211–220 of 254 posts
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> since we need female candidates May I ask why? Why does it matter if the candidate is male or female? Why not just hire the most fit candidates regardless of their gender and be done with it?
It's in vogue in Silicon Valley to bias hiring standards in order to get more "equality" on the other side.
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HR doesn’t really conduct interviews beyond maybe a quick high level screen. They select candidates, but also only as a high level screen, it’s up to the engineering team to screen more deeply and do interviews.
Of all places, Facebook had a pretty clearly non-technical person screen me over the phone. Apparently they gave her a list of questions and answers. The questions were structured so that none of the answers were open-ended. ("What is the OSI seven layer model? What is a Unix signal?") So, yeah, I'm not sure I would call it a real interview, but sometimes HR does get called upon to screen candidates.
Perhaps companies over-list requirements because everyone knows requirements are not ANDed together. There is a scoring scheme that combines all of these, and the quality of the requirement. And let’s be honest having spent “5 years of Python” at a Google is a different story from having spent “5 years of Python” at an Infosys. To be honest, I’ve never seen a job description that exactly lays out what you’re going to…
Yep the Infosys guy has experience of being airdropped into unfamiliar companies in foreign countries, getting up to speed with business requirements and technical constraints and producing something reasonable in three months.
The Google guy probably spent five years writing Yet Another Messager App.
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It's one thing for engineers to "be the HR department" at small companies. They are willing to let things slide because they know the candidate, especially after interviewing them, that they can fill in the knowledge gaps (well I don't know about the willing to move to china bit). Contrast that with a large company with a specific HR department that is in charge of taking a job requirement sheet and finding and filte…
If I see a position that has been open for longer than a month, I assume they are not serious about filling it. Either they aren't really hiring or they don't want to pay the market rate.
I've been posting this for ages: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18358038
We have well over a hundred people doing that sort of stuff.
This idea of "filling" a "position" is wrong. There is a need for competent technical staff who can contribute to the team. We hire them as we find them. There isn't a fixed number of slots to fill with warm bodies.
- super passionate (paying customer for while) about the product
- great designer with a few years of experience
- degree in CS from a reputed school
- picked up react recently
- few years of work experience doing design and coding
He got turned down by the startup with the excuse that they would like someone more senior who has worked on a product like Facebook. I could just smh because from everything I know, if you are senior and worked at fb, you are unlikely to be (or want to be!) an AMAZING designer AND front-end dev.
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Get used to it. From the perspective of running several consulting/job-shop types of business, this happens all the time from clients/customers/prospects (who are effectively employers, and are in very analogous positions here). We'll be going along through the process of sales, project definition, quoting, etc, and then all of a sudden they just go silent. No reason, no explanation, just ghosted. For days, weeks or…
If they treat you with disrespect initially then they will continue to do so as is their status quo.
I just don't put this int the category of disrespect, but of "they've probably got their own problems, so I ought to have a bit of compassion".
(If I put any unannounced hiatus in the sales process in the disrespect category, I'd have very few clients left, as I generally fire clients that treat us with any significant disrespect.)
It'd certainly be nicer if they were more forthcoming, but I've seen it in two industries, software & manufacturing, and it just seems that
1) they're writing the checks and determining the schedule, and 2) their schedule is often determined by THEIR clients, and when that has a hiccough, the entire downstream supply chain gets a cold.
I've just found it better for everyone to be sanguine.
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Is that really the reason why Apple Health didn't include menstrual cycle tracking? Or did they just decide not to add it in additional to a bunch of other things?
Not super familiar with that example but another one is all kinds of technology not working well with darker skin.
The developers of facial recognition tools were aware of the early devices' limitations, and dedicating resources towards an approach that worked better on subsequent iterations. Why people think things would have automagically worked on the first iteration if the teams building the devices were more diverse, and why people continue to use this as an example of the necessity of diverse teams is a mystery to me.
I think many people write their job description's requirements, as if it were the opening stage of a negotiation. You list everything you want as if it were a requirement, and you will only get about half of that. But the problem is, it isn't a negotiation, it's a minimum spec (especially if you put the word "required" next to that line), and so many quite good candidates won't apply. However, typically, I see 20-30…
But then there's that research that shows that on average, men will apply to a job if they meet less than half of of the requirements, so if you don't overspecify you'll be flooded with crap applications. Of course, then you get the research that women will apply only if they meet >90%, so the overspeccing contributes to gender imbalances.
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It's in vogue in Silicon Valley to bias hiring standards in order to get more "equality" on the other side.
This has little to do with SV.
For example, at my company 27% of our tech workforce is women, as compared to an industry average of 20% (figures are from our head of diversity). Despite already having an overrepresentation, we continue to enagage in discriminatory hiring policies that favor women and we've bumped our target for women in tech roles up to 33%.
I haven't worked outside of SV in 5+ years but this level of aggressiveness in pursuing diversity is not something I witnessed elsewhere.
The most interesting thing was 12% interview rate - is that normal? I was discouraged when getting 20% rates, maybe I need to apply to more stuff.