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I don't hire unlucky people

raganwald.posterous.com

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Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#41

Post by lutorm »

robterrell wrote: post #38
dustingetz wrote: post #21

i know a guy running a software shop. he's an active participant in the local meetup community, and he cares about people. it's no surpise that he has all sorts of talented people trying to work with him, and not enough funding to hire them all . (at least, i think that's why he hasn't hired me ;) i also know a few other people running software shops, who don't participate in the local meetup community. none of the b…

Isn't that just another filter for luck? You're filtering out candidates who don't know about the meetup, or have kids and can't make the meetup's evening hours, or prefer another meetup that happens to be at the same time elsewhere, etc.

I thought the point was that people don't even apply because they didn't hear about the job. That's not filtering, that's just not casting an effective net in the first place.

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#42

Post by idan »

yajoe wrote: post #12
idan wrote: post #4

This is exactly what we've been thinking about for the last year while we've been building http://skillsapp.com . Exactly. Love it when lucid, articulate writers take my mess of a brain and put the right words to it.

I took a look at skills app -- I like the approach and the clean layout, but a couple thoughts from this hiring manager: * Most of the really good devs I know and hire do not bother with easy metrics like number of tweets, followers, or StackOverflow points. They are perfect to paste together on summary reports and look "complete," but their absolute values or essence don't mean anything. * The high numbers on public…

Just FYI, we've been working hard on completely revamping ur github visualizationns to be a ton more meaningful. The current site is very much our MV(?)P.

We've thought about automated coding assessments but for where we are right now, it doesn't feel like the right direction to swim in to get to viability. Any kind of exam this early in the hiring process will sour the best candidates on applying. If you are a solid developer with a good track record, chances are that you wouldn't want to work with a company that can't figure that out about you with a brief googling. Anybody using that sort of tool to replace resumes is locking themselves out of the top talent.

Finally,mwe've definitely been thinking a lot recently about moving to a model without any kind of scores—just visualizations of data that help you figure out who a person is, maybe get a little bit of other personality in a way that resumes will never give you, and help you make that quick move-forward-or-not decision. We're not sure if scores really contribute something to that, and we'd love to hear what you think.

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#43

Post by emmett »

This is the opposite of my experience. When we greatly narrowed the pool of applicants from "people who want to work on live video" to "people who want to work on live video for gaming", we saw a huge uptick in how many people were interested in working for us.

TwitchTV is more attractive for programmers than Justin.tv ever was. There is something to be said for appealing to a smaller group of people more strongly.

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#44

Post by plinkplonk »

esmevane wrote: post #34
plinkplonk wrote: post #26

I agree with every point Reginald makes but (and I am being nitpicky here) the form of the story - the seeming overtailored parable nature of it, of the kind you'd find in the Reader's Digest or a religious tract - rubs me ever so slightly the wrong way. I could have done without all the fake (or seemingly fake anyway) dialogue between the Wooster/Oscar etc and would have preferred a straightforward "This is what I(R…

I agree with you on the preference, but I'd like to add that sometimes a format preference exists only as a way of allowing the author to express their ideas succinctly. As much as I may dislike the storyteller format of the article, philosophically speaking, I have a practical inability to read other, drier essays. And then there are essays which have no reasonable usage of paragraphs and sentences to encapsulate or…

"As much as I may dislike the storyteller format of the article,"

Thinking about it a bit more, there is nothing wrong with the story format. It is just that (I think) it doesn't work in this case.

The story with "He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone" in probably better than a bald statement of "don't be a hypocrite" (or whatever the moral of the story is supposed to be). But when you are hearing the story for the first time, you are drawn into it and held there till it ends and then you snap out of it and you are back in the real world.

It is just that in this case, I, the reader, was made aware that he is reading a story while I was reading it (vs being sucked into it) and every time a point came up I felt like I was being bludgeoned with it.

But then again, I thought "Godel, Escher, Bach" was pretentious and wordy, so it is highly probable that I just have weird tastes.

Again, I don't want to harp on this too much. Just offering some feedback which may (or may not ) be useful to Reginald.

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#45

Post by amirmc »

plinkplonk wrote: post #26

I agree with every point Reginald makes but (and I am being nitpicky here) the form of the story - the seeming overtailored parable nature of it, of the kind you'd find in the Reader's Digest or a religious tract - rubs me ever so slightly the wrong way. I could have done without all the fake (or seemingly fake anyway) dialogue between the Wooster/Oscar etc and would have preferred a straightforward "This is what I(R…

I understand your nitpick (and the post could have been a lot shorter had raganwald opted to use a different style).

