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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

#151

Post by jacques_chester »

Gustomaximus wrote: post #133

I had an interesting call once asking me to interview for marketing job at a women's online fashion business. I said to the person "not sure IM the right person, I'm male and have zero interest in fashion". To which she replied "That's great because I've got plenty of that fit, I want someone that looks at this more as a business than personal interest" I never interviewed as they salary was low, but I really liked t…

Some (not all) recruiters are salespeople. They'll say any old thing, just so long as you hop on the conveyor belt.

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

#152

Post by say_it_as_it_is »

I think that managers should have to take the GMAT as part of the hiring process, even if they got their MBA 20 years ago. They need to know number properties and have basic critical reasoning skills for the roles that they are interviewing for. Why give them a free pass while requiring principal engineers with 20 years experience to answer leetcode problems? The low quality management at large organizations is an obvious sign that they're not screening for the best talent, who clearly scores at least 700 on the GMAT.

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

#153

Post by delaynomore »

Spooky23 wrote: post #57
tjpnz wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the school thing a strictly American phenomenon? In New Zealand for instance all that tends to matter is which city/town you want to live in and whether the institution offers the field you want to major in (medicine for example is only offered by Otago IIRC). I've only been asked for grades once in the previous 12 years where at which point I withdrew my application.

In some cases, school is a legal way to discriminate. The top tier companies incorporate recruiting into their culture. If you recruit at Brown, you’re going to get a different candidate than some CUNY school. They all tested well in high school or have parents with good networks, and they tend to look and quack alike.

"Culture fit" is just another way to discriminate a candidate based on race, age, or gender.

HR from my company has explicitly told all interviewers not to use "culture fit" as a reason to disqualify a candidate presumably to avoid potential lawsuits.

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

#154

Post by [deleted] »

jldugger wrote: post #69
musingsole wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is this obvious perspective vacates with any level of moral maze. The hiring processes kind of require it --> getting headcount approval requires defining a role and arguing how it will lead to better outcomes and then finding/interviewing candidates takes months of time. If your priorities shift in that time...well now you have to shoehorn whatever candidates you get into the role definition you gave b…

> And then priorities shift again before they start. Leaving you not knowing what they'll be working on, but also certain you'll need extra hands on something sooner rather than later... > AND SO: "give me a smart generalist that specialized in these 8 technologies that make up the entirety of our product" becomes the only viable hire. I mean, unless you were going to fire this person when the project you got head co…

[deleted]

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

#155

Post by w0mbat »

EvilEy3 wrote: post #101
w0mbat wrote: post #60

I think this guy might be on to something. Every time you add a person to the team who is more stupid than you, it pushes you further up the stack rank. Why hire people with loyalty when you can hire people who can't quit because they can't find their way out of the building? Don't waste money on high salaries, just find people too dumb to realize you are paying them in Monopoly money. Soon you will be the top perfor…

You're probably bring downvoted for the attitude, but you're right. I've worked for a couple of low-mid tier companies and their core was always mediocre talent who is there because it's the top of the world for them. Top talent will always gravitate towards money, prestige. Sure there are some outliers that will work for food and change world, but if you can earn more why wouldn't you?

I was just riffing on a joke, but much as I love Hacker News, it's a bad place for that. Too many people who take everything too seriously. But yeah, there was a pinch of truth in what I said too.

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

#156

Post by lostcolony »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #91
lostcolony wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like you're saying FAANG is above average. Which I'd grant, but that's not really a negation.

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

#157

Post by alisonkisk »

Gustomaximus wrote: post #133

I had an interesting call once asking me to interview for marketing job at a women's online fashion business. I said to the person "not sure IM the right person, I'm male and have zero interest in fashion". To which she replied "That's great because I've got plenty of that fit, I want someone that looks at this more as a business than personal interest" I never interviewed as they salary was low, but I really liked t…

Being "passionate about the business" is overmuch, but for the employer, it's important that candidate respects the business, in the sense that the candidate believes that what the business is doing matters (quality product that will make the world better, boss recognizes good work and rewards it, customers deserve to be fleeced, or what ever gets you out of bed), so that you want to accomplish progress at work and not just do the minimum for the paycheck.

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

#158

Post by decafninja »

EvilEy3 wrote: post #141
zerr wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the stuff related to the actual day job. I've heard this about their London office.

Isn't this checked at system design round?

Kind of different. Using my example of the frontend interview track as an example, they would ask you something like:

"implement a custom event emitter class in JavaScript" or "implement an image carousel component"...

...instead of something like "invert a binary tree".

Plus you'd get 2-3 rounds of these questions in lieu of the leetcode DS&A rounds. The (usually single) system design round would remain the same (albeit being something like implementing a UI component at a high and holistic level).

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

#159

Post by KajMagnus »

WalterBright wrote: post #85
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.

> Why would you hire someone unless you had a need for their talents? If you have an opportunity to hire someone with stellar talents, even if it isn't directly aligned with your business, hire them anyway. Modify your business plan to capitalize (!) on those special talents. Even if you don't, there is the opportunity for unexpected synergy. After all, I've applied many things I learned designing gearboxes to the D…

> many things I learned designing gearboxes to the D programming language

I'm curious about what are some of those things :- )

(embedded software for gearboxes? Or physical design things that were translatable to software?)

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

#160

Post by WalterBright »

KajMagnus wrote: post #159
WalterBright wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would you hire someone unless you had a need for their talents? If you have an opportunity to hire someone with stellar talents, even if it isn't directly aligned with your business, hire them anyway. Modify your business plan to capitalize (!) on those special talents. Even if you don't, there is the opportunity for unexpected synergy. After all, I've applied many things I learned designing gearboxes to the D…

> many things I learned designing gearboxes to the D programming language I'm curious about what are some of those things :- ) (embedded software for gearboxes? Or physical design things that were translatable to software?)

I wrote a couple articles about one aspect:

https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b39.html https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b40.html

which I learned from mechanical design at Boeing.

Another aspect is making it impossible to assemble parts any way but the correct way. For example, you can write C code like this:

    for (i = 0; i
A colleague of mine, a very good programmer, was stymied by this for a full day. The next day I added a warning to my C compiler for it. As time went on, this warning became commonplace in other compilers.

But in D, I didn't make it a warning. I made in an error. A ; cannot be used to create an empty statement, that can only be done with { }. I still can't believe C/C++ have never made that an error.

Another one is:

    if (a
That doesn't do what one thinks it does. So in D it's an error.

D is better because so many unnecessary things in C and C++ are minefields, and instead of warning the user, they're just illegal. (All have ways of doing the equivalent if one really needs to.)

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