4 ms·

> Is it perfect? No, but it does work. How do you know it works? > I don’t want to hire the wrong person, it’s expensive and it makes my job awful for a while

> Is it perfect? No, but it does work. How do you know it works? > I don’t want to hire the wrong person, it’s expensive and it makes my job awful for a while. There we are. It is all about you. No need to say anything else - your life is all about you, so of course if it works for you, 'it works'.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
JohnHaugeland 5y ago
> How do you know it works? Because the hallways aren't empty.
- mylons 5y ago
  the hallways aren’t empty due to the total compensation and perceived prestige working at a FAANG or similar company offers.
  - dwater 5y ago
    I had a startup give me 2 interviews and a paid coding exercise before making an offer, but the compensation was below market with some long shot equity comp. I had a large consulting company give me one recruiter screen and a series of 3 20 minute interviews, one tech one manager and one in between before making an offer at market rate. Sounds like generally interview time scales with total compensation, which seems fine to me. I’m a data scientist and I’ve never had a live coding interview but I also have no desire to apply to a top tier tech co.
  - frankchn 5y ago
    Then there isn’t a problem — at least for FAANG. People are willing to jump through more hoops for more rewards in all aspects of life. If a less prestigious company with worse compensation tries the same thing, then they will quickly discover they can’t hire anyone. It will be self-correcting.
  - nova22033 5y ago
    due to the total compensation Yes..it's why people do jobs.
    - lanstin 5y ago
      Probably not as much as you would guess from talking to FAANG employees. It’s been fifteen years since my compensation exceeded the amount where it makes any difference to me. Now I want to have interesting problems, a business model I am not ashamed of, good and smart coworkers and decent conditions. I won’t be retiring early, which is fine: my work is almost always a fun and valued way I contribute to the world. One of the big problems with software ethics and the joy of solving problems is the influx of people choosing software not due to intrinsic affinity but just for money. Sometimes I wish more of them still went for law degrees or MBAs or surgery. It’s just a little sad to see someone who can make beautiful and useful software gems be dissatisfied because they didn’t get to be a CTO by the time they are thirty or the like. In the 90s people getting a big software job where thrilled because they were going to change the world. My mom’s friends used stuff that ran my code. Now it seems like people want FIRE or multiple houses or lambos.
  - JohnHaugeland 5y ago
    Sounds like you're agreeing with me in disagreeing tones
igetspam 5y ago
No, it's all about everyone. If I hire a person and fire them in less than a year, that's almost always because of a performance problem that's impacting the team or the org. If you're the one being fired, you probably left a job or didn't take some other job to work with us and now you're going to be unemployed. Additionally, as a hiring manager, I too am a human who wants to enjoy my job and have positive experiences and firing people sucks. It always sucks. It takes a toll on you. Filtering early is best for everyone. If that means more rounds of interviews to be sure, that's what I'm going to do. I do my best to schedule around candidates and I'm forthcoming about the process during the first call but we try hard to be thorough because we want this to work well for everyone. Would you rather be hired and then fired quickly because we didn't realize there was a misalignment? I wouldn't.
- randmeerkat 5y ago
  > Would you rather be hired and then fired quickly because we didn't realize there was a misalignment? I wouldn't. The fact that your knee jerk reaction to a misalignment is firing someone rather than mentoring them and aligning them with the org speaks volumes about your management style… And managers wonder why they have such a hard time hiring or retaining people right now…
  - ethanwillis 5y ago
    They want to outsource the costs of developing talent. To their own detriment, then they want to blame everyone else. This is of course when they're not busy abusing someone on a visa to make them do more work than a human should have to do.
    - igetspam 5y ago
      You've had some bad jobs, haven't you? Want to talk about it? We don't abuse anyone on a visa because we're fully remote and don't do visas. We target the high side of comp in the person's country. We specifically hire senior people because we're small and building. Developing talent is great but the time to do that is expensive and until you've hit a certain scale, it's detrimental to launching a startup. Look around the industry and look at the success stories. Then look at what their early hiring looks like. If you can find a startup that succeeded by hiring new grads and junior engineering first, I'd love to read about it.
david-gpu 5y ago
> How do you know it works? If the company in question is growing its business and the employees and customers are happy, then whatever they are doing is working, at least for now. I'm not sure there is a much better way to measure it. When I joined NVidia they had me through two phone screens (although they originally planned for three), followed by an onsite with seven different interviewers back to back on the same day. It wasn't fun, but it wasn't the end of the world either. When I was a hiring manager at Qualcomm we would typically do a phone screen followed by an onsite with maybe four one-hour interviews back to back and there was rarely any disagreement on whether the candidate made the cut or not, so I would argue that it was sufficient.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

