We only hire the trendiest • Hacker News Board

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#261

Post by wolfgke » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 2:32 PM UTC

sveme wrote: post #139

vinay427 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>by surrounding themselves with MIT grads, they suddenly generate the wanted association. Could you clarify what you meant here? Was it that 1. those who surround themselves with MIT grads discover an ingrained wish that they would have gone to MIT, or 2. that they satisfy a pre-existing wish to have gone to MIT by instead surrounding themselves with MIT grads? In the case of (2), are these effects tangible as they m…

The latter. Having been to quite a couple of interviews with hiring managers, most of them interviewed in a way that they would have hired themselves, so case number 1. Case number 2, hiring people that they subconsciously wish themselves to be, is coming more from an observation of all these hiring practices posts here on HN. The latter would be quite a nice empirical/psychological study, though I fully expect such…

> Disclaimer: I'm living in Germany and nearly exclusively interviewed in Germany so far. There's nothing comparable to the top US schools here, so school reputation is probably much less important than in the US.

There is something comparable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studienstiftung: 'it is often referred to as "Germany's secret elite university"'.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#262

Post by tptacek » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 2:34 PM UTC

rorykoehler wrote: post #252

tptacek wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It saved us enormous amounts of time at Matasano. When we designed our work-sample rubric, our #1 concern was filtering out people who interviewed well and/or had great resumes but weren't worth a billable hour on a real project, but our #2 concern was interviewing faster and getting results back to candidates quickly. (We didn't discover the best reason to do work-samples --- discovering hidden talent --- until afte…

Did you ever consider the candidate in all of this?

Yes: like I said, the goal was to get results back to candidates faster.

The biggest complaint we'd been getting from candidates before work samples was that our process took too long. Our goal became to get the entire process done under two weeks (from its worst point, a month or two earlier, of 1.5 months, when someone finally posted an anonymous complaint to Glassdoor about us).

After iterating a couple times, we could reliably go from first contact to hire/no hire, with a motivated candidates (ie: one who would work with us to schedule the interview process aggressively) inside of a single week.

Also, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11328090

The process I'm advocating for is far better for candidates.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#263

Post by rdl » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 2:36 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #232

djb_hackernews wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It is simply not true that the Perf team must deliver the same work-sample test as the Analytics team. Let's not dignify that argument. I absolutely believe you that your company has allowed HR to sabotage your hiring process, and that sucks. But let's not pretend HR is right to do it.

Ironically, a work-sample test which WAS the same across every developer would be closer to an IQ test than if that work sample test were tailored to the role.

There's probably a solid argument for giving every candidate for the same role the same work sample test; otherwise you might naturally want to randomize some parameters or choose from a bank (if you think "cheating" is likely).

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#264

Post by donretag » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 2:36 PM UTC

I once had an internal recruiter tell me during a phone screen that my resume was weak since I went to a no-name school in the south called Georgia Tech.

During my last interview round, another interviewer found it hard to believe that I did not use Twitter.

I think these problems existing more in the "trendy" areas such as the Bay area. Once you leave that culture, ignorant recruiters are still around, but the exclusivity is less.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#265

Post by tptacek » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 2:36 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #251

tptacek wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no magic to it at all. Have every candidate work on programming problems related to the work you do at your company. Have every candidate work on the same problems, and let them do it from home. Build and iterate on a rubric for grading those challenges. It is amazing to me that almost nobody does this, but: almost nobody does this. They have programmers write code on a whiteboard, or on some whiteboard-codin…

How is working for a month different that "work on programming problems related to the work"? I'd have thought that is even better as a filter.

I am fine with asking for candidates to work as a 1099 for a month if you pay them the standard 1099 contractor rate, which is almost invariably more than 2x their FTE rate. I am not fine with the industry norm of paying people their eventual FTE salary on a 1099 basis; that's a scam.

I think it's pretty dumb to do that, though, because most software developers can't take a month off of work from their current job to see if they're a fit for your company, and none of them will put their health insurance in jeopardy to do that.

I also think it's pretty silly to design a process that deliberately demands a month of time to make a decision that could be made effectively in a week.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#266

Post by ska » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 2:39 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?

I get the sentiment behind this, but bear in mind that interviewing is a two way street - and the company is often spending a lot more on it than you are (of course, they can better afford it).

