What surprises me is how many people dislike cover letters. When I go through applicants, a decent cover letter demonstrating some enthusiasm about the company and a unique point or two is appealing.
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What happens when you stop relying on resumes
131–140 of 195 posts
Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes
#132What surprises me is how many people dislike cover letters. When I go through applicants, a decent cover letter demonstrating some enthusiasm about the company and a unique point or two is appealing.
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Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes
#133What surprises me is how many people dislike cover letters. When I go through applicants, a decent cover letter demonstrating some enthusiasm about the company and a unique point or two is appealing.
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Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes
#134What surprises me is how many people dislike cover letters. When I go through applicants, a decent cover letter demonstrating some enthusiasm about the company and a unique point or two is appealing.
It surprises me how many employers think that any of their engineers give a crap about the actual business. The better ones have some form of passion for creating good code, the actual business is an implementation detail.
Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 w…
SO THESE INDIANS MAN. YOU EVER WORK WITH INDIANS?! THEY SAY YES TO EVERYTHING! DOESN'T MATTER IF THEY UNDERSTAND IT OR NOT. OH MY GOD, NEVER AGAIN. Actual quote from an interview ^
:(
Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That's definitely true. Do you have a particular set of questions you ask during project interviews? If so, which ones tend to be the most revealing?
Less an explicit set of questions but more recursively/iteratively asking why/what/when/how at increasingly deeper levels of the problem they're talking about. It requires the interviewer to be at least familiar with the general domain but you don't have to be an expert. It's borrowed from how Elon Musk says he does assessments. People who know their stuff remember everything about every part of something they worked on. They know why they did /didn't do something all the way down to the most trivial level of detail and they have intelligent thoughts about how they would improve and what tradeoffs they made. Most people fail after one or two levels of this "interrogation".
Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. I find myself almost irresistably drawn towards the…
The process being broken isn't a deal-breaker for companies, which can still hire from the 90% that can deal with the broken system. It's a deal-breaker for the 10% that are bad at playing the game / jumping hoops / resume writing / interviews, because they can't get a job.
It's not so rosy for companies. The situation is akin to the one in large companies and bureaucracies where all numbers and estimates in all communications become "padded" and largely fictionalized -- precisely because "everyone is doing it." In such broken games, signals lose their meaning, and everyone ultimately loses.
In academia, someone observed this: "The revolutionary idea of one generation becomes just the stuff you say to get tenure in the next generation."
Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cal…
The difference between a mechanical engineer and a mechanic is the engineer knows the math. A mechanic can pick up everything about engineering on the job, except the math, and without the math he's crippled.
That's why to be an ME, a degree is a gatekeeper. To get a degree, you have to pass the math classes.
Yes, I know engineers who can't do the math, despite having a degree. I've never known a mechanic to learn the math on the job.
Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's definitely true. Do you have a particular set of questions you ask during project interviews? If so, which ones tend to be the most revealing?
Not the GP, but I focus on tradeoffs and roads not taken. Get them to talk about a project they've worked on, and then ask about alternative design decisions around some interesting feature and see what they say. Example: I developed a little state-machine framework for managing complexity in a large, legacy code-base. It allowed me to refactor a lot of ad hoc distributed logic into the transition table and clean up…
Crazy reading your answer after i responded. I gotta say we're definitely on the same page here :)
Re: What happens when you stop relying on resumes
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cal…
> Engineering firms won't even talk to someone claiming to be a ME or EE with no degree, no certifications, and/or no license. I don't think software is "dumbing down" by ignoring credentials. We're ignoring credentials because we are finding that they have no predictive power whatsoever for competence. Most software companies do still pay attention to experience (at least while sourcing), on the belief that it is no…
> We're ignoring credentials because we are finding that they have no predictive power whatsoever for competence.
I disagree with that actually.
It's my own anecdotal evidence, but from what I've seen, people with degrees write generally better code. They have a better understanding of algorithms, are more aware that what they're writing in a high level language isn't running by magic but is being translated into lower level constructs which may or may not be very efficient, they're more likely to realize there's an existing algorithm for what they're doing, etc.
I guess I would sum it up that people without degrees tend to work harder and not smarter.