Silicon Valley hiring is not a meritocracy (2013)

The code that they select tells a lot and is a great starter for further discussion and finding out about how they think. It also demonstrates an essential skill, and that is evaluating other peoples work and how to work with it rather than against it.

For the poor employee, why the heck do they want to get hired just to write a first mobile app? So, is that job worth their uprooting their family, moving across country, buying a house, getting good schools for the kids, having their spouse happy, maybe also with a job, etc.?

Same for bookkeeping, accounting, taxes, payroll, business insurance, business law, setting up system monitoring and management for a server farm, network configuration, travel planning, employee benefits, etc.

For details of how to make use of high end products of Microsoft, Cisco, etc., I'd expect some good technical sales support and, later, some more technical support even if paid for by the hour. E.g., to set up some parallel, highly reliable, high performance, high end SQL Server database, I'd expect a lot of help from Microsoft. Same for much of their system monitoring and management software. If HP wants my startup to use some of their system monitoring and management software, then they'd better have their technical support people ready to play. I don't intend to hire full time employees with such expertise in place before I hire them; if they happen to have such expertise and look good as employees otherwise, then fine.

Same for running 500 A of 120 V electric power lines, fixing the HVAC or the plumbing, installing an employee kitchenette, installing phones, mowing the grass, plowing the snow, etc.

It seems like most of our employers pass up on people we know are qualified BECAUSE WE'VE WORKED WITH THEM ON HARD SHIT, to hire people who can whiteboard but something but are miserable engineers.

Or, at one recent employer, desperation to hire a certain flavor of mobile engineer, only to interview them with graph theory questions and reject them on the basis of that.

Or, there's another, nastier possibility. Code quality + stability is not valued nowadays, just getting shit done, no matter how buggy it is later. Management and teams will probably churn before the product collapses into itself, so nobody loses.

1. Make all the resumes that come in responding to technical jobs go straight to your inbox. If your company has a candidate tracking system then set up an alias that sends it to you and to the tracking system.

2. Review every resume yourself. Jump in and ask follow up questions for candidates that are interesting.

3. Interview them yourself. Every one you bring in you should spend some time with.

4. Have authority with the head of HR to make offers and move fast when you decide to hire people. If you leave this up to HR you will lose the best candidates.

The simple fact of the matter is you can't outsource this to recruiters. Let HR people do their paper work and all that but do NOT allow them in the decision making loop.

This article is right you can't train them to do your job, and my experience is that they are trained, basically, to be paper pushers and gate keepers.

Not only do these people not know how to tell a good candidate from a bad one, they (with very few exceptions) don't even KNOW they don't know, and they think they are an important part of the process in screening people out! Look at their blog posts and linked in profiles. They're proud of this role because they think it makes them important and they think they know what they are doing. This is the worst kind of ignorance, those who think they know but don't.

If I seem bitter it's because I've spent a lot of time dealing with HR people who are incompetent and who, basically, don't give a damn about the quality of hiring.

So, I'd say the number one most important hire in the early years (but not the earliest years) is the head of HR.

I happen to make a living because this dichotomy is real. I run a bootcamp to prep engineers for interview skills (http://InterviewKickstart.com). We routinely have sad moments, thinking and seeing how little correlation there is, to what technical interviewing tests for, and what is actually required to ship a product.

Because I've also been on the other side, I clearly understand why it's so. There is just no good way to predict future success with what's demonstrated today. Human beings work differently in different contexts.

(BTW: Aline, who blog this article is from, is awesome)