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

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#311

Post by boring_twenties » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 9:07 PM UTC

playing_colours wrote: post #285

boring_twenties wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It may be clearly better if all you need a bunch of young and fast code typists. What about ability to make balanced pragmatic decisions, not based on fun or hype? What about mature communications, understanding of business? Understanding of technical dept, complexity?

This assumes that everyone over 30 or so is focused on family, which is obviously not the case.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#312

Post by scarface74 » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 9:09 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #150

patja wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it works for you then great, but you are really limiting the pipeline of candidates. I'll bet there are 100 great candidates out there who don't even have Github accounts for every one you are seeing.

For every one of them, there are 100 people in the pipeline who can tell you in great detail how brilliant the last project they worked on is but can't write a lick of code.

And if you couldn’t figure that out doesn’t that say a lot about your interviewing process.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#313

Post by ghaff » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 9:09 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #300

ghaff wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That comes awfully close to saying it's OK to discriminate against $GROUP so long as everyone doesn't do it.

Requiring a public portfolio is the same as racism now?

The comment I was responding to was "Almost all of those procedures are perfectly ok as long as everybody is not doing the same ones. The problem appears if every well paying job requires your to have a public portfolio."

IOW, a fair reading is that the parent acknowledges that the practice excludes people who aren't in a position to have a public portfolio. (For whatever reason: IP rules, family obligations, lack of interest in programming as a hobby.) And that would be a problem if everyone did it. But everyone doesn't so it's OK as long as just some of us do it.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#314

Post by boring_twenties » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 9:09 PM UTC

boring_twenties wrote: post #298

ghaff wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should not have made a personal attack. But I really would encourage you to consider what others have written and think about why your take on hiring is not healthy and may even be actively discriminatory against a protected class.

You'll be happy to know I have nothing to do with hiring of any kind, but just as an individual contributor it seems quite unhealthy to me to work on a team where work is my #1 priority, but everyone else's distant second. I suspect you'd find it quite ridiculous to have to pick up my slack as I have to run at 5pm to practice with my bandmates, at least if you weren't paid correspondingly more for the extra effort. C…

Not sure what the proper way to respond to a deeply nested comment around here is, but @scarface74:

Company A will pay me $400k/yr, but only if I make work my top priority

Company B will pay me $150k/yr, no matter what

Please explain why it's "naive" to choose Company A. I don't need "ownership" in the company to profit from this.

I don't see how the company's reaction to my death factors into the decision at all.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#315

Post by bradlys » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 9:12 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #308

bradlys wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the idea but I don't think people expect you to do this all the time. It's more to back up a resume that's weak in other areas. (no name companies, no name University, etc. And this is all relevant to the area you're applying, what is no name somewhere is a name known elsewhere) I found having some open source contributions was a positive for my resume. People knew I could ship something then. They could litera…

Like I said before - I graduated from a no name college and a no name company and my average turn around time from looking to having at least two reasonable offers is less than three weeks - in 20 years. I haven’t done any side projects since 1994.

You graduated - what - 30 years ago? You presumably have more than 20 years of experience. Do you really think you're the person who needs to pad their resume out with open source contributions to make a strong resume as an IC? I'm gonna guess no.

Hiring the trendiest is also a bit of an SV thing. I don't know if you're in SV or not but if your job searching doesn't involve any leetcode prep then I presume you're not in SV. (Less than 3 weeks on leetcode prep seems crazy to get a job in SV unless you practice regularly)

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#316

Post by mattrp » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 9:17 PM UTC

Ididntdothis wrote: post #287

mattrp wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the recruiters - how much justice would it be for someone to start a recruiting agency and say to applicants, 'oh you have recruiting experience? yeah...well, we're looking people with a different skillset.'

I think part of it is also the interviewing process. In general I like the idea of being interviewed by future colleagues but I have been in interviews where the interviewer had a really narrow perspective and there was only one right answer and only one valid approach to problem solving. I think interviewing should be taken seriously as a skill and interviewers should be trained more.

