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We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

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Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#211

Post by wdmeldon »

OpenDrapery wrote: post #146
jrs235 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As stated several times over the years, particularly on HN and by patio11 (edit: or was it Joel on Software? Perhaps both?), work for a profit center not a cost center. The internal software to run insurance companies is a cost center. It is in managements interest to reduce and keep costs down... that's detrimental to what you do. Working on a software product or Saas is a profit center. What you are making is to be…

In addition to my previous comment, I'd like to hear people's thoughts on the "consulting" gig. It seems to rule here. You know the routine. Consulting shop places an individual at a client site and charges the client $100 an hour, and then turns around and gives the consultant less than half of it. I can see the argument of the consulting firm viewing their people both as profit centers and cost centers. Why are the…

As a midwesterner who's working as a "consultant", one thing I can say is I don't get benefits, so that's an obvious plus for them.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#212

Post by ArkyBeagle »

S4M wrote: post #56
struppi wrote: post #33

Also: 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 am a big believer that companies underestimate people's ability to learn, but what you describe works well if the company is stable and has little growth - a perfectly fine situation to be in - but I think the majority of startups don't have this kind of stability, and need someone who has the right skills now for whatever they need (building a new service, scaling the backend, tweaking the frontend, porting their…

I dunno from web stuff, really, but none of that sounds like rocket surgery ( because I don't know what I am talking about, you see - this always makes everything easier ). Of the list, "scaling the backend" sounds the riskiest because the tools landscape is very fragmented.

Then again, a person with whom I went to college is a recognized expert on Oracle performance. I find it keenly interesting that such a role even exists.

I look at startup-ey, Webby looking job postings and it's like the qualified people drew to several consecutive inside straights just to have the right buzzwords on their resume. And it's a different set of inside straights than it was six months ago. And it's different yet from firm to firm.

See there how easy it is when you don't know what you're talking about? :)

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#213

Post by jsprogrammer »

OpenDrapery wrote: post #146
jrs235 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As stated several times over the years, particularly on HN and by patio11 (edit: or was it Joel on Software? Perhaps both?), work for a profit center not a cost center. The internal software to run insurance companies is a cost center. It is in managements interest to reduce and keep costs down... that's detrimental to what you do. Working on a software product or Saas is a profit center. What you are making is to be…

In addition to my previous comment, I'd like to hear people's thoughts on the "consulting" gig. It seems to rule here. You know the routine. Consulting shop places an individual at a client site and charges the client $100 an hour, and then turns around and gives the consultant less than half of it. I can see the argument of the consulting firm viewing their people both as profit centers and cost centers. Why are the…

My last consulting firm accounted their consultant salaries as a cost center, despite our hours worked being directly billed to the client. I left about two weeks after finding out.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#214

Post by jldugger »

> What I like about audition projects: > It's real, practical work. > They get paid. (Ask yourself who gets "paid" for a series of intensive interviews that lasts multiple days? Certainly not the candidate.) > It's healthy to structure your work so that small projects like this can be taken on by outsiders. If you can't onboard a potential hire, you probably can't onboard a new hire very well either. > Interviews, no matter how much effort you put into them, are so hit and miss that the only way to figure out if someone is really going to work in a given position is to actually work with them.

I'm finally sitting down to read Peopleware, and from what I can tell, this is what they recommended back in 99 or 87 or whatever. Alongside portfolios of work. I need to find a 2013 edition, to see if they mention GitHub portfolios at all.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#215

Post by wdmeldon »

andrewstuart wrote: post #210
struppi wrote: post #33

Also: 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.…

My first job hired me with zero programming experience because they thought this. I like to think I turned out ok, but I strongly disagree with the sentiment. A more accurate statement would be "You can train most people to be relatively competent at average programming tasks."

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#216

Post by ArkyBeagle »

andrewstuart wrote: post #149

The concept of "The Best" is meaningless anyway. When someone says "We Hire The Best", ask them to quantify precisely what "The Best" means. They can't. They weasel around and avoid answering. And that is because they can't define in a tangible way what "The Best" is. And if you can't define it then how do you know you found it? Assuming you can define "The Best", an even bigger problem is working out a provable mech…

At the risk of being rude, some of it is just foam finger, jingoistic narcissism. Much is swept under the rug of "fit".

And employers want what they think they want. I've been forced to (inadvertently) undermine the Great Developer too many places to think otherwise.

Lest ye think otherwise, I'm not that good. I'm just rigorous but I can switch modes and hack like a shameless... hacker.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#218

Post by criddell »

emodendroket wrote: post #190
criddell wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to Google for it and I don't have the story right. Claudia Goldin was one of the authors of this study: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/aer.90.4.715 She was able to attribute 25% of the increase in hiring of women by orchestras was due to the blind auditions. She also found that there was an explosion of auditions when orchestras adopted the blind format. So it had an effect, just not as large a…

OK, perhaps so. But still, the 25% figure shows a large bias against hiring women (which is the conclusion of the study you have linked as well).

Yes, I agree.

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#219

Post by dorfsmay »

A few things have happened in the last few years that make me believe that the meaning of the best is a lot more influenced by our own biases than we will ever be ready to admit. This is a huge issue with hiring:

1. The study about blind interviews in orchestras mentioned in the article. Think about it, most people in symphonic orchestras have a university education, and often with more years of education than your average engineer, they learned all about critical thinking etc... They are artists, whom are usually considered more open minded (ok debatable). But, they as a group, were able to acknowledge that they have strong biases to the point of trying (and eventually adopting) blind interviews. This, tells me that these people have a strong sense of the fact that they are aware that they biased, and able to admit it, and aware that it might influence their interview process, yet, the experiment showed that they were not able to see passed gender! This has seriously made me rethink about my beliefs about being conscious of my own biases.

2. I have worked for company A, which hired only the best (besides me I guess ;-) ) pretty much as described in the article, I have recommended people I had worked with previously and whom I knew were amazing, but they didn't get hired. I was seriously surprised, but you know the "it's better not to hire one of the best than err and make one bad hire". Ok.

3. I then worked for company B. I recommended somebody who was hired at company A. That person was not a friend, but somebody who passed all interviews with flying colours at company A. I worked with that person and they are extremely smart. Everybody at company A was amazed how smart that person was, even after seeing them fly though all the oh-so-though interviews. Working for close to a year with that person, and everybody was still positive about how smart and good that person was, so they aren't just good at interviewing. That person was turned down at company B.

PS: Yeah, maybe I just need to stop recommending people, I now realise I'm the common thread in people not getting hired in my story!

Re: We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

#220

Post by st3v3r »

andrewstuart wrote: post #200
phamilton wrote: post #92

We used to ask "What makes this candidate weird?" during the decision meeting. It wasn't always a deal breaker, but it was very important that the team would be different after hiring someone. We hired quite a few non-CS grads, whether they came via a boot camp or were just self taught. We ended up with a ragged team of misfits and it was awesome. I've never worked on a team that was so effective at challenging assum…

"but it was very important that the team would be different after hiring someone." Makes no sense to me. Why should the team need to be different? Why should the team need to be the same? This is Voodoo recruiting - some belief that a company has formed that really is meaningless but becomes an important part of the companies recruiting culture. Will our team be different? Are they weird? Shake the chicken bones, dan…

It should be different because, hopefully, you're adding something that you didn't have before. In the worst case, you could be adding a negative.
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