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We Only Hire the Best

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Re: We Only Hire the Best

#191

Post by bicknergseng »

deedubaya wrote: post #7

Such a no brainer, but jezus it's about time for someone to call out the hiring posts. Hiring a good employee is like shopping for a car. You don't buy the coup if you have a family of six, a gas guzzler when you're a commuter, or a 2wd when you live in the boonies. It's a balance of values. I've seen "rock star" coders fail in team environments because they can't communicate. I've seen great communicators fail becau…

Definitely reading too much into your comment and not responding just to you but the hiring post trend, but IMO all of those scenarios are conflating mismanagement with bad hiring. Have a rock star coder who can't communicate (I'd challenge whether or not that was possible another time)? Put them in a position that minimizes the amount of communication they have to do or set up a structure for their inbound/outbound communications that works for everyone. Great communicator? Have them figure out how to facilitate that person who can't communicate. Great team player? Have them work with the team and don't make them outbound.

Point is, effective team building doesn't end at offer letters. Hire for fit, then fit the hire. Train up. Just because someone is weak in some area doesn't mean they can't contribute meaningfully given the proper resources and support, nor is a strong hire going to succeed without the same carefully tailored support.

Re: We Only Hire the Best

#192

Post by collyw »

dmitrygr wrote: post #174
galistoca wrote: post #90

I see a lot of people on this thread who just say it's bullshit without understanding what's going on. You can live your life that way, or you can enlighten yourself on what really is going on and make the right decision. This "salary cut" works only in this case: The employee is not just looking for money but something intangible from the job (Experience/network/etc.) This doesn't apply to most of you guys who have…

I'm not even going to try to reply on the sexist nature of the second half of this comment, but focus on the startup-related one. Your guy switched to another company because you were on track to become rich off his work, and he was not. If you incentivized him right, he'd stay. Did you ask him why he left? Because if not, you really did not learn a lesson.

What was sexist about that?

Re: We Only Hire the Best

#193

Post by mahyarm »

superuser2 wrote: post #178
cortesoft wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, lots of people have to be rejected for a the not-bullshit reason that there are only n jobs available at the company and n+x people applied. Even if they are all great, x number of people are going to be rejected.

I'm not so sure. My understanding is the big tech companies hire engineers on a rolling basis and basically take everyone they like. They're not approaching it for the frame of satisfying a requisition for a specific role with the best of the N applicants for it on X date, they're picking up talent as quickly as possible and then sorting out where to place people after the hire/no-hire decision is made.

It's more like there is unlimited demand, and most managers could think of more things to do if they had more staff.

Re: We Only Hire the Best

#194

Post by mahyarm »

jazzyk wrote: post #62
asb wrote: post #11

Corp: "We only hire the very best" Programmer: "What's the salary?" Corp: "Market average. Also, we're looking for people who aren't just motivated by money"

Did we mention the perks like our "unlimited vacation policy"?

You mean undefined vacation policy

Re: We Only Hire the Best

#195

Post by pmiller2 »

st3v3r wrote: post #175
pmiller2 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry. I'm sucking right there along side you. 3.5 years experience and I'm not even getting recruiter spam in the volume some of the people here are. :P

Do you guys put your stuff out there? Recruiters can't really harass you if they don't know you exist.

If by "put your stuff out there," you mean "have a LinkedIn profile," then yes. Otherwise, my "stuff" (meaning everything I've written in the past several years) is under NDA and not useful to anyone else.

Re: We Only Hire the Best

#196

Post by thedaveoflife »

jrs235 wrote: post #149
vonmoltke wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The counter-point is that without something to sell, the sales people wouldn't make any money. > They don't make the company any money, they're middle-men. The value comes from the product. It is supposed to be a symbiotic relationship. Sales staff can't make money if they have nothing to sell, and engineers can't build product if they have no customers. The sales staff is just as critical as the product developmen…

This $5 Billion Software Company Has No Sales Staff Atlassian sold $320 million worth of business software last year without a single sales employee. Everyone else in the industry noticed. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-18/this-5-bil...

