The Hiring Post • Hacker News Board

Re: The Hiring Post

#171

Post by patrickyeon » Sat, Mar 07, 2015, 6:05 AM UTC

whiteboarder wrote: post #125

Oh man, everything about this post rings true. I myself am a pretty mediocre developer. But fortunately for me, I realized that tech interviews are complete and total BS. So what I did was spend a whole bunch of time studying whiteboard algo questions, and I became really good at interviewing. I've gotten a couple awesome jobs that I had no business getting (and usually get fired after about 6 month, because I'm a sh…

Hi, I see you're a new user here and I hope you come back to check on this and it's not just a throwaway account.

You saw the flaw in the system and studied so that you could exploit it improve your own situation. Some people may be mad about that, but I'm honestly not. I'm sad that you put effort into practicing interviewing and sound like you're not putting effort into practicing your actual job. You say "I'm a shitty dev", which is a fixed mindset type of thing to say. You identify yourself as your current capabilities, as opposed to a growth mindset where you may say "I'm working on improving my dev skills".

It sounds like touchy-feely pop-psych, but think about it: you saw that getting better at interviews would land you better jobs, so you worked on interview skills, and you got better jobs. Now if you took your current job (and your next one) as a chance to work on your dev skills, maybe you won't get fired after 6 months. Maybe you'll grow in to absolutely deserving the awesome job, and then grow beyond that.

Please think about it. Paraphrasing an Adventure Time character, being a shitty dev is the first step to being a kind of good dev. And we need more good devs and fewer firings.

Re: The Hiring Post

#172

Post by mrkurt » Sat, Mar 07, 2015, 6:09 AM UTC

joesmo wrote: post #169

mrkurt wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you've just described sounds like the exact opposite of a rigorous, objective, work sample based hiring approach. Crappy companies have crappy hiring processes. It sucks to deal with that. When we started doing work sample hiring, we put a process in place to handle many applicants, make sure we were responsive, and work people through the funnel as efficiently as we could. I don't think it's possible to take ad…

No, it's not a high bar to be decent to people, yet many companies (and people) still aren't. The problem then is that prospective employees have no way of knowing that a company is decent versus another company that is not. Will I do another work sample for another company? I'm thinking likely not, but I haven't ruled out the possibility. Note though, that the company must offer something of great value for me to ev…

Just ask "what is your process and criteria for hiring?" It's a fair question, a company should have a good answer. A thoughtful process is a good sign.

Re: The Hiring Post

#173

Post by tptacek » Sat, Mar 07, 2015, 6:46 AM UTC

maxbrown wrote: post #140

tptacek wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're not mistaken! That's how Matasano has hired for something like 2.5 years. I left the company to do hiring-related things, after feeling like I'd more or less disposed of the challenge completely at Matasano/NCC. There's a pretty big plug coming next week, though not from me. What we're doing meshes well with the worldview in my post, but it isn't a productization of it. This is just what I really think abo…

Can't find a lick of information about Starfighter online - is that on purpose right now then? (Pre-"plug"/launch?) Definitely curious, give us the 2-sentence version if you can?

2 sentences. Hmm.

"The company is called Starfighter. We'll have a little more to say about it next week."

:P

Re: The Hiring Post

#174

Post by ahomescu1 » Sat, Mar 07, 2015, 6:54 AM UTC

smenko wrote: post #67

Great, if you want to hire people who "can code", but have no social skills. I am personally done working in environments where people think they "can code" but have not enough of a social skill to at least empathise with your point of view on naming conventions. Don't get me wrong, I can code, I'll write you anything you want, AND IT WILL WORK! and I'll still know there may be a better way but this is the way that w…

More often, when talking about naming/indentation conventions, consistency is more important than who's right. The entire code base should look exactly the same (no exceptions).

Re: The Hiring Post

#175

Post by ahomescu1 » Sat, Mar 07, 2015, 6:56 AM UTC

> Because here is the thing about interviews: they are incredibly hostile experiences for candidates.

