The software industry's greatest sin: hiring • Hacker News Board

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#411

Post by helen___keller » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 2:08 PM UTC

It's often very unclear what you really want out of a candidate, much less how to select for that.

Maybe a workplace wants someone who will conform to corporate culture and cheerlead for the company. Maybe a workplace wants someone who will learn a big stack of internal tools quickly. Maybe a workplace wants someone who will grind out intense hours without complaint. Maybe a workplace wants someone who isn't going to "waste time" paying technical debt and instead just ship an MVP as soon as possible. Maybe a workplace wants someone who learns new skills on their free time tries to incorporate them at work.

Workplaces don't identify or admit what they really want out of a candidate. And they certainly don't have a way for testing against it in interview.

Top tier (read: cash-flush) companies have settled for hiring strategies that effectively select for "yuppies" (I dont mean this in a derogatory way) who are willing to bust their ass and do whatever it takes to overcome any obstacle they are given. This mentality is common among top schools that are already intensely selective and competitive. People with this mentality are much more likely to spend hundreds of hours prepping for tests, such as the leetcode meta today.

Ultimately, while it's very annoying during a job search, I'm thankful for the fucked state of hiring because it means software engineers aren't commoditized.

If we were indistinguishable cogs, and any engineer with N years experience can be replaced by any other engineer with N years experience, that kind of dynamic ultimately results in a strong downward pressure on employee's power and wage. We are closer to a talent dynamic where every engineer is unique and some are much better hires than others. You wouldn't hire an actor just based on their resume. Knowing how many years they've acted or in how many roles isn't enough, you need an audition.

Software engineering is halfway between these extremes, and we should be thankful that we aren't (yet) indistinguishable cogs in the corporate machine.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#412

Post by clarry » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 2:12 PM UTC

bleah1000 wrote: post #300

asn0 wrote: post #154

We (Ambra Health) a few years ago decided our "typical" multi-hour multi-week interview process was a lot of effort for pretty mixed outcomes. We realized an interview can't really answer the most important questions: how a candidate works, and what's it like to work together. So we added an option to interview by way of a paid trial period (work part-time nights/weekends for a few weeks with the hiring team). Figure…

I'm sure you get good outcomes from this, but I'd be willing to bet you are completely weeding out whole classes of people. For example, most parents or caregivers (single or otherwise) don't necessarily have the time for this. Senior engineers are less likely to want to go through this. I would guess that most of your hires are single young people. And you are already kind of teaching them to work nights and weekend…

I think I'd like this even if I were married, as long as the trial period isn't too long and interview experience indicates that I should have a good chance of landing the job.

Contrast with the alternative: I'm a senior, considering switching jobs, but I have no real way to evaluate the potential new employer beyond word-of-mouth and interview experience. What if it turns out to be a place I don't like and I just gave up my former position for something worse?

Working a few evenings & weekends (and getting a little extra $$) to evaluate the new company sounds like a superb way to gain the confidence and jump ship without regrets. In best case, I get a new job I like. In best case, I get some extra money and keep my old job which is better than the new one proved to be. Win/win? What's the worst that could happen?

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#413

Post by kyuudou » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 2:14 PM UTC

kortilla wrote: post #311

onion2k wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yelp actually ripped off the Yellow Pages. The name comes from YEL-low-P-ages. The Yellow Pages was a paper-based business telephone directory that started decades earlier.

What made yelp good was the reviews, not the listings. This is the part that yellowpages turned around and ripped off.

That's not exactly an original concept, though.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#414

Post by wernercd » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 2:15 PM UTC

charlesu wrote: post #350

kortilla wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Underrepresented groups get more attempts and are actively recruited more.

Underrepresented groups are actively recruited but don't get more attempts. If you think otherwise just ask an engineer from an underrepresented groups about their recruiting experiences. They would probably know better. All their interviews include an underrepresented candidate, so their sample size is probably larger :) The active recruitment is to counterbalance the fact that referrals, one of the biggest sources…

> Underrepresented groups are actively recruited but don't get more attempts.

Other posts in this thread make claims oppose that.

One person says that bad phone screens for men? No call back... bad phone screens for women? call back and face-to-face to get them another chance.

that's the definition of "more attempts".

Whether said comment is real and honest is unknown (random internet comment) and whether "diversity and inclusion" are worth it (actively choosing ("recruiting") someone on race/color/etc to battle perceived racism is... a form of racism itself) is of course another battle...

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#415

Post by Drew_ » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 2:16 PM UTC

thu2111 wrote: post #324

KorematsuFred wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an employee of Google who is involved in hiring let me tell you the process is extremely rigorous and we work very hard to make it bias free. I am not an unbiased individual myself but when it comes to hiring, I work extra hard to ensure fairness regardless of other person's characteristics.

