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The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

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Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#341

Post by sgerenser »

opportune wrote: post #260
sgerenser wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It varies among the FAANGs, but in my experience Google was the worst with the algorithms above all approach. I actually had one interviewer cut me off after about a minute when I was describing an interesting problem I worked on, saying “yeah ok that’s great let’s get on to the algorithm question.” I’m sure it varies between interviewers but the lineup I had at google clearly didn’t want to dedicate more than a minu…

Your recruiter was rating you on your performance on the algorithm question, them cutting you off was actually them trying to help you spend enough time on the question.

I get that, but it just made it obvious that nothing else mattered but the whiteboard (or in this case, luckily, a chromebook with text editor).

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#342

Post by netjiro »

Tossing my 2c in the ring, this is how I usually hire new dudes[1]:

- Ask the existing team for a set of dude recommendations, and the reasons.

- Track down a set of dudes myself. Usually from publications, open source, or previous products.

- Discuss with the dudes regarding the greater project target, team, goals, initial tasks, scheduling. Ask the dudes for other dudes they can recommend, and why.

- From here on I pay the dudes for their time and effort during recruitment, always:

- Have the dudes look at previous problems and solutions, if available, and ask for feedback.

- Have the dudes spend time with existing team on current work and ideas. When populating entire teams I have dudes work with each other. I especially look for people who are freely sharing even with people they are (technically) in competition with.

- I always followup on my initial predictions over time, to see where I'm right or wrong, and what to look for in the future.

I often hire scientists or other people who do a lot of work out in the open. It's just so much easier to quickly get a feel for peoples' output by looking at, and discussing, previous work. And most of my projects require bleeding edge specialists.

I advertise Hiring is expensive and often takes a long time, but hiring the wrong people is much worse.

Throughout my projects I have only had one person leave, and that was for a once in a lifetime offer. I very rarely need to fire anyone.

I would rather hire two excellent dudes than five good dudes. So I tend to have the budget to pay good rates. Then I call up temporary manpower to solve the more mundane tasks so I can keep my excellent people on the more difficult and interesting items.

Red flags I look for when I'm on the other side of the table:

- Who is doing the hiring? Some checkbox HR drone, the owners/investors, or the actual team?

- Hiring evaluation tools. Have they actually bothered to read up on the latest few decades of research, or are they just following dogmatic trends? Do they even track their own prediction skills when hiring?

- What is their understanding of the project, tasks, etc?

- Do they respect my time investment?

1) a "dude" is gender and ageless, of no persuasion, has neither skin nor eye colour, and so on.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#343

Post by grumple »

josephg wrote: post #134
dahart wrote: post #47

> Developer hiring is broken This seems to be a pretty popular opinion. It totally might be right, but it’s not my own experience, so I have a serious question because maybe I don’t know what’s happening out there with most hiring today - what are the broad-stroke outcomes that demonstrate that hiring isn’t working? Are there statistics that show that hiring has problems? All of the reasons given in the article are c…

I'm a software engineer working at a company in the hiring space. I've done over 400 technical interviews in the last year alone, and ... this is a hot take, and not the view of my employer, but I think developer hiring processes are fine (At least, at most mature companies.) There's a problem at the moment in the market that there's a huge amount of pent up demand for senior developers. The market has responded with…

> I've done over 400 technical interviews in the last year alone

Have you gotten any actual work done in the last year?

> in the hiring space.

Oh wait. This is your job.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#344

Post by christophilus »

earthtourist wrote: post #57
jackcosgrove wrote: post #22

Technical interviews were once seen as a breath of fresh air. You can be a nobody without connections or degrees and if you can prove you have skills during an interview process you may be hired. Contrast this with other hiring processes which are more irrational, like med residency match, investment banks favoring "target school graduates", law firms favoring "top 14 graduates", etc. I think whiteboarding is dumb an…

It is true that you can succeed well at tech companies without a degree from a top school. Class, race, gender, sexual orientation are not barriers to success. That's the positive thing. The negative thing is that most tech companies heavily favor "top school" candidates and actively recruit for them. They would rather higher someone provably less qualified from a "top school" than someone else. They track and boast…

I’ve been in the industry for 20 years and have worked for a lot of companies, some very big names, and have been in a hiring position for the last 10 years or so. I’ve never once noticed or cared about an applicant’s university, nor has anyone I worked with. So, anecdotes be anecdotal.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#345

