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Ask HN: Has anyone ever been hired from “Who wants to be hired?” threads?

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Re: Ask HN: Has anyone ever been hired from “Who wants to be hired?” threads?

#51

Post by pgcj_poster »

sam0x17 wrote: post #13
souprock wrote: post #4

I've tried to find people that way, but usually there is nobody. Let's see, searching for "assembly" and "assembler" and "embedded"... 1. I already asked. He wants Rust and probably won't leave Albuquerque. Bummer. He'd be perfect. 2. Argentina... nope. 3. Barcelona... nope. 4. One might work. I probably already asked, but don't remember. 5. Remote only... nope. 6. Lisbon... nope. 7. Paris... nope. 8. I already asked…

It's funny, because people who code assembly and embedded systems are exactly the type of people well-suited for remote work.

Are you saying that they smell?

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone ever been hired from “Who wants to be hired?” threads?

#52

Post by dver »

I had a couple of phone conversations based on posting in the "Who wants to be hired". Nothing led to work but enjoyed speaking to people who reached out. I'm in a less popular niche with manufacturing applications so I think it's good for spreading a wide net.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone ever been hired from “Who wants to be hired?” threads?

#53

Post by phkahler »

aerovistae wrote: post #27

I always have this overwhelming desire to comment on people's posts in those threads. I wish they had a peanut gallery.

>> I always have this overwhelming desire to comment on people's posts in those threads. I wish they had a peanut gallery.

Which would be rude and off-topic. But by all means, make a fresh post where the goal is to learn by commenting on excerpts of peoples posts. Not sure if that will work but why not try?

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone ever been hired from “Who wants to be hired?” threads?

#54

Post by dandigangi »

souprock wrote: post #41
dandigangi wrote: post #37

I was just going to post a similar thread from the hiring manager's side. Genuinely curious how many responses y'all receive. I'm in Chicago, not SF but the responses almost never come.

I usually get several responses off of something like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20328264 It's almost always at least 1 response. I don't think I've ever gotten more than 10 responses. Something like 4 is typical. On average I think I find one that is good and one that is minimally acceptable. Several have been hired, but at least one of those was redundantly discovered elsewhere.

Thank you! I felt like my description wasn't far off so I'm going to adjust a little. I'm not opposed to juniors but that's all I have received thus far after 6/7 months of using the thread.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone ever been hired from “Who wants to be hired?” threads?

#57

Post by kranner »

souprock wrote: post #22
maxharris wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why aren't you open to remote work? I've been at NodeSource for the last four years. We are all remote. I honestly don't understand why anyone would go to an office to write code in 2019.

It's mainly about security. We keep our stuff off of computers that can reach the internet. I get two computers at my desk, one for random internet junk and one for real work. I happen to like the side-effect on work-life balance. Nobody will ever expect me to do a bit more work at home. When I go home, I'm totally off work. I also get paid overtime, so I'm not getting cheated at the office either. It's also somewhat…

> I happen to like the side-effect on work-life balance.

There's no problem with work-life balance while working remote. You can even have better work-life balance as you don't need to take half a day off from work to attend to a 10-minute chore that can't be rescheduled. It needs maturity and trust on the part of the employers and the employees. You're almost boasting about calling a bug a feature.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone ever been hired from “Who wants to be hired?” threads?

#59

Post by Uptrenda »

I tried out the last thread not expecting much to come from it and some surprisingly well-matched opportunities came my way. In fact, someone contacted me just yesterday from the same thread and that was over a month ago now!

What seems to happen with hiring is good companies very quickly get overwhelmed by bad applicants. Consequently, they have to instate barriers to try filter out the hundreds of unqualified people who apply. Unfortunately, the same filters also affect the people you want to hire and make it less likely you'll be introduced to a good engineer.

If you've already been in the industry a while you'll probably suffer from the same problem: A hell of a lot of low quality recruiter spam; Bad companies wasting your time with sub-minimum wage offers, and so on. Sometimes you just need 10 minutes to speak to a real person and you can both tell straight away if it's a good fit or not.

Good luck to people looking for their next opportunity. There are some great companies out there.

Edit: I find it amusing hacker news works so well for this compared to traditional career websites. It probably works so well precisely because it doesn't market itself as such, and on a dice roll the signal to noise ratio is far higher. Hopefully this doesn't change any time soon as having a high-quality service like this is very, very useful for people!

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone ever been hired from “Who wants to be hired?” threads?

#60

Post by cylentwolf »

s3cur3 wrote: post #55

I hired someone from one of these threads a few months ago. I chose them over other candidates based on a strong “portfolio” web site, showing me the person understood their code existed to serve business values (not the other way around).

So the HN candidate had a website that a business was based on? Or the candidate just had a good "fake" website that has a lot of good business code in it?
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