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We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)
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- lolive 9y agoThat's why it is supremely important to read through the lines, and discern which trend will last long and which trend won't.
- orf 9y ago> We like to think that we’re different from all those industries that judge people based on appearance, but we do the same thing, only instead of saying that people are a bad fit because they don’t wear ties, we say they’re a bad fit because they do, and instead of saying people aren’t smart enough because they don’t have the right pedigree… wait, that’s exactly the same. This is a great quote and an interesting point. I don't know what it's like in the US but in the UK it's not unexpected to wear quite formal clothes to an interview, even if the position is at a very relaxed company. I don't think I would judge someone for what they wore in an interview, but I fear I might if they continued to wear something overly formal at work.
- Stratoscope 9y agoYou haven't met Raymond Chen. https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Defrag-Tools/Defrag-Tools-143-Raymond-Chen-Microsoft-Archives-Part-1 https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Defrag-Tools/Defrag-Tools-14...
- bertil 9y agoAlso in the UK, and I would definitely not be surprised to see candidates show up with suits at places where that’s obviously not required. No one cares. “Pedigree” that’s another question. I did show up in a tailored three-piece suit with a tie and pocket for my interview at Deliveroo (a notorious streetwear influencer now). There was an eyebrow justifiably raised (by a guy in a t-shirt who, I learned afterwards, was the CEO) and I felt the need to explain that I had another interview for a very different company just after. That other interview went horribly and I got the job at Deliveroo! I’d still recommend showing up wearing biking gear.
- danpalmer 9y agoI did exactly the same thing for Thread (a fashion/tech startup) - wore the cheapest most unfashionable suit possible, because I was a poor student and needed to wear something that would work for multiple interviews in one trip to London. No one at Thread cared, no one at most of the other places cared, but I got the impression one more corporate place cared. I ended up taking the Thread offer, and despite working with people who's job it is to be good at fashion, I've not once felt out of place even though I have no real idea what I'm doing.
- bertil 9y agoImpostor syndrome is one thing — but you might want to know a bit of how fashion is structured if you work at Thread! I got a ton of points during an interview at a similar company by mentioning my uncle’s fashion brand as something “they might not have heard about”. Instant braggadocious “try me” from the interviewer. Turns out, my uncle’s sneakers are genuinely cool.
- danpalmer 9y agoOh completely, I believe I showed significant (genuine) interest in the product, and I've learned a lot about the industry from working here.
- Cthulhu_ 9y agoDepends, I've worked (as a consultant / developer) at a number of widely different companies, and knowledge or interest beforehand of the domain wasn't necessary. (investment banking, trains, shipping, e-commerce, etc)
- arethuza 9y agoI did a lot of interviewing at my last job and I used to ask agencies to tell people they could come along to interviews dressed casually - which seemed fair as I'd be dressed fairly casually. To my surprise a number of recruiters insisted that the people they send along came in suits and ties.
- TheArcane 9y ago> and instead of saying people aren’t smart enough because they don’t have the right pedigree… wait, that’s exactly the same. Does this still happen?
- jcadam 9y agoOf course, I still see job postings requiring a "CS degree from a top school." I think it's great they come right out and admit that they're a bunch of elitist douche-bags so I don't even bother applying. Could you imagine working at such a place with a degree from a :shudder: public university?
- lostboys67 9y agoMy first job was on campus at Cranfield University which regarded those top schools as "alright" (ad Stanford wasn't on the list btw) for your first degree but you had better got a first had the right supervisors.
- santaclaus 9y agoHalf of the top CS programs are public. Well, 40% -- four of the top ten CS programs in the US are state schools.
- arethuza 9y ago"I fear I might if they continued to wear something overly formal at work" Why would you be bothered about what someone wears at work - formal or informal?
- dx034 9y agoCan be important for anyone with client contact. Even if you don't care what people wear, external clients will react differently depending on what you wear. It could be that you specifically don't want to wear suit to give the impression that you're a dynamic start-up but in the end clothing always matters.
- protomyth 9y agoDepending on your position it might also be different for different clients. My friend kept a suit at work in case they had to meet with the feds or a bank. If I ever wore a suit to work, my coworkers would be wondering what was wrong or who was visiting.
- dx034 9y agoExactly, being overdressed can be as bad as underdressed. If everyone expects you to wear jeans and t-shirt, a suit can be as damaging as not wearing one when you're expected to.
