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

How to Hire

blog.samaltman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 82 posts

Re: How to Hire

#11

Post by mkramlich »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #9

I'd love if more companies adopted auditioning over the traditional interview process. It was counter intuitive to me at first but it's potentially a cheaper way to hire. There's less downtime for the hiring team - everyone can more or less continue what they're working on. It's a better quality of interview too - candidates have a more realistic platform to show their worth.

"touchable" portfolios, a public interaction trail, and realistic paid short audition contracts are a killer combo and I hope the future for software development hiring. I'm doing my part to promote it.

Re: How to Hire

#12

Post by beat »

bcrescimanno wrote: post #8
tom_b wrote: post #5

“Experienced” people often have higher personal burn rates and sometimes you’ll need to pay them more, but remember that great companies are not usually created by experienced people (with the exception of a few roles where it really matters a lot.) Scary statement for me to read. I'm getting older and worry that the above thinking will eventually cut off cool and even just new opportunities for me. Also hard to audi…

Ageism should scare you--and it should scare the author of this post. The inevitable forward progress of time means that literally every, single one of us will be on the wrong end of this equation at some point. The (possible) saving grace is that a lot of people who came up in the 2000s tech scene are now on the "other side of 30" and becoming quite "experienced" themselves. Hopefully, that group's attitude will cha…

On the flip side, as an old friend once said, "Do you have ten years of experience, or one year of experience ten times?"

Highly experienced people can be priceless because they have dealt with similar situations before (and it's not the technology, it's the situations). But if they didn't learn from their experiences, it doesn't help. And imho a majority of the old hands are still doing things wrong - sometimes due to management interference, sometimes due to ignorance, but mostly due to simply not making the effort to do better.

One of my own interviewing mantras is, "I don't care so much what you know how to do, as how you deal with what you don't know how to do." But honestly, this mantra taken to its logical extreme massively favors raw intelligence and flexibility over experience. That's not always a Good Thing.

Re: How to Hire

#13

Post by Scorponok »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #9

I'd love if more companies adopted auditioning over the traditional interview process. It was counter intuitive to me at first but it's potentially a cheaper way to hire. There's less downtime for the hiring team - everyone can more or less continue what they're working on. It's a better quality of interview too - candidates have a more realistic platform to show their worth.

For candidates who already have jobs, how would "auditioning" work? Is it assumed that they'd take time off from their current job to do it?

Re: How to Hire

#14

Post by bcrescimanno »

beat wrote: post #12
bcrescimanno wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ageism should scare you--and it should scare the author of this post. The inevitable forward progress of time means that literally every, single one of us will be on the wrong end of this equation at some point. The (possible) saving grace is that a lot of people who came up in the 2000s tech scene are now on the "other side of 30" and becoming quite "experienced" themselves. Hopefully, that group's attitude will cha…

On the flip side, as an old friend once said, "Do you have ten years of experience, or one year of experience ten times?" Highly experienced people can be priceless because they have dealt with similar situations before (and it's not the technology, it's the situations). But if they didn't learn from their experiences, it doesn't help. And imho a majority of the old hands are still doing things wrong - sometimes due…

Exceptionally well put; and good that you're aware of the shortcomings of looking too closely at dealing with the unknown. I love the succinctness of, "It's not the technology, it's the situations."

Obviously, crappy people with 10 years of experience are useless in any situation--it's just easier for them to blend in at Big Company X where they are one of a hundred. The rest of the article already applies well to how to weed those people out. Sadly, they're not always super-easy to spot.

Re: How to Hire

#15

Post by sama »

tom_b wrote: post #5

“Experienced” people often have higher personal burn rates and sometimes you’ll need to pay them more, but remember that great companies are not usually created by experienced people (with the exception of a few roles where it really matters a lot.) Scary statement for me to read. I'm getting older and worry that the above thinking will eventually cut off cool and even just new opportunities for me. Also hard to audi…

Experience itself is usually a good thing; the problem for startups comes when that experience brings with it things that cause issues with the startup--for example, much higher salary requirements.

