3 ms·

Hiring Sucks

20 points by guyshachar 9y ago

MsMowz 9y ago
I know hiring is hard, and the truly qualified candidates for any posting are sparse, but startups throw out way too many potentially-decent candidates before giving them a real look. Bigger companies can afford to use more blunt heuristics than startups can. When that "elite 1%" only makes up .1% of your applicants, you have to be willing to use a finer comb. I can't speak to the general case, only my personal experience as an applicant and early employee at 3 startups, but I can't count how many times I've been told that I wasn't a good fit (pre-interview) because I didn't have experience with parts of their tech stack, even though any developer worth hiring for those early positions should be able to pick up a new stack and run with it. Very little development experience is actually "irrelevant" to any given opening.
- alexandercrohde 9y ago
  Absolutely. In my experience it's the non-technical (or pseudo-technical) internal recruiter who's the most common issue.
rplnt 9y ago
What's with the use of female pronouns? I've seen it third time this week I think, referring to an imaginary/unknown developer as a woman. Isn't the norm to use "they" if one wants to avoid using specific gender?
- uoaei 9y ago
  >Isn't the norm to use "they" In theory, yes, but in practice we see "he" used way more. The subtext is that it is a lot more noticeable when people use "she" precisely because the opposite is used so often in typical writing. It is a response to underrepresentation, only made more salient because of the recent political conversation surrounding women in employment. Your reaction seems to prove the point.
  - rplnt 9y ago
    While it stands out to me (for different reasons than you think), it doesn't evoke a message of awareness. I see "fixing" one issue by creating another as worse than doing nothing. Especially since there's a clear way how to solve it. And "they" is such a great concept in my opinion. Along with having neutral position name, there's no bias towards one gender. That is not possible in my native language, there would be different word for male and female occupations (think actor/actress, but for virtually everything).
    - uoaei 9y ago
      Pray tell, how is this causing a problem? One could reverse the gender of the pronouns in TFA and your argument still holds. In a perfect world, everyone would use "they." Some people consider it necessary to respond to the prevalent usage of gendered pronouns to reverse the gender in common usage for the purpose of inciting conversations exactly like this one. IMO it's working to bring gender assumptions from a subconscious to a conscious phenomenon, which is the biggest step toward dissolving the underlying assumptions.
  - jhgb 9y ago
    > Your reaction seems to prove the point. I don't think it does. Markedness is much more universal in language and not merely affecting grammatical gender in indeterminate contexts. If "the point" in question is some kind of job underrepresentation, it would be more plausible that this pronoun thing is some kind of symptom of it if this indeterminate gender issue were isolated and recent, but the indeterminate gender is ancient (older than any jobs, in fact), and markedness in general is pervasive, so I'm not sure what it could prove about recent job issues.
    - uoaei 9y ago
      >If "the point" in question is some kind of job underrepresentation Still seeing the forest for the trees. The point isn't job underrepresentation in meatspace, the point is that the underlying assumptions about gender roles in employment are expressing and reinforcing themselves whenever the English language is written with a determinate gender as in TFA. And that determined gender seems to be disproportionately male to any perceptive reader. This betrays that the forces that engender (pun intended?) discrimination are operating in the writer and are reinforcing the worldviews of those who still hold such prejudices. The causal relation between using this language and discriminating against women is not a direct one, but it's intellectually dishonest to assume on the flipside that no relation exists in anybody who does habitually use gendered pronouns in their writing.
- jhgb 9y ago
  > Isn't the norm to use "they" if one wants to avoid using specific gender? Technically, the "norm" in IE languages that haven't dropped M/F distinctions (those that did include, e.g., some Scandinavian languages or dialects) is masculine in indefinite and interrogative contexts (feminine implies markedness), but since English doesn't really have a norm, it's more of a do-as-you-please situation.
s3nnyy 9y ago
> "Not to mention HR companies which in my opinion are during this stage, a complete waste of time and money. But mostly time." Well, most recruiters are promising you that they are "experts" in their field and will bring you the best engineers. And then nothing happens for weeks or you get spammed with crappy CVs which is even worse (waste of time). I am a former programmer, now running coderfit.com in Zurich. I am doing tech recruitment for a couple of very early stage startups here. I am switching to a retainer-based model where the company prepays me a third of the fee before I start working. Especially for hard to fill roles, for instance, no-name startups, this is a better strategy than just working on pure commission. So, if working with recruiters at all look for the ones that will offer this. Also ask: "From ten profiles you send us, how many will we approximately hire?" When they can't answer, that is a bad sign.
xiphias 9y ago
I have no idea why it's hard for the author to hire people.. I'd just love to have a boss whose main dictionary contains sentences like: - hiring sucks - I hate you - on demand economy is a lie I understand that hiring is a hard problem, but this essay just convienced me _not_ to join the company the author has created, as it seems like he's not the guy who can keep up the positive tone even in the hardest times for the company. If he's already stressed, what happens when things get harder?