I'm sorry I just thought it would be a nice ironic twist -- recruiters hiring other recruiters has to be like a matter meeting anti-matter. In all seriousness, it all comes back to the client. Having been a hiring manager, one of the things that frustrates me is that HR departments have so little bandwidth to do the one thing that's truly important (hiring) that they have no choice but to treat it like a retail shopping experience: hiring 3-5 recruiters, post it to the job boards and hope a qualified candidate shows up. And then by contrast you see the companies that work at it - they host meetups, they sponsor conferences and they go out of their way to create conversations between hiring managers and people who aren't even looking.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#317

Post by close04 » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 9:17 PM UTC

jefftk wrote: post #295

close04 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> barely noticed, and it didn't affect my thinking on them. Some people dress up, some don't. Of course this doesn't say anything about their technical abilities. But showing you care about the interview matters and flip-flops don't send that message. It's basically as close to no effort as it gets while still being allowed in public. I'm sure you'd find the same as a sign of unprofessionalism in many other fields ev…

> But showing you care about the interview matters and flip-flops don't send that message I'm not looking for candidates to show that they care about the interview, or that they have put effort into preparing for it. I'm looking for them to show that they can take a verbal description of a problem and turn it into something concrete enough that they can solve, that they can think about algorithms, that they can code.

> I'm not looking for candidates to show that they care

I'm sure gut-punching you also doesn't change the fact that they can think about algorithms and code. But it does say something about them as people and their character. Showing they put effort in preparing for the interview suggests they put effort in preparing [period]. I've seen plenty of exceptionally qualified people that were a net loss for any team due their attitude. I imagined that as an interviewer you already saw that interviews consist of more than just technical skills (there were probably other people in that panel looking at those other things specifically).

In life, and interviews, it's not just what you say but also how you say it. ;)

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#318

Post by ryandrake » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 9:18 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #216

flamtap wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really see both sides of this. It’s hard to get around the fact that OSS and GH activity really, truly, is a good hiring signal. It’s certainly one of many, and it’s not (nor should it be) the be-all, end-all hiring signal. There are wizardly devs who stick to a strict 40 hour week. There are equally astounding devs who live, breath, and dream code all day every day. We’d all be lucky to work with both. I don’t see…

On the one hand, it's hard to deny that a requirement (or strong preference) like this will often discriminate against some fairly large groups. And it feels cringe-y for that reason. But it's also hard to deny the value of a portfolio that's directly relevant to the job being hired for. And, if I'm being honest... I do a lot of writing as part of my job. If I'm hiring someone for a role like mine, you can be sure th…

Also keep in mind that while X could be a good hiring signal, that doesn’t mean that “lack of X” is necessarily a bad hiring signal.

I’d be ok with using public projects / GitHub as a boost to get someone into the hiring funnel, but I’d never use “no GitHub profile” as a reason to filter a candidate out.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#319

Post by excursionist » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 9:18 PM UTC

everybodyknows wrote: post #128

excursionist wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JS in Node and JS in browser is not that different. It's the same language, using the same JavaScript engine (v8 for chrome). The difference is in the APIs provided by Node vs Browser, which is pretty minor. Many popular JS libraries will run in Node just as well as Browser. That being said, JS is a pretty shit language and I don't know why anyone would want to use it for backend work.

>same JavaScript engine (v8 for chrome) That way lies surrender by default to the Google empire.

What? It's just a simple fact that Node, Chrome and Chromium all use V8 - which is an open source BSD licensed project.

Re: We Only Hire the Trendiest (2016)

#320

Post by pcwalton » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 9:20 PM UTC

ddevault wrote: post #264

plughs wrote: post #45

One frustration I've had recently is the number of companies encouraging or requiring code in the public sphere. They want to see open-source contributions or an active and impressive personal github page. If your employer is protective of their IP ( mine is ) and/or you are not willing to spend evenings and and weekends on pet projects, you are out of the running. Also >But if you think programmers aren't elitist, t…

I'll be honest: if you have one person who spends 8 hours a day practicing a talent, and another who spends 10 or 12 hours a day practicing their talent, which is going to be better at that skill? Having lots of open source code to read demonstrates in public the prospect's talent for writing code, has examples of their collaboration with others, etc, but also simply means they spend more time writing code and gettin…

The law of diminishing returns applies just as much to programming skill as anything else. Most programming work is not that hard; for the vast majority of jobs, the point of diminishing returns occurs well before "works 12 hours a day writing code for fun on GitHub". After that point, other skills start to matter more than sheer amount of code churned out. This is true even for e.g. senior R&D roles, where for those with the necessary programming skill the ability to come up with new techniques is more important than a few more hours spent writing code.