We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016) • Hacker News Board

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#231

Post by ACow_Adonis » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 7:06 PM UTC

eggsnbacon1 wrote: post #121

malvosenior wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who uses Github and OSS contribution as a strong hiring signal, I'd like to offer an alternative perspective. People who do a lot of personal projects tend to be very good developers, especially when you can see a demonstrated ability to ship. This is also helpful for people who haven't worked at big name companies or don't have degrees from elite universities. I'd happily hire someone with no experience a…

This is a stupid signal. Many/most developers are prohibited from working on open source projects by their employers. In any state besides California and Illinois you will be forced to sign an IP assignment agreement to work for any medium/large companies. Open source projects will not let you contribute under such an agreement, and anything you do on your own is owned by your employer.

Ok, but surely the problem there is that companies are (legally?illegally?) taking part in deliberately overreaching and anti- competitive work contracts.

And I mean hey, it's working isn't it? Can't show external evidence of your work and skills, now you're a bit more trapped here.

And I am sympathetic: those are completely unreasonable and anti-competitive employment terms, and I've had a past supervisor subtly imply they 'might own the intellectual property of all my thoughts', to which I can only offer the potentially useless advice of don't work there, or do work there but ignore/fight them.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#232

Post by busterarm » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 7:07 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #222

tptacek wrote: post #201

Last night on Twitter, someone said "Nearly every entrepreneur I talk so says hiring is their biggest challenge. The world is starving for competent people with a strong work-ethic." This is of course false. The world is not starving for competent people. It's starving for high-status resumes. If those resumes are attached to people who are competent or hard workers, that's a bonus. The high-status resumes without th…

I'll be honest, it's pretty hilarious to read someone talking about taking down the rich when their company was acquired for $13 million in cash, give or take.

everyone knows tptacek is woke af.

What I find funny is just a few weeks ago he was posting that he had the end all be all answer to everyones' hiring and now in this post he's saying it didn't work and he was happy to walk away from it.

All that said, everything Dan Luu said and quoted I agree with.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#233

Post by klodolph » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 7:08 PM UTC

traderjane wrote: post #213

klodolph wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tailored suit? Seriously? Does that not smell like luxury? Why is that part of the discussion for workplace uniform? You can get a suit off the rack for $200 and have it tailored at the time of purchase for maybe $20. Your mileage may vary, but that doesn’t smell like luxury at all to me. It sounds like a reasonable thing to own for people in office jobs. It is de rigueur in many parts of the world, including certa…

Wearing a suit is armor for race specifically because of its association with money. Race is dangerous as opposed to merely inconvenient for some because of the association with poverty, desperation, and crime. I still remember the term super-predator when it was the hot political term. Thus any symbol of class will always be a suit of armor for race in the way you describe, including Apple hardware. But the reason w…

> But why shouldn't t-shirt be the status quo culture of the office?

Any response to this question shorter than a hundred pages is going to do a disservice.

Because you asked: Because people are judged unequally for wearing a T-shirt. Because this fails to delineate between work attire (and spaces, modes) and personal attire (spaces, modes). The delineation is important. Because attire communicates, among other things, what you think about the people around you, and I dislike the message sent by wearing a T-shirt. Because the T-shirt is a symbol of Silicon Valley technology culture, privilege, and entitlement which I reject.

This kind of communication is not denotative, but it is full of information and intent, and interpreted differently by different people. Yes, it also encodes class, but so does every other form of communication, and attire communicates so many other things.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#234

Post by boring_twenties » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 7:09 PM UTC

throwawaymath wrote: post #118

natalyarostova wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Life is about trade-offs. If you want to spend more time outside of work on things like friends and family, that's great. In fact, it's probably optimal. But to then say it's discrimination when someone who has made the choice to instead only focus on their technical skill, at the exclusion of friends and family, is better than you, is a little silly.

To be more charitable to the commenter's point, that's not what's being asserted as discriminatory. They're making the claim that it's implicitly discriminatory to penalize people who don't spend time on programming outside of work, because that reasonably penalizes people who are older (i.e. more likely to have a family). They are not making the claim that choosing to hire someone better than someone else is discrim…

Why is it discriminatory? All else equal, isn't it clearly better to hire someone with no responsibilities outside of work, than someone who has to be out of the office at 5pm every day to deal with their kids?