Minor nitpick from a grad student here: interviews are nowhere near as hostile as academic peer reviews for papers. In an interview, the interviewers aren't actively trying to find any holes in your logic (no matter how small). To me, technical interviews are a walk in the park compared to conference submissions.

Re: The Hiring Post

#176

Post by eru » Sat, Mar 07, 2015, 7:00 AM UTC

thedufer wrote: post #147

tptacek wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had three work-sample exercises at Matasano. All told, they took candidates mid-single-digit hours to finish (many geeked out, or golfed on them; we did our best to keep this from happening --- you can read about this on our hiring page: http://www.matasano.com/careers This sounds onerous, but it is less onerous than the normal dev hiring process, which involves an onsite interview that eats the whole day. We did…

My concern here is that it seems to signal a lack of respect for the candidate if the company expects them to complete a task with no matching employee time. Interviews are even; both sides clearly have skin in the game; a work-sample test could be given to any number of people at basically no cost. This is somewhat alleviated by the knowledge that you do a phone screen with each person prior to that stage, but it st…

I think Matasano can make up for some of that with a good reputation. (Plus the 80 bucks they pay for books.)

Re: The Hiring Post

#177

Post by eru » Sat, Mar 07, 2015, 7:02 AM UTC

adpirz wrote: post #7

SamReidHughes wrote: post #3

As somebody who agrees in theory with tptacek's posts and now this blog post, what I find very funny is how I perceive typical technical hiring, with the interview gauntlet, to still be way better than what some other industries must do. How the hell does anybody hire a teacher?

Teacher here. Good schools will ask you to teach a sample lesson on a particular subject and prep your own materials. Principals and other teachers will observe and give feedback. It's what I did to work at my current school, and we're one of the top performing schools in our state.

Sounds like a work sample test to me. Great!

Re: The Hiring Post

#178

Post by eru » Sat, Mar 07, 2015, 7:08 AM UTC

elptacek wrote: post #130

jiffyjeff wrote: post #126

Terrific post, thanks! I am somewhat familiar with this hiring process thanks to tptacek's HN contributions (which incidentally led me to recommending a friend to Matasano). I would like to have a better feel for the context of the hiring problems involved here. I am wondering if the company's particular niche makes the hiring process unusually difficult. Or perhaps the company is in a growth phase with a correspondi…

When I was at Matasano, there was always enough inbound work (sometimes more than enough) to keep the consultants utilized. So yes, a company with a full pipeline will lose money on every qualified hire it doesn't make. Perhaps this is not the case for other industries, but for infosec consulting, there seems to be more work than there are qualified workers. Matasano ran under its own steam and did not take funding.…

Did the salaries of the bargain candidates creep up as their value was realized?

Re: The Hiring Post

#179

Post by lilpirate » Sat, Mar 07, 2015, 7:09 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #27

Author. I can talk in a pretty good amount of detail about how exactly our process worked, if anyone has any questions. And, to head off a concern a reviewer gave me: from 1997-2005, I was a full-time software developer; I shipped shrink-wrap boxed software on Windows and Unix in the 1990s, then appliances deployed at tier 1 ISPs. I'm a "software person" more than a "security person".

I applied for an internship at Matasano. I was asked about office preference and VISA sponsorship. Now I feel bad I didn't get an interview.

Re: The Hiring Post

#180

Post by eru » Sat, Mar 07, 2015, 7:14 AM UTC

dennisgorelik wrote: post #146

jowiar wrote: post #18

This article seems to put forward a good theory on interviewing someone who you want to lock in room with a problem and have code come out the other end. Unfortunately, most of us work in the real world, where that's a very limited portion of the engineering job. When the author says selecting for: "people who have the social skills to actively listen to someone else’s technical points, to guide a discussion with que…

> in my job, engineers spend a whole lot more time dealing with people than with code. What kind of job do you have?

Depends how you measure. Writing documentation is dealing with people. And even most code is meant more for people to understand than for the benefit of the computer.