Not only coders are hard to recruit • Hacker News Board

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#31

Post by existencebox » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 2:33 PM UTC

alexgotoi wrote: post #10

pmoriarty wrote: post #8

There's been a lot of criticism of hackerrank.[1][2] Are you doing anything to make sure your service gets more respect? [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12825953 [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12667174&source=techsto...

Glad you asked that. As i saw in the treads mentioned by you, the common problem is that the tests are more about theory, and less about practice. Which is true. Sometimes, in interviews, you are asked about algorithms that you studied in college and never used before. It's very difficult to score high in this tests. We propose to eliminate this gap by having real job, day to day, scenarios like: install apache, mysq…

As an ex-sysadmin turned coder, "sysadmins aren't paid to install apache" could be as true as statement as "programmers aren't paid to write code". The meat of the value of a good sysadmin is problem solving, learning, and communication abilities (perhaps a "duh" but the same qualities I look for in a programmer.) While there's certainly something to be said for a senior experienced sysadmin being expected to have an insane knowledge of their systems, at least for more entry roles, I've seen many of the same problems in sysop interviews as dev interviews, and having a hackerrank section for it may only exacerbate that. I'm simply not convinced that no matter what you guys ask from a programmatic angle you can solve the deep problems of interviewing that these soft skills are much harder to poll for, resulting in an uneven reliance on less effective signaling of tangential talent through e.g. hackerrank score.

Anecdotally, this sort of "filtering" would have precluded both my own hiring early on in my career (so I'm naturally sensitive to this), and that of probably two of the three best junior sysadmins I've had the pleasure to working with having come out of entirely non-technical fields, while allowed in both of the "disaster cases" that come to my mind.

Don't let this ramble be a "it's impossible stop trying;" but perhaps a "more of the same won't solve the problems we can already see endemic across our field", as the great-grandfather post brought up. I simply worry that the availability of "traditional hackerrank brute-force-evaluation" will simply result in more people leaning on it than trying to think more critically about their interview process.

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#32

Post by zzzcpan » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 2:35 PM UTC

Peroni wrote: post #27

The premise that technical people with in-demand skills are hard to recruit has very little to do with the screening process. The screening process is not a difficult problem to solve. The real difficulty in recruiting in this space is finding and engaging these people, not testing them. If this is a Hacker Rank for sysadmins, then great. I'm sure you'll have plenty of users but we're still a long way away from solvi…

> The real difficulty in recruiting in this space is finding and engaging these people, not testing them.

Tons of people in this space hang out on various places online, where you can simply advertise or do some PR and many do, is it really that difficult?

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#33

Post by kesor » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 2:35 PM UTC

When you have a very low supply of high quality people, and at the same time a huge demand for those same people, it is a major problem. You claim to solve this problem, by making it even harder? How does that help?

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#34

Post by Peroni » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 2:38 PM UTC

zzzcpan wrote: post #32

Peroni wrote: post #27

The premise that technical people with in-demand skills are hard to recruit has very little to do with the screening process. The screening process is not a difficult problem to solve. The real difficulty in recruiting in this space is finding and engaging these people, not testing them. If this is a Hacker Rank for sysadmins, then great. I'm sure you'll have plenty of users but we're still a long way away from solvi…

> The real difficulty in recruiting in this space is finding and engaging these people, not testing them. Tons of people in this space hang out on various places online, where you can simply advertise or do some PR and many do, is it really that difficult?

When was the last time you engaged with a company with a view to working with them because you saw an ad they happened to post in the right fora?

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#35

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 2:41 PM UTC

Peroni wrote: post #34

zzzcpan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real difficulty in recruiting in this space is finding and engaging these people, not testing them. Tons of people in this space hang out on various places online, where you can simply advertise or do some PR and many do, is it really that difficult?

When was the last time you engaged with a company with a view to working with them because you saw an ad they happened to post in the right fora?

[deleted]

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#36

Post by ohyoutravel » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 2:42 PM UTC

Peroni wrote: post #34

zzzcpan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real difficulty in recruiting in this space is finding and engaging these people, not testing them. Tons of people in this space hang out on various places online, where you can simply advertise or do some PR and many do, is it really that difficult?

When was the last time you engaged with a company with a view to working with them because you saw an ad they happened to post in the right fora?

The monthly hacker news "who is hiring" thread.

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#37

Post by dijit » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 2:45 PM UTC

Peroni wrote: post #34

zzzcpan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real difficulty in recruiting in this space is finding and engaging these people, not testing them. Tons of people in this space hang out on various places online, where you can simply advertise or do some PR and many do, is it really that difficult?

When was the last time you engaged with a company with a view to working with them because you saw an ad they happened to post in the right fora?

I've hired 3 people from an IRC community I run, they all turned out to be exceptional (sysadmins and developers).

I've never been hired from IRC though.

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#38

Post by CmdrSprinkles » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 2:48 PM UTC

globalgobble wrote: post #18

languagewars wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I used to work in OS support my actions were optimized for the assumptions of a default minimal install and being able to describe actions to a person of questionable knowledge over the phone and interpret what they would most likely try to read back at me. The certifications were along those lines too.. While the exact nature of the certifications was ridiculous and would be even more ridiculous in terms of jud…

I strongly disagree. We should not test edge cases and specific scenarios. We are trying to test the candidate and his abilities in daily tasks. If I say I use vi instead of "commands" I will probably solve most of the "text" editing tasks faster than an admin that only knows how to get around using commands. I can come up with tons of scenarios when where you do not really know the internals you can get stuck easily…

While I mostly agree with you, I can speak from experience with how we handled the first point:

We were interviewing a new admin for the sysadmin/maintenance team and her answers to "how would you solve this problem?" were "Open that file and check that these variables are set and, if not, set them". One of the more jerkish people there went down the rabbit hole of "How are you going to edit that file? What if you don't have vim? Okay, what if you don't have emacs? Nano is gone too" leading to the response that made us hire her: "Well, in that case the system is probably completely hosed and we need to stop configuring things and focus on recovery. But I think you are looking for me to tell you a sequence of commands that involve cat. If you give me five minutes I can check stack overflow and get back to you with those"

Which I personally think should be the response for stuff like that. Understand there is an alternative and a way to resolve the corner cases and know how to get that info if needed.

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#39

Post by Peroni » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 2:49 PM UTC

ohyoutravel wrote: post #36

Peroni wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When was the last time you engaged with a company with a view to working with them because you saw an ad they happened to post in the right fora?

The monthly hacker news "who is hiring" thread.

Great example. HN is the perfect place to find people right? I mean, I should know.

HN who's hiring, like most online job advertising, is a crapshoot. It's a once-a-month post where you are drowning in noise. Finding a very large group of potentially relevant people for the roles you are hiring for isn't as straightforward as it sounds. Engaging said group and convincing folk from said group to come work for you is exponentially more difficult.

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#40

Post by rch » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 2:50 PM UTC

ohyoutravel wrote: post #36

Peroni wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When was the last time you engaged with a company with a view to working with them because you saw an ad they happened to post in the right fora?

The monthly hacker news "who is hiring" thread.

Regrettably, HN is the only public resource that I'm able to recommend anymore. AngelList had promise, but never really delivered.