5 ms·

Hiring IS broken, unfortunately everyone isn't realizing it simultaneously, so half of us end up speaking about it to the other half who are already employed an

by yownie 11y ago

Hiring IS broken, unfortunately everyone isn't realizing it simultaneously, so half of us end up speaking about it to the other half who are already employed and feel the need to justify their employment. Since these discussions never happen out of CS / IT circles they very rarely propogate upwards to changing company practices unless the CTO/CEO happens to read HN. You're just further contributing to the rigged scenario when you respond like this.

Scea91 11y ago
Hiring in CS / IT is massively more objective compared to most of other fields.
- unprepare 11y ago
  IT (By IT I'm talking about my industry, I'm an IT administrator, not programming) hiring is based a lot on certifications, certifications which are abundantly easy to scam. You can find full exams with answers of CCNA and every Microsoft cert imaginable, I've worked for companies that incentivise certifications, and i watched coworkers use these 'tools' en masse to gain easy pay bumps and pad their resumes. I've had two interviewers ever to ask me technical questions that actually tested my knowledge or capabilities. I look good enough on paper so usually interviews are with a couple managers and if there's a culture fit I'm in. Doesn't matter if i dont know a damn thing, if my resume says MCSE on it. Microsoft and others further incentivise these certs by giving bonuses and breaks to companies employing certified individuals. If you think people being hired because they passed a test they cheated on is 'more objective than other fields' then maybe i just have a warped view of how objective other fields are
  - Scea91 11y ago
    None of the employees I would consider working for gives fk about certifications. I agree with you that certifications are crap but I haven't encountered a single good company that cares about them.
    - unprepare 11y ago
      I've let mine lapse completely to weed out companies searching only for major certs, i'm not interested in competing with cheaters. Vastly fewer responses and recruiters on major sites, but i've got about another 6 months to go on a really interesting couple of projects at my current job, so I'm not too upset about it.
    - odonnellryan 11y ago
      It's not true. Some companies legitimately care about them: if you are an MSP it is very useful to have people with Cisco, MS, and other certs. Sometimes it is almost required (see MS certs) to be competitive. So, they only care because it's a business thing (not a qualification thing) but they do care.
      - unprepare 11y ago
        I've worked for several MSPs this is my experience. They are very keen on getting employees with existing certs or getting current employees to actively be getting more certs. There are specific incentives from microsoft based on how many employees have certain levels of microsoft certification. it comes with discounts and marketing materials/privileges (Who doesnt want to say they are a Microsoft certified Gold support partner?) As such, it is conveniently ignored that the guy with an MCSE isnt going to get fired because their gold level partnership lapses if they dont keep X number of MCSEs on staff
    - ckozlowski 11y ago
      In my experience I wouldn't say they were complete crap or didn't care at all, but I'd agree with the notion that they're a poor indicator by themselves. When my team would look at candidates, past accomplishments and projects counted for tons more than a cert. Still, a cert told us what someone was interested in and what they wanted to bone up on. They could expect questions relating to that cert field during the call. If they had trouble talking on the subject, then we knew that the cert was likely there to be a pad or just something to fulfill some billet requirement. In good cases we'd find that the cert was an indicator of something they were passionate about. So I consider it a pointer of sorts. Never worthy of hiring someone on it's own, but I'd recommend them to people who are /ready/ to demonstrate knowledge and may not necessarily have the project experience otherwise. I'd just recommend to them that they be ready to talk to it in an interview.
  - dspillett 11y ago
    >* being hired because they passed a test they cheated on* The certificate shouldn't matter in the interview itself - it is just a way to pair down the choices of who you interview when you have many candidates. If you have knowledgeable people in the interview process (i.e. at least have a dev present for a dev interview, not just managers or HR people) then you should be able to catch those that don't really have the skills. Heck, even people who genuinely have a certificate might be rubbish overall but revised well for the exam days - you'll hopefully weed those out in a good interview process too.
