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We only hire the trendiest

danluu.com

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Re: We only hire the trendiest

#241

Post by pjmlp »

stegosaurus wrote: post #120

I tend to agree with most of this (university, GPA, subject, blah blah blah). Bits of paper that are signals of arbitrary things (family standing, ability to take on debt, country of birth). Anti-Windows bias doesn't really feel like an example of 'pedigree' to me, though. I can't imagine programming on Windows. I can't even imagine using the OS. I moved away from Windows ~a decade ago and haven't looked back - it se…

What I love on Windows.

Not stuck on the CLI and text terminals culture. The Windows developer community knows its way around basch, Technet scripts and Powershell, but we rather use nice comfy GUI tools.

C++ (moving away from C), .NET languages, COM and nowadays WinRT offer programming paradigms that follow Xerox PARC ideas and drive forward developer experience.

Those kind of developer experiences being shown by Bret Victor.

I could say the same about Mac OS X developer experience.

For almost a decade I was a dedicated *BSD and GNU/Linux user as well, but they seem to be stuck being just yet another UNIX clone without any consistent plan for anything outside C and POSIX APIs.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#242

Post by cableshaft »

wtbob wrote: post #207
cableshaft wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you feel the same way about someone who is currently doing .Net but has experience with other technologies in the past, and still learns and uses non-MS technology outside of their current job? Like me, for example, I currently have a job doing .Net, but in my past I have several years experience working in iOS, a year working with a Java stack, I used to do PHP way back in the day, I use Python all the time fo…

> Would you feel the same way about someone who is currently doing .Net but has experience with other technologies in the past, and still learns and uses non-MS technology outside of their current job? No, certainly not. But I've reviewed resumes of folks who were clearly just cogs in the Microsoft machine (without any indication that they were doing things with Unix & free software in their free time). I really am c…

That's encouraging, thank you. I've had some frustration in interviews because interviewers I've encountered have only really paid attention to my most recent tech stack and job and seem to almost completely ignore the rest of my resume, despite working with a wide variety of tech and fields in the past successfully (games, mobile, web, startups, enterprise).

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#243

Post by optforfon »

sveme wrote: post #113

There have been a number of posts about hiring practices lately. And a lot of them contradict each other. My conclusion is, that people hire people that are similar to themselves or similar to how they would like to see themselves , and the whole hiring process, the style of interviews and coding tasks and the sources from which they hire, is based upon this model. A company founded by Stanford CS students will focus…

For a generic/flexible developer position I'd purposefully avoid hiring people from "brand" school. You'll definitely need to be over paying, and they will likely be poached.

I unless you need like a PhD who is the top expert in X (and you're willing to pay any price) .. it just seems like a bad bargain

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#244

Post by wolfgke »

VLM wrote: post #240
wolfgke wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is so important: why don't they specify the desired culture values beforehand in the job ad so that people who don't fit don't have to waste their time applying for the job?

Because writing "young white men only need apply" is a fast track to a lawsuit. Its obviously OK to implement it, plenty of examples of that, just not OK to talk about it in public.

What reason does the company have to think that young white men fit the job better? I can imagine that there are properties that these kind of people have that makes them a better fit, but why not advertize these properties instead? This should probably not lead to a lawsuite.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#245

Post by aprdm »

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?

No compensation. And worse, no feedback as well in case they don't hire you. Just a wasted day you'll never get back.

source: been there, asked for feedback after received just a generic "No good luck with you career" and no response for my email..

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#246

Post by tptacek »

benmccann wrote: post #239
tptacek wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hours? It could take a week, and if you're going to hire more than one person this quarter, it will still be worth it just in the time savings from not having developers deliver bad interviews .

Have you done this? My worry would be that sooner or later you'll have a candidate who posts the assignment online ruining your weeks of effort. It also seems like it makes it much easier to cheat if you make it a take home.

Yes, I ran a process like this for several years. I ran recruiting for the largest software security firm in the US; before that firm bought us, I used this process to more than double the size of my company. When I left, to work on a recruiting startup, not one of the people I'd overseen hiring had quit or been fired.

I'm religious about this topic for a reason. :)

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#247

Post by sklogic »

dexterdog wrote: post #140
sklogic wrote: post #95

Greybeards do not mix with the hipstor kids well. In the other news, the Pope is catholic.

And both groups do a disservice to each other when they cannot work together. There are a lot of new ideas that we greybeards can learn from the greenies and there are a lot of tested foundations of which the newer generation is often unaware of, especially those that were taught to not worry about resources.

> And both groups do a disservice to each other when they cannot work together.

Why? What's the point of doing anything at all with the hipsters? They're irrelevant.

> we greybeards can learn from the greenies

Of course! But there are fresh engineers and there are trendy hipstors. They've got nothing in common besides their age.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#248

Post by drewg123 »

binarycheese wrote: post #230

"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.

At least at Google, it was almost impossible to hire an engineer with domain specific knowledge. Nearly everybody we tried to hire who had the domain specific experience our team needed didn't make it past HC due to some BS gotcha question in the interview. On the other hand, contractors were trivial to hire.

So in a sense, the contractors were not "as strong", since they didn't have make it through the absurd Google hiring process. As such, they were generally treated as second class citizens.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#249

Post by p4wnc6 »

braythwayt wrote: post #231
p4wnc6 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 product…

Your cynicism is noted. But my cynicism says that managers often hire people who will be productive because a huge part of their political game is producing software that appears to be “strategic” or will generate the revenues that make their group more valued and garner more budget and power for said managers. So yes, it’s cynicism all the way down, but no, that doesn’t mean that managers aren’t trying to hire produ…

> appears to be “strategic”

The key word is appears which is just a game of status and certification.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#250

Post by mooreds »

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…

Hi.

I definitely wasted time interviewing underqualified people. But I wasted time interviewing some overqualified people too (because of salary/location expectations that should have been communicated up front). Actually, all of interviewing feels like wasted time (you have this burning need, and you want to fill it yesterday, or better yet a month ago, and yet you have to go through this process and learn about all these strangers, while the building feels like it is on fire).

Note that I said feels like wasted time, not is wasted time. It's a bit like learning a new programming language--you end up going down lots of blind alleys before you find the way you really want to go.

(All we could afford was non textbook candidates, and out of 3 hires, 2 worked out.)

As far as walking the line, as I got more comfortable interviewing, I always worked off a rubric, and set things up so that I could ease out of a phone interview early if it was clear that they didn't live up to their resume. Ended up doing the same thing with the in person interviews as well. Definitely screened by resume.

> I've always been nervous about applying for jobs when I don't have every skill listed on the ad.

This is a hard problem because some institutions write wish lists in their job reqs, and some write hard and fast requirements. And you don't know before applying. (And sometimes the goal posts in the organization move when their "requirements" meet the labor market.)

Personally, I'd apply if you have half of the requirements and feel like you can speak to the way you learn.

If you're interested in the company, I'd also take the extra step and do some work around it, whether that's writing a pain letter ( http://www.forbes.com/sites/lizryan/2015/03/01/how-to-write-... ) or writing a simple client against someone's external API or creeping^Hscanning LinkedIn, Twitter and Github profiles and finding out about the team and company.

Good luck!

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