Hiring Is Broken? • Hacker News Board

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#131

Post by cbanek » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 7:06 PM UTC

While hiring is inefficient and biased (some would say broken, which I won't disagree with), I think performance reviews are equally so. Companies don't really know how to evaluate performance well, and without bias. Many of these same problems exist in performance reviews:

> Ask them for references, Do back-channel references

Asking people for feedback, peer review, 360 review, etc. This is somewhat effective, but if people can choose their own reviewers, they will of course get only the good info, same as for interviews. If anyone can submit feedback, you're likely to get people who don't like an employee to write stuff about how terrible that employee is, which might be exaggerated.

> Take home projects, Audition for the role as a contractor, Ask them to describe their past projects, Ask for source code from significant projects, Pair programming on a “real” problem, Live Coding Exercises

All of these are meant to try to get real signal on how the person would perform their job. But even when people are employed on a team and you can observe them at any time, it's hard to quantify their performance. Do you look at their commit count? Bug count? Lines of code? Any metric has its weakness, and people game them.

Interviewing is a game of making a decision with incomplete information. I would say we aren't much better having a whole lot more information about how someone works, when trying to give an accurate performance review.

If we can't accurately judge performance of the people we should know, I think that proves we can't accurately judge performance of people we don't know.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#132

Post by watwut » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 7:07 PM UTC

esotericn wrote: post #102

Apocryphon wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tech industry, and Silicon Valley in particular, has long pretended to be an ultra-rational meritocracy. Some people buy into the rhetoric, and get bitterly disappointed when proven wrong. If the industry didn’t feed the myth, perhaps people would have less of an emotional reaction.

I say this without meaning to be offensive, but surely it's blindingly obvious that this isn't the case? For all of the reasons I stated above? I think you'd have to be severely mentally deficient in order to think that commercial software development operates in some sort of strict high score board fashion. OSS development I think is significantly closer if you allow for the sampling bias that only certain groups ha…

Majority of OSS development is paid for. It is not done by unpaid volunteers feeding themselves by something else.

Some of it is like that, but not much.

As much as I like open source, there is a lot of myth making around it too.

________

Second whether obvious or not, people argued that we meritocracy on these forums here for years. And some still do. At meritocracy peek, Github had even that meritocracy carpet or whatever it was.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#133

Post by 0x445442 » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 7:17 PM UTC

esotericn wrote: post #91

0x445442 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would you hire Linus for your bog standard dev role? Of course not. He'd be bored in days. I've often wondered if Rob Pike or Guido Van Rossum went through the same interview process at Google that we all hear stories about. I'd be very surprised if they did and my guess is, for them, it was much more of a negotiation of what they were going to work on and what their compensation was going to be.

Almost certainly not, indeed. But then, if you ran a business, that's almost precisely what you'd do. It's completely rational. The hoi polloi need to be filtered aggressively, most companies need to select for hunger, etc. By contrast, you might as well give a big name an honorary position if you can afford it. If they do useful stuff - bonus. Hell, if I owned a company the size of Google, I'd give Guido some money…

Agreed but it leads me to wonder if they couldn’t do a lot more hiring using this mode. The mode based on reputation, voucher and referral; you know, the way almost every other field does it.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#134

Post by okaram » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 7:28 PM UTC

drchewbacca wrote: post #14

Another related question is how would you evaluate the quality of hires? So you hire for a team of 5 people who complete 83% of the tasks you set for them that year. How do you know if you hired well? Is this an excellent result or a terrible one? How do you know how well each of those 5 did and how well the team would have done with other people in the roles?

What makes this even worse is that you have no info on false negatives ... How would the people you didn't hire would have done?

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#135

Post by izacus » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 7:29 PM UTC

geggam wrote: post #63

SonOfKyuss wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

CVE list for android would be a good place to start ;)

Start with what exactly? Did you personally work on any other project at that scale with less CVEs?

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#136

Post by 0x445442 » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 7:30 PM UTC

neilv wrote: post #117

0x445442 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would you hire Linus for your bog standard dev role? Of course not. He'd be bored in days. I've often wondered if Rob Pike or Guido Van Rossum went through the same interview process at Google that we all hear stories about. I'd be very surprised if they did and my guess is, for them, it was much more of a negotiation of what they were going to work on and what their compensation was going to be.

