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We only hire the trendiest

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Re: We only hire the trendiest

#601

Post by yakult »

grandalf wrote: post #550
nommm-nommm wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Food is so so so personal and cultural. It's insane to believe someone not eating/not eating a particular food has anything to do with workplace performance.

> It's insane to believe someone not eating/not eating a particular food has anything to do with workplace performance. True, I meant it as a metaphor for the kinds of new experiences/ideas one encounters day to day in the workplace.

As metaphors go it's actually pretty good: people often have very specific, very individual, and entirely valid reasons to not eat something. Just as they can have the same for experiences under different conditions. Change the conditions, and you might get entirely different outcomes.

What I'm saying is, the one-shot impressions from interviews are horribly inaccurate. There is simply not enough data, plus the measuring instrument (interviewer) is flawed also in nonreproducible ways.

A simple thought experiment: let's say I build a machine that measures confidence and ability to read the room. Would it select different candidates than you?

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#602

Post by ionforce »

sago wrote: post #491
donretag wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many engineering/science-oriented schools have the same issue. Urbana Champaign, Ann Arbor, even CMU. If you are not from a STEM background, you tend to only "recognize" the Ivy League schools and MIT/Caltech/Berkeley/....

You have to really not care about your industry to not recognize Georgia Tech or CMU, birthplace of some of the greatest technical innovations in the industry. Let's talk about how you hire HR people. I've never interviewed for another company (always run my own), but I'd never hire a HR person who didn't have a basic understanding of tech.

It was a recruiter. Of course they don't care.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#603

Post by ionforce »

borkabrak wrote: post #371

Holy cow, was this a refreshing perspective. I'm one of those underrated engineers who has had trouble getting past nearly every phase of the hiring process at various times. It's frustrating because I'm pretty smart and very passionate about building software, especially tools. This bias against having the wrong keywords on your resume is incredibly unproductive,I agree, but I would guess it's a result of how little…

> I'm pretty smart

Is this really a good attitude to have?

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#604

Post by ionforce »

askafriend wrote: post #480
thegayngler wrote: post #100

In interviews I actively try to down play the companies I've worked for and the things I've done with them. The reason I do this is that I don't want people to come in with unrealistic expectations and expect me to live up to them. I also don't believe in preparing for interviews. I'm ok with the rough edges I have. I want my imperfections to come through on some level. Yes I have a preference for certain technologie…

If you don't prep for interviews then how do you handle all of the arcane theory heavy questions that a company like Google or Facebook will ask?

Maybe you want to self-select out of companies who have questions like that.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#605

Post by nommm-nommm »

grandalf wrote: post #592
nommm-nommm wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why give a question you wouldn't ask as an example?

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#606

Post by bobwaycott »

gearoidoc wrote: post #564
andersen1488 wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's actually a really good question. It shows deep knowledge and understanding of everything that is happening during a user interaction which is essential knowledge for a webdev. Plenty of "front end developers" have no clue what an HTTP request is.

Web developers don't need to know how a keyboard works. Nothing much more complex than key press down/up anyway.

Nobody was discussing how a keyboard works, but how the web works after you press return on the keyboard. And it's sad that too many web developers in general[1] seem to have the weakest understanding of such basic principles.

[1] super-anecdotal self-selected data points from hiring and conversations

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#607

Post by kpwagner »

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…

I feel like the whole "poker face" thing has been my achilles heal. I AM guarded with a lot of my personal information; in my experience for good reason.

So what do you do in your free time? FUCK YOU. If your answer isn't play softball and train for marathons, it's a way-ahead/way-behind scenario. Maybe you get lucky and interview with someone who has shared interests.

> I really like movies. I watch a lot of modern movies just for entertainment, but I also watch a lot of classics, even boring ones, to try to fill out my knowledge. I would love to make a short film and get it accepted to a film festival. I once, only once, made the horrendous mistake of telling two interviewers (they were doing the old gang-fuck) that I was passionate about Starcraft II (it was 2011 or something). I thought, what the hey, the truth will out. If I'm just open and genuine at least that will come across as a positive. They actually openly ridiculed me and subsequently told me that they weren't the kind of company that extended much free time or control over schedule to their junior employees, which I thought was especially interesting (frustrating) for two reasons: 1) Why the fuck are you asking me about my free time if I won't have any? 2) They just got through explaining how their company didn't have any hierarchy. So what the fuck is a "junior employee" in a company with no hierarchy?

On non-personal subjects, saying "I don't know" has never worked as well as everyone claims. Oh, just say, "I don't know". That shows maturity and confidence. WTF? Whenever I said, "I don't know" in an interview, the interviewer kept pressing me for an answer until I produced some garbage that I'm sure sounded rather like BS, because it was.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#608

Post by bobwaycott »

vehementi wrote: post #516
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…

Would love to put all these "no, THIS is how you hire properly" people in a (virtual) room together to hash things out. Someone is the most correct and the others are all more wrong than that person. We could go really slowly and break down all arguments etc. and see where things fall apart or when things contradict other arguments. And actually get somewhere

Ditto. Would love to be part of that conversation, but to referee it, walking everyone through all the arguments. It'd be so much fun.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#610

Post by wjomlex »

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…

I've done close to 200 interviews for Facebook. If you're coding in Python, then presumably you think it's your best language. If you aren't sure how to increment in your best language, it looks a little funny.

But just that: a little funny. It's certainly not a deal-breaker; we don't expect perfect syntax at all. For all I know you often switch between Python and JS in your day-to-day work and could easily make such a small error in a high pressure situation. That said, I'll notice it and take note. If one of four or five interviewers says " incremented funnily" nobody will care. If every interviewer is saying " doesn't seem very fluent in their chosen language" then the red flags start coming out.

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