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

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

brookeallen.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 337 posts

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

#251

Post by kbart »

kyllo wrote: post #193
bbcbasic wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read Michael Church's blog and from reading that I am convinced that we are our own worst enemy. We spend our spare time writing open source code, which then businesses can profit from without having to pay any of their own staff. I think companies should allow staff to spend some time on open source. It could even benefit the company by having their name associated with it, making it seem like a cool place to work…

I think it's somewhat of a misconception that most OSS is written for free in professional programmers' spare time. For small projects yes, but corporations aren't using their code anyway. OSS projects that are prominent enough to achieve corporate adoption, often have a staff of core maintainers that are employed by a company that makes money selling support for that OSS software. Why? Because corporations are risk…

Not always. TrueCrypt and OpenSSL comes to mind first. Sure, OpenSSL is more supported now, but it happened only after Heartbleed panic, when everyone realised how dependant they are on few overworked and underpaid programmers. Except several well known OSS projects, most others get only peanut money from donations.

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

#252

Post by UrMomReadsHN »

tomp wrote: post #245
DanBC wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point is, "discrimination" is sometimes just applying statistics. Just because some statistical factors correlate with race doesn't mean one is being racist; they are just optimizing their selection process. If your optimized selection process selects away from Black candidates it is by definition racist.

So, is college selection process in the US racist? The process is SAT, and AFAIK blacks and Hispanics score less than whites, who score less than Asians. Is is also sexist (as more women than men study)? I don't think so. Correlation doesn't equal causation. Edit: also, since more Asians and less blacks are accepted at good universities, if your company relies on the name of university when selecting candidates (e.g.…

We have a term for that in US law - "disparate impact." And yes, if your hiring practices are found to have a disparate impact on a protected class, it is illegal.

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

#253

Post by Fede_V »

RobertKerans wrote: post #231
jdeisenberg wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See http://www.businessinsider.com/daniel-kahneman-on-hiring-dec... for a very different viewpoint. (The full details are in Kahneman's book "Thinking, Fast and Slow")

Yeah, I've read it, and tbh, we do interview for a set of role-specific traits for each position; we aren't a million miles off what Kahnemann suggests - however there are environmental factors that do skew things (IT world in geographic area is small which heavily affects prior knowledge of experienced candidates; not primarily an IT company; not in a fashionable sector). I must say I'm not advocating snap judgement…

"I must say I'm not advocating snap judgement at all. I just think it is very common (as Kahnemann states). What he states as an ideal doesn't necessarily make an awful lot of difference in many situations; the snap judgement can very often be the same as the careful one (though external factors that partly force/aid preselection bias things greatly in this respect)."

Do you have any evidence at all to back this up? In general, people think they are much better at making decisions than they are, and unless you actually measure things empirically and track false positives/negatives, you are likely to fool yourself.

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

#254

Post by koyote »

bvanslyke wrote: post #118
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…

Palantir?

Could you elaborate on why Palantir might fit the description?

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

#255

Post by kbart »

midnightclubbed wrote: post #132

So unless I'm reading the cached text wrongly 38 people read the given manual and answered programming questions based on it. They then met informally. Lets say they burnt a day on this. 27 of those people then suggested being taught how to program in APL (after building a classroom). I'm assuming anyone who didnt want to attend got cut. 3 additional days spent. They were then given 3 weeks to solve some difficult pr…

..or give a nice paper certificate at the end and people will pay you instead.

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

#256

Post by jdudek »

This is quite similar to how we hire Ruby on Rails developers. We organise two-weeks long Bootcamp where we train people in Rails. At the end we offer some of them to join us as junior developers, with further training during next year. Those who are not hired still win—they receive two weeks of training which helps them find jobs elsewhere. We’ve had some fantastic hires this way over the past two years.

This article made my think that maybe we can do better and provide more assistance to those we do not hire after Bootcamp.

More details about our Bootcamps are available at http://pilot.co/bootcamp.

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

#257

Post by tomp »

UrMomReadsHN wrote: post #252
tomp wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, is college selection process in the US racist? The process is SAT, and AFAIK blacks and Hispanics score less than whites, who score less than Asians. Is is also sexist (as more women than men study)? I don't think so. Correlation doesn't equal causation. Edit: also, since more Asians and less blacks are accepted at good universities, if your company relies on the name of university when selecting candidates (e.g.…

We have a term for that in US law - "disparate impact." And yes, if your hiring practices are found to have a disparate impact on a protected class, it is illegal.

All hiring practices have a disparate impact on protected classes. The only issue is proving it. God I hate such laws!

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

#258

Post by Klockan »

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…

This is universal and there are studies supporting it. Most of the interview is spent just affirming the initial impression. If the initial impression is good then they will spend the hour trying to find your good points and vice versa.

Shouldn't technical interviews be different? No, not really. In general the interviewer will give more hints to people he likes and more follow up questions to people he dislikes. After enough hints even the worst candidate will find the solution and get extra points for good collaborative skills. Similarly even the best candidate will stumble sooner or later and gets a mark for being argumentative if pressured enough.

Also notice how everyone says "We care about the thought process and not if the solution actually works!". This allows for their subjectivity to reign supreme. Things like "Your solution is wrong but I love your thought process!" or "Your solution is better than mine but you didn't think things through enough before implementing it" can be said about everything.

It is of course not that hard to do technical interviews correctly, you just need to have hard rules on what to accept and what to reject, what hints to give and when to give them etc. Any leeway for subjectivity will be abused by your subconscious.

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

#259

Post by forgotten »

tomp wrote: post #250
UrMomReadsHN wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jesus... did you even read the article you are commenting on? It isn't just one example. And it isnt about being racist, its about racism without racists. > One study conducted by a Brigham Young University economics professor showed that white NBA referees call more fouls on black layers, and black referees call more fouls on white players. Another study that was published in the American Journal of Sociology showed…

> did you even read the article you are commenting on? No, I was just commenting on the logic of the quote in the parent comment, which I find faulty. I'm not saying people aren't racist, or subconsciously racist; I'm just saying that you can't reduce any statistical effect down to racist, while other explanations are just as possible. > And what the hell does someone coming from a poor neighborhood have anything to…

Less educated? Perhaps. Less intelligent? Now you're sounding like a bigot. Poor people in rough neighborhoods have survival skills and street smarts that the rest of us don't.

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

#260

Post by yaddayadda »

yarou wrote: post #206
courtf wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with this. No amount of formality and forced stoicism is going to eliminate the myriad biases that creep into every minute action and decision we all make every day. Hiring is a notorious minefield where believing in your own impartiality merely demonstrates a lack of self-awareness, or worse.

I cannot upvote your comment ( and the parent ) enough. If the labor market in tech was a perfectly competitive market where all parties had perfect information, hiring would be a lot more straightforward. However, as you state, cognitive biases and lack of rationality on both the supply and demand side muddy the waters.

Many orchestras have found a fairly simple solution to the problem - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22blind+auditions%22+hiring+music...

I'd hope to have a similar 'audition' approach that included not only basic programming skills but also –and as a junior level programmer, more importantly– learning skills. For example, commenting or debugging internal framework code (something that all interviewees are experiencing for the first time).

In regard to the linked article's approach - I couldn't afford to take three weeks off of my current job, to learn a new language, even if the training gave me a slim chance of a new job (I still have bills to pay). That said, I do think wish there were more apprenticeship type approaches for junior devs.

Post reply on HN