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

brookeallen.com

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

#71

Post by sliverstorm »

kazinator wrote: post #68
sekasi wrote: post #28

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…

Then there is the perspective from having heard "no": 1. Never believe anyone's rationale regarding their "no". They acted on instinct, and made up a clever story to afterward to convince themselves it was a rational decision. Or worse: it was some prejudice that they are consciously covering up. Or perhaps some internal reasons that they don't want to discuss with outsiders like sudden news that affects all hiring a…

1. Or even more simply, they are afraid to reveal what is almost certainly a perfectly acceptable reason for fear a jury will decide it wasn't acceptable after all, and take them to the cleaners for it.

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

#72

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

S4M wrote: post #48
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 starte…

That's an interesting story. Did you have experience writing firmwares and drivers in C before joining that startup? Did they ask you about it or it came on the spot? I am quite curious.

I had never written C before that, not on the job. Not much hobby-wise, just maybe tweaking shitty open source code to fix syntax errors or whatever. Never submitted a patch.

First time I had to write a makefile too. Ouch.

It had memory leaks, but nothing I couldn't have fixed given more time. It was userland, libusb, hadn't had time to get it anywhere near ready for a kernel driver.

I don't even know that I've ever properly learned any programming language... I get syntax Alzheimer's quite a bit. Other than novelty languages, how can you not look at code and not have some idea of what's going on though?

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

#73

Post by deedubaya »

humanrebar wrote: post #54
deedubaya wrote: post #3

When you hire for a person , you find that personality traits are much more important than what an applicant has done in the past, including passion, drive, etc. When you hire to fill a position, all this goes out the window the applicant goes into the hiring lottery pool to maybe get an interview, and then the traditional "You could totally goog this IRL, but I'm going to hire you based off your memory" type of hiri…

> When you hire for a person, you find that personality traits are much more important than what an applicant has done in the past, including passion, drive, etc. For early- to mid-career developers, definitely. But I wouldn't hire a fixer-upper architect (or systems specialist) then turn him loose on business-critical parts of my system. That's not to say you can't hire an architect for her big upside, but you'd wan…

Agreed.

However, saying personality traits are much more important doesn't reduce the value of past experiences.

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

#74

Post by sekasi »

kazinator wrote: post #68
sekasi wrote: post #28

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…

Then there is the perspective from having heard "no": 1. Never believe anyone's rationale regarding their "no". They acted on instinct, and made up a clever story to afterward to convince themselves it was a rational decision. Or worse: it was some prejudice that they are consciously covering up. Or perhaps some internal reasons that they don't want to discuss with outsiders like sudden news that affects all hiring a…

Seems you've had some bad runs.

I can pretty much debunk 1 and 3 personally. Good companies and people take hiring very seriously.

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

#75

Post by sekasi »

kohanz wrote: post #67
sekasi wrote: post #28

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…

I can see how you would do this for a technical shortcoming, but sometimes the choice of one candidate over another comes based on a personality judgement and who would fit better with the current team. How do you explain those types of decisions without sounding arbitrary?

Second round interviews, after having passed a code test as well, I do exclusively with the team in question all present.

It's less of an interview and more of a meet and greet, and we spend 30 minutes talking about anything under the sun.

The team makes the decision from this point. I very rarely veto.

Candidates know this is the process, because I tell them about it before hand. Does that make sense?

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

#76

Post by acoleman616 »

WalterBright wrote: post #65
hluska wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is a shame when trying to help people opens you up to liability. If that's not a sign that our society is too litigious, I don't know what is.

It's also why companies do not apologize, except as part of a settlement. An apology is an admission of guilt, opening the company to liability.

Man, this country is really messed up sometimes...

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

#77

Post by georgeecollins »

kazinator wrote: post #68
sekasi wrote: post #28

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…

Then there is the perspective from having heard "no": 1. Never believe anyone's rationale regarding their "no". They acted on instinct, and made up a clever story to afterward to convince themselves it was a rational decision. Or worse: it was some prejudice that they are consciously covering up. Or perhaps some internal reasons that they don't want to discuss with outsiders like sudden news that affects all hiring a…

I don't think kazinator is wrong about this. And yes I take the commenters point below that they take hiring very seriously. Study after study shows that people are much less objective than they think. And that they have an impression that they rationalize.

I have seen people be very strongly influenced negatively or positively by a word or phrase on the resume that in the scheme of things wasn't that important. I am sure I do the same thing, but I am not aware of it.

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

#78

Post by shortcircuit01 »

This story reminds me of how broken software engineer interviewing is. Imagine if a company decided to hire software engineers by giving them five 6-sided dice. Then they have to come to the company building and roll each dice once every hour. And during that hour they have to dance and sing in front of someone while being recorded. If they roll all 6 on all 5 dice, their dancing and singing will be judged by the committee! And if the committee likes their performance they might get the job! The acceptance rate is 0.01%, the company is so elite. And this company is also complaining about a software engineer shortage. They wish they could find more good engineers!

It's pretty obvious which company (or group of companies) I'm referring to. The interviewing process of these companies has done great harm to the software industry. And now they're trying to do further harm by using it as an excuse to get cheap foreign labor to reduce salaries.

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

#79

Post by jmccree »

JeremyMorgan wrote: post #31
FooBarWidget wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Never configured Apache that way, that sounds really interesting. I was running the site on a fairly well tuned LEMP stack and was using a cache plugin (forgot the name) but it would still choke fairly often. Since the content of my site only changes a couple times a month I started migrating away from towards a static solution. I'm not trying to say WP is bad but I think if your content is relatively static and you…

Using nginx/varnish as a caching reverse proxy in front of apache/php is rather common. You get all the ease of use of Apache (mod_rewrite instant .htaccess rule changes, mod_php, etc.) , ability to use whatever cpu intensive plugins/code you want in your application, and once the page is cached it loads instantly for as long as you cache it. Nginx can be configured to serve static assets directly or your app can use CDN links.

I've never really understood the recent fascination with static site generators. I get that it's neat you can upload just everything to S3 and host it there with no servers, but then if you want to change something site wide you have to reload everything. Dynamic app + with caching reverse proxy + optional CDN is a tried and true method. I've been on projects that use this method with small VMs to power sites with tons of traffic.

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