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We only hire the trendiest

danluu.com

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Re: We only hire the trendiest

#641

Post by bryanrasmussen »

grappler wrote: post #308
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so, basically what you just said here is you would try to hire people that were like you, by giving them tests that you know you would do well on. I mean I would do well at this particular set of tests so fine by me in that regard.

Feel free to propose a better approach...

yeah I'm pretty sure that any approach I proposed, on a spur of the moment answer on an HN thread, without spending years of research and data analysis with a team of diverse experts in the field, would end up being a method to hire people who were more like me.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#642

Post by patio11 »

lfx wrote: post #411
mikehollinger wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

re: poker face - I would reword this to "communication style" - does this person communicate in a style that I (and my team) can understand? Being open may depend on cultural norms, more than a "poker face." It's definitely a warning sign that Bad Things might happen in the future.

poker face - is super cultural thing, I work with several Asians, most of them (not all!) sits _with_ poker face whole day. It is kind of hard to read people and understand if they got it when I'm explaining something. They are not even nod or smile. I'm European and sometimes it is super frustrating to not receive any body lang feedback. But when we close office doors they starts to chat, nod, laugh and what not. On…

Fun fact: There is a word in Japanese -- aizuchi -- for "meaningless nothings which you say during a conversation to let the other party know that you're actively engaged in the conversation."

Sitting with a stone face during a meeting in Japan would be very not normative. Your counterparty would assume that either you're totally checked out, repulsed by what is on offer, or so ridiculously above their social standing that you didn't even have to go through the motions of pretending to care about what they had to say.

Your periodic dispatch from Asia Is A Big Place; Consider The Possibility It Is Populated Mostly By Humans.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#643

Post by steveoc64 »

Great article with a lot of good points. Enjoyed the read.

Having said that though, the first paragraph or so made be choke. In the "hypothetical" case of Mike, who after being layed off from Microsoft finds himself a little shocked that his "skills and experience" are not valued in the real world ... well, its really hard to have any sympathy for him.

Hiring on merit is one thing, but there also has to be some weight added for a candidate's integrity (or total lack thereof, as in this case.) These Microsoft folk will never understand how much damage they have done, and how deep the resentment against them runs. Its not even worth trying to explain to them.

For another example, lets consider the hypothetical case of "Gavin". Gavin is someone with brilliant skills in say - early childhood learning, adminstration, media relations and marketting skills. He applies for a job as a senior admin at a childcare centre. The application is rejected !!! Gavin is appalled at this blatantly unfair treatment, so decides to investigate further and marches into the office to demand an explanation.

Anyway, as it turns out, Gavin proudly made full disclosure on his CV about a number of recent highlights in his career, including filming and marketting child pornography, collecting healhly organs from child donars for resale in the Middle East, and also the collection and hiring out of particularly talented children to both the Catholic Church, and the Freemasons.

"Gavin" sees these activities as mere expressions of his brilliance in the fields required. He is at a complete loss as to why all the staff / parents in the childcare centre are "discriminating" against him, and some are even casting unfair daggers in their eyes. He cant understand why ???? Perhaps they are just inferior to him.

I dont see this as being any different at all to the hypothetical "Mike" situation. Seriously - Fuck Mike !

To anyone recently layed off from a job at MS, who thinks they can jump bandwagons onto the next "trendy" thing in software, I think the most humane thing to do would be to tell them the rotten truth right up front .... "Just Fuck Off, and get as far away from software dev as you can. Get a job pluckng chickens, or collecting broken glass, or whatever pays the bills ... but whatever you do, keep the fuck away from our computers. You are NOT wanted here, and we all have excellent reasons to hate your guts with a passion and intensity that you are too selfish and narrow minded to ever comprehend."

.... but they would still think this was unfair ! Ridiculous.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#644

Post by mclifton »

pingec wrote: post #9

Is the anti windows/.NET bias really that common? I have been a .NET dev for 6 years because that was my job. But I don`t believe that makes me useless on any other stack. In fact lately I desire to work on something that feels exciting and fresh again but sometimes I feel like .NET devs are looked down upon and it`s not so easy to land a job or contract outside .Net land.

I've strangely also found that this works the other way as well.

I have strong experience in the .NET ecosystem and good experience with nix platforms and commonly related technologies (including Java and Ruby). When I interviewed for a part time freelance gig with a company on Upwork, they were concerned about my nix experience. They wanted to make sure that since they were a .NET shop, that I wouldn't try to get them to use any non traditional Windows based technologies.

