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Resumes suck for hiring engineers

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Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#121

Post by vonmoltke »

codingdave wrote: post #85

Resumes are just a tool to decide whether or not to start a conversation. When hiring, you are not really concerned about letting a good candidate go. There will always be others. It is far more dangerous to let a poor candidate in. And poor candidates tend to be poor due to cultural and subject matter issues more than basic technical chops. I'm not making any hiring decisions at this point - just weeding a huge list…

> When hiring, you are not really concerned about letting a good candidate go.

With that attitude, I hope you aren't complaining about how hard it is to find talent.

> It is far more dangerous to let a poor candidate in.

This gets parroted a lot around here, but with no supporting evidence other than highly improbable hypotheticals or black swan events. On the other hand, I know plenty of companies that have had to deal with poor candidates, from a Fortune 500 with 70000+ worldwide employees down to a small 12-person shop, and none have suffered serious consequences from these poor choices. Considering the lack of hard evidence supporting your statement, I believe these companies I am familiar with are the typical case and not "lucky".

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#122

Post by ghaff »

hdennis wrote: post #91

In the part of the article that lists "Rejection Reasons" one rejection type is "Too Enterprisey". Could someone please clear up what that means for me?

This blog post discusses it a bit. http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2013/03/07/enterprisey/

It wouldn't shock me if it also gets used as code for things like "hasn't worked at a startup before" or, frankly, "too old."

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#123

Post by vonmoltke »

stared wrote: post #77

The experiment looks flawed. It seems that ALL (or almost all) resumes are, at least, OK. Resumes can work for weeding out bad fits, or people doing things clearly out of the scope of interest. They are not, and cannot, be a tool for choosing the best. (Unless success is so spectacular, that you know the person by name anyway.) It's HR's delusion that previous -perceived- presented achievements written on one's resum…

> The experiment looks flawed. It seems that ALL (or almost all) resumes are, at least, OK.

That is the point. The experiment was to determine who various people would call for an interview, not hire. Nearly every resume was worth a phone screen, yet on average half of them were rejected for that stage.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#124

Post by jschwartzi »

learnstats2 wrote: post #89

If you exclude a single outlier (a candidate rated poorly by the experimenter scores 100% in the resume test), the resume test doesn't look too bad. Apart from that one, the consistently well-rated CVs are all from the strong side. So it could be argued that CVs work pretty well for recruiters - hiring from the best CVs makes it unlikely you'll hire a weak candidate.

This also gives us concrete data on what makes a good CV, provided anyone has access to the ratings and can also come up with a good classification metric to extract attributes.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#125

Post by Bahamut »

vonmoltke wrote: post #121
codingdave wrote: post #85

Resumes are just a tool to decide whether or not to start a conversation. When hiring, you are not really concerned about letting a good candidate go. There will always be others. It is far more dangerous to let a poor candidate in. And poor candidates tend to be poor due to cultural and subject matter issues more than basic technical chops. I'm not making any hiring decisions at this point - just weeding a huge list…

> When hiring, you are not really concerned about letting a good candidate go. With that attitude, I hope you aren't complaining about how hard it is to find talent. > It is far more dangerous to let a poor candidate in. This gets parroted a lot around here, but with no supporting evidence other than highly improbable hypotheticals or black swan events. On the other hand, I know plenty of companies that have had to d…

I've seen many negative consequences from poor software engineers being brought into companies first hand.

I saw a junior engineer try to add a patchwork of libraries just because he was not confident in his ability to do something correctly, leading to a lot of maintenance overhead that grew very quickly.

Many of the previous frontend engineers got fired from my current company because they did not produce at all - a direct result is a polluted codebase that needs to be scrapped asap because it has led directly to poor perception of product. It also is extremely difficult to iterate upon.

One company I was at had some very terrible legacy code from full stack engineers. The person who wrote the code was fired as well, but not before leaving damage that persisted for years - some triply JSON.stringified JS object, along with some other extra parentheses, was stored right into the database as a string! This meant every time the data had to be fetched, it had to be parsed by the server to fill certain other data, but the core answer object was still sent as it was due to the difficulty associated with sending a parsed form (the backend was Java), which meant that the frontend also had to parse it! Thankfully we were able to silo the damage to an easy to adapt modular service, but it was the cause of much sadness, especially when it was a core piece of data for our product.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#126

Post by hdennis »

ghaff wrote: post #122
hdennis wrote: post #91

In the part of the article that lists "Rejection Reasons" one rejection type is "Too Enterprisey". Could someone please clear up what that means for me?

This blog post discusses it a bit. http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2013/03/07/enterprisey/ It wouldn't shock me if it also gets used as code for things like "hasn't worked at a startup before" or, frankly, "too old."

