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

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

#631

Post by beat »

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…

I've never worked at an organization that hired the best. Hiring the best is a myth.

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

#632

Post by beat »

jldugger wrote: post #563
beat wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a story about hiring (from a book which name I can't remember offhand). The author was hiring a team in India, and facing an onslaught of thousands of basically identical resumes. How to filter them? So he added "Ruby" as a requirement - not because it was required by the project, but because at that time, only programmers who really cared about their craft learned Ruby. This got rid of 99% of the…

So, I think we need to discuss the legal concept of 'disparate impact.' We've decided that, as an employer of 15 or more people, it's your duty to avoid even accidental racial bias without justification. Normally this isn't a problem as screening criteria like experience in language X is a bona fide job requirement, so even if such criterion filtered out minorities disproportionately, it's not a liability. Tacking on…

If I ever get to the point where I'm in charge of a large-scale hiring process, I absolutely want to use name-free resumes, to reduce gender and racial bias, plus other steps that are effective as I learn them.

That said, the African-American candidate pool in America is so vanishingly small that subtle tech bias at hiring time isn't the issue - the heuristics to filter them out started before they ever finished high school. (This has actually been a point of interest for me for a long time. I mentioned elsewhere a friend who has terrible spelling but a very successful career. He also happens to be black, which has been something else to overcome. We've talked for years about ways to encourage more black students to go into IT, which we both believe is a route to middle-class success with substantially less racial animosity than they'll face in other fields.)

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

#633

Post by iainmerrick »

monocasa wrote: post #445
iainmerrick wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they care about your fluency with maths and algorithms "Maths" is a red herring -- a physics PhD who's still active in academia will definitely be very fluent in maths. It's all about "algorithms", but I think a lot of software people have tunnel vision about that. There's a lot of fancy terminology you pick up in a CS degree; requiring people to know that filters out a lot of potentially good candidates, unless they…

> That's fine if the special CS terminology is absolutely essential for all programmers. But is it really? I'd argue that it matters more for Google more than most employers. The combo of their scale, combined with their large amount of custom infrastructure, combined with their desire to be able to retask engineers on a whim, means that individual engineers will have pretty good chance of touching code where the cho…

Mayyybe, I'm not so sure but you could be right. [Edit to add: even at Google, most programmers are not doing that kind of stuff most of the time.]

On the flip side, though, I think many programmers (even programmers who are up to date on their CS) are fairly weak at mathematics. We think we're good because we can, you know, invert a binary tree, but how about figuring out an appropriate filter to smooth some data, or verifying that some randomized process is unbiased?

For something like digital filters, if you have basic knowledge you can just look up wikipedia for the details. But the same applies to data structures and big-O!

A lot of companies (including Google) can benefit strongly from people with good maths or stats skills. Do those people also need to be strong in CS? Or if not, do they need to be siloed into a separate hiring process, and placed in separate departments?

I reckon CS, maths, stats and other specialized academic training should all be treated as nice-to-have skills, of varying importance depending on the team balance and project requirements.

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

#634

Post by wolfgke »

gugagore wrote: post #627
wolfgke wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think you're mostly talking about orthography (writing), and not language itself. You might be saying that because of the different writing systems, the spoken language is different today, which seems plausible. In any case, no matter how "mixed" a language's history is, I bet that for its native speakers, it is acquired as one language and feels like one language. When people learn and acquire language, they don…

Awesome reply! The beginning of your comment is still talking about the writing system. If you are a kid learning to speak (or in the rarer case that you never learn the writing system of the language) then you don't notice that the orthography is inconsistent. Furthermore, if you are a literate native speaker of a language whose orthography is very inconsistent to begin with, due to an extreme liberal use of loan wo…

> Aren't there German speakers who say "Pommes Frites" the German way and to hell with who ever says that's technically not correct?

As far as I am aware, "Pommes Frites" is pronounced in German nearly the same way as in French. So this is clearly not true.

What is true, is that if you appreciate it to "Pommes" (which is rather colloquial; at least when I hear "Bitte ein mal Pommes mit Mayo", I intuitively think of uneducated, fat (because of bad eating habits) people), this word is pronounced "German". But, as I said, this contraction with German pronunciation is rather associated with uneducated people.

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

#635

Post by s73ver_ »

austincheney wrote: post #608
s73ver_ wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fail to see what's good about your approach. I suppose if your company has a lot of pointless bullshit that doesn't apply to the actual problem, then yeah, you're selecting for people who either are willing or have no other alternative.

> I fail to see what's good about your approach. It was pretty clear in that the primary motivation was to eliminate candidates who either lack confidence or competence so that you can spend more quality time with those candidates who care more about the respective skills. I don't know you, but I am guessing from your highly defensive tone that you likely fall into one of the categories I described in the previous pa…

I highly disagree. And no, I don't fall into one of those categories; I'm just not willing to put up with random and arbitrary bullshit. Which is what those things are. Yes, I could operate under all those conditions. I choose not to, because those conditions suck ass.

While someone must be eliminated, you need to ask yourself why you're selecting for those who would opt to work under random and arbitrary bullshit when they don't have to.

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

#636

Post by s73ver_ »

malvosenior wrote: post #587
s73ver_ wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's something that a hiring manager uses to make a determination, it's a policy.

By that logic every decision made during the hiring is a policy. Too vague to be useful imo. Semantics aside, my point stands: it’s reasonable to hire the best person for the job. A person’s personal problems are just that, personal.

I'm sorry, but that just tells me you've never been in that kind of situation. Which tells me that you lack empathy for other people.

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

#637

Post by wenc »

DarronWyke wrote: post #544
wenc wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive my sloppy phrasing, I should be clear: Oracle's license terms prohibit public disclosure of any benchmarks without their consent. So technically you can benchmark in-house, but you can't publish those results without written permission.

That's a lot worse. It's not just prohibition, it's a way to filter out anything negative through license enforcement.

Yes. SQL Server and others used to have the same terms but was later removed.

The original intent was to prevent non-neutral third-party benchmarking by biased agents that sought to discredit their products through contrived setups (which admittedly can be a problem for any product), but to enforce it through licensing seems a bit heavy handed. Oracle does allow benchmarks that are favorable to them (see TPC-C benchmarks).

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

#638

Post by BearGoesChirp »

austincheney wrote: post #606
BearGoesChirp wrote: post #564

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.

>If eliminating unnecessary abstraction is offensive to you

If the hiring individual dictates what trade offs are made so far in advance that it happens in the interview, it means they aren't just eliminating unnecessary abstractions. Premature optimization isn't generally a good thing. Premature optimization showing up in an interview as a way to get people to quit is even less likely to be a good thing.

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

#639

Post by gugagore »

wolfgke wrote: post #634
gugagore wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome reply! The beginning of your comment is still talking about the writing system. If you are a kid learning to speak (or in the rarer case that you never learn the writing system of the language) then you don't notice that the orthography is inconsistent. Furthermore, if you are a literate native speaker of a language whose orthography is very inconsistent to begin with, due to an extreme liberal use of loan wo…

> Aren't there German speakers who say "Pommes Frites" the German way and to hell with who ever says that's technically not correct? As far as I am aware, "Pommes Frites" is pronounced in German nearly the same way as in French. So this is clearly not true. What is true, is that if you appreciate it to "Pommes" (which is rather colloquial; at least when I hear "Bitte ein mal Pommes mit Mayo", I intuitively think of u…

thanks for the correction. I certainly intended just "Pommes". Glad you understood my meaning.

Of course language that deviates from what's spoken by the educated (and powerful) people in the country is considered uneducated. I think you'll also find that in many languages. That's the same principle behind the people who think you are stupid for not saying "der Zucchino". I won't get into the stereotypes about fat people...

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

#640

Post by Analog24 »

alexasmyths wrote: post #553
Analog24 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not disagreeing with your point but I think it's a bit out of context here. The parent comment was specifically talking about what they heard from Renaissance Technologies, not a some hipster startup.

I was literally trying to give context to the 'no finance' trope.

How does taking 'no finance' out of context and applying a much more general comment that in no way applies to the very specific original context help?
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