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Ask HN: Ever been hired through a “who's hiring” post?

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Re: Ask HN: Ever been hired through a “who's hiring” post?

#281

Post by imron »

Kalium wrote: post #279
imron wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to demonstrate emotional attachment. You do need to demonstrate that you can solve the problems of the potential employer. People advertising for a job have a business problem to solve. If you can demonstrate that not only can you solve that problem but that you have solved similar problems for other businesses before, then you stand a greater chance of making it through to an interview.

You're right! Cover letters are all about demonstrating value. Cover letters are great for copywriters, marketers, and others whose primary output is prose for humans. In such cases, cover letters demonstrate competence for the job at hand. However, software engineering is not such a job. A cover letter showcasing a software engineer's ability to author vaguely reality-flavored prose and get past the HR drone doing t…

Cover letters don't need to be paragraph after paragraph of prose, and they don't always go to HR drones either, see for example, the context of this thread because many of the who's hiring posts bypass HR drone screening.

> I've literally never had a good experience with a company that wanted a cover letter.

To provide a counter point, for a recent contracting job, I got an interview with a cover letter only (no resume), and then the position.

I had responded to a 'we're hiring' link at the end of a technical blog post (linked to from HN). I wrote a brief email introducing myself and talking about the value I thought could bring to the company (with links to examples of prior, related work), and that led to follow up emails and an interview. I don't think it would have gone any further if I had just sent an email saying 'Please find my resume attached' and then sent a generic resume.

Re: Ask HN: Ever been hired through a “who's hiring” post?

#283

Post by cableshaft »

biztos wrote: post #276
cableshaft wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 in-person interviews means twice that an employed developer has to either take a PTO day (for something that might not work out), or lie to their boss for why they need to take a really long lunch. Also a lot of companies fly candidates in to interview (i.e. Google), it'd be really expensive to fly the candidate out twice, plus the candidate is effectively investing at least 2 days for the round trip flight and int…

I see your points. Flying someone in twice probably only makes sense for higher-level positions, though you could always schedule two days of interviews on the same trip. Having already paid for the flight and expenses, you could make an argument for it that most flown-in candidates would I think accept. (For local candidates, AFAICT the "doctor's appointment" or similar excuse seems pretty easy to manage.) As to the…

The vast majority of onsite interviews I've had were exhausting Google style interviews. Generally speaking, the ones that haven't been were the ones where I got the job (exception is the current job, that was a two hour sit down exam where I was left alone. I made it, but I'm surprised I did. I've seen dozens of people come in and fail at the test since).

My favorite interview, in fact, was one were a grizzled veteran (he was the Lead Programmer on NBA Jam), asked me a couple questions on the code sample I brought in, showed me an example (uncommented) class from their actual code base (I verified later) and asked me to interpret what it's doing, asked me a couple more questions, then said "Okay, I know you can handle the job, now let's see what you really know."

And he proceeded to ask me deep questions about memory and graphics, which I could only partially answer most of them, and then he proceeded to teach me about the details.

It felt more like a mini-lecture at that point than a pop quiz ("Do you know this? No? Well tough! Better look it up later. Next question!"). I legitimately learned things from that interview that I can still recall today.

Then I had a friendly chat with the president of the company afterwards, who used to work for Midway and designed many classic arcade games, most notably Rampage, about what they do at the company. I played that game a ton when I was a kid, so I was happy just to be chatting to him like we happened to run into each other at a family BBQ.

I was in and out of there in about an hour, and there wasn't even a weed-out phone screen.

Then I got a job offer a few days later, which I ended up accepting.

Re: Ask HN: Ever been hired through a “who's hiring” post?

#284

Post by Kalium »

imron wrote: post #281
Kalium wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right! Cover letters are all about demonstrating value. Cover letters are great for copywriters, marketers, and others whose primary output is prose for humans. In such cases, cover letters demonstrate competence for the job at hand. However, software engineering is not such a job. A cover letter showcasing a software engineer's ability to author vaguely reality-flavored prose and get past the HR drone doing t…

Cover letters don't need to be paragraph after paragraph of prose, and they don't always go to HR drones either, see for example, the context of this thread because many of the who's hiring posts bypass HR drone screening. > I've literally never had a good experience with a company that wanted a cover letter. To provide a counter point, for a recent contracting job, I got an interview with a cover letter only (no res…

What did the cover letter that got you an interview look like? What it something that could not be describes as paragraphs of prose? What you say about it - introducing yourself, showing an understanding of their problems, talking about your value-add - sounds very likely to bear a strong resemblance to paragraphs of prose. Though if you tell me it was a series of limericks, I will be very impressed.

