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We only hire the trendiest

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Re: We only hire the trendiest

#421

Post by mdpopescu »

TickleSteve wrote: post #282
mdpopescu wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it raise a warning flag? I'd move to Australia for a one-week job, but I would hate moving to another town for six months. [I'm in Europe.] I just can't see any drawback to short-term contracts.

Certainly in my experience, all my contracts have been a minimum of 3 months, but averaging around a year and going up to a couple years or even more if you include return contracts. Its not necessarily the length, but the lack of extensions that is a warning sign. Most projects do not last a short time so a lack of extensions indicates a problem.

I worked for a company which extended my contract to two years, but I've been in five or six different projects during that time. All but one (Avon AU which is ongoing) have been completed successfully.

I am really biased towards short, "solvable" projects :)

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#422

Post by anonymousguy »

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…

Try this over the top guide - https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Web_Intervi...

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#424

Post by johnloeber »

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…

Pivotal forces you to sign an NDA for an interview? Won't this discourage some substantial fraction of applicants?

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#425

Post by tptacek »

jvehent wrote: post #416
tptacek wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shouldn't be on top of that! It wasn't for our process. Of course: we did in-person interviews. And in-person interviews are disruptive no matter what you do. But: * Our in-person interviews were shorter than typical in-person interviews because they weren't tasked with fully teching candidates out. * Because they didn't try to tech candidates out, they weren't as stressful, and so were less draining and unpleasan…

Can you share an example of challenge given to candidates? In the past, I've used "script a file sharing tool that handles encryption", which worked well and took candidates ~4/8 hours to complete, but isn't something we used directly in our projects.

Sure: we wrote a very simple retail trading system as a one-file Ruby app. It used a custom binary protocol. We had candidates reverse the binary protocol, implement enough of it to test the system, and find vulnerabilities in it.

We had a grading rubric for the challenge that was based on the kinds of things people found in the application. We evaluated performance on the challenge on a 1-5 score; depending on how you did on other challenges, a 3 would keep you in the game, and a 4-5 probably assured an in-person interview.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#426

Post by AndrewUnmuted »

pjmlp wrote: post #297
zeveb wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not stuck on the CLI and text terminals culture. See, those of us who use Unix & free software see that as a benefit, just as the literate find the written word to offer advantages over picture books. With a keyboard, I am able to enter hundreds of discrete inputs: with a mouse or touchscreen I have one 2D input and a few buttons. With a keyboard I am able to have a conversation with my computer and my data; with a…

See, some of us that were already into computers when Sun was a startup got bored of it. Your answer is a typical example of UNIX CLI users that need to express themselves as being more intelligent than GUI users, while forgetting that some us do have enough CLI experience and decided to grew out of it. I can use macros and key + mouse combos in FPS style across many GUI applications and if I ever need a CLI, Powersh…

Mouse use has a much higher risk of CTS and other work-related injuries. [1]

I've worked at startups and enterprise environments, and what has always remained constant at every Microsoft/Enterprise company is the troves of obese, unhealthy, arthritic middle-managers that can barely use a computer anymore because they got lazy and succumbed to using GUIs to get their basic work done.

Now, they are stuck on MS because any foreign GUI elicits a sudden "NOPE!" from them. They are constantly unhealthy because none of them have standing desks. They don't have standing desks because mouse use is extremely non-intuitive in such setups and in many cases dangerous [2].

By surrendering to the mouse and the GUI, my older co-workers are low-quality producers, exceedingly lazy, and otherwise slowly dying.

My console emulator has looked the same for the last ten years. I can SSH into any UNIX system and it's familiar to me. Innovation hasn't slowed me down at all.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/carpal-tunnel-s...

[2] http://www.workwhilewalking.com/avoiding-carpal-tunnel-neck-...

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#427

Post by grandalf »

ambicapter wrote: post #375
grandalf wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I usually ask "What are you interested in?" and just let them speak, then ask them to elaborate a few times. People who find this frustrating are usually low-openness, as are people who become noticeably indignant after being asked to share more. Also, I ask what are the most important things they are looking for in the team they will be joining. Some people are interviewing because they dislike their current job so…

Can you offer some advice to people who are low-openness and don't see why that's a problem?

I'll be more specific about openness. It's not bad to be socially introverted. Many of us are somewhat, especially in comparison to the average member of the population.

But imagine you're at a restaurant with your team and someone orders a dish you've never tried. Do you simply decline to try a bite? Or do you try a small bite in case you might like it? I find that openness to new experience correlates highly with good problem solving skills and team cohesion.

Many group/team interactions are essentially minor culture clashes, and being able to navigate them requires being open to different points of view, etc.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#428

Post by aprdm »

munificent wrote: post #378
grandalf wrote: post #345

I've found that the best predictors of a good hire are indications of the following characteristics during the interview/vetting process: - adaptability -- can this person deal with situations that are spontaneous and unplanned without losing his/her cool. - openness -- is this person instinctively scornful of new concepts/ideas or energized by the chance to be exposed to something potentially interesting. - resource…

> - rationality -- can this person admit to being wrong and speak about it authentically... can I imagine this person admitting to being slightly wrong and even very wrong about something and handling it gracefully. I think this is a super important characteristic for a great employee to have, but I don't know how reasonable it is to expect to see much of it in an interview. In an interview setting, the candidate is…

As you said, interviewing itself is a very stressful environment. I've been asked a time I've failed by one of the HR person and I talked about it. Was basically sending emails to real people from my test environment...

I talked about it openly but he kept pushing. In the end my feedback was that my "time I've made an error" was not very impressive.

Like... wtf? I find these questions very weird. I never know what they're expecting as an answer.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#429

Post by rntz »

grandalf wrote: post #345

I've found that the best predictors of a good hire are indications of the following characteristics during the interview/vetting process: - adaptability -- can this person deal with situations that are spontaneous and unplanned without losing his/her cool. - openness -- is this person instinctively scornful of new concepts/ideas or energized by the chance to be exposed to something potentially interesting. - resource…

A big long list of relevant but subjective traits is a perfect vector for bias to creep in. Take what you call "poker face", for example - how do you measure openness? By how well they make small talk? What if they're just nervous because of the interview; what if they experience social anxiety; or what if they're just an introvert, and don't tend to be open around new people?

For a less trivial example, take "resourcefulness". To a large extent, resourcefulness is determined by access to resources. Continued learning after college takes more than curiosity: it takes a bunch of free time to burn on reading, hacking, debugging, etc. What if the interviewee has been spending their time outside of work raising a family instead?

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#430

Post by grandalf »

SonicSoul wrote: post #403
grandalf wrote: post #345

I've found that the best predictors of a good hire are indications of the following characteristics during the interview/vetting process: - adaptability -- can this person deal with situations that are spontaneous and unplanned without losing his/her cool. - openness -- is this person instinctively scornful of new concepts/ideas or energized by the chance to be exposed to something potentially interesting. - resource…

these are all great traits, but how do you determine them in an interview? for example openness. Everyone will say they are open and interested to new ideas, maybe accept few odd cases. how do you test for rationality? do you wait to catch them on something and keep drilling until they admit defeat?

I've found that people who are open usually think of the interview as a way to learn new things and to determine whether it's a good fit. They will ask questions and seem to enjoy gathering knowledge.

Rationality is more of a value than a litmus test. Those who value rationality will understand systems thinking and will tend not to focus highly on authority (either being authoritative or deferring to someone else's authority).

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