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Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses

benjiweber.co.uk

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Re: Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses

#91

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

lostcolony wrote: post #71
rozap wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of "top" candidates don't work and don't want to work at a faang company.

Quite honestly I have my doubts FAANG selects for "top" candidates anyway. Unless you define "top candidate" as "those FAANG selects".

The loop variance is very high, so there's a lot of error, but in terms of the overall quality of my co-workers, the FAANG i spent five years at was definitely the best.

I do notice a substantial difference in average quality between them and less successful Bay Area companies, which does suggest that they are doing a reasonably good job at getting pretty good people in the door.

Re: Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses

#92

Post by onion2k »

waihtis wrote: post #75
nsonha wrote: post #72

this whole thing reads: don't hire top talent, hire special talent, to us, whatever. The latter sounds even harder than the former. It's hard to see your own weakness, it's rarer to have people to fill an exact particular gap at that particular point in time. Maybe do away with the mindset of people as off-the-shelf products and think about them more as raw resources and focus more on upskilling. Universities are hop…

Good mindset for big corp, not so for small biz. Waiting for someone to upskill and gain momentum for 6-12 months means a lost lump sum of money that can kill your business.

Hiring a candidate who already knows what you need often takes a lot longer than hiring someone who can learn what you need even if you account for the on-boarding time, especially if it's a slightly esoteric thing.

Difficulty in hiring people who know your stack is also a good reason to choose the simplest and most common tech to run on rather than something niche you feel is technically better.

Re: Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses

#93

Post by vidarh »

johnsmith4739 wrote: post #42
marcinzm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've both taken and been at a company that administered personality tests as part of the interview process. I found the results fairly useless to be honest. Although I did manage to score so low on one part of the assessment that an interviewer seemed to question my basic ability to function in society.

Personality tests are broken - there is no way a functioning human being will answer them truthfully. Not for the lack of trying... our subconscious will try to protect us and we'll answer in a way we imagine it is socially acceptable.

Personality tests are useful for one thing: Filtering out potential employers that I don't want to work for.

Re: Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses

#94

Post by Too »

johnsmith4739 wrote: post #30

Amazes me how little data-driven recruiting is. Just as the author puts it, a good hire is for culture ad, and that means being explicitly aware of what's missing. Tough stuff to really look inside and see what's missing. Most hires I see are either out of desperation or because the recruiter had a good chemistry with the candidate. A 1h interview means 0,3% of the time I will work with that person in one year. Talk…

Counter point to this also on the front-page today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26763336 - Things I was asked to do while job hunting

The punchline being, after filling in a bunch of such personality tests "I accepted a position with a company that had a sane, speedy hiring process."

Asking candidates to fill in data in a format to fit your funnel will just scare away top talent.

Re: Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses

#96

Post by EvilEy3 »

zerr wrote: post #89
objclxt wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> at Facebook the general hiring process is in two steps. There’s a centralized hire/no hire that most people are aware of and then a second phase where team selection happens This is not quite how it works. I was a hiring manager at Facebook for several years. It is made very clear to EMs that team selection is not a second interview or extension of the hiring process. We do not consider team selection part of hirin…

Btw, I've heard fb is moving away from leetcode BS stuff for interviews. Can you confirm that?

What are they replacing it with? Back to prestigious university?

Re: Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses

#97

Post by tsimionescu »

jghn wrote: post #66
vjeux wrote: post #26

For what it’s worth, at Facebook the general hiring process is in two steps. There’s a centralized hire/no hire that most people are aware of and then a second phase where team selection happens. This is where all the “hire for weakness” steps that the author mention happen. Teams are looking at this pool of people for speciality, levels... that they need and where the matchmaking happens. There are also a lot of sma…

This is one of those areas where more companies need to realize they're not a FAANG. As Joel has pointed out in the past, you're not getting the cream of the crop as a normal company. Likewise you probably neither need nor even want the top. However what you do need is to plug a few holes here and there. As a hiring manager I find it much better to think in terms of a skill mesh. I'm always looking to bring the colle…

Not sure why you think FAANG is getting the cream of the crop. Looking at stuff like Rob Pike's comments about Go's use for the general Google employee base [0], I think there is quite a lot of misalignment between the aura of mystique from the outside and the situation as seen from the inside.

[0]“The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.”

https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2014/Fr... (00:20:40 up to 00:21:10)

Re: Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses

#98

Post by EvilEy3 »

onion2k wrote: post #90
wccrawford wrote: post #2

>Instead of “how can we find the smartest people?” think about “how can we find people who will make our team stronger?” I would have thought that was obvious? Why would you hire someone unless you had a need for their talents? I guess I'm probably thinking small-business. At the biggest companies, they probably just hire and hope to fit them in because hiring for exact needs doesn't really scale.

You only need to read a few dozen job adverts to see that tech companies are focused entirely on technical ability and don't hire for other skills. How often do you see "must know Typescript, expert in Docker, passionate about algorithms" compared to "must understand writing documentation, expert in sprint planning, passionate about user value"? Skills that aren't tech are rarely valued by tech companies despite the…

> expert in sprint planning

Because they need tech expert and not PO?

> passionate about user value

Lmao, this is such a vague and useless statement that it is barely worth commenting.

What the hell is "passion", how do quantify it and how do you use it? What happens when person you hired for "passion" loses it?

> Sometimes the best hire for the team is the second best developer but the best person-who-can-explain-things or person-who-can-run-meetings if explaining things or running meetings is holding the team back.

You test for that during interview. Do you think algo challenge, system design are just writing some stuff on the whiteboard and you're done? You need to explain stuff in such a way that interview wants to hire you.

Re: Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses

#99

Post by EvilEy3 »

Kinrany wrote: post #29
andrew_v4 wrote: post #7

Two personal counterexamples, whether right or wrong: Management consulting - you want to be perceived as hiring the best - project work that is not known in advance, you need very versatile people - looking for demonstrated desire to jump through the hoops and do the marginal work that makes you the "top" Software Engineering - some overlap with the reasons above - adds to the moat: if they're happy working for FAAN…

> project work that is not known in advance, you need very versatile people Don't you need the team to be versatile instead of individuals?

You can combine versatile individuals in versatile teams.
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