How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire • Hacker News Board

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#21

Post by FooBarWidget » Thu, Jan 08, 2015, 10:34 PM UTC

JeremyMorgan wrote: post #7

The first time I got a front page link to my site on HN, it did this exact same thing, which prompted me to move away from Wordpress. Static HTML ever since. But to comment on the article, I think this is a fantastic idea. I do wonder though how he found so many enthusiastic people. Maybe it's just a new era, but I have a hard time finding people who even want to do a 1 hour coding challenge. He got these folks who w…

My Wordpress blog used to go down because of HN. I fixed that as follows.

1. Use the Wordpress supercache plugin.

2. Put Apache behind Nginx, and limit the number of Apache processes to ~6. This way you're effectively using Apache as a "PHP app server", simulating an architecture similar to Passenger/Unicorn. Nginx acts only as a buffering reverse proxy, shielding Apache from slow clients.

Why this instead of running Wordpress/PHP through Nginx using php-fpm? It's because Apache is just easier: mod_rewrite rules work automatically, etc.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#22

Post by computerjunkie » Thu, Jan 08, 2015, 10:34 PM UTC

seagreen wrote: post #6

"So, here is my answer to the question, “What do we owe the people who we do not hire?” 1. Information on where they stand. 2. An explanation of what they are doing wrong. 3. Help improving." Nope! You don't owe them those things. Good for the author that they tried it and it worked out, but it's not a general rule. Everything works smoother in lots of different parts of life if all parties understand the concept of…

Lets talk about a simple example. You apply for a visa to X country for a special occasion (eg; brothers wedding, graduation ceremony et.al). Two weeks later, you get a response saying "No", just no.

Will you be satisfied that you never got any feedback to why it was refused, what you did wrong and what to do to fix it?

Feedback, be it good or bad is crucial. I, myself appreciate this feedback, especially in this scenario the author is talking about. How am I supposed to improve my self when I don't even know what I am doing wrong?

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#23

Post by codyb » Thu, Jan 08, 2015, 10:35 PM UTC

seagreen wrote: post #6

"So, here is my answer to the question, “What do we owe the people who we do not hire?” 1. Information on where they stand. 2. An explanation of what they are doing wrong. 3. Help improving." Nope! You don't owe them those things. Good for the author that they tried it and it worked out, but it's not a general rule. Everything works smoother in lots of different parts of life if all parties understand the concept of…

To be fair, a clean no is a little easier when people haven't invested three weeks of their lives into learning and developing solutions to problems you've given them.

I have a feeling this worked out for all parties because who knows how they would have chosen hires otherwise? In this way, as the article states, they got literally the cream of the crop as basically elected by the crop. That's pretty sweet. And in return, for the crops contributions, they got some free advertisement for their work by being a part of the groups, learning new languages, solutions, and theories.

Had their interview process been less intense then I believe a clean no would certainly have been appropriate.

My one buddy, this is anecdotal of course, has a biology (or some sort of major like that) B.S. and can't get a job at all. I remember him telling me one time that after sending out so many questionnaires and e-mails and making so many phone calls that very often people wouldn't even reply. He told me that one time he got a response that said "We're sorry but we're considering other people" and he actually responded "Thank you so much for the closure."

In that case, it might seem that you owe people at least the clean no!

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#24

Post by jimbokun » Thu, Jan 08, 2015, 10:35 PM UTC

nostromo wrote: post #15

I have mixed feelings about this. It's easy to see what's to love: an open, honest, and collaborative hiring process with a boss willing to train employees. Awesome! But he also got about 30 people to spend four weeks building trading software for him. Collectively that's over two years of uncompensated work, the results of which the hiring manager may use for free. And from the perspective of the applicant, how many…

But the interesting part is he found a way to help a lot of the people who didn't get the job benefit from the process, which is exceedingly rare.

It was also interesting that there seemed to be a lot of collaboration among the applicants, even though they were all competing for one position.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#25

Post by dustingetz » Thu, Jan 08, 2015, 10:35 PM UTC

tacostakohashi wrote: post #19

sosuke wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always thought so, and I figure it is a case of our sue-happy culture and a cover your ass tactic "anything you say can and will be used against you" kind of fear. I'd love to have reached out to some applicants in the past to offer help, but what if they don't want any?