Thank you for the link, it was very informative.

The two main points in the blog stated that an "enterprisey" developer may not be a good fit in a startup (change in development pace, responsibilities, etc.) and that they may use languages unpopular in a startup environment (Java and .Net are called out in the post).

I'm interested to see if there are other posts that echo this sentiment, aside from the OP, because now I have a fear of being "too enterprisey."

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#127

Post by fecak »

ghaff wrote: post #122
hdennis wrote: post #91

In the part of the article that lists "Rejection Reasons" one rejection type is "Too Enterprisey". Could someone please clear up what that means for me?

This blog post discusses it a bit. http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2013/03/07/enterprisey/ It wouldn't shock me if it also gets used as code for things like "hasn't worked at a startup before" or, frankly, "too old."

I wrote the piece you linked, and I do see still see that feedback on some candidates almost two years later. I think your interpretation of this as code for other things is fairly accurate, although not as much for the 'too old' piece. I've heard it for even the 7-10 years of experience range (though perhaps that could be construed as too old for some).

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#128

Post by tristor »

codingdave wrote: post #85

Resumes are just a tool to decide whether or not to start a conversation. When hiring, you are not really concerned about letting a good candidate go. There will always be others. It is far more dangerous to let a poor candidate in. And poor candidates tend to be poor due to cultural and subject matter issues more than basic technical chops. I'm not making any hiring decisions at this point - just weeding a huge list…

> And poor candidates tend to be poor due to cultural and subject matter issues more than basic technical chops.

I wish this were true, but the amount of seemingly experienced/employable people I've interviewed in the tech industry who don't understand basic concepts related to their areas of experience/expertise is astounding. As an example I recently interviewed a person to join our operations team managing our VMware stack, who had worked at VMware as an engineer of all places, but could not tell me the difference between paravirtualization and full virtualization or the difference between a virtual machine and a container.

More than anything, it seems many people in the tech industry these days lack understanding of the fundamentals. It's great that you've written a RoR app that makes use of APIs, but if you don't know how HTTP works at least at a high level, how can you troubleshoot that API if you encounter an issue? How can you make intelligent decisions about building out the datastore for your system if you don't understand the CAP Theorem, the trade-offs associated with various data storage engines, and the relation between available memory and available IOPS capability and the TPS capabilities of your datastore.

People seem to have forgotten the mantra "learn to walk before you run" and have gone straight from being dudebros in high school to being full stack engineers or ops engineers without any time spent actually learning how a computer works. Many of the candidates that we end up interviewing have at least 10 years of experience, and still many fail to understand fundamentals.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#129

Post by Bahamut »

raverbashing wrote: post #88
CmonDev wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Treat CV writing as a SEO task: "JavaScripted the JavaScript scripts using the JavaScript MVC framework Angular.js (JavaScript)." instead of "Implemented using Angular.js".

Exactly this. I don't think Google can give a good match to a Javascript CV with only Angular.js written Yes, it's stupid. Yes, do it.

I got an interview with Google without having "JavaScript" in my resume, and with tons of AngularJS on it. I did link to my GitHub though, where it shows contributions to Angular, various Angular plugins, and other random libraries.

I ended up turning down the interview after accepting another offer though.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#130

Post by joshyeager »

vonmoltke wrote: post #121
codingdave wrote: post #85

Resumes are just a tool to decide whether or not to start a conversation. When hiring, you are not really concerned about letting a good candidate go. There will always be others. It is far more dangerous to let a poor candidate in. And poor candidates tend to be poor due to cultural and subject matter issues more than basic technical chops. I'm not making any hiring decisions at this point - just weeding a huge list…

> When hiring, you are not really concerned about letting a good candidate go. With that attitude, I hope you aren't complaining about how hard it is to find talent. > It is far more dangerous to let a poor candidate in. This gets parroted a lot around here, but with no supporting evidence other than highly improbable hypotheticals or black swan events. On the other hand, I know plenty of companies that have had to d…

Here are some of the problems I had with previous employees that tighter hiring filters would have prevented. Now that my mindset is "don't hire the wrong person" instead of "hire someone", I don't have these problems.

- Developer who only worked when being directly monitored. Every feature he worked on was seriously late.

- Sysadmin who had good technical skills but was scared to give anyone bad news until it was so bad the project was in serious danger.

- Developer who stayed stuck at the same junior skill level for four years because he never learned from his mistakes.

- Manager who was too timid to hold his directs accountable, which both decreased team performance and demoralized the team members who cared about their jobs.

I was able to help two of them grow out of these problems, but it took a lot of work. I failed with the other two and fired them, but only after they had caused a lot of damage to productivity and morale.

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