We only hire the trendiest • Hacker News Board

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#301

Post by rpgmaker » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 3:14 PM UTC

pingec wrote: post #9

Is the anti windows/.NET bias really that common? I have been a .NET dev for 6 years because that was my job. But I don`t believe that makes me useless on any other stack. In fact lately I desire to work on something that feels exciting and fresh again but sometimes I feel like .NET devs are looked down upon and it`s not so easy to land a job or contract outside .Net land.

> Is the anti windows/.NET bias really that common?

I think it's less common now than it used to be but back in their heyday Java devs looked down hard on .NET devs. I think it's because MS visual IDEs, going all the way back to vb6, made a lot of people think they were professional developers just because they could create a basic crud program with a functional GUI very easily. This ended up promoting a huge amount of unusually bad code/coders to production environments and with that the bad rap .NET devs get to this day. The perception is that developers outside of the MS ecosystem usually have to be a little bit more erudite in the way they went about learning their programming language of choice.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#302

Post by dominotw » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 3:14 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…

>it's a solicitation for assistance with a built in humility.

Thank you for bringing this up. No matter how good or bad a candidate is, that person is your social equal and deserves basic respect.

I feel strongly about this ever since the humiliation I faced at AirBnb,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11291155

This could happen to anyone.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#303

Post by ghurtado » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 3:15 PM UTC

Grishnakh wrote: post #275

mooreds wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>But I wasted time interviewing some overqualified people too (because of salary/location expectations that should have been communicated up front). Well that's your own fault as the job advertiser, and when I say "you", I mean almost all companies that advertise jobs. You almost never state the salaries to be paid, so tons of peoples' time gets wasted by pointless interviewing which gets followed up with insultingly…

You must be a joy to interview.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#304

Post by vdnkh » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 3:16 PM UTC

donw wrote: post #150

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…

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…

In my experience, pairing interviews usually falls into two categories: one where you're tapping away at a problem while your interviewer is doing a work assignment (but please ask me questions), and the second is where the interviewer is grading you (and interjecting) line-by-line rather than actually participating. It's rarely the case when pairing goes as it should i.e. a collaborative work process.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#305

Post by golergka » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 3:18 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #176

golergka wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you saying that nobody does that? My last job search wasn't typical (I thought of starting a consultancy, so didn't search for a job per se), but one before that showed to me that it's exactly what people do. A company that was looking for a guy to write mobile SDKs asked me to build an Android app with embedded webview and animate html stuff with JS based on gyro movement. A slot game company asked me to bui…

I'm glad that I'm starting to get feedback like this. I believe you that more companies are doing work sample tests. For the the gigs that asked you to do these problems: did you also get interviewed with a standard programming interview? If you had to guess, between 1% and 100%, how much of the weight of your technical evaluation do you feel was on the sample challenges you did at home, versus Q&A and whiteboard cod…

Don't remember details about interviews, but I'd tell that homework was about 75%, because in those two cases they told me that I exceeded their expectations and they learned something new from my projects.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#306

Post by p4wnc6 » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 3:20 PM UTC

euroclydon wrote: post #289

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…

I'm a hiring manager at a mature healthcare software company. Productivity is my number one concern. Among regulatory overhead, testing, and legacy compatibility, a developer has to work hard and smart to move the ball forward here. Teams are lean. A single unproductive developer will cause us to miss the scheduled release date of a feature.

There are a number of buzzwords in your comment that cause me to doubt its veracity. Without getting into an extended debate about exactly how you detect this productivity in a candidate (something even the best tech firms openly admit is extremely hard to do), the best thing is just to agree to disagree.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#307

Post by JoeAltmaier » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 3:21 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #278

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah last time I did it, it was just a week. And I got my full contract rate (which is about double as you suggest). It went well; got an offer. Its not usually that hard for a contractor to take the time off; they're on their own time already.

That strikes me as a very costly way to build a team. Independent contractors are expensive; they know, better than most other developers, what their time is worth.

Microsoft, of course, interns college juniors for 90 days as a summer job. Less costly I imagine per hour, but apparently working for them.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#308

Post by grappler » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 3:21 PM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #294

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.

Feel free to propose a better approach...

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#309

Post by cowardlydragon » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 3:22 PM UTC

p4wnc6 wrote: post #299

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…

"Good hiring" is fundamentally an altruistic ideal with all the attendant difficulties of idealistic practices in the modern workplace.

This may seem ridiculous given competition for talent and cutthroat markets involved in startups and tech companies...

But from the perspective of low-level hiring, where someone you hire will possibly replace or eclipse you, or where you may empower a team with more resources, or there is budgetary envy (or kill-or-be-killed cuts to funding), or easily masked discriminations aplenty (dotNET vs Java, Stanford vs Berkeley, Indian vs Pakistani, Georgia vs Alabama), conflicting management directives (we will hire the best but only pay for mediocre) or just sheer resistance to change... there are many reasons to resist transparency, hire mediocre, submarine good candidates, backstab rivals, all from obscure chaos of middle management and its wannabe Machiavellis.

Management can put their smiley faces as they impose conflicting priorities and try to parse data that is fundamentally enshrouded by the multiple agendas from actors with highly variant priorities in a complex game theory all they want, but idealism is hard in cutthroat capitalism.

Oh, did I mention that all candidates are lying to some degree of mendaciousness? Oh yeah, that.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#310

Post by arunk-s » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 3:23 PM UTC

A lot of people treat employment status and credentials as measures of the inherent worth of individuals. But a large component of these markers of success, not to mention success itself, is luck.

This is one of the most accurate lines I've seen on a technical blog.