JohnHaugeland 5y ago

> How do you know it works? Because the hallways aren't empty.

mylons 5y ago
the hallways aren’t empty due to the total compensation and perceived prestige working at a FAANG or similar company offers.
- dwater 5y ago
  I had a startup give me 2 interviews and a paid coding exercise before making an offer, but the compensation was below market with some long shot equity comp. I had a large consulting company give me one recruiter screen and a series of 3 20 minute interviews, one tech one manager and one in between before making an offer at market rate. Sounds like generally interview time scales with total compensation, which seems fine to me. I’m a data scientist and I’ve never had a live coding interview but I also have no desire to apply to a top tier tech co.
- frankchn 5y ago
  Then there isn’t a problem — at least for FAANG. People are willing to jump through more hoops for more rewards in all aspects of life. If a less prestigious company with worse compensation tries the same thing, then they will quickly discover they can’t hire anyone. It will be self-correcting.
- nova22033 5y ago
  due to the total compensation Yes..it's why people do jobs.
  - lanstin 5y ago
    Probably not as much as you would guess from talking to FAANG employees. It’s been fifteen years since my compensation exceeded the amount where it makes any difference to me. Now I want to have interesting problems, a business model I am not ashamed of, good and smart coworkers and decent conditions. I won’t be retiring early, which is fine: my work is almost always a fun and valued way I contribute to the world. One of the big problems with software ethics and the joy of solving problems is the influx of people choosing software not due to intrinsic affinity but just for money. Sometimes I wish more of them still went for law degrees or MBAs or surgery. It’s just a little sad to see someone who can make beautiful and useful software gems be dissatisfied because they didn’t get to be a CTO by the time they are thirty or the like. In the 90s people getting a big software job where thrilled because they were going to change the world. My mom’s friends used stuff that ran my code. Now it seems like people want FIRE or multiple houses or lambos.
- JohnHaugeland 5y ago
  Sounds like you're agreeing with me in disagreeing tones

igetspam 5y ago

No, it's all about everyone. If I hire a person and fire them in less than a year, that's almost always because of a performance problem that's impacting the team or the org. If you're the one being fired, you probably left a job or didn't take some other job to work with us and now you're going to be unemployed. Additionally, as a hiring manager, I too am a human who wants to enjoy my job and have positive experiences and firing people sucks. It always sucks. It takes a toll on you. Filtering early is best for everyone. If that means more rounds of interviews to be sure, that's what I'm going to do. I do my best to schedule around candidates and I'm forthcoming about the process during the first call but we try hard to be thorough because we want this to work well for everyone. Would you rather be hired and then fired quickly because we didn't realize there was a misalignment? I wouldn't.

randmeerkat 5y ago
> Would you rather be hired and then fired quickly because we didn't realize there was a misalignment? I wouldn't. The fact that your knee jerk reaction to a misalignment is firing someone rather than mentoring them and aligning them with the org speaks volumes about your management style… And managers wonder why they have such a hard time hiring or retaining people right now…
- ethanwillis 5y ago
  They want to outsource the costs of developing talent. To their own detriment, then they want to blame everyone else. This is of course when they're not busy abusing someone on a visa to make them do more work than a human should have to do.
  - igetspam 5y ago
    You've had some bad jobs, haven't you? Want to talk about it? We don't abuse anyone on a visa because we're fully remote and don't do visas. We target the high side of comp in the person's country. We specifically hire senior people because we're small and building. Developing talent is great but the time to do that is expensive and until you've hit a certain scale, it's detrimental to launching a startup. Look around the industry and look at the success stories. Then look at what their early hiring looks like. If you can find a startup that succeeded by hiring new grads and junior engineering first, I'd love to read about it.

david-gpu 5y ago

> How do you know it works? If the company in question is growing its business and the employees and customers are happy, then whatever they are doing is working, at least for now. I'm not sure there is a much better way to measure it. When I joined NVidia they had me through two phone screens (although they originally planned for three), followed by an onsite with seven different interviewers back to back on the same day. It wasn't fun, but it wasn't the end of the world either. When I was a hiring manager at Qualcomm we would typically do a phone screen followed by an onsite with maybe four one-hour interviews back to back and there was rarely any disagreement on whether the candidate made the cut or not, so I would argue that it was sufficient.