And as a former Googler who did hundreds of interviews there, let me tell you you're wrong. It wasn't bias free even years ago, and Google has gone much more hard-core SJW since then. It's still much better than at most companies, and the article we're discussing is so wrong about the way executives are hired. But Google isn't some paragon of freedom from bias, far from it. Ignore yourself. The system surrounding you…

Nothing you're referring to has anything to do with the actual hiring process. None of the issues you listed makes anyone more or less likely to pass the hiring committee. Offers are based on merit as much as they can be. You just have a problem with efforts to reach out to people who normally have a hard time making it into the industry.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#416

Post by sanderjd » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 2:16 PM UTC

josephg wrote: post #222

sanderjd wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And a few angry senior engineers out there saying "Why do I have to keep writing fizzbuzz? Its like I have to prove over and over again that I can program at all!". You didn't address this part of the problem. This friction is one of the reasons the job market is so distorted.

Oh sorry I wasn't clear. The reason is that successfully completing a simple programming exercise puts you in the top 15% or so of resumes that get sent in for most programming roles. When you apply for a company, they have to assume you aren't very good, because most people who apply aren't very good. (Because people with strong skills get snapped up, and people with weak skills spam their resume everywhere they can…

> When you apply for a company, they have to assume you aren't very good, because most people who apply aren't very good.

Is this a problem for other professionals? Why not? When an accountant with a successful career spanning 15 years applies to a new job, does the company "have to" assume that know exactly nothing?

It does distort the market. It trades off against the desire to switch jobs, which distorts the availability of job switchers. When I get an email from a recruiter, I'm not just thinking "would that job be better for me?", I'm also thinking "am I willing to practice and perform the whiteboard code ritual right now?".

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#417

Post by zeroonetwothree » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 2:18 PM UTC

irrational wrote: post #140

StandardFuture wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have my doubts about your conclusions given your statements. It seems you have 3 steps in your interview process: code assessment, architecture assessment, and CTO interview. And the candidate who does well on all three gets the job? So, does your funnel filter to exactly one candidate every time? And if it does not, then what criterion are used to funnel all candidates who finished this process successfully? Perha…

In my experience, if there are multiple qualified candidates it usually comes down to things like who lives closest (so we don't have to pay to move them here)? Who was the most friendly/likeable? Who might have a skill that we might need in the future? Etc.

Asking candidates where they live is illegal. You can not discriminate based on exact location. (It’s okay to ask if they need relocation of course, but you can’t decide based on who is “the closest”)

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#418

Post by watwut » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 2:20 PM UTC

austhrow743 wrote: post #284

watwut wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is the part where you give junior pay raise after he or she learns enough to get raise elsewhere.

If you're going to end up paying what it would cost you to hire the trained person anyway to avoid having your staff leave for higher wages, that heavily reduces your incentive to put a lot of resources in to training. Training + market rate compensation is more expensive than just market rate compensation.

Market rate for junior + training while he/she is junior is not more expensive.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#419

Post by Drew_ » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 2:21 PM UTC

solveit wrote: post #72

earthtourist wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is true that you can succeed well at tech companies without a degree from a top school. Class, race, gender, sexual orientation are not barriers to success. That's the positive thing. The negative thing is that most tech companies heavily favor "top school" candidates and actively recruit for them. They would rather higher someone provably less qualified from a "top school" than someone else. They track and boast…

> They would rather higher someone provably less qualified from a "top school" than someone else. Is this true? I can see this being the result of poorly implemented hiring processes, but I can't see this being the explicit goal at a reasonable company doing reasonable things.

"Provably less qualified" means a cheaper hire so yeah many reasonable companies would choose that option. It's good to remember that you can easily be overqualified.

Re: The software industry's greatest sin: hiring

#420

Post by jermaustin1 » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 2:27 PM UTC

glangdale wrote: post #304

nine_k wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally not my experience. And I do 3-4 hiring interviews a week here in NYC. What connections? First show that you can code; a lot don't pass this filter. Then show that you can architect a large distributed system on a whiteboard; a lot of people applying for a senior software engineer position lack the breadth of knowledge and the consideration required. And after that you'd speak to CTO, where maybe you can say o…

Ah yes, the bane of my existence, again: "senior" == "ability to build large distributed systems". I mean, hell, that's a great skill. I wish I had it. Then again, I've seen people forced to build "large distributed systems" to solve things I can solve on one thread on one CPU because they don't have my skills. It's almost as if there is more than one skill that qualifies you as "senior" or something!

What is funny is I had spent more than half of my career working in the SEO space building "efficient," "high-scale," "single server" web applications, because people don't want to have to hire teams of people to manage all the different "-ops" that go along with the modern, micro-service, distributed architecture that is unnecessary 90% of the time.

All of those quotes were because they are all relative terms. Like high-scale meaning 10,000s of concurrent users; and single server for the web app (separate database server, or utilities server for cron jobs, offline processing, etc); and efficient meaning nothing really.