121–130 of 238 posts
> I got kicked out of AP English for insubordination in high school. The difference between my high-school performance in English classes and professional accomplishments as a writer is vast Ironically, if I was a hiring manager I would much rather care about your history of insubordination than your self-ascribed writing skills.
Why do recruiters have such trouble with such a simple task like gauging a candidate's real skills? Seriously. Here is how to do it. I'm looking for a React Developer, I ask the following simple questions: 1. Tell my about your contributions to major projects you have been involved in. (if they share their work ask more in-depth questions about it) 2. With $givenTechnologyStack, how do you usually solve state managem…
IMHO, complaining about the status quo is easy and giving armchair hot takes about circumstances one does not understand is also easy. If one wants to play the smart game, there are some facts that can leverage to one's advantages:
1) job postings being above the fold vs long tail is a thing. There are tons of companies/roles you will never hear about from by perusing linkedin search.
2) following from that, interview criteria often needs to be adjusted based on various factors and plenty of companies have to make more streamlined funnels in order to have a fighting change of capturing any talent at all.
3) even for high visibility/demand companies, recruiters have incentives to think outside the box to find truly valuable talent, because these people are not even in the market for a new job, let alone willing to put up w/ bullshit. The catch that many people miss is that just accruing a high number of years of experience doesn't necessarily translate to being valuable, especially on the fast changing world of tech.
Definitely put 4.0 GPA. If they ask for proof, spend a few bucks on fiverr and get a photoshop wizard to cook you up a transcript.
But hypothesize that someone in their 30s now grew up in a country like South Africa, Zaire, or one of the Balkans. How exactly do you even prove you attended High School at this point? Much less get a transcript?
Why does Cannonical stop with high school? Why not go all the way back to nappies/diapers? The questions write themselves: "Please indicate how frequently you cried between the ages of 1 and 2. Cries per day is the desired unit" "How good of a napper were you between the ages of 2 and 4? Did you talk back to the teacher when naptime was scheduled? Did you fake your naps?"
While I agree that questions about High School are dumb, if a candidate answered the question with "this question is irrelevant" in a free-form text field (as they did in the screenshot), I would probably thing twice about hiring the person.
"I got kicked out of English for insubordination" oh, and the blogger gave a smarta* answer to a free-form text question? Yep, insubordination is still there. I'd pass on this candidate too.
But allow me to give you some advice: good managers don't have subordinates, they have a team.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, it seems like these discussions assume everyone went to college. If they haven’t, asking about high school is relevant.
Asking about High School assumes everyone graduated from it. With dual enrollment it's quite possible for someone to get a college degree without ever getting a high school diploma (or even taking high school classes).
1) There are more questions about high school if you make it into the interviews, so they do take it seriously.
2) There is research indicating that "who or how we are" is pretty well determined in our formative years, with the high school years being a prime driver, so there is at least some rational motivation to ask about it.
Ex: I self-sabotaged two different classes (and my grades therein) due to personality clashes with teachers. If one believes that I am fundamentally "still the same person who did that", then it might seem worth exploring those situations and my responses before hiring.
Not trying to justify it.
Related: This was the first step in the interview process at Canonical – I withdrew (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735678
It's funny to imagine that the barrage of questions from Ubuntu is merely a tactic to suppress the obvious question from the candidate: why is the company seeming to fall for that move by MS.