9 ms·

In addition to all of the very dystopian examples given in this post, there are other non-technical, super-dystopian things that have been popping up as "trends

• Benjammer 7y ago
  Yet, the people who pass the grueling gauntlet will still be dumped on a fringe feature team with a first- or second-time engineering manager within 2 years of your age, and a PM that's fresh out of college (or worse, just finished MBA) who is spending 100% of their time learning how to use Jira instead of how to build product.
  • deleted 7y ago
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  • octoboto 7y ago
    This new trend of hiring PMs straight out of college seems like insanity to me
    • VHRanger 7y ago
      MBAs ruining another industry
    • runawaybottle 7y ago
      Oh this trend. I sit next to a recruiter at a large company that literally vets college grads all day for PM and scrum master positions. Like people with zero experience dealing with deadlines, requirements, resource management, time management, release cycle experience. Oh, and I’ll just leave off ‘software development’ experience from that list too, since they also all come from non coding backgrounds. What’s the rationale behind this one, anyone got anything? I’m stumped.
  • mattrp 7y ago
    That’s what I don’t get - they spend so much time hiring for these narrow skill sets and then the guy next to you takes longer than five minutes to figure out Jira.
    • Aeolun 7y ago
      Generally I don’t think it’s the engineering team that delays the project.
• samkater 7y ago
  Also other trends that, thankfully in my experience, have not yet made their way to tech. I suspect it is only a matter of time, though... A lot of non-technical positions I have seen and heard about (including non entry-level positions) require a video of the candidate to describe themselves and why they would be a good fit for the position. That just sounds awful to me.
  • agumonkey 7y ago
    Is it that different from a cover letter ?
    • steve_taylor 7y ago
      Yes. It’s a tool to filter candidates based on race and appearance.
      • agumonkey 7y ago
        oh yeah, I was totally naive.
    • samkater 7y ago
      For some people maybe not. A video would be far more stressful for me. I'm sure my voice would be up an octave (along with my blood pressure) trying to get the recording just right. Speaking aloud is also not my forte. One benefit of a cover letter is it is easier to re-use the base story and update the details as appropriate. Unless you want to spend time editing (which depending on your skill impacts the quality) you have to re-record the whole thing.
      • agumonkey 7y ago
        I find motivation letters to be stressful too and an emotional rape 99% of the time (I just want a job). Hence my question, a video would be just a tiny step lower in happiness compared to a letter.
• paulie_a 7y ago
  Personally I'd call off the interview and let them know they need to rethink their hiring practices. If that's how they interview the company probably is horrible to work for anyways.
  • AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    > If that's how they interview the company probably is horrible to work for anyways. If the hiring process seems designed to find the very best people who are willing to put up with being abused, yeah, it seems pretty likely that it's a horrible place to work.
    • AtlasBarfed 7y ago
      Yes. What's amazing, these incredibly bright people that are being subjected to torture.... Wait, wouldn't the incredibly bright tell you to take your process and shove it? Very large online retailer is 100% this.
      • AnimalMuppet 7y ago
        The incredibly secure would tell you to take your process and shove it. I'm not sure to what degree "bright" and "secure" correlate. I suspect that they may do so eventually, but I think many bright young people are still insecure with respect to jobs and employment.
        • Aeolun 7y ago
          I’m very much enjoying interviews now that I’m secure :D it’s amazing how straightforward you can be if you don’t really need a job.
          • ghaff 7y ago
            Heh. Someone was recruiting me a few weeks back. The company/position looked somewhat interesting but, as we talked, it turned out that what they were looking for wasn't quite my core skill set though I could probably have done it. At the end of the day, it was much easier just to say not a good match at this time so both of us could move on. If I were really looking for something, I suppose I would have felt the need to pitch myself more for the position and have them say no.
• agumonkey 7y ago
  So many people suggest me to lie. So many do. When you don't (anxious, imposter, doubtful or else), recruiter hasn't shiny eyes so you fail. It's a recipee for fake.
  • KungFuJohnny 7y ago
    They lie to you. Why should you feel bad about lying to them?
    • agumonkey 7y ago
      That was another reason indeed. For science I tried an blatant lie, and it was the most horrendous experience I ever felt regarding work. I was gutted and never want to do it again. But factually, I don't think it mattered to them, it was just smalltalk to them. Although I'm not 100% sure they didn't see through. Oh and ironically, some recruiters casted doubt on very factual and true parts of my resume. I mean what stupid game is this.
