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What happens when you stop relying on resumes

blog.alinelerner.com

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Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#41

Post by michaelchisari »

pzxc wrote: post #21
vonmoltke wrote: post #12

> While AJ’s government work experience gave him a good amount of cred in the public sector, he found that making the move to industry, and startups especially, was near impossible. It wasn’t that he was blowing interviews. He just couldn’t get through the filter in the first place. ... > It was AJ, a candidate that Zouhair Belkoura, KeepSafe’s cofounder and CEO, readily admits he would have overlooked, had he come i…

I'm going through this right now as well. I ran my own business for 7 years, making content websites monetized through google adsense, building games, and freelancing, among other things. The primary source of revenue was adsense, and it paid the bills enough for me not to need a "real job" for years. 18 months ago, the adsense revenue started to dry up, and in an effort to make some additional income, I started look…

A significant number of them are clock-watchers that the bosses don't even try to assign anything important to

That doesn't sound too far off from a lot of corporate america as well.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#42

Post by levlandau »

Harj wrote: post #19

We have the same belief in the limited usefulness of resumes at Triplebyte. We found talking about projects with candidates both more enjoyable and interesting than looking at words on a resume. Especially when people are enthusiastic about what they built. The difficulty we had was not seeing a strong correlation between talking about projects and doing well at programming during an interview.

I think the other thing to look into is what "talking about projects" means. I'm willing to bet that there's some version of talking about projects that correlates well with programming ability. I've had to screen ~ 500 engineers and we basically use the same method aline describes as a first filter and then talk about the project. Imo it's other things like reliability, speed in real world conditions etc that are a bit harder to verify but those are hard to verify in a programming interview as well.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#43

Post by a-dub »

Resumes are fine, it's really in how you treat them. When I read resumes I generally ignore where people have worked and gone to school and instead look for what they have done. If there's either a good match between the general type of stuff they've done in the past and what the role is, or if there's stuff on there that is interesting enough such that I'd enjoy hearing about it, I give a thumbs up.

When I interview, I tend to spend most of the time asking in depth questions about the projects I find most interesting on the resume. What was easy? What was hard? X sounds like it would be a problem, how did you solve it? What was fun? What was headbangonthewall miserable? Generally this gives a sense as to whether or not there's any bullshitting going on, and gives a sense for whether or not the candidate has a good head for thinking about hard problems.

Finally, I'll ask a few questions to probe for "difficult-to-work-with" red flags and finish with a few fairly easy "technical challenges" that offer opportunity for the candidate to either walk about having solved the problem, or walk away having solved the problem and demonstrated understanding of the solution from top to bottom.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#44

Post by leeny »

msandford wrote: post #34
leeny wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aline here. Fwiw, I don't disagree with TripleByte's findings... anecdotally, after having interviewed somewhere between 500 and 1000 people in my career, I think they're right -- I, too, have observed a disconnect between how polished people sound when they talk about their work and what happens when they actually have to write code. What we're actually comparing here, though, isn't coding vs. describing projects. I…

> I think they're right -- I, too, have observed a disconnect between how polished people sound when they talk about their work and what happens when they actually have to write code. I've done a lot of work that people would probably find very interesting and useful. But I tend to choke on whiteboard code interviews because they're so high stakes. Any time spent thinking about the problem looks bad, so you have to t…

I think what you describe is a real problem and unfortunately one that getting data around is really tough, for the reasons you describe.

For what it's worth, when I observed a disconnect between how well people spoke about their projects and how well they coded, it was generally a situation where someone had perfected a pretty polished self-pitch rather than a situation where I drilled down deeply into what they had done, asked them what they'd have done differently if we varied up certain constraints, etc. And when they fucked up on coding, it was on warmup problems that was something you'd reasonably expect anyone with some experience to be able to do (e.g. explain why you might want to use a hash table over a linked list for certain scenarios, reverse a string in place).

That said, one of the reasons I'm really psyched about interviewing.io (the thing I'm working on now) is that we're getting a lot of comparative interview data, i.e. where the same person gets interviewed a bunch of different ways. Excited to see if we can draw some good conclusions about what works and what doesn't.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#46

Post by tikhonj »

First of all, I definitely agree that resumes are woefully overused and overrated. They have structural problems and incentivize people to use "negative selection" criteria where people are eliminated based on not having a specific feature rather than selected for excelling on something¹.

