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We all know the tech hiring process is broken and bad at picking performant individuals. In the time you have available, under the conditions you have the cand

We all know the tech hiring process is broken and bad at picking performant individuals. In the time you have available, under the conditions you have the candidates, I don't think I would be able to determine competency or even personality traits. In a 4 week segment that I taught I would start to form opinions of students after ~6 hours of interaction with them. Sometimes arrogance was just nerves, expectations were super malleable and not necessarily deeply embedded. Competence is almost completely separated from course completion / rate of completion. Effort applied isn't a great indicator either (although slightly better than the other two). I would recommend if you want to find great candidates, teach a bootcamp. There's literally the top 10% going through that can just be picked off. I hired one of the 3 brightest I taught and the other two I primed for when I have hiring budget.

metadat 5y ago
"Just pick the cream off the top, even though you're supposed to be their instructor." Because that's totally moral and ethical? No conflict of interest at all. What a neat hunter trick. Also, tell them you're their fairy auntie, that'll disarm the marks even more.
- aunty_helen 5y ago
  Sorry, can you explain the conflict here and who or what it's conflicting with? I don't think you've thought this out or thought about it from the point of view of the students.
  - 29083011397778 5y ago
    Your recommendation was to teach a bootcamp to find applicants. This, in my mind, reads like a combined internship / interview that the applicant pays the potential employer to partake in.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - aunty_helen 5y ago
      OK, that's not what I intended. Teaching a bootcamp is pretty full on commitment so using it solely as a hiring funnel would see you ousted via feedback scores pretty quickly if you weren't delivering on the learning aspect. The way I see it, and I'm open to being wrong about this, is that people that join a bootcamp are doing so to find a job. If at the end of the course I shoulder tap the best students I've had and we connect on linkedin (or they make the request) and then we end up entering into some kind of internship / jr position, I can only see that as a good thing. The dev gets a job, I get good staff, the course gets their vague job placement goals met and at the end of the day, software gets written. The only people I see being disadvantaged is others in the market for a dev. But that's not going to keep me up at night.

metadat 5y ago

"Just pick the cream off the top, even though you're supposed to be their instructor." Because that's totally moral and ethical? No conflict of interest at all. What a neat hunter trick. Also, tell them you're their fairy auntie, that'll disarm the marks even more.

aunty_helen 5y ago
Sorry, can you explain the conflict here and who or what it's conflicting with? I don't think you've thought this out or thought about it from the point of view of the students.
- 29083011397778 5y ago
  Your recommendation was to teach a bootcamp to find applicants. This, in my mind, reads like a combined internship / interview that the applicant pays the potential employer to partake in.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - aunty_helen 5y ago
    OK, that's not what I intended. Teaching a bootcamp is pretty full on commitment so using it solely as a hiring funnel would see you ousted via feedback scores pretty quickly if you weren't delivering on the learning aspect. The way I see it, and I'm open to being wrong about this, is that people that join a bootcamp are doing so to find a job. If at the end of the course I shoulder tap the best students I've had and we connect on linkedin (or they make the request) and then we end up entering into some kind of internship / jr position, I can only see that as a good thing. The dev gets a job, I get good staff, the course gets their vague job placement goals met and at the end of the day, software gets written. The only people I see being disadvantaged is others in the market for a dev. But that's not going to keep me up at night.