The software industry's greatest sin: hiring • Hacker News Board

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#551

Post by namdnay » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 11:57 AM UTC

hunterwerlla wrote: post #530

namdnay wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> especially US people definitely not. french companies actually have engineering salary tables depending on your age and university

That sounds interesting, is there an english source to read about that?

I can’t find anything concrete, each company does it internally. There are some articles where they publish the starting salary based on your university’s “rank”. Try google translate on this: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.lexpress.fr/emploi/les-atou...

It discusses how there are 6 ranks for business schools, and your salary for the first N years will be based on that. Same for engineering. It’s funny that one of the companies is proud to declare that they can move salaries by “up to 5%!!!” based on the candidate themselves (whereas the school can make a 20-30% difference...)

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#552

Post by disgruntledphd2 » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 2:03 PM UTC

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #444

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 (…

>(especially US people for some reason) seem overly obsessed with the university someone attended That happens literally everywhere, especially at big companies that make easy money. The elites don't like sharing the pie with the great unwashed.

I dunno man, I was really surprised by the behaviours I saw; maybe I have been particularly fortunate in my career but it definitely seemed to me like it was worse in the US.

Perhaps it's bad in other places too. I personally think it's idiotic, as the point of interviewing is to find great candidates, and I have never felt like the University they attended was a particularly good predictor of that.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#553

Post by learc83 » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 3:06 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #534

learc83 wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The best programmers I've worked with have mostly not had CS degrees (tended to have degrees in maths, physics, or that sort of area). There's no you were rigorous enough in tracking this for this statement to be useful to anyone. The people who don't fit the mold stand out.

> There's no you were rigorous enough in tracking this for this statement to be useful to anyone. Sure, but has anyone claiming the opposite done rigorous analysis? Is there any evidence that having a CS degree makes for better programmers than not? > The people who don't fit the mold stand out. I'm not thinking about people who stood out as particularly unusual. Most of the time I didn't find out which field someone…

>Sure, but has anyone claiming the opposite done rigorous analysis? Is there any evidence that having a CS degree makes for better programmers than not?

I'm not making that claim, you're the one making a claim that people with degrees other than CS are better programmers without evidence.

I'll only make the claim that a CS degree made me a better programmer. Specifically the upper level theoretical classes. I can verify that there are many problems I've solved because I realized that the problem I was working on had already been solved 50 years ago.

I also worked about a decade as a professional programmer without a CS degree, before I went back. Personally I am a better programmer.

Would I have been an even better programmer had I taken another few semesters of math classes instead of CS classes? Who knows? Absent any other evidence though, the simplest explanation is that domain specific knowledge is likely useful.

>I'm not thinking about people who stood out as particularly unusual. Most of the time I didn't find out which field someone's degree was in until months into working with them.

The point is that the more unusual someone's background is, the more likely you are to remember it. Particularly if there is some confirmation bias involved.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#554

Post by mlthoughts2018 » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 3:29 PM UTC

irrational wrote: post #129

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has never ever been true that you can “be a nobody” and get hired on merit alone. Even with dozens of responders to this comment coming to say that’s how they got hired, it’s total round-off error compared to size of tech hiring at large. Your credentials and political connections are what allow your resume through the ten arbitrary filters before you even get to the technical screen, collaborative coding, etc., a…

I've worked for a Fortune 150 company for nearly 2 decades. In that time I've been involved in hiring tons of people. I've never cared about what school they went to or their political connections. That would literally be the last thing I, or anyone else I know, would care about. The thing is, I don't have any political connections and I didn't attend an ivy league school, so why would I care about anyone else having…

This statement is so wildly uncommon that it does not bear relevance.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#555

Post by pandaman » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #539

pandaman wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my uneducated opinion, Google's hazing interview is not to establish whether one can write a for loop or not but to establish how dedicated one is to working at Google. An anecdote: I interviewed at Google ~10 years ago and failed. They did not ask anything complicated (I don't know if it was because the polices were different or they actually needed someone with my expertise) but I had a complete brain freeze for…

This is the real difference between the bar exam and a Google interview, in my eyes. The bar exam is intended to pass everyone who meets the standard: your score on the bar is supposed to be an accurate measurement of you. And conversely, if you know the material, you should pass the bar. California's bar exam is considered infamously difficult because the passing rate is "only" 45%. None of that is true of the inter…

This is very true. Unlike an examination there is neither a well defined set of questions nor even a well defined condition for succeeding! It's not good or bad as an interview should be an informal and subjective evaluation. But it does make comparison to an examination invalid just from the procedural point of view.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#556

Post by indigochill » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 6:06 PM UTC

yakireev wrote: post #549

ativzzz wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's common to all nations, period.

