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What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

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Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#161

Post by kelnos »

w33ble wrote: post #29

The poor interview process is one thing, but what irks me most is that almost nobody offers you a chance to meet the team, even when they make you an offer. That's been my general experience so far anyway. It sucks, because your only exposure to anyone was the hiring manager, and maybe a lead, and all they did was ask questions about what you memorized about whatever language(s).

That's odd; at every tech company where I've interviewed, the majority of the interviewers were potential peers on the team (or from another team, to have an "outside voice"). The hiring manager is usually mainly there to judge culture fit and, if they like you, to help sell the company.

At the companies where I've worked and have interviewed people, the hiring manager would of course have veto power, but would never hire someone without the agreement of the team.

At my current company (Twilio), even the first phone screen (after a possible initial recruiter call) is done by a team lead or member of the team. But often the candidate doesn't end up on the same team as the phone screener, since we don't always know what team would be the best fit until after the screen.

I think of hiring as everyone's job, as it's right up at the top of the list of things that will determine the course of company culture over time.

(Shameless plug: having said all that, if you're an Android developer who enjoys building frameworks and APIs, email me at my HN username at twilio.com.)

Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#162

Post by technotony »

dllthomas wrote: post #127
greendestiny wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think posting the same information again and again is welcome. The people who might be inspired to debate it simply can't have a discussion about it every time it appears - and it goes beyond wanting to engage with the community and share something and becomes an attempt to manipulate. I'd certainly encourage tokenadult to stop posting it.

I think the optimal solution might be to post a link to the comment on a previous version of the article, where the discussion's been had before?

I haven't seen this comment before and took something useful from it, so it seems ok to repost it. Your suggestion to link to the previous posting and it's discussion seems like the best approach.

Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#163

Post by wildranter »

codemac wrote: post #79
tokenadult wrote: post #68

It's very easy to decry company hiring procedures. That happens all the time here on HN, and for a very good reason--most company hiring procedures are not based on research and are demonstrably suboptimal for hiring the best people. We discuss this a lot on Hacker News because many of us have been looking for jobs or looking for people to hire some time in our adult lives. From participants in earlier discussions I…

You post this every time, and I want to decry the astro turfing.. but it's good information, well referenced, and I don't have the background or time to refute anything you've said.

Geez! Haven't you learned manners from your parents? Here's how it goes...

In face of all the time and effort you've voluntarily put into this research, I hereby thank you.

Easy. Isn't it?

Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#164

Post by ozgung »

lessnonymous wrote: post #76

As a hiring manager, the thing I find most interesting on posts like this (ignoring that the analogy is TERRIBLE) are the comments of people used to being on the other side of the desk. I don't think we (as interviewers) do a good job of explaining why we ask the questions we ask. And I don't think we do a good job of communicating what our job is. Our job is to stop you getting hired. If we get 100 people applying f…

This illustrates why it's a terrible idea to work in a large corporation where the hiring process is managed by an HR department. The process is optimized for filtering out people. The reason why the job postings and interview questions seem to expect unrealistically high standards has nothing to do with the actual jobs requiring any of those high standards. In reality those jobs tend to be very dull and standard.

Tech start-ups and good engineering teams ask a different question: "What value this talented engineer can provide to our team or product?" Their job is not to stop people getting hired. Their job is to convert the available Human Resource to economic value as much as they can.

As far as I know hiring decisions made only by HR departments don't perform any better than randomly hiring one of those 100 candidates. Actually random is better if you really need the absolute best candidates because HR process has a high risk of filtering them out at the initial stage carried out by a clueless junior HR staff. But it's OK for the HR's sake since their actual purpose is to stop people getting hired.

Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#165

Post by hatcravat »

lessnonymous wrote: post #89
mmorett wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"That you could go away and learn what color the middle wire is is great. But the guy next to you has been fixing wiring in distributor caps for years. And right now, I need people that know what color the middle wire is." If you're hiring a mechanic, yes. However, the analogy was pointing out that the person being asked the question was a potential car renter. That specific knowledge is not relevant as a car renter.

Yes, the analogy is silly.

Actually, I think you misunderstand the analogy. The color of the middle wire on the distributor is something you'd like a prospective mechanic to know, so he isn't learning on your time. It isn't, however, something that is in any way relevant to driving a car. I think this is why your comment provoked such hostile responses.

