3 ms·

I was about to tack that on. Not only the badly worded job descriptions, but zero trust that you actually worked at $COMPANY and did some $JOB. You can verify

I was about to tack that on. Not only the badly worded job descriptions, but zero trust that you actually worked at $COMPANY and did some $JOB. You can verify that pretty anonymously/easily (with the interviewees permission, of course) by acting like a landlord or something, calling the previous employer and asking if $PERSON works/worked for your company and had $TITLE and did they work there $YEARS. That should almost be the first step imo after the quick "are you a person / do you have these skills" interview which is normally reserved for an HR person who doesn't know a bit from a byte. If they picked up the phone, claimed to have some skills, a company they work/worked for genuinely seems to exist and employed them, heck hire them - I bet 9/10 it would work out just fine.

deleted 4y ago
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lesuorac 4y ago
Well if you have 100,000 employees then 9/10 means you have 10,000 "bad" employees and certainly means that everybody in the company is going to be interacting with "bad" employees which I can't imagine will be great for a company that claims only to hire the best and brightest. (F has ~70k employees, G has ~164k employees) The other issue is that if we look at something likes levels.fyi [1] the roles don't always line up. Ex. Capital One's SE/Senior Associate is a similar role to both Amazon's SDE I & II. While Capital One's pay is ~137k and SDE I is ~165k / SDE II is ~237k so which do you hire the candidate at? Although it will sometimes be an "easy" choice as say Microsoft's 62 is completely within SDE II's bucket. IMO, the probation period idea is probably the better one I've seen although it does really take people time to ramp up to all the legacy code. [1]: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Capital%20One,Amazon,Microsoft&track=Software%20Engineer#negotiation-promo-home https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Capital%20One,Amazon,Microso...
- lapcat 4y ago
  > a company that claims only to hire the best and brightest That's what they claim. It seems unlikely, especially seeing some of the things they produce. ;-) A less sarcastic point is that a company with a uniform hiring process tends to get a uniform workforce. What this means is that all employees tend to have the same strengths, and also the same weaknesses, because the hiring process is always looking for the same exact things. The result is that the team ends up not being more than the sum of all the parts but rather less than the sum of all the parts. The same strengths added together are redundant, and the same weaknesses added together create giant corporate blind spots. When you go about trying to "minimize the bad hire", what you're really minimizing is any sort of difference or diversity among the workforce, thereby missing the forest for the trees. We always talk about the so-called "10x engineer", but it's not clear that 2 10x engineers with the exact same skills would be better than 2 other engineers with different but complementary skills. Maybe 10x + 10x effectively adds up to much less than 20x.

deleted 4y ago

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lesuorac 4y ago

Well if you have 100,000 employees then 9/10 means you have 10,000 "bad" employees and certainly means that everybody in the company is going to be interacting with "bad" employees which I can't imagine will be great for a company that claims only to hire the best and brightest. (F has ~70k employees, G has ~164k employees) The other issue is that if we look at something likes levels.fyi [1] the roles don't always line up. Ex. Capital One's SE/Senior Associate is a similar role to both Amazon's SDE I & II. While Capital One's pay is ~137k and SDE I is ~165k / SDE II is ~237k so which do you hire the candidate at? Although it will sometimes be an "easy" choice as say Microsoft's 62 is completely within SDE II's bucket. IMO, the probation period idea is probably the better one I've seen although it does really take people time to ramp up to all the legacy code. [1]: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Capital%20One,Amazon,Microsoft&track=Software%20Engineer#negotiation-promo-home https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Capital%20One,Amazon,Microso...

lapcat 4y ago
> a company that claims only to hire the best and brightest That's what they claim. It seems unlikely, especially seeing some of the things they produce. ;-) A less sarcastic point is that a company with a uniform hiring process tends to get a uniform workforce. What this means is that all employees tend to have the same strengths, and also the same weaknesses, because the hiring process is always looking for the same exact things. The result is that the team ends up not being more than the sum of all the parts but rather less than the sum of all the parts. The same strengths added together are redundant, and the same weaknesses added together create giant corporate blind spots. When you go about trying to "minimize the bad hire", what you're really minimizing is any sort of difference or diversity among the workforce, thereby missing the forest for the trees. We always talk about the so-called "10x engineer", but it's not clear that 2 10x engineers with the exact same skills would be better than 2 other engineers with different but complementary skills. Maybe 10x + 10x effectively adds up to much less than 20x.