4 ms·

P(I'm impressed) ~= Nope Turning down a lot of candidates is not the same as finding good candidates. If you are turning down that many applicants, all it mea

P(I'm impressed) ~= Nope Turning down a lot of candidates is not the same as finding good candidates. If you are turning down that many applicants, all it means is that your applicant pool is almost entirely bad candidates. That merely implies you are failing where it matters most, getting awesome candidates interested and excited about working for you. I bet you could drive the P down even more. You could write worse job descriptions that get even more of the wrong people to apply. You could post the job listing on job boards like Monster or Dice, where there is a huge pool of un-hirable candidates who will apply to 20-30 jobs per day. I bet you could make it so bad you will have to hire someone to be the initial filter of candidates. Congratulations! You now have an HR department. They will arbitrarily filter candidates before the people actually competent to filter candidates get to see them, based entirely on buzzword bingo and 'number of years of experience'. You are failing and you're proud of it!

latch 15y ago
Interviewing process is something which, to my astonishment, companies don't tweak or experiment with. They have a process and they stick with it...this is as true of large corporations as it is of small startups. There's no attempt at being better or trying something different, even though everyone acknowledges how difficult and important it is. Part of the problem is people don't realize that they are doing it poorly.
- randomdata 15y ago
  Part of the problem is people don't realize that they are doing it poorly. You would think the 0.16% success rate would be a pretty big indicator. Based on my own experience, there were a number of points in the article that I have found to be not effective ways to hire programmers. And that is fine. They are free to hire people as they wish. But placing all of the blame on 99% of programmers being unqualified seems to miss the mark. It is more likely the hiring process causes them to miss out on the really good programmers.
AndrewMoffat 15y ago
What's interesting to me is the opening paragraph of the blog post: "It turns out to be quite difficult to hire good developers. I’m involved in the hiring process at deviantART, and it has opened my eyes to just how unqualified the majority of applicants to these jobs are." There seems to be a complete lack of connecting the dots from "this is unusually difficult" to "what can be done to make this better/easier/more efficient." And given that this failure is centered around software developer positions... it doesn't say good things about the kinds of problem-solving that goes on in their culture.
aidenn0 15y ago
All applicant pools are almost entirely bad candidates. If you got every single good hacker looking for a job to apply (very unlikely) you would still be left with an applicant pool of mostly people that suck (By the way, the worst place to hire people is actually not Monster, it's job fairs where all the people who can't hold down a regular job go).

latch 15y ago

Interviewing process is something which, to my astonishment, companies don't tweak or experiment with. They have a process and they stick with it...this is as true of large corporations as it is of small startups. There's no attempt at being better or trying something different, even though everyone acknowledges how difficult and important it is. Part of the problem is people don't realize that they are doing it poorly.

randomdata 15y ago
Part of the problem is people don't realize that they are doing it poorly. You would think the 0.16% success rate would be a pretty big indicator. Based on my own experience, there were a number of points in the article that I have found to be not effective ways to hire programmers. And that is fine. They are free to hire people as they wish. But placing all of the blame on 99% of programmers being unqualified seems to miss the mark. It is more likely the hiring process causes them to miss out on the really good programmers.

AndrewMoffat 15y ago

What's interesting to me is the opening paragraph of the blog post: "It turns out to be quite difficult to hire good developers. I’m involved in the hiring process at deviantART, and it has opened my eyes to just how unqualified the majority of applicants to these jobs are." There seems to be a complete lack of connecting the dots from "this is unusually difficult" to "what can be done to make this better/easier/more efficient." And given that this failure is centered around software developer positions... it doesn't say good things about the kinds of problem-solving that goes on in their culture.

aidenn0 15y ago

All applicant pools are almost entirely bad candidates. If you got every single good hacker looking for a job to apply (very unlikely) you would still be left with an applicant pool of mostly people that suck (By the way, the worst place to hire people is actually not Monster, it's job fairs where all the people who can't hold down a regular job go).