Resumes suck for hiring engineers • Hacker News Board

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#131

Post by raverbashing » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 4:37 PM UTC

Bahamut wrote: post #129

raverbashing wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. I don't think Google can give a good match to a Javascript CV with only Angular.js written Yes, it's stupid. Yes, do it.

I got an interview with Google without having "JavaScript" in my resume, and with tons of AngularJS on it. I did link to my GitHub though, where it shows contributions to Angular, various Angular plugins, and other random libraries. I ended up turning down the interview after accepting another offer though.

Maybe they explicitly looked for people in the Angular.js space?

Yeah, I think you made the right choice turning them down.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#132

Post by vonmoltke » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 4:52 PM UTC

Bahamut wrote: post #125

vonmoltke wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When hiring, you are not really concerned about letting a good candidate go. With that attitude, I hope you aren't complaining about how hard it is to find talent. > It is far more dangerous to let a poor candidate in. This gets parroted a lot around here, but with no supporting evidence other than highly improbable hypotheticals or black swan events. On the other hand, I know plenty of companies that have had to d…

I've seen many negative consequences from poor software engineers being brought into companies first hand. I saw a junior engineer try to add a patchwork of libraries just because he was not confident in his ability to do something correctly, leading to a lot of maintenance overhead that grew very quickly. Many of the previous frontend engineers got fired from my current company because they did not produce at all -…

First off, thanks for providing some concrete examples.

That said, those all fundamentally sound like process problems to me. They would not have been allowed to happen at either of the companies I have worked for or any of the companies I have worked with, at least not to a degree that they would harm products. Sure, we have shit code down in the bowels of our libraries, and some of it was put there by people who didn't know what they were doing. I would not characterize any of it as serious problems, though. Those tend to either not live long or not make it into the codebase in the first place.

I understand there is a tradeoff here, and that "process" is a dirty word to many people. A little process can go a long way, though. It can make problems like those you describe minor or non-existent. To me this seems like a small price to pay for opening up your hiring process and dealing with the poor choices.

On a slight tangent and speaking of costs, I get the impression that many people discount the cost of a false negative. You are trying to hire people for a reason. Your company is incurring costs from not having this person, be it the lost revenue from expanding or the actual costs of working your current engineers harder to meet deadlines. That needs to enter into the equation, along with the costs of false positives and the costs of mitigating same.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#133

Post by metacorrector » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 4:52 PM UTC

um, "where you went to school" does not matter only to people who didn't go anywhere.

when you go to school filled with very smart people you really get used to working with really smart people. I'm not saying it's panacea or even good, it just is.

So, when you say "where you went to school" makes no difference in hiring, that tells me more about your hiring culture than it does about the candidates.

I got a serious degree in computer science at a serious school, and I'm not hiring people without one, just based on being able to expect a certain baseline for conversations.

think of it like high school geometry, Euclidean proofs. It's not necessarily rocket science, it's taught to a vast swath of the population. But imagine a job that required a knowledge of geometry, are you going to look at the resume of somebody "self taught" the same way as somebody who went to the Alexandria Institute of Geometry?

Yes, there are many other factors to a complete human being, and a good worker, but one of the valuable things you learn from a good education is how to tease apart complex problems and look at which inputs have what effect on what output (kind of like separation of concerns). I'm am commenting on one aspect of a resume or a hire; pointing out all the other aspects will not dissuade me from my point.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#134

Post by ghaff » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 4:53 PM UTC

rumcajz wrote: post #73

The interesting part is that recruiters seem more in agreement when identifying low performers. When faced with a high performer their scores differ wildly.

It wouldn't especially surprise me if that were the case. It's a lot easier to identify people who don't meet the requirements of a position than to intuit how good a job they'll do based on paper qualifications. You'll make mistakes in both cases, but more in the latter.

Testing like SATs are similar. A low score is probably a much better predictor of (lack of) success at an elite school than a high score is a predictor of success.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#135

Post by eloisant » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 4:58 PM UTC

yangchi wrote: post #53

vonnik wrote: post #42

The startup where I serve as in-house recruiter, FutureAdvisor, recently ran an experiment in hiring without resumes. It was called StaffupWeekend. The Chronicle's careers blogger wrote about it here: http://blog.sfgate.com/gettowork/2014/10/31/staffup-offers-a... We recognized that resumes were poor indicators of performance. In fact, we believe that the only thing that correlates with performance -- is performance.…

>The solution we came up with was to invite people to work on projects for a weekend at no cost other than their time. I see more and more companies doing this small projects type of initial screening. I like it. But time is actually an expensive cost. Suppose your candidate makes $130,000 per year, which isn't even a high salary in bay area. Then if he/she spends 15 hours on this project, then we are talking about 1…

One solution is to give a free pass for people who have public open source projects to show off.

