I just want to confirm the sentiment about how subjective interviewing is. I recently switched to using a coding challenge instead of a traditional interview loop. I would take candidates out for coffee pitch them the team and position, ask them some questions about themselves and then explain how the challenge would work. The first time I did this I decided to give everyone the challenge, even people I was sure were going to eat it, just to give myself some good data about how tough the challenge was and if it needed to be tuned. I was shocked by how bad my tech-radar really was. Not so much on the upper end, I can spot the winners still. However some of the people who I thought would eat it did a lot better than I thought they would. It made me realize how subjective interview loops really are, with little to no chance of the interviewer to be shaken out of their biases if they don't want to be. Not that coding challenges are perfect, but I'm never going back. I will refuse to participate in interview loops now - on either end.
Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories
181–190 of 213 posts
Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories
#182I'm a recruiter and I sometimes say that "recruiting is the business of rejection". At any given moment I might have between 5 to 20 possible jobs that I'm searching for people for. In a given week I might receive 1,000 applicants. It is incredibly hard to get anyone into a job and often great people are rejected for various reasons. The Business of Rejection - that's recruiting.
> In a given week I might receive 1,000 applicants.
What tools do you use to manage that many applicants? Certainly not your inbox?
Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Oh no, highly skilled mostly white males experiencing temporary setbacks, Here comes the racist right here. people get rejected all the time even when they are white, in fact, most of the people that get rejected for a job are white. I think you do not fool anyone anymore with this kind of narrative. It's tough for everybody, so don't make it about race or gender. Stop complaining and try harder. And FYI, I'm black…
You ignored the part where I included "skilled". Of course it's hard for unskilled white people too, I'm complaining about the specific combination of white + male + technically skilled, who have no real reason to complain, as they are extremely likely to land a job and become wealthy.
Fallacy of relative privation. It's one of the stupidest arguments I've ever heard. The one advantage of this particular fallacy, is you always just give it right back:
> Who cares about underprivileged groups in the United States, when there are people in Africa that don't even have food.
The fact that things happen to other people does not diminish the things relevant to my life.
Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's creepy
Fun thought experiment: all this information is publicly available, and we're okay with it as evidenced by the fact that we're participating freely in the activity. You're not bothered by algorithms (maybe you are, but you're not writing about it, so from this context you're less bothered) that can analyze data and language and patterns of communication, but you do have a problem with a human trying to understand the…
> Fun thought experiment: all this information is publicly available, and we're okay with it as evidenced by the fact that we're participating freely in the activity.
Spoken like a true stalker.
> You're not bothered by algorithms (maybe you are, but you're not writing about it, so from this context you're less bothered) that can analyze data and language and patterns of communication, but you do have a problem with a human trying to understand the needs and desires of another human in the aim of helping that person land a job they would live?
There is a difference between machines aggregating large datasets and individuals directly targeting other individuals.
Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's start by not stressing race/gender
We still live in a very racist society, how is that helped by pretending otherwise? http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873 > The results show significant discrimination against African-American names: White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. We also find that race affects the benefits of a better resume. > We find little evidence that our results are driven by employers inferring something other than r…
> We still live in a very racist society, how is that helped by pretending otherwise?
No one is pretending anything. You are the one that brought race into this. And your evidence of the problem is to post studies that didn't even study the actual industry we are discussing?
> These are two narrow examples of course
This is the first relevant thing you've said. So narrow, they don't even touch on the subject at hand.
Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories
#186Eventually these folks got accepted though. I guess that's the moral we're supposed to take away from this: If you get rejected a lot, but you keep trying, you'll eventually be accepted? If so, that's bullshit. The only reason we don't see any examples here of people who never get accepted is because they're invisible to the industry. Many of them probably ended up committing suicide or switching careers. (I've conte…
I don't think it's bullshit. I also don't define people as "winners" or "losers" depending on whether they get cool jobs. I think it's true you'll eventually get accepted in a nice job if you work in IT/software development, have a decent level of competency, and keep at it without getting too discouraged. It's easy to feel crushed when you get rejected twice in a row, so I think this is valuable lesson: you can have…
> I also don't define people as "winners" or "losers" depending on whether they get cool jobs.
Normally I don't either, but in my post above I was using it as a shorthand.
You can't win them all, and you probably won't lose them all, but there might be someone out there who does.
Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Should probably clarify that it's only important if you're looking for Web jobs :-) Sometimes people here forget there's more to software than the web.
Is that really true? In the page some report that Google and other companies that aren't ALL web require you to know JS.
Until a week ago, the only reason I needed to know Javascript was for my own side projects. I have never done anything requiring the web professionally until about 4 days ago.
I've been in software for over 20 years!
Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories
#188Eventually these folks got accepted though. I guess that's the moral we're supposed to take away from this: If you get rejected a lot, but you keep trying, you'll eventually be accepted? If so, that's bullshit. The only reason we don't see any examples here of people who never get accepted is because they're invisible to the industry. Many of them probably ended up committing suicide or switching careers. (I've conte…
> Many of them probably ended up committing suicide or switching careers. If you honestly think about committing suicide even for a moment (as in, seriously consider it) because you didn't get a Big 4 CS job, you have serious mental health issues and should probably be under constant supervision.
I'm not sure how to respond to this without end up with both of us talking past each other, but I do believe you missed the point.
> If you honestly think about committing suicide even for a moment (as in, seriously consider it) because you didn't get a Big 4 CS job,
You're reducing what I was describing (which was a prolonged series of rejection and failure over years without any acceptance or successes, and every company that seems promising slamming the door on you almost immediately) to a single event.
A one-off let-down from a "Big 4 CS job" opening isn't the same as years of emotional duress from really shitty circumstances.
Please keep the difference in mind.
Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could the difference be due to education being cheaper and thus there being fewer reasons to forego it?
No, it just saves a bunch of time and you later won't hear (when someone messes up) 'he doesn't even have a degree, what did you expect'? It's the recruiting equivalent of buying IBM (or Microsoft I guess). If the applicant pool is large enough any quick way to discriminate that skews positively for applicant capability is going to be used. It is also much easier to see if someone has a degree than to actually test i…
That might make sense, but why the difference between Europe and the US, if in fact it exists as the grandparent claimed?
It's true that it's costly and hard to test one's skills. The trouble with grades though is some people cheat brilliantly on their tests and others, some of them really good, test badly (if they're bored they don't prep, screw the grade average, etc) and some of the latter are actually extremely pragmatic on the job. I don't quite understand it but it's there.
Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
You ignored the part where I included "skilled". Of course it's hard for unskilled white people too, I'm complaining about the specific combination of white + male + technically skilled, who have no real reason to complain, as they are extremely likely to land a job and become wealthy.
Fallacy of relative privation. It's one of the stupidest arguments I've ever heard. The one advantage of this particular fallacy, is you always just give it right back: > Who cares about underprivileged groups in the United States, when there are people in Africa that don't even have food. The fact that things happen to other people does not diminish the things relevant to my life.
That's not the best comparison because many people in the USA also don't have food: http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/sayonara-middle-cl...
> #14 The number of Americans that are living in concentrated areas of high poverty has doubled since the year 2000.
> #19 46 million Americans use food banks each year, and lines start forming at some U.S. food banks as early as 6:30 in the morning because people want to get something before the food supplies run out.
This is all part of the point I'm making, America is not uniformly great or a land of opportunity.