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We only hire the trendiest

danluu.com

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Re: We only hire the trendiest

#331

Post by vanderhosen »

jamesdutc wrote: post #148
koevet wrote: post #110

"Contractors are generally not the strongest technically" Where does this come from? I actually see a contractor as someone who had experienced way more "war stories" than the guy who has been sitting in the same chair for 10/20 years. As a contractor, you are exposed to more technologies, more business sectors, different working cultures.

"Consulting" or "contracting" can refer to different kinds of work arrangements. One of these is what's called "staff augmentation." Large companies with huge teams of full-time employed software programmers will often hire contractors to fill gaps. These contractors are typically contractors-in-name-only: they work under exactly the same conditions as full-time employees but with a worse tax situation, without acces…

I'm a contractor for a large research facility. The arrangement is almost exactly as you describe, but I am a W2 employee. They hire researchers with phds and such, while offloading all software work to contractors.

I took the job a year ago with the hope its name recognition would be helpful in the future but I had no idea there was such a stigma around contracting. I'm starting to look around again, so I guess I'll see how it effects me.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#332

Post by vonmoltke »

DrNuke wrote: post #292

I think cold hiring is dead: draining exchanges of info lead too much too often to nothing and leave both parties dissatisfied. Referrals are the easiest way to go.

The industry seems to be trending this way, but I think that is a very bad thing that should be fought at every stage. It is leading to ghettoization of talent and the perception of a talent shortage that probably doesn't exist.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#333

Post by ant6n »

annnnd wrote: post #296

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).

Or not use the full width of the screen for text. I use an rss reader, and it says updated 2016-03-21 6:26

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#334

Post by OJFord »

phpnode wrote: post #158
OJFord wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "1 bad hire is worse then 100 good ones" I don't think that's quite right! (Or at least, it's so obviously right that it can't possibly be the "now-popular attitude" you mean.)

I think cubano is referring to the mindset that "it's better to skip over 100 good people than to hire one bad apple" which is very silly but a common attitude in certain kinds of organisation.

Ah, I see, sort of "1 bad hire is worse than 100 good ones can make up for".

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#335

Post by dominotw »

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…

>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.

Sorry I didn't read the book but I am curious if there is any scientific evidence to back this up.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#336

Post by ThrustVectoring »

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 hiring manager has a principal-agent problem going on. The manager's incentives are more around avoiding blame for bad hires than getting the best expected value for a hire at the best price.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#337

Post by wehadfun »

dominotw wrote: post #302
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.

I just read that. Dam.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#338

Post by stephencanon »

jhwhite wrote: post #121
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…

I get what you are saying, but Stanford isn't an Ivy League school. :) But yes, I agree with everything you're saying.

Funny, I read it as an intended example of "how they would like to see themselves". =)

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#340

Post by dasil003 »

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…

Actual salaries don't correlate to ability nearly as closely as you imply.
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