask HN: Can the “Who is Hiring?” post include a bit about the interview process?

#98

Post by brianwawok » Sun, May 01, 2016, 12:04 AM UTC

smm2000 wrote: post #75

drdeadringer wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> candidate throwing a miniature temper tantrum This happens?

In my previous company, one candidate became belligerent and physically pushed interviewer away from whiteboard after interviewer told him that his solution is not correct. Interviewer asked candidate to wait a few minutes, left room, called recruiter who in turn called security to escort candidate out. My desk was just outside interviewing room and I saw the long glance that the guy gave to interviewer - it was "if…

Sure beats finding out after you hire the psychopath.

Re: Ask HN: Can the “Who is Hiring?” post include a bit about the interview process?

#99

Post by brianwawok » Sun, May 01, 2016, 12:08 AM UTC

p4wnc6 wrote: post #80

shawnps wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A long time ago I was interviewing with Facebook. They told me exactly what to expect from the process. I was actually shocked that they were giving away so much information. I studied for the interview and did very well in the first half, and then horribly the second half. Overall I enjoyed it because of how honest they were.

I had a different experience with Facebook. I was told what the technical phone interview would consist of, and that much was true, but I was also told I would receive feedback within a certain time frame. After my interview (in which I felt I did very well), I did not hear anything back within the time frame they told me, and then many days afterwards I finally heard back. They said they were not going to move forwa…

98% of interviews wont tell you why you got rejected. So do you not interview anywhere?

Re: Ask HN: Can the “Who is Hiring?” post include a bit about the interview process?

#100

Post by crdb » Sun, May 01, 2016, 12:12 AM UTC

p4wnc6 wrote: post #95

crdb wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you call high leverage observations then?

This is similar to "multicollinearity". I have two graduate degrees in applied statistics and machine learning, and did math as an undergrad, but I did not ever even hear the term "multicollinearity" until I got my first job after grad school in a place that used a lot of regression models. I had studied "spurious correlation" in some machine learning courses and in some research, but almost all of the methods I ever…

However, if you ping me on my profile email after I put up a job on Who's Hiring, and I send you back an email saying "hey, can you answer these few filter questions, take your time" and one of them is "what is multicollinearity", chances are you'll google it and tell me what you typed above and it will be fine. It's not like you can't use Google or take your time.

What I'm dealing with is people who are dumping their CV and a standard cover letter on me at high frequency and I do not want to put an HR filter between them and me, because I want to spot the guy without a LinkedIn profile (HR red flag), who dropped out of college (so no brand - HR red flag) but has plenty of useful experience (so no buzzwords, because real experience looks unremarkable on a CV - HR red flag). I know no more efficient way. Would love to hear of any.

I did make the mistake many years ago of rejecting a PhD in stats because she admitted not knowing about neural nets ("but my lab buddy is doing some research in them"). I'm still kicking myself, but have learnt a bit about hiring since then.