Re: How to Hire

#16

Post by mooreds »

mkramlich wrote: post #10
tom_b wrote: post #5

“Experienced” people often have higher personal burn rates and sometimes you’ll need to pay them more, but remember that great companies are not usually created by experienced people (with the exception of a few roles where it really matters a lot.) Scary statement for me to read. I'm getting older and worry that the above thinking will eventually cut off cool and even just new opportunities for me. Also hard to audi…

> Also hard to audition for longer periods as suggested He did follow that up by saying you should pay the candidate for the "audition" as a contractor. I've personally experienced this, and love it, and I advocate it strongly if not outright insist on it going forward. It's the employment equivalent of dating before marriage. And it's about Getting Real as much as you can, as early as you can.

If someone is working a full time job (the currently employed are definitely targeted in the article), and are 'experienced'/older, and thus more likely to have other demands on their time like wife/kids, contracting, even in off hours, becomes more difficult.

It won't be impossible to 'audition' but it will definitely be tougher.

(To say nothing of the intellectual property issues if the possible employee is in a related field and the employer is peeved at them leaving.)

If I was at a stable, good job, and wasn't looking, and someone was trying to poach me with the siren call of 'contract to hire' or 'work this weekend', well, it'd be an uphill battle for the poacher.

Maybe that's why I'm not in the Bay area, working for a startup :).

Re: How to Hire

#17

Post by beat »

pdfcollect wrote: post #3

And why does Stripe need top developers? To make a REST API for payments? What am I missing?

Payments is an extremely hard problem. Try picking up a NACHA rulebook. Makes a great doorstop, it's the size of an old-school phone book.

Don't know what NACHA is? Consider the possibility that you don't actually understand the problem space, then.

Re: How to Hire

#18

Post by beat »

mooreds wrote: post #16
mkramlich wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also hard to audition for longer periods as suggested He did follow that up by saying you should pay the candidate for the "audition" as a contractor. I've personally experienced this, and love it, and I advocate it strongly if not outright insist on it going forward. It's the employment equivalent of dating before marriage. And it's about Getting Real as much as you can, as early as you can.

If someone is working a full time job (the currently employed are definitely targeted in the article), and are 'experienced'/older, and thus more likely to have other demands on their time like wife/kids, contracting, even in off hours, becomes more difficult. It won't be impossible to 'audition' but it will definitely be tougher. (To say nothing of the intellectual property issues if the possible employee is in a re…

It'd depend on what the incentives are. If you're trying to lure a highly experienced person from a secure enterprise job to the uncertainties of a startup, what are you offering them? Money? They can make a lot more than a startup can offer by going into consulting, if they're good. Freedom? Maybe. A mission? Maybe. But you'd better have something.

For an example of other conditions... I have a friend I'd love to poach away to work for me. But he's the sole breadwinner with five young children. Besides money, I'd have to make sure I can provide good health benefits.

Re: How to Hire

#19

Post by carbon8 »

tom_b wrote: post #5

“Experienced” people often have higher personal burn rates and sometimes you’ll need to pay them more, but remember that great companies are not usually created by experienced people (with the exception of a few roles where it really matters a lot.) Scary statement for me to read. I'm getting older and worry that the above thinking will eventually cut off cool and even just new opportunities for me. Also hard to audi…

"The average and median age of U.S.-born tech founders [of companies that have more than $1 million in sales, twenty or more employees, and company branches with fifty or more employees] was thirty-nine when they started their companies. Twice as many were older than fifty as were younger than twenty-five."

http://www.kauffman.org/research-and-policy/education-and-te...

Re: How to Hire

#20

Post by Michael_Murray »

Great thoughts in this one, but missing what I think is the biggest key to hiring correctly in the startups I've been part of is what Paul DePodesta said in Moneyball - ""What gets me really excited about a guy is when he has warts... and the warts just don't matter."

I've always thought that hiring in a startup is really like what the A's had to do in Moneyball - you don't have the advantages in terms of money, facilities, and even equity value of some of your much better funded competition for talent.

In that situation, you have really only three levers to pull - 1) give up more than you want (which is what I've seen too many people do); 2) sell the benefits of the startup life and your mission; and 3) find talent that can perform at a similar level that's undervalued.

The place that I've seen startup hiring really add value is when someone can be incredibly effective at #2 (which the author talks about) and they can develop a process that effectively hires for #3.

I've built my last couple of companies in the information security space and #3 is especially important, because there's a significant premium paid for high-value talent in our space. So, finding talent who can perform at an extremely high level whose "warts" don't matter has been a life-or-death matter for creating a company that can compete with those in the space that have more money (either through funding or scale).

Post reply on HN