18 ms·

My platonic ideal for how engineering hiring should work

180 points by leeny 6y ago

blacksqr 6y ago
There's an old saying: "Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up." The phrase "hiring is broken" comes up dozens of times in HN searches. If something appears broken to you, but persists for a long time, it's time to start considering that the apparently broken thing actually serves a purpose you can't see to someone you don't know.
- smithmayowa 6y ago
  If everyone had this mindset, we will still be in the Stone Age, things can and should always be made better. Minute progressive changes to systems that already supposedly work end up bringing about systems that work better.
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    You're adding a value judgment to the comment you're replying to that wasn't there. > serves a purpose you can't see to someone you don't know. Does not mean "good, but you're too stupid to see it." edit: after one figures out why something is a certain way one could come to the conclusion that it must be changed immediately, and the reason it was that way was more destructive than one could have imagined.
  - gagege 6y ago
    It's implied that if the reason is not a good one you should take down the fence.
- stmw 6y ago
  I think that's what this blog does, no?
- Afton 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence
- admax88q 6y ago
  On the other hand, hiring gets discussed endlessly on HN and there doesn't seem to be a compelling reason presented for the status quo. At some point you have to accept that the fence maybe doesn't serve a purpose, or its purpose may be forgotten and not applicable, and its worth the risk to take it down and see what happens.
  - spaetzleesser 6y ago
    Just remember that taking down the fence is easy but not enough. You also need to find something else to do the job. Which often turns out to be very hard. There is a long history of dysfunctional processes being replaced with other processes that often turn out to be as dysfunctional as the previous one. Just in a different way. See Scrum and Agile as examples.
  - carabiner 6y ago
    The compelling reason is the massive success of FAANG companies. How are they making unimaginable amounts of money if their engineers are from "broken hiring"? How is FAANG on a resume such a strong signal if it just means they got through a broken system? Aline has said some good stuff but she loses me at: "There’s no substitute for chemistry, in dating or in hiring." Hiring is not fucking dating. You are not having sex with your coworkers, you are not discriminating on gender, race, body type as everyone regularly does in dating. Dating is not a healthy system that you should aspire to in employment. It's very much broken in comparison with swipe apps and the like, just broken in different ways.
    - wolfgke 6y ago
      > The compelling reason is the massive success of FAANG companies. How are they making unimaginable amounts of money if their engineers are from "broken hiring"? Two possible expanations: - What works for a big company of FAANG type is not necessarily a good idea for other companies. - Because the FAANG companies have found a formula for printing money, they can afford such a hugely broken hiring process.
    - logicslave 6y ago
- neilk 6y ago
  Read the article, she discusses that. > Although these approaches are rational under existing constraints, they’re neither particularly efficient nor particularly fair to the individuals subject to them. This doesn’t mean that we can’t improve the system … But before we talk about what we have the power to change, let’s dive a bit deeper into the constraints we face today.
  - blacksqr 6y ago
    I did read the article. The fact that someone reasons ones way to a dubious conclusion doesn't make the conclusion less dubious. All premature fence-pullers think they have rational reasons for pulling the fence down. They're the ones the quote is meant for.
- spaetzleesser 6y ago
  “it's time to start considering that the apparently broken thing actually serves a purpose you can't see to someone you don't know.” That sounds a little like conspiracy theory. My theory is that hiring is just really hard and it’s difficult to do that at scale. I know people who are really good at interviewing. I think I myself can interview reasonably for people who have to work with me. But that takes a lot of time and energy. So “specialists” from HR take over. But they don’t understand the real requirements for the job so they have to come up with a lot standardized indirect measures which don’t work well.
  - blacksqr 6y ago
    > My theory is that hiring is just really hard Not that hard. Talk to people like human beings and examine their previous work and employment history.
    - MauranKilom 6y ago
      You conveniently cut off the important part: > hiring is just really hard and it’s difficult to do that at scale Yes, talking to people about their previous work and employment history is a good way to judge their fit for a position. It also takes about half a working day of 2-3 people each time to do it properly.
      - blacksqr 6y ago
        Like Soylent Green, a software company is people. If you have hiring authority and you don't think it's worth your time to spend half a day a couple of times a week to get the right people into your organization, you have the wrong job.
        MauranKilom 6y ago
        I can confirm that putting in this time is imperative to getting the right people hired. But if you require that any engineer involved should spend a quarter to half of their week on hiring, and that you yourself consider anyone with less commitment unsuitable, don't you agree that scalability becomes a problem? How many half-recruiters, half-engineers do you think are available, compared to the overall need for engineers with hiring authority? I don't have data on the former, but it's apparent to me that, if you hire people to do this full-time instead, you're hiring a recruiter. That's what gets you exactly the system everybody seems to complain about.
- tartoran 6y ago
  > If something appears broken to you, but persists for a long time, it's time to start considering that the apparently broken thing actually serves a purpose you can't see to someone you don't know. What does this even imply? That someone benefits from this broken system? The recruiting firms? It is indeed broken as engineers are not happy with going through the middleman gauntlet, companies are short on developers and would ideally want to hire asap. The only problem I see for companies here is find the right candidates (filter the bad candidates) but all these obstacles don't seem to be doing that at all. So back to the drawing board...
  - itsdrewmiller 6y ago
    It implies that the things that people complain about in interviews may serve a non-obvious purpose. For example, giving hard algorithm problems may not be to test whether you are a good programmer, but to test whether you are invested enough in landing the job to study for the interview.
    - coralreef 6y ago
      This kind of logic can be used to rationalize anything and does not satisfy first principles thinking. Processes and tests should serve obvious purposes, otherwise there is no metric for measuring their effectiveness. An example of this is coming up with "how many golf balls can you fit in a bus?" riddles, in the vain attempt at "seeing how the person thinks"/"problem solving"/"creativity".
      - itsdrewmiller 6y ago
        I'm not trying to defend it (and as a hiring manager I don't do it) - I'm just explaining the implication of Chesterton's Fence as applied to interviews. "Processes and tests should serve obvious purposes" seems very wrong to me, though - they should certainly serve useful purposes, and those purposes should be documented, but there is no real reason they need to be obvious to a layperson. Google specifically dropped those riddles because they did not find them effective, which means they have some metric for testing efficacy. They have not dropped algorithmic challenges, though. I wonder why?
- Nursie 6y ago
  Or alternatively it's a hard problem, in a domain where nailing down a good solution may be non-obvious, or perhaps even really defining the problem domain is not yet done.
  - nullsense 6y ago
    The hard problem being you have incredibly limited bandwidth to gather data on a candidate.
  - lkbm 6y ago
    I think this is a big part of it. When I think about how I'd like my work to have a big, positive impact on the world, one of the first things that comes to mind is fixing hiring/job hunting. I'm moderately intelligent and have felt this way for a couple decades, and I still haven't done anything about it because I still don't know how to make it not suck, and I've yet to see anyone else working on a good solution either. I've seen a lot of very smart, capable, and talented people have trouble finding a decent job, and eventually settle for underemployment for a good while. A system that could properly utilize their productivity would be vastly superior to our current system. There's a lot of money on the table for anyone who implements that system. I don't know what that system looks like. I just know with certainty that there's a massive amount of wasted productivity under our current system. What I can tell you is that when I graduated college, the way you found a job was to use Monster.com--a big job search engine--apply to various openings in a tedious process, and interview. Today, you use Indeed.com--a big job search engine--apply to various openings in approximately the same tedious process, and then interview in approximately the same way. There's money on the table for anyone who can improve the system, and no one has. This tells me it's hard. (The fact that I don't know how to improve it a bonus.)
    - wolfgke 6y ago
      > There's money on the table for anyone who can improve the system, and no one has. This tells me it's hard. In other comments on this article, I wrote my arguments why I don't believe that detecting good candidates is hard (I wrote suggestions there). I believe the hard problem is rather that most companies/recruiters don't actually know (or won't say) what skills they are really looking for, so they use dubious processes to rationalize why they chose a specific candidate.
- pydry 6y ago
  What if the answer is a combination of laziness, fashion, elitism and a desire to haze?
- bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago
  That cuts both ways. There's an old saying, a special case of the one you've cited: "If everyone says X, consistently and over an extended period of time, it could be mass delusion, but I wouldn't bet that way." (Hiring is broken, btw. Largely because engineers too often combine intellectual narrowness with intellectual overconfidence and poor interpersonal skills in a way that makes them think they're competent psyshometricians without even realizing they're attempting to do psychometrics at all, let alone incompetent at it.)
- ebiester 6y ago
  The fence is there because the risk of doing something new is hard, especially because testing hypotheses in hiring is expensive. I am a hiring manager. I've also put significant thought into how we can change the hiring process, if only to get better candidates. However, it comes down to this: I only get 2-3 hires a quarter. Trying to get a meaningful result on changes I make is difficult. If one doesn't work out, did it not work out in a way that my original process would fix? And so, we get conservative because even though it rejects a lot of qualified candidates, it also gets good candidates.
  - x0x0 6y ago
    Also a hiring manager. If you conceptualize a hire as "this decision costs me $100k to $200k, and six months", you'll understand why folks are conservative. That's my finger in the wind cost of a bad hire, in terms of their salary, the salary and opportunity cost of their first two weeks buddy, plus all the other related efforts to onboard and train. Plus, again, if it's a bad hire, by the time we spend 2 months getting to the termination, and a 2 month search, and a 2 month onboarding, I wait 1/2 a year before I get the employee I need.
  - wolfgke 6y ago
    > I am a hiring manager. I've also put significant thought into how we can change the hiring process, if only to get better candidates. Simple solution: Be very clear what kind of candidate the company actually needs, e.g. do you need - a genius in algorithm design - a person who knows the subtle details of a specific language/platform/standard X - a nice person vs a person that will fight for "doing the right thing" (e.g. is possibly strongly opinionated) - how important is it really that the person is also nice to hang up after work - an allrounder vs an expert for X, Y - a person who creates solid code that will be good to maintain vs. a person that "simply get things done" - a person who is is already good at X vs a person who has a high potential to become good at X
    - MauranKilom 6y ago
      > a nice person vs a person that will fight for "doing the right thing" (e.g. is possibly strongly opinionated) Maybe it's just a matter of wording, but the implication that people who will go to bat for an important choice can't also be "nice" strikes me as strange and contradicts my experience. Good comment otherwise though.
- user5994461 6y ago