It would be nice if, at the start of the application process, companies could ask you if you would like to agree not to sue them in exchange for open, honest feedback, e.g. notes from your interviewers. Sometimes its pretty clear if you are not a good match, but sometimes its really not, and it seems like it would be best for both parties if certain kind of feedback could be provided, e.g. you were close, please cons…

in my experience, if one understands and explicitly acknowledges their reasoning for not giving feedback, one can connect with their interviewers directly as a human and receive frank feedback. One just has to make it clear that they are not a risk.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#26

Post by JeremyMorgan » Thu, Jan 08, 2015, 10:36 PM UTC

gkop wrote: post #10

JeremyMorgan wrote: post #7

The first time I got a front page link to my site on HN, it did this exact same thing, which prompted me to move away from Wordpress. Static HTML ever since. But to comment on the article, I think this is a fantastic idea. I do wonder though how he found so many enthusiastic people. Maybe it's just a new era, but I have a hard time finding people who even want to do a 1 hour coding challenge. He got these folks who w…

Fyi, the author is a man.

Fixed, thanks

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#27

Post by computerjunkie » Thu, Jan 08, 2015, 10:40 PM UTC

tacostakohashi wrote: post #19

sosuke wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always thought so, and I figure it is a case of our sue-happy culture and a cover your ass tactic "anything you say can and will be used against you" kind of fear. I'd love to have reached out to some applicants in the past to offer help, but what if they don't want any?

It would be nice if, at the start of the application process, companies could ask you if you would like to agree not to sue them in exchange for open, honest feedback, e.g. notes from your interviewers. Sometimes its pretty clear if you are not a good match, but sometimes its really not, and it seems like it would be best for both parties if certain kind of feedback could be provided, e.g. you were close, please cons…

It would be nice if, at the start of the application process, companies could ask you if you would like to agree not to sue them in exchange for open, honest feedback, e.g. notes from your interviewers.

This. I would gladly tick the check box for some honest feedback. I personally think that leaving candidates with a generic response is unprofessional and says plenty about the company.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#28

Post by sekasi » Thu, Jan 08, 2015, 10:40 PM UTC

I've done a LOT of interviewing, recruiting and ultimately a lot of saying "no" to people.

Over the years I've landed on a series of personal rules on how to do just that.

1. Always explain rationale around the No, to help them improve 2. Always let people down gently reinforcing positive notions as well, you never know what state of mind they are in. 3. Always respond to requests for more information

This takes me a lot of time in my professional life, but it's making me a happier person. Ultimately, it's people's lives you're dealing with. You don't owe anyone anything, but life is about treating people well.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#29

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft » Thu, Jan 08, 2015, 10:40 PM UTC

JeremyMorgan wrote: post #7

The first time I got a front page link to my site on HN, it did this exact same thing, which prompted me to move away from Wordpress. Static HTML ever since. But to comment on the article, I think this is a fantastic idea. I do wonder though how he found so many enthusiastic people. Maybe it's just a new era, but I have a hard time finding people who even want to do a 1 hour coding challenge. He got these folks who w…

About 5 years ago, I moved to another city across the country to work for a small startup. The city was small, candidates were few locally, and maybe fewer still wanting to move there (Lubbock, but my inlaws are nearby, and I liked the idea of my kids getting to see their grandparents).

It was the funnest job I ever had, moreso than I could describe. I was hired on as a web developer, but about 3 weeks in they started asking me to help work on firmware written in C for pic microcontrollers. Soon after that, they asked me if I thought I could produce comparable products with commodity hardware, and I found myself trying to write linux drivers for a packet radio (the usb development kit that the chip maker sells... but only provides Windows drivers for).

A few weeks in, I had that working. With a dozen other projects on the backburner too, all of them interesting and challenging. They were buying whatever hardware I said I needed, and if I ordered something that turned out to not be so useful, no one ever complained.

It was easy to be excited doing all of this. So of course the day after I managed to get a working prototype of the biggest challenge yet, I was shitcanned. Startups run out of money.

Now I write stupid web apps for a university. They pay me better ($20,000 more a year, not including benefits, probably more like $35,000 more with those). But it's boring as hell. And it's not the university's fault. The world needs alot of boring stuff to keep running.

My point is, if you've found alot of enthusiastic people, it's not your HR department's competence that gets the credit. It's not really those people's credit either. You just have a rare job that's actually fun.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#30

Post by bbcbasic » Thu, Jan 08, 2015, 10:40 PM UTC

protl wrote: post #16

seagreen wrote: post #6

"So, here is my answer to the question, “What do we owe the people who we do not hire?” 1. Information on where they stand. 2. An explanation of what they are doing wrong. 3. Help improving." Nope! You don't owe them those things. Good for the author that they tried it and it worked out, but it's not a general rule. Everything works smoother in lots of different parts of life if all parties understand the concept of…

You've spent the time evaluating a candidate enough to make a decision not to hire them, you know why you aren't going to hire them, the only extra work is passing that information on to them.

What about the great candidate that you couldn't hire because you only have X positions?

If you help those candidate by referring them to a job at another company then both the candidates and the other company will love you.

Months or years down the track, when you need to hire more, you will have a list of good candidates, and companies that may refer candidates back to you.