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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

#151

Post by UrMomReadsHN »

stretchwithme wrote: post #137
UrMomReadsHN wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or... you're not a potential drinking buddy. ;) http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2012/12/03/employers-...

Believe it or not, I was actually asked if I liked to drink. And I don't really drink.

So, were you offered the job?

Which is why I try to avoid all types of personal questions as much as possible. I do not want to take if you like squash or knitting or beer into account when I evaluate you as a potential hire. So if i don't know, it can't subconsciously affect my opinion of you. I am interested in your job performance.

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

#152

Post by WalterBright »

kstenerud wrote: post #144
WalterBright wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A person does not need 'very strong' reasons for legal challenges. They can be spurious, with the plaintiff hoping the company will find it cheaper to settle than defend themselves. A system where the loser pays the winner the amount the loser paid their own lawyers will stop most of this nonsense.

A "loser pays" system sounds great on the surface, but is fraught with unintended consequences: - A complainant who loses on a technicality or procedural failure, and is now on the hook for hundreds of thousands in legal fees. - A big company that bullies the complainant with legal shenanegans until the complainant is worn out, drops the case, and is now on the hook for hundreds of thousands in legal fees. Just the f…

The loser's max liability will be what he paid his own lawyers, not what the other party paid theirs. Thus, you cannot spend your opponent into oblivion.

A better formula for what loser pays would be:

    min(what you paid your lawyers, what the other side paid their lawyers)

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

#153

Post by lsiebert »

RobertKerans wrote: post #98
kazinator wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do the actual hiring, but sit in in one of the two interviews, and as a team we carefully discuss each candidate. We've got a good team, the work environment & people are great, hiring process is solid enough. And we all agree that, almost without exception, we can tell within about thirty seconds of meeting them whether someone is likely to be hired. I assume this is overwhelmingly common? Bar sending a poli…

I, seriously, don't understand how this works, unless your candidates appearance and accent are your main tools for judging a candidate. I would prefer to think that's not the case. If you were teaching a new member of the team to make such a decision, what would you point to?

What's more important, is I don't understand how anyone could possibly improve their 30 second impression.

I guess it could be that you believe this to be the case, and are remembering wrong. Why don't you note this down after 30 seconds, and then check it only after you make a decision to see if you were correct?

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

#154

Post by okaram »

nilved wrote: post #36
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…

This is first time I've seen the words "Apache is just easier" in that arrangement. I think php-fpm is significantly easier to set up than Apache and expect it to be more performant with less resources.

This probably depends more on experience, and which OS/platform you're using; although I don't do it a lot, I've configured Apache servers several dozen times, whereas I've only done nginx a couple of times, so it is 'easier' for me.

Also, on ubuntu (and centos, but haven't used it in a while), it is something like 'apt-get install apache-mod-php' and everything is there :)

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

#155

Post by UrMomReadsHN »

jzwinck wrote: post #148
UrMomReadsHN wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is you can give the appearance of discrimination without discriminating. Consider this: You say someone [a minority] needs more experience in X so they didn't get the job. The person who did get the job [a white male] has the same amount of experience with X. But they have demonstrated other skills that just blow you away so you hired them anyways. Person 1 finds out and since they weren't in the interview…

Yes, but having signed an agreement in advance won't really help: Person 1 may still feel they were treated improperly and sue. Except now they might be suing for breach of contract on the basis that the company lied to them about the reason for their rejection. Or Person 1 will simply argue that signing away their rights was not legal in the first place (which is true in many places).

Perhaps I wasn't clear... or responded to the wrong post.

I agree, signing a document is really stupid and unnecessary.

What I mean, if you give someone a reason, it can lead to it looking bad on paper. Unintentionally. If you don't give them a reason, you protect yourself.

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

#156

Post by pkaye »

shortcircuit01 wrote: post #78

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 com…

I'm presuming you are talking about Google? Why can't they then just hire in their offshore offices then?

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

#157

Post by InclinedPlane »

nilved wrote: post #36
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…

This is first time I've seen the words "Apache is just easier" in that arrangement. I think php-fpm is significantly easier to set up than Apache and expect it to be more performant with less resources.

Yup. I've been running nginx + php-fpm for pretty much as long as it's been possible, and it's pretty great with far less hassle than most other configs.

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

#158

Post by lsiebert »

wyager wrote: post #64
sekasi wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in Australia, not in the US. I don't know the intrinsic legal differences here, but I do know a few things about my local market. I feel really strongly about trying to help people improve, and it's really challenging to do that if you can't bring up the reasons for rejection. If you're being dicky about it "You're not good enough in memory management", that instantly makes people defensive. If you're trying t…

>If you're trying to help them forward and give them useful tips for improving their portfolio and skillset, the conversation is almost exclusively positive and 9/10 times I get a thank you very much in the end. No doubt, and I know a lot of US recruiters wish very strongly that they could have these kind of interactions with potential hires. However, the difficulty of friendly, open interviewer-interviewee discussio…

This is why a general assessment should be separate from hiring.

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

#159

Post by stephen_g »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #21
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…

You can do the rewrite with a single nginx command:

    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;

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

#160

Post by dismal2 »

UrMomReadsHN wrote: post #116
sekasi wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems you've had some bad runs. I can pretty much debunk 1 and 3 personally. Good companies and people take hiring very seriously.

What would be a polite way to say "I didn't hire you because you have no idea how to program?" I mean I've interviewed people who we didn't hire for that reason... You can't say that though because its mean... Instead you get "your skills didn't align with our needs."

the questions you asked or the way you asked them were answered in a way that made it appear to you that that person couldn't program. not saying that was the case, but just want to add that line of thinking too.
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