Hire people who aren’t proven • Hacker News Board

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#321

Post by ergothus » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 6:01 PM UTC

heurist wrote: post #270

ergothus wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Passionate" in programming is shorthand for "cares for quality" AND "will improve on their own". Companies are unwilling or unable to train on the job (because it requires tech mentor resources they dont have /wont spare) so they are looking for people they can drop in and see payout for without further investment (particularly in time). I think it is a shortsighted strategy, but not one without basis. The supply pr…

It's a little dangerous to expect companies to train junior employees well when their focus is on making product/revenue. Generally they would prefer solving immediate problems over developing the craft, so over time most training would align with short-term solutions rapidly executed. Perhaps we need to be thinking about building trade schools as a service which can be hired by companies to institute part-time profe…

I'm all for trade schools, but I feel like that's a slightly orthogonal issue.

There's no immediate reason to expect a company to help train up employees (not just juniors, but moving people from every level to the next step)....unless those companies want to improve the outcomes of their staff, want to improve morale, and want to resolve their perpetual difficulty in finding people senior enough for their needs.

Don't do it out of social responsibility, do it for keeping your business functioning long-term. I've worked too many places that have almost exclusively senior devs with more work than they can handle. They focus on hiring MORE senior devs (but don't have much success), meanwhile their senior devs are spending a lot of time doing work that junior devs could accomplish.

There are numerous side-effects too - mentoring (if you like it) can help improve your own skills and outlook. Fresh perspectives are always good, and once someone gets their first few years in, they will occasionally have insights that seniors can learn from. At the best places I've worked the more senior devs have wider perspectives and deeper experience, but the "who is right" between junior and senior becomes more of a statistical model than a certainty.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#322

Post by austinjp » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 6:03 PM UTC

tomnipotent wrote: post #312

sound1 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, if a candiate is ready to be an asshole in an interview, what are the chances that he will be an asshole to his team members to just get that raise or a promotion?

He's not being an asshole. He's probably stressed out and doesn't know how to cope well. This is behavior that can be addressed and improved. After 20 years and hiring 100+ developers through three exits and an IPO, I've only met 1 actual "asshole" that couldn't integrate and needed to be let go. The problem is that we're too quick to be offended and we look for excuses. I'm in the middle of hiring a business analyst…

> Everyone is an asshole to someone.

Amazing, I'm stealing this, thanks.

Also, by the by, great to read someone writing openly and candidly about mental illness.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#323

Post by ergothus » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 6:05 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #292

ergothus wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard this distinction before, and I think it's a difference in the base quality of the place. My last three jobs all put "passion" as a major hiring criteria, but all maintained a strong work/life balance (average work week was 40 hours give or take a few, and though crunch times happened more than a few weeks a year was considered a bad thing. I conducted plenty of interviews myself and helped write interview…

You would be surprised about how many founders who post on HN bemoan the fact that they can’t find developers who have passion for the founder’s “vision” and only care about the money. My usual retort is why should I care about a founder’s vision if I don’t have a substantial amount of equity in the company? They find that highly insulting.

I have zero disagreement here. I have a similar reaction when someplace tries to attract me to the "challenge". Finding hard, interesting work is EASY - I'm looking for interesting work (often but not always hard) that also pays well. ...and it'd be nice to be able to tell people who I work for and what I do without feeling defensive.

Nothing wrong with believing in the product or the company, but there is something wrong with thinking that would be enough. I don't think the entitled executive syndrome you're discussing is really the norm for companies, but yeah, I've encountered it and it's annoying.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#324

Post by lovich » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 6:05 PM UTC

luckydata wrote: post #299

arkades wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> become a doctor for the love of taking care of people that are sick and help them overcome a bad situation That’s the fantasy. And, hey, when it pops up, awesome - it’s a very energizing moment. However, most medicine has absolutely nothing to do with that day to day. The day to day is subject to Pareto’s Law. A surgeon may occasionally get to “take care of the sick,” but 80% of the time they get to do a five minut…

You're talking about the bad ones, the ones I hate to see. The friends I'm talking about are all excellent professionals. Passion matters.

You can't be passionate about boring work 24/7 and most jobs are boring work. Even if they aren't when you start, once you've done something 1000 times it becomes rote. Why do you think there's stories of burnout from places like google where people join up to do great work, but get stuck doing CRUD apps to support the business?

The only people I see claiming everyone needs to be passionate all the time are business owners and management who then channel that passion into unpaid overtime

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#325

Post by asdkhadsj » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 6:12 PM UTC

dmarlow wrote: post #320

asdkhadsj wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd go so far as to ask: "can this candidate learn to do the job?". In our recent job postings, I've started adding a specific paragraph after the desired qualifications stating more or less "if you don't tick all the boxes above but are motivated to learn and grow, please apply. We'll teach you what you need to do the job" Totally agree. I was involved in the hiring process (new for me) in the last two hires and t…

I agree for most scenarios. However, when building out a team, you can't hire a bunch of people you're going to have to train. Sometimes, like I had to recently, you have to hire an individual that has the skills you need at the moment who can help mentor and help others learn the tools and frameworks needed.

