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The Boss Doesn’t Want Your Resume

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Re: The Boss Doesn’t Want Your Resume

#41

Post by mrkurt »

bitL wrote: post #34
toomuchtodo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the best part though. We don't have to agree! And that's totally okay. Are there companies that ask for work samples (like yours)? Yes. Are there companies that rely more on resumes and interviews? Yes. Is the ratio going to change substantially? Possibly! It's an experiment, and like all experiments we're still waiting for the data to come back. I think interviews and references are far more important than a…

This is a great suggestion - perhaps the guys from Compose can come back in 2 years and tell us how it went?

We've actually been doing this for two years already! It's much more sophisticated now, but even the naive version of what we're doing has been tremendously successful.

Re: The Boss Doesn’t Want Your Resume

#42

Post by mrkurt »

avn2109 wrote: post #37
grayfox wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad you brought up the other side of things. If you were an applicant of such impressive, world renowned stature the answer would be: yes, (sir), you still need to go through the regular hiring process. It isn't an arbitrary request, like building a JavaScript calculator. The samples we ask that you complete closely resemble the type of work you'd do in the role. When hiring engineers for example, we take a piec…

I think what the GP is asking is this: If Jeff Dean walks through your door tomorrow, are you going to try to make him jump through hoops? Obviously he's a better hacker than statistically ~everyone you've ever met, so it might be silly to not hire him immediately. Plus, it takes some chutzpah to intentionally waste 3 hours of his time.

I don't think it makes sense to base a hiring process on outliers. Still, if he were interested, he'd go through the same process as everyone else. There's a fairly good chance most of our positions require more than being a good hacker, be it some UI skills, or operations work, or even "ability to talk to an angry customer".

Re: The Boss Doesn’t Want Your Resume

#43

Post by mrkurt »

bitL wrote: post #29
grayfox wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad you brought up the other side of things. If you were an applicant of such impressive, world renowned stature the answer would be: yes, (sir), you still need to go through the regular hiring process. It isn't an arbitrary request, like building a JavaScript calculator. The samples we ask that you complete closely resemble the type of work you'd do in the role. When hiring engineers for example, we take a piec…

Your problem would be that such talents don't have time nor need to complete whatever assignment you give to them. What if they programmed a core of enterprise cloud system handling 100,000s threads and millions of messages/second you might be unknowingly using daily, wrote papers about it you might have read already but it didn't occur to you and you are asking them to write a concurrent ring buffer? They would just…

If you treat people inconsistently, you open yourself up to tremendous political problems within an organization. _Particularly_ when it comes to hiring, or performance evaluation, or firing.

I think these mythical candidates who have an impressive body of work are probably going to be more thoughtful about a company they join up with than you'd naturally give them credit for. We pitch the heck out of our org, explain why we think it's awesome, and what people can do if they join up. If we can't get someone to see enough value to put time into deciding if it's right for them, I'm not sure they'd ever work out for us.

Re: The Boss Doesn’t Want Your Resume

#44

Post by FLUX-YOU »

grayfox wrote: post #5

A dude from Compose here, I'm currently helping out with hiring. If you'd like to know more about the process described in the article, we've recently blogged about it: https://www.compose.io/articles/compose-hiring-scaling-to-10... We have a bunch of postings up right now for those of you who are looking to give something like this a try (you may have seen us looking in the latest Who's Hiring): https://compose.io/j…

Can you share a sample test?

Re: The Boss Doesn’t Want Your Resume

#45

Post by snowwrestler »

grayfox wrote: post #27
bitL wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are telling us that if we had a PhD, multiple awards from previous companies for actual work and not politicking/backstabbing/brownnosing, Coursera/edX certificates relevant to your area of business with almost 100% success rate on their most difficult courses, can program in 50+ languages, you would still ignore our past success and we have to go through your normal hiring process? I am sure this would bring…

I'm glad you brought up the other side of things. If you were an applicant of such impressive, world renowned stature the answer would be: yes, (sir), you still need to go through the regular hiring process. It isn't an arbitrary request, like building a JavaScript calculator. The samples we ask that you complete closely resemble the type of work you'd do in the role. When hiring engineers for example, we take a piec…

If you hire someone and they are a talented, hardworking, likable teammate, the other employees will not care what the interview process was.

If you hire someone and they are a poor worker and a pain in the ass, you should get rid of them regardless of the interview process.

I think you're letting the tail wag the dog here.

Re: The Boss Doesn’t Want Your Resume

#46

Post by mrkurt »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #17

I'm always torn between appreciating guys like this for their good advice, and wanting to scream because the entire rest of the industry still hasn't twigged to this gobsmackingly "water-is-wet" obvious fact. How can so many smart people be so deeply, enduringly stupid?

