This part was golden: Agency : How much did you pay for your last rental car? Applicant : I don't see how that matters. What are you charging? Agency : We like to know what you paid before so you get a fair rate. Applicant : I paid market rates. Agency : Sorry, we must know how much...
What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?
101–110 of 177 posts
Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?
#102Maybe it's because I just made the egregious mistake of getting drawn into a gun-control debate with a friend and his friends on Facebook, but hyperbolic arguments by analogy feel really silly, cheap, and disingenuous to me right now...
Reasoning from analogies is like tying your shoes with laces made of butter.
Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?
#103As a hiring manager, the thing I find most interesting on posts like this (ignoring that the analogy is TERRIBLE) are the comments of people used to being on the other side of the desk. I don't think we (as interviewers) do a good job of explaining why we ask the questions we ask. And I don't think we do a good job of communicating what our job is. Our job is to stop you getting hired. If we get 100 people applying f…
So this means you hire people for specific tasks, and when new task comes, you fire them and go looking for new people for the next specific task. seems like a very good strategy...
Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Our job is to stop you getting hired. If we get 100 people applying for the job, then our job is to not employ at least 99. So we are looking for anything that identifies you as being one of the 99." If you have only position to fill and 100 people applied for that position, yes, your position makes sense. But if you have 100 positions to fill, will you still insist that you must interview 10000 people to fill those…
If you're hiring 100 people, you still only get the same number of applicants. If you get 100 applicants, you're not going to fill your 100 positions. (Note the "at least 99" in my post) If I'm desperate to hire 100 people and I can't get 100 qualified applicants, that's when I start looking to people who could be the right people in very quick order. I've done that and ended up with some true super stars. But that w…
I think this reveals some of the root of the problem. The interviewers have no incentive for hiring good or great people ("superstars"), but absolutely cannot let crappy applicants inside, under no circumstances, under the risk of losing their jobs.
So they just don't care if you are good at what you do, if you can learn fast, etc -- all they care if whether you are not shit and can certainly fulfill the specific requirements for the job they were instructed to fulfill.
How to change this? Well, one way would be to get people interested in the applicant's abilities and long term capacity and commitment. It's good to find this kind of people inside a company which are not in the higher ups. Another alternative would be to attach the long term success of the applicant to the ones responsible for hiring somehow. Those are all very difficult problems, but ones that can be managed with good will and commitment from the guys inside the company.
Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?
#105As a hiring manager, the thing I find most interesting on posts like this (ignoring that the analogy is TERRIBLE) are the comments of people used to being on the other side of the desk. I don't think we (as interviewers) do a good job of explaining why we ask the questions we ask. And I don't think we do a good job of communicating what our job is. Our job is to stop you getting hired. If we get 100 people applying f…
First off, not sure how your company does it, but I've had companies ask me to interview when I wasn't even looking, and then not extend an offer. So interviews are not always to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Second, the gist I got from the "color of the wire" question was it was an analogy for asking someone to write code for a linked list. It's banal and been done before, so it seems ludicrous to ask, but many places use it as a FizzBuzz filter. I can think of very few places that would actually pay someone to "fix the wiring distributor cap" (write linked lists).
Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?
#106The author is confused.
1) While renting a car you are paying. 2) Interviews are for getting PAID.
It is buying versus selling.
The buyer will be cautious, try to get the best deal. The seller will be sweet, nice and somehow sell it.
So, we should ignore this post.
Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?
#107It's very easy to decry company hiring procedures. That happens all the time here on HN, and for a very good reason--most company hiring procedures are not based on research and are demonstrably suboptimal for hiring the best people. We discuss this a lot on Hacker News because many of us have been looking for jobs or looking for people to hire some time in our adult lives. From participants in earlier discussions I…
You post this every time, and I want to decry the astro turfing.. but it's good information, well referenced, and I don't have the background or time to refute anything you've said.
I don't think posting the same information again and again is welcome. The people who might be inspired to debate it simply can't have a discussion about it every time it appears - and it goes beyond wanting to engage with the community and share something and becomes an attempt to manipulate. I'd certainly encourage tokenadult to stop posting it.
Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is that the guy who can fix wiring in distributor caps might be able to do that specific task. But maybe it took him 5 years to learn that and a much better candidate who has no clue how to do that could master it in a week and will be fixing those caps at a higher quality. It's also that it's incredibly short-sighted to seek such specific skills in the technology industry with the rate of change in tech. F…
The problem with the analogy is that it's too specific. But I'm still hiring for right now. That you can easily learn next year's technology is something I'd rather you don't do on my time.
Then you are the one being short-sighted here. A good engineer is a good engineer is a good engineer, someone with great learning aptitude is a great asset for any company. Say you hire someone for today's task, but next year the technology changes and the guy you hired is horrible at learning new things. What do you do? Do you fire him and hire someone for next year's task? What if the old technology still requires backward support, do you keep the old guy on payroll as well? What if the same thing happens the year after next?
You don't want people to learn on your time? That's incredibly short sighted. Real engineering is about learning all the time, whether it's taking a formal training session or just reading a long post on StackOverflow. If you don't want to pay your engineer to learn things then you simply don't care about the engineering quality of your company and all you care about is short term payroll bottom-line.
I feel sorry for the engineers who work under you.
Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity, why do you consider binary trees, linked lists, and pointer arithmetic to be so out of the bounds of possibility for work at a job? Those strike me as skills I might find invaluable in one of my software engineers depending on the job.
You probably won't be doing pointer arithmetic in C#. It's been about 5 years since I wrote any C#, but I don't remember any... mostly I remember it as a Java clone, which would preclude pointer arithmetic.
C# has pointers (although you're rarely going to use them)
Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find analogies very good for explaining concepts (to make the details easier to understand), but absolutely horrible for debates. Analogies generally over simplify issues, and hackers are particularly bad at arguing the analogy to an absurd extent instead of arguing the main premise behind it. It happens here all the time.
It seems like this example helps highlight the absurdity of requiring experience in $Language for $Years (or other similar too-constrained metrics) when an Able Programmer can just learn that stuff. The general populace views what we do as magic, but understands being able to drive very well. This effectively says that programming is a general skill, and that a good programmer should be able to learn it if they alrea…
For hiring Excellent Programmer, it is true. For hiring Average Programmer, experience matters a lot - average programmers become proficient slower than excellent ones, so it is better to hire somebody that has already passed most of the learning curve. OTOH, hiring by tool usually doesn't make any sense unless this tool has really steep learning curve (in which case why use it anyway? yes, I know there are exceptions, but generally it's true).