    - unprepare 11y ago
      >The certificate shouldn't matter in the interview itself Have you had many IT interviews? I have, they are vastly non-technical interviews. Unless you count "have you ever used #CommonSoftware? how about #SlightlylessCommonSoftware?" as a technical interview. I'm an IT administrator, not a programmer, so i'm speaking to my experience in that field, I am not trying to make any claims about how programming interviews work. I've never had a whiteboard in an interview, I have in two interviews ever been asked to walk through a diagnostic process for problems, or asked any infrastructure or network design/architecture questions. Its worth noting I work and live in Detroit Michigan, so I'm not exactly interviewing with major technology companies regularly. But I have worked for MSPs which glossed over technical interviews in favor of culture fit as well. (MSPs are especially incentivised to have employees with certs, they get discounts and kickbacks)
      - devonkim 11y ago
        The discounts and kickbacks matter far less than referrals from the major tech company vendor for, say, integration work that's contracted. Most tech work outside major cities comes down to basic IT or contracting for the big tech companies that don't want to deal with enterprise drivel.
  - unprepare 11y ago
    Thanks for the downvotes on these comments, I'd love an explanation as to why - Am i not contributing to the discussion with my comments? I guess maybe i insulted some CCNA or MCSE-ers
    - metaphorm 11y ago
      I downvoted you because your comment was off topic. The discussion is about the interview process for business application developers. That is a very different role than what you do.
      - unprepare 11y ago
        I respectfully disagree. The article starts with: >This is a story about my interview experience in the tech industry. I also work in the tech industry, I was sharing my experience of interviewing in the tech industry. More specifically i was responding to a comment that said: > Hiring in CS / IT is massively more objective compared to most of other fields.
  - praneshp 11y ago
    Can someone explain why this is downvoted (it appears grey to me). Is his content wrong/false?
- khuey 11y ago
  Unfortunately it's objectively wrong.
- falcolas 11y ago
  Not really - these kinds of interviews are about hiring "People Like Us", i.e. recent college CS graduates who the interviewers like right off the bat (are they going to strongly recommend someone they don't like). It discourages diversity, reinforces ageism, and creates a stagnation in the company doing the hiring. I've seen this directly happen - the interviewers were two Asian and one White male, who came to this job as their first outside college. Looking over the engineering department, I saw, with one exception in fourty, young White or Asian males. The one exception was a lone Asian female, who had a doctorate in CS. Hiring "People Like Us" doesn't help a company.
  - tomp 11y ago
    > Looking over the engineering department, I saw, with one exception in fourty, young White or Asian males. IME, that's much more a consequence of the limited diversity of candidates, not a limited diversity of hires. In most places I've worked at, even if they hired all women and blacks (or other non-Asian minorities), there would still be at most approximately 5% women and 0% blacks (the latter would probably be higher in the US).
    - falcolas 11y ago
      How many of those potential candidates were weeded out by phone interviews with the same hiring criteria and scoring mechanism? I have personally been rejected after a phone interview, not because my technical skills were lacking, but because the interviewer didn't like something he heard in our conversation. I could quite literally hear him checking out of the conversation and going back to surfing the internet.
- fweespee_ch 11y ago
  > Hiring in CS / IT is massively more objective compared to most of other fields. That is the illusion many people have convinced themselves of but literally 0 of my coworkers could answer the questions I was asked simply because don't have similar responsibilities despite us applying for literally word-for-word identical job ads. The reality is, unless you do X regularly, you simply aren't going to be able to impress people with your answer to X.
stocktech 11y ago
When the author himself describes very positive and negative interviewing experiences, yet having no success at either, I have a hard time blaming the hiring practices.
