My favorite is when you see companies droning on about how they only hire "the best" and their advertised salary ranges are at or below market.
We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
101–110 of 373 posts
Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
A really good strategy which is unfornately not very common. For one part because of the topic of the article, but for the second part because many companies seem to think that their employees will be hired away by their competitors at the first opportunity, which basically says that they do not trust themselves to be good enough to retain their employees .. but if these companies do not trust themselves how can thei…
I think it isn't common because it is expensive . People would rather hire someone who has made mistakes on someone else's dime (another word for it is "experience").
You are right, that is the third component, but hiring is also very expensive, especially if you have a low quote of acceptance and have to interview many candidates for each position.
Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
#103In the spirit of this advice, if you are serious about really finding the best people, you should offer very comprehensive severance packages as part of every offer -- on the order of 6-10 months of salary, possibly even "grossed up" so that it results in at least 6 months of salary after taxes. Instead of spending money on needlessly complicated hiring processes, with back and forth phone calls, panel Skype intervie…
>Talk to people, dig into their background and preferred working style a little. If they appear to be competent, then just hire them. If I am very good at this assessment, then this may work. However, if I trust my skills to assess someone accurately, I am unlikely to have a complicated hiring process. If I am a company owner (or manager!) who is not good at assessing people this way, then wouldn't substituting my pr…
> I will end up with many not-so-best-fits
I am not sure I believe this. First, if you are aware that you're not good at assessing it, then have someone else in your company do the assessment, or hire someone who can (possibly on the advice of your investors or something).
If you can't do either of those, I am afraid your business just isn't going to work out.
So, almost by definition, the person doing the assessment is reasonably good at it. For otherwise, you won't be around very long regardless.
Also, if you find that you're hiring a lot of people who seem good, but ultimately are fired, maybe look in the mirror. Maybe it is that your expectations are unrealistic, or maybe you expect people to adhere to "culture" standards that do not support human flourishing.
Unless the tech problem you need to solve involves lasering in on a fleetingly tiny population of candidates (most don't), then a sequence of looked-competent-but-needed-to-fire people is probably more a reflection on the company than the candidate stream. It's unlikely that all of them were elaborate fakers.
The costs of (1) should be low unless there's a fundamental problem with the company (in which case the costs of (1) are way cheaper than hiring a management consultant to help you not fix it).
(2) is a real cost, and yes, some companies can't afford it (so maybe they scale back to 3 months severance? Maybe they add continued health coverage. Maybe they let you pick a foosball table to keep) ... but it is just the cost of getting useful information about an employee, instead of the not-very-useful info that most hiring processes generate.
Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
#104In the spirit of this advice, if you are serious about really finding the best people, you should offer very comprehensive severance packages as part of every offer -- on the order of 6-10 months of salary, possibly even "grossed up" so that it results in at least 6 months of salary after taxes. Instead of spending money on needlessly complicated hiring processes, with back and forth phone calls, panel Skype intervie…
>Talk to people, dig into their background and preferred working style a little. If they appear to be competent, then just hire them. If I am very good at this assessment, then this may work. However, if I trust my skills to assess someone accurately, I am unlikely to have a complicated hiring process. If I am a company owner (or manager!) who is not good at assessing people this way, then wouldn't substituting my pr…
> If I am very good at this assessment, then this may work. However, if I trust my skills to assess someone accurately, I am unlikely to have a complicated hiring process.
If you don't have the skills for that assessment, how do you know your complicated hiring process works?
Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
#105Getting a job is an accident you get involved in (most of the times) knowingly.
The interview is the collision (or the contact event)
The job represents how well you survive after you come home after treatment.
There is no best... only better.
Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
People who ask for more complicated code than "reverse a string" or "fizzbuzz" in a remote code screen is doing it wrong. People who can't code, compile, and run a fizzbuzz in an hour are probably not fit to be hired. Asking someone to implement a proper Diffie-Hellman over Hackerrank is ludicrous, on the other hand. Interviewers should err on the side of stupidly simple problems. A surprising number of people can't…
The one time I tried a fizzbuzz in a series of interviews, one candidate was surprised and almost insulted. At the end of the day, I learned almost nothing about any of the candidates from this question. Only one candidate (in fact, the one female candidate) implemented it substantially different than any other. All the candidates could do it. They were all CS students at a university, so what was the chance they wer…
It's supposed to be a minimum filter to filter out people who can't program novel solutions. It doesn't prove they are the best though.
Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
#107tl;dr: The only measure of on the job performance is on the job performance. The only thing that matters to your company is also on the job performance. Why not focus on that? It is utter voodoo. I came up in the late 80s. Interviews were maybe 2 hours long. You might be handed a piece of paper with a problem to aggregate some information distributed in a few different arrays and print them out. You know, write some…
Perfect. I wish I could single handedly up vote this comment straight to the top so everyone could see it.
Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
#108My team does take-home project, a small problem to solve that should take at most a couple hours. It's the same problem for every candidate so we're judging them on common work. It's not real work, it's made up. In interviewing discussions in places like HN, there is enough pushback against this idea, which is a bit surprising to me. I thought a few hours work was reasonable when I was interviewing. But my point is t…
One thing I find off-putting is when the project is the first stage of the interview process. It means the applicant has to invest a large amount of time upfront, while it's easy for the company to send the test over.
I prefer at least having a phone interview upfront, which suggests that the company is willing to put in some effort.
Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
#109I really like this post, that most companies require workers to be at a specific location is very strange considering our type of work. I don't want to work in Sillicon Valley, even if the work is interesting. I live in Scandinavia and for me scandinavian countries are the best to live in the world.
It boils down to 2 things: Management is incompetent to tell when work is actually being done, and management doesn't trust their employees. I'm just waiting for the day when requiring on-site commutes is regarded as backwards as it deserves.
Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
#110This might be an unpopular opinion on HN, but another example of this problem manifests in the sheer volume of companies that require a HackerRank screening test these days. Apart from the clumsy web editor, recording someone under a time constraint means nothing in the larger context of how a programmer's actual work happens. Sigh. By using such automated tests, companies want to identify top talent by taking a shor…
The context of pressure is also not the same as the pressure from meeting deadlines at work, it is now about proving yourself in some set time. I took one of these recently, and botched one of the tests. Within 10 minutes after the timer was up, I had restarted my solution with a successful answer and was iterating on it. The idea that the pressure is the same doesn't seem to apply to all applicants. Doing work under…
> The context of pressure is also not the same as the pressure from meeting deadlines at work, it is now about proving yourself in some set time.
I am so tired of hearing the refrain that "we want to see how you work under pressure". Anybody who thinks that all pressure or stress is the same and that you can translate performance in one stressful situation into any and every other one has no business being near a hiring decision.