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We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

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Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#111

Post by crispyambulance »

struppi wrote: post #33

Also: Give the "not-the-best" people a chance to develop. The CEO of one of my past clients, a consulting company, always said: "You can teach everyone to be a great programmer". And he put his money where his mouth was: He hired people with no programming experience (even with no university education) and personally trained them for several months . Also, senior people in the company were encouraged to also help the…

Yep...

The best organizations "grow" their talent in addition to "finding" it.

Talent is not a resource which merely exists out in the wild like some kind of unicorn. Talent is DEVELOPED in the right environments with the right team and the right resources.

Large companies especially, need to take a bit more responsibility for cultivating talented people instead of merely project-managing "resources" ad-nauseum, and then finding increasingly elaborate ways to find and recruit talent.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#112

Post by marcosdumay »

sandworm101 wrote: post #62
struppi wrote: post #33

Also: Give the "not-the-best" people a chance to develop. The CEO of one of my past clients, a consulting company, always said: "You can teach everyone to be a great programmer". And he put his money where his mouth was: He hired people with no programming experience (even with no university education) and personally trained them for several months . Also, senior people in the company were encouraged to also help the…

I would add one proviso, that training can only occur where a company already has someone capable of teaching. A raw recruit may do well if they are trained, but someone has to train them. Most startups seem looking to hire skills rather than people. They want to bring in skills nobody already on board has. Without any form of mentor, the raw recruit will always fail. My big issue: Startup hiring kids to do work that…

> training can only occur where a company already has someone capable of teaching

Is that true? Maybe for a subset of people, and (union) a subset of the skills. But one can surely improve their knowledge in an environment where there is nobody able to teach him. The environment must support a few failures, because they'll happen, but it is possible.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#113

Post by sytse »

sandworm101 wrote: post #17

There is no "the best". There are only people. Some people work wonderfully at one shop, but horribly at another. This can have nothing to do with their skill or even their personality. Each working environment is unique as is each candidate. You simply cannot tell which will work perfectly until long after someone is properly hired. So why bother interviewing? The goal is not "we only hire the best". Hiring is only…

For engineers a working with them to solve a real issue is pretty telling. GitLab is a young company but so far we never had to fire an engineer and I largely attribute it to this.

Totally agree that retaining is the other side of the story. We actively encourage people to tell about their life outside of work and celebrate the diversity in cultures.

The article also talks about geographic diversity which I think is a great help in getting good people to apply, we have people in 4 continents now. If we only had to hire in the bay area we can't have been as selective as we're now.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#114

Post by vonmoltke »

paulddraper wrote: post #81

Just because everyone is trying to hire the best doesn't make the advice wrong. It just means that some will be able to execute it, and some will not. A successful sports team should hire the best, even if that's what everyone else is trying to do too.

> A successful sports team should hire the best, even if that's what everyone else is trying to do too.

Yes, but sports teams recognize "the best" is dependent on the other pieces in the organization. Teams that try to stack their rosters with "the best" in objective measure typically crash and burn. Teams that recognize "the best" is whomever fits the team's scheme and current players the best succeed. Too many software companies want the first sense instead of the second.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#115

Post by emodendroket »

criddell wrote: post #71

> Using screens to hide the identity of auditioning musicians increased women's probability of advancing from preliminary orchestra auditions by fifty percent. I thought that the increase was largely attributed to more women being willing to audition anonymously? > if that describes you, and you have serious Linux, Ruby, and JavaScript chops, perhaps you should email me I don't know why, but I always thought the Atwo…

Why would professional musicians be unwilling to audition in a non-anonymous situation? That sounds quite dubious to me.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#117

Post by jrs235 »

bdavisx wrote: post #58
OpenDrapery wrote: post #29

I work in the "boring" old insurance industry, based in the midwest. I love reading articles like these, and as I read them I get excited and say to myself "yea!" and "spot on!". But they seem to center around startups and Silicon Valley. The truth is, when it comes to building, maintaining, and supporting internal, line of business apps, management isn't even pretending to look for high end talent. They want predict…

Yep, me too, midwest huge insurance company. From what I've seen, there are very few people in mid to upper management that think developers are anything more than a cog in the machine (and only 1 who's ever stated that 'publicly') - I'm looking to leave after 11 years - I've given up on it changing.

As stated several times over the years, particularly on HN and by patio11 (edit: or was it Joel on Software? Perhaps both?), work for a profit center not a cost center. The internal software to run insurance companies is a cost center. It is in managements interest to reduce and keep costs down... that's detrimental to what you do. Working on a software product or Saas is a profit center. What you are making is to be sold. It's an asset. An asset management wants to make as valuable and profitable as possible so they are willing to invest in it. That works to your favor if you're developing that asset.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#118

Post by odonnellryan »

karterk wrote: post #6

This 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…

I hate technical interviews, but I completely understand the need.

However, what I cannot condone is wasting the time of 100 applicants. It takes the employer ten minutes to "sort by best" and start calling down the list.

You are 100% right about their time investment. They are saying their time is more important than yours. It is another layer that muddies the process.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#119

Post by marcosdumay »

pdevr wrote: post #96
p4wnc6 wrote: post #76

In 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…

You accept more risks on the hiring process, by hedging them with the firing process.

If it'll be good or bad depends on the actual risk balance you create between those two processes. But if the idea that the hyper strict hiring process does not help selecting great candidates, a moderate increase on nominal risk on the hiring process will actually improve your odds there, and you'll gain both ways.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#120

Post by hitekker »

The article is a real gem. One part I particularly like:

>This level of strictness always made me uncomfortable. I'm not going to lie, it starts with my own selfishness. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't get hired at big, famous companies with legendarily difficult technical interview processes because, you know, they only hire the best. I don't think I am one of the best. More like cranky, tenacious, and outspoken, to the point that I wake up most days not even wanting to work with myself.

Jeff Atwood has the self-security to say something like this publicly. It's really small-applause worthy in my book, since people will look for anything, especially anything unrelated to leadership, to tear a leader down[1]

As an aside, I think the political cost to admitting faults ties in roughly with the "Great Man Fallacy"[2] We're looking for an Iron Man to believe in, but when Tony Stark can't actually write a program to hack into a government mainframe in two hours, we get disappointed.

It reminds me very strongly of when Zuckerberg tried, for fun, to solve an engineering problem after two years of being the CEO of Facebook. He had a lot of trouble writing basic code; the engineers watching him struggle, who all thought Zuckerberg was this amazing super-genius who could do anything, ended up condescending him.[3]

[1] I do believe that plenty of so-called "leaders" are not actually good leaders. Rather that those people who grow to learn to be leaders, should not be detracted on certain details that are tangential to their business.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory

[3] There should be a specific term for "Gosh darn it, I may not have a billion dollars b-b-but at least I'm better at this thing in this particular way!"

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