Live data from Hacker News

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

danluu.com

491–500 of 653 posts

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

#491
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 overheard this in an elevator, "our HR department tosses the bottom half of resumes in the pile into the trash because we refuse to hire unlucky people"

Have you ever seen a pile of one thousand resumes that you have to go through?

I will give you a tip. You can't read them all. Don't even bother trying.

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

#492

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…

Your right about dyslexia adding challenges to being a programmer. I've worked with a couple of developers with dyslexia, and it is clear that being a slow reader is sometimes a challenge for them. But on the other hand, both of them are respected for their skills, doing well, and seem to be happy. So it is absolutely possible to succeed as a developer even if you have dyslexia.

I do know someone that works as a high school teacher and has dyslexia. You would think that, that would be a horror show. But as far as I know, that is actually a success story. Where it works well both for her, and the school.

We also have the Norwegian prime minister Erna Solberg, which is dyslectic.

So I would be careful about telling people what they can and can't succeed at, even if they have dyslexia.

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

#493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 almo…

Nothing to say, just wanted to chime in: Awesome comment, thanks for sharing.

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

#495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Honest question: Would you toy with the idea of adding a small blurb right at the start of your resume stating this? I'm thinking a box that acknowledges up-front that you have diagnosed dyslexia, which would explain any spelling mistakes, but that you're still highly competent as an engineer. Not sure about others, but if I were hiring, I would welcome the honesty and instantly stop caring about any errors. Note: I'…

It'd shave N% off your salary. The best time to admit something like that is after negotiation.

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

#496
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 don't want to be too critical, but you have a number of grammatical errors in your comment. I believe this shows how easy it can be to get at least 2 typographical errors in even a short piece of communication. I am sure that this comment will infringe on someone's standard.

A throwaway comment on a website and the thing that is your first impression to a hiring manager are two completely different things.

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

#497
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 c…

Especially with industry terms, tools, software and naming that is often intentionally wrongly spelled words.

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

#498

If Google's hiring is as good as this article suggests, it must have changed a lot in the last few years. Can anyone point me at an up-to-date article on Google's hiring process? Not so long ago, they were very focused on school rankings, GPAs, and academic qualifications. I always felt this was misguided because it was nowhere near as objective and quantitative as they thought. More recently they said they had a big…

I was resume screened/rejected from many no name companies. Google was one of the only few who took a chance on me and I think that's so cool.

That's great!

As an anecdote from the other side -- a friend of mine got referred to Google, was interviewed but not hired. A year later they called up and asked if he was still interested, interviewed him again, and rejected him again. Then a year later they called him again, and... you get the picture!

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

#499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 almo…

Not to mention people with dyslexia objectify words differently. This is why the exact token representation of words are less relevant in our brains than those without it. Given that in programming words are just symbols for values or conditions, we view the words of code very differently than the words that convey linguistically meaning. The structure of words in a sentence is very different than the structure of words and symbols in code. It has never presented a problem for me when coding.

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

#500
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…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN