We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016) • Hacker News Board

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

#401

Post by huac » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 5:25 PM UTC

gooseus wrote: post #280

pasquinelli wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so mediocre is better than best sometimes?

I'd say so, do you want to drive a ferrari/porsche around your local city/town traffic? How about if nobody ever saw what you were driving and you just arrived at locations? High-end resources are a pain in the ass to acquire and maintain... the best usually know they're the best and expect a lot of upkeep. The truth is that most work (as someone else mentioned) is boring and using high-end resources when lower-end w…

The question becomes what you optimize for - optimizing for speed picks you the Ferrari, optimizing for gas mileage gets you the Prius.

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

#402

Post by nmcfarl » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 5:25 PM UTC

ballenf wrote: post #385

einarfd wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

I too have close family members with dyslexia. If they asked whether they'd make good programmers, I'd honestly tell them that their disability would make it very challenging and frustrating. They could still do it, but their passion would have to be enough to drive them to work much harder than their colleagues to achieve the same results. I'd also recommend that they go to whatever lengths necessary to eliminate ty…

So I'm really really biased here. But as a programer with (mild) dyslexia, I have to say I think it's one of the best professional fields for this. We have linters, syntax highlighting editors, pretty printers, compilers and a whole suite of tools to make sure typos never go live.

No other other field has these tools, and high paying professional work does in fact require "typo free work" to make it anywhere, in almost any field.° Sure in plenty of fields you can try to paper over this with process - but this just means as a dyslexic your promotions are limited by the caliber of your secretary, PA, MA, editor or whatever person fixes your work in your field. You get a good one you flourish and bad one your career dies.

As I've moved to management I've had to delegate every piece of writing which is a frustrating experience, and that writing I end up doing usually ends up passing before multiple peoples eyes before being sent -- even for a simple email. This is not easier than coding - it's way harder.

° Spelling and grammar checkers help, but really are no where near as good as linters and all the other tooling.

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

#403

Post by astura » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 5:26 PM UTC

markshead wrote: post #375

alskdfji wrote: post #232

This was the most depressing part to me: "Another person I know is in a similar situation because his group won’t talk to people who aren’t already employed." It's a long story, but both my wife and I have most recently been at places, in a small-medium city, that have had huge turnover in the last several years due to mismanagement (her entire unit, except for her, left twice while she was working with them; we've l…

Typically if you have an organization that only talks to people with current jobs, that rule is for people sending in cold resumes. On the other hand, if they know who you are, you probably won't have the same filters applied. Let's say you go ahead and move and take time off to watch your child. Two years down the road you want to start looking for work. What you've done with those two years is going to really matte…

God, what a terribly insensitive comment. Leaving the workforce to care for family is not "check[ing] out for 24 months."

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

#404

Post by s73ver_ » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 5:26 PM UTC

logfromblammo wrote: post #298

pault wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, what's wrong with Texas?

You ever notice how most people never tell you what state they're from unless you ask them? It's almost like they don't believe their state of origin to be all that important to their personal identity. Some of those people might even be from Texas. But the hombre from Texas is not one of those people. He will drive for 30 minutes, past dozens of ordinary, mundane restaurants, to reach the nearest Texas-style barbecu…

Well, if it's any consolation, right now all their college football programs suck, and suck hard.

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

#405

Post by watwut » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 5:27 PM UTC

alskdfji wrote: post #232

This was the most depressing part to me: "Another person I know is in a similar situation because his group won’t talk to people who aren’t already employed." It's a long story, but both my wife and I have most recently been at places, in a small-medium city, that have had huge turnover in the last several years due to mismanagement (her entire unit, except for her, left twice while she was working with them; we've l…

Is there a possibility for remote work? Even part time or lower paid would help to ease the stress of long term outlook. And frankly, as someone who have been and done that, being at home spouse can be frustrating/isolating/etc and having something outside, some goals and duties to focus on, helps a lot. I mean, if you are frustrated from discrepancy now, it will got only worst. So having a goal, part time job, small business (even if it earns no money) helps really a lot to deal with all those frustrations.

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

#406

Post by kwhitefoot » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 5:27 PM UTC

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…

Why is that people don't run a spellcheck? It's rare for me to see even official internal documents without several spelling mistakes even after they have been approved for publication. Just turning on the spelling checker in your favourite word processor, editor, or even web browser will go a long way toward catching most typos.

The grammar checker in Word is also worth a try. Did you mean "P. G.'s maxim" when you typed "pg's maximum"? :-)

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

#407

Post by volkk » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 5:27 PM UTC

cwbrandsma wrote: post #345

volkk wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ha. except perhaps they're the unlucky ones because they chucked out a great engineers resume and the engineer is actually the lucky one ;)

or, "the lucky engineers had their resumes tossed in the trash so they didn't have to waist their time at that company"

that's what i was implying

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

#408

Post by notyourloops » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 5:28 PM UTC

wwweston wrote: post #288

malvosenior wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if I take time off to watch our child while my wife rebuilds her career, and maybe move to a different career myself, somehow I'm penalized? Pardon my language, but fuck that. No offense but this reads as fairly entitled. Why would your value continue to rise as an employee if you take time out of your career? You will be competing against people who are bettering themselves without taking > 1 year breaks. It’s…

Your premise seems to be that people taking one-year breaks aren't doing something to sharpen the saw. I don't know about you, but I've added more to my skills during some times that I wasn't full-time employed doing study and personal projects than during some times that I was (and yes, that's a sign you should leave a position you're in, but this doesn't always happen immediately).

It's really unfortunate to see how common it is to look down on people who spend their time differently. There are some tasks I wish to undertake that likely mean I would have to leave the office job experience for about a year.

Given how this may affect my future hire-ability, I doubt I will pursue it. I can't really afford to have my resume thrown in the trash because I felt something else was worth devoting my limited time to, even if only temporarily.

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

#409

Post by rhexs » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 5:29 PM UTC

linkregister wrote: post #290

adamnemecek wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody wants to hire only the mediocre. Employee education is such an undervalued idea. Like you can get workers on the cheap and then setup incentives for education/self-education. I'm yet to see a company that sets up some sort of education pipeline for it's employees. I know that startups don't have time and or money but education doesn't need to be as long as the school system made you believe.

A few notable organizations offer paid continuing education (Masters degrees) and have extensive in-house training, with career progression mapped out. Here are some: - Accenture - Booz Allen Hamilton - Deloitte - Department of Defense - Lockheed Martin - Northrop Grumman - Raytheon It’s not just consulting companies and the defense industrial complex, these are just the only companies I have exposure to that offer m…

Defense has career progressions? Is this for management? From what I've seen engineers are treated like cattle and hired and fired for the whims of every project.

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

#410

Post by js2 » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 5:29 PM UTC

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…

About that heuristic, when hiring for sysadmins in the early 2000s, I found there to be an inverse relationship between résumé quality and candidate quality (with one notable exception — résumés written in LaTeX were usually of high quality and almost always indicated a quality candidate).

Originally I had a similar conception about résumés — they should be one or two pages max, should look nice, and should contain no errors. For obviously this indicated a candidate who cared about how they represented themselves. How could a candidate with a slap dash résumé be any good?

But time and again the better candidates had the worse résumés ... résumés that were pages long, or completely unformatted, or filled with errors. Perhaps these candidates with poor résumés have simply prioritized their time on their work, not tending their résumé. Or perhaps they feel that they should be judged on the content of their résumé and not its presentation.

Regardless, I no longer put any stock in how a résumé looks, only wheter it indicates an appropriate background for the job.