Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

danluu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 653 posts

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#361

Post by kag0 »

groby_b wrote: post #339
nanodano wrote: post #207

When I hear "we only hire the best" it just sounds like generic crap an HR person added, not a big red flag that they are snobs. I don't think it really means anything. By definition, anyone hiring anyone wants to only hire the best. Nobody wants to hire only the mediocre. If I hear things like that I generally just ignore it. Anyway, the author makes all kinds of unfounded assumptions. Someone with .NET and Windows…

Any decent programmer I know is perfectly fine with switching OSs - if you know .NET and Windows, learning Unix will slow you down for a few weeks, but that's it. "Work experience" is rather overrated. Critical thinking skills are what matters for the job, and those are in awfully short supply. Rejecting a candidate who possesses them because they don't have the right keyword on the resume is... Wait. On second thoug…

I agree that rejecting people for lack of a keyword is a silly practice. But all the decent programmers you know must be really quite good. I know a lot of devs who I consider to be at least decent and switching os, stack, paradigms, everything would trip them up for more than a few weeks in the best case. In a lot of reasonable cases people have a preference what tools that use, that's why there's a "Ruby way of doing things" and a "python way of doing things" and a "go way of doing things".

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#362

Post by lostboys67 »

Delmania wrote: post #101
Datenstrom wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being self taught I haven't learned a single thing in college. Besides networking I do not see any advantage. > If you're not willing to put in the work Why should anyone who already knows everything for a degree have to waste 4-6 years of their life?

I'm sure you don't know everything. Looking at your profile, I see the words "technician" so I am thinking you were trained at some point.

Less snark about technicians after all someone has to correct the engineers maths or remind them how Ohms law works :-)

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#363

Post by CalChris »

Your job, as a job seeker, is to get passed HR to a hiring manager. You can go through HR, around HR (a buddy ships your res to a hiring manager) or over HR (an exec or VC flips your res to a hiring manager). You will not be working for HR. They are merely an impediment to be overcome.

If you wish, you can think of it as the border. You can apply for legal immigration (lengthy and dicey; think of the immigration and interview scenes in Thunderdome), you can have a mule help you across (ideally this should cost you a lunch; the mule will get a bonus from BigCo), or you can be awarded special status based on your illustrious and meritorious service to the glorious republic as determined by and at the sole discretion of its benevolent leaders.

Any which way, get passed HR. Do not complain about HR. Just show your skill set (networking, interview prep, ...) and get passed them.

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#364

Post by leroy_masochist »

I thought this was a great commentary and it reminds me of the tendency of early-stage CEOs to say, "we really don't care that much about your current skill set, we just want to hire athletes" ('athlete' in this case meaning someone very talented and hard-working).

The message these founders are trying to communicate here is, "we want to hire people who have the capacity to learn and grow and who are willing to work long hours, so we'll overindex on those qualities and be accept the fact that many people who fit these criteria are more risky hires, in that they have not been doing a similar job at another company prior to us hiring them."

Based on anecdotal observations of many hiring decisions, what these founders often actually have in mind is, "we want to hire people who've achieved prestigious milestones". And so they will hire a person whose school prestige/GPA/employer prestige factor is high, but who is not likely to succeed in the role.

Anyway the upside of all this is, as OP mentioned, there's a lot of underserved talent out there.

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#366

Post by lostboys67 »

jstewartmobile wrote: post #165
humanrebar wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> reservists Meaning discrimination against reservists in the armed forces because of their service requirements? Or discrimination because the employer doesn't like the armed forces?

Service requirements. Even employers who are vets are terrified of this one. Hire a guy, he gets deployed just a week after he starts, you have to keep his seat warm, then when he's back several months later he's taken a job somewhere else...

Isn't that illegal? I worked for one company that sponsored a TA signals unit - I suppose they though experience as a RSM running a royal signals unit in the gulf war II was good management experience

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#367

Post by einarfd »

beat wrote: post #275

So here's the thing... hiring at larger, growing companies often means weeding through a stack of a hundred resumes, for one or two or five roles. Most of those resumes need to go away. The interview process, for competent candidates, is going to cost you at bare minimum a half hour of one person's time for initial screening. A quality interview is going to take a couple of hours each for a few important people - man…

> I consider it evidence of carelessness - I don't care if you can't spell, but I do care if you don't bother to run it past someone else who can for editing.

Getting someone to look over your stuff and looking for spelling errors sounds like a simple and easy fix doesn’t it? But in my experience that doesn't work as well as one would think, prof reading is a lot harder than it looks. After all it's isn't enough to catch some of the errors, you need to catch them all.

As someone that has close family members with dyslexia, and have struggled with spelling all my life. I have to say that seeing those challenges characterised as carelessness is infuriating. For a lot of people getting spelling right is easy, and that is great. But for some of us it is not, while prof reading and spell checkers might help, they are not a magical fix all. Some errors often sneak through, no matter what you do.

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#368

Post by pklausler »

pizza234 wrote: post #359
pklausler wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about the original poster, but I'll immediately spot every error in spelling, punctuation, and usage in a ten-second skim of a page. My eyes just go right to them. And yes, I consider that it's difficult to write correct English. But if you're willing to send out an erroneous resume without getting it competently reviewed, I have to suspect the depth of your commitment to quality overall.

> And yes, I consider that it's difficult to write correct English. But if you're willing to send out an erroneous resume without getting it competently reviewed, I have to suspect the depth of your commitment to quality overall. Is this theory or practice? People who individually craft CVs and cover letters (I do) go through a very resource consuming process. Having all the CVs and cover letters externally reviewed…

You meant "except".

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#369

Post by EpicEng »

pasquinelli wrote: post #264
EpicEng wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>By definition, anyone hiring anyone wants to only hire the best I agree with your overall sentiment, but this isn't true at all. The best cost money, and the best don't want to work on boring stuff. Most software is boring. A team of mediocre devs is more often than not just fine to do the job and it keeps cost down (and turnover likely lower).

so mediocre is better than best sometimes?

Definitely. Like any other decision, there's a cost/benefit assessment to be made. Why am I trying to hire super-ninja-ex-google-guy to code up my DB interface for the marketing folk? Doesn't make any sense, the value just isn't there, and super-ninja-ex-google-guy isn't going to take that job anyway.

Hell, I'm in this boat currently. I'm looking for a junior dev to help with certain menial tasks here and there. I'll pick the best _that I can quickly find_, but really, I just need someone halfway competent and I need them now.

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#370

Post by s73ver_ »

static_noise wrote: post #311
beat wrote: post #275

So here's the thing... hiring at larger, growing companies often means weeding through a stack of a hundred resumes, for one or two or five roles. Most of those resumes need to go away. The interview process, for competent candidates, is going to cost you at bare minimum a half hour of one person's time for initial screening. A quality interview is going to take a couple of hours each for a few important people - man…

People learn about and optimize for those heuristics. Those resumes will on average get better and better over time until half of them are almost perfect. Those people all spent considerable time and energy on optimizing their resume. You get people who look good on paper. They will continue to excel in your company (on paper). If your job is to look good on paper. Yes, go on.

To be perfectly honest, I can't see proofreading your resume to be that big of a burden. And if you can't bother to do that, what else can't you bother to do while on the job?
Post reply on HN