I told them that I'm not partial one way or the other - I just like to use the best tool for the job regardless of where it's hosted. I did end up working for them for a short period of time, but it didn't work out long term.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#646

Post by zamalek »

eropple wrote: post #569
junto wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Everyone I know in the .Net world is busily building upon open source libraries via Nuget, which is an NPM equivalent. Most of that open source code is hosted on Github. Now .Net is now also open source it would seem that the only proprietary part to the stack is Windows itself, and shortly .Net is going to be running on any platform.

In my experience, trying to get people to use NuGet is like pulling teeth. When OSS dependencies are considered cromulent, vendoring, sometimes just straight-up binary vendoring , has been my experience with .NET shops. Those are the above-average places, though--I've seen a ton of reticence around using anything with an OSS license. Coming from a Mono background, this was very weird to me.

> I've seen a ton of reticence around using anything with an OSS license.

Very true. This used to be a point of contention where I work, but was easily fixed by having an automated process for getting our lawyers to approve OSS code (with a Nuget or Github URL). We still have to do it on a per-project basis (not per-license), but we're using lots of OSS code now and I've made a little headway on open-sourcing some of our own stuff.

These days OSS advocacy isn't that hard, especially with the hard facts demonstrated by CoreCLR.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#647

Post by dclowd9901 »

mbrock wrote: post #39

I sometimes think there's a built in pomposity in the whole attitude of hiring, looking for someone "good enough to qualify." Instead, I like to think of it as, we are looking for someone to help us , someone who has different experience and knowledge, someone who could tell us how we can improve. Then instead of this adversarial situation of selecting a new ingroup member, it's a solicitation for assistance with a b…

Yeah, definitely. I never felt more like the Mike of the story than I did interviewing at Airbnb. Every interviewer was fresh out of school, very smart, fashionable and attractive and definitely wanted to prove something. Despite doing rather well and scoring exceptionally well on personality, I was still passed on, and it's hard to shake the feeling that maybe it was because I wasn't a hipster. They just had this air of superiority the whole time.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#648

Post by dclowd9901 »

ryanSrich wrote: post #519
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…

Ha. I had the same thing happen with a recruiter. They thought RIT was a technical institute liken to ITT Tech.

That seems counter to the norm. Most recruiters I know basically jizz themselves at potential RIT candidates.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#649

Post by dclowd9901 »

dominotw wrote: post #302
mbrock wrote: post #39

I sometimes think there's a built in pomposity in the whole attitude of hiring, looking for someone "good enough to qualify." Instead, I like to think of it as, we are looking for someone to help us , someone who has different experience and knowledge, someone who could tell us how we can improve. Then instead of this adversarial situation of selecting a new ingroup member, it's a solicitation for assistance with a b…

>it's a solicitation for assistance with a built in humility. Thank you for bringing this up. No matter how good or bad a candidate is, that person is your social equal and deserves basic respect. I feel strongly about this ever since the humiliation I faced at AirBnb, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11291155 This could happen to anyone.

Wow I had a similarly perplexing and bad experience interviewing there.

It was for a UI Engineer position. I did very well on all of my technical coding challenges, with the exception of an algorithm question, which I still managed to complete once the interviewer pointed me in the right direction.

I was later told that while everyone really liked my culture fit for the company one of the interviewers with whom I sailed through the challenge thought I did mediocre, and the algo question asked said I "really struggled". It was pretty devastating but I just chocked it up to me needing to dig in and study harder.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#650

Post by dclowd9901 »

mikegioia wrote: post #122
tptacek wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no magic to it at all. Have every candidate work on programming problems related to the work you do at your company. Have every candidate work on the same problems, and let them do it from home. Build and iterate on a rubric for grading those challenges. It is amazing to me that almost nobody does this, but: almost nobody does this. They have programmers write code on a whiteboard, or on some whiteboard-codin…

Have every candidate work on the same problems, and let them do it from home To be fair, I've seen a lot of good arguments against programming assignments. I think at the end of the day, the employer needs to conduct some method of determining if the employee has the technical capabilities needed for the specific job they're being hired for. However, there are MANY other factors too like "how well they get along with…

If you substitute the candidate's time in an in person technical interview with the estimated time for the take home assignment, I can't see the issue. I would gladly give 3 hours of bullshit algorithm white boarding exercises for 3 hours of homework.
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