- hinkley 9y agoI worked with a guy who had been at this place forever. He would show up in a suit and take long lunches whenever he wanted a raise. And it worked.
- emodendroket 9y agoProgrammer is rarely a client-facing role and I think the odds that someone overdressed can successfully dress down, if requested, are a little bit better than the opposite.
- lmm 9y agoI would be bothered that someone dressing excessively formal might act excessively formally - after all, dressing formally is normally a deliberate display of conformity.
- pjmlp 9y agoNot only in UK, in Portuguese and German company culture that is also expected. At very least some kind of business causal should be weared.
- CaptSpify 9y agoAdditionally: I find it hard to judge a place's definition of "casual" if they aren't fairly explicit. I've worked at places where "casual" meant "hooray, you don't have to wear a tie!" and other places where casual meant "it's a good day if you can't see your co-workers underwear".
- chirau 9y agoI disagree with this article, to some extent at least. Perhaps it's specific for trendy companies and startups. Most of which are just looking for the next shiny object, true. However, when you look at companies that move the needle in different industries, companies that have repute, market share and profitability, they couldn't care less what is trending these days. They look for domain expertise and excellence. I have friends who work at Renaissance, the hedge fund. The company couldn't care less about your grasp of the latest ML framework or Keros or whatever you were. As long as you know what you are doing and are exceptionally good at it. Having worked, full time, at Microsoft, I'd say the same goes there and at Apple, Oracle, even Google for the most part. They don't care about what is trending, just prove your weight. I think this conclusion was drawn from the companies that make the most noise but are actually not major players in industry. The same companies that are hot for a minute until they meet their eventual demise. The most robust, relevant and profitable companies out there basically say, 'F* trends, show us your worth in salt'. It's the hippie companies that ruin it all yet dictate social media conversation...for the 2 minutes their company is hot, then it dies. Long live domain expertise and exceptionality.
- Boothroid 9y agoI want to believe this is true.
- CydeWeys 9y agoMost SWE interviews at Google take place in either Java or C#. These aren't sexy, trendy languages. They're boring line-of-business languages that just work. And the frameworks you already know matters very little.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deepGem 9y agoI think you have the option of taking the test in Java, C++ or Python. I hadn't heard of the C# option. Thank you for mentioning the same.
- majke 9y agoBryan Cantrill at Surge 2013 "Leadership Without Management: Scaling Organizations by Scaling Engineers" aka "Middle management, a toxin or a cancer?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGkVM1B5NuI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGkVM1B5NuI He said clearly - it is possible to hire only the best.
- dsr_ 9y agoStep one is to figure out what "best" means for your company and the positions you have open. Step two is to figure out how to evaluate that effectively.
- keithnz 9y agois this a problem just in areas with the big trendy companies? I've always liked working at smaller companies as it always feel like what you do is more significant and a lot more diverse. I know other smaller companies < 30ish people and they tend to like broader experience and people who can get stuff done. School background counts for little.
- a13n 9y agoDoes anyone else find full-width text hard to read? I had to actually turn my head. Instantly closed the page.
- nitrogen 9y agoResize your browser window.
- a13n 9y agoNo
- misnome 9y agoYeah, I realised after a couple of paragraphs. I just resized my browser instead though.
- userbinator 9y agoIt wraps to the width of your browser window, like a good webpage should.
- raverbashing 9y agoWebpage yes, its contents no
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- a13n 9y agoSaid no designer ever
- mdemare 9y agoUse Safari Reader, or a bookmarklet with similar functionality.
- msl09 9y agoI use reader view in firefox
- santialbo 9y agoI´ve recently been in charge of hiring a lot of people and have probably done +100 interviews in the last year. I generally don´t mind the stack/language candidates have been using but I always value very highly that they have used different stacks and languages during their whole carrer. When I interview 5+ years .NET developers who haven't used another language, not even in their spare time, the result is usually a rejection. Since the time I can spend on interviews is limited I need to discard candidates based on signals, even if that means discarding good candidates.
- philjohn 9y agoThis. It's all about using the right tool for the job, and if you only have a hammer, you start treating everything as a nail. I've used Java, .NET, PHP, Node, Ruby, Python and more in my career - each one for different uses and where there was a good fit.