  Hiring is not broken, there's simply wayyyyy too many candidates for any opened position, so companies get to be extremely picky and reject 100 people to fill one position. And to be clear I'm not talking about having too many unqualified candidates who can't do a hello world (there's some but don't pass a screening test), I am talking about an oversupply of candidates of all levels who are able to pass the marathon of interview questions and exercises.
  - Tainnor 6y ago
    That might be true in some areas but... in almost every company I've been, it's been ridiculously hard to find enough qualified applicants for a given role. There wouldn't even have been 100 people to reject. I think programming is still mostly an employee's market.
    - user5994461 6y ago
      The 100 applicants are down to 10 people for an onsite, 2 or 3 get an offer, 1 is accepting it. Sometimes when I look back at the last few people I interviewed onsite, I'm pretty sure they could all have done the job just fine. It's crazy that they're all getting rejected, there is nothing wrong with them, the company is overly picky for no reason. Digging down there's probably 1 who got an offer and rejected it. Companies always forget to mention that half of their offers are rejected, hiring would be easier if they improved on that.
      - triceratops 6y ago
        > Companies always forget to mention that half of their offers are rejected, hiring would be easier if they improved on that. Easier for that company, but harder for the companies they beat out.
      - decafninja 6y ago
        Same. Pretty much every candidate we interview is more than capable of doing the job technically. Overwhelmingly, why my team picks one person for the job and reject the others is for non-technical/behavioral reasons. Then again my company is a boring investment bank, not a hot tech company. Top quality candidates are not in a rush to trample each other to join us. 90% of the candidates we get would not be able to brute force naively solve an leetcode medium or even a harder leetcode easy, let alone come up with an optimal solution. We would never be able to hire anyone if we rejected everyone that wasn't able to code an optimal solution in 40 minutes. Yet if hired, I have no doubt nearly all of them would be able to do the actual job more than well enough - and that has been the case with everyone that I've interviewed and gave the thumbs up to.
- jorblumesea 6y ago
  Correct, the algo style interview is mostly a test of work ethic and time spent, not one simple of technical skill.
- tdeck 6y ago
  I think that phrase is a thought terminating cliche. How can one argue with the claim that every construct has a valuable hidden purpose despite evidence to the contrary?
  - wolfgke 6y ago
    > How can one argue with the claim that every construct has a valuable hidden purpose despite evidence to the contrary? He doesn't claim that it has a valuable hidden purpose, he claims that it had (when it was constructed). :-)
  - triceratops 6y ago
    I don't think the claim is "every construct has a valuable hidden purpose". It's "if you can't explain all the important purposes of a construct, you aren't ready to take it down." I remind myself of Chesterton's Fence every time I encounter some WTF code.
- jaclaz 6y ago
  Only for the record, that is Chesterton's fence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence
thdc 6y ago
> In any event, on interviewing.io, once you’ve built up your reputation by doing mock interviews (persistent, meaningful credentialing) Credentials for doing well in interviews, maybe. I can respect the frankness in the following paragraph though: > Of course, one of the limitations of our approach is that we’re getting performance data about engineers from the practice interviews they do on our platform. Any seasoned interviewer will tell you that the signal one gets from a technical interview isn’t the whole story. And really that is another big topic that requires more research imo - interview performance vs job performance.
hartator 6y ago
I really don’t like the “x is broken”-style of saying something doesn’t work. It’s not broken, it’s suboptimal.
- CravingLogic 6y ago
  100% Agree. There are 6 ridiculous reasons why click-bait titles are broken.
- jpxw 6y ago
  Exactly. If you’re going to make a claim that “hiring in tech is broken”, you’ll need some pretty good data to back that up, especially when you consider that some of the most profitable companies in human history are doing the thing you say is “broken”.
SavageBeast 6y ago
Someone here pointed it out on another post a long time ago but the only explanation for the hazing ritual that has become modern hiring is that we have a glut of engineering talent. I'm interested to see what the new trend of remote work will do to the current paradigm. I think the lot of us are about to find we're not much more than highly skilled mechanics. Edit: On reading all the comments that came after mine, I realize I'll have a decision to make Q1 2021 when my role at my current startup becomes financially unwise to maintain (slow growth on a popular product in a very niche industry). Im a co-founder but still it will make more financial sense to put the tech product in Maintenance Mode for awhile with some offshore contractors. All the hard work has been done save for riding out the slow Change The Industry adoption curve. When this day comes I'll be back on the market myself and in considering all this I think Im going to target large F500 companies who's core business isn't tech or internet or whatever. Companies that rely on tech as a part of their larger non-tech business. I know folks who are devs at AMZN and GOOG and I can't help but come away with the impression that save for the RSUs they wouldn't be there either. The pain around getting the offer may not be the worst part - the worst part may be after you accept and actually have to work there. Fairly simple logic might indicate that if the dating phase is this bad, the marriage can't be much better.
- fizixer 6y ago
  pandemic has worsened the situation big tech engineer turnover has ground to a halt (employed engineers playing it safe) they have open positions but those were based on pre-pandemic turnover estimates so they don't need to hire as many the result: perfect coding challenges not enough ... now also need perfect behavioral answers, perfect 40 yard dash, perfect push-ups, perfect knife juggling, and most importantly, perfect clown show while wearing red nose and green wig.
- koube 6y ago
  I think this is part of the answer to the question of why hiring sucks. I was speaking to a coworker at one point and discussing mistakes that led to a rejection, and the conversation turned to the fact that these mistakes don't make someone a bad engineer, especially if they weren't actively preparing for interview. He said "Well, you have to reject someone", and the conversation kind of ended there. I found this answer to both be true and unsettling.
daniel2x 6y ago
Ha, yeah, bureaucracy sucks!
deeblering4 6y ago
Hiring is just one of many things that the big G has made worse for the tech field. I wish people would stop idolizing them and see the negative influence they have had on our profession.
polote 6y ago
> Or wonder why we think we can succeed where so many others have failed. But, before you do, think on this. I’ve spent the last five years of my life dedicated to bringing this vision of hiring to fruition because I believe, in my heart of hearts, that this is the only way hiring can be both efficient and fair. When your best argument is "trust me I know" usually this doesnt mean any good
PunchTornado 6y ago
This is a really long article. The author should consider putting a TLDR at the top. Manged to read only half of it and still didn't get the point.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  The point was "use interviewing.io's (the author's company) services", in the last paragraph.
nwsm 6y ago
God I am so sick of hearing "hiring is broken". Not that I necessarily disagree, but this is the first sentence of every single recruiting startup pitch. (And spoiler alert- none of them have fixed it) It comes off tongue in cheek to me now.
- _qulr 6y ago
  Yes, this article is nothing more than an advertisement for interviewing.io
  - sam_lowry_ 6y ago
    They seem to be running a marketing campaign. I saw a clickbait-style article on habr today.
    - leeny 6y ago
      OP here/founder of interviewing.io. What is habr?
      - nonplussed 6y ago
        Harvard Business Review?
        sam_lowry_ 6y ago
        habr.com
- billylindeman 6y ago
  I'm sick of hearing _x_ is broken
  - beiller 6y ago
    If it ain't broke, fix it until it is!
  - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
alain94040 6y ago
Here's a radical idea (read to the end before you object). The inspiration is a blend of how open source projects recruit developers, and how the 20% Google side-projects used to work. I work for company A, I'm starting to get slightly bored or interested in doing something else. Without quitting my job, I contribute a few days of code to company B, whose project I find interesting. As I contribute more to company B, I eventually quit company A and join company B full-time. Benefits of this approach: no interviews. Know what you are getting into. Try different things and what works for you. How can we make this work: legal framework. California, if you are listening, pass a law that prevents companies from exclusive work arrangements, so I can always do a side-gig with company B even if they are competitors. Have company B compensate me, so we don't end up in a situation where company B is abusing job seekers by getting free work done. Maybe a law could say that I'm safe as long as my work for company B while employed by company A doesn't exceed 5% of my salary or so. Would that work?
- mlvljr 6y ago
  "A"-type companies' mgt would hate ya :)
- alanwreath 6y ago
  1000x this! Seems like win win for both sides. Kind of reminds me of universities that let you take a course or two to then allow you to continue in the degree program . For some reason I can’t think of any university that actually does that. Is it possible that hiring and university admission suffer the same affliction?
- youeseh 6y ago
  I think there is already a law. What you do in your time, material and equipment is your own business.
  - Rebelgecko 6y ago
    ...as long as your employer doesn't think it competes with their business. If it does (even if it competes with a part of the business that has nothing to do with your work or that you don't even know about) things can get messy
watertom 6y ago
Hiring is broken period, not jut for engineers. I could whine on about this topic for days, I ran an IT Division that supported HR for a very large company, and we built a slick streamlined system that worked great, in spite of what HR wanted. The two things that drive me crazy when applying for a job 1) keyword matching metrics, UGH!! It's not an effective filter. If you really want to filter candidates have a job specific requirements questionnaire. As a hiring manager I'd much rather create my filter questionnaire. 2)Using the resume submission process to complete the employment application form <DUMBEST IDEA EVER>, it can be a two step process, REALLY IT CAN BE A TWO STEP PROCESS! NOBODY READS THE EMPLOYMENT APPLICATION FORM, it has nothing to do with screening candidates. If you want to interview a candidate THEN have them complete the employment form.
- dang 6y ago
  "Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- apple4ever 6y ago
  Yup. Having a crazy long form to fill out is madness. Here is my resume. That's all you need. I already did all the work for you. I have stopped applying to places that require any more than a resume submission. Its just not worth my time.
mkl95 6y ago
Is hiring broken, or is it a symptom of deeper organizational issues? When I browse European startup offers and I interview for some of those positions, I get the feeling that their endless list of requirements has more to do with having high developer turnover and lack of funds to build a team, rather than their CTO's desire to hire a programming demigod.
jamesfe 6y ago
"If you’ve ever been on either end of the table, you’re probably mad at the state of hiring, too. Whether you have given it a lot of thought or whether you just feel it deep down, something about the whole process feels off." This feels like a really big assumption. Is it true? Is there data to back this? I've felt annoyed at individual interviewers, or a process at a given company but I've in general felt like I got more of a fair shake in the tech world than other industries I've worked in.
- MauranKilom 6y ago
  I also cannot agree with the sentiment you quoted. But I appreciate that it's possible - and in fact extremely likely - that the author's experiences and mine are fully disjoint. Different sides of the world and FAANG vs smaller businesses need not have the same hiring challenges.
rogerdickey 6y ago
Bad companies are bad at hiring, good companies tend to be good at it. In most cases as efficient as they can be if you understand their constraints.
- stmw 6y ago
  Lots of "good companies" have terrible hiring processes, in part because they're sufficiently famous and prestigious that they can be really bad at hiring - like proudly advertising a 2 month long process - and still hire enough qualified software engineers. I don't think it's correlated.