This article neatly demonstrates that resumes are not necessary and that not using them can unlock new sorts of candidates.

However, I don't think there's a conclusion to be made about the actual method used here. I suspect that it worked because it was different, not because it carried a fundamentally strong signal. If everyone did this, project descriptions would be gamed even more than resumes—it would select for people who prepared for the selection process² more than anything else.

This reminds me of various captcha strategies I've seen used by small forums to great effect—solving some math, typing a word into a text box, choosing a popular character's picture… etc. They all work, perfectly. But only because spammers don't care about the small fry: it's not worth their time to modify their bots for your little site. If any given captcha becomes used widely—or your forum grows big enough—they will bypass it trivially.

Now, an essay like this isn't quite as bad as a captcha, but the idea is the same: it works because it's new and different. If everybody used it, it would probably be a step back.

Ultimately, I think the real moral is that more companies should do their own thing, even if that thing is not great in the abstract. Being different carries a value of its own, and it breeds biodiversity that's healthy for the system as a whole. (Of course, many of the things companies try are really bad for various reasons, but that's a different story…)

¹ In particular, most people have a bunch of "red flags" they look for with, at best, cursory rationale—everything from passing on people who didn't go to the right school to those who have breaks in their work history, based on "common sense" or "experience" rather than anything meaningful. Most of these criteria seem counter-productive.

² I also think this is really true for college admissions and especially the admissions essay. A project blurb for hiring is more or less the same idea in a new context.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#47

Post by s_q_b »

vonmoltke wrote: post #26
nether wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And again, if you worked at NG, what possibly interesting things you could have done? Applicant: Well, I wrote a code to optimize a UAV flight path to avoid enemy radar and minimize fuel consumption, and debugged another controls code to prevent people from dying. Did some debugging on a computational electrodynamics code for radar simulations... Recruiter: Oh. You know what's cool? Photo sharing.

On top of that, hope your title was never "Systems Engineer"[1] at one of these companies. If it was, prepare for a whole lot of clueless recruiters and managers to misunderstand your experience. [1] At Raytheon, if you were the one developing radar avoidance algorithms[2] and code, that was probably your title. [2] "Algorithms", another word that has slightly different meaning leading to major misinterpretation.

Hmm... That probably does have a lot to do with it.

At my company, you're permitting to choose a public title of either your job description (e.g. Lead Data Scientist), your "engineering rank" (e.g. Lead Scientist/Technologist/Developer/Engineer) or your consulting rank e.g (Lead Associate). All of these are equivalent in rank and promotion opportunities, but it does give you some flexibility on what you can place on your resume.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#48

Post by bmh100 »

Harj wrote: post #19

We have the same belief in the limited usefulness of resumes at Triplebyte. We found talking about projects with candidates both more enjoyable and interesting than looking at words on a resume. Especially when people are enthusiastic about what they built. The difficulty we had was not seeing a strong correlation between talking about projects and doing well at programming during an interview.

Your interviewing process is broken when it comes to those with line-of-business backgrounds. The type of work those people do can sound like "project management", when in fact it is evidence of the "most valuable" programming skill, organizing complexity [1]. Reducing reliance on resumes is less useful when the same "someone like me" and algorithm-knowledge biases still seep through.

[1]: http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2015/06/18/most-important-skil...

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#49

Post by __z »

s_q_b wrote: post #24
soham wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, regularly. Valley has a very short attention span. NG isn't in the list of hip sexy companies. Same goes with profiles from Cisco, VMWare, Intel, Synposys, IBM, and pretty much all the big companies that were pinnacles of business and your career at one point, but they are not considered hip anymore. Looking at Github profiles, however much people talk about it, also doesn't regularly happen. It's a chore to typ…

Don't overlook the East Coast firms. CSC, SAIC, Unisys, Booz | Allen | Hamilton, Mitre, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and smaller companies are developing very sophisticated software, especially in data science (my field), and not just for the government. A lot of these positions are highly competitive and involve a great deal of skill and education. Around here, they're still seen as major resume builders. Anec…

Some really hip stuff actually had origins in the defense industry like these little things we call The Internet and GPS.
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