- tobyhinloopen 9y agoIt is also finding a balance of course. All these technologies you mention are good for most webdevelopment projects. No point in writing everything in a different language
- brightball 9y agoTrue but it does show exploration and curiosity to at least try another language or two. If you’ve been doing .NET or PHP for 5+ years without even trying something else I’d treat it as a red flag too. Level of interest is the #1 quality in the great programmers I’ve been around. If you aren’t exploring even a little that’s a concern.
- astura 9y agoHow silly. Level of interest [in doing unpaid work] doesn't mean a damn thing as far as skill level and work ethic are concerned. Some of the best programmers I've ever met were the 9-5 types and the absolute worst of the worst programmer I've even known spent all his free time writing code. Once you get past 30 it's difficult to spend all your free time doing unpaid work even if you wanted to.
- vog 9y agoIt's strange that this article does not appear in the RSS/Atom feed: https://danluu.com/atom.xml https://danluu.com/atom.xml Is that feed broken? I was quite surprised finding this via my secondary news sources (HN, etc.) rather than my primary news sources (RSS/Atom feeds of blogs I follow).
- grabcocque 9y agoI always forget how much the enlightened community of Hacker News loves to downvote comments drawing attention to the heavily young white privileged male-centric hiring policies of many tech companies. Honestly, you'd think I'd learn, that this community does not like to be reminded quite how regressive our gender, class and racial politics looks to the outside world.
- philliphaydon 9y agoThe outside world being outside of America where pretty much no one cares?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ssijak 9y agoKeywords much?
- lr4444lr 9y agoMaybe they just don't like the casting of aspersions made with no evidence, like yours, to people you've obviously never met.
- outsidetheparty 9y agoIn which Mr. "Grabcocque" takes issue with our regressive gender politics
- outsidetheparty 9y ago(I don't actually disagree with your rant, much, at least for a significant subset of the HN community. This particular article is maybe a somewhat tangential prompt for it, though.)
- 1812312 9y agoShut up and learn how to program.
- qxzw 9y agoHow important is GPA? I will soon get my Master's degree in CS, but it is via the path of least resistence. Therefore GPA is not shiny. I decided that spending my finite time and energy can be better, so I concentrated on coding (my own projects) and socializing, sports and games etc. When I studied for exams, at point where I knew that I was going to pass, I shifted to other projects. Next year when I join the workforce and start looking for jobs, will low GPA bite me?
- flor1s 9y agoIt depends (TM) Some companies value GPA a lot, others do not value it so much at all. See https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-GPA-matter-when-applying-for-software-development-jobs https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-GPA-matter-when-applying...
- amyjess 9y agoThe question is: does it ever matter past the first job? Sure, for your first job, you have no work experience, so your education is all a potential employer has to go on, but I'm wondering if I should remove the GPA from my resume since it's been over a decade since I graduated and have a ton of work experience since.
- consp 9y agoIn my experience there are three types. Note: We don't have GPA, but some companies look at study grades (some only masters, others bachelors grades) and some even go further back to high school/middle school which would be sort of GPA. The types I've met (companies/recruiters alike): 1) Don't care, look at what you think you can do and your motivation for that assessment. They usually also give some form of shorter first contract or traineeship with reduced pay while in training but at least you will get a chance. On the other end, they hire you simply because you have the relevant skill set and show good work ethics (e.g. can work on your own, which is somewhat deducible from your curriculum). 2) Select solely on bachelors/masters grades and don't care about GPA/High school. In my experience this dies out as soon as you have +3 years of work experience. There are so many levels in this category from only looking at relevant fields or looking at all even non relevant. 3) Look at GPA/High/middle/etc school grades and everything else to 'properly select' their employees. They pay good though and usually wear suits, most of them to hide their incompetence in the field they should excel in (I'm not claiming they aren't any good, but usually not in what they are supposed to do).
- SQL2219 9y agoWhat the hell does top 10 school mean anyway? Top 10 most expensive?
- ex_amazon_sde 9y agoSome companies hire by buzzword. Some by looks / first impression / "culture fit" / age. Some care about real skills and behavior. That's pretty much it. Go hunt for the latter and you'll be fine.
- JepZ 9y agoYeah hiring seems to be something hard. I mean it is not as simeple as writing a value to every candiate, sort them and choose the best, but instead you have to individually rate each candidate while considering the effect it will have on your existing company.