afrojack123 6y ago
TLDR Interviewing.io is different from other recruiting startups because verified candidates get to directly book time slots with engineers at companies. Candidates get verified by taking multiple mock interviews (more data points). Other competitors, such as Triplebyte, still have a recruiter in between interview and company. Even after you get verified and have good performance on the Triplebyte quiz and interview, there is still a recruiter who acts as a gatekeeper. That recruiter can prevent you from speaking to companies even if your interview performance was 99% percentile.
cushychicken 6y ago
If there's anyone that I'd listen to talk about this, it's Aline. She's a shining example of something I think patio11 once wrote: dogged learning about one topic is bound to produce value sooner or later. You just need to spend enough time learning where the pain points are, and build something that solves them. She's been turning this crank for years, and I believe her when she cites interviewing.io having a 40% successful place rate.
- MauranKilom 6y ago
  > I believe her when she cites interviewing.io having a 40% successful place rate. Is that from a different piece? The only 40% figure in the article is in reference to reasons for people using the platform, not conversion rate...
fl0wenol 6y ago
I'd almost advocate maybe even providing less signaling, like a technical chat-roulette where you get put into a pool and both sides can just "NOPE" out at any time if the interaction isn't sparking joy. Only when you build a rapport talking about the kind of work and challenges does it allow you to say: okay, let's meet later in an attributable fashion for real. Also, bonus points if it involves OTR/PFS so you can talk details without attribution and know that since you're in a "pool" if you got through to an identifiable, in-person interview you can pretend like it never happened, but the candidate and the engineer both at some point definitely interacted in a way that they both felt comfortable proceeding to that point.
- stmw 6y ago
  Having used interviewing.io a lot, that's pretty close to how it works... It even had a "chatroulette..." tagline early on.
  - fl0wenol 6y ago
    Thanks for the pointer, now I'm very curious
- throwaway_dcnt 6y ago
  This does not work for introverts that are fantastic at their jobs
  - centimeter 6y ago
    I think it's important to distinguish "introvert" from "lacks social skills". I'm introverted in the sense that social interaction drains my energy and solitude recharges it (with the stereotypical consequences like I don't like parties qua parties). However, I have good social skills in that I can make almost anyone like me, quickly. That is extremely useful in both getting hired and keeping a job.
    - tsjq 6y ago
      wow. are you me ? :)
rehman 6y ago
Hope this gets fixed some day.
Inception 6y ago
I've been seeing this sentiment a lot on LinkedIn, particularly with new developers entering the field. Leaving aside the whole argument about whether or not we should really be calling software developers engineers, a lot of these same people are advertising themselves as full-stack. I'm sorry, but you going through a 10-week bootcamp or even getting a 4 year CS degree does not make you full-stack. It's comparable to how we laugh at recruiters when they ask for 5 years in a given language that has only been around for 2 years. You clearly don't know what you're talking about. I always tell the folks I mentor through bootcamps they should figure out which area they like best, focus most of their efforts in that area, and then advertise themselves as a front-end developer or back-end developer or whatever, not full-stack. The upside down T approach. Show recruiters and hiring managers you at least know enough to know what you don't know. And stop complaining on LinkedIn about how unfair it is that you don't have a million job opportunities pouring in or about all the applications you submitted and didn't hear back from - yes it's annoying, but if you advertise yourself as something you're not, you've likely already wasted someone else's time, so understand they probably don't want to waste anymore giving you an explanation for why you were passed over.
- ipnon 6y ago
  If you can write a web page that submits a user form and a server that writes that data to a persistent database ... I'm failing to see which part of the "stack" is unfilled. This is what bootcamps teach.
  - Inception 6y ago
    Yes, bootcamps teach you the basics of each part of the stack. I would make the argument that you aren't proficient in any of these areas, so to advertise yourself as such is misleading. I file my own taxes, but I don't refer to myself as an accountant. I've yet to meet a bootcamp grad that can efficiently architect a relational database, for example. I know plenty of Sr. level front-end developers who wouldn't think to call themselves full-stack even though they know how to submit a user form that persists to the database. Same with back-end developers who know HTML, CSS, and pick your flavor of JS framework. If you've worked in the industry, you know things change too fast to stay up to speed on everything. It's not impossible, but it's unlikely and unrealistic to have that expectation of someone once they are employed.
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
Everybody talks about how hard it is to tell a good engineer from about one. I've been thinking about what exactly that means in terms of our day-to-day. If 10% of the work you're doing this quarter is work that you are going to be doing next quarter, you'll need to be interviewed differently than if 90% of the work you're doing this quarter is work that you're going to be doing next quarter. If the job is narrow and predictable enough, you can just assess somebody's ability to do the tasks you will ultimately need them to do. if the job is broad and unpredictable enough, you have to assess it by proxy. Like how due to the long tail of word usage [0], it's easier to just talk to somebody to see if they are fluent, rather than quizzing them on words. I wonder if software engineering is in some weird anti-sweet spot, where our breadth of work isn't so broad that we really need many year degrees and licenses and boards, but isn't narrow enough that you can just assess somebody on the actual duties you want them to be performing. Not to mention that different jobs in the field really do have different degrees of unpredictability/variety, so the breadth experienced in a few years at one shop would be completely different from the narrowness experienced in a few years at another, so a resume doesn't you tell as much as you'd hope. [0] A full 50% of the words in Tom Sawyer only occur once, for example. It's why teaching languages can only go so far, and you really just get lots of experience using a language to become proficient.
SPBS 6y ago
This article is not talking about how broken Google-style algorithmic interviews are. It's encouraging Google-style algorithmic interviews by bringing them to the candidate as soon as possible. This is achieved by making candidates pay money for mock interviews with interviewers from tech companies. This fundamental problem this article is describing is that recruiters are filtering out too many candidates by pedigree to ever have them end up in an algorithmic interview with a tech company.
- decafninja 6y ago
  How important is your pedigree in getting a (good) tech job? If you've worked as a SWE in some capacity, it seems like most companies (even top ones) consider you good enough to at least interview you. My pedigree is average at best. I've worked my entire career at non-tech companies (banks, hedge funds) doing decidedly unsexy work. I'm still able to attract enough attention that FAANG and many other top tech company recruiters contact me first. Interestingly enough, it's the top companies in my current sector (finance) that refuse to even have an internal recruiter casually speak with me. i.e. Citadel, Two Sigma, Jane Street, etc. There's also stories I see occasionally on LinkedIn, etc. of people from completely non-technical backgrounds getting hired as SWEs at top tech companies. Taxi drivers, ex-felons, aestheticians, etc. getting hired as SWEs at FAANG and unicorns.
  - necubi 6y ago
    My experience interviewing with hedge funds is that they expect candidates to be working with an external recruiter.
    - decafninja 6y ago
      Yup - seems that's the way it works in finance. External recruiter sends my resume to a firm, internal recruiter then does a casual chat with me, and assuming I don't throw any red flags, I proceed to the coding phone screen. Multiple external recruiters have attempted to submit me to Citadel and Two Sigma over the course of the past five years. I always tell the recruiter I've never heard back from them in the past, but they're always confident that they can vouch for me and get me an interview. Of course, I never hear back and the recruiter is puzzled.
commandlinefan 6y ago
> They wisely rejected pedigree as a viable means of credentialing and adopted the admirable mission of democratizing access to opportunity in software engineering. You know that college admissions are just as "democratic" as somebody's online testing process, right? As in, anybody can take the test and if they pass, they get admitted? Like... they're exactly the same concept?
nunez 6y ago
> Breaking character for a moment, a friend of mine recently got this recruiting email from Google, who has elevated gaslighting to an art form God I love Aline's stuff.
stakkur 6y ago
The real truth is: hiring is a crapshoot. For any position and any field. Software engineering is no different. There is no meaningful data that any hiring process--good or bad--improves the outcome of a hire. If there were, everyone would be using it. Instead, third-party HR monoliths have moved in and snatched up (and more or less created) the 'market' for screening and filtering applicants. Larger companies sigh, throw up their hands, and say 'well how else can we deal with hundreds of applicants?'. As if that 'funnel' of applicants contains what you think you want. As if it's just an exercise in reductionism, each applicant a data point to evaluate. Given this, why not hire lightly and fire lightly?
- UncleOxidant 6y ago
  I think a lot of us suspect that just choosing applicants randomly would probably have a very similar outcome to what we do now, but nobody wants to be the first to try it.
  - stmw 6y ago
    The above statement is really just validation that the current process sucks so much for everyone that it's conceivable to replace it with random choice. However, it's not actually true (for reasons explained in the blog) - as a hiring manager, I am confident you couldn't ship "Hello world" by hiring randomly.
- sk2020 6y ago
  Construction and trades takes that approach. It’s a mixed bag. I would say implicit job insecurity removes a lot of potentially good employees from the applicant pool. People who value stability and support families tend to be reliable, and some of them won’t work for someone who has a reputation for firing everyone as soon as things get slow or if they have an off day. I think my industry (civil engineers) is a bit easier to hire for because credentialing weeds out people who are completely out of their depth, and lying about qualifications can get you in real trouble. Managers can assume you’re basically competent and can focus on hiring people with decent personality and a good reputation. Some of my software friends use brain-teasers to screen candidates, and it comes off as a bit silly to me.
jennyyang 6y ago
The thing that companies fail to do is reconcile hiring decisions with performance reviews afterwards. They have a single hiring practice and they NEVER EVER change it, regardless of the quality of the eventual hires. The missing feedback loop from performance review back to the hiring process means that the hiring process can't get fixed. Until companies start adding that process back in, hiring will never get better.
- pkaye 6y ago
  I believe Google does this reconciliation between hiring decision and performance reviews.
- tmsh 6y ago
  I think it's complicated by the fact that the better the company, they better they are at mentoring even "bad" hires. I.e., performance review isn't normalized across all companies. Google might think their hiring process is great because a lot of their hires do well in their performance review - but maybe that has more to do with the engineering culture and mentorship in the company, and less to do with their ability to pick future winners. Perhaps though if one looks at the performance review weighted to a review date as soon after the hiring, and sort of tail off how much weight is given over the coming years it'd make sense. I've just seen a lot of bad hires get better with time. And some good hires lose steam or become jaded and perform worse over time. Thus, as messed up as it is, one of the keenest signals is tenacity in the end. And ironically tenacity in preparation for interviews (that Leetcode grind) is somewhat correlated with performance reviews in the long run and perhaps correlated with utility to the company. That said, "decent" engineers in the long run that don't think outside the box but check their performance review boxes slowly bleed a company's ability to disrupt. I.e., performance reviews need to be expanded a bit to think about the health of the overall company and not just the employee performing their function. As a large tech organization, I'd prefer a complex distribution of performances over an even distribution any day - because value to tech companies is still influenced by more black swan event type of innovation. But then I have a high "beta" (variation) in terms of what I'm looking for. Companies with more of a utility emphasis perhaps are better served by a hiring process that is "reliable" with a lot of false negatives.
