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Presumably people are paying you to find good engineers, not just people who match particular profiles. If "rational prejudice" doesn't always find the good en

by panic 8y ago

Presumably people are paying you to find good engineers, not just people who match particular profiles. If "rational prejudice" doesn't always find the good engineers, why justify it like this? Wouldn't it be better to take this as evidence that your approach could use improvement?

darawk 8y ago
No. You have limited resources to sift through people. Heuristics like this are an efficient way to reduce your search space. That is sort of the whole point of statistics.
- deleted 8y ago
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curun1r 8y ago
> people are paying you to find good engineers No, they're paying them to find engineers that will pass the interview process. It's a subtle, but important distinction since prejudices that exist among engineers will naturally develop in recruiters. It's the recruiting equivalent of teaching to the test. And like it or not, the kind of signaling the article describes is real. When an engineer says they can write clojure, it indicates a curiosity that ability to program JavaScript does not. Almost no one is forced to learn Clojure because of some job, project or even job prospects. It means you likely cared enough to devote your own time to learning for the sake of learning. And a lot of engineers look at this kind of thing as important and screen for it in interviews. A recruiter operating any differently would be like a machine learning algorithm that ignores its training data.
- gaius 8y ago
  It means you likely cared enough to devote your own time to learning for the sake of learning. And a lot of engineers look at this kind of thing as important and screen for it in interviews. The curious thing is, I think the number who regard it as important is likely far higher than the number who actually do it. Which is understandable; once you reach a level of seniority you also have many other demands on your time and may not be able to be a hobbyist anymore on top of day job, family commitments and so on. So maybe once you learnt every new language but now you don’t have the opportunity, or you have decided to “go deep” in just a few, established languages. So the power of the signal is highly variable depending both on where the interviewer and interviewee are in their lives. Also, knowing JS in the late-90s did indicate a curious and ambitious developer. It only went mainstream later...

by panic 8y ago

darawk 8y ago

No. You have limited resources to sift through people. Heuristics like this are an efficient way to reduce your search space. That is sort of the whole point of statistics.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

curun1r 8y ago

> people are paying you to find good engineers No, they're paying them to find engineers that will pass the interview process. It's a subtle, but important distinction since prejudices that exist among engineers will naturally develop in recruiters. It's the recruiting equivalent of teaching to the test. And like it or not, the kind of signaling the article describes is real. When an engineer says they can write clojure, it indicates a curiosity that ability to program JavaScript does not. Almost no one is forced to learn Clojure because of some job, project or even job prospects. It means you likely cared enough to devote your own time to learning for the sake of learning. And a lot of engineers look at this kind of thing as important and screen for it in interviews. A recruiter operating any differently would be like a machine learning algorithm that ignores its training data.

gaius 8y ago
It means you likely cared enough to devote your own time to learning for the sake of learning. And a lot of engineers look at this kind of thing as important and screen for it in interviews. The curious thing is, I think the number who regard it as important is likely far higher than the number who actually do it. Which is understandable; once you reach a level of seniority you also have many other demands on your time and may not be able to be a hobbyist anymore on top of day job, family commitments and so on. So maybe once you learnt every new language but now you don’t have the opportunity, or you have decided to “go deep” in just a few, established languages. So the power of the signal is highly variable depending both on where the interviewer and interviewee are in their lives. Also, knowing JS in the late-90s did indicate a curious and ambitious developer. It only went mainstream later...