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)

#501

Post by s73ver_ » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 7:28 PM UTC

malvosenior wrote: post #486

s73ver_ wrote: post #393

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." Agreed. Anyone who wants to implement some kind of asinine policy like that should instantly be forced to spend the next 6 months unemployed, and then try to find a new job.

I don’t think it’s a policy as much as it is common sense. Unless the OP was producing output during that time (which he doesn’t suggest he would be doing), he _will_ be less attractive to hiring managers. Why would someone want to hire somebody who is letting their skills atrophy when they can hire somebody who’s been growing their skills actively? There are a lot of candidates out there and to ignore your competiti…

No, it's an asinine policy that screams "We only hire guys right out of college with no other life."

It's the kind of thing that only comes up with people who have never been in such a situation, and can't imagine that such a situation would exist.

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

#502

Post by beat » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 7:31 PM UTC

einarfd wrote: post #475

beat wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear here - being a poor speller, due to dyslexia or any other reason, is not the problem. But if you know you are a poor speller, you should have someone who is a good speller edit your resume, looking for spelling errors. If you know a misspelled resume can cost you a job, and you don't take additional steps to make sure it's spelled correctly, that's careless.

As I said earlier, getting someone to prof read your text, and catch all the problems is not as easy as you would think. Nor is getting a spell checker to catch all your errors. I have to admit I thought I was done with getting graded on spelling in high school. I haven't seen anything on either side of the fence, in my carer to indicate that some spelling mistakes is enough to cost people an opportunity. But I'm sur…

One of my best friends has a MD and an MBA degree. He currently manages a $100M investment portfolio. We chat online almost daily.

He is, by far, the worst speller I know. Even after 20+ years of online conversation, I can barely understand what he's saying sometimes.

He also passes bits of professional writing past me for validation, usually to check his intent. His professional writing is always perfectly spelled, with impeccable grammar. He relies heavily on both software and human checks (secretaries and copywriters) to insure the basic quality of his writing. That's one reason why a truly wretched speller makes more in bonuses alone than I make in salary.

So yes, I have a hard time forgiving a misspelled resume. If he can do it, you can do it, too.

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

#503

Post by Cyph0n » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 7:32 PM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #429

kccqzy wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s part of the metadata. Look for content creator and PDF producer fields. Or even more simply, just use your eyes. The superior line breaking algorithm is extremely obvious, with or without microtype. Then less obviously, look at ligatures, kerning etc.

Doesn't mean much since tooling like Sphinx will generate Latex as an intermediary for PDF generation. I don't care for the rigidity of Latex and don't want to hand craft my own TeX documents. I once had a resume generation system that would convert ReST to Docbook and from there used XSLT to produce plain text, docx, and PDF output using XSL-FO. Sadly the code was on a failed Seagate drive and is lost. And yes I had…

I just use the moderncv package[1] included with most LaTeX distributions. It produces beautiful output while needing only minimal LaTeX customization from your end.

[1]: https://github.com/xdanaux/moderncv

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

#504

Post by aeorgnoieang » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 7:33 PM UTC

asveikau wrote: post #455

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…

You've got to be careful about assuming things about what people can do based on prior positions. Speaking personally, I have been employed doing windowsy things for ~10 years, probably being typecast by my stint at Microsoft, but I am willing to bet I can out-unix a very sizeable chunk of candidates who think of themselves as Unix people. (Did some Linux kernel hacking in spare time, have been a home user of differe…

> (Did some Linux kernel hacking in spare time, have been a home user of different *BSDs for ~17 years, learned C on Unix.. none of this you can tell from my resume)

Maybe you should add that stuff to your resume. I include 'skills' that weren't necessarily relevant to any particular job.

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

#505

Post by davehtaylor » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 7:33 PM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #489

citizens wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've mentioned several ways to reduce the number of candidates that you consider for each role, but I don't see how any of it leads to better quality hires.

When you have hundreds of people to interview, the quantity is a huge problem. You can't interview the majority of them. His question takes away the people who are not interested. It's useful.

It also seems to remove the people who may or may not actually understand the fundamentals of the language they claim to have experience in, rather only knowing how to cobble together frameworks and/or copypasta code.