- delta1 9y agoThought this article looked familiar. Dan please add dates to your blog posts, Admin please add 2016 to the title.
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- kyleschiller 9y agoPoe's Law
- jstewartmobile 9y agoIt would be nice if the process were a little more transparent. If people just knew that a company rejected them for reason X, that would make a huge difference. If X were stupid, they'd know they missed a bullet. If X were rooted in a misunderstanding, they'd have a chance to clear it up. There is so much side-channel information used in the corporate hiring process, and it gets mixed-up in HR far more often than any company is willing to admit.
- wolfgke 9y ago> If people just knew that a company rejected them for reason X, that would make a huge difference. Give a thanks to the discrimination laws. Companies don't want to give any leads for getting sued.
- freddie_mercury 9y agoThe practice is exactly the same in countries that aren't the U.S. And countries that don't even have discrimination laws. The fact that companies behave the same in the presence of dramatically varying legal norms suggests that your belief that discrimination laws are the problem is baseless.
- wolfgke 9y agoAt least I know that in Germany before the "Allgemeines Gleichbehandlungsgesetz (AGG)" (general equality law) was passed, companies were more open about reasons. Since this law was passed, any openness can easily lead to a lawsuite against the company where the company has to prove that they did not discriminate against the candidate. Indeed when the law was passed there were lots of lawsuits of really untuitable candidates, where the company could nevertheless not prove up to "valid in court" that it did not discriminate against the candidate for reasons specified in this law and thus had to pay the unsuitable candidate some months of salary as compensation.
- emodendroket 9y ago
- TijmenAlberink 9y agofirst impression is important, but clothes dont make the man
- emodendroket 9y agoBut there are plenty of fish in the sea and one man's trash is another man's treasure. On the other hand, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
- guuz 9y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326940
- twoquestions 9y agoDamn, this paints a picture where only the shiniest candidates matter, and the rest of us mere mortals should apologize for breathing their air. How do you know if you're "the best", and if not, how do you become "the best" (or at least employable), or is this industry a "ya got it or ya don't" kind of place like music or art, where only the top 10% deserve to make a living?
- lolive 9y agoBasically, you must understand that you are fighting against yourself. Each day, you fight your former self. You must WANT to become better. The best thing for that is to code a lot (:important) & reread your ancient code (:super important). You will fall in ALL the pitfalls, at first. And then, you will learn to circunvent them. And then you will learn to draw straight lines between the pitfalls, and things will start to become clean. At the end, like Neo in the Matix, you will no longer see the pitfalls. (And then, you will learn FP and you will have to relearn everything. And then Haskell... And then...)
- jamesmp98 9y agoThis is how I see the future of the industry. Either that, or wages get driven down so low that it's not a career worth pursuing anymore
- jakebasile 9y agoThis doesn't just paint the picture, it holds a mirror up to the reality of our industry. If you aren't in SV (or NYC maybe), don't have a degree from an expensive college (or worse, no degree at all!), or haven't worked for FB/Google/Apple, you're basically dog shit to any interviewer. All the clamoring for developers is because so many companies delude themselves into thinking they should only hire the shiniest candidates, as you put it, even though there are thousands of other people who could do the job almost or just as well if they would look at people living in another city, without degrees, and who haven't worked at a huge company and/or unicorn startup. As a bonus, people like that (like me!) are generally cheaper since they don't have to pay the ridiculous cost of living in the Valley, or realize that making enough salary for a comfortable living without going into multiple hundreds of thousands is perfectly fine.
- bambataa 9y agoWhat strikes me about this is how little weight recruiters put on referrals from current employees. I would have thought that being recommended by an internal employee would get you an initial interview at the very least. Surely a trusted employee’s recommendation is more reliable than whatever random sift the recruiters have. Does anyone with experience of recruitment have any stats on how successful referred applicants tend to be?
- drchickensalad 9y agoI've always known referrals to do exactly that; guarantee an interview.
- emodendroket 9y agoHasn't been my experience submitting them.
- demygale 9y agoI don't think recruiters keep metrics on anything. Once the candidate is hired, they consider their job done. Companies appear unwilling to measure recruiting and employee success, so the inefficient hiring processes continue.
- DarronWyke 9y agoDepends upon the type of recruiter. An external one will likely have a few follow-ups, because it's how they get paid. An internal one, however, won't bother unless the company is excessively on the huggy-feely side.
