Hiring Is Broken? • Hacker News Board

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#161

Post by clairity » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 9:28 PM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #141

clairity wrote: post #140

hiring is really simple: you can straightforwardly filter out the obvious no's, but beyond that, it's a crapshoot. basketball analogy time! (my favorite =) the NBA employs 450 of the best basketball players on the planet, and at any given time, the league is evaluating a few thousand more (out of hundreds of millions of basketball players, out of ~7.5 billion people worldwide). all the easy filtering is done. every y…

Fortunately, for smaller companies there's another option - use personal networks to find candidates, the chances would be much better. For googles, they can just afford some misses, it costs but not something they couldn't stomach.

yes, that can improve the odds, but i've hired people through my network (as a founder and an employee), and good hires (those who add productivity & efficiency to the team) still often boils down to the idiosyncracies of the individual human relationships involved.

going back to basketball, no team has yet to sign 10x nba all-star carmelo anthony this year, and 8x all-star dwight howard only just signed with the lakers (on an unguaranteed minimum contract) because of a season-ending injury to demarcus cousins. both players are individually very talented, but are reputed to be hard to play with (thus lowering team productivity & efficiency).

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#162

Post by dkhenry » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 9:30 PM UTC

Whenever I see anything about hiring I always think back to this article

https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/08/on-secretly-terrible-engin...

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#163

Post by ozim » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 9:34 PM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #142

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.

That is a very dangerous gamble though because the next question would be "you did all that? How cool! Tell me more details!" and my experience shows that faking the details, unless you've done at least something very close to what you claim you did, is not very easy. And generic bullshit is rather easy to detect - usually you can see when the person is genuinely talking about something they did and are excited to sh…

Yeah... or I have been working on that cool project six months ago and by the time we just have this talk I had a 100 other things on my plate which are not that cool. Then maybe I want to change job because we got new boss that was stressing me out for 3 months and I gave up. So I am rusty on the details and I am also intimidated when you bring in 3 people to have talk about it.

I would say it is OK if it works for you but it still might be that you drop off some good guys. Because it is environment that creates good employees, and if someone was working for months or years in a bad environment, he can be perfectly capable of doing work, but not being confident and feeling good about talking about his last job.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#164

Post by palerdot » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 9:54 PM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #144

marktangotango wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

> And he was knowledgeable enough to back that claim up! If he worked on it and could convincingly fake it, I - as a recruiter - wouldn't care too much if he embellishes a bit and claims he also did it from the start. Maybe he factually didn't, but if he's good enough to make me think he did, there's a decent chance he would be good enough to actually do it for me. Not a certainty, there's never certainty, but a good…

The point is the hiring method attracts people who are both not genuine , to admit that they just jumped in on an impressive project and insecure enough , that they think they should claim everything as their own ... It doesn't matter if they actually possess the technical skill as there might be behavioural issues between this person and the rest of the team.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#165

Post by yellowapple » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 9:55 PM UTC

I recently got thrown into interviewing a bunch of NetSuite developers (so lots of JS programming), and so far my strategy has boiled down to:

1. A verbal pop quiz about some reasonably-complex NetSuite-related programming topic/task (i.e. "on a high level, how would you go about implementing $FOO, given the constraints $BAR and $BAZ?")

2. Digging into past projects/experience and gleaning info on how involved the candidate was with those projects

3. If available, look at an existing programming portfolio / GitHub account / etc.

I feel like these three things tend to cover my bases, knowing full well that they're flawed assessments (but flawed in ways I can control and adjust/tweak as necessary).

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#166

Post by beeblebr0x » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

I've interviewed many candidates for cloud native architect positions. None could tell me what important tools/patterns like TLA+ or CQRS and none could discuss the concepts once explained. Instead of recreating the binary tree from an array of in-order, depth-first-traversed nodes, which is an extremely narrow minded test of someone's skills, I want them to describe how they build reliable distributed systems. LeetCode, HackerRank and the companies whose interview process gave rise to these sorts of services misunderstand the idea of software engineering.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#167

Post by ltbarcly3 » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 10:05 PM UTC

The older I get and the longer I do stuff the more I realize that everything is broken and there's nothing you can do about it but try to do the things you are doing well, learn from people that you think are doing something well, and teach people where you have figured out how to do something well. None of these things are blanket rules you can read in a blog and then follow.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#168

Post by AnimalMuppet » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 10:07 PM UTC

n_ary wrote: post #25

nafeydev wrote: post #2

Whats the general consensus on take home projects? How helpful are they?

Take home has two sides to it. Group A: People who excel at face to face interviews(extroverted) will complain that it is waste of time and disrespectful, because it demands significant time commitment compared to a 1 hour in-person interview. Group B: People with interview anxiety(introverted) will excel at this type of test because they have the freedom to set aside their own time, do things at their own pace and e…

I don't know that I'm extroverted. I'm still in group A, though, because I don't have interview anxiety.

My problem with take home stuff is that it's asymmetrical. That is, if we're doing a phone interview, it takes my time, and it takes your time. Ditto an in-person interview. You're serious enough to commit some of your time to it, so I'm willing to also do so. I know you're looking at other candidates, but if you call me in for an in-person interview, I figure I've got at least a 30% chance of landing the job. That's enough for me to be willing to invest the time.

But with a take-home assignment, it costs me much more time than it costs you. So you could be giving it out to tons of people. How many? I have no way of knowing. So you're asking me for 6 hours (which may turn into 12), but what are my odds on getting the job? Are they still 30%? Or are they now 1%, because you just gave this assignment to 100 people?

I'm not going to plow 12 hours of my time into a 1% chance at a job. Just no. And the problem is, if you tell me "oh, we're only looking at a couple of people", I have no reason to believe you. But if you're actually interviewing me, I believe you, because it's too expensive for you to interview 100 people to hire only one.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#169

Post by 9nGQluzmnq3M » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 10:08 PM UTC

beeblebr0x wrote: post #166

I've interviewed many candidates for cloud native architect positions. None could tell me what important tools/patterns like TLA+ or CQRS and none could discuss the concepts once explained. Instead of recreating the binary tree from an array of in-order, depth-first-traversed nodes, which is an extremely narrow minded test of someone's skills, I want them to describe how they build reliable distributed systems. LeetC…

If you want somebody to describe how they build reliable distributed systems, then ask them to describe in detail how they would build one for a specific use case, instead of quizzing them on alphabet soup.

Re: Hiring Is Broken?

#170

Post by anon44 » Sat, Aug 31, 2019, 10:09 PM UTC

mobjack wrote: post #83

akhilcacharya wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a popular sentiment but it’s still false. A hiring committee isn’t going to pass you if you don’t finish the problem (ideally multiple problems) optimally.

It depends on the committee. I am more looking into how a candidate thinks than if they get the problem correct. It is more telling when someone is able to logically work through a problem they never seen before even if it isn't optimal or even correct. I am more skeptical of those who blow through a hard problem getting the optimal solution right away. It likely means they memorized it or had lots of practice on suc…

In that vast majority of cases, interviewers are expecting the right solution.

When I see a question I know the answer to, I pretend to eventually come to the solution to impress fools such as yourself.