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My spiciest take on tech hiring

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Re: My spiciest take on tech hiring

#61

Post by corimaith »

busterarm wrote: post #40
corimaith wrote: post #26

IMO, any strategy or attempt to filter out the "right" candidates can always be gamed that a change of culture is inevitable. Iron Law of Bureaucracy. You can delay it, but it will happen. Just look at Google today despite their massive investments in the hiring process. I think if you really want to preserve your culture long term, you need to start looking to exporting your culture outwards into general society rat…

Given how the culture of every company I've ever worked for was a stinking, nasty, high-school environment and how the companies' values did nothing but encourage ineptitude and mediocrity, I'm glad that companies absolutely suck at exporting their culture as much as they suck at building it. Your suggestion will give me nightmares for weeks.

I'd agree that whether a specific culture is worth preserving or not is another question. Change by itself is not necessarily good or bad.

But my point of how internal culture gradually changes is in effect an exportation from another culture to this one. If the toxic practices you are describing were to begin to become relentlessly exported to the environment around you, remaining defensive dosen't work long term. You'd need to push back.

Re: My spiciest take on tech hiring

#62

Post by busterarm »

tylerchilds wrote: post #39
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your solution is "change society" because you think that's easier than fixing your hiring process???

That's roughly how Apple became Apple. Computers as a lifestyle. Google could have made the world googley, but they kept the googley to themselves.

Every single successful Google product except Search, Gmail and Chrome was an acquisition. The last two almost didn't even get released and the third relied on poaching a bunch of Firefox engineers.

Google can't build anything, only buy.

Re: My spiciest take on tech hiring

#63

Post by busterarm »

sublinear wrote: post #60
busterarm wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My whole point is it's a worse deal at anything less than 3x pay. Three to six months of 1.5x pay just to have to look for a job again and you probably haven't done any meaningful work in the last three to six months? My brother used to contract-to-hire in the 90s-00s for banks and not even getting issued a laptop for the first few months of a contract happened nearly 100% of the time. Literally months of sitting aro…

> Three to six months of 1.5x pay just to have to look for a job again and you probably haven't done any meaningful work in the last three to six months? Hard disagree. They're not really looking to extend full employment to people like you, but may from time to time. If you're really that good you have nothing to worry about. I'm speaking from experience working on both ends of the contract-to-hire process.

If I'm really that good I have another contract lined up already and I'm out the door. The only way you're getting me back is with a fulltime offer after my next contract ends. Or you're buying me out.

Might as well skip the games.

I've been on both sides of it too and I would never hire that way looking for good, experienced people. My experience with people successful at work is that they're successful in other endeavors too such as their private life. Experience also tells me that most peoples' life partners are extremely intolerant of career uncertainty, unless as a couple they are both very young.

Re: My spiciest take on tech hiring

#64

Post by busterarm »

LVB wrote: post #27
sfblah wrote: post #12

If you want to see a weird process, apply for a dev role at Meta. They appear to optimize for people who have either memorized leetcode or are really good at cheating. I’m in their process as a pretty senior dev mostly on a lark (I hate the company). I’m pretty sure the only way I could get hired is to cheat. Why would they want to hire folks that way?

I recently bailed on their process. My reward for passing the leetcode gantlet would be a 50% chance that the offer would require uprooting my family and moving across the country. Ok, we’re done.

They really need to get their shit together. Even for a few years after the Instagram acquisition and having an established office in NY, they tended to be pretty wishy-washy even with new hires on whether they could work from NY or would be forced to relocate to the west coast and it would take going through their full orientation in CA before you found out.

Now that they have a big office in Moynihan and SWE teams that do operations work they're a little more consistent about being able to work out of the location that you expect, but they still can't seem to always figure this out for sure _before_ you accept their offer.

Re: My spiciest take on tech hiring

#65

Post by sublinear »

busterarm wrote: post #63
sublinear wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Three to six months of 1.5x pay just to have to look for a job again and you probably haven't done any meaningful work in the last three to six months? Hard disagree. They're not really looking to extend full employment to people like you, but may from time to time. If you're really that good you have nothing to worry about. I'm speaking from experience working on both ends of the contract-to-hire process.

If I'm really that good I have another contract lined up already and I'm out the door. The only way you're getting me back is with a fulltime offer after my next contract ends. Or you're buying me out. Might as well skip the games. I've been on both sides of it too and I would never hire that way looking for good, experienced people. My experience with people successful at work is that they're successful in other end…

> Experience also tells me that most peoples' life partners are extremely intolerant of career uncertainty, unless as a couple they are both very young.

I can only laugh at this statement.

Re: My spiciest take on tech hiring

#66

Post by nickcox »

LVB wrote: post #27
sfblah wrote: post #12

If you want to see a weird process, apply for a dev role at Meta. They appear to optimize for people who have either memorized leetcode or are really good at cheating. I’m in their process as a pretty senior dev mostly on a lark (I hate the company). I’m pretty sure the only way I could get hired is to cheat. Why would they want to hire folks that way?

I recently bailed on their process. My reward for passing the leetcode gantlet would be a 50% chance that the offer would require uprooting my family and moving across the country. Ok, we’re done.

Why didn't they tell you this at the start?

Re: My spiciest take on tech hiring

#67

Post by busterarm »

sublinear wrote: post #65
busterarm wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm really that good I have another contract lined up already and I'm out the door. The only way you're getting me back is with a fulltime offer after my next contract ends. Or you're buying me out. Might as well skip the games. I've been on both sides of it too and I would never hire that way looking for good, experienced people. My experience with people successful at work is that they're successful in other end…

> Experience also tells me that most peoples' life partners are extremely intolerant of career uncertainty, unless as a couple they are both very young. I can only laugh at this statement.

You can but it's pretty naive. The effects of layoffs and non-fulltime employment on families have been well studied with all of the conclusions that one should expect.

I know multiple guys with wildly successful side-hustles, years-long backlogs of clients and more than enough income to exceed their day jobs and their wives absolutely will not allow them to leave their fulltime jobs because they're fearful of the risks of self-employment. These are the kind of men that put their family as their first priority.

If you're only in the business of hiring kids, maybe you're entitled to your perspective but that's not somewhere I'm looking to work.

Re: My spiciest take on tech hiring

#69

Post by tptacek »

foobiekr wrote: post #18
tptacek wrote: post #2

This is not a very spicy take. A spicier take is that you can hire people without administering any interviews at all. Hire like an orchestra: through an audition process, which, in a work setting, is also known as "work-sample testing". It works a treat.

What senior person wants to do this?

I don't care. We hire resume-blind.

Re: My spiciest take on tech hiring

#70

Post by anal_reactor »

> A lot of companies think that dragging out the interview process helps improve candidate quality, but what they’re actually doing is inadvertently selecting for more desperate candidates that have a higher tolerance for bullshit and process. Is that the kind of engineer that you want to attract as you grow your organization?

OP has never worked in a corporate environment

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