- k__ 9y agoDepends on many things. Is the employee that referred you valued at the company? Did the employee refer bad prospects in the past? How much do they need to fill the position? I saw a few problematic employees that always referred their friends who never got even a call.
- hinkley 9y ago
- Lxr 9y agoI just want to say that I absolutely love this no-frills type of page - tapping the link on mobile and instantly getting nothing but content is such a pleasant surprise!
- whostolemyhat 9y agoI find it really difficult to read on a laptop though, due to the long lines.
- faitswulff 9y agoI've been using Firefox's reader mode to good effect lately. I'd give it a try, or something like it for Chrome.
- DGCA 9y agoI use Outline to make stuff like this easier to read. It works on a ton of sites. Also lets you get around a lot of paywalls. Just made this bookmarklet so you don't have to install any extensions -> https://codepen.io/dgca/full/BmNdmy/ https://codepen.io/dgca/full/BmNdmy/
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jerianasmith 9y agoWhether you are trendy or not, what counts is your expertise in your niche. You just have to prove your worth and you are good to go.
- dustingetz 9y agoPattern matching has problems but it also evolved because other signals are even weaker, I'd like to see an analysis centered around this idea
- emodendroket 9y agoBut if they're using heuristics proven to have no value over recommendations, which probably have some value, then I'm not sure that's what's going on.
- humanrebar 9y agoEvolution works over many generations and is most pronounced when there is an evolutionary advantage. Certain kinds of "pattern matching" could be vestigial like wisdom teeth or less important than other things, like freckles and moles. Point being, maybe the company has great sales or some unassailable market advantage. They could form an untested hypothesis around their hiring preferences since the success of the organization is largely unaffected by it.
- emodendroket 9y agoThis is an older piece but it's really timeless. I have some experience because my first job programming was at a small nonprofit, on a tiny team, doing .NET software, and during the job search when I sought to move on there were a lot of backhanded complements about how they didn't expect me to do that well on their evaluations.
- danschumann 9y agoAre there not plenty of companies that hire only older, more experienced people? Such as government entities and large corporations? Seems like we always hear about the pro-youth companies. Perhaps its only silicon valley.
- emodendroket 9y agoSilicon Valley is an extreme example, but I don't think it's bucking the general trend.
- frwntfwtr 9y agoDnsnd
- nanodano 9y agoWhen I hear "we only hire the best" it just sounds like generic crap an HR person added, not a big red flag that they are snobs. I don't think it really means anything. By definition, anyone hiring anyone wants to only hire the best. Nobody wants to hire only the mediocre. If I hear things like that I generally just ignore it. Anyway, the author makes all kinds of unfounded assumptions. Someone with .NET and Windows experience may not actually be relevant to a backend Unix system. Their assumption though is "they don't like Windows people." Is it not actually possible their work experience was irrelevant? Is the first or most reasonable conclusion you come to really, 'they don't like windows people." Seriously? That is purely an assumption driven by their own stereotypes and opinions. "They said they didn't hire me because my experience was irrelevant, but I know the truth. They are bigoted against Windows people! That's the REAL reason!"
- gurkendoktor 9y ago> By definition, anyone hiring anyone wants to only hire the best. Nobody wants to hire only the mediocre. ...unless the best ask for more money. When I hear "we only hire the best", I assume that the company is willing to pay very competitively. The other end of the spectrum would be companies that try to do everything with juniors or outsourcing teams.
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoeh from my experience you can just say that, because there are no consequences and the startup won't be around long enough to get called out on it
- JamesBarney 9y agoIf you look at Triplebyte posts they've said before that there is significant bias against enterprise backgrounds. And so they recommend that if you have an enterprise background to try to minimize it in tech interviews. And there methodology isn't just "enterprise people get hired less", it's there is a large discrepancy between how well they do on Triplebyte internal tests and reviews which are pretty standardized and how often their client's hire them(which is usually a much lower quality, more biased process).
