We only hire the trendiest

Post by dasmoth » Tue, Mar 22, 2016, 8:05 AM UTC

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…

Post by google_tvc » Tue, Mar 22, 2016, 8:28 AM UTC

jamesdutc wrote: post #148

koevet wrote: post #110

"Contractors are generally not the strongest technically" Where does this come from? I actually see a contractor as someone who had experienced way more "war stories" than the guy who has been sitting in the same chair for 10/20 years. As a contractor, you are exposed to more technologies, more business sectors, different working cultures.

"Consulting" or "contracting" can refer to different kinds of work arrangements. One of these is what's called "staff augmentation." Large companies with huge teams of full-time employed software programmers will often hire contractors to fill gaps. These contractors are typically contractors-in-name-only: they work under exactly the same conditions as full-time employees but with a worse tax situation, without acces…

  - non-technical degree from a local state school
  - 35+ years old
  - only have a couple of years of professional software development experience and most of it as a contractor/consultant
  - not white
  - most of my work is back end bug-fixing, maintenance, being in an on-call rotation, and occasionally integrating some system to some enterprise database
  - buzzwords in my resume (Java, Borg, RPC, Hibernate, SQL, XML, Eclipse IDE, DAO, DTO, etc) probably scares off the young devs because apparently anything remotely related to J2EE or enterprise is evil
  - my real employer is one of those Indian staffing firms

Post by chrisbennet » Tue, Mar 22, 2016, 9:18 AM UTC

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…

Post by rmc » Tue, Mar 22, 2016, 10:32 AM UTC

mikehollinger wrote: post #400

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…

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.

Post by rmc » Tue, Mar 22, 2016, 10:36 AM UTC

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.