I asked a recruiter there whether someone like that (like the creator of a popular programming language) would have to go through the normal new-grad-style whiteboard coding hazing gauntlet (phrased diplomatically) interview process that they were expecting me to. The recruiter said no. I decided not to interview, because it turns out the hazing wasn't something "everyone" had to do, and I just didn't rate decent tre…

At this point in my career I won’t do coding tests or problems at home or over the phone. I’ve done my fair share of hiring and I’ve never needed to resort to such things.

Being asked to perform these tasks is actually a pretty good litmus test to filter out companies. Also, I expect a certain degree of deference given my resume shows a 25 year history of implementing and delivering systems.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#137

Post by ebiester » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 7:35 PM UTC

streetcat1 wrote: post #89

ebiester wrote: post #55

This goes back to the idea that there is a "fungible" programmer that is universally substitutable between companies. In some companies, I am a highly valuable addition. In others, I am mediocre at best. I think of this like a sports team - a highly performing sports team both needs people of the highest skill and complementary role players that are the best at a valuable skill even if they aren't the best at every s…

So if you are not good at coding/recent tech, how do you know if a given solution is high quality or not?

I am good at coding. I am a good enough debugger to get through most cases. I am good enough at getting a prototype out. However, if you are looking for someone to sort out some deep and ugly multithreading issues, there are people who are better at it than me.

If you are running an agency trying to drum up work, there are people better than me.

If you have a codebase with no tests and everyone is afraid to touch it, you want me. If you have three teams that are trying to sort out a problem but nobody will dig in, talk with everyone, and sort out the technical issue, you want me. That’s the difference.

Now, as for determining high quality code without having that basis, I would start with Robert Martin’s book “clean code.” At the very least, it can teach the basics of understanding a code sample. However, it can be a difficult problem. I might think about a consultant to judge those and use behavioral interviews to judge the rest.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#138

Post by gridlockd » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 7:37 PM UTC

dymk wrote: post #125

gridlockd wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many engineers including myself would be thrilled to have somebody else highly skilled around, and "selfish/vain" isn't the default in our industry. What else are you supposed to say about yourself or anyone else? I'm not talking about the best developers in general, I'm talking about "the best developer in the team". The "golden child". Do you sincerely believe they're thrilled about giving up that special status…

You can construct any number of hypothetical evils that might plague your team; I don't really see why you'd let that shape your perception of engineers when you hardly ever run across people like that though. Most people are fine, and if you run into a toxicity then go take care of it like an adult and talk to your manager/HR/whatever.

I'm not talking about "my team", I'm talking about people. Status preservation is one of the most basic behaviors in higher animals. It's not "toxic" or otherwise special in any way.

If you follow the advice of the GP, you are setting up a conflict of interest. I'm not ruling out that the "best developer" in some teams is of such noble disposition that they will always hire someone better than themselves. It's not what you can expect though, so don't set yourself up for failure.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#139

Post by AJ007 » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 7:46 PM UTC

oneepic wrote: post #38

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 exper…

We will see the debate go on as long as humans are working. The problem is hiring is reflexive. Hiring is a marketplace, not a static measurement. Human behavior changes in reaction to other human behavior.

If someone found a foolproof method of hiring once it become widely known, it would no longer foolproof. Either employers would all try to hire the same employees or employees would find out which signals mattered and tried to game them. This already occurs to some extent with the Ivy League hiring approach. The general “college degree” part has already been over-gamed to the extent it is meaningless.

What employers should be doing is measuring the long term success and failures from interviews and seeing if the interviewer even has an above random chance of selecting good employees. If it’s worse than random than the interviewer is probably just terrible at what they are doing.

This would also require the employer to agree on what makes a long term successful employee, something I’m not sure many people even agree on. At minimum, I’m presuming you couldn’t make a judgement on a hire in less than 5 years.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#140

Post by clairity » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 7:53 PM UTC

hiring is really simple: you can straightforwardly filter out the obvious no's, but beyond that, it's a crapshoot.

basketball analogy time! (my favorite =) the NBA employs 450 of the best basketball players on the planet, and at any given time, the league is evaluating a few thousand more (out of hundreds of millions of basketball players, out of ~7.5 billion people worldwide). all the easy filtering is done. every year, the 60 most promising players are drafted. and because they're among the most promising, most of these 60 players should become regular NBA players. in practice, only 5-10 will do so in any given year, and you have no idea which ones it will be as they all look promising (e.g., laker kyle kuzma drafted 27th in 2017).

in short, once you get down to the 10-20 candidates you think will fit a given job, you might as well just draw a name out of a hat, work with them for 3-6 months, and re-evaluate. there really is no shortcut to this (not even for google).