• bitexploder 7y ago
  A few words on top grading. We are use a top grading like process, and are pretty flexible on the references part of it. It is just a long conversation. I think it is a structured and simple way to talk about a person and where they have been. Yes, it is comprehensive, but it works well. We hire almost all candidates that have made it to the top grading stage of our hiring process. We don’t use it to find liars and don’t think of it like that. What it really is good at is finding patterns of behavior in someone’s life and work history. It’s not full of campy dumb mental problem questions. You just talk about yourself and your work history and how you relate to previous colleagues and managers. And it’s done consistently to make it a little more comparable from one person to the next. The reference checks are one of the most useful and valuable parts of the whole process (we are flexible here, we are a small company). I can see how this process could get morphed into something less friendly, but at the end of the day it’s a huge time investment for us and the candidate so we don’t embark upon it lightly. I haven’t found a better interviewing technique that takes the pain out of it for the employee and the employer. Our team all appreciated the process and we take their feedback seriously. We don’t follow all of the steps in top grading religiously, but the interviewing process is really good. We also read a lot of other books on building a hiring process and settled on top grading as the most consistent and logical. The few people we didn’t hire threw up major red flags in their interview process in terms of how they would fit in at the company and the work we do. How else should a company hire people? For a small business we try to de-risk the hiring process as much as possible because mishiring is /extremely/ painful. We have grown from 3-20 people organically. Each hire we made was and is very important to our growth and stability. Edit: just wanted to say I am a partner/founder at my company and we deeply give a shit about what we do and who we work with. Our turnover across 7 years is very, very low. We strive for a good work life harmony with everyone that works with us. You have to have some process to fit people into a company and that means you gotta talk to people and get to know them. The goal is to eliminate interviewer bias as much as humanly possible after the technical screening. So it goes. Not everyone can be pleased and I would defend our hiring practices as very reasonable and humanistic in an otherwise crazy tech interviewing system at the FAANGs of the world.
  • sibeliuss 7y ago
    Top grading seems like a much more humane way to hire than obscure algorithm tests, even if it is more involved. Thanks for dropping in the defense here, I've never heard of this process.
• LordFast 7y ago
  My experience as both a 50+ hiring manager and as a candidate tells me that we are collectively living in an illusion of whacked up expectations. Yes, it's super hard to hire good people, but most of the time it's because "good enough" isn't good enough anymore, and while we may think our company is a 9 and we deserve 9s, we are probably more of a 4 based on what people are actually working on. Yes, interviews suck, but that's because we all want to get paid the big bucks so we can afford the prohibitively expensive COL and actually do better economically than our middle-class parents. My background and resume legitimately qualifies me as a 9 on the high end, but really I'm probably just a 4. Cascading causal relationships thus expand both upwards into the capital markets and downwards into your grocery stores. If we can all take a chill pill employers+employees and stop 49er'ing around so hard, then I think most everyone can be happily employed. I don't see us getting there on our own though, since that next door neighbor ain't gonna stop and I'm sure as hell not getting left behind /s. I hope we can find a bit more maturity in our industry, but I'm not holding my breath.
  • whack 7y ago
    > we are collectively living in an illusion of whacked up expectations. Yes, it's super hard to hire good people, but most of the time it's because "good enough" isn't good enough anymore, and while we may think our company is a 9 and we deserve 9s, we are probably more of a 4 based on what people are actually working on. You're essentially implying that companies like FAANG can get by just fine, even if they hired "average" programmers, as opposed to "exceptional" ones. If this were the case, they wouldn't need to pay anyone 250-350k compensation either - they can just hire some average programmer for 70k and call it a day. Or better yet, hire someone in a country with much lower COL, pay them 30k, and everyone walks away happy. I don't think this is true, for the simple reason that companies are far too greedy to pay people 200k a year, unless they really need to. Do you honestly think that a company like Amazon is going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on someone, if they can get someone else for a fraction of that? Maybe I'm wrong and one day, some startup will grow to be a unicorn while paying their developers sweatshop rates. I'll believe it when I see it.
    • scarmig 7y ago
• courtf 7y ago
  Not sure if they were using this exact method, but I did interview at a place that had a long, grueling process (series of interviews, coding challenge, etc). They also asked for every employer back to high school, as well as contact info for supervisor for all of those jobs, which of course was ridiculous. I did enjoy seeing them taken aback when I provided that information and, despite being in my early 30s, having 20+ jobs listed that included things like "fruit picker," "janitor" and "waiter at gay bar". I blew away the algorithmic coding challenge, mostly because it was a take-home test (I have flubbed some white-boarding ones pretty badly). The company was almost entirely men, many with quite obvious and malignant ego issues. Their method for making technical decisions was to get all ~20 of them into a conference room and argue about how things should be done, with the loudest, most forceful arguments tending to win. The entire time I worked there, the socially dominant clique was primarily concerned with moving their stack into Kubernetes, despite having almost no traffic that I could discern. I wouldn't say I was impressed overall, people who didn't fit the mold had little chance of making career progress, and I personally felt I had more experience and could code circles around the majority of them.
  • BlueTemplar 7y ago
    So there are companies corresponding to that "tech bro" cliché ?
  • runawaybottle 7y ago
    Lol, the Kubernetes part.
• jpindar 7y ago
  Great way to weed out older developers, since there's a good chance that some of the companies they've worked for have gone out of business or been acquired, and some of their references have died.
  • geomark 7y ago
    Yeah. Every one of my past employers has been acquired and my old organizations picked apart and my old managers ended up who knows where.
  • justinclift 7y ago
    Agrees. There's no chance I have contact details for people from even the first 10-15 years of my career. That was a long time ago. ;)
• blarghhh 7y ago
  Twitter uses what they call top grading, but really isn't, it's just a 1 hour reverse chronological set of questions through the most relevant/recent of your work history, asking the same set of defined questions for each role you had. Really just a structured way to understand your history in a consistent way. It basically the same as asking someone about their work history, but in a structured way. It is absolutely definitely not the actual top grading of multi hours of interviews , phoning references etc.
• deleted 7y ago
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