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

#506

Post by finiter » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 7:38 PM UTC

digitalsushi wrote: post #281

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 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"

And HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3804134

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

#507

Post by JimboOmega » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 7:39 PM UTC

symlinkk wrote: post #307

alien_at_work wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue is the massive, massive power imbalance. Sure, as a worker you would like those things, but an employer has no reason to care. Even if they make a mix-up there are plenty of other candidates for the same position. Maybe they get someone actually worse but they have no way to know that and no reason to care. For the employee it's a rejection from 1 out of 1-10 companies they are talking to, so it's a…

sounds like the dating market

Thing is that the dating market goes both ways in all cases. There was a term for this that I lost somewhere, but basically it allows all parties to be very picky when there is a feeling of infinite candidates.

It's true that there might be more e.g. straight men than straight women in the bay area, but it's not like the number of straight single women is so small that candidates are rare.

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

#508

Post by aetherson » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 7:43 PM UTC

hyperpape wrote: post #488

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 don't even disagree with this. It's just also an admission that you don't hire the best. We can argue about whether there are 10x developers or not, but it doesn't matter for this discussion. If you assume that a developer is going to be with you for a year or more, then it starts to be worth a week or more of your (collective) time to improve the expected productivity of the people you hire by 10%. Not 2x, not 10x…

If you have 100 candidates for a job, then doing a half-hour phone screen for all 100 of them is 50 hours of work -- a bit more than one whole work-week.

And if you're committed to not missing a candidate who might be really good but your heuristics would lead to a false negative on, how much does a half-hour phone screen really tell you? I mean, can you really reject more than half of the candidates based on a half-hour phone screen if you're committed to a very low false-negative rate?

What are you going to do, bring 50 candidates into the office for half-day interviews? You've now brought your sunk cost of interviewing from one person-week to 6 person-weeks. And you've also actually probably spent 3 months doing this process, so you've probably also delayed actually hiring someone for at least a month. 10 person-weeks worth of productivity starts looking a lot less good compared to a 10% productivity bonus.

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

#509

Post by lynnetye » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 7:43 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…

I'm a web developer who has been thinking about engineering hiring and culture a LOT over the last 6 months. I'm confused about employers' desire to cast a wide net, only to filter through applicants thoughtlessly. Instead, why don't engineering teams save time and energy by articulating their specific engineering values, and sharing that information up front? Be honest. Say divisive things. This will allow job-seekers to self-filter. Your goal is not to attract every software engineer. Your goal is to attract the people you are most likely to hire. (Career pages can be fluff, and job descriptions are dry and uninformative beyond a list of technologies.)

I've been working on Key Values (https://www.keyvalues.io) for many months now trying to do just this: surface details about actual team members, day-to-day processes, and a team's engineering culture. At least this way, we as engineers can be more informed when deciding where to apply, where we'll devote hours/energy interviewing. Of course engineers might be skeptical or have questions, but at least we have something to respond to.

Ultimately, neither job-seekers nor employers want to waste time and energy interviewing people they aren't culturally aligned w/. Maybe the lesson here is that engineers should seek out the teams that care about what they care about, whether it's mentorship, high quality code, or work/life balance. I know it's controversial (especially here in HN), but is salary really more important than doing work that is exciting/challenging/energizing/stimulating or feeling valued/appreciated/respected/passionate?

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

#510

Post by godelski » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 7:44 PM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #429

kccqzy wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s part of the metadata. Look for content creator and PDF producer fields. Or even more simply, just use your eyes. The superior line breaking algorithm is extremely obvious, with or without microtype. Then less obviously, look at ligatures, kerning etc.

Doesn't mean much since tooling like Sphinx will generate Latex as an intermediary for PDF generation. I don't care for the rigidity of Latex and don't want to hand craft my own TeX documents. I once had a resume generation system that would convert ReST to Docbook and from there used XSLT to produce plain text, docx, and PDF output using XSL-FO. Sadly the code was on a failed Seagate drive and is lost. And yes I had…

Honestly I've never understood people's problem with LaTeX, where everyone says it si "hand crafted". Honestly just grab a template. Maybe modify it a little and tweak it, but then save that skeleton. Have one for a resume, research papers, other docs, etc and you're golden. You have to do the same thing in Word too, the difference is in LaTeX it looks like code. But IMO LaTeX looks nicer than Word every time. I can usually spot a paper written in LaTeX vs Word and there definitely is a correlation to quality.

You CAN get fancy with LaTeX, but I doubt most people will be doing those things. For every day research papers or resumes, just pick up an online template and make whatever minor tweaks you want. Then fill with text.