I really enjoyed the article until he got to the audition process. That would shrink the pool of candidates so much that all the previous advice about widening and diversifying the pool becomes irrelevant. Almost no one with significant experience would agree to that. Almost no one with a family would do it either. And let's face it, it's a buyer's market, not just for "the best", but even for the "just OK".
We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
201–210 of 373 posts
Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
#202>Those of us who have families simply can not afford to do this. Then don't take the job? Your life choices (Children, wife, loan payments) aren't the fault or social responsibility of your prospective employer. Why get so uppity about a job you aren't even going to apply for?
Children are a life choice? You're part of the problem.
Please don't respond to incivility with further incivility.
Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
#203> The most significant shift we’ve made is requiring every final candidate to work with us for three to eight weeks on a contract basis. Are you fucking kidding me? What am I going to tell my current employer while I "audition" for the mere possibility of a next job? Most working adults in the US don't even get three to eight weeks of discretionary vacation that they aren't already using to spend time with family or,…
In my country, everyone in engineering and programming is hired through a trial period of 4 to 8 months. So what? I'd rather have this being used more often as a real trial and not have to go through the ever humiliating process of totally random interviews lead by unqualified recruiters making decisions with unknown arbitrary criteria.
Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tried the midwest large insurance company job, and it was not a fun experience. I often had full weeks where I was waiting on something from other slow-moving departments and had literally nothing to do, and my boss knew and didn't really care, although I still had to show up and sit in my desk for eight hours a day. And I was a developer but had to ask permission and make a case for every single program I wanted t…
> The atmosphere was also the most subdued environment I've ever been in. Most people not talking to or acknowledging each other unless their cubes were near, very few jokes, I almost got the feeling I'd get in trouble if I ever showed exuberance. I know exactly what you mean! It is suffocating! Currently struggling with this right now. I can't stand it because it just feels so fake and phony. To me work is easier an…
Yeah, fake and phony, I definitely got that feeling. Like people were putting on a mask the entire time they were there.
I don't even mind corporate necessarily, as long as it's relaxed. My current place people will talk about pretty much whatever, help each other out, tease each other about things, the boss will join us for lunch and talk about Star Wars and Deadpool, team leads are willing to admit that they can make mistakes, you feel like you can be more open and honest around your superiors, no one gasps or blinks an eye when you casually curse, etc.
And yet it's not quite no-holds-barred like a previous job that erupted into nerf gun battles and openly (but not seriously) insulting each other on an almost daily basis.
Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
#205tl;dr: The only measure of on the job performance is on the job performance. The only thing that matters to your company is also on the job performance. Why not focus on that? It is utter voodoo. I came up in the late 80s. Interviews were maybe 2 hours long. You might be handed a piece of paper with a problem to aggregate some information distributed in a few different arrays and print them out. You know, write some…
"Never memorize what you can look up in a book" --Einstein
Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think two hours for a small take-home project is reasonable. Otherwise the applicant would spend two hours in your offices anyway, right? More than two hours, though, and I can see the problem.
It would be acceptable if the results of the project were sufficient to make a hire/no-hire decision. If I do one two hour project, and either get an offer letter or polite refusal in response, I'd do it in a heartbeat. But no one does that. They would be fools if they did.
An anecdote is not data, but I actually did have this happen. I did a 15 minute phone chat talking about the job and a week later had a one hour online live coding session. Two weeks later, with no more contact I had a formal job offer letter in my inbox. The offer was above market rate, and the commentary in the email from the CEO said that the offer was a negotiating floor. I actually had to ask to fly into the office s(the job was remote) to meet the team and learn some more about the company and work itself.
I ended up declining the job, and they told me that the offer would _stay open_. They even got in touch with me a year later (to the day) to see if I wanted to reconsider. This was all about a year and a half ago now.
Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
#207Also: Give the "not-the-best" people a chance to develop. The CEO of one of my past clients, a consulting company, always said: "You can teach everyone to be a great programmer". And he put his money where his mouth was: He hired people with no programming experience (even with no university education) and personally trained them for several months . Also, senior people in the company were encouraged to also help the…
"You can teach everyone to be a great programmer" You really can't - but it doesn't matter. This has nothing to do with programming specifically. You can train most people to do most tasks. With a modicum of natural inclination, competent. With a bit of interest, good. With a willingness to work hard, very good. However, you can't ever train greatness. You can't make it by any method - only they can. Your broader poi…
If they are interested, you can - but probably not in an ... affordable amount of time.
What's desired is that our company have the best talent, but that someone else develop it for us. We'll pay the maintenance fee at a high level but we won't actually invest in it.
This is a simple problem - we know the cost of everything but the value of nothing. And then we begin to redefine "best" down to make it easier to measure.
Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
#208Also: Give the "not-the-best" people a chance to develop. The CEO of one of my past clients, a consulting company, always said: "You can teach everyone to be a great programmer". And he put his money where his mouth was: He hired people with no programming experience (even with no university education) and personally trained them for several months . Also, senior people in the company were encouraged to also help the…
I tell you true: when I look back on my career so far, I'm most proud of the work I did helping people climb that hill.
Most of the code I've written, even the best of it, is long gone. The company died, the system eventually got replaced, the business needs changed. I've debugged some epic problems through herculean efforts, but in retrospect most of those problems shouldn't have even existed; bad work process created bad results. I created some great system architectures, but technology advances so rapidly that the great solution of 10 years ago is now sadly out of date.
But getting some non-developer hooked on development? The shine on that doesn't wear off. Taking somebody who's struggling and helping them become a solid contributor? I'll always be proud of that.
Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
#209There's a very big time cost to hiring just the best. If you're afraid of even one bad hire, then a growing company must be willing to have all their managers and top employees commit 20+% of their time to hiring. Then you ask "Is the 1-2 standard deviation in performance improvement worth it?" If the answer is yes, then it's worth it. And... Interviews are awful. Seeing how someone work is even better. This is one r…
It's not just a time cost. The graph near the top of Jeff's article shows "Ran Out of Cash" as the #2 cause of startup failures, ahead of anything else hiring-related. I say anything else because hiring the best means paying for the best. If you hire nobody else, then salary costs rise. Attrition probably does too, because the best are often among the first to jump elsewhere. Every startup needs a few of the best. Yo…
You could argue that the best pay for themselves, and that running out of a cash could come from hiring bad people.
The absolutely best employees I've seen haven't been frequent job hoppers. At most it's every 3-5 years. I'm thinking of an unscientific sample size of 5 or 6 people who have had sustained outstanding technical performance of 10-25 years. Companies don't let people like them go. And they tend to be loyal to the mission if treated fairly.
Now a company with $1mm of seed money that's supposed to last 12-18 months can't afford to hire 5 people like that. There's not enough cash or equity to go around.
Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
#210Also: Give the "not-the-best" people a chance to develop. The CEO of one of my past clients, a consulting company, always said: "You can teach everyone to be a great programmer". And he put his money where his mouth was: He hired people with no programming experience (even with no university education) and personally trained them for several months . Also, senior people in the company were encouraged to also help the…
"You can teach everyone to be a great programmer"
Flat out dead wrong. If you hire "anyone" and try to teach them to be a programmer then you will probably fire them.
This is the sort of attitude that leads companies to outsource their development overseas: "Our programmers are people hitting keys. We'll get overseas people to hit keys and overseas people hit keys for less money.", cause, you know, anyone can do it.
Programming is VERY hard and it takes a huge amount of motivation and hard work to become any good at it. Sure you can learn how to do simple stuff without any serious interest, but to be beyond ordinary it takes enormous work and time and research and Joe Schlepp off the street is simply not going to do that.
If you want to hire people and teach them then you need to look for these things: enthusiasm for computers and programming, demonstrated willingness to learn, energy and effort. You should value energy and effort more highly than anything. Those are the raw ingredients for trainees, and people with those ingredients are far from "anyone".