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We only hire the trendiest

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Re: We only hire the trendiest

#611

Post by Retra »

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 a rational person, I'm going to be honest in an interview, and if the interviewer doesn't value that, then they can just suck a turd. :)

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#612

Post by shawn-butler »

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 is the new Thoughtworks.

Arrogant absurd process with no basis or evidence in reality.

You either drink the kool-aid and march in line or you are "not with the program"

Someone who will donate ten hours to an interview is someone that is "malleable" enough to be told how to think.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#613

Post by sotojuan »

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?

My guess is he doesn't interview at companies like that.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#614

Post by tptacek »

marktd wrote: post #525
tptacek wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes: like I said, the goal was to get results back to candidates faster. The biggest complaint we'd been getting from candidates before work samples was that our process took too long. Our goal became to get the entire process done under two weeks (from its worst point, a month or two earlier, of 1.5 months, when someone finally posted an anonymous complaint to Glassdoor about us). After iterating a couple times, we…

As a candidate, I would be a little wary of this process. You're asking me to put in multiple hours of work, but you only put in 7 minutes. So the incentives are misaligned: you are incented to give these challenges to many people, even if they have a low chance of passing through. But as a candidate, I don't want to sped multiple hours if I have a low chance of passing through. This is one reason why full-day on-sit…

First, I don't concede the idea that this is a concern I need to ameliorate, because the work-sample process consumes fewer hours of candidate time than the conventional interview does, and, better still, consumes those times as, when, and where the candidate chooses to make them available: an hour a night during the week, say. Do the work from your favorite quiet bar. Do it during your coffee break.

I am spending a lot of time these days talking to people interviewing in the valley, and what I'm seeing is that the norm candidates are subjected to is 7+ hours of 6-7 on-site interviews. Candidates have to go through all the interviews, even if the first interview has effectively ejected them from the process.

Compared to that horrid process, I don't believe I have to justify anything about my process.

But, if you read downthread, you'll see that we in fact did a lot to ameliorate the (bogus, I think) concern that we were incentivized to soak up hopeless effort from lots of people.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#615

Post by sotojuan »

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…

> If I want to be less charitable, the demand for hours and hours of preparation is just (further) hazing to prove dedication.

Come to reddit's /r/cscareerquestions one day. Tons of stressed out 18-22 year olds practicing CTCI and LeetCode for hours just for a chance at passing the Facebook/Google hazing. Because these people are usually "high achievers" who spent hours in high school at SAT preps, this feels natural to them, which is why they'll give questions like this when they hire in the future.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#616

Post by nammpknguyen »

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 will review the video you mentioned to make sure we are not misleading any candidates unnecessarily. I have done 500+ interviews at Facebook, 100 for coding. I have also read thousand of interview feedback, and there has not a single time when the point about "++ instead of += 1" coming up. So something is obviously lost in translation here, and we will correct that. Thanks for the feedback!

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#617

Post by sakopov »

How many of you guys continue to interview when you sense that you're either being insulted or your interviewer acts like a jackass and thinks that he's God's gift to this earth? Has anyone politely walked out?

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#618

Post by uiri »

Ologn wrote: post #487
donretag wrote: post #264

I once had an internal recruiter tell me during a phone screen that my resume was weak since I went to a no-name school in the south called Georgia Tech. During my last interview round, another interviewer found it hard to believe that I did not use Twitter. I think these problems existing more in the "trendy" areas such as the Bay area. Once you leave that culture, ignorant recruiters are still around, but the exclu…

The computing building is named after a student who went to Georgia Tech in the mid 1990s. He went on to found a company which was sold to IBM for over $1 billion.

For those interested but did not want to do the research, the student in question is Chris Klaus who donated $15 million in 1999 in order to get Georgia Tech's new (at the time) computing building named after him[1]. He founded Internet Security Systems right after graduating which IBM acquired for approximately $1.3 billion in 2006[2]. It is also interesting to note that the gift was made after his company went public in 1998[3].

[1] http://www.philanthropy.gatech.edu/building/christopher-w-kl...

[2] https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/20164.wss

[3] http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/ipos/company/internet-security...

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#619

Post by guscost »

ionforce wrote: post #603
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?

OK sure, there's the appeal of "Smart? Any human is as a lowly slug to the cosmos!" but in the context of a job application it would be dancing around the common use of the word. If the meaning is "I'm probably in the minority of humans who could solve this problem" then it is definitely a good attitude to have in the context of applying for a job.

Now if you say "I'm hardly ever wrong" that won't go over as well.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#620

Post by chipsy »

grandalf wrote: post #544
_yosefk wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I can totally make that impression now. I totally couldn't when I was younger - and when I would have provided you much more value for the money (meaning, I'd work my ass off for peanuts.) I would have failed on numerous grounds: * desire to ship: more like "I don't care who uses my work, I just want a job" * desire to grow: more like "I don't know what people grow into, I just want a job" * rationality: I du…

Those are good points. You're right I'm describing a fairly rare kind of hire, and a solid process must take into consideration the reality that not everyone is that strong or interviews that well, yet may have other highly valuable traits.

Perhaps an appropriate measure for interviewing is to do some psychological profiling to spot where a candidate is imbalanced, and then incorporate into the remainder of questioning. As an interviewer, you're always going to be biasing towards your own strengths and downplaying weaknesses, and although there are personalities that pose more or less danger to others, there isn't a perfect personality overall.
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