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He got 1%, we can't hire him

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Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#101

Post by jacques_chester »

Xylakant wrote: post #73
antirez wrote: post #14

Improving a company 101: * Get rid of HR people. * Profit.

I respectfully disagree. Get some decent HR people and don't give them the last call on hiring decisions. Make it clear that HR is supporting the process, but not leading the process and that the last call is with the department/team that is looking for a hire. Let HR take all the tedious tasks of hiring from the developers, such as all the legalese, handling employee benefits, sick reports and all associated paperwo…

The key is to distinguish between organisations that provide a service and organisations that enforce a standard.

HR is ideally the former and not the latter.

Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#102

Post by valleyer »

robinson-wall wrote: post #58
rjknight wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really valid, but it's not uncommon either. It's something that would sound unremarkable in speech but looks quite bad when written down.

It's perfectly valid. "X and I" is only valid if the sentence makes sense if you only used "I". This article makes one valid use of "me and X": > in an effort to score extra points with me and Carl. If you changed that to "Carl and I" then took out Carl it would be "to score extra points with I", which is disturbing and wrong.

Notice that I said "as the subject of a sentence". It certainly works in the single case you chose. How about these:

"… and me and Carl were quietly trying to weigh up which team …" "Me and Carl had a winner and …" "During the excercise me and a colleague, Carl, made ourselves available …"

Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#103

Post by mathattack »

antirez wrote: post #14

Improving a company 101: * Get rid of HR people. * Profit.

I disagree very much. There are many bad HR people, and many HR people who are given bad direction. It's very hard to imagine a company of over 30 or 40 people surviving without one.

Is the CEO supposed to be up on all the HR rules? Is the CEO out in the market calibrating salaries every day? Does the CEO have time to analyze optimal organization designs? Should the CEO do all the initial fit screens? Chase down background checks?

If HR is an issue, it's because they're being asked to do the wrong thing, or the individual is incompetent. Saying "We don't need HR because they are poor technical interviewers" is like saying "We don't need accountants because I don't like the expense report form." You still need accountants, and you still need HR.

Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#104

Post by jacques_chester »

robin2 wrote: post #98
antirez wrote: post #14

Improving a company 101: * Get rid of HR people. * Profit.

I once had a job at a software company where an HR manager was hired to introduce a new "Performance Management" system, where people were scored on their "behavioural competencies" and "technical competencies". I learned from my line manager (before he quit) that the HR manager regarded behavioural competencies as more important than technical competencies, because anything technical could be picked up on a week's t…

> To me, that sounds like a recipe for trouble.

You are correct. It is demonstrably going to lead to bad outcomes:

http://www.dorsethouse.com/books/mmpo.html

Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#105

Post by ajuc »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #47
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Count the number of people in senior mgmt and in all positions who can do fizzbuzz. Greater than 50% in all cases - great. Greater than 50 % for all but less than 20% in senior positions - get out. Anything less - run for the hills. It's not saying its important - everyone in Hollywood says the story is the thing - but only Pixar seems to live by it. See any talk by Ed Catmull

Why do people say "doing fizzbuzz" rather than just programming? Fizzbuzz is just a trick question to see if new programmers know how to use the modulo operator or not.

You can solve fizbuzz without modulo operator:

    bool divisible_by(int a, int b) {
      return a==((a/b)*b);
    }
It doesn't require anything more than knowledge about what division means, and I think it's fair play to require such knowledge from programmers.

Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#106

Post by chx »

If you fill out a personality test and hand it to someone who is not your doctor in some capacity you have no idea what are you doing. There's a hell of a lot one can read from the quite a few personality tests and it's can backfire you in quite spectacular ways later.

Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#107

Post by Lerc »

amirmc wrote: post #26

Thought experiment: For those running companies and hiring people. Would you take the time to occasionally run your interview processes over your existing employees? I'm not talking about involving them, I mean actually putting them through it. It would be one way to sanity-check that the process is selecting for the things you want from those coming from outside . As a company grows, the non-technical systems and po…

How many people trust their employer to take a negative result on such a test as a sign of a poorly functioning test rather than a poorly functioning worker.

Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#108

Post by Peroni »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #80
illumen wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol. London does quite a lot of risky financial shit. Also you might have heard of a little company kicking the shit out of Intel... ARM. Based in Cambridge UK, that is also where most tech investments in Europe are happening (not London or Berlin). Also, Germany and Switzerland are much more quiet and private about investments. You won't hear about many of them. These days you can invest in a UK startup, and have th…

Don't developers in London get paid crap though? I've heard horror stories about ridiculously low London salaries here on Hackernews. Are the low salaries just because their is a surplus developer talent in the UK?

It really depends on your definition of crap. London dev salaries range from £24k for absolute juniors to £120k+ for the top 2%. Contractors fare substantially better. In my recruiter days I placed a Python developer who had experience with a particular trading system on a contract with a large trading firm. His contract was £1,100 per day for 6 months.

Keep in mind the other notable differences between here and the US such as free health care, a larger number of paid holidays etc.

Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#109

Post by nicholassmith »

It's been a long while since I had to get involved in any HR related business practises, but I've got a vague feeling not hiring a candidate on the basis of a psychometric test might actually fall within hiring discrimination, if it's a case that the test is unsuitable for the candidate. Which in this case, as a non-native speaker, it seems very much like the test wouldn't be a fair fight. They simply cannot complete the testing in the same way a native speaker would.

Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#110

Post by amberes »

I once failed a test because I wasn't good at abstract thinking. And they decided to be a good developer, you had to be a good abstract thinker. At that time, the test was already more than 10 years old.

I didn't get the job, although I had several references that I was one of the best and also most social and motivated developers they had ever worked with.

One of the references also stated that I was really good at thinking 'out of the box', finding a solution while everyone was blindly staring at the problem. That is abstract thinking, no?

I'm CEO now... And it might be me, but I've worked with some abstract thinkers and whatever they cook up hasn't resulted in anything concrete yet. (except for a huge consultancy bill on occasion)

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