- odonnellryan 11y ago
  An interview can be positive and not lead to a job. I went on a lot of interviews (maybe close to 100) before starting my own business, and I'd say at least 9/10 of them were very positive. By positive: I felt we both left the interview a bit happier than we went in. We both had a legitimate good time, and enjoyed it. It wasn't a grind, both people got to know each other. I'd say I had a 10% offer rate. The most common "why didn't you select me?" follow up answer I got was "we need someone who is an expert in XYZ language." Sometimes it was even that they need someone who is an expert in ABC library (when I was already pretty-much an expert in the language.) The ones that did lead to job offers I didn't want after the interview. The other 1/10 was because they had me take an IQ test, or do some really super long project, or meet with literally all 20 people in the company, or they made me sit in the lobby for 2 hours past the meeting time.
  - pigpaws 11y ago
    2 hours? wow. and you stayed?
    - odonnellryan 11y ago
      I had already took the day off, and they did update me every 20 minutes or so. They also gave me water and snacks before I even knew to wait, and I had my laptop. It wasn't that big a deal, but they didn't have a good reason to make it not a deal breaker.
    - logfromblammo 11y ago
      I once showed up to an interview only to discover that the people who were supposed to interview me had traveled to another state. This was only after I had taken time off work and been escorted from the military base security gate to the ramshackle, unmarked building that did not in any way resemble a clean and healthy workplace. Someone eventually called me to reschedule, and it took every last ounce of my willpower not to perform a verbal auxiliary anus installation over the phone. To name names and shame the shameful, it was SAIC (before they split into SAIC and Leidos).
b0p1x 11y ago
I run a small company and I absolutely refuse to have an HR department. We're still small enough that this is fairly easy to work around. My recent hires are all just people I met at events. I'm told by people outside the company that they're all very happy workers. We do not do technical interviews. We talk casually about past work and what people want to achieve. After hiring we usually find out they have a different skillset and then we find the right tasks to match experience vs. career path. Knowing this works for my team I would never want to go back to full-time employment at a place with HR ever again. HR has become an insular group of "specialists" who do not deliver value to organizations, and often ruin them IMO.
- yownie 11y ago
  If you've got a good mix of developers at various levels of skill I'd say you're doing it correctly then. The problem is the corporate mandates that 100% of employees be ninja/guru/cowboys. It's this mindset that keeps everyone else running around interviewing needlessly.
- cheshire137 11y ago
  I'm confused. I think of HR as human resources, that is, the folks who manage benefits and paychecks and insurance struggles. How is that related to interviewing new engineers?
- _vn5r 11y ago
  That does sound like a nice play to work. How do I get in touch?
  - b0p1x 11y ago
    I wish I were hiring! I just doubled the team though so I'm not bringing anyone new on for the next ~6mo probably. Sorry!
- dennis_jeeves 11y ago
  >I run a small company and I absolutely refuse to have an HR department. You are my hero. If you ever end up having an HR department you can put in mediocre software developers to do the menial tasks. Most mediocre software developers will out do your average HR drone. For hiring and interviewing use the very best people that you have.
fullshark 11y ago
It's really not an either/or situation. Hiring could improve obviously but the current process of generic white board problems is effective if imperfect. It's just really hard to decipher one's ability when everyone puts technical experience on their resume because they took an online class or read a book on some thing once.
- Klathmon 11y ago
  But don't many thousands of lines of code for personal and professional projects written over many years count for anything?
  - fullshark 11y ago
    1. It gets your foot in the door and gets you an interview. 2. It likely gives you valuable experience to answer white board questions. I don't think it's a perfect process but it weeds out fakers/resume padders. Also a lot of companies arent looking for specialists but want broad skills to handle a variety of problems cause the problems 5 years from now could be very different for the company.