That's worth possibly negotiating the amount of time or staging earlier parts with less impact.

I wouldn't say no to an interview that is going to burn a day, but I also wouldn't go to one without a pretty good feeling that I was likely to accept an offer if it came.

I mostly think of interviews as at least as much of a chance for me to evaluate them as the other way around (even the way they choose to interview tells me a lot).

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#267

Post by mdpopescu » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 2:39 PM UTC

wtbob wrote: post #204

akjetma wrote: post #106

I think we're starting to see the need for 'laborer' programmers. There's a lot of relatively unskilled glue/laborious coding that needs to be done. When you need someone to hammer a bunch of code out for you, you don't need an experienced and flexible software engineer as much as you need a kid with a well-trodden neural pathway that lights up when they write code in your tech stack. I think code schools are effecti…

> I think we're starting to see the need for 'laborer' programmers. There's a lot of relatively unskilled glue/laborious coding that needs to be done. I have a computer for that! Seriously, that's one of the things a computer excels at. This is what is so nice about a language with strong dynamic typing: it makes writing the sort of code which writes glue code reasonably easy.

How do you get your computer to solve the problem of "this text needs to be 2 points larger, a darker shade of red and 5 pixels to the right" without involving a programmer?

I've worked on the Avon AU website and we had a few hundred tasks like that. It's why (to link back to my current pet peeve) I'm upset that my relatives are unwilling to learn a tiny bit of web design because "it's too hard". There is a market for people who ONLY know how to do this. (There were two people in the company I was working for and my team only got access to them one hour every week - they were that busy.)

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#268

Post by Spooky23 » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 2:40 PM UTC

mbrock wrote: post #39

I sometimes think there's a built in pomposity in the whole attitude of hiring, looking for someone "good enough to qualify." Instead, I like to think of it as, we are looking for someone to help us , someone who has different experience and knowledge, someone who could tell us how we can improve. Then instead of this adversarial situation of selecting a new ingroup member, it's a solicitation for assistance with a b…

That approach makes a lot of sense to me. If you can actually manage people, filtering for "not dumb" is usually sufficient to get the desired result.

Most companies demonstrate this with H1 contractor hiring. They usually don't bother with the cool kids club screening in those situations. One of the smartest people I ever worked with had a degree in Chemical Engineering from some mid-tier university in India that I never heard of. That guy would never get hired as a FTE at that company, because he didn't drink and didn't have the cultural "fit" nonsense.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#269

Post by Bahamut » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 2:42 PM UTC

mbrock wrote: post #39

I sometimes think there's a built in pomposity in the whole attitude of hiring, looking for someone "good enough to qualify." Instead, I like to think of it as, we are looking for someone to help us , someone who has different experience and knowledge, someone who could tell us how we can improve. Then instead of this adversarial situation of selecting a new ingroup member, it's a solicitation for assistance with a b…

When I interview candidates, the make or break question for me is does the person possess critical thinking skills?

Various things may point one way or another for this, but it is a mistake to assume [insert working at a particular company] is an indication that someone has to have the skills, as well as to assume someone not having [insert pet qualification] is an indication that someone does not have these skills.

Sadly, there is a severe lack of this skill applied in our profession, and it is probably the costliest common mistake I see.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#270

Post by steego » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 2:43 PM UTC

Daniel Kahneman talks about an idea called substitution in his book Thinking Fast and Slow that I think really applies here. Here's the jist: When your brain is faced with doing a task that's going to require a lot of glucose it will look for shortcuts to save you energy. One of those shortcuts is your mind will look for an available heuristic, swap out the energy hungry analysis for the heuristic, and then signal your conscious mind that you did all the analytical hard work.

https://erikreads.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/thinking-fast-...

I think the truth of that matter is, most of us (myself included), don't know how to interview people well. Interviewing is really hard. Rather than doing the hard work by researching the subject and testing ideas, most of us try to imitate successful companies much in the same way the Melanesian cargo cults imitated the construction of airfields and air traffic control towers to lure back that wonderful cargo.

I suspect we like to tell ourselves that we're more analytical because our work can demand rigorous precision. More often than not, I find we developers tend to select heuristics that indirectly test a person on how similar they are to ourselves or people we aspire to be like. Then again, I'm probably making a broad generalization.