Hiring Is Broken? • Hacker News Board

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#121

Post by aantix » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 6:39 PM UTC

username90 wrote: post #109

dahart wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your assumption is incorrect, based on my own experience. I’ve never hired a liar, and I’ve hired a lot of people. I have, however, declined to hire people who failed to answer follow up questions honestly or appeared to not be able to explain their success. Anyone who wants a job knows it’s a bad idea to lie because you find out immediately once you hire someone whether they are lying, and it would be ground…

> you find out immediately once you hire someone whether they are lying Do you really believe this? Lets say we have a mediocre person on a team who tells the story of him being a star performer. How would you catch that? He went on the design meetings, he know why every decision was made, he has worked on the project for years. There is no way you would catch it, and the halo effect would likely mean that you still…

Nuance comes from experiencing constraints from implementing the solution.

Eventually the liar runs out of those details when pressed.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#122

Post by lubesGordi » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 6:41 PM UTC

strikelaserclaw wrote: post #71

graycat wrote: post #34

It's easy for a person in good health, never arrested, never bankrupt, good credit score, native born US citizen, world class Ph.D. with one of the very best backgrounds for analytics and machine learning , with peer-reviewed publications in applied math, mathematical statistics, and artificial intelligence, having recently written .NET code in 100,000 lines of typing for an ambitious Web site, code that appears to r…

and you've met such a person?

If they're 50+ and live in rural America, yeah good luck.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#123

Post by marktangotango » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 6:42 PM UTC

wslh wrote: post #107

username90 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they could just lie and tell you from the perspective of another dev on their team, or even combining the achievements from several of them at once. Of course most people wont lie a lot but this style heavily favors those who do so you will get a disproportionate amount of liars on your team.

You can discover the lie asking very technical questions on how the solved some issue. They will answer at the greatest level of detail if they did it themselves.

Provided you or the arbitrary interviewer have the technical background to evaluate the answers! I once had reason to view the resume of a former colleague who took all credit for a major project I implemented. This project involved parsing and a particular parser generator. He worked on it after I implemented it, but he claimed it all. And he was knowledgeable enough to back that claim up!

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#124

Post by username90 » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 6:45 PM UTC

empath75 wrote: post #118

dahart wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your assumption is incorrect, based on my own experience. I’ve never hired a liar, and I’ve hired a lot of people. I have, however, declined to hire people who failed to answer follow up questions honestly or appeared to not be able to explain their success. Anyone who wants a job knows it’s a bad idea to lie because you find out immediately once you hire someone whether they are lying, and it would be ground…

Yeah all you have to ask is questions like why did you use A instead of B? Did you run into any problems implementing that? It doesn’t take long before people start stammering and deflecting if they’re full of shit.

Why wouldn't a person be able to answer those questions? You were on the standups, you know whatever issues they had, you were on the design meetings, you know what alternatives were considered and why they weren't chosen. Being able to walk through someone else's thought process is a lot easier than doing the actual work.

The end result is that you will hire people for high level roles like tech leads or architect who are very mediocre at what they do since they sound like a star performer at the interview. All you need to get a good career in such an environment is just to job hop a lot and at every job you mostly try to gather impressive things people around you do in order to sound impressive in the next interview. I bet a no small fraction of CEO's went that route, and I think it is a pattern we should avoid since it is so easy to test actual coding skills in tech.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#125

Post by dymk » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 6:45 PM UTC

gridlockd wrote: post #100

dymk wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a weirdly insulting straw man of a developer you set up. Many engineers including myself would be thrilled to have somebody else highly skilled around, and "selfish/vain" isn't the default in our industry.

> Many engineers including myself would be thrilled to have somebody else highly skilled around, and "selfish/vain" isn't the default in our industry. What else are you supposed to say about yourself or anyone else? I'm not talking about the best developers in general, I'm talking about "the best developer in the team". The "golden child". Do you sincerely believe they're thrilled about giving up that special status…

You can construct any number of hypothetical evils that might plague your team; I don't really see why you'd let that shape your perception of engineers when you hardly ever run across people like that though.

Most people are fine, and if you run into a toxicity then go take care of it like an adult and talk to your manager/HR/whatever.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#126

Post by lubesGordi » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 6:48 PM UTC

dahart wrote: post #87

> Anyone can glamorize and exaggerate the work they have done, and make it sound a lot more impressive than it actually was My personal experience interviewing is that people cannot easily glamorize their past projects when pressed for details. It might be easy to make it look good on a resume, but hard in person during a discussion with follow up questions. I think asking about past projects is a fantastic interview…

Yeah it's pretty easy to tell where a senior engineer is at if you're in the same domain as them. Just discussing projects really provides much more insight than leetcoding them to death. It's shocking to me how many places are leetcoding senior engineers before talking to them about their past work or discussing design. Is it because we want to have hiring automated? Is it because of discrimination? Why is the leetcode interview process so widely adopted?

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#127

Post by tyscorp » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 6:48 PM UTC

ddebernardy wrote: post #21

The biggest issue isn't one mentioned in the article. No amount of hiring tricks and hacks will work around the fact that hardly anyone (including most managers and HR pros) gets trained on how to review a resume, conduct an interview, and evaluate a candidate.

How can someone get this training outside of their job?

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#128

Post by jimbob45 » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 6:51 PM UTC

While hiring is broken, let's certainly not pretend it was in a workable state in the past. Let's further appreciate things we have now that we didn't in the past. Previously, if you wanted a job in another state, you'd have to move there and hope you got a job before your bank account ran dry. Now, you can safely apply for jobs while at your current job until you get something.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#129

Post by UK-Al05 » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 7:01 PM UTC

empath75 wrote: post #118

dahart wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your assumption is incorrect, based on my own experience. I’ve never hired a liar, and I’ve hired a lot of people. I have, however, declined to hire people who failed to answer follow up questions honestly or appeared to not be able to explain their success. Anyone who wants a job knows it’s a bad idea to lie because you find out immediately once you hire someone whether they are lying, and it would be ground…

Yeah all you have to ask is questions like why did you use A instead of B? Did you run into any problems implementing that? It doesn’t take long before people start stammering and deflecting if they’re full of shit.

"people start stammering and deflecting if they’re full of shit. " - I think what your evaluating there is charisma.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#130

Post by UK-Al05 » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 7:06 PM UTC

alexeiz wrote: post #111

esotericn wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't surprise me at all. Fundamentally, companies do not hire for raw technical ability. Would you hire Linus for your bog standard dev role? Of course not. He'd be bored in days. You probably wouldn't want a supermodel as a life partner. The whole thing is about selecting model employees. People who will rock the boat in the correct ways; need money, but are neither impoverished nor independent; are reliable; an…

> Would you hire Linus for your bog standard dev role? The question is incorrect. By hiring Linus you eliminate the need for 5 bog standard dev roles. Bog standard dev roles is not a requirement. It's what you end up with if you hire mediocre people.

I doubt linus is any good at modern web dev. Might take him a while to learn and will probably never enjoy it.