The Way We Hire Is All Wrong

People have kind of touched on this a bit, but I just want to say this as explicitly as possible, because I think this is a thing that's been kind of forgotten over time: Forcing employers to commit to their employees on some level was one of the most significant achievements of the labour movement.

Most people don't really want to have the 'flexibility' of working, because that also comes with having to find work on a regular basis. In some post-scarcity or at least post-austerity society this might be something people are willing to do, but most people aren't working because that work is something they have a passion for, they're doing it so they can do other things like have a home and a family.

Employers of this kind of labour would love nothing more than to schedule you whenever they felt like, have more part time employees at lower wages, and let you go if you miss even one shift.

This is awesome; I am so thrilled you are talking about this.

I am preparing a response to Deborah’s article; working title:

A Hackathon Cannot Fix a Broken Hiring Process. But the Right Experiences Can.

You see, in 2004 my life changed when I started caring about the people I did not hire. You discussed that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8859199

But the thing you probably don’t get, and I didn't get until much later, is that I did not create a hiring process.

And it sure wasn't a contest with a job at the end (as many of you think).

It was an experience.

For the people who engaged with the experience it was life-changing. For those who didn't it wasn't.

Certainly for the people I hired it was life changing.

Changing jobs will change your life – what would be the point otherwise?

And certainly going from unemployment to employment changes your life; how could it not?

And working for me will definitely change your life because I grok this better than almost anyone you’ll ever meet.

But I want to change everyone’s life whether they work for me or not because I never wanted to be a programmer, or an analyst, or a hedge fund manager or all those other things I have had the accidental good fortune of becoming.

All I've ever wanted to be since the sixth grade is a teacher. See this: http://internationalfamilymag.com/IFarchives/archives/sep07/...

Most of the attendees experienced a hackathon because they couldn't figure out how to experience anything else. After all, this was held in the Bay Area in 2014.

The exact same thing could have been held in London in 1842 and yet nobody could have possibly experienced a hackathon back then.

When you read her article, notice that Deborah poses a question but doesn't answer it. She talks about her experience of the other attendees but doesn't offer to introduce any of them to readers who might be hiring. She ends the article with a really good suggestion that someone should create Smartup Weekend to slap some sense into employers. She asks, “Who wants in?” But she doesn't even buy the domain name. Doesn't she know that you shouldn't mention a domain name you don’t own in a coffee shop anywhere near San Francisco because the guy next to you will buy it and then try to sell it to you for $10,000. And NEVER EVER do that in print. (Of course, as soon as I read her piece I snapped up SmartupWeekend.com and I offer to transfer it to anyone who can convince me they will actually build something rather than just talk about it. I’ll give it to you for free on condition that if you don’t do much with it then I get it back.)

In short, so far Deborah has reported on her experience, but hasn't fully ENGAGED WITH IT.

Deborah’s experience of Staffup Weekend is only beginning now. I am confident that someday she will see that weekend as a pivotal point in her life.

I’m less sure about the rest of the attendees because I have seen no evidence they have engaged with the experience as anything but a contest they have lost. After all, Deborah organized a 1-month reunion and nobody showed up.

There is still hope if these folks reflect on what happened, refer to their notes (surely they took notes), then refactor the whole thing and reflect on what they can still learn.

But even if they don’t do that, I’m sure every one of them could be excellent employees under the right circumstances because, as Woody Allen says, 80% of success is showing up and they did way more than that. You can see everyone here: http://staffupweekend.org/2014/11/22/report-on-staffup-san-f...

If you’d like to meet any of them then let me know. I’ll gladly make the introduction.

"One reason is that employers can easily be flooded with hundreds, or sometimes thousands, of applications"

We're told our immigration policy has caused a drought in programmers, yet employers are flooded with applications from the nonexistent workforce.

I don't think that's a typo. I think pluma added (sic) to point out that he spelt it differently on purpose, not that he's quoting someone verbatim.

But thank you for teaching me about eutopia!

That would be fair to surmise, but incorrect. While most startups cannot pay Google salaries, we are competitive with our salary-equity mix. It took us a while to learn what the market price was for various types of roles, and we offer that.

We made 8 interview offers. 7 people either chose not to continue or were rejected by my teams further down the line.

Some of those who chose not to continue were not devs, but client-service specialists. This was not a purely technical hackathon. Many of those people decided they did not want to deal with the math involved in financial services.

You have to remember that SF is a very competitive job market. Devs are choosing jobs that fit their salary expectations, but also their lifestyle choices and their passions. We meet those needs for some people, but not all, since they are idiosyncratic.