ipnon 6y ago
We shouldn't ask why engineering hiring is broken. We should ask how an industry with broken hiring can succeed. Software engineering has such ludicrous margins that the labor market for software engineers can be ludicrous in equal proportion. The result is that we can bully and cajole smart, capable people, then go on to make 6 figure salaries and makes billions of dollars in revenue.
- invalidOrTaken 6y ago
  Much to be said for this.
staticassertion 6y ago
I have a very simple hiring process. I describe the product, the work, the gaps. I ask them what their interests are. We find where the interests align with our gaps. If there is no alignment, we simply don't move forward. I tell them the compensation. They accept or reject. Takes about 45 minutes. Pretty simple, the goal is to make sure that they want to do the work that we need done, and that they feel prepared to do so. So far so good.
- ipnon 6y ago
  n=?
- dariusj18 6y ago
  And how do you evaluate their ability to fill those gaps?
  - FeistySkink 6y ago
    Probation period?
  - staticassertion 6y ago
    We just talk about the work. I don't test them, that's a waste of everyone's time.
- travisjungroth 6y ago
  You can’t have possibly described your whole process. How do you get these candidates in the room? Does everyone who applies get an interview? And how do you decide between candidates? If it’s as you described, it sounds like it’s “first come first serve”.
  - staticassertion 6y ago
    I just reach out. We're small. At scale I would still prefer to primarily base recruiting on referrals. Yeah, first come first serve.
andrewstuart 6y ago
Platonic is an odd word to use in this context.
- fennecfoxen 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_idealism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_idealism
robertlagrant 6y ago
> Breaking character for a moment, a friend of mine recently got this recruiting email from Google, who has elevated gaslighting to an art form: somehow the fact that it takes two months to get through their process has become a selling point. The quoted email in no way supports this statement.
- wanderer2323 6y ago
  the statement is such a blatant indefensible lie I had to wonder if I stumbled on some kind of 'point deer make horse' [0] scenario. [0] https://epochtimes.today/chinese-idiom-point-to-a-deer-and-call-it-a-horse-%E6%8C%87%E9%B9%BF%E7%82%BA%E9%A6%AC/ https://epochtimes.today/chinese-idiom-point-to-a-deer-and-c...
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > 'point deer make horse' [0] Your link never glosses the saying as "point deer make horse". Why did you? The grammar of the saying is normal, far more so than usual for these, and "make" is not the relevant sense of 為.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
unexaminedlife 6y ago
anecdata here: I once was asked to explain the difference between 2 functions in a standard library that I don't think I had ever used. That was the only question I was asked. They completely wrote me off as soon as I couldn't answer the question. If they had just asked me to write an entire app from scratch (not counting frameworks) I could've done that for them no problem :)
sys_64738 6y ago
Unless you have engineering credentials from a recognized engineering body, then you’re not an engineer. Software developer, maybe. Engineer, no.
- bane 6y ago
  In the United States there are no licensure requirements for Software Engineering.
- stmw 6y ago
  There are no reliable software engineering credentials in the US. But there are also no reliable electrical engineering credentials, and many other things. There is a P.Eng. (professional engineer) examination, but it's really most relevant for civil engineering, buildings, and the like, and unused in most other cases.
unexaminedlife 6y ago
I'd like to see a "speed dating" concept implemented in tech hiring. You, along with however many other candidates rotate around among different companies. You maybe work for each company up to 1 week. At the end you get your offers and decide among them. I've ended up working for too many lemons because of lack of visibility into how well put together they really are. I want to know ahead of time whether they really have their ish together or if the interview bubble is just a facade.
- tk75x 6y ago
  We already have something kind of like speed dating for hiring: job fairs. Your idea is more like a one night stand. It would be cool if there were large scale career fairs that are hosted outside of colleges open to the general public, and then there was some sort of organized process where people could talk one on one for some period of time with representatives of the top X companies they choose. Probably will need a basic filter so there aren't tens of thousands of people per company, and spread the interviews out over several days. You always hear about networking, but outside of exclusive groups that already require money or status to be a part of, there aren't opportunities for people who need each other to meet up in an organized way and get things done.
  - unexaminedlife 6y ago
    I'm not anticipating you'll read this, but for anyone who happens to read this part of the thread, I don't think job fairs are even close to what I described above. They serve similar purposes, but in my case described above, an actual hire will occur or it won't. Job fairs, at least the ones I've been to are more like an advertising kiosk in a mall where no one you're talking to has any authority of any kind let alone deciding whether or not to hire you on the spot :) Also, at a job fair you have no idea what the day to day life will be in your new position. In my scenario, once you are or aren't hired you will have already lived the life you will be living if you are hired.
gnabgib 6y ago
Why did the title change (on HN)? It now no longer matches the original article ("I’ve been an engineer and a recruiter. Hiring is broken. Here’s why… and what it should be like instead.") - contrary to HN guidelines[0] [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
AndrewKemendo 6y ago
I'm convinced that there is no generalized "right" way to do hiring - for engineers or otherwise. Considering "engineers" as a monolith is silly and the diversity of engineers makes any attempt to generalize fail. Different types of people fit into different cultures and work styles. If there's anything at all that I would generalize on, it would be: "Be candid about your work culture if hiring and don't try to work some place that doesn't fit your style if applying."
the_only_law 6y ago
> I could try some job boards to see which companies are out there. But what would I filter on? I know a lot of programming languages but am not set on having to work in a specific one. How can I tell if I’ll hit it off with the team? I’m applying via a job board to a position I know next to nothing about — will anyone even respond? Man I really can't stand job boards. I feel like the only way to make a good job board would have to aggressively vet companies posting jobs, which ofc would lead to it being very barren.
yowlingcat 6y ago
I've been known to write egregiously long comments, emails, articles, but good good is this article overly long. I was really ready to blow it off when I realized -- the author is putting her money where her mouth is. She's built a very useful platform that helps connect real people with real job opportunities. Okay. In that case, I can forgive the "cardinal sin" of bad writing. Here's the problem with hiring: organizations. Hiring practices reflect organizational ladders and career progressions. Where you see flaws in the latter, of course it will backpropagate into the former. The problem with a "platonic ideal" for how engineering hiring should work is that it requires a "platonic ideal" for how a company should work. And what is that? How do you avoid politics as you scale up a company? Sure, engineering skills are fungibly valuable, that much is evidenced by the market. But engineering career output, and promotional success -- that part is very circumstantial and specific to the company. And I would argue hiring is part of that process -- hiring is getting promoted from candidate to employee. Every company does it differently. And the dynamics are not platonic but tribal. There's no way around that but to find the tribe you want to be a part of and accept it's a little irrational. I remember wishing and hoping when I was younger for a platonic ideal for engineering hiring and engineering organizations that never came. I grew to understand that the warfield of political economy that the business existed inside of (including and especially non-technical and executive personnel) had so much of a major impact on what engineering even means that to conceive of its retraction or engineering in isolation was a little naive and unrealistic. Is it cynical for me to say that? Is it bad for me to say that?
jl2718 6y ago
> recruiters spend roughly 15 hours a hire, and engineers spend about 40. 15 hours can save you 15% on someone else’s salary. I feel used....
optimuspaul 6y ago
6 hours on site for engineering interview is nuts.
- roland35 6y ago
  For some recent interviews I have had 2 hour long interviews with 2-3 people in each, so 6 hours as a total seems realistic! Too bad I didn't get paid for my time!
apple4ever 6y ago
My problems with hiring: 1. Resume forms. Just accept a resume. I don't have time to fill out your form that requires exact months. 2. Not hearing back. Its not hard to send a response. The ones I really hate are "we get so many responses so we'll only contact you if we like you!" come one 3. Bad recruiters. The ones who just email and call about being an automotive technician when I'm an infrastructure engineer.
rizpanjwani 6y ago
Having been in the field for almost 15 years, it seems to me that hiring has always kind of been hit and miss and all these timed tech interviews don't really help much as they focus too much on just code or system design. But the majority of problems I have encountered have not been technically difficult. Once you create an application with a sound system design, all the other technical stuff isn't really a challenge. Majority of the issues are caused by requirements not being communicated, captured, or implemented properly. That's something that's not really focused on tech interviews. I just want a diligent developer who can identify potential issues, do their research, and propose solutions rather than be able to design a system in 90 minutes, because that's never happening in real life. In fact, I'd not hire someone who can claim to do so.
zachrose 6y ago
This is a pretty good breakdown of the dynamics of software engineering hiring, even if I don't follow to her conclusions. It seems like "abstraction" is a recurring theme. The hiring manager is abstracted from the job description by the recruiter. Whether by institutional affiliation or passing a quiz, candidates are abstracted into punch cards that can be fed through the system. Furthermore there's a seemingly overwhelming institutional bias for companies to congratulate themselves on making the right hire, and for their employees for being the right hires, that the whole thing becomes kind of circular.
helsinkiandrew 6y ago
Recruiters are often a necessary evil - they act as a filter to find the "smart people" and for smart people to find the good roles. 1. Finding a good recruiter is as hard or harder than finding a good employee - only do it if you expect to be recruiting for multiple roles over a period. 2. Think a lot about what you're looking for in an engineer, how you'll evaluate candidates, what experience will be shows for the talents you need and then how to articulate that to the recruiter. When they send CVs/resumes make sure you give feedback on what are the bad and good qualities. 3. When recruiting I've nearly always gone via recruiters that have gotten me roles or have worked with in the past (or atleast through them to someone else in their organisation).
tilolebo 6y ago
So what about certifications? To me it looks exactly like the kind of credentials the article describes.
chovy 6y ago
I've been hiring part-time engineers for about 2 years now at my consulting company. I post on r/Jobs4Bitcoins, ask for their github and that they speak English fluently. I have some really good engineers who love working for me. I do weekly standups, give them direction and then get the f-- out of their way. We have a kanban board where I populate tasks and the devs just grab what they want to work on. We don't do sprints.
nonplussed 6y ago
How come when I login to my interviewing.io account I don't see Twitter but it's shown in the screenshot? Is that an accurate representation? I do see the other companies from the screenshot but with fewer jobs.