by yownie 11y ago

Scea91 11y ago

Hiring in CS / IT is massively more objective compared to most of other fields.

unprepare 11y ago
IT (By IT I'm talking about my industry, I'm an IT administrator, not programming) hiring is based a lot on certifications, certifications which are abundantly easy to scam. You can find full exams with answers of CCNA and every Microsoft cert imaginable, I've worked for companies that incentivise certifications, and i watched coworkers use these 'tools' en masse to gain easy pay bumps and pad their resumes. I've had two interviewers ever to ask me technical questions that actually tested my knowledge or capabilities. I look good enough on paper so usually interviews are with a couple managers and if there's a culture fit I'm in. Doesn't matter if i dont know a damn thing, if my resume says MCSE on it. Microsoft and others further incentivise these certs by giving bonuses and breaks to companies employing certified individuals. If you think people being hired because they passed a test they cheated on is 'more objective than other fields' then maybe i just have a warped view of how objective other fields are
- Scea91 11y ago
  None of the employees I would consider working for gives fk about certifications. I agree with you that certifications are crap but I haven't encountered a single good company that cares about them.
  - unprepare 11y ago
    I've let mine lapse completely to weed out companies searching only for major certs, i'm not interested in competing with cheaters. Vastly fewer responses and recruiters on major sites, but i've got about another 6 months to go on a really interesting couple of projects at my current job, so I'm not too upset about it.
  - odonnellryan 11y ago
    It's not true. Some companies legitimately care about them: if you are an MSP it is very useful to have people with Cisco, MS, and other certs. Sometimes it is almost required (see MS certs) to be competitive. So, they only care because it's a business thing (not a qualification thing) but they do care.
    - unprepare 11y ago
      I've worked for several MSPs this is my experience. They are very keen on getting employees with existing certs or getting current employees to actively be getting more certs. There are specific incentives from microsoft based on how many employees have certain levels of microsoft certification. it comes with discounts and marketing materials/privileges (Who doesnt want to say they are a Microsoft certified Gold support partner?) As such, it is conveniently ignored that the guy with an MCSE isnt going to get fired because their gold level partnership lapses if they dont keep X number of MCSEs on staff
  - ckozlowski 11y ago
    In my experience I wouldn't say they were complete crap or didn't care at all, but I'd agree with the notion that they're a poor indicator by themselves. When my team would look at candidates, past accomplishments and projects counted for tons more than a cert. Still, a cert told us what someone was interested in and what they wanted to bone up on. They could expect questions relating to that cert field during the call. If they had trouble talking on the subject, then we knew that the cert was likely there to be a pad or just something to fulfill some billet requirement. In good cases we'd find that the cert was an indicator of something they were passionate about. So I consider it a pointer of sorts. Never worthy of hiring someone on it's own, but I'd recommend them to people who are /ready/ to demonstrate knowledge and may not necessarily have the project experience otherwise. I'd just recommend to them that they be ready to talk to it in an interview.
- dspillett 11y ago
  >* being hired because they passed a test they cheated on* The certificate shouldn't matter in the interview itself - it is just a way to pair down the choices of who you interview when you have many candidates. If you have knowledgeable people in the interview process (i.e. at least have a dev present for a dev interview, not just managers or HR people) then you should be able to catch those that don't really have the skills. Heck, even people who genuinely have a certificate might be rubbish overall but revised well for the exam days - you'll hopefully weed those out in a good interview process too.
  - unprepare 11y ago
    >The certificate shouldn't matter in the interview itself Have you had many IT interviews? I have, they are vastly non-technical interviews. Unless you count "have you ever used #CommonSoftware? how about #SlightlylessCommonSoftware?" as a technical interview. I'm an IT administrator, not a programmer, so i'm speaking to my experience in that field, I am not trying to make any claims about how programming interviews work. I've never had a whiteboard in an interview, I have in two interviews ever been asked to walk through a diagnostic process for problems, or asked any infrastructure or network design/architecture questions. Its worth noting I work and live in Detroit Michigan, so I'm not exactly interviewing with major technology companies regularly. But I have worked for MSPs which glossed over technical interviews in favor of culture fit as well. (MSPs are especially incentivised to have employees with certs, they get discounts and kickbacks)
    - devonkim 11y ago
      The discounts and kickbacks matter far less than referrals from the major tech company vendor for, say, integration work that's contracted. Most tech work outside major cities comes down to basic IT or contracting for the big tech companies that don't want to deal with enterprise drivel.
- unprepare 11y ago
  Thanks for the downvotes on these comments, I'd love an explanation as to why - Am i not contributing to the discussion with my comments? I guess maybe i insulted some CCNA or MCSE-ers
  - metaphorm 11y ago
    I downvoted you because your comment was off topic. The discussion is about the interview process for business application developers. That is a very different role than what you do.
    - unprepare 11y ago
      I respectfully disagree. The article starts with: >This is a story about my interview experience in the tech industry. I also work in the tech industry, I was sharing my experience of interviewing in the tech industry. More specifically i was responding to a comment that said: > Hiring in CS / IT is massively more objective compared to most of other fields.
- praneshp 11y ago
  Can someone explain why this is downvoted (it appears grey to me). Is his content wrong/false?
khuey 11y ago
Unfortunately it's objectively wrong.
falcolas 11y ago
Not really - these kinds of interviews are about hiring "People Like Us", i.e. recent college CS graduates who the interviewers like right off the bat (are they going to strongly recommend someone they don't like). It discourages diversity, reinforces ageism, and creates a stagnation in the company doing the hiring. I've seen this directly happen - the interviewers were two Asian and one White male, who came to this job as their first outside college. Looking over the engineering department, I saw, with one exception in fourty, young White or Asian males. The one exception was a lone Asian female, who had a doctorate in CS. Hiring "People Like Us" doesn't help a company.
- tomp 11y ago
  > Looking over the engineering department, I saw, with one exception in fourty, young White or Asian males. IME, that's much more a consequence of the limited diversity of candidates, not a limited diversity of hires. In most places I've worked at, even if they hired all women and blacks (or other non-Asian minorities), there would still be at most approximately 5% women and 0% blacks (the latter would probably be higher in the US).
  - falcolas 11y ago
    How many of those potential candidates were weeded out by phone interviews with the same hiring criteria and scoring mechanism? I have personally been rejected after a phone interview, not because my technical skills were lacking, but because the interviewer didn't like something he heard in our conversation. I could quite literally hear him checking out of the conversation and going back to surfing the internet.
fweespee_ch 11y ago
> Hiring in CS / IT is massively more objective compared to most of other fields. That is the illusion many people have convinced themselves of but literally 0 of my coworkers could answer the questions I was asked simply because don't have similar responsibilities despite us applying for literally word-for-word identical job ads. The reality is, unless you do X regularly, you simply aren't going to be able to impress people with your answer to X.

