10 ms·

If the minimalist resume is appealing, can we also bring back walk-on hiring? In warehouse and construction work, if someone shows up at 7:30 AM on a Monday mo

• jaza 4y ago
  The closest equivalent to that today, in most white-collar roles at least, is contracting. Usually not a physical walk-on hire anymore, but it is often quite a quick process (sometimes as little as a few hours), from "I need a worker", to "I can do it", to "get cracking sonny". And it's then, days / weeks / months (usually not years) later, a similarly quick process, from "we don't need you anymore" / "I'm outta here", to "don't let the door hit you". But the contractor usually needs to be "employed by" some agency company, that guarantees his/her suitability, and that handles the (not insignificant) paperwork / legalities, and that takes a handsome cut.
• golergka 4y ago
  > Hire someone right away and let them quit if they want to and hire someone else. It's just business for crying out loud. You're not hiring construction workers, you're hiring architects. It often takes more than 3 months to get used to a new codebase and understand how and why things are done the way they are.
  • jacobr1 4y ago
    And sometimes you are hiring construction workers, and sometimes trade-specialists. I've hired contractors to address specific tech-debt, or accelerate QA on project, to implement a CRUD type stuff for things with well-known approaches that just take time.
    • golergka 4y ago
      Well, then may be it's important to note that we are talking about two different industry niches and practices from one of them are not a good match for the other. And may be we even should come up with some kind of names for these kinds of "tech" to avoid mixing one up with the other.
      • hunter2_ 4y ago
        We do have a variety of words that have certain connotations -- there are even essays / blog posts about the supposed hierarchy (or soup) of script kiddies, hackers, coders, programmers, developers, architects, etc. etc. etc. but the analogies to their metaphorical ancestors (very often from real construction) are neither perfect nor stable. A housing developer can more easily search for laborers than a software hiring manager can search for a code monkey who doesn't try to steer the ship!
• brianobush 4y ago
  If software was so regular like construction, we could automate most of it.
  • mylons 4y ago
    then why isn't construction automated? i think if your company's processes are so specialized and nuance, you should really take a step back and ask if they should be.
    • thaeli 4y ago
      Construction in the US is highly mechanized, the vast majority of laborers have been replaced by machinery.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    • chuckster563 4y ago
      Are you saying the fortune 500 are bad at business?
      • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        A. Bank caused the financial crisis of 2008 B. Are you saying top banks are bad at banking?
        • end_of_line 4y ago
          That's the convenient myth to think banks caused crisis. Money printing and credit rates lowering by government caused this. Free money? Sure, why not. Please watch princes of yen documentary where they speak about "credit window guidance" conducted by Japanese national bank for more than decades
          • 4y ago
• PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > Hire someone right away and let them quit if they want to and hire someone else. It's just business for crying out loud. This is missing the point of interviewing. The goal isn't to find any warm body to fill the chair, the goal is to find someone qualified to do the work who also has a history of doing good work at previous employers. You also don't have unlimited headcount and hiring budget, so it's worth making the investment to find the top 10% of your applicants rather than picking first-come first-serve. One of the things you don't realize about the hiring market until you've been reviewing resumes for a while is that problem employees are over-represented in the candidate pool. The most qualified employees spend the least time job searching because they're given offers right away. The most problematic and underqualified employees are frequently searching for jobs after being fired or let go. If you sample applicants at random, they're far more likely to be in the underqualified and/or problematic group than in the great employee group, statistically. The other thing that isn't obvious is just how damaging a single bad hire can be to a team. Hire someone who clashes with their peers and fails to deliver any good work and you'll find yourself losing the good team members very shortly. Nobody likes working with painful coworkers. That said: The analogy of a "walk-on" job isn't dead in tech. If you pick a company you want to work for, find someone on LinkedIn, and send them your resume with a short pitch about why you want to work there, there's a good chance they'll at least strongly consider your resume. Nobody is guaranteed a job this way, but it's one route to getting your foot in the door even when you don't see the exact job posting you want on the website.
  • primeblue 4y ago
  • mixmastamyk 4y ago
    The GP was using the proxy of "shows up at 7:30AM, ready to work" as signal for motivation and a lesser extent, competence. Not a morning person, but would prefer this to leetcode hazing.
  • vgel 4y ago
    The first thing you mention is a common problem in marketplaces: used cars, online dating, etc. Term is "market for lemons"
• dkurth 4y ago
  As Seymour Cray said, "The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late." It can be months (at a high salary) before you really know whether a hire is likely to work out. I think it makes sense to invest more effort in screening applicants in this case.