180 points by leeny 6y ago

There's an old saying: "Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up." The phrase "hiring is broken" comes up dozens of times in HN searches. If something appears broken to you, but persists for a long time, it's time to start considering that the apparently broken thing actually serves a purpose you can't see to someone you don't know.

smithmayowa 6y ago
If everyone had this mindset, we will still be in the Stone Age, things can and should always be made better. Minute progressive changes to systems that already supposedly work end up bringing about systems that work better.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  You're adding a value judgment to the comment you're replying to that wasn't there. > serves a purpose you can't see to someone you don't know. Does not mean "good, but you're too stupid to see it." edit: after one figures out why something is a certain way one could come to the conclusion that it must be changed immediately, and the reason it was that way was more destructive than one could have imagined.
- gagege 6y ago
  It's implied that if the reason is not a good one you should take down the fence.
stmw 6y ago
I think that's what this blog does, no?
Afton 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence
admax88q 6y ago
On the other hand, hiring gets discussed endlessly on HN and there doesn't seem to be a compelling reason presented for the status quo. At some point you have to accept that the fence maybe doesn't serve a purpose, or its purpose may be forgotten and not applicable, and its worth the risk to take it down and see what happens.
- spaetzleesser 6y ago
  Just remember that taking down the fence is easy but not enough. You also need to find something else to do the job. Which often turns out to be very hard. There is a long history of dysfunctional processes being replaced with other processes that often turn out to be as dysfunctional as the previous one. Just in a different way. See Scrum and Agile as examples.
- carabiner 6y ago
  The compelling reason is the massive success of FAANG companies. How are they making unimaginable amounts of money if their engineers are from "broken hiring"? How is FAANG on a resume such a strong signal if it just means they got through a broken system? Aline has said some good stuff but she loses me at: "There’s no substitute for chemistry, in dating or in hiring." Hiring is not fucking dating. You are not having sex with your coworkers, you are not discriminating on gender, race, body type as everyone regularly does in dating. Dating is not a healthy system that you should aspire to in employment. It's very much broken in comparison with swipe apps and the like, just broken in different ways.
  - wolfgke 6y ago
    > The compelling reason is the massive success of FAANG companies. How are they making unimaginable amounts of money if their engineers are from "broken hiring"? Two possible expanations: - What works for a big company of FAANG type is not necessarily a good idea for other companies. - Because the FAANG companies have found a formula for printing money, they can afford such a hugely broken hiring process.
  - logicslave 6y ago
neilk 6y ago
Read the article, she discusses that. > Although these approaches are rational under existing constraints, they’re neither particularly efficient nor particularly fair to the individuals subject to them. This doesn’t mean that we can’t improve the system … But before we talk about what we have the power to change, let’s dive a bit deeper into the constraints we face today.
- blacksqr 6y ago
  I did read the article. The fact that someone reasons ones way to a dubious conclusion doesn't make the conclusion less dubious. All premature fence-pullers think they have rational reasons for pulling the fence down. They're the ones the quote is meant for.
spaetzleesser 6y ago
“it's time to start considering that the apparently broken thing actually serves a purpose you can't see to someone you don't know.” That sounds a little like conspiracy theory. My theory is that hiring is just really hard and it’s difficult to do that at scale. I know people who are really good at interviewing. I think I myself can interview reasonably for people who have to work with me. But that takes a lot of time and energy. So “specialists” from HR take over. But they don’t understand the real requirements for the job so they have to come up with a lot standardized indirect measures which don’t work well.
- blacksqr 6y ago
  > My theory is that hiring is just really hard Not that hard. Talk to people like human beings and examine their previous work and employment history.
  - MauranKilom 6y ago
    You conveniently cut off the important part: > hiring is just really hard and it’s difficult to do that at scale Yes, talking to people about their previous work and employment history is a good way to judge their fit for a position. It also takes about half a working day of 2-3 people each time to do it properly.
    - blacksqr 6y ago
      Like Soylent Green, a software company is people. If you have hiring authority and you don't think it's worth your time to spend half a day a couple of times a week to get the right people into your organization, you have the wrong job.
      - MauranKilom 6y ago
        I can confirm that putting in this time is imperative to getting the right people hired. But if you require that any engineer involved should spend a quarter to half of their week on hiring, and that you yourself consider anyone with less commitment unsuitable, don't you agree that scalability becomes a problem? How many half-recruiters, half-engineers do you think are available, compared to the overall need for engineers with hiring authority? I don't have data on the former, but it's apparent to me that, if you hire people to do this full-time instead, you're hiring a recruiter. That's what gets you exactly the system everybody seems to complain about.
tartoran 6y ago
> If something appears broken to you, but persists for a long time, it's time to start considering that the apparently broken thing actually serves a purpose you can't see to someone you don't know. What does this even imply? That someone benefits from this broken system? The recruiting firms? It is indeed broken as engineers are not happy with going through the middleman gauntlet, companies are short on developers and would ideally want to hire asap. The only problem I see for companies here is find the right candidates (filter the bad candidates) but all these obstacles don't seem to be doing that at all. So back to the drawing board...
- itsdrewmiller 6y ago
  It implies that the things that people complain about in interviews may serve a non-obvious purpose. For example, giving hard algorithm problems may not be to test whether you are a good programmer, but to test whether you are invested enough in landing the job to study for the interview.
  - coralreef 6y ago
    This kind of logic can be used to rationalize anything and does not satisfy first principles thinking. Processes and tests should serve obvious purposes, otherwise there is no metric for measuring their effectiveness. An example of this is coming up with "how many golf balls can you fit in a bus?" riddles, in the vain attempt at "seeing how the person thinks"/"problem solving"/"creativity".
    - itsdrewmiller 6y ago
      I'm not trying to defend it (and as a hiring manager I don't do it) - I'm just explaining the implication of Chesterton's Fence as applied to interviews. "Processes and tests should serve obvious purposes" seems very wrong to me, though - they should certainly serve useful purposes, and those purposes should be documented, but there is no real reason they need to be obvious to a layperson. Google specifically dropped those riddles because they did not find them effective, which means they have some metric for testing efficacy. They have not dropped algorithmic challenges, though. I wonder why?
Nursie 6y ago
Or alternatively it's a hard problem, in a domain where nailing down a good solution may be non-obvious, or perhaps even really defining the problem domain is not yet done.
- nullsense 6y ago
  The hard problem being you have incredibly limited bandwidth to gather data on a candidate.
- lkbm 6y ago
  I think this is a big part of it. When I think about how I'd like my work to have a big, positive impact on the world, one of the first things that comes to mind is fixing hiring/job hunting. I'm moderately intelligent and have felt this way for a couple decades, and I still haven't done anything about it because I still don't know how to make it not suck, and I've yet to see anyone else working on a good solution either. I've seen a lot of very smart, capable, and talented people have trouble finding a decent job, and eventually settle for underemployment for a good while. A system that could properly utilize their productivity would be vastly superior to our current system. There's a lot of money on the table for anyone who implements that system. I don't know what that system looks like. I just know with certainty that there's a massive amount of wasted productivity under our current system. What I can tell you is that when I graduated college, the way you found a job was to use Monster.com--a big job search engine--apply to various openings in a tedious process, and interview. Today, you use Indeed.com--a big job search engine--apply to various openings in approximately the same tedious process, and then interview in approximately the same way. There's money on the table for anyone who can improve the system, and no one has. This tells me it's hard. (The fact that I don't know how to improve it a bonus.)
  - wolfgke 6y ago
    > There's money on the table for anyone who can improve the system, and no one has. This tells me it's hard. In other comments on this article, I wrote my arguments why I don't believe that detecting good candidates is hard (I wrote suggestions there). I believe the hard problem is rather that most companies/recruiters don't actually know (or won't say) what skills they are really looking for, so they use dubious processes to rationalize why they chose a specific candidate.
pydry 6y ago
What if the answer is a combination of laziness, fashion, elitism and a desire to haze?
bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago
That cuts both ways. There's an old saying, a special case of the one you've cited: "If everyone says X, consistently and over an extended period of time, it could be mass delusion, but I wouldn't bet that way." (Hiring is broken, btw. Largely because engineers too often combine intellectual narrowness with intellectual overconfidence and poor interpersonal skills in a way that makes them think they're competent psyshometricians without even realizing they're attempting to do psychometrics at all, let alone incompetent at it.)
ebiester 6y ago
The fence is there because the risk of doing something new is hard, especially because testing hypotheses in hiring is expensive. I am a hiring manager. I've also put significant thought into how we can change the hiring process, if only to get better candidates. However, it comes down to this: I only get 2-3 hires a quarter. Trying to get a meaningful result on changes I make is difficult. If one doesn't work out, did it not work out in a way that my original process would fix? And so, we get conservative because even though it rejects a lot of qualified candidates, it also gets good candidates.
- x0x0 6y ago
  Also a hiring manager. If you conceptualize a hire as "this decision costs me $100k to $200k, and six months", you'll understand why folks are conservative. That's my finger in the wind cost of a bad hire, in terms of their salary, the salary and opportunity cost of their first two weeks buddy, plus all the other related efforts to onboard and train. Plus, again, if it's a bad hire, by the time we spend 2 months getting to the termination, and a 2 month search, and a 2 month onboarding, I wait 1/2 a year before I get the employee I need.
- wolfgke 6y ago
  > I am a hiring manager. I've also put significant thought into how we can change the hiring process, if only to get better candidates. Simple solution: Be very clear what kind of candidate the company actually needs, e.g. do you need - a genius in algorithm design - a person who knows the subtle details of a specific language/platform/standard X - a nice person vs a person that will fight for "doing the right thing" (e.g. is possibly strongly opinionated) - how important is it really that the person is also nice to hang up after work - an allrounder vs an expert for X, Y - a person who creates solid code that will be good to maintain vs. a person that "simply get things done" - a person who is is already good at X vs a person who has a high potential to become good at X
  - MauranKilom 6y ago
    > a nice person vs a person that will fight for "doing the right thing" (e.g. is possibly strongly opinionated) Maybe it's just a matter of wording, but the implication that people who will go to bat for an important choice can't also be "nice" strikes me as strange and contradicts my experience. Good comment otherwise though.
user5994461 6y ago
Hiring is not broken, there's simply wayyyyy too many candidates for any opened position, so companies get to be extremely picky and reject 100 people to fill one position. And to be clear I'm not talking about having too many unqualified candidates who can't do a hello world (there's some but don't pass a screening test), I am talking about an oversupply of candidates of all levels who are able to pass the marathon of interview questions and exercises.
- Tainnor 6y ago
  That might be true in some areas but... in almost every company I've been, it's been ridiculously hard to find enough qualified applicants for a given role. There wouldn't even have been 100 people to reject. I think programming is still mostly an employee's market.
  - user5994461 6y ago
    The 100 applicants are down to 10 people for an onsite, 2 or 3 get an offer, 1 is accepting it. Sometimes when I look back at the last few people I interviewed onsite, I'm pretty sure they could all have done the job just fine. It's crazy that they're all getting rejected, there is nothing wrong with them, the company is overly picky for no reason. Digging down there's probably 1 who got an offer and rejected it. Companies always forget to mention that half of their offers are rejected, hiring would be easier if they improved on that.
    - triceratops 6y ago
      > Companies always forget to mention that half of their offers are rejected, hiring would be easier if they improved on that. Easier for that company, but harder for the companies they beat out.
    - decafninja 6y ago
      Same. Pretty much every candidate we interview is more than capable of doing the job technically. Overwhelmingly, why my team picks one person for the job and reject the others is for non-technical/behavioral reasons. Then again my company is a boring investment bank, not a hot tech company. Top quality candidates are not in a rush to trample each other to join us. 90% of the candidates we get would not be able to brute force naively solve an leetcode medium or even a harder leetcode easy, let alone come up with an optimal solution. We would never be able to hire anyone if we rejected everyone that wasn't able to code an optimal solution in 40 minutes. Yet if hired, I have no doubt nearly all of them would be able to do the actual job more than well enough - and that has been the case with everyone that I've interviewed and gave the thumbs up to.
jorblumesea 6y ago
Correct, the algo style interview is mostly a test of work ethic and time spent, not one simple of technical skill.
tdeck 6y ago
I think that phrase is a thought terminating cliche. How can one argue with the claim that every construct has a valuable hidden purpose despite evidence to the contrary?
- wolfgke 6y ago
  > How can one argue with the claim that every construct has a valuable hidden purpose despite evidence to the contrary? He doesn't claim that it has a valuable hidden purpose, he claims that it had (when it was constructed). :-)
- triceratops 6y ago
  I don't think the claim is "every construct has a valuable hidden purpose". It's "if you can't explain all the important purposes of a construct, you aren't ready to take it down." I remind myself of Chesterton's Fence every time I encounter some WTF code.
jaclaz 6y ago
Only for the record, that is Chesterton's fence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence

