4 ms·

"You’re setting up a gigantic straw man." And called it the HN gestalt. Pretty sure I labelled it with what it is right up front. Nevertheless, I do think the

by jerf 4y ago

"You’re setting up a gigantic straw man." And called it the HN gestalt. Pretty sure I labelled it with what it is right up front. Nevertheless, I do think there are quite a few individuals who have an unexamined (in the philosophical sense) assumption that they just shouldn't have to do anything to get hired. I bet most of them, if they examined it, would realize that it's not a sensible assumption. I think it sneaks in through these conversations. But I think it's a modestly popular view.

sarchertech 4y ago
Labeling it it as a the HN gestalt doesn’t mean that it’s not a straw man. You can’t take the union of everyone’s food dislikes and say “according to the Earth gestalt, no food is edible.”
- rglullis 4y ago
  But you can ignore anyone that says "this food is not ok to eat because I once tried it at a bad restaurant and I didn't like it".
- saxonww 4y ago
  Sure you can. They are not trying to make the point that no food is edible, they are trying to make a point that depending on who you ask, you will end up hearing that any and every type of food is inedible. I get what they are saying. If you read the comment threads here on interview experiences, you're going to encounter groups that dislike or want to forbid every kind of technical screening technique. It's easy to read comments here and come away thinking nothing is OK and everything is unfair.
  - sarchertech 4y ago
    That’s not the point they are are making at all. They further expanded on this by talking about the straw man hacker news user who doesn’t think they should have to do anything to get hired.
    - strokirk 4y ago
      It's the exact point they are making. The union of all dislikes and eloquently put putdowns is exactly what many of us bring with us in our heads every day.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
smoe 4y ago
I haven't met many people that think they shouldn't do anything, what I see more commonly, is people assuming the way they personally prefer getting evaluated is the way it should be for everyone.
- shagie 4y ago
  I've seen it more of a "this is the way that you should hire me." That's fine if there is only one candidate to be evaluated. The difficulty with such is that these tend to be very time intensive on the employer side often requiring more time per candidate than the candidate spends with the prospective employer. This can work for one candidate, but fails if one tries to scale it up to even 10 (much less 100) candidates. For that, a filter needs to be applied... and we're back at square 1 of a subset of people not wanting to do take homes (and so on).
LocalPCGuy 4y ago
> quite a few individuals who ... that they just shouldn't have to do anything to get hired THAT is your strawman. I would question that this is a "common" assumption - most everyone, when pressed, understands there is some need for an interview and some form of evaluation of skills. They may push back on specific mentions as one person already mentioned, but almost everyone falls in a middle ground where it's something like "yes, interviewers have to vet people, and that is hard, but it can be done in a manner that is respectful of the interviewee's time and properly reflects the kinds of things a person may be asked to do for the job in question." I would premise that the problem isn't with (most) interviewees not wanting to do anything to get hired, but that (many) interviewers do not have a lot of experience interviewing and have just googled what other companies do and copied that, many times for the detriment to the entire process. If the interview process were actually thoughtfully designed to both probe the interviewee's ability to work with the team in question and ability to do the specific work the position entails, I don't think you'd see nearly the same level of disdain for the process.
- edanm 4y ago
  I've been in software long enough to know that these criticisms of the prices aren't new. And a lot of the things people complain about are improvements on the past, and came about precisely because old ways of hiring were leading to people who couldn't code (hence things like the whiteboard interview)
fsloth 4y ago
Generally companies succeed in hiring by filtering resumes and interviewing candidates. That's it. It's weird if a company feels it needs to do more than that. Companies either have trial periods or can let go of non-performing personnel. Hiring is critical but I've not seen any study that would correlate "high scores" in any type of hiring test to actual work performance. This implies no matter how elaborate interview performances are orchestrated, their capability to do anything else except create false negatives increases as their complexity increases. Hiring, in essence, is always a gating process with very little predictive capability beyond. The only thing you can know is the percentage of new hires who fail at their duties, and if that percentage is oddly high, you realize there is a problem in your hiring process. I suppose you can gauge candidate agreeableness and conformity by subjecting them to all sorts of hazing procedures but in our field I don't see how that translates to good outcomes either - technically speaking. Might be good for creating cult enclaves, though, for lonely gurus. I was a bit tongue in cheek here but my opinion "less is better" holds as it comes to hiring practices - this does not imply lack of diligence from the part of the hiring manager.
- ghaff 4y ago
  >there is a problem in your hiring process Or in your onboarding process.
- edanm 4y ago
  > Hiring is critical but I've not seen any study that would correlate "high scores" in any type of hiring test to actual work performance. There definitely are such studies. I don't have citations here, but it's well known that IQ tests or work-sample tasks are both the most effective at predicting on job performance.
  - fsloth 4y ago
    As I understand it (please correct me if I'm wrong) IQ tests work as a predictor for a population not for individuals. I.e. if you prefer IQ in your job application process, you will get a more performative workforce. However, with point samples it's not a very good benchmark. I.e. if you are comparing fairly strong candidates A and B, just preferring the one with the higher IQ is not necessarily the best option. So, getting the best hire for a specific position, and getting the most statistically best workforce are not necessarily the same thing.
risyachka 4y ago
Most devs have a shit ton of projects, code etc to show. This is way more than enough to estimate skill level and bypass leetcode memorization performances and 90% of other tech elements of interview. Corps basically just offload this work on the candidate as this is obviously cheaper and more convenient, instead of spending time and looking into his profile.
- ghaff 4y ago
  >Most devs have a shit ton of projects, code etc to show. I question how true that is. In any case, GitHub as resume basically tells applicants that if you don't work in open source for your day job and don't have the time/inclination to do coding as a hobby, don't bother applying. Which is going to be pretty discriminatory against a number of demographics. It's fine if someone wants to show off some project, but it shouldn't be a mandatory filter.
  - mariusor 4y ago
    I think nobody says having public code should be a mandatory filter, but if someone has a github history that stretches to when the site went up, covering multiple programming languages and containing contributions to titled open source software I feel like it would be fair to skip over the leet code section of a hiring pipeline. Personally I feel fine about take home coding challenges, because I would be programming something either way, but I can understand people that consider that they have better things to do with their free time.
- lenocinor 4y ago
  I’ve been professionally coding for two decades and I have exactly zero public code I can show. I know plenty of similar people. You cannot assume people have code to show you.

