Hiring Is Broken? • Hacker News Board

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#31

Post by ptasci67 » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 2:50 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #15

esotericn wrote: post #4

This article appears to be an extremely long-winded way of stating that you don't have to pick from the top-end. Which is true. Companies know this. Most of the stuff I read here is basically made up of people who aren't quite the best moaning that they couldn't get a job at Google or whatever. Life goes on. It is impractical and not a good thing for every software developer, even the very good ones, to pile into the…

I have generally been rather disappointed with Google/FANG software developers. These companies generally though not always avoid the bottom 1/3 of the talent pool, but that’s about it. Effectively they simply select for people willing to hack their hiring process, which also excludes most actually talented developers. Resulting in a few very talented people, and an overall average workforce. This is also why most in…

This is one of those statements that is too broad to be true. We can't wave a wand and just say developers at FAANG companies are better than the bottom 1/3 and no more.

You do have a point here which I do agree with which most of those companies would refer to as "culture fit". Agree with it or not, having an employee that gels with the team is a critical aspect to hire for. You could have 10 Jeff Deans and get nothing done if they refuse to work together.

A significant problem I see here is that we are trying to define "good" on a linear scale which makes no sense to me. Is candidate A better than candidate B based on 6 hours of interviews about the same topics or a single take home test. Even Madden breaks down a person into dozens of traits and uses that to compare people. Tech companies like to flaunt how data driven they are but why hasn't that made it into hiring. For the most part, these decisions are still made on personal feelings of the interviewers which...yeah, that's not going to be very consistent and reproducible.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#32

Post by SonOfKyuss » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 2:54 PM UTC

maxaf wrote: post #8

esotericn wrote: post #4

This article appears to be an extremely long-winded way of stating that you don't have to pick from the top-end. Which is true. Companies know this. Most of the stuff I read here is basically made up of people who aren't quite the best moaning that they couldn't get a job at Google or whatever. Life goes on. It is impractical and not a good thing for every software developer, even the very good ones, to pile into the…

Your implicit assumption seems to be that Google and its ilk hire the absolute best engineers. This is simply not true, for one very simple reason. There is no proven method for sorting a pile of candidates such that the absolute best engineers will float to the top. In the case of high-profile employers, a significant percentage of hires will be those who have trained themselves specifically to beat the hiring proce…

> Those people aren’t the absolute best software engineers.

There’s no proof that they are but there’s also no proof that they aren’t

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#33

Post by zug_zug » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 2:55 PM UTC

Frost1x wrote: post #9

esotericn wrote: post #4

This article appears to be an extremely long-winded way of stating that you don't have to pick from the top-end. Which is true. Companies know this. Most of the stuff I read here is basically made up of people who aren't quite the best moaning that they couldn't get a job at Google or whatever. Life goes on. It is impractical and not a good thing for every software developer, even the very good ones, to pile into the…

There's an impression that this problem is only at a few places like Google which is not the case. As someone recently browsing the market I've seen this process adopted rampantly and without reason or rationale. So many companies I would consider mid-tier, lower, or not even technology companies have outsourced have adopted similar if not the same hiring models of FAANG or outsource hiring/recruiting/assessments tha…

Meh. I don't buy it. I agree with the parent that it's usually people not getting hired being mad about it.

- "interviewing is broken" is a meaningless linkbait title. All you can really say is it's less efficient than it could be.

- In fact, interviewing in tech might be the best of any industry. Look how good we are at hiring minorities, people without college degrees, people who don't wear suits, people with verbal tics, or even tattoos. That wouldn't happen in investment banking.

- If your point IS that hiring could be better, then instead of winging, propose a fast and simpler and cost-effective alternative, and then try to give some hard evidence that the method you propose is better than whatever you're winging about (usually leet code).

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#34

Post by graycat » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 2:57 PM UTC

It's easy for a person in good health, never arrested, never bankrupt, good credit score, native born US citizen, world class Ph.D. with one of the very best backgrounds for analytics and machine learning, with peer-reviewed publications in applied math, mathematical statistics, and artificial intelligence, having recently written .NET code in 100,000 lines of typing for an ambitious Web site, code that appears to run as intended and be ready for production, and who has shipped very high quality code to high end customers to be 100% completely, utterly, totally, permanently unemployable for anything beyond minimum wage, literally.

That's just the way it is.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#35

Post by eternal_intern » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 2:58 PM UTC

Why not list the pros/cons of each method and let the candidates choose their poison. Whichever metric they think they would be best at given their constraints.

Still requires work and a subjective estimation of candidate skill because you have to make a judgment across metrics instead of within one, but I mean, everybody wins in this case, right?