stocktech 11y ago

When the author himself describes very positive and negative interviewing experiences, yet having no success at either, I have a hard time blaming the hiring practices.

odonnellryan 11y ago
An interview can be positive and not lead to a job. I went on a lot of interviews (maybe close to 100) before starting my own business, and I'd say at least 9/10 of them were very positive. By positive: I felt we both left the interview a bit happier than we went in. We both had a legitimate good time, and enjoyed it. It wasn't a grind, both people got to know each other. I'd say I had a 10% offer rate. The most common "why didn't you select me?" follow up answer I got was "we need someone who is an expert in XYZ language." Sometimes it was even that they need someone who is an expert in ABC library (when I was already pretty-much an expert in the language.) The ones that did lead to job offers I didn't want after the interview. The other 1/10 was because they had me take an IQ test, or do some really super long project, or meet with literally all 20 people in the company, or they made me sit in the lobby for 2 hours past the meeting time.
- pigpaws 11y ago
  2 hours? wow. and you stayed?
  - odonnellryan 11y ago
    I had already took the day off, and they did update me every 20 minutes or so. They also gave me water and snacks before I even knew to wait, and I had my laptop. It wasn't that big a deal, but they didn't have a good reason to make it not a deal breaker.
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    I once showed up to an interview only to discover that the people who were supposed to interview me had traveled to another state. This was only after I had taken time off work and been escorted from the military base security gate to the ramshackle, unmarked building that did not in any way resemble a clean and healthy workplace. Someone eventually called me to reschedule, and it took every last ounce of my willpower not to perform a verbal auxiliary anus installation over the phone. To name names and shame the shameful, it was SAIC (before they split into SAIC and Leidos).

b0p1x 11y ago

I run a small company and I absolutely refuse to have an HR department. We're still small enough that this is fairly easy to work around. My recent hires are all just people I met at events. I'm told by people outside the company that they're all very happy workers. We do not do technical interviews. We talk casually about past work and what people want to achieve. After hiring we usually find out they have a different skillset and then we find the right tasks to match experience vs. career path. Knowing this works for my team I would never want to go back to full-time employment at a place with HR ever again. HR has become an insular group of "specialists" who do not deliver value to organizations, and often ruin them IMO.

yownie 11y ago
If you've got a good mix of developers at various levels of skill I'd say you're doing it correctly then. The problem is the corporate mandates that 100% of employees be ninja/guru/cowboys. It's this mindset that keeps everyone else running around interviewing needlessly.
cheshire137 11y ago
I'm confused. I think of HR as human resources, that is, the folks who manage benefits and paychecks and insurance struggles. How is that related to interviewing new engineers?
_vn5r 11y ago
That does sound like a nice play to work. How do I get in touch?
- b0p1x 11y ago
  I wish I were hiring! I just doubled the team though so I'm not bringing anyone new on for the next ~6mo probably. Sorry!
dennis_jeeves 11y ago
>I run a small company and I absolutely refuse to have an HR department. You are my hero. If you ever end up having an HR department you can put in mediocre software developers to do the menial tasks. Most mediocre software developers will out do your average HR drone. For hiring and interviewing use the very best people that you have.

fullshark 11y ago

It's really not an either/or situation. Hiring could improve obviously but the current process of generic white board problems is effective if imperfect. It's just really hard to decipher one's ability when everyone puts technical experience on their resume because they took an online class or read a book on some thing once.

Klathmon 11y ago
But don't many thousands of lines of code for personal and professional projects written over many years count for anything?
- fullshark 11y ago
  1. It gets your foot in the door and gets you an interview. 2. It likely gives you valuable experience to answer white board questions. I don't think it's a perfect process but it weeds out fakers/resume padders. Also a lot of companies arent looking for specialists but want broad skills to handle a variety of problems cause the problems 5 years from now could be very different for the company.