Depends how you define "sales staff". They need to sell their product in order to make money and they certainly have employees who provide a conduit for customers to buy JIRA.

Their sales costs are low, but maybe not having more sale people is negatively affecting revenue growth?

Re: We Only Hire the Best

#197

Post by ex_amazon_se »

leroy_masochist wrote: post #12

One other aspect of "we only hire the best" that wasn't explored by this article is the practice -- especially common among unicorn companies -- of purposely casting a far wider net than needed, so that their hiring yield on applicants is dauntingly low. The recruiting process is deliberately set up to yield a lot of false negatives -- i.e., applicants who are qualified on both skill and fit who are rejected for some…

> The recruiting process is deliberately set up to yield a lot of false negatives

Absolutely. There are a hundred bad candidates for every good one, but large companies reject good ones as well will bullshit justifications for a reason: rejection keep salaries down.

Re: We Only Hire the Best

#198

Post by Karunamon »

st3v3r wrote: post #177
Karunamon wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those... are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to have a culture in which people are not shut down for saying "This course of action sucks because X" without there being a lot of profanity and other between-the-lines nastiness in that previous sentence. Of course, some people find being told "no" to be asshole move. 🤷 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It is entirely possible. However, assholes will do it because they find they can have control over things. And still others, like myself, will do it despite not really wanting to. I find it's extremely easy to "shut down" things in a discussion like that, and make other people not want to speak, even though I don't want to. It's much more difficult to take a bit of time, rethink how I'm going to say something, and tr…

Serious question: At what point does it become the problem of the person to integrate vs the problem of the group to accommodate?

We've heard many stories of how it only takes one asshole on a team to ruin the team. However, assholery takes many forms. It includes the perpetually acerbic who's impossible to work with, but it also includes the perpetually offended who derails conversations into pointless tone arguments and recursive meta-discussion unless you walk on metaphorical eggshells when speaking to them.

Lots of talk about the former, little to none about the latter. I'd wager that if you're running a team whose purpose is to accomplish a set goal, the latter is necessarily more destructive than the former from a sheer time commitment standpoint, and that's before discussing the "meta is murder"[1] principle.

Then again, I'm speaking from the standpoint of a group outsider. If you have a culture that demands civility above all else (up to and including logic and correctness), that group is probably okay with how they work, and would rightly judge poorly anyone who wouldn't conform to that culture.

[1]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/meta-is-murder/

Re: We Only Hire the Best

#199

Post by st3v3r »

Karunamon wrote: post #198
st3v3r wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is entirely possible. However, assholes will do it because they find they can have control over things. And still others, like myself, will do it despite not really wanting to. I find it's extremely easy to "shut down" things in a discussion like that, and make other people not want to speak, even though I don't want to. It's much more difficult to take a bit of time, rethink how I'm going to say something, and tr…

Serious question: At what point does it become the problem of the person to integrate vs the problem of the group to accommodate? We've heard many stories of how it only takes one asshole on a team to ruin the team. However, assholery takes many forms. It includes the perpetually acerbic who's impossible to work with, but it also includes the perpetually offended who derails conversations into pointless tone argument…

I would say it depends on how much of an effort is made on the part of the person. If they're not making any effort, then why should any accommodation be made for them? Get rid of them, and find someone who will at least make an effort. If they are making an effort, it still can be difficult, because even though they're making an effort, they're still shutting down other members of the team.

Re: We Only Hire the Best

#200

Post by st3v3r »

pmiller2 wrote: post #195
st3v3r wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you guys put your stuff out there? Recruiters can't really harass you if they don't know you exist.

If by "put your stuff out there," you mean "have a LinkedIn profile," then yes. Otherwise, my "stuff" (meaning everything I've written in the past several years) is under NDA and not useful to anyone else.

While it's always better to have stuff on a Github profile or similar, usually a filled out LinkedIn profile with mention of what kinds of projects you've worked on (usually vague enough to avoid NDAs) is good enough, especially if you're mentioning things that happen to be in demand in the area.
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