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I don't hire unlucky people

raganwald.posterous.com

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Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#171

Post by vellum »

tedunangst wrote: post #164
quaunaut wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 500 applicants gets wittled down quickly after you look at someone's Github or code examples. Suddenly you're looking at 10 or 15 at most. You can do that.

And now you're using a heuristic even less correlated with programming ability. My list of awesome programmers I would hire again in a heartbeat has, to my knowledge, a combined 0 lines of code on github.

It's one heuristic out of many, and it's a fast one. If you go through all 10-15 github profiles, and you find an awesome programmer, than you're done for that point in time. If you don't find any, you can use a more time-consuming heuristic.

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#173

Post by davidkatz »

jack-r-abbit wrote: post #139
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.

Wow. That app is really bad for people like me. I'm not on GitHub because I code for my employers. That work doesn't get put out there like that. I don't tweet much at all about the languages I code in or cool bits of code I just wrote or any of that. I'm one of those weirdos that tweets pictures of my lunch and funny crap my 4yr old says. I'm "on" StackOverflow since I have a log in... but I rarely comment on stuff…

We know, and we're working hard at that problem. Here's two thoughts:

(1) It's not our goal to make candidates like you look bad, not at all. When candidates have professional stuff online, we think employers should be interested in getting a good view of it. That's all we try to do. We wouldn't give you a bad score - we'd give you no score at all. Essentially, we're telling employers: "we can't know anything about this candidate, you should look at other stuff".

(2) I checked out your HN profile, and you have a ton of comments up. So, you do interact professionally online, at least in some way. I'm curious to hear your thoughts - say you applied for a job, and we did our best (algorithmic) job to make your HN footprint interesting to employers - what would that do for your attractiveness as a candidate?

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#174

Post by eli_gottlieb »

timr wrote: post #141
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article criticises the unquestioning use of bad heuristics. One needs to think very carefully about how accurate the heuristics employed are at describing the unseen (but directly desired) attribute(s) as well as what un-desirable attributes it may be silently signalling. As someone who worked at an investment bank, I'd go ballistic when managers would turn away candidates because their resumes weren't properly a…

You know what's kind of funny, though? I bet that a not-so-small percentage of people who are nodding their heads up-and-down wildly in response to this essay think nothing of filtering their applicant pool based on github profile. After all, it's a "coding" metric, right?

Ha, I always love seeing a job application that demands a Github profile, with no place for Bitbucket or Google Code (not to mention Sourceforge!).

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#175

Post by davidkatz »

amcintyre wrote: post #169
davidkatz wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sometimes developers don't have a choice about putting their work online--many large companies actively discourage (or prohibit) their engineers from participating in any meaningful way in open source projects. Want to post your personal hacking online under your real name? Nope, sorry--"everything you do belongs to the company, and we can't take the chance that you might accidentally post some uber-valuable trade se…

We know, and that sucks. Let me ask you a question though - developers who can't put their code online, will some of them not engage online otherwise? Say, consume professional content on twitter, post on HN, or answer questions on Stack Overflow?

Our goal is to look at any kind of professional activity online, not only code. What do you think?

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#176

Post by wonnage »

brazzy wrote: post #83
DarkShikari wrote: post #10

This article is superb. We tried placing ads for ninjas, rock stars, and so on, but I discovered this was the cultural equivalent of advertising for white males who drink dry martinis. Not that white males who drink dry martinis can’t do the job, but there’s no real difference between advertising for a Ninja and throwing half your resumés away because you don’t like unlucky people. Either way, you end up with fewer r…

The article is almost completely useless. It claims you shouldn't throw out resumes based on simple heuristics and stuff that only correlates with programming ability because there are so few people applying who are any good, but has exactly one sentence to say about how to then actually find those few people: "I grill them, hard, on actual programming and actual software development." Right. Sure. Every single one o…

Not to mention the importance of cultural fit, too.

People dismiss cultural fit because it seems superficial. In reality, programming ability is part of cultural fit - who wants to work with an incompetent? A good programmer does not exist in isolation, a good programmer exists in context of the people s/he works with.

So if you find that rockstar/ninja advertising attracts the type of people you want - why not? Personally I think it's tacky, and we make fun of it where I work. But there are plenty of places with no such qualms, and it seems dishonest to not embrace that.

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#177

Post by davidkatz »

zavulon wrote: post #55
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.

Something that wasn't clear to me - as an employer - what do I get when I sign up? Do you have candidates' profiles like the sample one in the system, or I will have to provide my own candidates to filter through your system to get a profile like that?

We definitely need to make that clearer. Right now, we're focussing on letting companies make better sense of the candidates they already have. Can you tell me your thoughts on that?

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#178

Post by davidkatz »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #77
idan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now, we aren't doing any kind of indexing. If you apply for a position through our service, you give whatever information you want about yourself, and we check out your public data on those networks. If you don't want to share your twitter or stack overflow, leave those fields blank. We don't publish the details of the algorithm but in effects it would be fairly difficult to game. Either you have a solid histor…

I didn't actually see any way for me as a developer to use your service. Signing up for the beta looked like a way for an employer to sign up.

Right. Our current goals is to help employers with their existing candidates. I have a question - would you like to be able to get a profile on skills? If so, what would you do with it?

Thanks!

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#179

Post by davidkatz »

mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #61
davidkatz wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey! I'm David, the other co-founder of Skills. We're been mulling over our scoring for a while, and at this point we don't consider it a fundamental part of the product. Within the next few weeks, we'll be canning 'passion' and 'respect' and replacing it with something much simpler. In the future, we might drop scoring all together. Our mission it to extract the most meaningful data from someone's professional activ…

I think that online activity like contributions to forums, twitter and github could be good indicators of a quality employee. However, I know many really smart, productive people who just aren't participating online in a significant way. If you're hiring for a community liaison then online activity is a critical indicator. If you're hiring a network engineer who watches log files and traffic all day online activity m…

Agree 100%. Our approach is "if a candidate has some data online, we'll help you make better sense of it. If they don't, there's nothing we can tell you."

Re: I don't hire unlucky people

#180

Post by chrisrhoden »

cgag wrote: post #167
zanny wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a semi-introvert graduating with my BS in CS and am looking for jobs right now. And this is all I ever feel. I read dozens of job ads across the country (I look through all of them because I really want to get out and move some place new, see the world - being fresh out of college is the best time for me to do that and all) and in the process I see only two kinds of jobs for someone like me. The ads either come a…

I feel the same way, when I hear about this talent shortage, I can't help but assume they mean there are only so many people at the top of stanford/mit's classes.

This is wrong. I don't know a single Rails developer (with or without a degree) who doesn't have more work than they can handle available to them. Sometimes the jobs are more concentrated in certain areas than others, but I personally get several cold calls from recruiters every week, and I have no degree, and I am no rockstar.
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