20 points by guyshachar 9y ago

I know hiring is hard, and the truly qualified candidates for any posting are sparse, but startups throw out way too many potentially-decent candidates before giving them a real look. Bigger companies can afford to use more blunt heuristics than startups can. When that "elite 1%" only makes up .1% of your applicants, you have to be willing to use a finer comb. I can't speak to the general case, only my personal experience as an applicant and early employee at 3 startups, but I can't count how many times I've been told that I wasn't a good fit (pre-interview) because I didn't have experience with parts of their tech stack, even though any developer worth hiring for those early positions should be able to pick up a new stack and run with it. Very little development experience is actually "irrelevant" to any given opening.

alexandercrohde 9y ago
Absolutely. In my experience it's the non-technical (or pseudo-technical) internal recruiter who's the most common issue.

rplnt 9y ago

What's with the use of female pronouns? I've seen it third time this week I think, referring to an imaginary/unknown developer as a woman. Isn't the norm to use "they" if one wants to avoid using specific gender?

uoaei 9y ago
>Isn't the norm to use "they" In theory, yes, but in practice we see "he" used way more. The subtext is that it is a lot more noticeable when people use "she" precisely because the opposite is used so often in typical writing. It is a response to underrepresentation, only made more salient because of the recent political conversation surrounding women in employment. Your reaction seems to prove the point.
- rplnt 9y ago
  While it stands out to me (for different reasons than you think), it doesn't evoke a message of awareness. I see "fixing" one issue by creating another as worse than doing nothing. Especially since there's a clear way how to solve it. And "they" is such a great concept in my opinion. Along with having neutral position name, there's no bias towards one gender. That is not possible in my native language, there would be different word for male and female occupations (think actor/actress, but for virtually everything).
  - uoaei 9y ago
    Pray tell, how is this causing a problem? One could reverse the gender of the pronouns in TFA and your argument still holds. In a perfect world, everyone would use "they." Some people consider it necessary to respond to the prevalent usage of gendered pronouns to reverse the gender in common usage for the purpose of inciting conversations exactly like this one. IMO it's working to bring gender assumptions from a subconscious to a conscious phenomenon, which is the biggest step toward dissolving the underlying assumptions.
- jhgb 9y ago
  > Your reaction seems to prove the point. I don't think it does. Markedness is much more universal in language and not merely affecting grammatical gender in indeterminate contexts. If "the point" in question is some kind of job underrepresentation, it would be more plausible that this pronoun thing is some kind of symptom of it if this indeterminate gender issue were isolated and recent, but the indeterminate gender is ancient (older than any jobs, in fact), and markedness in general is pervasive, so I'm not sure what it could prove about recent job issues.
  - uoaei 9y ago
    >If "the point" in question is some kind of job underrepresentation Still seeing the forest for the trees. The point isn't job underrepresentation in meatspace, the point is that the underlying assumptions about gender roles in employment are expressing and reinforcing themselves whenever the English language is written with a determinate gender as in TFA. And that determined gender seems to be disproportionately male to any perceptive reader. This betrays that the forces that engender (pun intended?) discrimination are operating in the writer and are reinforcing the worldviews of those who still hold such prejudices. The causal relation between using this language and discriminating against women is not a direct one, but it's intellectually dishonest to assume on the flipside that no relation exists in anybody who does habitually use gendered pronouns in their writing.
jhgb 9y ago
> Isn't the norm to use "they" if one wants to avoid using specific gender? Technically, the "norm" in IE languages that haven't dropped M/F distinctions (those that did include, e.g., some Scandinavian languages or dialects) is masculine in indefinite and interrogative contexts (feminine implies markedness), but since English doesn't really have a norm, it's more of a do-as-you-please situation.

s3nnyy 9y ago

> "Not to mention HR companies which in my opinion are during this stage, a complete waste of time and money. But mostly time." Well, most recruiters are promising you that they are "experts" in their field and will bring you the best engineers. And then nothing happens for weeks or you get spammed with crappy CVs which is even worse (waste of time). I am a former programmer, now running coderfit.com in Zurich. I am doing tech recruitment for a couple of very early stage startups here. I am switching to a retainer-based model where the company prepays me a third of the fee before I start working. Especially for hard to fill roles, for instance, no-name startups, this is a better strategy than just working on pure commission. So, if working with recruiters at all look for the ones that will offer this. Also ask: "From ten profiles you send us, how many will we approximately hire?" When they can't answer, that is a bad sign.

xiphias 9y ago

I have no idea why it's hard for the author to hire people.. I'd just love to have a boss whose main dictionary contains sentences like: - hiring sucks - I hate you - on demand economy is a lie I understand that hiring is a hard problem, but this essay just convienced me _not_ to join the company the author has created, as it seems like he's not the guy who can keep up the positive tone even in the hardest times for the company. If he's already stressed, what happens when things get harder?