5 ms·

Your comment is chock full of flawed and patently false ideas. Firstly, I have yet to encounter a company with a hiring process that is actually, provably, repe

by maxaf 7y ago

Your comment is chock full of flawed and patently false ideas. Firstly, I have yet to encounter a company with a hiring process that is actually, provably, repeatedly tied to any of that company’s business needs. Designing a working hiring process is harder than the software work that the hiring is for. It’s no surprise that results usually seem arbitrary and ineffective. Secondly, and following up on my first critique, an ineffective hiring process usually leads to the hiring of candidates who are good at interviewing, not at the actual work. These are the literal “bad hires” that should have been sifted out by the hiring process.

isugimpy 7y ago
Having just gone through the interview process with a very well known tech company, as someone who is honestly pretty terrible at interviewing, I think some companies actually get it. It's really a matter of the interviewer at play. Two of the phases I went through really aligned with the company's needs. I was interviewing for a SRE position, and in one phase they gave me a broken EC2 instance that had been manually configured and asked me to get it back up and running. That's a legit task that I've had to do in daily work for years, because there's ALWAYS going to be someone that does a quick hack to get something working and forgets to productionize it. It was a completely contrived box that didn't actually serve customers, but still a good exercise. In another phase, they had me completely blind fire design some infrastructure (without a complete picture of what the current state of the application is) to lead toward a scalable solution for a real problem they're facing. While, yes, that's basically them getting me to do unpaid work, since I didn't put hands on a keyboard during it and really just talked it through with them, I feel like that was a great exercise in seeing how I thought and could work with a member of the team. There's no truly bulletproof solution to interviewing, because the needs of every org are different, and the skills of interviewers are rarely nurtured to the point of usefulness. Sometimes you just have to luck out and get a good interview.
dahart 7y ago
> Your comment is chock full of flawed and patently false ideas. Whoa, what triggered and justified that response? I don’t know if the parent was edited, but it seems pretty reasonable to me. > Firstly, I have yet to encounter a company with a hiring process that is actually, provably, repeatedly tied to any of that company’s business needs. What do you mean? Why do companies hire then? > an ineffective hiring process usually leads to the hiring of candidates who are good at interviewing, not at the actual work. These are the literal “bad hires” This hasn’t been true in my experience. Why would someone who’s good at the work not tend to be good at interviews? I’ve interviewed hundreds of people and hired dozens. The number one reason for a candidate not getting a position is that there was another better candidate. More often than not, it has nothing to do with how good the candidate is, nor does it have anything to do with how good the company’s interview process is. After that, there is usually a large number of candidates that are young and shooting above their weight, hoping to get in somewhere with almost enough qualification. Occasionally, that works. I haven’t bumped into anyone yet that was great at interviewing but not good at the work, but like many companies, I’m using the interviews to try and find out if they’ll fit it, and if they’re truly interested, and if they’re good at work.
- codingdave 7y ago
  > I don’t know if the parent was edited Nope, no edits. I'm not sure where the bitterness is coming from either, aside from the obvious that they aren't pleased with how recent interviews have gone.
- TuringNYC 7y ago
  >> > Firstly, I have yet to encounter a company with a hiring process that is actually, provably, repeatedly tied to any of that company’s business needs. >> What do you mean? Why do companies hire then? Sadly this is very common -- the bigger and more profitable the company the more common it is. Companies often hire for non-business related reasons for several major reasons: 1. Bench strength -- Hire top talent before you need it so you are ready to fire when you have a strategic project. Ideally, hire away talent your competitors might hire. In many ways, this is a good thing. 2. "Burn the Budget" - Divisions will often lose budget if they dont spend it, and they may lose it in future years when they need it ("well you got it last year and you didnt use it, so this year you dont get it...") -- so many divisions will hire to burn the budget and use it just so they dont lose budget when they really really need it. 3. HR - It is common for HR to institute Crazy-8s policies or some variant of it -- where you only get promoted if you have 8 (or N) people working for you. Naturally all sorts of non business related tasks suddenly pop up and people hire just enough to get promoted. This is very common in organizations where promotion and pay is linked to non business metrics (how much budget you control, how many people report to you) rather than business metrics (revenue delivered, revenue enabled, churn reduced, traffic increased, etc.) Often your boss themselves wants to be promoted and needs 8 middle-managers 8 under them to get promoted. And so on up the chain. Almost half the HR departments in my ~20yr career institute such a policy, whether it is internally known or not. It is of course more common in organizations which are not metrics driven.
  - dahart 7y ago
    Aren’t those all “business needs” in a general sense?
    - TuringNYC 7y ago