- alskdfji 9y agoThis was the most depressing part to me: "Another person I know is in a similar situation because his group won’t talk to people who aren’t already employed." It's a long story, but both my wife and I have most recently been at places, in a small-medium city, that have had huge turnover in the last several years due to mismanagement (her entire unit, except for her, left twice while she was working with them; we've lost about 30% of our employees in the last few years). She was pressured to resign after returning from her maternity leave because, as far as I can tell, they figured out they could cut her position and offload the work onto others while she was gone. So she's stayed home to raise our child. I haven't lost my position, but every week brings a new clusterfuck of horrors that I'm running out of ways of coping with. The problem is, now she's wanting to return to work, and has a job offer, but it's in another state, and it's created a situation where basically I have to give up a job and probably career, or she has to run the risk of her career dying off because of lack of opportunities in the area. So if I take time off to watch our child while my wife rebuilds her career, and maybe move to a different career myself, somehow I'm penalized? Pardon my language, but fuck that. I'm also in my early 40s, so there's that. I'm starting to feel like my life is ending, really, like opportunities are just vanishing left and right. It's odd because up until this point I always felt optimistic, like there was always something out there for us. My wife comes from an elite school, we both graduated with Ph.D.s from a program in the top 5 in our field (according to dubious rankings), if you're into that. I don't mean this narcissistically, but I just feel like there's this huge discrepancy between what I know my wife and I are, in terms of work ethic and competency, and what our opportunities are.
- the-dude 9y agoRaise the child, build a business from home. I would sign for it in a heartbeat.
- mrkurt 9y agoThat is sometimes good advice for developers. But only sometimes — it's not work that interests mosts people. For most careers, it's not very reasonable to quit a job and try to build a company.
- 9y ago
- technovader 9y agoI love the format of this blog post (plain text in full width of the screen). Reminds me of the 90s and is a breath of fresh air (no ads or performance issues on the page)
- amiga-workbench 9y agoThe web is responsive by default after all :)
- ben_jones 9y agoGood for them honestly. We can only hire the best who aren't recruited out of college by Google, Facebook, etc.
- iainmerrick 9y agoIf Google's hiring is as good as this article suggests, it must have changed a lot in the last few years. Can anyone point me at an up-to-date article on Google's hiring process? Not so long ago, they were very focused on school rankings, GPAs, and academic qualifications. I always felt this was misguided because it was nowhere near as objective and quantitative as they thought. More recently they said they had a big data-driven effort to improve their process, but it was hard to tell if that really led to new ideas, or if it was just more of the same veiled elitism.
- meatyapp 9y agoI was resume screened/rejected from many no name companies. Google was one of the only few who took a chance on me and I think that's so cool.
- iainmerrick 9y agoThat's great! As an anecdote from the other side -- a friend of mine got referred to Google, was interviewed but not hired. A year later they called up and asked if he was still interested, interviewed him again, and rejected him again. Then a year later they called him again, and... you get the picture!
- beat 9y agoSo here's the thing... hiring at larger, growing companies often means weeding through a stack of a hundred resumes, for one or two or five roles. Most of those resumes need to go away. The interview process, for competent candidates, is going to cost you at bare minimum a half hour of one person's time for initial screening. A quality interview is going to take a couple of hours each for a few important people - managers and senior/lead tech staff, for engineering jobs. Considering pg's maximum about maker schedules, the hiring process is very disruptive for the productivity of some of your most valuable tech staff. So you want to get rid of 19 resumes out of 20, without ever interviewing them. And for that, you need heuristics. And those heuristics are, in all likelihood, going to be biased and stupid in some ways. For example, I will automatically reject any resume that has more than two typos. I consider it evidence of carelessness - I don't care if you can't spell, but I do care if you don't bother to run it past someone else who can for editing. The danger is that a heuristic - any heuristic - for filtering out resumes will inevitably lead to missing some candidates who would excel in the role. Oh well. I'm not going to waste time interviewing every possible candidate, just hoping to catch that magic person. It's irresponsible.
- digitalsushi 9y agoi overheard this in an elevator, "our HR department tosses the bottom half of resumes in the pile into the trash because we refuse to hire unlucky people"
- volkk 9y agoha. except perhaps they're the unlucky ones because they chucked out a great engineers resume and the engineer is actually the lucky one ;)
- cwbrandsma 9y agoor, "the lucky engineers had their resumes tossed in the trash so they didn't have to waist their time at that company"
- 9y ago
- donretag 9y ago"who was tragically underemployed for years because of his low GPA in college" Who puts their GPA on their resume, or even discusses it, 2-3 years out of school? I have never discussed GPA or anything about their academic experience to mid/senior level candidates, nor has anyone ever asked me.
