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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 sim
by sveme 11y ago
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 on ivy league CS students; friends of mine have a pretty successful consulting company and none of them has a formal CS background, but years of experience delivering complex software; they focus on guys that can deliver, regardless of background. Some people never went to MIT, but have a deeply ingrained wish that they would have - by surrounding themselves with MIT grads, they suddenly generate the wanted association.
- jhwhite 11y agoI get what you are saying, but Stanford isn't an Ivy League school. :) But yes, I agree with everything you're saying.
- sveme 11y agoI will not edit it to preserve this statement of my ignorance about the American university system for eternity, but thanks for pointing this out!
- nommm-nommm 11y agoThe Ivy League is actually an athletic conference, believe it or not, and consist solely of schools in the Northeast. The schools are Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University
- acheron 11y agoI assumed he was using it as a metaphor, because the actual Ivy League schools aren't especially known for computer science. So "ivy league [of] CS" as in the top CS schools, not literally the Ivy League schools.
- santaclaus 11y agoEhhh, something like 6 of the top 20 CS schools are Ivies. Mark Zuckerburg founded Facebook while at an Ivy.
- qmalzp 11y agoI propose "Silicon League" to refer to {Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Harvard, CalTech, ...?}.
- cowsandmilk 11y agowell, Harvard is Ivy League...
- Futurebot 11y agoThey're better lumped together as "elite" schools to avoid "that's not Ivy" arguments.
- logfromblammo 11y agoAs a Midwesterner from the heart of Big Ten territory, I am often disappointed that Carnegie-Mellon, Northwestern, Purdue, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio State, and Indiana are seldom mentioned in such lists, despite all of them being world-class schools for computer science. Sure, the Ivy Leaguers and Californians, and the closer-to-the-coast schools are remembered (except maybe Georgia Tech, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Penn State, or Johns Hopkins), but it's like the space between the Appalachians and the Rockies is one vast flyover wasteland not worthy of notice (or venture capital). Rice, Texas A&M, and Texas at Austin are also ignored pretty often, but Texans can be offended on their own behalf without my help.
- vinay427 11y agoAs another person from Big Ten territory, you might as well add University of Washington to that list. I often find interesting work (research, course assignments, etc.) from there, and it's typically ranked highly in CS, but it also seldom is remembered.
- stephencanon 11y agoFunny, I read it as an intended example of "how they would like to see themselves". =)
- vinay427 11y ago>by surrounding themselves with MIT grads, they suddenly generate the wanted association. Could you clarify what you meant here? Was it that 1. those who surround themselves with MIT grads discover an ingrained wish that they would have gone to MIT, or 2. that they satisfy a pre-existing wish to have gone to MIT by instead surrounding themselves with MIT grads? In the case of (2), are these effects tangible as they might expect?
- sveme 11y agoThe latter. Having been to quite a couple of interviews with hiring managers, most of them interviewed in a way that they would have hired themselves, so case number 1. Case number 2, hiring people that they subconsciously wish themselves to be, is coming more from an observation of all these hiring practices posts here on HN. The latter would be quite a nice empirical/psychological study, though I fully expect such a study to already exist. Disclaimer: I'm living in Germany and nearly exclusively interviewed in Germany so far. There's nothing comparable to the top US schools here, so school reputation is probably much less important than in the US.
- wolfgke 11y ago> Disclaimer: I'm living in Germany and nearly exclusively interviewed in Germany so far. There's nothing comparable to the top US schools here, so school reputation is probably much less important than in the US. There is something comparable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studienstiftung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studienstiftung: 'it is often referred to as "Germany's secret elite university"'.
- donw 11y agoMost 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 at the same time get a good read on personal fit from multiple team members. Pivotal is shockingly good at this. You start with an hour-long pairing exercise over the phone. If that goes well, you come in, sign an NDA, and pair on two different projects, with a block for lunch in the middle. That's a grand total of ten hours of screening time. This process isn't fool-proof, mind you. But it does do a good job of answering the most important question: Do I want to show up for work, tomorrow, and start working with this person? Perhaps just as importantly, it gives the candidate enough information to answer that same question for themselves. Nothing tells you whether or not you want to work somewhere, like actually working there.
- minikites 11y agoWhat's the compensation like for 10+ hours of work?
- coliveira 11y agoGreat answer. When I see these ideas floated around, I always think that these companies will never hire people who value their time and have at least a decent job. When a company comes to me with these great "deals" the first thing I say is thank you very much and move their emails to my spam box.
- tamana 11y agoAnd that saves them the hasle of extending an offer to someone who doesn't want the job because it doesn't offer enough life improvement. Win/Win
- aprdm 11y agoNo compensation. And worse, no feedback as well in case they don't hire you. Just a wasted day you'll never get back. source: been there, asked for feedback after received just a generic "No good luck with you career" and no response for my email..
- lallysingh 11y agoI think part of the reason people how those like themselves of that that's the only area where they have any confidence in their ability to assess skill. It's easy to say that this person is just like me, only a few years behind (or ahead!). But someone with a vastly different style and background is much harder to assess. Even with the same questions - as they're often kinda bullshit - it's hard to interpret the responses.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- optforfon 11y agoFor a generic/flexible developer position I'd purposefully avoid hiring people from "brand" school. You'll definitely need to be over paying, and they will likely be poached. I unless you need like a PhD who is the top expert in X (and you're willing to pay any price) .. it just seems like a bad bargain
- vehementi 11y agoWould love to put all these "no, THIS is how you hire properly" people in a (virtual) room together to hash things out. Someone is the most correct and the others are all more wrong than that person. We could go really slowly and break down all arguments etc. and see where things fall apart or when things contradict other arguments. And actually get somewhere
- bobwaycott 11y agoDitto. Would love to be part of that conversation, but to referee it, walking everyone through all the arguments. It'd be so much fun.
- Futurebot 11y agoI just read an ad on a "Who's Hiring?" HN post which had one of these right in the requirements: "You have a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) Degree from a top tier school." I wonder how much longer positions with requirements like that go unfilled compared to more open-minded ones.