thdc 6y ago

> In any event, on interviewing.io, once you’ve built up your reputation by doing mock interviews (persistent, meaningful credentialing) Credentials for doing well in interviews, maybe. I can respect the frankness in the following paragraph though: > Of course, one of the limitations of our approach is that we’re getting performance data about engineers from the practice interviews they do on our platform. Any seasoned interviewer will tell you that the signal one gets from a technical interview isn’t the whole story. And really that is another big topic that requires more research imo - interview performance vs job performance.

hartator 6y ago

I really don’t like the “x is broken”-style of saying something doesn’t work. It’s not broken, it’s suboptimal.

CravingLogic 6y ago
100% Agree. There are 6 ridiculous reasons why click-bait titles are broken.
jpxw 6y ago
Exactly. If you’re going to make a claim that “hiring in tech is broken”, you’ll need some pretty good data to back that up, especially when you consider that some of the most profitable companies in human history are doing the thing you say is “broken”.

SavageBeast 6y ago

Someone here pointed it out on another post a long time ago but the only explanation for the hazing ritual that has become modern hiring is that we have a glut of engineering talent. I'm interested to see what the new trend of remote work will do to the current paradigm. I think the lot of us are about to find we're not much more than highly skilled mechanics. Edit: On reading all the comments that came after mine, I realize I'll have a decision to make Q1 2021 when my role at my current startup becomes financially unwise to maintain (slow growth on a popular product in a very niche industry). Im a co-founder but still it will make more financial sense to put the tech product in Maintenance Mode for awhile with some offshore contractors. All the hard work has been done save for riding out the slow Change The Industry adoption curve. When this day comes I'll be back on the market myself and in considering all this I think Im going to target large F500 companies who's core business isn't tech or internet or whatever. Companies that rely on tech as a part of their larger non-tech business. I know folks who are devs at AMZN and GOOG and I can't help but come away with the impression that save for the RSUs they wouldn't be there either. The pain around getting the offer may not be the worst part - the worst part may be after you accept and actually have to work there. Fairly simple logic might indicate that if the dating phase is this bad, the marriage can't be much better.

fizixer 6y ago
pandemic has worsened the situation big tech engineer turnover has ground to a halt (employed engineers playing it safe) they have open positions but those were based on pre-pandemic turnover estimates so they don't need to hire as many the result: perfect coding challenges not enough ... now also need perfect behavioral answers, perfect 40 yard dash, perfect push-ups, perfect knife juggling, and most importantly, perfect clown show while wearing red nose and green wig.
koube 6y ago
I think this is part of the answer to the question of why hiring sucks. I was speaking to a coworker at one point and discussing mistakes that led to a rejection, and the conversation turned to the fact that these mistakes don't make someone a bad engineer, especially if they weren't actively preparing for interview. He said "Well, you have to reject someone", and the conversation kind of ended there. I found this answer to both be true and unsettling.

daniel2x 6y ago

Ha, yeah, bureaucracy sucks!

deeblering4 6y ago

Hiring is just one of many things that the big G has made worse for the tech field. I wish people would stop idolizing them and see the negative influence they have had on our profession.

polote 6y ago

> Or wonder why we think we can succeed where so many others have failed. But, before you do, think on this. I’ve spent the last five years of my life dedicated to bringing this vision of hiring to fruition because I believe, in my heart of hearts, that this is the only way hiring can be both efficient and fair. When your best argument is "trust me I know" usually this doesnt mean any good

PunchTornado 6y ago

This is a really long article. The author should consider putting a TLDR at the top. Manged to read only half of it and still didn't get the point.

commandlinefan 6y ago
The point was "use interviewing.io's (the author's company) services", in the last paragraph.

nwsm 6y ago

God I am so sick of hearing "hiring is broken". Not that I necessarily disagree, but this is the first sentence of every single recruiting startup pitch. (And spoiler alert- none of them have fixed it) It comes off tongue in cheek to me now.

_qulr 6y ago
Yes, this article is nothing more than an advertisement for interviewing.io
- sam_lowry_ 6y ago
  They seem to be running a marketing campaign. I saw a clickbait-style article on habr today.
  - leeny 6y ago
    OP here/founder of interviewing.io. What is habr?
    - nonplussed 6y ago
      Harvard Business Review?
      - sam_lowry_ 6y ago
        habr.com
billylindeman 6y ago
I'm sick of hearing _x_ is broken
- beiller 6y ago
  If it ain't broke, fix it until it is!
- 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

alain94040 6y ago

Here's a radical idea (read to the end before you object). The inspiration is a blend of how open source projects recruit developers, and how the 20% Google side-projects used to work. I work for company A, I'm starting to get slightly bored or interested in doing something else. Without quitting my job, I contribute a few days of code to company B, whose project I find interesting. As I contribute more to company B, I eventually quit company A and join company B full-time. Benefits of this approach: no interviews. Know what you are getting into. Try different things and what works for you. How can we make this work: legal framework. California, if you are listening, pass a law that prevents companies from exclusive work arrangements, so I can always do a side-gig with company B even if they are competitors. Have company B compensate me, so we don't end up in a situation where company B is abusing job seekers by getting free work done. Maybe a law could say that I'm safe as long as my work for company B while employed by company A doesn't exceed 5% of my salary or so. Would that work?

mlvljr 6y ago
"A"-type companies' mgt would hate ya :)
alanwreath 6y ago
1000x this! Seems like win win for both sides. Kind of reminds me of universities that let you take a course or two to then allow you to continue in the degree program . For some reason I can’t think of any university that actually does that. Is it possible that hiring and university admission suffer the same affliction?
youeseh 6y ago
I think there is already a law. What you do in your time, material and equipment is your own business.
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  ...as long as your employer doesn't think it competes with their business. If it does (even if it competes with a part of the business that has nothing to do with your work or that you don't even know about) things can get messy

watertom 6y ago

Hiring is broken period, not jut for engineers. I could whine on about this topic for days, I ran an IT Division that supported HR for a very large company, and we built a slick streamlined system that worked great, in spite of what HR wanted. The two things that drive me crazy when applying for a job 1) keyword matching metrics, UGH!! It's not an effective filter. If you really want to filter candidates have a job specific requirements questionnaire. As a hiring manager I'd much rather create my filter questionnaire. 2)Using the resume submission process to complete the employment application form <DUMBEST IDEA EVER>, it can be a two step process, REALLY IT CAN BE A TWO STEP PROCESS! NOBODY READS THE EMPLOYMENT APPLICATION FORM, it has nothing to do with screening candidates. If you want to interview a candidate THEN have them complete the employment form.

dang 6y ago
"Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
apple4ever 6y ago
Yup. Having a crazy long form to fill out is madness. Here is my resume. That's all you need. I already did all the work for you. I have stopped applying to places that require any more than a resume submission. Its just not worth my time.

mkl95 6y ago

Is hiring broken, or is it a symptom of deeper organizational issues? When I browse European startup offers and I interview for some of those positions, I get the feeling that their endless list of requirements has more to do with having high developer turnover and lack of funds to build a team, rather than their CTO's desire to hire a programming demigod.

jamesfe 6y ago

"If you’ve ever been on either end of the table, you’re probably mad at the state of hiring, too. Whether you have given it a lot of thought or whether you just feel it deep down, something about the whole process feels off." This feels like a really big assumption. Is it true? Is there data to back this? I've felt annoyed at individual interviewers, or a process at a given company but I've in general felt like I got more of a fair shake in the tech world than other industries I've worked in.

