Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326940
We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)
111–120 of 653 posts
Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)
#112How important is GPA? I will soon get my Master's degree in CS, but it is via the path of least resistence. Therefore GPA is not shiny. I decided that spending my finite time and energy can be better, so I concentrated on coding (my own projects) and socializing, sports and games etc. When I studied for exams, at point where I knew that I was going to pass, I shifted to other projects. Next year when I join the workf…
Master's in CS: Worthless. Sorry, but it's the bare truth. If you picked up some new skills, great, but the degree itself has no value.
Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)
#113Does anyone else find full-width text hard to read? I had to actually turn my head. Instantly closed the page.
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Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure they may lose some great candidates that way, but the reality is that they don't want people in finance because: 1. They have preconceived notions about how finance "should" work 2. People not from finance are driven by other things This is not to say that there aren't people from finance who don't fall under this, but it's a good way to weed them out without inviting a billion applications from people in financ…
So then by your own admission they’re not hiring the best due to this heuristic. One thing my experience in HFT has taught me is that technical ability is only loosely correlated with profitability. So I wouldn't conflate Renaissance's success with their hiring practices.
>So then by your own admission they’re not hiring the best due to this heuristic.
Picking up on your use of the word heuristic, "hiring the best" is very much an optimization problem. Specifically, there's a signal detection problem inherent to hiring in which you want to maximize your hits (selecting the best candidates) while minimizing your false alarms (hiring someone who turns out to be a bad candidate).
There's another layer to this optimization problem, which is that you want to minimize costs, both in time and in money.
As such, there are bound to be many heuristics that are close-to-optimal. I don't know whether excluding people with a background in finance is one of them (in fact, I suspect it's not), but the use of such a heuristic is not prima facie absurd.
In fact, using (good) heuristics in hiring is a feature, not a bug.
The problem here is that the heuristic is (I think) bad.
Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
We had an interviewee showing up in shorts and t-shirt. Turns out he wanted to combine the interview with a tee off time in the afternoon. While not customary (even though we don't wear suits/business attire at our company) he totally got away with it and it didn't affect the interview.
I’ve only interviewed in jeans and a tshirt, never had issue, but was thanked by one company for not showing up in a suit.
When I interviewed for my new job (at a tech company), I knew it was fine to wear casual clothes, but only because I have a friend who works there. I probably would have worn a suit otherwise.
I gave feedback that they should just tell candidates to wear casual clothes when they invite them to interview. It's such a simple thing to do and really helps put candidates at ease.
Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
So then by your own admission they’re not hiring the best due to this heuristic. One thing my experience in HFT has taught me is that technical ability is only loosely correlated with profitability. So I wouldn't conflate Renaissance's success with their hiring practices.
Two things: 1. what was more or equally important than technical ability for HFT programmers' success in increasing profitability for the company? That was an interesting statement: can you elaborate? 2. That fun might have these heuristics that GP talks of, and for them, the people they hire may well be the best for them . As in, motivated and attitudinally oriented towards what they want, and more able to work free…
Trading always has this trade off in terms of (dumb and fast) vs (smart and slow). In the past few years, I think it's been more beneficial to be fast enough, but very smart. So, in this sense, technical ability only takes you so far since "smarts" come from domain expertise or, plainly, just creativity. Team composition matters, since your technical guy needs to be complemented. The objective, of course, is making your team take your organization towards the holy grail of (smart and fast). I'm not sure if this directly answers your question, but perhaps it describes the scenario in which technical ability isn't everything.
I do not think assembling a team for HFT is easy at all, especially now. There are a lot of good reasons for being very peculiar and selective. I am not sure industry outsiders who are just applying understand the dynamic or, in many cases, why a seemingly great candidate is rejected.
Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)
#117I´ve recently been in charge of hiring a lot of people and have probably done +100 interviews in the last year. I generally don´t mind the stack/language candidates have been using but I always value very highly that they have used different stacks and languages during their whole carrer. When I interview 5+ years .NET developers who haven't used another language, not even in their spare time, the result is usually a…
I've been at the other end of that scale. I've had a fair few candidates that have used 10 different stacks, but wasn't truly good at any of them. On the other hand, I've had candidates with 10 years of C#, but used it in different settings, web, backend, actor based system, ect, and they blew the socks of most other candidates. What I look for, is that they show versatility and depth. The combination is really impor…
Why not ask them to build an anti-gravity device as well while you're at it?
I just ask interviewers what the point of these questions is now.
If you can't give someone an interview with relevant questions, how can you justify not hiring the candidate? AFAIK at least in the UK candidates have a legal right to know why they weren't selected to make sure it wasn't based on prejudices, etc. So if your response is "you didn't do something that we both knew from your CV you never claimed to do", that sounds immediately unfair.
Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had to leave college early due to a family thing and start working to contribute. That was eighteen years ago, and I've put in so much work because I run into attitudes like yours. Of course, in the past twenty four hours I've created an app and potential side-business from a technology stack I had absolutely no experience in any of it just to prove to a potential employer I can do 'front-end' stuff for them. The a…
> Of course, in the past twenty four hours I've created an app and potential side-business from a technology stack I had absolutely no experience in any of it just to prove to a potential employer I can do 'front-end' stuff for them. This tells me you're wasting your time and potential. There are other ways to get a job.
They didn't request it, I just didn't have any direct professional experience with React/Redux or the Python ecosystem, which are the lion's share of front-end positions in my area. I've gotten a lot of immediate 'passes' from recruiters unfortunately.
Thanks for your reply though, I agree with you but then I run into reality and the need to pay bills.
Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is also finding a balance of course. All these technologies you mention are good for most webdevelopment projects. No point in writing everything in a different language
True but it does show exploration and curiosity to at least try another language or two. If you’ve been doing .NET or PHP for 5+ years without even trying something else I’d treat it as a red flag too. Level of interest is the #1 quality in the great programmers I’ve been around. If you aren’t exploring even a little that’s a concern.
>If you’ve been doing .NET or PHP for 5+ years without even trying something else I’d treat it as a red flag too.
But if I put other languages on my resume outside of .NET, I might look unfocused or "not specialized". Plus, some people treat resume skills as an expert matter, so if I'm only doing hobby stuff, the conversation might not be that interesting (hobby projects usually never pay technical debt so I can just write whatever I want).
So in one corner, we have you, that thinks different languages on a resume are good for showing curiosity and breadth. You don't have as much of a focus on depth (or, you want us to be deep on a few and broad at the rest, which requires a ton of time)
In another corner, we have hiring managers that can ask difficult questions of whatever's on your resume. Or who will think your .NET experience is lower than it should be because you spent time on other languages.
So I, as an individual, get both of those and basically have to flip a coin to figure out which people I want to side with. But since I can't know what kind of resume-parsing person you are before talking to you, I still have to waste my time applying to everyone vs. knowing that ahead of time.
The same is true for technical interviews. Some are Algs/DS, others are CRUD examples, others are some hard problem someone solved last week, some are knowledge quizzes.
There's a huge amount of breadth in the interviewing world and it makes it a whole skill you have to waste time on.
Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except all of those companies put an unreasonable amount of weight on degrees. Good luck getting Google to talk to you if you didn't graduate a top collage, let alone not having a degree.
The people I know who never got a CS education yet ended up programming got their break interviewing at Google. Google seems more comparatively willing to hire those without degrees since there's so much confidence in the interview process.
That doesn't sound like any Google interview I've ever read about. I thought their questions were really mathematical and algorithm heavy?