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We only hire the trendiest

danluu.com

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Re: We only hire the trendiest

#291

Post by pfarnsworth »

grappler wrote: post #285

Recognizing these difficulties and biases, and watching the swaggering, overconfident, surface-level way coworkers around me talk about their interview candidates as if they had awesome powers of judgement, my approach has evolved into: Pick an LSAT-style logic problem. First just give the candidate the problem, and see if they can work it out. No programming, just simple logical thinking skills. Then get into writin…

Back when the web was still young and I had less than 1 year experience, I interviewed at IBM for a web developer position. They gave me an aptitude test, which they said I scored amongst the highest they had ever seen. This got me through several rounds of interviews but at the very end, I was rejected. When I asked for feedback, the hiring manager said that I didn't have enough experience. It felt like a complete waste of time, because they KNEW I didn't have enough experience from the beginning, so the entire process was really offputting.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#293

Post by 0xCMP »

And the thing that sucks is that a lot of the best places to get started as someone out of college is a .NET or otherwise boring shop. Not everyone who is talented and intelligent has been programming since 7th grade or went to a brand-name school.

Unemployment after graduation for CS majors is one of the highest because a lot of times they aren't ready for the real world. They get started in a .NET shop and grow in to better developers. I think we can all agree that if you consider your self good at this it's mainly because you had to or wanted to do it for real and thats where they get the experience to be on their own.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#294

Post by bryanrasmussen »

grappler wrote: post #285

Recognizing these difficulties and biases, and watching the swaggering, overconfident, surface-level way coworkers around me talk about their interview candidates as if they had awesome powers of judgement, my approach has evolved into: Pick an LSAT-style logic problem. First just give the candidate the problem, and see if they can work it out. No programming, just simple logical thinking skills. Then get into writin…

so, basically what you just said here is you would try to hire people that were like you, by giving them tests that you know you would do well on.

I mean I would do well at this particular set of tests so fine by me in that regard.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#295

Post by throwaway85305 »

throwaway85305 wrote: post #287

I'm currently in the process of applying at Facebook (which I guess qualifies as a TrendCo that recently transitioned to BigCo). I haven't even got to the technical phone screen yet, but the recruiter tried to get me to attend an "interview prep session" and then sent me a pair of videos from it totalling 2.5 hours when I couldn't, which of course I felt obligated to watch on the assumption that all the other candida…

Not directly related but also relevant to the OP: half the reason I'm applying to Facebook in the first place is that I know telling recruiters at other places that I have a Facebook offer will do more to make me attractive than any actual work I've done at non-TrendCos.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#296

Post by annnnd »

Minor nitpick: how difficult is it to slap a date somewhere? Especially with this design it is impossible to tell when in the last 30 years this post was written (for the curious, it looks like it was posted today).

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#297

Post by pjmlp »

zeveb wrote: post #288
pjmlp wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Br…

> Not stuck on the CLI and text terminals culture. See, those of us who use Unix & free software see that as a benefit, just as the literate find the written word to offer advantages over picture books. With a keyboard, I am able to enter hundreds of discrete inputs: with a mouse or touchscreen I have one 2D input and a few buttons. With a keyboard I am able to have a conversation with my computer and my data; with a…

See, some of us that were already into computers when Sun was a startup got bored of it.

Your answer is a typical example of UNIX CLI users that need to express themselves as being more intelligent than GUI users, while forgetting that some us do have enough CLI experience and decided to grew out of it.

I can use macros and key + mouse combos in FPS style across many GUI applications and if I ever need a CLI, Powershell or Terminal (Mac OS X) are just a click away.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#298

Post by rsync »

donretag wrote: post #264

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 exclu…

"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."

Wow. Just wow. What a (cognitive) bubble to be in.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#299

Post by p4wnc6 »

steego wrote: post #270

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 yo…

The frustrating part is that even when this is brought up and openly described and discussed explicitly in the context of working towards a better and healthier hiring practice, manager and HR types still insist on the cargo cult nonsense.

It goes further than just an inefficient heuristic or biases. It becomes codified, even venerated, standard practice, and gains an air of certified approval up the corporate ladder, and eventually becomes something that, politically, you're not allowed to disagree with and typically you must even display boisterous and enthusiastic approval of it.

It exacerbates the crab mentality that affects the programming world -- engineers basically start to feel that if they had to put up with stupid, inefficient interview hazing, and if it's all just going to be a political status game anyway, then they're going to drag the candidates down into the muck with them and give themselves over to designing their own hazing interview questions.

The spirit becomes focused on cutting people down, and only hiring people if some gauntlet was unable to cut them down. Without ever stopping to think: what kind of human beings are you actually helping to succeed? And what kind of human beings is this process systematically harming? Nobody cares.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#300

Post by Lawtonfogle »

pfarnsworth wrote: post #291
grappler wrote: post #285

Recognizing these difficulties and biases, and watching the swaggering, overconfident, surface-level way coworkers around me talk about their interview candidates as if they had awesome powers of judgement, my approach has evolved into: Pick an LSAT-style logic problem. First just give the candidate the problem, and see if they can work it out. No programming, just simple logical thinking skills. Then get into writin…

Back when the web was still young and I had less than 1 year experience, I interviewed at IBM for a web developer position. They gave me an aptitude test, which they said I scored amongst the highest they had ever seen. This got me through several rounds of interviews but at the very end, I was rejected. When I asked for feedback, the hiring manager said that I didn't have enough experience. It felt like a complete w…

I'm not one to believe the official explanations given. It is too easy to lie than to give the truth, even when that truth isn't bad. So I wouldn't put too much work into you being inexperienced. Instead, I would say that they had a different reason for not choosing you but that was the simplest lie they could come up with on the spot by looking over your resume.
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