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We only hire the trendiest

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Re: We only hire the trendiest

#591

Post by tptacek »

e15ctr0n wrote: post #578
ArkyBeagle wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aha! I sort of like that, then. Assuming of course that it actually does work. Back when things were simpler, we had a multiple guess questionnaire that did the similar. For onsites, we then looked for evidence of rigor and thoroughness, the ability to estimate how much communication was required, had they deployed real systems? You understand that it sounds like you "fixed" hiring, and so we're all sorta skeptical,…

> You understand that it sounds like you "fixed" hiring, and so we're all sorta skeptical, right? If you could bottle that, there's your billion. Announcing Starfighter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9173939

I am talking my book in the sense that my business works a lot better if companies get saner about how they hire people, but Starfighter is not the commercialization of the idea I'm talking about here.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#592

Post by grandalf »

nommm-nommm wrote: post #554
grandalf wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree about the possibility of bias creeping in. On the other hand, humans are biased, so understanding how to hire for success within your own (or your organization's) biases is useful. Some people would want the opposite candidate to the one I described. Resourcefulness is more of a mindset. New parent? OK, what have you discovered about childrearing that you didn't anticipate? What will you do differently next t…

> New parent? OK, what have you discovered about childrearing that you didn't anticipate? What will you do differently next time? These are extremely inappropriate questions for a job interview.

I would not ask those things, my point was that whatever a person is focused on can indicate the characteristics I mentioned. Obviously some things are personal and cannot be asked about, but may be volunteered by an applicant.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#593

Post by ionforce »

bjourne wrote: post #476
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…

It's telling that in your list you never once mentioned "Actually possesses the technical skills required to do a good job."

I just had this discussion at work... I think that it is implicit in this context that a minimum amount of technical ability be met. Otherwise we'd just be hiring "nice people". Obviously we don't do that.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#594

Post by Futurebot »

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 just read an ad on a "Who's Hiring?" HN post which had one of these right in the requirements:

"You have a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) Degree from a top tier school."

I wonder how much longer positions with requirements like that go unfilled compared to more open-minded ones.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#595

Post by alexgartrell »

barillari wrote: post #565
throwaway85305 wrote: post #287

I'm currently in the process of applying at Facebook (which I guess qualifies as a TrendCo that recently transitioned to BigCo). I haven't even got to the technical phone screen yet, but the recruiter tried to get me to attend an "interview prep session" and then sent me a pair of videos from it totalling 2.5 hours when I couldn't, which of course I felt obligated to watch on the assumption that all the other candida…

For what it's worth (I'm not speaking on Facebook's behalf, etc etc), I've done hundreds of interviews for Facebook and I don't think it's a red flag if you write ++ in Python. Unless you're interviewing as a Python syntax expert or something like that.

Also in the hundreds of interviews club for Facebook and I also do not care about ++ or standard library memorization stuff. I think the recruiter is just trying to do as much as he/she can for you, because our recruiters are inherently invested in the candidates for obvious reasons.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#596

Post by eropple »

alkonaut wrote: post #585
eropple wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling it a large open-source community is perhaps stretching the definition. When I look at the Java open-source universe, or the Ruby one, or even the Node one, I see a lot more activity and a lot more generally applicable, useful stuff coming out of any of those compared to .NET. Which is not to say .NET isn't fine--I use it for many things because I enjoy the language and what it lets me effectively target (you'…

Depends on what you count into the community I guess. Making a language that already has a very large community open source, means that bit of open source has a very large community. Only a small fraction is active in developing open source applications on it, but a large user community is also a great asset.

Enh. Fair point, but if it's inactive, it kind of hurts at the same time. Everybody waiting for somebody else to fix a problem, nobody's contributing so we won't worry about issues or pull requests...

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#597

Post by grandalf »

SonicSoul wrote: post #460
grandalf wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

thanks sounds like you've done your share of interviewing. It would be great to hear more about your experience if you ever want to write a more lengthy blog post on this subject. I still find it very hard to predict who will make for a great employee.. provided they do ok on technical side it's still more of an intuition thing rather than process.

I should do that sometime. For some reason I'm much more inspired to write my ideas in a forum like HN than I am in a blog post or writeup.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#598

Post by ionforce »

bjt wrote: post #347
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…

I think you're right about the mental shortcuts, but the main effect I see at play in the article is about misaligned incentives. It's in the organization's interest to hire the underrated, but it's not in the HR recruiter's interest to do that. If the recruiter refers a candidate who looks good on paper but turns out to be a bad hire, no one's going to blame the recruiter. But every time recruiters have the engineer…

> recruiters risk losing credibility with the engineers if the candidate is rejected or ends up being a bad hire

This isn't really a good way of looking at it. It should be more collaborative/problem solving rather than adversarial/blame-based.

"YOU didn't get ME the RIGHT candidate."

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#599

Post by ionforce »

klenwell wrote: post #377
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…

Kahneman also writes in the same book about his experience with interviews as a young psychologist with the Israeli army. His recommendation? A simple (but well thought out) rubric. Identify 5 or 6 qualities that are essential to the success of your team. Tailor your questions around evaluating for those. Interview a bunch of people, score them on a scale of 1 to 5 for each of those categories. Resist your gut feelin…

Does anyone else have experience with a system like this? Sounds bold. Sounds like something someone in the valley should try.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#600

Post by ionforce »

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…

Some companies and candidates don't have the bandwidth for such a lengthy interview process.
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