For the record: not to all nations. In Russia, a really cool technical university (Bauman's, PhysTech, some faculitis of MGU) will give you some advantage in the early stages of your IT career, but not that much. Source: am a dropout of a shitty university, still have no degree. It does not bother HRs, as far as I could see so far.

Also anecdotally I haven't noticed it in Iceland. I've been part of a number of hiring processes here and although the presence or absence of education has of course been a factor, where that education happened has been totally irrelevant.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#557

Post by amznthrowaway5 » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 6:09 PM UTC

dahart wrote: post #176

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has never ever been true that you can “be a nobody” and get hired on merit alone. Even with dozens of responders to this comment coming to say that’s how they got hired, it’s total round-off error compared to size of tech hiring at large. Your credentials and political connections are what allow your resume through the ten arbitrary filters before you even get to the technical screen, collaborative coding, etc., a…

> It has never ever been the least bit about meritocracy. You might find it as amusing as I did to learn that the word ‘meritocracy’ was intentionally coined to mean more or less the opposite of what you think and how you used it here — meritocracy was a derogatory word intended to highlight the social injustice of thinking that ‘merit’ is somehow fair and can be measured and used to rank people. https://en.wikipedia…

> Wait, aren’t credentials one type of “merit”?

Credentials are only a weak signal of merit. They are often gained illicitly and are no substitute for actual ability.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#558

Post by gwbas1c » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 6:49 PM UTC

spunker540 wrote: post #447

RichardCA wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the thing people are "on about" is that we have become so cynical about the current status quo, that there's no oxygen left to have a real conversation about what constitutes a true "false negative". It would require some sort of longer-term data gathering around the rejection / ghosting process. For example, Google claims to be very objective and data-driven about their hiring process, but once a candidate i…

I’ve been rejected from Google, and a year later they reached back out asking if I wanted to try again. The recruiter even told me over the phone that most people they hire these days have already been rejected at least once before. So they openly acknowledge that a lot of times their best bet is to get people back in the door who they know were close. I’m curious how they determine the timing. Why wait a year vs 6 m…

Similar situation; I was rejected around 2007-ish. Many years later when they reached out the recruiter told me that they changed their process and they believed their newer process was bringing in better hires.

For what it's worth: Someone who works well in an established company isn't always the right person to hire in a young company.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#559

Post by joshuamorton » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 6:55 PM UTC

thu2111 wrote: post #546

joshuamorton wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only one of those 6 suggests an "easier" interviewing path. And it doesn't happen at Google, so I'm still comfortable saying the process is meritocratic. You're trying to argue that processes to encourage women to join somehow make it easier for them to be hired. Those aren't the same.

Many of those things have absolutely happened in the past at Google. I was told so directly by recruiters and had direct evidence of it myself e.g. I was one of the interviewers that one day started being allocated only female candidates; confirmed by recruiters to be an attempt to boost the numbers. I learned about the females-go-straight-to-HC policy from recruiters as well. Facebook experimented with much higher h…

> I learned about the females-go-straight-to-HC policy from recruiters as well

I've heard lots of things from recruiters that were wrong. So much so that I generally advise people I know to check with be before believing anything a recruiter says. But because they lie on purpose, but because they're often misinformed.

This goes for compensation, process, and policy questions where recruiter statements reliably break with policy and practice. So pardon me if I don't find recruiters to be a reliable source for hot corp goss.

> Not due to any innate sexism but because they'd realised that female transfers were far more likely to be troublemakers or poor performers than male transfers, due to HR's desperate attempts to recast unacceptable behaviour

Sounds like innate sexism to me, given that the same thing happens with men. It's really hard to get fired. Ive had to deal with (men) not being fired for ages.

> For instance she was mystified by a CL she reviewed one day that contained hexadecimal, something she'd apparently never seen before!

Depending on the language and background, this sounds reasonable. I wouldn't expect a he java or frontend person to necessarily know hex. So yeah you're making my case for me. Sounds like bias against women.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#560

Post by irrational » Sat, Apr 11, 2020, 8:54 PM UTC

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #554

irrational wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked for a Fortune 150 company for nearly 2 decades. In that time I've been involved in hiring tons of people. I've never cared about what school they went to or their political connections. That would literally be the last thing I, or anyone else I know, would care about. The thing is, I don't have any political connections and I didn't attend an ivy league school, so why would I care about anyone else having…

This statement is so wildly uncommon that it does not bear relevance.

What part is uncommon? Working for a Fortune 150 company? Being involved in the hiring of new people? Not having political connections (seriously, who has political connections below the c-level?)? Not attending an ivy league school?