Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Get A Job: The Craigslist Experiment

thoughtcatalog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 130 posts

Re: Get A Job: The Craigslist Experiment

#101

Post by greenranger »

robryan wrote: post #99
chubs wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You saying that he simply put too high a payrate on his fake ad and that's why the glut of responses?

Interesting that this high rate of payment is much lower than the Australia minimum wage in USD. I guess the purchasing power in America might be a little higher but still sounds like a pretty sad state of affairs.

I was thinking the same thing. I'm in Canada and I haven't made twelve bucks an hour since I was a pimple faced high schooler. If you advertised a wage like that here, you would be literally scraping the bottom of the labour barrel.

Re: Get A Job: The Craigslist Experiment

#102

Post by natmaster »

I'm genuinely curious why the author - who is obviously very intelligent otherwise - does not simply use their intelligence to learn an actual marketable skill. Especially if they are looking at applying for such boring jobs - surely some sort of scientific analysis like they did in this article would be more interesting to do as a job.

Re: Get A Job: The Craigslist Experiment

#103

Post by jsnell »

btilly wrote: post #98
l3amm wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that work samples are definitely the way to go, I'm unsure how you could possibly engineer a work-sample that is time effective for 600 people. Clearly, the first pass of the screen cannot be the work sample alone or you will be administering dozens if not hundreds, since I doubt the threat of a worksample in a job ad would scare many people away (could very well be wrong about that.) I think this is wh…

Here is a simple example of how to automate this for developers. Everyone who applies is sent a link. That link contains a problem description, and a stub program. You're supposed to write the program and send it back. When you send it back, they compile your program and run a standard set of unit tests on it. If it passes the unit tests, then a human looks at it. Generally the code will be "good enough" to bring the…

The problem is that the people you'd most like to hire probably have little interest in taking a programming test. So you're just filtering them out and left with the dregs. For this to work you need one of the following:

* Problems that are so interesting that people would hack on them just for the fun of it, even if they have no interest in the job.

* A company that's high profile enough (and in a good way) that they can have slightly abusive hiring practices and still get an abundance of good candidates.

* You're looking for inexperienced or desperate people.

The canonical example of using programming problems as a pre-filter was ITA software, who had both of the first points covered. There's some great discussion on this in the HN archives, e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3429231

Re: Get A Job: The Craigslist Experiment

#104

Post by michaelt »

jsnell wrote: post #103
btilly wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a simple example of how to automate this for developers. Everyone who applies is sent a link. That link contains a problem description, and a stub program. You're supposed to write the program and send it back. When you send it back, they compile your program and run a standard set of unit tests on it. If it passes the unit tests, then a human looks at it. Generally the code will be "good enough" to bring the…

The problem is that the people you'd most like to hire probably have little interest in taking a programming test. So you're just filtering them out and left with the dregs. For this to work you need one of the following: * Problems that are so interesting that people would hack on them just for the fun of it, even if they have no interest in the job. * A company that's high profile enough (and in a good way) that th…

>The problem is that the people you'd most like to hire probably have little interest in taking a programming test. So you're just filtering them out and left with the dregs. For this to work you need one of the following:

That may be the case if you're trying to headhunt experienced developers who are currently in good jobs.

But if you're an unemployed programmer, or an employed programmer actively looking for a different job, why wouldn't you take a programming test? Programming tests and technical interviews where you have to code are normal and expected for coding jobs, at least in my experience.

Re: Get A Job: The Craigslist Experiment

#105

Post by lrobb »

patio11 wrote: post #100
chubs wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You saying that he simply put too high a payrate on his fake ad and that's why the glut of responses?

He is getting many responses because he is offering approximately $4,000 (delivered half in taxable cash and half in untaxable benefits) in return for a thing whose market price is closer to $1,500 (delivered all in taxable cash). He should be offered the product he wishes to buy at any quantity which he wishes to purchase. (The product is "The full-time labor of any literate person legally capable of work in Midtown…

12per hour with benefits is right in line with what payscale reports as the average for admin assistants in Manhattan.