by jerf 4y ago

sarchertech 4y ago

Labeling it it as a the HN gestalt doesn’t mean that it’s not a straw man. You can’t take the union of everyone’s food dislikes and say “according to the Earth gestalt, no food is edible.”

rglullis 4y ago
But you can ignore anyone that says "this food is not ok to eat because I once tried it at a bad restaurant and I didn't like it".
saxonww 4y ago
Sure you can. They are not trying to make the point that no food is edible, they are trying to make a point that depending on who you ask, you will end up hearing that any and every type of food is inedible. I get what they are saying. If you read the comment threads here on interview experiences, you're going to encounter groups that dislike or want to forbid every kind of technical screening technique. It's easy to read comments here and come away thinking nothing is OK and everything is unfair.
- sarchertech 4y ago
  That’s not the point they are are making at all. They further expanded on this by talking about the straw man hacker news user who doesn’t think they should have to do anything to get hired.
  - strokirk 4y ago
    It's the exact point they are making. The union of all dislikes and eloquently put putdowns is exactly what many of us bring with us in our heads every day.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

smoe 4y ago

I haven't met many people that think they shouldn't do anything, what I see more commonly, is people assuming the way they personally prefer getting evaluated is the way it should be for everyone.

shagie 4y ago
I've seen it more of a "this is the way that you should hire me." That's fine if there is only one candidate to be evaluated. The difficulty with such is that these tend to be very time intensive on the employer side often requiring more time per candidate than the candidate spends with the prospective employer. This can work for one candidate, but fails if one tries to scale it up to even 10 (much less 100) candidates. For that, a filter needs to be applied... and we're back at square 1 of a subset of people not wanting to do take homes (and so on).

