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Hiring Is Broken?

software.rajivprab.com

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Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#141

Post by smsm42 »

clairity wrote: post #140

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 y…

Fortunately, for smaller companies there's another option - use personal networks to find candidates, the chances would be much better. For googles, they can just afford some misses, it costs but not something they couldn't stomach.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#142

Post by smsm42 »

username90 wrote: post #98
dahart wrote: post #87

> Anyone can glamorize and exaggerate the work they have done, and make it sound a lot more impressive than it actually was My personal experience interviewing is that people cannot easily glamorize their past projects when pressed for details. It might be easy to make it look good on a resume, but hard in person during a discussion with follow up questions. I think asking about past projects is a fantastic interview…

Or they could just lie and tell you from the perspective of another dev on their team, or even combining the achievements from several of them at once. Of course most people wont lie a lot but this style heavily favors those who do so you will get a disproportionate amount of liars on your team.

That is a very dangerous gamble though because the next question would be "you did all that? How cool! Tell me more details!" and my experience shows that faking the details, unless you've done at least something very close to what you claim you did, is not very easy. And generic bullshit is rather easy to detect - usually you can see when the person is genuinely talking about something they did and are excited to share and when they're just stalling because they have no idea. Of course, once in a while you can get a bullshit artist of high caliber - but those very quickly reveal themselves when you ask them to actually do something.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#143

Post by dahart »

username90 wrote: post #109
dahart wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your assumption is incorrect, based on my own experience. I’ve never hired a liar, and I’ve hired a lot of people. I have, however, declined to hire people who failed to answer follow up questions honestly or appeared to not be able to explain their success. Anyone who wants a job knows it’s a bad idea to lie because you find out immediately once you hire someone whether they are lying, and it would be ground…

> you find out immediately once you hire someone whether they are lying Do you really believe this? Lets say we have a mediocre person on a team who tells the story of him being a star performer. How would you catch that? He went on the design meetings, he know why every decision was made, he has worked on the project for years. There is no way you would catch it, and the halo effect would likely mean that you still…

> Do you really believe this?

Yes, absolutely. I’m not lying. :) Like I said, I have lots of experience with it. I’ve interviewed people who tried to inflate their contributions, and it’s easy to tell over the course of a 5-10 minute conversation.

> How would you catch that?

Easily, they would fail to be a star performer, and fail to match the abilities they advertised. You can’t lie your way into good programming.

However, it’s bigger than lie or not. Seasoned programmers have mature philosophies, and you can tell by talking to them. And honestly, I don’t mean this judgementally, but your question does sound like it comes from a lack of experience. You will find out what I’m talking about in time; big lies are not in the least bit easy to pull off, and almost nobody tries that kind of thing because the probability they’ll get caught and have serious consequences is very high. Being present in design meetings and knowing why decisions are made does not make you able to talk about it fluently.

BTW, while I believe this myself absolutely, I don’t know for absolute certainty that I’m right. So if it’s easy to do and the payoff is large then you should do it and write about it! If you could easily lie your way into a job, then it should be easy to work your way into one of those super high paying jobs, making robots or neural networks, and get away with it for years.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#144

Post by smsm42 »

marktangotango wrote: post #123
wslh wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can discover the lie asking very technical questions on how the solved some issue. They will answer at the greatest level of detail if they did it themselves.

Provided you or the arbitrary interviewer have the technical background to evaluate the answers! I once had reason to view the resume of a former colleague who took all credit for a major project I implemented. This project involved parsing and a particular parser generator. He worked on it after I implemented it, but he claimed it all. And he was knowledgeable enough to back that claim up!

> And he was knowledgeable enough to back that claim up!

If he worked on it and could convincingly fake it, I - as a recruiter - wouldn't care too much if he embellishes a bit and claims he also did it from the start. Maybe he factually didn't, but if he's good enough to make me think he did, there's a decent chance he would be good enough to actually do it for me. Not a certainty, there's never certainty, but a good chance. Of course, given the choice, I'd prefer the one who actually created it, but one who worked on it and knows it well enough is not bad either.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#145

Post by GoToRO »

gridlockd wrote: post #43
GoToRO wrote: post #40

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.

Your "best developer" probably doesn't want someone better than them on the job.

If s/he is any good s/he will also be a nice human being. In any case, for that particular company it's their only good and cheap chance.

There is an alternative, use an agency. The problem with that is that companies will simply reject the proposed candidates without justification because hey, they are the customer.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#146

Post by GoToRO »

graycat wrote: post #34

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 r…

The simple truth is companies value loyalty above all else. If you are the best or not doesn't really matter. It matters that you can pass some simple tests but nothing else.

In the gig economy it's important to be able to show to your client how the final product looks like. I.e. a portfolio. They have money just for one run, one try. Risk aversion is high.

Companies that truly want the best and have a process to filter for the best are exceptions. Maybe less than one in a thousand.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#147

Post by m0zg »

graycat wrote: post #34

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 r…

Yep, it's easy. All you have to do is stop applying for jobs. Although .NET and machine learning typically don't go hand in hand, as does ML and "ambitious web site" experience. I'd have someone review your resume and make sure you're not trying to be all things to all people. That's a major red flag.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#148

Post by sharadov »

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…

Exactly, every company here in the Bay area, however crappy their technology stack or the actual work you will be doing, will put you through a process akin to FAANG. As much as I love tech and have kept my skills up to date, this ridiculousness has left many truly creative engineers demoralized. I have reached a point where I want to leave tech altogether.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#149

Post by edflsafoiewq »

watwut wrote: post #132
esotericn wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

I doubt that. The super-star projects with millions of users sure, but the majority of OSS is probably in the long tail of tiny one-man shows, Github projects with five stars, etc.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#150

Post by itronitron »

username90 wrote: post #124
empath75 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah all you have to ask is questions like why did you use A instead of B? Did you run into any problems implementing that? It doesn’t take long before people start stammering and deflecting if they’re full of shit.

Why wouldn't a person be able to answer those questions? You were on the standups, you know whatever issues they had, you were on the design meetings, you know what alternatives were considered and why they weren't chosen. Being able to walk through someone else's thought process is a lot easier than doing the actual work. The end result is that you will hire people for high level roles like tech leads or architect w…

You keep mentioning design meetings as a source of technical insight that a person can co-opt as their own expertise. If you steer your interview questions more towards things that are 'solo' in nature then you might have a better job of identifying people that have more software development experience.

An example of such a question could be ... can you tell me about a time that you tracked down a bug that you at first thought was not possible but later identified and found a solution for?

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