by maxaf 7y ago

isugimpy 7y ago

Having just gone through the interview process with a very well known tech company, as someone who is honestly pretty terrible at interviewing, I think some companies actually get it. It's really a matter of the interviewer at play. Two of the phases I went through really aligned with the company's needs. I was interviewing for a SRE position, and in one phase they gave me a broken EC2 instance that had been manually configured and asked me to get it back up and running. That's a legit task that I've had to do in daily work for years, because there's ALWAYS going to be someone that does a quick hack to get something working and forgets to productionize it. It was a completely contrived box that didn't actually serve customers, but still a good exercise. In another phase, they had me completely blind fire design some infrastructure (without a complete picture of what the current state of the application is) to lead toward a scalable solution for a real problem they're facing. While, yes, that's basically them getting me to do unpaid work, since I didn't put hands on a keyboard during it and really just talked it through with them, I feel like that was a great exercise in seeing how I thought and could work with a member of the team. There's no truly bulletproof solution to interviewing, because the needs of every org are different, and the skills of interviewers are rarely nurtured to the point of usefulness. Sometimes you just have to luck out and get a good interview.

dahart 7y ago

> Your comment is chock full of flawed and patently false ideas. Whoa, what triggered and justified that response? I don’t know if the parent was edited, but it seems pretty reasonable to me. > Firstly, I have yet to encounter a company with a hiring process that is actually, provably, repeatedly tied to any of that company’s business needs. What do you mean? Why do companies hire then? > an ineffective hiring process usually leads to the hiring of candidates who are good at interviewing, not at the actual work. These are the literal “bad hires” This hasn’t been true in my experience. Why would someone who’s good at the work not tend to be good at interviews? I’ve interviewed hundreds of people and hired dozens. The number one reason for a candidate not getting a position is that there was another better candidate. More often than not, it has nothing to do with how good the candidate is, nor does it have anything to do with how good the company’s interview process is. After that, there is usually a large number of candidates that are young and shooting above their weight, hoping to get in somewhere with almost enough qualification. Occasionally, that works. I haven’t bumped into anyone yet that was great at interviewing but not good at the work, but like many companies, I’m using the interviews to try and find out if they’ll fit it, and if they’re truly interested, and if they’re good at work.

codingdave 7y ago
> I don’t know if the parent was edited Nope, no edits. I'm not sure where the bitterness is coming from either, aside from the obvious that they aren't pleased with how recent interviews have gone.
TuringNYC 7y ago
>> > Firstly, I have yet to encounter a company with a hiring process that is actually, provably, repeatedly tied to any of that company’s business needs. >> What do you mean? Why do companies hire then? Sadly this is very common -- the bigger and more profitable the company the more common it is. Companies often hire for non-business related reasons for several major reasons: 1. Bench strength -- Hire top talent before you need it so you are ready to fire when you have a strategic project. Ideally, hire away talent your competitors might hire. In many ways, this is a good thing. 2. "Burn the Budget" - Divisions will often lose budget if they dont spend it, and they may lose it in future years when they need it ("well you got it last year and you didnt use it, so this year you dont get it...") -- so many divisions will hire to burn the budget and use it just so they dont lose budget when they really really need it. 3. HR - It is common for HR to institute Crazy-8s policies or some variant of it -- where you only get promoted if you have 8 (or N) people working for you. Naturally all sorts of non business related tasks suddenly pop up and people hire just enough to get promoted. This is very common in organizations where promotion and pay is linked to non business metrics (how much budget you control, how many people report to you) rather than business metrics (revenue delivered, revenue enabled, churn reduced, traffic increased, etc.) Often your boss themselves wants to be promoted and needs 8 middle-managers 8 under them to get promoted. And so on up the chain. Almost half the HR departments in my ~20yr career institute such a policy, whether it is internally known or not. It is of course more common in organizations which are not metrics driven.
- dahart 7y ago
  Aren’t those all “business needs” in a general sense?
  - TuringNYC 7y ago