Which is just slightly more than average pay for baristas.

Re: Get A Job: The Craigslist Experiment

#106

Post by lrobb »

patio11 wrote: post #92

Cheat sheet for humanities master's degree holders: microecon 101 suggests that anyone offering to pay a substantial premium to the market clearing price for X will be offered lots of X.

Another cheat sheet suggests that wages are downwardly sticky, and that an oversupply of X will also result in a lot of X being offered.

Re: Get A Job: The Craigslist Experiment

#107

Post by simonbarker87 »

I know that unemployment is high but how does a shift from say 6% (arbitrary number as I'm not american so don't know the numbers) to 9% have such dramatic effects, if you spin it round and say that employment has dropped from 94% to 91% the stats sound pretty good - wrong direction change granted.

Jumping from 6% to 9% means half as many more are now looking for work.

I must be missing something somewhere so if someone can explain this I would very much appreciate it.

Re: Get A Job: The Craigslist Experiment

#108

Post by jsnell »

michaelt wrote: post #104
jsnell wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the people you'd most like to hire probably have little interest in taking a programming test. So you're just filtering them out and left with the dregs. For this to work you need one of the following: * Problems that are so interesting that people would hack on them just for the fun of it, even if they have no interest in the job. * A company that's high profile enough (and in a good way) that th…

>The problem is that the people you'd most like to hire probably have little interest in taking a programming test. So you're just filtering them out and left with the dregs. For this to work you need one of the following: That may be the case if you're trying to headhunt experienced developers who are currently in good jobs. But if you're an unemployed programmer, or an employed programmer actively looking for a dif…

There's a big difference between a programming assignment used as a filter to decide whom to interview vs an interview question.

The hiring process is very expensive. But it's expensive in a fairly symmetric way. It's in the interest of both parties to stop the process if there isn't mutual interest.

Both the company and the candidate will spend a lot of time in interviews, so it's in everyone's best interests to make sure that time isn't wasted if there no (or almost no) chance of the person being hired / accepting a job.

There might be earlier steps in the process, but those are also symmetric. It'll take a few minutes of your time to send a resume to a company, but somebody there will be tossing away 80% of them after reading through them once. There might be a phone screen or two in advance, to decide whether there's any point in having someone come in for an interview, but that is likewise costly to both parties.

But a programming test as the very first step of an interview is totally different. Now the costs are asymmetric. The company has an up-front cost (potentially substantial) but spends little time on each candidate. The candidate spends the time up-front, and only later finds out whether the company is at all interested.

The candidate isn't invested in the process yet. So why would he spend an hour, when he has no idea of whether the company is interested? Maybe it's a really fun problem to solve. Or maybe he really, really wants to work at that particular company. Or maybe he is indeed unemployed like you suggested.

But someone currently employed is likely to have a different priorities from a student or someone who is unemployed, even if they are actively looking for a new job. How large a percentage of them are you willing to weed out completely just by making it harder for them to even enter the hiring funnel? 90%? 50%?

Re: Get A Job: The Craigslist Experiment

#109

Post by Paul_S »

I see how the author gets useful information for himself but is this ethical? He essentially wasted time of those people who applied in good faith. A bit cruel.

He solicited personal information from those people - I'm sure there are rules about storing and processing personal information.

Re: Get A Job: The Craigslist Experiment

#110

Post by yummyfajitas »

tokenadult wrote: post #56

An interesting experiment (for a company that actually has a job and is not leading people on) would be to distinguish a job posting that says "Hiring for this position will be based in large part on a work-sample test during a half day at our office" versus "Previous experience . . . preferred, but will train the right candidate." We can tell that the United States economy is in recession (as is the case in many oth…

We can tell that the United States economy is in recession

The recession ended years ago. May 2009, if I remember right.

Post reply on HN