We only hire the trendiest • Hacker News Board

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#661

Post by marvin » Tue, Mar 22, 2016, 11:15 AM UTC

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 think the conclusion we can draw from this discussion is that dismissing Microsoft-stack developers is a terrible generalization.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#662

Post by JabavuAdams » Tue, Mar 22, 2016, 11:29 AM UTC

cp9 wrote: post #507

mseebach wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, there's no principle, there's a ~20 minutes old idea that we engineers are so obviously awesome that companies should actually be paying us for the privilege of interviewing us. There may exists engineers obviously awesome enough for that to be feasible, and great for them (but they are probably also obviously awesome enough to not have to go through coding tests, so it's a moot point) and even if I could perhaps…

I just value my own time. It's not entitlement, it's merely knowing what my free time is worth

> it's merely knowing what my free time is worth

This is a sound-bite, not something that holds up to scrutiny.

If you decide not to interview with possibly great places based on this, you're essentially saying that all future expected gain isn't worth some set hourly rate for 2-8 hours of your time.

Also, what's your free time worth? For me, sometimes it's worthless, and sometimes I feel like I'd sell my soul for 10 minutes to myself.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#663

Post by mightygoldenboy » Tue, Mar 22, 2016, 11:38 AM UTC

throwaway85305 wrote: post #295

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…

Not directly related but also relevant to the OP: half the reason I'm applying to Facebook in the first place is that I know telling recruiters at other places that I have a Facebook offer will do more to make me attractive than any actual work I've done at non-TrendCos.

Sounds about right. I work at a company a lot of people are trying to work for. We had a rash of Googlers interviewing with us not too long ago. Turned out, most of them weren't actually interested in the work we do. Instead, they were trying to get counter offers to stay at Google. Brutal.

Likewise, I've seen our recruiters shit themselves trying to sell candidates because they had a competing offer from another A-list company. Getting competing offers is excellent leverage to maximize your starting salary / equity.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#664

Post by StavrosK » Tue, Mar 22, 2016, 12:08 PM UTC

peeters wrote: post #621

epalmer wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Hah, I'm exactly the same, and not just with this, with everything. I just have a hard time retrieving things by index when prompted, and I envy people who can just recall interesting/funny things that happen to them. Things happen to me too, I just have to be reminded of the situation to recall it, I can't just go "funny thing? Ah yes, I remember X".

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#665

Post by jameshart » Tue, Mar 22, 2016, 12:54 PM UTC

epalmer wrote: post #587

lilcarlyung wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find your last comment interesting! From my experiences with employers in many parts of Europe, they value partial contributions to teams more than complete individual achievements. Talking to much in "I did..." sentences instead of "We did... (...and I helped with...)" can come across as self-centered, which often is considered a negative trait here.

So noted. We asked follow up questions to get to a person's contribution. It is valid to move the team forward. It is not valid to ride on the contributions of the team without putting your own contribution in.

This is exactly where biases creep in to evaluation. It's really, really hard to assess these signals objectively, and not use them to justify your snap judgements or prejudices. So maybe when the guy with a college sports background and a military-style buzz cut talks about how 'the team' did stuff, you mark it down as a sign of being a great team player and sharing credit. But when a guy with long hair does it, you assume he didn't make any individual contribution. And if a young woman talks about 'I' did stuff, you interpret it as confidence and evidence of personal contribution, but an older lady with kids does it and you dig in hard for evidence she's taking credit for others' work. Not personally accusing you of these specific biases here - just trying to show how these vague 'personality' judgement signals can be unconsciously misjudged by an interviewer, without them even knowing that's what they did.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#666

Post by tptacek » Tue, Mar 22, 2016, 1:32 PM UTC

bcaine wrote: post #638

tptacek wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, the position most definitely had absolutely nothing to do with longest path or combinatorial optimization. Anyway, my larger point is that what I've been seeing interviewing is that these tests are becoming much more common at US startups without companies removing/reducing the rest of their technical evaluation process, nor really structuring the problems to be a good signal. In an ideal world where companies do…

Most of our partners have a somewhat abbreviated interview for our candidates, but everyone (as far as I know) still techs our candidates out.

I'm actually fine with that! We make no pretense of having designed a screening process that is appropriate for every job. What I'm less fine with is the fact that the norm, even for abbreviated tech-outs, is 7-8 hours of on-site whiteboard interview.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#667

Post by mdpopescu » Tue, Mar 22, 2016, 1:43 PM UTC

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?

Most definitely. Self-confidence is much better than the opposite.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#668

Post by amorphid » Tue, Mar 22, 2016, 1:44 PM UTC

vdnkh wrote: post #304

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…

In my experience, pairing interviews usually falls into two categories: one where you're tapping away at a problem while your interviewer is doing a work assignment (but please ask me questions), and the second is where the interviewer is grading you (and interjecting) line-by-line rather than actually participating. It's rarely the case when pairing goes as it should i.e. a collaborative work process.

I agree. I interviewed with Pivotal, and it was fairly distracting for me to be asked to work on a problem where the interviewer clearly knew the solution, and did all the typing. It wasn't fun.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#669

Post by akhilcacharya » Tue, Mar 22, 2016, 2:05 PM UTC

sotojuan wrote: post #615

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…

I don't really see the issue with that. The benefits ($45-$51/hr internship salary or $110K+ starting) *outweigh the cost of preparation.

Re: We only hire the trendiest

#670

Post by ScottAS » Tue, Mar 22, 2016, 2:28 PM UTC

wolfgke wrote: post #174

ScottAS wrote: post #165

You can replace "trendy" with "good cultural fit" in many places. Cultural fit is arguably the most important factor in hiring someone. From my network, I see a hugely different culture at Microsoft and Google. Just saying.

If this is so important: why don't they specify the desired culture values beforehand in the job ad so that people who don't fit don't have to waste their time applying for the job?

Because it's so easy to fake "cultural fit" during the relatively short hiring process.