Yea that's definitely fair. It's also a movable "bar", as even in my example I mentioned within reason, because I wanted to hire by passion, but they needed some pre-existing skills. So it's all relative

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#326

Post by vkou » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 6:14 PM UTC

namanyayg wrote: post #269

vkou wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically, nothing too much out of the reach of your average teenager -- with the exception of interest/dedication to the art. My father grew up, went to school, and finished university in the 70s and 80s, in the Soviet Union, where none of those things were within the reach of an average person. He's only started programming towards the end of his physics PHD. Since moving to Canada, he's done ~20 years of program…

Of course, this question is only valid for applicants in their twenties. I don't think anyone in their right minds would expect someone in their 30s+ to be programming since they were teenagers!

If your interview involves you asking different questions to people based on their age, you are treading dangerous ground, for dubious gain.

Why not go with something safe - like asking people to implement fizzbuzz and merge-sort on a whiteboard, or something else that has nothing to do with their age, gender, or ethnic background?

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#327

Post by sj3k » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 6:15 PM UTC

docker_up wrote: post #290

The problem that has happened at my company is that we take a "chance" on bootcampers or other people who aren't proven, we spend the time and effort to mentor and train them, pay them well, and then they turn around in 9-12 months and leave us for another company with their enhanced experience. It has happened 3 times so far, so we have stopped hiring bootcampers, and fresh grads and instead have started hiring peop…

This is me. I graduated last year and work at a small consulting shop doing web apps. I'm currently interviewing and getting offers from more established companies. This is the first time I've felt bad about leaving a company after one year. My coworkers are awesome. But the benefits suck, the clients are a nightmare, pay isn't great. I feel like I would be a fool to stay.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#328

Post by aphextron » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 6:16 PM UTC

>Don't hire like FAANG companies, don't use their best practices, don't use their super oiled processes, don't play their same games with the same rules.

I'm back on the job market for the first time in 4 years and it seems like things have changed a lot. I'm now stuck in this weird twilight zone where every single company I talk to has the exact same process that they run through the motions as if it were dictated from somewhere, and I've yet to even have a genuine conversation. It inevitably leads to a "live coding" session over the phone where I completely go blank and am unable to perform because programming under a time constraint with someone staring at your screen is absurd. Problems on the level of fizzbuzz become impossible because my mind simply goes blank in those situations and I freeze up. It'd be nice if someone would just give me a take home project where I can actually code something properly and show off my skills, rather than conclude that I'm an idiot who can't even code after 20 minutes of struggling with some toy problem through my intense anxiety.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#329

Post by arkades » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 6:16 PM UTC

luckydata wrote: post #299

arkades wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> become a doctor for the love of taking care of people that are sick and help them overcome a bad situation That’s the fantasy. And, hey, when it pops up, awesome - it’s a very energizing moment. However, most medicine has absolutely nothing to do with that day to day. The day to day is subject to Pareto’s Law. A surgeon may occasionally get to “take care of the sick,” but 80% of the time they get to do a five minut…

You're talking about the bad ones, the ones I hate to see. The friends I'm talking about are all excellent professionals. Passion matters.

No, I'm talking about 99% of docs 99% of the time. It's a job. It's a great job sometimes, but it's paperwork most of the time. For every hour we spend rounding in the morning - when we're given at best 2/3 of the time we need to actually do the bare minimum, and half the time we need to really talk to people - we spend another 1-2 hours (minimum) in a windowless room doing a pile of paperwork notating the hell out of the morning's visits. I won't mention the X additional hours doing bullshit like wrangling with insurance companies and home healthcare and calling the nurse to very-politely-because-we're-all-a-team-here find out why my STAT EKG on last night's chest pain didn't get a fucking EKG. No one is passionate about paperwork in windowless rooms and workplace political wrangling. No one. But that's what it is most of the time, because it's a job. A real world job, with TPS reports (heh) and never enough printer paper to go around.

But, hey, if you want to buy the hype, go for it.

Re: Hire people who aren’t proven

#330

Post by primitivesuave » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 6:16 PM UTC

docker_up wrote: post #290

The problem that has happened at my company is that we take a "chance" on bootcampers or other people who aren't proven, we spend the time and effort to mentor and train them, pay them well, and then they turn around in 9-12 months and leave us for another company with their enhanced experience. It has happened 3 times so far, so we have stopped hiring bootcampers, and fresh grads and instead have started hiring peop…

This is my experience exactly, and I am starting to get a sense of this mentality after my girlfriend went through a bootcamp. As a CS graduate myself I had several years to get a sense of what the industry looks like and what part of the industry I would be most satisfied working in (startups). Bootcamp graduates have less time to define their personal goals and industry view, so they are more prepared to give up equity and learning experiences for the opportunity to say "I work at [insert big tech company here]".