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How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

brookeallen.com

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Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#131

Post by hyperpape »

RobertKerans wrote: post #98
kazinator wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then there is the perspective from having heard "no": 1. Never believe anyone's rationale regarding their "no". They acted on instinct, and made up a clever story to afterward to convince themselves it was a rational decision. Or worse: it was some prejudice that they are consciously covering up. Or perhaps some internal reasons that they don't want to discuss with outsiders like sudden news that affects all hiring a…

I don't do the actual hiring, but sit in in one of the two interviews, and as a team we carefully discuss each candidate. We've got a good team, the work environment & people are great, hiring process is solid enough. And we all agree that, almost without exception, we can tell within about thirty seconds of meeting them whether someone is likely to be hired. I assume this is overwhelmingly common? Bar sending a poli…

If those first 30 seconds don't involve the candidate saying "I can't believe you bought those lies on my resume", or "Do I smell ok? I made sure to shower this month", your hiring process isn't actually good if you can prejudge it in 30 seconds.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#132

Post by midnightclubbed »

So unless I'm reading the cached text wrongly 38 people read the given manual and answered programming questions based on it. They then met informally. Lets say they burnt a day on this.

27 of those people then suggested being taught how to program in APL (after building a classroom). I'm assuming anyone who didnt want to attend got cut. 3 additional days spent.

They were then given 3 weeks to solve some difficult problems. Estimating they spent 4 days solving those problems.

They then re-met and were interviewed. Another day spent.

So to get to the end a candidate had to spend best part of two work weeks doing nothing but learning and programming an obscure language. No time for interviewing elsewhere, earning a wage, or attending college classes.

I would really hope he cared about the majority of the candidates who spent so much of their own time and money to be rejected with nothing to show for it. Most companies would have interviewed a couple of times, given a few hours of programming/aptitude testing and made a decision as to whether to hire the person (and teach them the job while paying them a fair wage).

Feel free to vote down if I'm getting this all wrong or an being overly cynical.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#133

Post by sfilipov »

UrMomReadsHN wrote: post #116
sekasi wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems you've had some bad runs. I can pretty much debunk 1 and 3 personally. Good companies and people take hiring very seriously.

What would be a polite way to say "I didn't hire you because you have no idea how to program?" I mean I've interviewed people who we didn't hire for that reason... You can't say that though because its mean... Instead you get "your skills didn't align with our needs."

As a CS student who's still not very confident in his skills and without enough experience to recognize his own weak spots, I would say that "you understand X's language well, but you need to improve your knowledge of algorithms and data structures" or "you have a good theoretical understanding X and Y Computer Science concepts but you need to work on side projects to gain programming experience" or "you have shallow understanding of a lot of languages/technologies but I advice you to concentrate on X or Y until you become good at them instead of jumping between L/T".

I know that very few employers would take the risk to be so frank but I personally wish they were. It would be helpful to the candidates who actually care about improving their knowledge and skills while potentially offending those who are trying to fake it.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#134

Post by skybrian »

RobertKerans wrote: post #98
kazinator wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then there is the perspective from having heard "no": 1. Never believe anyone's rationale regarding their "no". They acted on instinct, and made up a clever story to afterward to convince themselves it was a rational decision. Or worse: it was some prejudice that they are consciously covering up. Or perhaps some internal reasons that they don't want to discuss with outsiders like sudden news that affects all hiring a…

I don't do the actual hiring, but sit in in one of the two interviews, and as a team we carefully discuss each candidate. We've got a good team, the work environment & people are great, hiring process is solid enough. And we all agree that, almost without exception, we can tell within about thirty seconds of meeting them whether someone is likely to be hired. I assume this is overwhelmingly common? Bar sending a poli…

Isn't that kind of suspicious? What are you really detecting in 30 seconds? I would suspect unconscious bias.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#135

Post by kazinator »

001sky wrote: post #125
UrMomReadsHN wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be a polite way to say "I didn't hire you because you have no idea how to program?" I mean I've interviewed people who we didn't hire for that reason... You can't say that though because its mean... Instead you get "your skills didn't align with our needs."

If you "interview" people that are blatantly incompetent , that's on you not on them. Just sayin.

That is hard to avoid, because people are called in to interviews based on how they look on paper. Some blatantly incompetent people write themselves up to look good on paper. They have relevant education, skills, plausible-looking experience and so on.

Following up on some references before calling people in for an interview isn't a bad idea.

Man, I have seen some blatantly incompetent ones. You'd give them a white board and ask them to show a linked list with boxes and arrows. They just couldn't do it.

One case I remember couldn't demonstrate pseudo code for a circular buffer operation based on an array with a head and tail index.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#136

Post by UrMomReadsHN »

001sky wrote: post #125
UrMomReadsHN wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be a polite way to say "I didn't hire you because you have no idea how to program?" I mean I've interviewed people who we didn't hire for that reason... You can't say that though because its mean... Instead you get "your skills didn't align with our needs."

If you "interview" people that are blatantly incompetent , that's on you not on them. Just sayin.

Our HR tells us who to interview. We'd like that to change, and asked for change, begged even, but thats the way it is. Not everyone works in startups.

(These werr people who couldn't program FizzBuzz)

Plus anyone can just make shit up on their resume.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#137

Post by stretchwithme »

UrMomReadsHN wrote: post #120
jlees wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Not a fit" can get dangerously close to "You're not the same gender/race/orientation/age-range as our core team" (especially if that happens to be true).

Or... you're not a potential drinking buddy. ;) http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2012/12/03/employers-...

Believe it or not, I was actually asked if I liked to drink. And I don't really drink.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#138

Post by jen729w »

RobertKerans wrote: post #98
kazinator wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then there is the perspective from having heard "no": 1. Never believe anyone's rationale regarding their "no". They acted on instinct, and made up a clever story to afterward to convince themselves it was a rational decision. Or worse: it was some prejudice that they are consciously covering up. Or perhaps some internal reasons that they don't want to discuss with outsiders like sudden news that affects all hiring a…

I don't do the actual hiring, but sit in in one of the two interviews, and as a team we carefully discuss each candidate. We've got a good team, the work environment & people are great, hiring process is solid enough. And we all agree that, almost without exception, we can tell within about thirty seconds of meeting them whether someone is likely to be hired. I assume this is overwhelmingly common? Bar sending a poli…

I feel this 100%.

You know from the resume whether the person can do the job. It's whether you want to sit next to them for 8 hours a day while they do it.

30 seconds? Yep.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#140

Post by GauntletWizard »

WalterBright wrote: post #119
midnightclubbed wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you go into any specifics as to what was (allegedly) said to the candidates? 18 cases sounds like the company was either interviewing thousands of applicants or giving very strong reasons for legal challenges.

A person does not need 'very strong' reasons for legal challenges. They can be spurious, with the plaintiff hoping the company will find it cheaper to settle than defend themselves. A system where the loser pays the winner the amount the loser paid their own lawyers will stop most of this nonsense.

Loser pays sounds like a good system, and I'll admit your suggestion for amount makes a lot of sense, but what if the lawyer is working entirely on contingency, as many of these cases are?
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