We only hire the trendiest • Hacker News Board

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#621

Post by peeters » Tue, Mar 22, 2016, 12:42 AM UTC

epalmer wrote: post #499

munificent wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 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…

I worked in an organization where we used behavioral interviewing techniques to get to the core of how someone operates. "Tell me about a time in which you..." works very well. If they resist answering the made mistakes questions we prompted them to understand that an honest answer is important. If they could not do that then they were not considered. These were not developer roles but most were very technical / anal…

> "Tell me about a time in which you..." works very well.

These types of questions probably cause me more stress than any other. Being asked to think of a situation where you felt a certain emotion or had a certain mental experience is not actually that easy for everyone. My memory is terrible at that kind of thing.

It's like my memory lacks a necessary index for what you are asking. I can start going through every major work experience I've had in sequence and filter out the ones that fit, but we might be sitting there in silence for 2-3 minutes which gets awkward enough in itself.

And it's not an inability to remember mistakes specifically, I mean the old "tell me about a time where you solved a problem with no prior knowledge of the domain..." gets me. I solve problems like this ALL THE TIME. That's a skill I have. Fetching those times from memory is not a skill I have.

Luckily I've had these questions in enough interviews that I generally try to have some examples in mind.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#622

Post by timv » Tue, Mar 22, 2016, 12:57 AM UTC

pklausler wrote: post #469

solipsism wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one said "impossible". Just harder and harder. I think this is okay, especially if the interviewee knows that's the plan. Make sure they shed the notion that they're expected to know everything that is asked of them, let them know that your plan is to challenge them. A developer who can't accept a challenge that stretches his/her boundaries a little bit is probably not a developer you want.

I completely agree that I want to hire programmers who want to constantly learn and improve, but I'm not sure that I should expect them to do so during a stressful high-stakes interview.

I've had good success when we introduce the conversation with "We're going to ask a bunch of questions across a variety of problem domains. We don't expect anyone to be strong in all these areas, but we want to get a feel for where your strengths are, and then we'll drill down into those areas"

But, once you do that setup, everyone is eventually going to say that they don't know what they don't know. It's exceptionally rare for someone to be able to delve into the implementation details of a couple of different programming languages (of our choosing), cryptography, distributed systems, relational modelling, CS theory, and a variety of algorithms and data structures.

So "I don't know" ceases to be much of a signal, since everyone says it a few times.

In fact we prefer to see the opposite, where people are willing to tell us the bits of info that they do know. Even if you don't know how two phase commit is implemented, knowing what problem it's trying to solve will allow you to research it when the need arises.

Because an interview situation is so unlike a normal workplace environment, I don't know any reliable way to translate their willingness (or otherwise) to say "I don't know" in the interview, to on the job behaviours. Either you'll coach everyone into it, or you'll be letting the interview pressure (potentiality) distort their behaviour so much that it's too hard to derive a signal from.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#623

Post by sheepmullet » Tue, Mar 22, 2016, 1:04 AM UTC

euroclydon wrote: post #289

p4wnc6 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, hiring managers, and almost all companies apart from extremely early-stage do-or-die start-ups, simply do not care about productivity. Sure, they'll use productivity as a political excuse to fire you, overlook you, or ding you on a bonus or something. But that's just a way of cover their political games with plausible deniability paperwork. At the end of the day, they don't really care about product…

I'm a hiring manager at a mature healthcare software company. Productivity is my number one concern. Among regulatory overhead, testing, and legacy compatibility, a developer has to work hard and smart to move the ball forward here. Teams are lean. A single unproductive developer will cause us to miss the scheduled release date of a feature.

> A single unproductive developer will cause us to miss the scheduled release date of a feature.

The way you phrase it implies that it actually matters if you miss a release. If that is the case then why would you operate with such a lean team?

You have a bus factor of one.

This implies you are on the losing side of a political fight...

Or it really doesn't matter to the org if you don't deliver (even if it matters to you personally)...

Or you haven't communicated the potential risks properly and senior management will get a huge shock when you don't deliver...