When I'm applying to a company of greater than fifty or so people, I tend to assume that any general-purpose resume-inbox will be read primarily by an HR person or recruiter. Not personally by a hiring manager. That would almost certainly be a poor use of time.

What, precisely, does a cover letter show that a well-composed resume doesn't for an in-house full-time engineer? A willingness to accept the received wisdom that authoring prose on demand demonstrates critical core competencies for software engineering job performance, perhaps?

To cap it all off, I've found that at scale the improved response rate from submitting applications with cover letters doesn't justify the increased time spent applying. Doing the reading and writing to create a halfway decent cover letter takes at a minimum 10x the time it takes to click "Apply with LinkedIn".

Re: Ask HN: Ever been hired through a “who's hiring” post?

#285

Post by WWLink »

maxaf wrote: post #214
TheMog wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it works both ways. You might send out 20 resumes. As a hiring manager - especially when using a "no filter" approach like posting on here (keep in mind that IME people posting jobs on Hacker News are more likely doing "guerilla hiring" and circumvent their HR departments) - I easily get 100+ resumes, and I don't have days to spend trawling through them. I think it was rands of randsinrepose who mentioned befor…

You get 100+ resumes through a "Who's Hiring?" post?! I get two-three in a good month, but more often than not I get nothing at all. That said, I have hired one person through HN back in 2011, if memory serves me right, so this hasn't been all for naught.

Oh, ouch! That sucks. Your product is pretty darn cool. I remember cross-comparing it and some other stuff. Only reason I didn't buy it, was the lack of a desktop webapp. (That's a serious problem IMHO.) If I were interested in moving I'd totally apply there.

Re: Ask HN: Ever been hired through a “who's hiring” post?

#286

Post by user5994461 »

maxaf wrote: post #280
cloverich wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a link to a recent job posting? If so I'm sure you can get some feedback on why that is.

Here it is! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12847191

You don't say what you are looking for in the post. There is a mention of "platform engineer" but no clue what this is or what he's supposed to do.

Plus, I assume that the NY area + security engineering has a lot of companies competing.

Re: Ask HN: Ever been hired through a “who's hiring” post?

#287

Post by slau »

rsfinn wrote: post #186
slau wrote: post #119

About 18 months ago I posted on "Who wants to be hired?" and saw that Realm was looking for people in the monthly "Who's hiring" thread. I think it was Tim ('ello mate, hope you got the bucket picture) who posted those on HN back then. I reached out to them, alongside a number of other startups that were interested in remote workers or had an office in Copenhagen (my SO and I wanted to move there from southern France…

The job listings on your web site don't suggest that remote work positions are available. If that's really the case, then I respectfully suggest updating the text. (I really appreciate the effort Realm has put into supporting the development community by hosting conference videos; you're definitely creating a lot of goodwill that way.)

It looks like there's a change in strategy here, which goes against what I posted initially. I wasn't really aware of it, and it's still up for grabs on a case-by-case basis, but from the looks of it, we're now mainly interested in local candidates.

Apologies if I created any confusion by claiming something without fact-checking first.

Re: Ask HN: Ever been hired through a “who's hiring” post?

#289

Post by danesparza »

Pica_soO wrote: post #218
danesparza wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It is very common to send out 20 resume's and maybe get a single response or two. It is very time consuming to write a custom multi-paragraph cover letter with every application." If you're a programmer and you're approaching problems this way, I most likely don't want to hire you. Strike a balance between automation and giving a personal touch where it's necessary.

Automated personal touch, mmh.. i can do procedural Rts units, i can do that. Dear Sir and Madam, i always greatly admired the spaghettis growing in your yard. The idea of adding to was asthma taking and diamond. Now finding myself, in need and desire to accomplish, a similar feet, ladder jump several feet deep up, i hereby apply for your post which i will embrace with great pressure on passion fruit and tail end. Re…

I'm not sure if you willfully misread that and you enjoy being wrong, or if you made a mistake and need to re-read my response.
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