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To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

youteam.io

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Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#231

Post by derangedHorse »

capableweb wrote: post #132
soneca wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

”I’m sure your success rate will improve then” I think you are wrong. I don’t have a CS degree, I don’t have top brand college or employer. You also assume wrong that I didn’t dedicated myself to apply to specific jobs where I was a very good fit. I did that. And it didn’t got me offers. If you tell me more about your profile, I am sure I can pinpoint why you get 100% success rate and I don’t. I am pretty sure it is…

I don't have any CS degree, nor studied at any college, nor worked at any famous employer neither. So probably irrelevant. I sure knows that when I'm doing the hiring, I rarely if ever read what colleges or what previous companies the candidate worked on. All that matters is what their experience is, what they learned so far, what they tell me they wanna do in the future and how they are as a person. > You also assum…

Soneca said that they dedicated themselves to applying to specific jobs not all jobs, so your comment saying it’s hard to imagine them applying to 250 jobs makes no sense.

And it’s also false that someone who gets hired a lot can accurately give advice on what got them hired unless they personally ask everyone who was involved in the hiring decision.

The employer, compensation, and social capital of the applicant may play a role as well. I think you may be too focused on proving OP wrong to ask about more factors that could be affecting their results because there are way too many things that come into play (from when an employer gets an application to the interview and offer) to generalize.

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#233

Post by SkyPuncher »

baby wrote: post #47
SkyPuncher wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how it is at my company (100% remote). Having Zoom on stand-by is key for us. Anytime things get complicated, we just hop on a Zoom call. All of us can communicated well in writing, but I don't know of anyone on my team who prefers it. For me, in particular, I'm an incredibly slow writer, so it's just painful to write too much.

This doesn’t scale well, every time someone needs to understand, or onboards, or wants to audit a process then they have to go through that. It’s really hard to improve on something not documented.

I don't see how it doesn't. Our approach is literally no different than most in person companies.

Instead of walking over to somebody's desk, we get on a video call. Sure, there are still things that require written communication - but day-to-day quick talk is no different.

We still Slack, we still write PR feedback, we still document processes and policies, etc.

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#235

Post by vonmoltke »

hodgesrm wrote: post #11

I've been working on remote teams for almost 20 years. The key to success is overcommunicating. In other words--don't assume people have full context or share assumptions. Write emails that lay out assumptions explicitly and detail problems completely. As a manager I sometimes feel like a Habsburg bureaucrat buried in the Chancery offices sending painstaking messages to a far flung empire. Come to think of it, remote…

> Come to think of it, remote work is not that different.

I've spent the majority of my career at large companies with multiple offices. My experience is that non-remote work is no different unless everyone in the company is in the same building. Even then, if different functions or teams are sufficiently siloed it still requires that level of over-communication.

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#236

Post by drewg123 »

I'm an IC who has worked remote for 18 of the last 20 years. Effective communication is critical.

I tell my teenage son that my most important class in high school was actually English. Being able to write accurately, concisely, and persuasively is critically important, even when you're in a technical role.

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#237

Post by b112 »

abdusco wrote: post #130
Nevaeh wrote: post #81

How do you feel about acronyms? Do they improve or hurt communication? From time to time, Musk will send out an e-mail to the entire company to enforce a new policy or let them know about something that's bothering him. One of the more famous e-mails arrived in May 2010 with the subject line: Acronyms Seriously Suck: There is a creeping tendency to use made up acronyms at SpaceX. Excessive use of made up acronyms is…

They are detrimental to understanding. I hate them with a passion. I see people using acronyms without explaining them in context, which makes it even more difficult to understand what's written. Some terms are jargon and are probably ubiquitous in the field, but unless I'm reading a text written for the professionals working in that field, I'd much rather see it explained.

What got me, was explaining SMTP to engineers not familiar with the acronym, who used SNMP, and a guy walked in asking it if was SNTP.

Everyone started saying the above as initialisms, or long form, at that point.

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#238

Post by soneca »

capableweb wrote: post #132
soneca wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

”I’m sure your success rate will improve then” I think you are wrong. I don’t have a CS degree, I don’t have top brand college or employer. You also assume wrong that I didn’t dedicated myself to apply to specific jobs where I was a very good fit. I did that. And it didn’t got me offers. If you tell me more about your profile, I am sure I can pinpoint why you get 100% success rate and I don’t. I am pretty sure it is…

I don't have any CS degree, nor studied at any college, nor worked at any famous employer neither. So probably irrelevant. I sure knows that when I'm doing the hiring, I rarely if ever read what colleges or what previous companies the candidate worked on. All that matters is what their experience is, what they learned so far, what they tell me they wanna do in the future and how they are as a person. > You also assum…

Not all 250 applications are in the same time frame. I would that the first 4 to 6 weeks I was applying just like you said. Selecting very specific companies and creating higher quality applications. Only when it seemed to be going nowhere I made it a numbers game. And that worked for me.

About your profile, I was not talking about credentials only. The fact that you are in position to hire someone tells me you are not a junior developer. The hiring market for junior vs senior is very different. If you are a senior/principal/staff/tech lead fullstack, you can choose where to work. If you happen to know something very specific, that helps too. I have 3 years of experience only with Javascript on the frontend. It is not the same market as you probably.

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#239

Post by Balgair »

comprev wrote: post #120
soneca wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

”I’m sure your success rate will improve then” I think you are wrong. I don’t have a CS degree, I don’t have top brand college or employer. You also assume wrong that I didn’t dedicated myself to apply to specific jobs where I was a very good fit. I did that. And it didn’t got me offers. If you tell me more about your profile, I am sure I can pinpoint why you get 100% success rate and I don’t. I am pretty sure it is…

Your comments echo what many who are currently employed say. When the shoe is on the other foot though, and unemployed, you can almost guarantee they will have applied to 100+ roles!

Oh man, it's in the thousands every time I apply. I used to keep a spreadsheet of it, but that just got depressing. Job searches are quite painful.

(Note that I'm in biotech and real engineering, not SW)

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#240

Post by demosito666 »

capableweb wrote: post #93
soneca wrote: post #80

I believe I am a good writer. On my first job as a developer I kept getting very positive feedback on my writing. I ended up even starting a newsletter with writing advice for software developers[0]. So 4 months ago I started looking for a remote job. I applied to 250+ positions. All very suited to my skills (e.g. I wouldn’t apply to any job asking for “senior” or “fullstack”). I got about only ~15 interviews, 1 offe…

> I applied to 250+ positions That sounds wrong. It's common, but it still sounds wrong to me. When I look for new jobs, I find a couple of companies (3-4) that match with what I'm looking for exactly, read up on the companies, tell them explicitly how I fit into what they need and write them personally. I have a 100% success rate when it comes to interviews, and most of the time I get a offer, but drop out when my c…

Is the job market so tough/picky in US (I assume it's US by default since we're on HN) or is it because the IT companies don't hire people without CS degree? I get 2-3 interview invites every day on my LikedIn account just for listed keywords (nothing special, really, generic devops stuff). And the account is explicitly marked as "not looking for a job". I leave in Eastern Europe with a lot of huge outsource outlets though, maybe that drives the demand up.
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