4 ms·

In any other profession I would agree with the complete nonsense going on with hiring, but at least in IT (and at least in the bay area), there is such a demand

In any other profession I would agree with the complete nonsense going on with hiring, but at least in IT (and at least in the bay area), there is such a demand for engineers that I don't see this going on too much except at some of the big shops (Google, Facebook etc) which are frontended with incompetent recruiters that only look at keywords.

lovich 8y ago
Outside of Silicon Valley, there are many ridiculous hiring practices. On the east coast I have applied to multiple companies where I knew enough of the employees to get dinner with the team after. When we talked about hiring policies and practices all but one of those dinners ended up with a fight between the coworkers that fell into two teams of whether they should fail candidates over not wearing a suit because it showed they weren't professional or whether they should fail a candidate for wearing a suit because they valued looks over ability. Hell every single job I've worked at had multiple people whose requirements to hire someone were so difficult that they, themselves wouldn't have been hired A lot of the software worlds application process out of a few tech hubs is just shotgunning applications so that you get your resume in front of enough hiring managers who are having a good day that you get an interview.
- learc83 8y ago
  I think this is a product of the relative immaturity of our industry, and the problems exist inside SV companies as well as outside. We tend to cargo cult interview practices from whomever the big player of the week is (IBM, then MS, now Google). Then we justify these awful hiring practices by convincing ourselves that programming is so hard that of course we need to put candidates through 6 rounds of interviews and treat people with 20 years of experience like new grads.
  - lovich 8y ago
    Agreed on the immaturity of our industry being a cause for problems. The industrial revolution took nearly 100 years to permeate through society and create standard practices for many industries. Computer technology and science has only been around for a little over half of that, and the fact that the majority of it is abstractions that our brains didnt evolve for as opposed to plain physics which we do have instincts for, appears to be making it harder for us to come to a consensus as to the right way to solve these problems

lovich 8y ago

Outside of Silicon Valley, there are many ridiculous hiring practices. On the east coast I have applied to multiple companies where I knew enough of the employees to get dinner with the team after. When we talked about hiring policies and practices all but one of those dinners ended up with a fight between the coworkers that fell into two teams of whether they should fail candidates over not wearing a suit because it showed they weren't professional or whether they should fail a candidate for wearing a suit because they valued looks over ability. Hell every single job I've worked at had multiple people whose requirements to hire someone were so difficult that they, themselves wouldn't have been hired A lot of the software worlds application process out of a few tech hubs is just shotgunning applications so that you get your resume in front of enough hiring managers who are having a good day that you get an interview.

learc83 8y ago
I think this is a product of the relative immaturity of our industry, and the problems exist inside SV companies as well as outside. We tend to cargo cult interview practices from whomever the big player of the week is (IBM, then MS, now Google). Then we justify these awful hiring practices by convincing ourselves that programming is so hard that of course we need to put candidates through 6 rounds of interviews and treat people with 20 years of experience like new grads.
- lovich 8y ago
  Agreed on the immaturity of our industry being a cause for problems. The industrial revolution took nearly 100 years to permeate through society and create standard practices for many industries. Computer technology and science has only been around for a little over half of that, and the fact that the majority of it is abstractions that our brains didnt evolve for as opposed to plain physics which we do have instincts for, appears to be making it harder for us to come to a consensus as to the right way to solve these problems