The programmer equivalent of the middle wire color question is something like, "Is the 3-phase power supply on XYZ mainframe wired in a delta or wye configuration? As a followup, what is the input frequency tolerance?" A sysadmin might need to know that, and an electrician certainly would, but it is far, far outside the purview of a programmer. [Edit: I'm assuming the programmer to be someone writing software running on the mainframe, not the firmware for a microcontroller in the power supply]

Maybe you're just a very good interviewer and haven't had to deal with the 90% that are crap? :+)

Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#166

Post by ZoFreX »

lancewiggs wrote: post #84
amputect wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interviewer#3: We are willing to accept 8 years of education with a Master's or equivalent on the subject of 2010 Escort navigation systems in lieu of 10 years driving experience, for otherwise qualified candidates Completely off-topic response to your note, but I loved my 2000 Focus and I was almost sad to sell it. It went through air intake hoses on the transmission about as fast as it did gasoline (hyperbole, but…

> got my wife from Tucson to Seattle as safe as could be It's a lot safer, I would have thought, per mile to do long highway drives than lots of short urban journeys, particularly on the separated highways in the USA.

Yup, the per-mile risk is higher on short journeys.

(Also you might want to edit your comment, it's ended up all on one line)

Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#167

Post by jnazario »

tokenadult wrote: post #68

It's very easy to decry company hiring procedures. That happens all the time here on HN, and for a very good reason--most company hiring procedures are not based on research and are demonstrably suboptimal for hiring the best people. We discuss this a lot on Hacker News because many of us have been looking for jobs or looking for people to hire some time in our adult lives. From participants in earlier discussions I…

thanks for this. timely - i'm hiring a bunch right now and have to build up good hiring practices from scratch since it's a startup - and thorough.

Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#168

Post by Tloewald »

I've been through a lot of hiring processes, on both sides of the desk, and I don't know what the article is trying to satirize. The worst, most bizarre hiring process I've ever been involved with bore no resemblance to anything in this little drama, and the analogy is bad. (My immediate reaction to the title was that car rental is based on what's available and how spiffy the car is (fairly rational) whereas programmer hiring is abased on jumping through hoops (e.g. Dumb C trick questions or programming challenges or certifications), who's available, and some weird perception of value almost guaranteed to be out of whack with reality.

Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#169

Post by w33ble »

kelnos wrote: post #161
w33ble wrote: post #29

The poor interview process is one thing, but what irks me most is that almost nobody offers you a chance to meet the team, even when they make you an offer. That's been my general experience so far anyway. It sucks, because your only exposure to anyone was the hiring manager, and maybe a lead, and all they did was ask questions about what you memorized about whatever language(s).

That's odd; at every tech company where I've interviewed, the majority of the interviewers were potential peers on the team (or from another team, to have an "outside voice"). The hiring manager is usually mainly there to judge culture fit and, if they like you, to help sell the company. At the companies where I've worked and have interviewed people, the hiring manager would of course have veto power, but would never…

> I think of hiring as everyone's job, as it's right up at the top of the list of things that will determine the course of company culture over time.

That's what bothers me so much about it. The team and the culture is hugely important. I appreciate that the interviewer has determined culture fit, and that's fine I guess, but I want to know that I'll like the team I'll be working with too.

Re: What If Cars Were Rented Like We Hire Programmers?

#170

Post by w33ble »

mzarate06 wrote: post #71
w33ble wrote: post #29

The poor interview process is one thing, but what irks me most is that almost nobody offers you a chance to meet the team, even when they make you an offer. That's been my general experience so far anyway. It sucks, because your only exposure to anyone was the hiring manager, and maybe a lead, and all they did was ask questions about what you memorized about whatever language(s).

Friendly advice ... don't settle for an offer, make a request. The team is too important in helping determine if you'll be happy working at a given company. When I'm interviewed, I take it as a bad sign if I'm not allowed to meet other members of the team. Typically they're included in interviews, in which case it's a non-issue. In other cases, I make a friendly request to meet 2-3 members of the team for a short con…

That's definitely what I should be doing. Usually though, I've gone through 2 or 3 interviews already for this position, one of many I am interviewing for, and I'm tired and want to be done with it all. The last round, one 1 company sat me down in front of their team, and that's the job I took, because the team seemed cool and I enjoyed that part of the process a lot.

It's just surprising that this is consistently a problem. I shouldn't have to make the extra effort, it should be part of the process.

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