Post by SamReidHughes »

dvt wrote: post #50
renewiltord wrote: post #31

You've got to know if the other person can code. Lots of people can talk a mean game and make nothing and few people can spot them. That's the thing, though. If you make a reputation as the kind of guy who can near 100% spot the good engineers, you will make boatloads of money. An employer will pay you more than $30k if you only do great hires. You do 10 of them with your conversation out to lunch and you've made $30…

> You've got to know if the other person can code. Lots of people can talk a mean game and make nothing and few people can spot them. If only this were true. I've co-authored a (technical) book, edited another, have dozens of OSS contributions, and GitHub projects with hundreds of stars. Everyone still tries to whiteboard interview me. Usually I tell them to screw off, but still. My theory is that (a) people are too…

I can think of people with all those credentials, and more, who are well known for having no technical chops. (And there are others for which you can make the inference based on the content of their books, problems with their popular but flawed Github projects, and employment outcomes.) Hirers could look at your actual Github code, but that can obscure how fast you write it, whether it is plagiarized, etc.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#346

Post by christophilus »

thu2111 wrote: post #324
KorematsuFred wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an employee of Google who is involved in hiring let me tell you the process is extremely rigorous and we work very hard to make it bias free. I am not an unbiased individual myself but when it comes to hiring, I work extra hard to ensure fairness regardless of other person's characteristics.

And as a former Googler who did hundreds of interviews there, let me tell you you're wrong. It wasn't bias free even years ago, and Google has gone much more hard-core SJW since then. It's still much better than at most companies, and the article we're discussing is so wrong about the way executives are hired. But Google isn't some paragon of freedom from bias, far from it. Ignore yourself. The system surrounding you…

I’ve seen this, too, at a number of places I’ve worked. Pointing it out always gets you downvoted (or whatever the real life equivalent is).

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#347

Post by perlgeek »

asn0 wrote: post #154

We (Ambra Health) a few years ago decided our "typical" multi-hour multi-week interview process was a lot of effort for pretty mixed outcomes. We realized an interview can't really answer the most important questions: how a candidate works, and what's it like to work together. So we added an option to interview by way of a paid trial period (work part-time nights/weekends for a few weeks with the hiring team). Figure…

Have you written down some kind of instructions for how you do it? What tasks to select, preparations for both sides etc.

Also, do you give them tasks on your actual code base? If yes, you are likely biased towards people already familiar with your tech stack (getting really productive with an unfamiliar tech stack takes more than a week, but short enough to make hiring somebody from a different background still worthwhile).

Any thoughts on this? (I realize that some amount of bias in the process is OK)

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#349

Post by cies »

deepGem wrote: post #337
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my previous bosses (at a large tech company) moved over to the US and was asked to hire 9-10 people in a quarter. Everyone said it was impossible. She went to LinkedIn, found people with the right skills (strong data and ability to communicate), and had a massive fight with HR because none of the candidates came from "top" schools. She won the argument, and all of the hired candidates did a great job. People (…

The university obsession is not unique to US. It's true in India as well. If you are not from the elite institutions, you won't get past any hiring scanners of top tech companies. You'll still get a job, not the best paying one though.

It's common to all developing nations, and the US (which is both a developing nation and a developed nation in one).

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#350

Post by charlesu »

kortilla wrote: post #308
dontreact wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say Google discriminates on the basis of race? I used to work there and was involved in the hiring processes and never saw evidence for this

Underrepresented groups get more attempts and are actively recruited more.

Underrepresented groups are actively recruited but don't get more attempts. If you think otherwise just ask an engineer from an underrepresented groups about their recruiting experiences. They would probably know better. All their interviews include an underrepresented candidate, so their sample size is probably larger :)

The active recruitment is to counterbalance the fact that referrals, one of the biggest sources of talent, is not a diverse pipeline. Everyone's network is mostly male and white or Asian. This is even true of engineers from underrepresented groups. If you want a shot at hiring qualified underrepresented candidates, you have to actively recruit them. Your existing workforce cannot help identify them. That's what's meant by diversity and inclusion.

Now whether you agree that diversity and inclusion are worthwhile is another discussion altogether.

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