- nanodano 9y agoTotally agree with this. If they were tragically underemployed for years, I'd bet almost anything it was not because of their college GPA. Nobody looks at GPA, or cares, or even expects it to be there, unless you have never had a job and have nothing else to put on your resume. As someone who has interviewed many developers, GPA has never, ever even come up as a topic.
- rb808 9y agoThe comments about Microsoft tech stack are interesting. The best, most successful, most reliable most loved by users application I worked on was distributed C# SOA system windows with a relational database. However coming off that job I had trouble finding work. Now I work on a Scala/Java/Python with containers - we have so many problems - its difficult to use and maintain but suddenly I'm drowning in job offers.
- jamesmp98 9y agoSorry, but it's not JavaScript
- larsbars 9y agoThis is great news for any company who's able to see a few millimeters through the bullshit. Just hire people who are strong with computer science fundamentals, any maybe a few others who can play cross-functional roles. Treat them like a team and create proper mentorship/leadership dynamics. Work towards a common goal and empower the team. Watch them become one of the more functional teams in the tech industry. The companies that hire fresh-out programmers from top schools have such an uphill battle. They have to handle people who have huge ego's from being sought after all bickering with each other on the team. They have to deal with the mistakes of people who think they know how to build something good for the company but are actually just wide-eyed and pig-headed. And then they have to deal with the fact that these people who are the "cream of the crop" will leave in a year or two to another companies' offer because even though this first company hired with a high salary no company in tech understands how to promote or give raises from within. It's always about the fresh and shiny new employee because almost all of tech is broken and once the reality of a team/person is seen it never meets expectations.
- jamesmp98 9y agoThere not enough developers to fill the demand though!
- Yahivin 9y agobody { max-width: 960px; margin: auto; padding-top: 2em; }
- ksk 9y agoThere is a school of thought that the user should be in charge of resizing a window.
- CalChris 9y agoYour job, as a job seeker, is to get passed HR to a hiring manager. You can go through HR, around HR (a buddy ships your res to a hiring manager) or over HR (an exec or VC flips your res to a hiring manager). You will not be working for HR. They are merely an impediment to be overcome. If you wish, you can think of it as the border. You can apply for legal immigration (lengthy and dicey; think of the immigration and interview scenes in Thunderdome), you can have a mule help you across (ideally this should cost you a lunch; the mule will get a bonus from BigCo), or you can be awarded special status based on your illustrious and meritorious service to the glorious republic as determined by and at the sole discretion of its benevolent leaders. Any which way, get passed HR. Do not complain about HR. Just show your skill set (networking, interview prep, ...) and get passed them.
- leroy_masochist 9y agoI thought this was a great commentary and it reminds me of the tendency of early-stage CEOs to say, "we really don't care that much about your current skill set, we just want to hire athletes" ('athlete' in this case meaning someone very talented and hard-working). The message these founders are trying to communicate here is, "we want to hire people who have the capacity to learn and grow and who are willing to work long hours, so we'll overindex on those qualities and be accept the fact that many people who fit these criteria are more risky hires, in that they have not been doing a similar job at another company prior to us hiring them." Based on anecdotal observations of many hiring decisions, what these founders often actually have in mind is, "we want to hire people who've achieved prestigious milestones". And so they will hire a person whose school prestige/GPA/employer prestige factor is high, but who is not likely to succeed in the role. Anyway the upside of all this is, as OP mentioned, there's a lot of underserved talent out there.
- senatorobama 9y agoWhy is this guy so obsessed about salaries?
- swolchok 9y agoThis article is from 2016, per the main page at https://danluu.com/ https://danluu.com/ . Can we get a (2016) in the title?
- newusertoday 9y agoI think reason people don't want to hire windows/.net is because of very low signal to noise ratio. This makes detecting a good developer very difficult from bad developer as 9/10 times it is a waste of time interviewing them and after doing this for a while u develop unconscious bias towards some technology/platform.
- mementomori 9y ago>By going after people with the most sought after qualifications, TrendCo has narrowed their options down to either paying out the nose for employees, or offering non-competitive compensation packages. TrendCo has chosen the latter option, which partially explains why they have, proportionally, so few senior devs – the compensation delta increases as you get more senior, and you have to make a really compelling pitch to someone to get them to choose TrendCo when you’re offering $150k/yr less than the competition. What is the "compensation delta"? Is that part of a formula for calculating expected compensation? For that matter, what is a good formula for calculating compensation when weighing job offers?
