We only hire the trendiest • Hacker News Board

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#221

Post by p4wnc6 » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 1:58 PM UTC

braythwayt wrote: post #194

The “Moneyball” quote is by far the most provocative. Never mind hanging around bashing TendyCo or trendy engineers. There is a market for programmers, and like in every market, some are overvalued and some are undervalued. But unlike stocks, you don’t extract value from your programmers by selling them at what the market perceives it will pay. So you aren’t hunting for programmers that are valued by the market, you’…

In my experience, hiring managers, and almost all companies apart from extremely early-stage do-or-die start-ups, simply do not care about productivity. Sure, they'll use productivity as a political excuse to fire you, overlook you, or ding you on a bonus or something. But that's just a way of cover their political games with plausible deniability paperwork. At the end of the day, they don't really care about productivity, and most businesses are not punished by consumers when the business is not productive, beyond a low, low threshold of productivity that non-do-or-die stage businesses can mostly automate and extract from workers who only even need to be semi-conscious to do the work. I've experienced this laissez-faire autopilot attitude first hand, even in a multi-billion dollar asset management company where there was "real money on the line every day" and blah blah blah.

Just look at the office space provided to knowledge workers. Open-plan offices demonstrably destroy productivity. You're literally throwing away something like 10-15% of a worker's productivity (and thus also the corresponding compensation you pay them) just by placing them in a loud, no-privacy open-plan space.

But companies can't get enough open-plan. They want on-site cafes, rock-climbing walls, elaborate decorations, game rooms, liquor-focused cultural activities, etc. etc. all taking place right on top of the space where work is supposed to get done. Can there be more of an unequivocal admission that they don't actually value productivity?

The idea that most businesses have to be really sensitive to bottom-line productivity is a Big Lie. They hire you because they think you'll be a politically ally to their particular internal faction for their pet projects and power struggles. They may need to use your on-paper credentials to win arguments or to "certify" some things, but make no mistake, they absolutely don't care about what you can do.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#222

Post by mdpopescu » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 1:59 PM UTC

oxplot wrote: post #128

wolfgke wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But not only that, unix goes deeper and teaches you about how to do things inside your program, even if that part never talks to other programs. Things like do the dumb thing first; or when you have nothing to say, say nothing (e.g. `ls` prints nothing if no files found), etc. It's about mindset and values and those are almost always dictated by the environment. Also values cannot be looked up on stackoverflow and…

It's not that unix folks don't appreciate it, but that it's not clear what to appreciate. From solely a personal standpoint, years of both using and programming on Windows taught me nothing about its values. However, I can talk about Apple and its values for hours and I've never owned anything Apple except its keyboard. Joel, the author of the article you linked to, states the core value of Windows as being "useful t…

"Aunt Marge will be as happy using Linux without even knowing it's Linux"

Unless she wants to print something... [1]

[1] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cups-horror.html

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#223

Post by lallysingh » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 1:59 PM UTC

J-dawg wrote: post #190

mooreds wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appreciate the humanization of both job candidates and employers inherent in the shift you advocate. I have done a bit of hiring and it was very hard to walk the line between effective use of my time and being open to people with all kinds of experience. (It was a junior position and I talked to some very junior candidates.) But it is always important to remember that there is a human being on both sides of the table…

Could you expand on how you ended up walking that line? Did you feel you wasted your time on under-qualified people? Did you end up hiring anyone who initially didn't seem like a textbook candidate? If so, how did they turn out? The reason I ask is that I've always been nervous about applying for jobs when I don't have every skill listed on the ad. The advice I've been given is usually something like "Apply anyway. T…

I interview tons of candidates. The resume tells me nearly nothing, just what you've worked on before. Not how much, out how well that went. So in terms of some "textbook" model fit, the question is a little silly.

Generally few people are really good. And their spread out unpredictably across the landscape, so you have to just interview lots of people to find them.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#224

Post by djb_hackernews » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 1:59 PM UTC

rdl wrote: post #189

djb_hackernews wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW I presented this option to my senior management and HR at a "household name" software company and was essentially told we can't do this because it looks like a test and we'd have to do the same test for every candidate or else open our selves up to discrimination issues, no matter which team the position is for, and that was a no go.

Work-sample tests are clearly protected; it's IQ tests which aren't permitted (Duke Power v.)

Right but 2 things:

1) HR (presumably taking direction from in house counsel) takes the position that it will be difficult to distinguish between a work sample test and an IQ test

2) We are a large organization with very broad roles. The Performance Team hiring for a Senior Software Engineer will probably want a different work sample than the Analytics Team...

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#225

Post by stirno » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 2:00 PM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #183

ciaranm wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask what location this is? It's vastly different to my experience of the contracting environment in the UK.

I think this is an U.S thing where this kind of division has sprung up - so you have contractor ("temp", "paid less") full-time employee consultant ("paid more")

There is a pretty important distinction here -- We have seen in the US consulting market (at large corporations) an influx of 90s style contractor arrangements for staff augmentation. This is basically the counter to failed outsourcing efforts. These contractors almost entirely work for large groups like Robert Half, Tata, Infosys, Tek Systems and others.