However, the main benefit of the story format (to me at least) is that the underlying message is so much more memorable. I'll probably forget the names of the characters and some of the detail but I'll certainly remember the point.

More importantly perhaps, is that I'll be able to re-tell the story to others (in some form). Expecially if I'm trying to convince them of this view point.

Stories are easier to remember and share (and it's one reason that telling stories about your products is better than, say, a feature list).

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#46

Post by scott_s »

plinkplonk wrote: post #26

I agree with every point Reginald makes but (and I am being nitpicky here) the form of the story - the seeming overtailored parable nature of it, of the kind you'd find in the Reader's Digest or a religious tract - rubs me ever so slightly the wrong way. I could have done without all the fake (or seemingly fake anyway) dialogue between the Wooster/Oscar etc and would have preferred a straightforward "This is what I(R…

I agree with your nitpick, but he almost makes up for it by making me read Ernestine's first sentence in the voice of Ernie from Sesame Street. (I assume that must have been intentional - I'm incapable of not doing that with a sentence that starts with "Bert,")

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#47

Post by davidkatz »

yajoe wrote: post #12
idan wrote: post #4

This is exactly what we've been thinking about for the last year while we've been building http://skillsapp.com . Exactly. Love it when lucid, articulate writers take my mess of a brain and put the right words to it.

I took a look at skills app -- I like the approach and the clean layout, but a couple thoughts from this hiring manager: * Most of the really good devs I know and hire do not bother with easy metrics like number of tweets, followers, or StackOverflow points. They are perfect to paste together on summary reports and look "complete," but their absolute values or essence don't mean anything. * The high numbers on public…

Perhaps I can try to convince you of our long term vision: developers increasingly take their work online, which results in a mountain of professional data. A lot of it is meaningless, but some of it can be woven into interesting stories.

We're still trying to find the best approach to this, but in essence, our mission is making sense of this data. Some of this will have nothing to do with popularity - say, we might give you a concise overview of someone's code or professional thoughts. Other metrics will use social activity only as a rough validation. For example, if someone has 20 watchers on GitHub, they're definitely not a celebrity, but they have crossed a very meaningful threshold of "someone cares about this person's work".

Does that sound like a good direction to you?

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#48

Post by stcredzero »

Just this morning, I was thinking about metrics. It should be possible to develop a set of metrics for code quality that would apply to apps using particular languages and libraries. These metrics would be general and very imperfect, but they would still have some utility. For example, it would be fairly easy to develop an automated metrics program to run on a given Ruby on Rails app. Things like depth of nesting in code, reported errors per statement, average lines of code per function.

What if there was a website where you could download a metrics app, which would take the measurements, then upload the data to a web app, where someone could login and see how well their shop stacks up in comparison to the general population of shops using the same language and library?

This would give hiring shops some way to quantify the maturity of the shops a prospective hire has worked.

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#49

Post by Timothee »

plinkplonk wrote: post #26

I agree with every point Reginald makes but (and I am being nitpicky here) the form of the story - the seeming overtailored parable nature of it, of the kind you'd find in the Reader's Digest or a religious tract - rubs me ever so slightly the wrong way. I could have done without all the fake (or seemingly fake anyway) dialogue between the Wooster/Oscar etc and would have preferred a straightforward "This is what I(R…

The writing style reminded me a lot of the book "Leadership and self-deception" (http://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Self-Deception-Getting-out-...) in which a guy shows up at a new job and gets a day-long welcoming from the CEO, during which they slowly go through the idea of putting people in boxes and what to do about it.

The ending of raganwald's post especially was similar in tone with "You belong here. We'll do great things together".

edit: "they slowly go through the idea of putting people in boxes and what to do about it" Hmm, this sounds kind of odd when you don't know the book I guess :) To clarify: in the book, you put people "in a box" basically when you have prejudices about them and look at things through that angle only. Or something like that.

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#50

Post by terryk88a »

Heh. My wife was turned down for a product management position because she did not send a thank you note. She forgot because she was (we were) so excited about the position.

The hiring manager went back to the recruiter asking for somebody else "just like" my wife.

(Loved the conversational format. "Bertie Wooster" is an inspired choice for that style of hiring...)

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