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We hire the top 5% of applicants. This says a lot about our applicant pool. It says very little about our team. No one here is from a top program. Many don't ev
by cirgue 8y ago
We hire the top 5% of applicants. This says a lot about our applicant pool. It says very little about our team. No one here is from a top program. Many don't even have CS degrees.
- pmiller2 8y agoHow do you measure this? I would wager that, at best, you're hiring the top 5% of applicants based on interview performance. It's likely you know little or nothing about what that says vis a vis job performance, because your interview probably doesn't exercise skills used on the job, except in a very tangential way.
- eberkund 8y agoI think he just means that they hire 5% of applicants, by definition they are the top 5% because they are the ones they chose to hire. Unless of course they have a significant number of people going through the entire interview process only to decline the offer.
- pmiller2 8y agoThat's pretty close to the point I was making. They call it the top 5% because 5% of people pass their interview. The company doesn't have any idea whether those people (out of the entire pool) are the best candidates to do the job they were hired to do, because the company probably doesn't measure that. And, they sure don't know that their "top 5%" is representative of the top 5% of all engineers. For starters, how do you measure that?
- rorykoehler 8y agoNo you don't. I know you don't because you have no idea who the top 5% of applicants are. Not after interviews, not after 6 months on the job, not even 10 years in the job. You can't distill something as complex as humans working in teams that form a part of a larger organisation into a single number like that. That's not how the world works. For example Bob was doing great work but then his wife cheated on him and he is doing less great work. Is Bob in the top 5% or not?
- cirgue 8y agoYou're completely right of course, we hire people who we believe are the top 5% of the applicant pool. The point remains the same: what a company says about their hiring standards has little or no bearing on what their standards actually are in the context of the entire universe of software engineers (or any other field)
- rorykoehler 8y agoI'm still not quite sure what you think the 5% measures?
- kamaal 8y agoThis discussion came up in even during that Netflix thread. These companies aren't looking for top 1% people. They are looking for top 1% people who are in form currently. The day you get unlucky and slip out of form, they don't want you.
- rorykoehler 8y agoWhich means they will miss the real top performers. The savants who are capable of flashes of brilliance that can make whole new industries. These people will most definitely fall outside any measure / quantifiable scale that any company uses for comfort.
- kamaal 8y agoThey apparently want people are having flashes of brilliance at this moment. They don't want them on their payroll once the flash dies. Then they want the next set of savants in form. Its basically the equivalent reducing the great people to Kleenex. Once used, they want to throw them. Then buy the next Kleenex box.