LocalPCGuy 4y ago

> quite a few individuals who ... that they just shouldn't have to do anything to get hired THAT is your strawman. I would question that this is a "common" assumption - most everyone, when pressed, understands there is some need for an interview and some form of evaluation of skills. They may push back on specific mentions as one person already mentioned, but almost everyone falls in a middle ground where it's something like "yes, interviewers have to vet people, and that is hard, but it can be done in a manner that is respectful of the interviewee's time and properly reflects the kinds of things a person may be asked to do for the job in question." I would premise that the problem isn't with (most) interviewees not wanting to do anything to get hired, but that (many) interviewers do not have a lot of experience interviewing and have just googled what other companies do and copied that, many times for the detriment to the entire process. If the interview process were actually thoughtfully designed to both probe the interviewee's ability to work with the team in question and ability to do the specific work the position entails, I don't think you'd see nearly the same level of disdain for the process.

edanm 4y ago
I've been in software long enough to know that these criticisms of the prices aren't new. And a lot of the things people complain about are improvements on the past, and came about precisely because old ways of hiring were leading to people who couldn't code (hence things like the whiteboard interview)

fsloth 4y ago

Generally companies succeed in hiring by filtering resumes and interviewing candidates. That's it. It's weird if a company feels it needs to do more than that. Companies either have trial periods or can let go of non-performing personnel. Hiring is critical but I've not seen any study that would correlate "high scores" in any type of hiring test to actual work performance. This implies no matter how elaborate interview performances are orchestrated, their capability to do anything else except create false negatives increases as their complexity increases. Hiring, in essence, is always a gating process with very little predictive capability beyond. The only thing you can know is the percentage of new hires who fail at their duties, and if that percentage is oddly high, you realize there is a problem in your hiring process. I suppose you can gauge candidate agreeableness and conformity by subjecting them to all sorts of hazing procedures but in our field I don't see how that translates to good outcomes either - technically speaking. Might be good for creating cult enclaves, though, for lonely gurus. I was a bit tongue in cheek here but my opinion "less is better" holds as it comes to hiring practices - this does not imply lack of diligence from the part of the hiring manager.

ghaff 4y ago
>there is a problem in your hiring process Or in your onboarding process.
edanm 4y ago
> Hiring is critical but I've not seen any study that would correlate "high scores" in any type of hiring test to actual work performance. There definitely are such studies. I don't have citations here, but it's well known that IQ tests or work-sample tasks are both the most effective at predicting on job performance.
- fsloth 4y ago
  As I understand it (please correct me if I'm wrong) IQ tests work as a predictor for a population not for individuals. I.e. if you prefer IQ in your job application process, you will get a more performative workforce. However, with point samples it's not a very good benchmark. I.e. if you are comparing fairly strong candidates A and B, just preferring the one with the higher IQ is not necessarily the best option. So, getting the best hire for a specific position, and getting the most statistically best workforce are not necessarily the same thing.

risyachka 4y ago

Most devs have a shit ton of projects, code etc to show. This is way more than enough to estimate skill level and bypass leetcode memorization performances and 90% of other tech elements of interview. Corps basically just offload this work on the candidate as this is obviously cheaper and more convenient, instead of spending time and looking into his profile.

ghaff 4y ago
>Most devs have a shit ton of projects, code etc to show. I question how true that is. In any case, GitHub as resume basically tells applicants that if you don't work in open source for your day job and don't have the time/inclination to do coding as a hobby, don't bother applying. Which is going to be pretty discriminatory against a number of demographics. It's fine if someone wants to show off some project, but it shouldn't be a mandatory filter.
- mariusor 4y ago
  I think nobody says having public code should be a mandatory filter, but if someone has a github history that stretches to when the site went up, covering multiple programming languages and containing contributions to titled open source software I feel like it would be fair to skip over the leet code section of a hiring pipeline. Personally I feel fine about take home coding challenges, because I would be programming something either way, but I can understand people that consider that they have better things to do with their free time.
lenocinor 4y ago
I’ve been professionally coding for two decades and I have exactly zero public code I can show. I know plenty of similar people. You cannot assume people have code to show you.