- mathattack 9y agoMy engineering friends thought Mike’s resume was fine If they thought it was fine, they could easily tell HR, "Interview this person" and just like that, they're past the screen. (I don't know why it too me so long to learn this.)
- jroseattle 9y ago"We only hire the best" is a statement made by those who subconsciously don't believe they project outward quality and excellence in their everyday execution. It's as if those on the selling side believe that others see them as just-another-job, and they need to refute it. It's not a red-flag, but quite literally ignore the remark -- it's pointless white noise. As for uninformed biases about tech stack and experience and what-not -- yep, that's going to happen. It's fairly well-known that hiring is basically a broken experience, even at the very best of companies. Don't expect everyone to get it. In terms of MS stack vs non-MS stack, the reality is it's a hit and miss proposition. The OP's story about his colleague being competent in general comp-sci can be matched with plenty of others where the individual's competency seems to stop at Win32. My advice -- if your resume points only to MS-stack systems, get something non-MS on there. I'm in Seattle, we run non-MS systems and I see quite a few MSFT-based resumes. I'm ex-MSFT and feel I can gauge competency across these lines fairly effectively. Many companies are willing to give some a chance, but learning Linux on their dime-and-time? That's a lot to ask. With all of this, take it with a grain of salt. The common basis most people are told to follow is "hire slow, fire fast". In reality, this just means be super-conservative in your hiring decisions. Super-conservative leads to people "checking off all the boxes" in case something doesn't pan out -- that way they won't be criticized later.
- makesthingspos 9y agoIs ToolCo Google and ProdCo Microsoft?
- tmccrmck 9y agoJudging by his resume... yes.
- babesh 9y agoInstitutional bias is perpetuated this very way.... Who do you think was more likely to go to the elite school given the same or inferior test scores?
- dsign 9y agoI was there a few years ago: good academic title, good coding skills, some industry experience. But I also hit a wall trying to get a job .... My problem was that I was doing it "the right way" which turns out to be the wrong one. The application process is terribly broken, as somebody noted above. Which makes me think, as developers we get this entire hiring thing wrong. Next time I want a job, I will think hard about a way to hustle it without entering the application process.
- throw2016 9y agoThis is a culture of fabricated hyper-competitiveness just for the sake of making a few feel special. It's completely integrated, cultural and also immature. There is really not that much difference between people for the range of jobs available to create this mythology. The stars or 'the best' are Sergey and Larry not the people now working at Google etc. Employees could be talented, efficient but they are like the millions of other faceless people working at corporations and this is not meant to diminish them. But the special ones usually made their own way and are know for that. And you don't have to be a billionaire. There are tons of software folks who have distinguished themselves. There is a lot of self aggrandizement and pandering to egos on among employees and hiring companies.
- Balgair 9y agoA lot of people in this thread need to read about the Secretary Problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem This method would help solve a lot of the issues people have with hiring and applying to jobs. The argument is then how to set N correctly.
- dzonga 9y agothen what happens to us from no name schools ? get interviews only to be told you're too early into your career.
- dlwdlw 9y agoLarge companies IMO aren't setup to take advantage of arbitrary levels of ability. They're antifragile in being able to ingest common denominator type skills and plod along despite bad engineering. The lynchpins are already in place BEFORE the hiring/growth phase. New hires that can actually compete with the established lynchpins only scatter the attention and increase the failure rate by questioning leadership. A lean chain of intent is necessary to hit a goal as the slack compounds each layer down the chain. This is terrible for exploratory action because the output space is myopically limited but necessary for goal setting. Fatter chains often produce more total value but that energy is dispersed and the revenue streams often cannot take advantage of the innovation. An analogy I like to use is trebuchets and daggers. JavaScript ability is like a dagger, generically useful but fungible and always in some sort of demand. Trebuchets are much more complex and much better at doing certain types of damage but the only buyers are castle seiging kings who may have already invested everything in a catapult producing supply chain. Most fields like archaeology or art history don't expect their specialization to be highly compensated but often fields that go through periods of hype don't realize their skills can lose relevance. There are a lot of people learning ML now for example but once commoditization of tools and techniques happens the actual number of jobs may become too low to have market liquidity. Unlike A/B testing consultants. Currently everyone in software can have their cake and eat it too but it's a position of privilege and luck and often this is forgotten.