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

danluu.com

611–620 of 653 posts

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

#611
Large companies IMO aren't setup to take advantage of arbitrary levels of ability. They're antifragile in being able to ingest common denominator type skills and plod along despite bad engineering. The lynchpins are already in place BEFORE the hiring/growth phase. New hires that can actually compete with the established lynchpins only scatter the attention and increase the failure rate by questioning leadership.

A lean chain of intent is necessary to hit a goal as the slack compounds each layer down the chain. This is terrible for exploratory action because the output space is myopically limited but necessary for goal setting. Fatter chains often produce more total value but that energy is dispersed and the revenue streams often cannot take advantage of the innovation.

An analogy I like to use is trebuchets and daggers. JavaScript ability is like a dagger, generically useful but fungible and always in some sort of demand. Trebuchets are much more complex and much better at doing certain types of damage but the only buyers are castle seiging kings who may have already invested everything in a catapult producing supply chain.

Most fields like archaeology or art history don't expect their specialization to be highly compensated but often fields that go through periods of hype don't realize their skills can lose relevance. There are a lot of people learning ML now for example but once commoditization of tools and techniques happens the actual number of jobs may become too low to have market liquidity. Unlike A/B testing consultants.

Currently everyone in software can have their cake and eat it too but it's a position of privilege and luck and often this is forgotten.

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

#612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I would tell them jQuery isn't available in this job. Half would immediately drop out. Good. Unless the job description made clear why it wasn't available, I would take this as a sign of a toxic workplace and avoid it. It isn't about jQuery being banned, it is about the type of workplace where jQuery is not only banned, but such a ban is mentioned early in the interview process. I guess if you want people who are ok…

> I would take this as a sign of a toxic workplace and avoid it. You avoided explaining this. If eliminating unnecessary abstraction is offensive to you then I would be more happy to eliminate you from employment consideration at the earliest possible moment so that I don't waste your time.

Good way to filter out candidates that understand tradeoffs or are willing to question potential fallacies. Technically no abstraction is necessary. But it's often useful.

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

#614
post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-seeke…

Applicants do not self-filter. If you've ever read resumes for a job listing that haven't been prescreened, you'll be blown away by how many people refuse to self-filter even for basic fitness for the job. Put out a job listing asking for a college degree, and you'll get applicants who are still in school with their graduation date two years in the future looking for an internship. That's an extreme, but people will…

As an applicant, I don't self-filter from positions I think are interesting, because I've gotten several offers from companies after to applying to jobs I wasn't technically qualified for.

Some companies are pretty strict about their qualifications. For some, the qualifications are more like guidelines. But if the position is interesting, I'll take that chance.

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

#615
post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Those trying to hire super-ninja-ex-google-guy want to raise more funding and need to brag to VC's to get more money.

...to pay for hiring super-ninja-ex-google-guy!

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

#616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that isn't how statistics work. If you have 100 applications, 20% of which are good, and drop 50% of them, you get 50 applications, but you still have the 20% good application/bad application rate. Of course, you still get 50% less total good applications, but ratios != total.

If there are 10 'good' hires in the initial pile, then cutting out 5 arbitrarily lowers your chance of getting any one of those 10 by half instantly. This is what I was trying to express. At the end of the day there are only so many 'good' applicants.

Sure, but usually you don't want to hire _all_ of the good applicants - the reason you get bad hires is the false positive rate, not because there aren't enough total good hires in the pile.

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

#617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of my SWE coworkers at Google did not graduate from a "top college". Not sure where you're getting this impression from. There simply aren't enough annual graduates of the top programs to fully populate all tech companies, and there are plenty of people from other schools (like me) who also do well.

It is, however, a filter that will be applied against applicants, and from what I've heard, it's more than enough to trigger the "we'd rather have false negatives than false positives" filter if you're not in the lucky minority. Even if it's never used as a filter by Google, their hiring practices just don't apply to the rest of the industry - Google can afford to pass on 99.9% of the high quality talent that applies…

I strongly disagree. Most of my coworkers are not from "top colleges". Neither are most of the people I interview. Even for Google, it is tough getting interviewees who do very well. Given that, it'd be ludicrous to discard most interviewees out of the bat because they didn't come from a "top school". The interview questions and relevant job experience are the true hiring bar. Possession of a relevant degree, and the granting institution for said degree, is far down the list.

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

#618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely true that some languages are better than others, because the types of problem and time limitations are the same regardless of the language chosen. Lower level languages tend to be worse because they take longer and there's more ways to trip yourself up. Personally, I think that C# is the ideal language for interviewing in, as the .NET standard library is very powerful. SortedDictionary alone can easil…

I would probably use Python on a whiteboard nowadays, even though at my day job I use C# and only use Python periodically in my freetime at the moment. Python's a lot more concise of a language in general. Although C# is smooth like butter when paired with Visual Studio, and I could use it if requested.

I think my views here might be biased since the only people I see interviewing in Python tend to be bootcamp graduates or new grads, and their coding performance in general tends to be not as good (which is fine, as the expectations for L3 SWE are lower).

I agree with you that the Python language syntax is nice, but it doesn't have quite the same level of built-in support for algorithmically useful data structures as C# or Java with Guava. To give you a concrete example, it's not unusual for interview questions to require the use of a self-balancing binary search tree or a similar data structure in order to reach optimal runtime complexity. Realistically no one is ever going to implement a self-balancing BST along with solving the actual problem inside of a 45 minute coding interview, but it's nicer if you're able to refer to an actual library implementation that exists and can be used versus hand-waving away the existence of one.

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

#619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's a good sign that the tech interview process is very broken That could be the case, or maybe at that stage we're past a verbal phone screening, 1. interview, and they've been selected for the last round of interviews. They know before hand what the nature of the interview will be, including the "deep end of the pool" question. It is far and away the best way I've found to see how well they can adapt to new th…

Do people interviewing for orthopedic surgeon positions often get randomly asked about the latest antipsychotics in job interviews?

did you miss this part?

> see how well they can adapt to new things, which is important to us

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

#620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more important than that is to get people who really are aligned with what the company actually is, instead of just the standard bullshit that everybody says. I, too, really like the idea, but I wonder if, in practice, it wouldn't work because companies don't introspect deeply enough to understand what makes them distinct? For instance, if what's remarkable about your company is that you have a great culture whe…

You're so spot on. Some companies do not introspect deeply enough, nor do they have the desire! I've met some of them and guess what –– they don't end up creating a profile on Key Values. Honestly, I think it says a lot about team who put in the time and care to create a profile. The exercise of selecting 8 values and qualifying them signals a real desire to invest in people, culture, and to make sure values actually…

I think there are a couple of confounding problems. One is the "Astrology" problem. Well-written horoscopes are written in such a way that people want to believe these things about themselves- and they are nebulous enough that they can. Who doesn't want to think of themselves as being a great friend when someone really needs you? In the case of your website, I think you should consider giving scenarios and force people to make choices between options on a Likert scale.

The other issue is that companies may truly be trying to find the most intelligent (for whatever that word means) person as long as she or he isn't malignant- someone who will be successful in future endeavors after the one they are hiring for is finished. In that case they are just dragging a wide net and trying to get the biggest fish. This is all throw out the window, of course, when some of their screeners have ad-hoc and very personal criteria for rejection (two typos, or not being gender-inclusive, or whatever). Then the process becomes ipso facto a cultural screening process.

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