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Speaking as someone who has taken on a lot of hiring responsibility: the cost for rejecting a good applicant is 4-5 hours of my teams time while they interview

by sjburt 10y ago

Speaking as someone who has taken on a lot of hiring responsibility: the cost for rejecting a good applicant is 4-5 hours of my teams time while they interview someone else. The cost for accepting a bad applicant is several months of salary, reduced productivity for my team, risk of a discrimination suit if I don't put them on a PIP, etc. So as a hiring manager I am pretty OK with rejecting a lot of good applicants just because some little part of the interview didn't go well, if it means that I never hire anyone really bad. The good applicants will get jobs somewhere else, it's OK. The technical interview is part of that. The coding test is part of that. Sitting down with them and making sure they can talk through a problem with their future teammates is part of that. There's no one piece. And finally, if your career is to write code and solve problems, and someone gives you a test where you have to write code and solve problems, you should be elated. Is there anyone that wants to answer the "Tell me about a time where you had a disagreement with a supervisor"-type questions that the rest of the world has to deal with?

MustardTiger 10y ago
>the cost for rejecting a good applicant is 4-5 hours of my teams time while they interview someone else The cost seems much higher to me. I have to interview dozens of people to find a single good applicant. Rejecting one good applicant costs me dozens of interviews, not one.
mjevans 10y ago
Maybe actual apprenticeships are the answer. 3-6 months to get someone trained up, and a lot of their pay would be in /training/ them (you'd still pay at least a living wage for the area, but you might upfront plan and disclose to relocate them if hired). The benefit would be both in seeing if they're a good fit, and also enriching that employee as an employee. Both sides would have a much better perspective of if it's a good fit, if they want to restart the process with a different team, or if the employee can find better value in society elsewhere.
- kagamine 10y ago
  When you think about it, college degrees in IT/CS are the wrong way to go about IT/CS learning. A 3 year apprenticeship like an electrician or plumber does would make a lot more sense. 60% of your time is spent at work, shadowing and helping an experienced professional who can show you the ropes and explain concepts in the real world. Remaining time spent in the classroom doing theory and learning new stuff. My degree attempted something like this, with a lot of guest companies providing projects that amounted to coursework. For example, one coursework was to make a front and back end in asp.net with a predefined set of features for a company. The problem with apprenticeships is that educators are handing over a large part of your training to a company with unknown factors, like mental people with random hangups. Still, I'm sure many of us when we got our first job felt hopelessly unprepared for working in a real company.
- wyclif 10y ago
  My experience, when I ask decision-makers about training, is that there's a lot of resistance to the idea because of fear of poaching.
  - wccrawford 10y ago
    There's fear of poaching because the tech industry is so incredibly bad at giving raises. People are forced to change jobs to get what they're worth after just a few years. Some companies are smarter than this, but most are not, from what I've seen. So yeah, they're going to worry about poaching because they know they aren't doing what's really needed to keep people.
ryandrake 10y ago
> So as a hiring manager I am pretty OK with rejecting a lot of good applicants just because some little part of the interview didn't go well, if it means that I never hire anyone really bad. How does this square with the oft-repeated "shortage of engineers" meme that Silicon Valley can't shake. You seem to be able to pick and choose, and pass on good candidates for nit-picky reasons, so is there really a shortage of talent?

by sjburt 10y ago

MustardTiger 10y ago

>the cost for rejecting a good applicant is 4-5 hours of my teams time while they interview someone else The cost seems much higher to me. I have to interview dozens of people to find a single good applicant. Rejecting one good applicant costs me dozens of interviews, not one.

mjevans 10y ago

Maybe actual apprenticeships are the answer. 3-6 months to get someone trained up, and a lot of their pay would be in /training/ them (you'd still pay at least a living wage for the area, but you might upfront plan and disclose to relocate them if hired). The benefit would be both in seeing if they're a good fit, and also enriching that employee as an employee. Both sides would have a much better perspective of if it's a good fit, if they want to restart the process with a different team, or if the employee can find better value in society elsewhere.

kagamine 10y ago
When you think about it, college degrees in IT/CS are the wrong way to go about IT/CS learning. A 3 year apprenticeship like an electrician or plumber does would make a lot more sense. 60% of your time is spent at work, shadowing and helping an experienced professional who can show you the ropes and explain concepts in the real world. Remaining time spent in the classroom doing theory and learning new stuff. My degree attempted something like this, with a lot of guest companies providing projects that amounted to coursework. For example, one coursework was to make a front and back end in asp.net with a predefined set of features for a company. The problem with apprenticeships is that educators are handing over a large part of your training to a company with unknown factors, like mental people with random hangups. Still, I'm sure many of us when we got our first job felt hopelessly unprepared for working in a real company.
wyclif 10y ago
My experience, when I ask decision-makers about training, is that there's a lot of resistance to the idea because of fear of poaching.
- wccrawford 10y ago
  There's fear of poaching because the tech industry is so incredibly bad at giving raises. People are forced to change jobs to get what they're worth after just a few years. Some companies are smarter than this, but most are not, from what I've seen. So yeah, they're going to worry about poaching because they know they aren't doing what's really needed to keep people.

ryandrake 10y ago

> So as a hiring manager I am pretty OK with rejecting a lot of good applicants just because some little part of the interview didn't go well, if it means that I never hire anyone really bad. How does this square with the oft-repeated "shortage of engineers" meme that Silicon Valley can't shake. You seem to be able to pick and choose, and pass on good candidates for nit-picky reasons, so is there really a shortage of talent?