Instead of presenting the "screening project", they present their open source project and its source code.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#136

Post by Iftheshoefits » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 5:24 PM UTC

marktangotango wrote: post #116

Iftheshoefits wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was he paid for his work? If he wasn't, he's part of the problem in hiring processes in our industry.

Agreed, I did a coding exercise for the Nerdery once, I epended about 8 hours on it, no one even reviewed it. Total waste of time. Yes I am naming them intentionally, I felt that behavior was antagonistic and exploitative.

This industry is filled with what I've come to call the "Naive Narcissist". There is a very large percentage of developers who are so eager for "kudos," renown, and other intangibles that they will happily subvert their own livelihoods and contribute to the culture of relegating programmers to second-class commodity labor in the pursuit of overcoming a (usually arbitrary, artificial) challenge.

I come from academia. I know what its like to work toward a goal for the sheer pleasure the challenge brings without expecting (much) compensation. But that's academia. This is (typically) private, for-profit industry. There is no good reason to not demand fair compensation and respectful treatment that includes not being given unpaid monkey-work to "show off" for some ass with a superiority complex.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#137

Post by angersock » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 5:30 PM UTC

danielweber wrote: post #92

ddebernardy wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The solution we came up with was to invite people to work on projects for a weekend at no cost other than their time. As in working for you for free, and on a WE to boot? For a student or someone who is unemployed, that might work. For someone with a job and a family life, I don't think so. Especially if that person can command a $120k+ salary.

Dude, they get to contribute to the company for free .

You can't put a price on that!

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#138

Post by tokenrove » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 5:37 PM UTC

vonmoltke wrote: post #132

Bahamut wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen many negative consequences from poor software engineers being brought into companies first hand. I saw a junior engineer try to add a patchwork of libraries just because he was not confident in his ability to do something correctly, leading to a lot of maintenance overhead that grew very quickly. Many of the previous frontend engineers got fired from my current company because they did not produce at all -…

First off, thanks for providing some concrete examples. That said, those all fundamentally sound like process problems to me. They would not have been allowed to happen at either of the companies I have worked for or any of the companies I have worked with, at least not to a degree that they would harm products. Sure, we have shit code down in the bowels of our libraries, and some of it was put there by people who di…

Even though process is intended to mitigate the damage an individual can cause, in practice it's hard to have a good process without good people. Everywhere I've felt that a poor hire had serious negative effects on a company, those employees were also obstacles to bringing in a better process.

I agree with you that the cost of a false negative must be considered. The kind of bad hire I'm thinking of here is a net negative producer that actively costs the company money (or even causes good employees to leave), even after they're gone (if you can manage to get rid of them).

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#139

Post by fibbery » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 5:41 PM UTC

hnnewguy wrote: post #108

danielweber wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, they get to contribute to the company for free .

I almost spit out my coffee when the OP stated " for free ", as if not having to pay anything but time, my most valuable asset, was some perk. I'm sure the OP means well, and it may have been a success for them, but I don't know anyone in my circle who would participate in something like this, unless they were utterly desperate for a job. I thought there was a serious talent crunch? Who is courting whom? I wonder wha…

Ones that are young enough not to know any better. This is a double-win for a company that only wants to hire 22 year olds anyway, as it avoids having to hide under the hazy fog of "culture fit", and they get free work out of the deal to boot.

Re: Resumes suck for hiring engineers

#140

Post by jplahn » Wed, Dec 03, 2014, 5:41 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #102

Spearchucker wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had the same experience. These days I tailor my resume for every single job application. I make sure it uses the language the job description uses. If it says Red Hat, my resume says Red Hat. If it says JavaScript, my resume says JavaScript. It takes time, but its been worth it. Where a skill is required that I don't have, I don't mention it. Where a skill applies to a version I'm not experienced with, I leave the ve…

> These days I tailor my resume for every single job application You absolutely need to do this unless you're in crazy demand. Every generic resume I've sent out has yielded exactly zero phone calls. Every tailor-made resume I've sent out has gotten at least to the in-person interview stage. Survivor bias? Maybe, but 5 jobs in since college and I'm never sending generic resumes anywhere ever again.

While I understand the sentiment, I only used a single resume for all of my applications this past fall. But I think the reason it worked is that I knew what positions I wanted to apply for and they were all similar(ish). So my resume matched all of them.

I did find that when I was applying to the bigger SV companies (and Seattle), I wasn't necessarily applying for a specific position, so even if I had wanted to tailor it, it would have been more of a challenge. That's just my experience though. I do believe that if I was going for a very specific position, I would definitely spend the extra time to make sure it was perfect.