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#36

Post by akhilcacharya » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 2:59 PM UTC

otras wrote: post #5

One thing I’d add is that live coding exercises can vary widely in quality. > If you solve the problem, you’re scored highly. If you don’t, you’re scored poorly. In my own opinion, this is a terrible way to look at these problems, though many people do use this metric. This is further emphasized by HackerRank-style exercises where you have to pass all test cases. This is robotic and not empathic at all. A more fluid…

This is a popular sentiment but it’s still false. A hiring committee isn’t going to pass you if you don’t finish the problem (ideally multiple problems) optimally.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#37

Post by hysan » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 3:00 PM UTC

gravypod wrote: post #20

nafeydev wrote: post #2

Whats the general consensus on take home projects? How helpful are they?

I haven't been able to find a better screening method than take home projects. A major issue that I find when watching hiring take place is people don't separate learnable/domain specific skills from the "inherent" skills you need as an engineer. Hiring someone who has a 10 year track record as a software engineer in systems software for a web-stack backend role should be an easy "Yes" if they are a skilled software…

Would you be able to give an example of how limited in scope you're talking about?

Is it just a single "write a method that does this" type problem? I ask because I did a take home very recently which I know I could knock out quickly, but it took much long because everything you listed ballooned the amount of time it took me to complete it. Specifically:

  - Has the engineer followed a language standard (PEP/PSR)?

For JavaScript, it takes some time to setup a new project from scratch with linting and formatting configurations. Then documenting it in your README.

   - Were unit tests provided?
   - Were sample cases the engineer ran manually provided?

Once you go beyond a few "features" to write, this balloons in time due to both writing it with good descriptions and documenting it for the reviewer.

   - Was the code "elegant"? Could another engineer at the company look at the code and maintain it in a year.

If what you ask is of sufficient complexity, it would just be normal to take time to think about what the interviewer is expecting here. Like what future features could there be? How might this be used in a larger codebase? etc. Then once you've decided on this, you'll want to spend time commenting and/or writing up an explanation in your README about your design choices.

Lastly, this isn't mentioned but I did this on the take home I recently completed - using version control and properly branching & merging on each deliverable. Doesn't take time, but if you are making atomic commits with good comments, that's just another way for you to lose time. Of course, I don't think the fact that I did this is going to be noticed as it wasn't written out as a requirement.

If you notice what I'm nitpicking, it's all the setup and writing that becomes a time sink for most. In isolation, it wouldn't break the bank, but with all those requirements combined, you've lost much more than 3 hrs. When I'm given take homes for interviews, this is where I've burnt the most time - taking the time to document well.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#38

Post by oneepic » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 3:00 PM UTC

This debate will keep happening for years to come, but everyone's just repeating the same talking points over and over. I have to sum up my thoughts like this:

I really don't think we're ever going to find a perfect hiring method. You will always have a nonzero chance of false positives and false negatives, and there will always be downsides that piss people off. So, pick a reliable hiring method(s) (talk about experience, solve whiteboard q's, do take-home projects, or whatever) and try to make it better over time. If you don't like it, you can switch to another method and start improving on that. Etc. But your method will always fail some good hires and pass some bad ones. It sucks, but we are still able to hire mostly good/trainable people, so we should stop worrying and move on.

I hypothesize that there are a lot more interviewees than interviewers getting involved in the debate. I only have to tell the former group to keep trying and stop complaining. If you're not sure why you're failing interviews, that's a solved problem -- just do mock interviews with your friends or on interviewing.io. But stop blaming the process for your own failures.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#39

Post by esotericn » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 3:01 PM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #24

esotericn wrote: post #4

This article appears to be an extremely long-winded way of stating that you don't have to pick from the top-end. Which is true. Companies know this. Most of the stuff I read here is basically made up of people who aren't quite the best moaning that they couldn't get a job at Google or whatever. Life goes on. It is impractical and not a good thing for every software developer, even the very good ones, to pile into the…

You don't have to be the best at what you do, either. Being pretty good is just fine. I'm glad that I'm not the best at what I do. I'd be working more hours, given too much responsibility, picking up the slack for people, subject to more meetings, etc. None of that is for me.

Right.

One thing is for sure, and that's that I'm the best me, and you're the best you.

I spent most of a day yesterday trying to get openssh 8.0 working on Debian 2 (with 1998 era kernel, glibc, etc). Because I can.

Genuinely more fun than all the toys money can buy.

It didn't even work. Fuck.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#40

Post by GoToRO » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 3:03 PM UTC

Well, none of the above. Anytime you try to gauge someone by counting, it's not going to work well. You need the best developer at your company, to do the hiring. Filtered by HR for personality and so on.