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#235

Post by yowlingcat » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 7:09 PM UTC

peterwwillis wrote: post #158

Here's what recruiters see: 1) Oh, it's not the same tech stack, our client isn't going to want to look at this, 2) This person either can't dedicate themselves to one career or is taking any job they can find. And the client sees 3) Our past contractors have built the crappiest products that aren't in sync with our patterns. I basically work for RegularCo. And I can tell you, the one person they don't need any more…

Sounds like a problem with recruiting, which isn't that surprising to me. As I've ranted about before, great recruiters are worth their weight in gold. On the other side of things, subpar recruiters are a risk. At best, they'll bumble around and never find you appropriate candidates but at worst, they'll actively alienate candidates that could have been a great fit.

It's a high risk, high reward profession. For some reason, you see a lot of clowns in it -- it always confuses me and has me convinced that executives and hiring managers don't fully understand what they should expect from recruiters and how to find an effective one.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#236

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 7:09 PM UTC

sorenn111 wrote: post #228

ScottFree wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's rich and then there's Rich. The former's money goes in banks. The latter's money buys banks.

Yeah and there's thousands of Zach Dell's populating tech companies and failing around accruing high status roles?

[deleted]

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#237

Post by mud_dauber » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 7:10 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #201

Last night on Twitter, someone said "Nearly every entrepreneur I talk so says hiring is their biggest challenge. The world is starving for competent people with a strong work-ethic." This is of course false. The world is not starving for competent people. It's starving for high-status resumes. If those resumes are attached to people who are competent or hard workers, that's a bonus. The high-status resumes without th…

Herman Blume's quote is damned good. I'm going to use this - somewhere.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#238

Post by dkhenry » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 7:11 PM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #179

dkhenry wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is absolutely no evidence for this whatsoever. The ability to program or not, the ability to abstract, generalize, arrange your code right, solve problems, ask questions, and so on, changes little when the tooling ceremonies are different. There is overwhelming evidence for this, and its been known to anyone who has had to hire engineers for a very long time. Something like 95% of people with CS degrees can't…

Overwhelming evidence? For such claims, citations are generally requires, or is the evidence all anecdata? > Something like 95% of people with CS degrees can't do any of the things you listed there. Again, I don’t think this is born out at all. Yes, a lot of people fail or answer that LeetCode question with that special trick solution in 45 minutes, but we don’t really have any quick tests to gauge actual ability in…

I am only aware of one study that found it was actually 97% of full time engineers couldn't write code[1], but I don't think that was a very rigorous study. The best evidence would be the very well known blog post by Jeff Atwood [2] or this article on c2[3]. Also you don't need to ask LeetCode questions, simple for loops can throw most people off, that I know from anecdata.

1. https://www.gadgetsnow.com/jobs/95-engineers-in-india-unfit-...

2. https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

3. http://wiki.c2.com/?FizzBuzzTest

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#239

Post by synaesthesisx » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 7:13 PM UTC

throwaway444010 wrote: post #15

> When I've compared notes with folks who attended schools like Utah and Boise State, their education is basically the same as mine. I work at one of the well-known tech companies, and what I’ve noticed among most software engineers and data scientists is that they don’t really care about your background as long as you can do the work. Which is really nice; whenever I interview candidates, I don’t notice much correla…

Oddly enough some of the brightest engineers I've worked with were actually self-taught. No formal CS background or education, but they were incredibly driven and outperformed from Stanford.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#240

Post by TrentLarr » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 7:14 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #222

tptacek wrote: post #201

Last night on Twitter, someone said "Nearly every entrepreneur I talk so says hiring is their biggest challenge. The world is starving for competent people with a strong work-ethic." This is of course false. The world is not starving for competent people. It's starving for high-status resumes. If those resumes are attached to people who are competent or hard workers, that's a bonus. The high-status resumes without th…

I'll be honest, it's pretty hilarious to read someone talking about taking down the rich when their company was acquired for $13 million in cash, give or take.

I'm a beneficiary of the "startup lottery". I am living the dream, and I state that in this anonymous forum to provide perspective to my own feelings about The Rich.

In your early thirties twenties, managed effectively, one million dollars is enough to retire on, and live care-free. Two million dollars is enough to live well. Six million dollars is enough to retire on extremely well. Ten million dollars is disgusting. Twenty is obscene. A hundred should be criminal.

Thirteen million dollars is excessive, for sure, but that's not the kind of awful, powerful wealth that is the root of problems in our society.