We also still have a very very strong consultant labor force making 2-3x what W2 full-time employees can pull in. These consultants generally work through smaller consulting firms that take smaller cuts for the placement/handling billing and invoicing.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#226

Post by coliveira » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 2:03 PM UTC

minikites wrote: post #219

donw wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most hiring processes spend gigantic amounts of effort to see how a candidate works as a member of the team, without actually having the candidate... work as a member of the team. I suspect that the reason why, is that so few engineering teams do pair programming full-time, complete with daily-or-more rotations. Pairing gives you the ability to spin somebody up rapidly enough to see how well they do on real code, and…

What's the compensation like for 10+ hours of work?

Great answer. When I see these ideas floated around, I always think that these companies will never hire people who value their time and have at least a decent job. When a company comes to me with these great "deals" the first thing I say is thank you very much and move their emails to my spam box.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#227

Post by tptacek » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 2:03 PM UTC

dood wrote: post #213

tptacek wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People say this in every thread about hiring, and it never makes any sense to me at all. Companies that don't hire using objective at-home tests hire instead with grueling on-site interviews that knock out an entire business day (most of them last a whole business day, some recent interviews peers have gone on have taken multiple business days, and all of them at the very least kill the day for anything else). The la…

If used wisely, at-home coding tests should be far better than the average mess of a technical interview. The problem is in the hands of TrendCo, they can be used crudely to find the trendy hire who has the exact same ideas about engineering as the hiring person. Because giving the test costs TrendCo nothing, they are happy to throw people at it until they randomly find someone who is exactly what they are looking fo…

If you had asked at Matasano how we evaluated our work-sample tests, we'd have told you. In fact: the first contact any new candidate had at Matasano was a 45-minute-long phone call with a director+ (for a year and a half: me), during which we explained our process in excruciating detail and answered any questions that came up. If we got even a hint from a candidate that they might not know exactly what we were looking for, we'd get their mailing address and fedex them a stack of free books; we gave them cheat-sheets on what parts of those books to read, as well.

I have the strong impression that a typical SFBA tech hiring manager thinks it's crazy to give candidates cheat sheets for interviews, and that helping candidates with technical evaluations decreases rigor. THE EXACT OPPOSITE THING IS TRUE. Evaluating technical ability under unrealistic pressure and with unrealistic restrictions confounds the results of the evaluation.

Of course, you have to design tests that are valid predictors for candidates who have received tips and assistance and practice and resources. That sounds hard! But it isn't. The best predictor for a candidate's ability to do the kind of work you really do is, simply, the kind of work you really do. Not problems from a book, not trivia questions, not one algorithm poorly implemented on a shared coding site and a Skype call, not whatever bug is at the top of the bug tracker today, but a sample assignment given to a real member of your team, the same one, for every candidate, graded the same way.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#228

Post by hibikir » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 2:04 PM UTC

jamesdutc wrote: post #148

koevet wrote: post #110

"Contractors are generally not the strongest technically" Where does this come from? I actually see a contractor as someone who had experienced way more "war stories" than the guy who has been sitting in the same chair for 10/20 years. As a contractor, you are exposed to more technologies, more business sectors, different working cultures.

"Consulting" or "contracting" can refer to different kinds of work arrangements. One of these is what's called "staff augmentation." Large companies with huge teams of full-time employed software programmers will often hire contractors to fill gaps. These contractors are typically contractors-in-name-only: they work under exactly the same conditions as full-time employees but with a worse tax situation, without acces…

In Missouri, you want the contractor.

I've worked for Fortune 500 companies around here. The senior full time employees have been working at the same place forever, so their skills are often outdated. They get paid a lot less, but they are often fine with that, because the place gives them the one thing they want: status. Changing jobs means you might not get that status. In comparison, the top contractors get far better pay, have worked in more than one or two places in their career, and are the guys you want to hire.

It's probably different in the bay, where big tech companies have little trouble paying 200K+ compensation packages, but around here, just contractors do.

Why do the contractors get paid more? Because they can get paid without talking to HR, or meeting any pay bands. Last year, I worked with other three contractors, whose names anyone in the Scala community would recognize. 200-300K a year range. The best full timer they had (which just quit, after being told how silly he had been by being full time), made 110K.

Being well known means that switching to work for TrendyCo isn't difficult though.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#229

Post by Delmania » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 2:04 PM UTC

wtbob wrote: post #195

Well, I personally would have a lot of caution inviting in someone who is familiar with .Net, out of concern that he would be a Trojan horse. He would be more familiar with proprietary than free software, and hence when confronted with the choice to either bring in what he knows or learn something new, under pressure, it's likely that he would try to bring in something from Microsoft or another proprietary vendor. No…

That's an incredibly naive filter. I'd estimate the vast majority of developers don't care too much about whether their technology stack fits some arbitrary ideal. A good interviewer would focus on gleaming out a person's understanding of the fundamentals, and more important, actual instances of problem-solving, creativity, and learning.

> I'd be very concerned that he was just a glue monkey assembling bits & bobs of proprietary software and not an actual developer.

You can remove the word proprietary and apply that claim to a significant number of developers, regardless of their chosen tech stack.

> Free software is better for developers

Citation needed.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#230

Post by binarycheese » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 2:04 PM UTC

"Contractors are generally not the strongest technically"

Nonesense. Contractors are actually much stronger technically because they usually come in to complete a specific task and are not usually trained by the company.

At least that is my experience here on the east coast.