This used to wig me out a bit. We have people we turn down thank us for having a decent hiring process ... and I think what we have is a good philosophy with an imperfect implementation.

But it's actually really hard to do what we're doing. It's not hard in the "can I get a rocket to land itself?" sense, it's more of a grind and commitment problem. It's hard to spend the time developing a new position in a way that works with our process (2-3 weeks of work, minimum), it's tiring to keep up with people who apply, it's painful to fight for rigorous hiring criteria. I can see why places just go with the default.

Re: The Boss Doesn’t Want Your Resume

#47

Post by [deleted] »

grayfox wrote: post #31
toomuchtodo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you guys will do great for junior folks (where a resume with little experience would be a hinderance traditionally) or perhaps people who are willing to jump through hoops to work from home, but I don't see it catching on (unfortunately?). > If you were to circumvent this, or feel you "shouldn't have to do this", what message does that send to the rest of the team? Does everyone on your team get paid the same…

We've had no issues attracting excellent and talented people. Most of them would be considered "senior". You might be interested to hear that Juniors are the group most likely to be deterred by the sample. The (great) majority of candidates have backgrounds and capabilities up to or exceeding what we're asking them to do. We actually get very few under-qualified applicants. The process appeals to people who appreciat…

[deleted]

Re: The Boss Doesn’t Want Your Resume

#48

Post by e12e »

grayfox wrote: post #24
e12e wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OT: Why the USA, Canada and UK only - and not EU/EEC as well (or at least other Commonwealth contries, but maybe that's not a (tax/business)thing any more..?) [Ed: Or does UK really mean anyone with the right to work in/through the UK, and not anyone actually in the UK?]

We were acquired by IBM last year. As we adjust to their HR systems, we have to limit our hiring range. Each region needs to have a "proxy" manager to take care of the employees within that region. As we had Canadians and folks from London with us at the time of the acquisition, we were set-up respectively. We hired an excellent engineer out of Germany before we were clear on the processes, and it's added a significa…

Thank you for your reply. But I'm a little confused (perhaps the EU/EEC labour marked is more complicated than I thought (or your German hire wasn't a German citizen?): Surely a German is entitled to work in the UK?

Would you need/want EU hires to relocate physically to the UK - and if so, why? (Seeing as you're remote-first anyway)?

Re: The Boss Doesn’t Want Your Resume

#49

Post by saynotocompose »

grayfox wrote: post #5

A dude from Compose here, I'm currently helping out with hiring. If you'd like to know more about the process described in the article, we've recently blogged about it: https://www.compose.io/articles/compose-hiring-scaling-to-10... We have a bunch of postings up right now for those of you who are looking to give something like this a try (you may have seen us looking in the latest Who's Hiring): https://compose.io/j…

Yep, I have looked over your sample test. It was in both Go and Ruby. I finished the Go section and then decided against bothering with the rest.

The "instructions" for the sample test were either purposely obfuscated or just badly written and it reflected poorly on the merit of your documentation methods more so than anything else.

To be quite honest, you are nothing more than an arm of IBM at this point and I would never work for a company that so carelessly devalues developer time and then comes into a forum arguing with random developers that they are right and everyone who disagrees is wrong.

In all seriousness though, what do you guys even do? Set up etcd for a cluster? Or PostgreSQL? etc.? Do you have any idea how simple that is these days?

For all interested: the work sample was focused around alerting DevOps via third-party services like Slack and PagerDuty. In other words: I imagine the developer positions here are simultaneously "on-call" operations positions as well! haha!

Good luck, Compose Team. You're going to need it! :)

Re: The Boss Doesn’t Want Your Resume

#50

Post by mrkurt »

FLUX-YOU wrote: post #44
grayfox wrote: post #5

A dude from Compose here, I'm currently helping out with hiring. If you'd like to know more about the process described in the article, we've recently blogged about it: https://www.compose.io/articles/compose-hiring-scaling-to-10... We have a bunch of postings up right now for those of you who are looking to give something like this a try (you may have seen us looking in the latest Who's Hiring): https://compose.io/j…

Can you share a sample test?

It totally depends on the position.

For developers, we extract some production application code, remove some features, and give people relatively open ended "implement a feature to solve X problem" instructions. The criteria for those range from "idiomatic code" to "good enough to ship right now" to "good UX", depending on what specific type of dev we're after.

For support, we pull actual tickets and ask for responses + documentation. Criteria for those are things like "technically accurate" and "doesn't overpromise".

Others could be writing samples (we have a new feature, write a how-to) or even a marketing plan.

After the sample project, we do a "work day" in place of a series of interviews. These are typically continuations of what the sample project was, and involve a whole day on Slack / video / whatever with people they'd be working with.

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