3 ms·

Knew the HN SV crowd would find a way to spin this as "This is good for <company>"

kefka 10y ago
Its not a spin. Its the actual business process and thought behind it. The solution to that is challenge it with clout equal to the business. And that means unions. Only when 2 powers butt heads, will there be any fairness out of that.
- jknoepfler 10y ago
  > Its the actual business process and thought behind it. Exactly. Even if one disagrees with a thought process (actually, especially if one disagrees with a thought process), one should still seek to understand it inasmuch as possible. Otherwise one is doomed to repeat it.
jknoepfler 10y ago
For the record, I am neither employed in or near Silicon Valley (not that it should matter), nor do I have any strong beliefs about whether or not actively weeding out developers is a good tactic for a business (five years ago I would have said it wasn't, now I'm agnostic). Whatever my beliefs or situation though, it's not hard for anyone to understand how a medium-to-large scale organization with a high hiring bar could make a rational decision to "hire the best" while still making an effort to release the least valuable developers in the company. An alternative strategy is Google's. Google tunes their hiring process to produce almost exclusively false negatives rather than false positives (they very deliberately reject qualified candidates far more often than they hire under-qualified candidates). With this hiring strategy in place, it wouldn't make as much sense for Google to "weed out" developers. And for the record I think 20th-century impersonal, statistical business thinking is toxic, but that doesn't mean I don't see its use or that I know of a better way to do things.
- abraae 10y ago
  If I had a dollar for every time someone said "why don't we hire like Google does"? Answer: Google can do what they do because of their scale, culture, systems, access to pots of money etc. Google are Google. The rest of us are not and can't calibrate our hiring process to turn up only false negatives. We'd never hire anyone.
  - jknoepfler 10y ago
    I agree, it's not a feasible strategy for most companies. It's not even that innovative, it's just repeating a test with a high error rate repeatedly. This doesn't reduce error, but it does change the type of errors they make. I think that's pretty interesting. (From speaking with co-workers, it also damages Google's image considerably and reduces the probability that people will spend time and energy applying there; the their applicant pool seems large enough anyway).

kefka 10y ago

Its not a spin. Its the actual business process and thought behind it. The solution to that is challenge it with clout equal to the business. And that means unions. Only when 2 powers butt heads, will there be any fairness out of that.

jknoepfler 10y ago
> Its the actual business process and thought behind it. Exactly. Even if one disagrees with a thought process (actually, especially if one disagrees with a thought process), one should still seek to understand it inasmuch as possible. Otherwise one is doomed to repeat it.

jknoepfler 10y ago

For the record, I am neither employed in or near Silicon Valley (not that it should matter), nor do I have any strong beliefs about whether or not actively weeding out developers is a good tactic for a business (five years ago I would have said it wasn't, now I'm agnostic). Whatever my beliefs or situation though, it's not hard for anyone to understand how a medium-to-large scale organization with a high hiring bar could make a rational decision to "hire the best" while still making an effort to release the least valuable developers in the company. An alternative strategy is Google's. Google tunes their hiring process to produce almost exclusively false negatives rather than false positives (they very deliberately reject qualified candidates far more often than they hire under-qualified candidates). With this hiring strategy in place, it wouldn't make as much sense for Google to "weed out" developers. And for the record I think 20th-century impersonal, statistical business thinking is toxic, but that doesn't mean I don't see its use or that I know of a better way to do things.

abraae 10y ago
If I had a dollar for every time someone said "why don't we hire like Google does"? Answer: Google can do what they do because of their scale, culture, systems, access to pots of money etc. Google are Google. The rest of us are not and can't calibrate our hiring process to turn up only false negatives. We'd never hire anyone.
- jknoepfler 10y ago
  I agree, it's not a feasible strategy for most companies. It's not even that innovative, it's just repeating a test with a high error rate repeatedly. This doesn't reduce error, but it does change the type of errors they make. I think that's pretty interesting. (From speaking with co-workers, it also damages Google's image considerably and reduces the probability that people will spend time and energy applying there; the their applicant pool seems large enough anyway).