What happens when you stop relying on resumes • Hacker News Board

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#61

Post by esonderegger » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 9:49 PM UTC

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've been enjoying reading the TripleByte posts about what you all have been learning while trying to build a better hiring funnel. (Thank you for sharing!)

Have you been able to place anyone yet? I'd love to know out of the 300 or so interviews you've done, how many have led to accepted offers, and what those successes had in common.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#62

Post by istvan__ » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 9:55 PM UTC

nether wrote: post #17

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…

> 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.

Welcome to California! :) You know you are absolutely right. Some companies care only about what is hip and nothing else.

"I saw the best minds of my generation... writing spam filters." — Neal Stephenson, Solve For X

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#63

Post by caublestone » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 10:06 PM UTC

We use an alternative screening process where we prompt prospective interviewees with 2 extreme customer service complaints (this product sucks, it didn't arrive on time, i hear it's poison etc.), ask them to provide an answer directed to the customer and create a plan to prevent the issue from happening in the future. It's fascinating to see how people approach the problem of making people happy now and preventing dissatisfaction down the road. If they pass (1/10 do), we use a 30 minute phone call to identify interests and motivations which ends up being the strongest indicator of value add. This might work for B2C companies only but I'd love to see any company identify people that are truly passionate about making people happy.

Edit: Clarifying that this is for non-engineering roles.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#64

Post by kansface » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 10:16 PM UTC

caublestone wrote: post #63

We use an alternative screening process where we prompt prospective interviewees with 2 extreme customer service complaints (this product sucks, it didn't arrive on time, i hear it's poison etc.), ask them to provide an answer directed to the customer and create a plan to prevent the issue from happening in the future. It's fascinating to see how people approach the problem of making people happy now and preventing d…

I don't suspect strong correlation between the desire to make customers happy and productivity writing software - maybe you can tell me if my intuition is correct.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#65

Post by sjtgraham » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 10:17 PM UTC

I screened and interviewed a lot of developers in my last position and it stood out to me that résumé quality seemed to be inversely correlated with the candidate's actual ability. I distinctly remember the absolute best developers that I hired also had the most atrociously bad résumés. The candidates with résumés that literally almost knocked me off my chair failed miserably at the most basic programming task.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#66

Post by a-dub » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 10:19 PM UTC

__z wrote: post #52

a-dub wrote: post #43

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…

What kind of "difficult-to-work-with" questions do you ask? I'd like to filter out these people but I'm not sure what sorts of questions to ask to suss that out.

Basically I goad them into complaining about past bad work experiences and then pay close attention for subtle clues that may indicate that they are systemically disrespectful or unwilling to compromise on things that don't seem worth fighting for. Were they bothered by people, situations or outcomes?

Tell me about the most frustrating time when you needed a thing, or consensus on a thing, and you had to go through way too much to get it.

Tell me about the most frustrating time when you needed a thing, or consensus on a thing, and no matter how hard you pushed, you never got it.

And, of course: The fastest way to be shown the door around here is to be an agitator of your colleagues on the grounds of race, sex, religion or any other attribute that has little to do with work. Nobody here is in the business of policing behavior and nobody wants to be. This requires perhaps more discipline than other places as the hammer falls harder and quicker here if things go awry, so it demands either heightened discretion or a heightened sense of self awareness and awareness of those around you. Do you think you would be able to work under such conditions?

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#67

Post by function_seven » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 10:19 PM UTC

tikhonj wrote: post #46

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. Howeve…

> 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.

Which reminds me of Jeff Atwood's original "captcha"[1] on the Coding Horror blog. It was a static image of the word "orange" every time. It was the most trivially defeatable captcha ever, but he didn't care because it worked. It would have been senseless for him to invest time and effort into implementing a complex captcha engine, when the existing solution was filtering spam bots just fine.

[1] http://blog.codinghorror.com/captcha-is-dead-long-live-captc...

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#68

Post by codeonfire » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 10:20 PM UTC

Nacraile wrote: post #53

codeonfire wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a way, the entire premise of what a software engineer is has been destroyed. Imagine if mechanical engineers were hired based on their ability to design a simple bracket. Imagine if electrical engineers were hired because they amazed management by building a flashing LED circuit. After many years, the entire criteria for being an engineer is dumbed down to "are you able to make a flashing led or simple bracket or…

I'm not sure I buy your implicit assertion that other engineering disciplines are somehow better at hiring than the software industry is. As far as I can tell, mechanical and electrical engineers are hired based on relevance of work experience, some discussion of that experience, and maybe a few specific technical details which should be known by anybody with the experience they claim to have. All of which is isomorp…

Engineering firms won't even talk to someone claiming to be a ME or EE with no degree, no certifications, and/or no license. And, the premise of the article are that they are ignoring both education and experience, so I don't see how your comparison fits.

This thread isn't about who is more likely to fail. We are talking about hiring and who is likely to succeed. My point that companies have dumbed down what they call success so that managers can have jobs has nothing to do with engineering catastrophes. What is being called a success, I call a failure.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#69

Post by caublestone » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 10:22 PM UTC

kansface wrote: post #64

caublestone wrote: post #63

We use an alternative screening process where we prompt prospective interviewees with 2 extreme customer service complaints (this product sucks, it didn't arrive on time, i hear it's poison etc.), ask them to provide an answer directed to the customer and create a plan to prevent the issue from happening in the future. It's fascinating to see how people approach the problem of making people happy now and preventing d…

I don't suspect strong correlation between the desire to make customers happy and productivity writing software - maybe you can tell me if my intuition is correct.

Ah, I meant to say we do this for non-engineering roles. For engineering we provide coding challenges as a pre-screen.

Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes

#70

Post by resu_nimda » Thu, Jun 25, 2015, 10:23 PM UTC

a-dub wrote: post #43

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…

It sounds like you're saying "resumes are fine, as long as you ignore most of the stuff that is considered important in contemporary resume culture." It's broken at a conceptual level, even if there are functional workarounds.

The experiment from the article basically does what you describe, cuts out the stuff to ignore and goes straight to the project history. It would be beneficial for this to spread even if some people can suss it out in the current process, because there is still a large culture of looking heavily at things like alma mater and GPA.