Etc

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#624

Post by mahyarm » Tue, Mar 22, 2016, 1:22 AM UTC

shawn-butler wrote: post #612

donw wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Almost all silicon valley interviews are a 1hr phone screen and a full day of interviewing with lunch in the middle. What they seem to be asking seems to be about the same amount of time. And TBH it's less intense sounding since it should be a mostly normal work day.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#625

Post by tptacek » Tue, Mar 22, 2016, 1:30 AM UTC

bcaine wrote: post #535

tptacek wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a really simple test for whether a work-sample scheme is effective, or just a bullshit trend-chasing afterthought: Does the work sample test offset all or most of the unstructured tech evaluation the company would otherwise do? If it does, that means they have a work-sample test rubric they believe in, and they're hiring confidently. If it doesn't, they don't believe in what they're doing, and the programming…

I think that's fair. I've had both the former and the latter, but unfortunately most of my experiences fall into latter case, where it's simply been hoop jumping. Most of my friends (all about to graduate, so a good number of examples) are experiencing the same. For example one company gave a problem with five parts, with the final part being solve longest path on a bipartite weighted graph (which is quite a hard and…

Does the job they're interviewing involve finding the longest paths on weighted bipartite graphs? Or is this just non-recursive Towers of Hanoi pretending to be a realistic work sample?

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#626

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Tue, Mar 22, 2016, 2:40 AM UTC

mdpopescu wrote: post #267

wtbob wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think we're starting to see the need for 'laborer' programmers. There's a lot of relatively unskilled glue/laborious coding that needs to be done. I have a computer for that! Seriously, that's one of the things a computer excels at. This is what is so nice about a language with strong dynamic typing: it makes writing the sort of code which writes glue code reasonably easy.

How do you get your computer to solve the problem of "this text needs to be 2 points larger, a darker shade of red and 5 pixels to the right" without involving a programmer? I've worked on the Avon AU website and we had a few hundred tasks like that. It's why (to link back to my current pet peeve) I'm upset that my relatives are unwilling to learn a tiny bit of web design because "it's too hard". There is a market fo…

If this is true there's a serious mismatch somewhere.

There a lot of people who can do this work in the UK. Mostly they don't get paid very much at all.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#627

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Tue, Mar 22, 2016, 2:48 AM UTC

VLM wrote: post #209

stegosaurus wrote: post #120

I tend to agree with most of this (university, GPA, subject, blah blah blah). Bits of paper that are signals of arbitrary things (family standing, ability to take on debt, country of birth). Anti-Windows bias doesn't really feel like an example of 'pedigree' to me, though. I can't imagine programming on Windows. I can't even imagine using the OS. I moved away from Windows ~a decade ago and haven't looked back - it se…

So far none of the responses have gone on a business tangent, yet usually business guys are the ones who decided on / enforced the MS-only doctrine. I assure you some MBA veep who's never touched a keyboard did not make the decision based on the accurate technical details in some replies. The first one is hiring. Supposedly everyone knows windows, great hiring pool. I donno if I believe that anymore, but in the old d…

I think your last sentence covers all the other points.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#628

Post by nhumrich » Tue, Mar 22, 2016, 2:55 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #563

A lot of businesses which are basically web sites don't need high-powered technical talent. They just need competent people who can make the thing go. This isn't new technology any more. Don't overcomplicate things. Soylent is looking for a software engineer.[1] Soylent, as someone figured out a few months back, does about two sales transactions a minute. They now have all of two products. They should be using some o…

It helps that soylent itself was invented by a trendy, hipster, software engineer.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#629

Post by einarvollset » Tue, Mar 22, 2016, 3:15 AM UTC

Related anecdote: a good friend of mine works at FB, and pushed and pushed and pushed for me to be okay with him passing off to a recruiter. Finally I said yes, and after much ball dropping, they rejected me without even a phone screen. I don't mind, but related to this - my background is odd, yet pretty strong: YC co-founder (Corp acquired by Google), top 5 in country PhD, bootstrapped several businesses, lead several concurrent teams of developers, strong ability to ship, among the top iOS BTLE developers in the world, etc. I just don't think I fit their mold, and told my friend so before he even tried. Guess I was right.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#630

Post by _delirium » Tue, Mar 22, 2016, 3:28 AM UTC

DrNuke wrote: post #292

I think cold hiring is dead: draining exchanges of info lead too much too often to nothing and leave both parties dissatisfied. Referrals are the easiest way to go.

What's depressing is that the article is about applying via a referral. The non-referral case is probably even worse.