MauranKilom 6y ago
I also cannot agree with the sentiment you quoted. But I appreciate that it's possible - and in fact extremely likely - that the author's experiences and mine are fully disjoint. Different sides of the world and FAANG vs smaller businesses need not have the same hiring challenges.

rogerdickey 6y ago

Bad companies are bad at hiring, good companies tend to be good at it. In most cases as efficient as they can be if you understand their constraints.

stmw 6y ago
Lots of "good companies" have terrible hiring processes, in part because they're sufficiently famous and prestigious that they can be really bad at hiring - like proudly advertising a 2 month long process - and still hire enough qualified software engineers. I don't think it's correlated.

afrojack123 6y ago

TLDR Interviewing.io is different from other recruiting startups because verified candidates get to directly book time slots with engineers at companies. Candidates get verified by taking multiple mock interviews (more data points). Other competitors, such as Triplebyte, still have a recruiter in between interview and company. Even after you get verified and have good performance on the Triplebyte quiz and interview, there is still a recruiter who acts as a gatekeeper. That recruiter can prevent you from speaking to companies even if your interview performance was 99% percentile.

cushychicken 6y ago

If there's anyone that I'd listen to talk about this, it's Aline. She's a shining example of something I think patio11 once wrote: dogged learning about one topic is bound to produce value sooner or later. You just need to spend enough time learning where the pain points are, and build something that solves them. She's been turning this crank for years, and I believe her when she cites interviewing.io having a 40% successful place rate.

MauranKilom 6y ago
> I believe her when she cites interviewing.io having a 40% successful place rate. Is that from a different piece? The only 40% figure in the article is in reference to reasons for people using the platform, not conversion rate...

fl0wenol 6y ago

I'd almost advocate maybe even providing less signaling, like a technical chat-roulette where you get put into a pool and both sides can just "NOPE" out at any time if the interaction isn't sparking joy. Only when you build a rapport talking about the kind of work and challenges does it allow you to say: okay, let's meet later in an attributable fashion for real. Also, bonus points if it involves OTR/PFS so you can talk details without attribution and know that since you're in a "pool" if you got through to an identifiable, in-person interview you can pretend like it never happened, but the candidate and the engineer both at some point definitely interacted in a way that they both felt comfortable proceeding to that point.

stmw 6y ago
Having used interviewing.io a lot, that's pretty close to how it works... It even had a "chatroulette..." tagline early on.
- fl0wenol 6y ago
  Thanks for the pointer, now I'm very curious
throwaway_dcnt 6y ago
This does not work for introverts that are fantastic at their jobs
- centimeter 6y ago
  I think it's important to distinguish "introvert" from "lacks social skills". I'm introverted in the sense that social interaction drains my energy and solitude recharges it (with the stereotypical consequences like I don't like parties qua parties). However, I have good social skills in that I can make almost anyone like me, quickly. That is extremely useful in both getting hired and keeping a job.
  - tsjq 6y ago
    wow. are you me ? :)

rehman 6y ago

Hope this gets fixed some day.

Inception 6y ago

I've been seeing this sentiment a lot on LinkedIn, particularly with new developers entering the field. Leaving aside the whole argument about whether or not we should really be calling software developers engineers, a lot of these same people are advertising themselves as full-stack. I'm sorry, but you going through a 10-week bootcamp or even getting a 4 year CS degree does not make you full-stack. It's comparable to how we laugh at recruiters when they ask for 5 years in a given language that has only been around for 2 years. You clearly don't know what you're talking about. I always tell the folks I mentor through bootcamps they should figure out which area they like best, focus most of their efforts in that area, and then advertise themselves as a front-end developer or back-end developer or whatever, not full-stack. The upside down T approach. Show recruiters and hiring managers you at least know enough to know what you don't know. And stop complaining on LinkedIn about how unfair it is that you don't have a million job opportunities pouring in or about all the applications you submitted and didn't hear back from - yes it's annoying, but if you advertise yourself as something you're not, you've likely already wasted someone else's time, so understand they probably don't want to waste anymore giving you an explanation for why you were passed over.

ipnon 6y ago
If you can write a web page that submits a user form and a server that writes that data to a persistent database ... I'm failing to see which part of the "stack" is unfilled. This is what bootcamps teach.
- Inception 6y ago
  Yes, bootcamps teach you the basics of each part of the stack. I would make the argument that you aren't proficient in any of these areas, so to advertise yourself as such is misleading. I file my own taxes, but I don't refer to myself as an accountant. I've yet to meet a bootcamp grad that can efficiently architect a relational database, for example. I know plenty of Sr. level front-end developers who wouldn't think to call themselves full-stack even though they know how to submit a user form that persists to the database. Same with back-end developers who know HTML, CSS, and pick your flavor of JS framework. If you've worked in the industry, you know things change too fast to stay up to speed on everything. It's not impossible, but it's unlikely and unrealistic to have that expectation of someone once they are employed.

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago

Everybody talks about how hard it is to tell a good engineer from about one. I've been thinking about what exactly that means in terms of our day-to-day. If 10% of the work you're doing this quarter is work that you are going to be doing next quarter, you'll need to be interviewed differently than if 90% of the work you're doing this quarter is work that you're going to be doing next quarter. If the job is narrow and predictable enough, you can just assess somebody's ability to do the tasks you will ultimately need them to do. if the job is broad and unpredictable enough, you have to assess it by proxy. Like how due to the long tail of word usage [0], it's easier to just talk to somebody to see if they are fluent, rather than quizzing them on words. I wonder if software engineering is in some weird anti-sweet spot, where our breadth of work isn't so broad that we really need many year degrees and licenses and boards, but isn't narrow enough that you can just assess somebody on the actual duties you want them to be performing. Not to mention that different jobs in the field really do have different degrees of unpredictability/variety, so the breadth experienced in a few years at one shop would be completely different from the narrowness experienced in a few years at another, so a resume doesn't you tell as much as you'd hope. [0] A full 50% of the words in Tom Sawyer only occur once, for example. It's why teaching languages can only go so far, and you really just get lots of experience using a language to become proficient.

SPBS 6y ago

This article is not talking about how broken Google-style algorithmic interviews are. It's encouraging Google-style algorithmic interviews by bringing them to the candidate as soon as possible. This is achieved by making candidates pay money for mock interviews with interviewers from tech companies. This fundamental problem this article is describing is that recruiters are filtering out too many candidates by pedigree to ever have them end up in an algorithmic interview with a tech company.

decafninja 6y ago
How important is your pedigree in getting a (good) tech job? If you've worked as a SWE in some capacity, it seems like most companies (even top ones) consider you good enough to at least interview you. My pedigree is average at best. I've worked my entire career at non-tech companies (banks, hedge funds) doing decidedly unsexy work. I'm still able to attract enough attention that FAANG and many other top tech company recruiters contact me first. Interestingly enough, it's the top companies in my current sector (finance) that refuse to even have an internal recruiter casually speak with me. i.e. Citadel, Two Sigma, Jane Street, etc. There's also stories I see occasionally on LinkedIn, etc. of people from completely non-technical backgrounds getting hired as SWEs at top tech companies. Taxi drivers, ex-felons, aestheticians, etc. getting hired as SWEs at FAANG and unicorns.
- necubi 6y ago
  My experience interviewing with hedge funds is that they expect candidates to be working with an external recruiter.
  - decafninja 6y ago
    Yup - seems that's the way it works in finance. External recruiter sends my resume to a firm, internal recruiter then does a casual chat with me, and assuming I don't throw any red flags, I proceed to the coding phone screen. Multiple external recruiters have attempted to submit me to Citadel and Two Sigma over the course of the past five years. I always tell the recruiter I've never heard back from them in the past, but they're always confident that they can vouch for me and get me an interview. Of course, I never hear back and the recruiter is puzzled.

commandlinefan 6y ago

> They wisely rejected pedigree as a viable means of credentialing and adopted the admirable mission of democratizing access to opportunity in software engineering. You know that college admissions are just as "democratic" as somebody's online testing process, right? As in, anybody can take the test and if they pass, they get admitted? Like... they're exactly the same concept?

nunez 6y ago

> Breaking character for a moment, a friend of mine recently got this recruiting email from Google, who has elevated gaslighting to an art form God I love Aline's stuff.

stakkur 6y ago

The real truth is: hiring is a crapshoot. For any position and any field. Software engineering is no different. There is no meaningful data that any hiring process--good or bad--improves the outcome of a hire. If there were, everyone would be using it. Instead, third-party HR monoliths have moved in and snatched up (and more or less created) the 'market' for screening and filtering applicants. Larger companies sigh, throw up their hands, and say 'well how else can we deal with hundreds of applicants?'. As if that 'funnel' of applicants contains what you think you want. As if it's just an exercise in reductionism, each applicant a data point to evaluate. Given this, why not hire lightly and fire lightly?

UncleOxidant 6y ago
I think a lot of us suspect that just choosing applicants randomly would probably have a very similar outcome to what we do now, but nobody wants to be the first to try it.
- stmw 6y ago
  The above statement is really just validation that the current process sucks so much for everyone that it's conceivable to replace it with random choice. However, it's not actually true (for reasons explained in the blog) - as a hiring manager, I am confident you couldn't ship "Hello world" by hiring randomly.
sk2020 6y ago
Construction and trades takes that approach. It’s a mixed bag. I would say implicit job insecurity removes a lot of potentially good employees from the applicant pool. People who value stability and support families tend to be reliable, and some of them won’t work for someone who has a reputation for firing everyone as soon as things get slow or if they have an off day. I think my industry (civil engineers) is a bit easier to hire for because credentialing weeds out people who are completely out of their depth, and lying about qualifications can get you in real trouble. Managers can assume you’re basically competent and can focus on hiring people with decent personality and a good reputation. Some of my software friends use brain-teasers to screen candidates, and it comes off as a bit silly to me.

jennyyang 6y ago

The thing that companies fail to do is reconcile hiring decisions with performance reviews afterwards. They have a single hiring practice and they NEVER EVER change it, regardless of the quality of the eventual hires. The missing feedback loop from performance review back to the hiring process means that the hiring process can't get fixed. Until companies start adding that process back in, hiring will never get better.

pkaye 6y ago
I believe Google does this reconciliation between hiring decision and performance reviews.
tmsh 6y ago
I think it's complicated by the fact that the better the company, they better they are at mentoring even "bad" hires. I.e., performance review isn't normalized across all companies. Google might think their hiring process is great because a lot of their hires do well in their performance review - but maybe that has more to do with the engineering culture and mentorship in the company, and less to do with their ability to pick future winners. Perhaps though if one looks at the performance review weighted to a review date as soon after the hiring, and sort of tail off how much weight is given over the coming years it'd make sense. I've just seen a lot of bad hires get better with time. And some good hires lose steam or become jaded and perform worse over time. Thus, as messed up as it is, one of the keenest signals is tenacity in the end. And ironically tenacity in preparation for interviews (that Leetcode grind) is somewhat correlated with performance reviews in the long run and perhaps correlated with utility to the company. That said, "decent" engineers in the long run that don't think outside the box but check their performance review boxes slowly bleed a company's ability to disrupt. I.e., performance reviews need to be expanded a bit to think about the health of the overall company and not just the employee performing their function. As a large tech organization, I'd prefer a complex distribution of performances over an even distribution any day - because value to tech companies is still influenced by more black swan event type of innovation. But then I have a high "beta" (variation) in terms of what I'm looking for. Companies with more of a utility emphasis perhaps are better served by a hiring process that is "reliable" with a lot of false negatives.

