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Just last night, I listened to my son explain the long and rigorous process that he watched senior faculty at a top 10 university go through in selecting post g
by travisgriggs 4y ago
Just last night, I listened to my son explain the long and rigorous process that he watched senior faculty at a top 10 university go through in selecting post grad students and research assistants. I’ve been part of the “try to pick the best candidate” process for many years in professional, church, and community institutions.
Of late, I’m beginning to suspect that there are basically two camps in this whole game.
1. The optimistic one that believes rigorous evaluations and screening are worth the effort. They may even accept some of the failures, but basically believe we’re still getting there, we’ll figure this out. It’s better than doing nothing.
2. The near nihilistic group that basically worries the whole process creates a lot of heat but sheds very little light. That often these choices backfire on us, that our prejudices are our own worst enemies, that while we have some wins in steering the “right” choice, taken overall as a net, it’s not really any better than just random luck of the draw.
For many years I think I was camp 1. I worry of late that camp 2 is looking more and more like the reality. Maybe I’m just down about this whole process today.
- UncleOxidant 4y agoEvery place I've ever worked says "we only hire the best". I don't recall anyone saying "we intend to hire average people". It's sort of like Lake Woebegon where all the children are above average.
- mrj 4y agoI worked at a Bank before at this was the hiring plan. Simply fill the seats and expect a strong(er) manager to guide the output. Hiring the best simply wasn't an option in most cases, but one good hire was expected to closely monitor and correct the output from many. This didn't work out very well in practice. The efforts of one bad programmer's output can easily max out two people to clean it up. So the Bank had mostly given up on producing its own code and tried to outsource or buy everything it could.
- tomrod 4y agoCulturally, I like the emphasis on "every hire increases the average in the long run." When the project or product has the capacity, then when I hire folks I am way less concerned with what they can do immediately today and more interested in what they can do after 3 to 6 months of consistent, earnest growth. If they have critical skillsets and capabilities that are crucial and needed immediately, that's a wonderful thing too, but cross-skilling and training are really needed to prevent those kinds of situations from occuring generally.
- _hcuq 4y agoDo you do leetcode tests?
- tomrod 4y agoI've done the leetcode thing. As a hiring manager, I don't find much value in homogenization of skillsets that comes from dedicating time to memorizing rote answers to problems. Some amount of that skill on a team can be beneficial, but it's less effective when everyone brings that skillset to the table. The issue with leetcode is a lot like the issue of GMAT/GRE/SAT/ACT. It can be used to remove candidates from the pool, but it is a really poor indicator of general success overall. All it does is make the candidate pool a bit more manageable at the expense of people who have other skillsets. Skillsets that are selected against by leetcode are tip-of-the-spear adopters and other innovators (broad thinkers), communication skillsets, and often UX understanding/projection. As an employer, I have used Hackerrank for a specific skillset and role we needed (deep SQL experience), but that is the only type of testing we used for selection processing.
- scruple 4y agoYeah, but it's the best of their availabile options. No TechCo or startup that I've seen is capable of admitting to themselves that they're a Pony league baseball team in southern Ohio and not the LA Dodgers.
- throwawaygh 4y agoThere are managers and directors in tech who realize that their job is to hire the best given their budget. This happens, in particular, when hiring technical middle management at "second tier but still amazing" employers. Outside of FAANG, but definitely household names. The unique characteristic is that their "ideal candidate" will almost certainly interview and is almost certainly unaffordable. At lower tier employers, it's safe to tell yourself "we hire the best" because the best almost never apply (and, when they do, they're doing so for a very good reason and probably understand your constraints). Also, for fungible roles, you always say "we hire the best" because you don't actually care about hiring the best but telling everyone that you did is good for morale because that means they're the best.
- mikro2nd 4y agoSee also: Joy's Law - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy%27s_law_(management) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy%27s_law_(management)
- JackMorgan 4y agoWell it's the best of the ~10 candidates they interviewed, but that's not exactly the same thing.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]