ipnon 6y ago

We shouldn't ask why engineering hiring is broken. We should ask how an industry with broken hiring can succeed. Software engineering has such ludicrous margins that the labor market for software engineers can be ludicrous in equal proportion. The result is that we can bully and cajole smart, capable people, then go on to make 6 figure salaries and makes billions of dollars in revenue.

invalidOrTaken 6y ago
Much to be said for this.

staticassertion 6y ago

I have a very simple hiring process. I describe the product, the work, the gaps. I ask them what their interests are. We find where the interests align with our gaps. If there is no alignment, we simply don't move forward. I tell them the compensation. They accept or reject. Takes about 45 minutes. Pretty simple, the goal is to make sure that they want to do the work that we need done, and that they feel prepared to do so. So far so good.

ipnon 6y ago
n=?
dariusj18 6y ago
And how do you evaluate their ability to fill those gaps?
- FeistySkink 6y ago
  Probation period?
- staticassertion 6y ago
  We just talk about the work. I don't test them, that's a waste of everyone's time.
travisjungroth 6y ago
You can’t have possibly described your whole process. How do you get these candidates in the room? Does everyone who applies get an interview? And how do you decide between candidates? If it’s as you described, it sounds like it’s “first come first serve”.
- staticassertion 6y ago
  I just reach out. We're small. At scale I would still prefer to primarily base recruiting on referrals. Yeah, first come first serve.

andrewstuart 6y ago

Platonic is an odd word to use in this context.

fennecfoxen 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_idealism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_idealism

robertlagrant 6y ago

> Breaking character for a moment, a friend of mine recently got this recruiting email from Google, who has elevated gaslighting to an art form: somehow the fact that it takes two months to get through their process has become a selling point. The quoted email in no way supports this statement.

wanderer2323 6y ago
the statement is such a blatant indefensible lie I had to wonder if I stumbled on some kind of 'point deer make horse' [0] scenario. [0] https://epochtimes.today/chinese-idiom-point-to-a-deer-and-call-it-a-horse-%E6%8C%87%E9%B9%BF%E7%82%BA%E9%A6%AC/ https://epochtimes.today/chinese-idiom-point-to-a-deer-and-c...
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > 'point deer make horse' [0] Your link never glosses the saying as "point deer make horse". Why did you? The grammar of the saying is normal, far more so than usual for these, and "make" is not the relevant sense of 為.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

unexaminedlife 6y ago

anecdata here: I once was asked to explain the difference between 2 functions in a standard library that I don't think I had ever used. That was the only question I was asked. They completely wrote me off as soon as I couldn't answer the question. If they had just asked me to write an entire app from scratch (not counting frameworks) I could've done that for them no problem :)

sys_64738 6y ago

Unless you have engineering credentials from a recognized engineering body, then you’re not an engineer. Software developer, maybe. Engineer, no.

bane 6y ago
In the United States there are no licensure requirements for Software Engineering.
stmw 6y ago
There are no reliable software engineering credentials in the US. But there are also no reliable electrical engineering credentials, and many other things. There is a P.Eng. (professional engineer) examination, but it's really most relevant for civil engineering, buildings, and the like, and unused in most other cases.

unexaminedlife 6y ago

I'd like to see a "speed dating" concept implemented in tech hiring. You, along with however many other candidates rotate around among different companies. You maybe work for each company up to 1 week. At the end you get your offers and decide among them. I've ended up working for too many lemons because of lack of visibility into how well put together they really are. I want to know ahead of time whether they really have their ish together or if the interview bubble is just a facade.

tk75x 6y ago
We already have something kind of like speed dating for hiring: job fairs. Your idea is more like a one night stand. It would be cool if there were large scale career fairs that are hosted outside of colleges open to the general public, and then there was some sort of organized process where people could talk one on one for some period of time with representatives of the top X companies they choose. Probably will need a basic filter so there aren't tens of thousands of people per company, and spread the interviews out over several days. You always hear about networking, but outside of exclusive groups that already require money or status to be a part of, there aren't opportunities for people who need each other to meet up in an organized way and get things done.
- unexaminedlife 6y ago
  I'm not anticipating you'll read this, but for anyone who happens to read this part of the thread, I don't think job fairs are even close to what I described above. They serve similar purposes, but in my case described above, an actual hire will occur or it won't. Job fairs, at least the ones I've been to are more like an advertising kiosk in a mall where no one you're talking to has any authority of any kind let alone deciding whether or not to hire you on the spot :) Also, at a job fair you have no idea what the day to day life will be in your new position. In my scenario, once you are or aren't hired you will have already lived the life you will be living if you are hired.

gnabgib 6y ago

Why did the title change (on HN)? It now no longer matches the original article ("I’ve been an engineer and a recruiter. Hiring is broken. Here’s why… and what it should be like instead.") - contrary to HN guidelines[0] [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

AndrewKemendo 6y ago

I'm convinced that there is no generalized "right" way to do hiring - for engineers or otherwise. Considering "engineers" as a monolith is silly and the diversity of engineers makes any attempt to generalize fail. Different types of people fit into different cultures and work styles. If there's anything at all that I would generalize on, it would be: "Be candid about your work culture if hiring and don't try to work some place that doesn't fit your style if applying."

the_only_law 6y ago

> I could try some job boards to see which companies are out there. But what would I filter on? I know a lot of programming languages but am not set on having to work in a specific one. How can I tell if I’ll hit it off with the team? I’m applying via a job board to a position I know next to nothing about — will anyone even respond? Man I really can't stand job boards. I feel like the only way to make a good job board would have to aggressively vet companies posting jobs, which ofc would lead to it being very barren.

yowlingcat 6y ago

I've been known to write egregiously long comments, emails, articles, but good good is this article overly long. I was really ready to blow it off when I realized -- the author is putting her money where her mouth is. She's built a very useful platform that helps connect real people with real job opportunities. Okay. In that case, I can forgive the "cardinal sin" of bad writing. Here's the problem with hiring: organizations. Hiring practices reflect organizational ladders and career progressions. Where you see flaws in the latter, of course it will backpropagate into the former. The problem with a "platonic ideal" for how engineering hiring should work is that it requires a "platonic ideal" for how a company should work. And what is that? How do you avoid politics as you scale up a company? Sure, engineering skills are fungibly valuable, that much is evidenced by the market. But engineering career output, and promotional success -- that part is very circumstantial and specific to the company. And I would argue hiring is part of that process -- hiring is getting promoted from candidate to employee. Every company does it differently. And the dynamics are not platonic but tribal. There's no way around that but to find the tribe you want to be a part of and accept it's a little irrational. I remember wishing and hoping when I was younger for a platonic ideal for engineering hiring and engineering organizations that never came. I grew to understand that the warfield of political economy that the business existed inside of (including and especially non-technical and executive personnel) had so much of a major impact on what engineering even means that to conceive of its retraction or engineering in isolation was a little naive and unrealistic. Is it cynical for me to say that? Is it bad for me to say that?

jl2718 6y ago

> recruiters spend roughly 15 hours a hire, and engineers spend about 40. 15 hours can save you 15% on someone else’s salary. I feel used....

optimuspaul 6y ago

6 hours on site for engineering interview is nuts.

roland35 6y ago
For some recent interviews I have had 2 hour long interviews with 2-3 people in each, so 6 hours as a total seems realistic! Too bad I didn't get paid for my time!

apple4ever 6y ago

My problems with hiring: 1. Resume forms. Just accept a resume. I don't have time to fill out your form that requires exact months. 2. Not hearing back. Its not hard to send a response. The ones I really hate are "we get so many responses so we'll only contact you if we like you!" come one 3. Bad recruiters. The ones who just email and call about being an automotive technician when I'm an infrastructure engineer.

rizpanjwani 6y ago

Having been in the field for almost 15 years, it seems to me that hiring has always kind of been hit and miss and all these timed tech interviews don't really help much as they focus too much on just code or system design. But the majority of problems I have encountered have not been technically difficult. Once you create an application with a sound system design, all the other technical stuff isn't really a challenge. Majority of the issues are caused by requirements not being communicated, captured, or implemented properly. That's something that's not really focused on tech interviews. I just want a diligent developer who can identify potential issues, do their research, and propose solutions rather than be able to design a system in 90 minutes, because that's never happening in real life. In fact, I'd not hire someone who can claim to do so.

zachrose 6y ago

This is a pretty good breakdown of the dynamics of software engineering hiring, even if I don't follow to her conclusions. It seems like "abstraction" is a recurring theme. The hiring manager is abstracted from the job description by the recruiter. Whether by institutional affiliation or passing a quiz, candidates are abstracted into punch cards that can be fed through the system. Furthermore there's a seemingly overwhelming institutional bias for companies to congratulate themselves on making the right hire, and for their employees for being the right hires, that the whole thing becomes kind of circular.

helsinkiandrew 6y ago

Recruiters are often a necessary evil - they act as a filter to find the "smart people" and for smart people to find the good roles. 1. Finding a good recruiter is as hard or harder than finding a good employee - only do it if you expect to be recruiting for multiple roles over a period. 2. Think a lot about what you're looking for in an engineer, how you'll evaluate candidates, what experience will be shows for the talents you need and then how to articulate that to the recruiter. When they send CVs/resumes make sure you give feedback on what are the bad and good qualities. 3. When recruiting I've nearly always gone via recruiters that have gotten me roles or have worked with in the past (or atleast through them to someone else in their organisation).

tilolebo 6y ago

So what about certifications? To me it looks exactly like the kind of credentials the article describes.

chovy 6y ago

I've been hiring part-time engineers for about 2 years now at my consulting company. I post on r/Jobs4Bitcoins, ask for their github and that they speak English fluently. I have some really good engineers who love working for me. I do weekly standups, give them direction and then get the f-- out of their way. We have a kanban board where I populate tasks and the devs just grab what they want to work on. We don't do sprints.

nonplussed 6y ago

How come when I login to my interviewing.io account I don't see Twitter but it's shown in the screenshot? Is that an accurate representation? I do see the other companies from the screenshot but with fewer jobs.