  • CamperBob2 4y ago
    That's an awesome saying -- I'm surprised I've never heard it. It remains true after a LOT of mutation. The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late. The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a program is doing until it's too late. The trouble with programs is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late. The trouble with programs is that you can never tell what a program is doing until it's too late.
    • myhf 4y ago
      The trouble with aphorisms is that you can never tell what an aphorism is saying until it's too late.
      • 0xdeadbeefbabe 4y ago
        I hear it's worse in those languages where the subject comes last.
  • LtWorf 4y ago
    But I don't think there is research showing that those strange hiring processes actually do work.
    • Kamq 4y ago
      Of course there is. You can generate studies that show roughly anything. It may not be the majority, but if the research is all done in-house by various firms, there's no way for anyone to know that.
• time_to_smile 4y ago
  > bring back walk-on hiring? This make sense for highly productive labor, that foreman hiring people for just showing up generally got a positive expected return for this. In fact, this is still how a lot of (sometimes illegal) day labors go about getting work: truck comes by, picks up people ready for work, work get done and everyone makes money. > Why again does boutique startup need to interview 500 overqualified people? Because these startups lose money as a matter of principle. The people working there aren't actually performing productive labor. All of that hiring is about creating a large illusion in the market place. Most of my labor has gone to waste. More projects than not never ultimately shipped, but even the most valuable projects I did, still made money for companies that ultimately lose more money than they take in. Many of my best projects are for SaaS companies that don't exist any more. The guy picking up a bunch of people in the back of his truck is about to go build something real and is going to get paid in cash, and the more people he can get in the back of the truck the more jobs he can get done in that day, which means more cash for everyone (and if you're on the paying end, it means that project you wanted done is done faster). > It's just business for crying out loud. I don't think this has been true in tech for over a decade. I had a COO once excitedly proclaim that if the company made more money than it cost to run, we would have unlimited runway. The COO seriously thought he had stumbled upon some brilliant realization about a company making more than it costs to run. The guy with the truck knows far more about business than most execs at tech companies today.
  • UncleOxidant 4y ago
    > Most of my labor has gone to waste. More projects than not never ultimately shipped Same here and I've been in the biz for ~35 years. An architect can drive around a city and point to buildings he designed. It's a bit disillusioning to think that the vast majority of the work I've done has just sort of disappeared because either a startup didn't make it or got swallowed up into a larger organization that had other plans. > The guy with the truck knows far more about business than most execs at tech companies today. Yep. The guy with the truck can't lose much money for very long. A lot of tech execs have gone years without needing to worry about that because there was so much easy money around.
    • 4y ago
• Gordonjcp 4y ago
  That reminds me of one of my dad's favourite jokes. A guy goes up to the shipyard gates and asks to see the foreman. When the foreman comes along he asks "Hey, any chance of a job in your yard?" "Yes, of course", says the foreman, "if you're prepared to start at the bottom and work your way up. Are you any good at making tea?" "Yes", says the man, "I can make the tea!" "Great!", says the foreman, "do you know how to drive a forklift?" The man squints at him quizzically, "How big is your f***** teapot, then?"
  • Sprocklem 4y ago
    Any chance someone could explain this to me? I think I'm missing something.
    • IggleSniggle 4y ago
      The joke is that the would-be worker assumes the forklift question relates to the previous question, and thus that the teapot is so large that it requires a forklift.
  • Aeolun 4y ago
    I can totally see why this one would be someone’s favorite.
• UncleOxidant 4y ago
  > can we also bring back walk-on hiring? This used to happen in the 80s. I went to interview at a startup company in Mountain View in 1987. There was some chit-chat then the interviewer asked me to wire-wrap a circuit (diagram was provided) and power it on and connect it up to the logic analyzer - he went away for about 1/2 an hour while I did that. He came back and complemented me on my neatness. Then he took me over across the room to talk to the VP of engineering who, after a few minutes of chit-chat, asked me when I would like to start. Those were the days.
  • eastbound 4y ago
    Pretty much my interview process. I ask them to program a contains(string, substring), then come back 30 minutes later to code scattered all over the place, sometimes with “// 54 upvotes http://stackoverflow.com/…” http://stackoverflow.com/…”, code not compiling, and I’m still wondering whether I should accept them. I wonder what’s so hard with my interview. 5 years ago, even interns could do it, one of them could even tell the difference between UTF-8 and UTF-16.
    • IggleSniggle 4y ago
      Maybe the problem is that nobody needs to solve that problem in their jobs anymore? For the last few months I've had the joy and privilege to really get to know the TCP and TLS stack intimately, and find myself looking for the patterns that are going to be most useful for handling data bit by bit. But prior to that, I really needed to care much more about the semantics (and the engineering culture around them) and the large scale structure of my code. I might get more hung-up/distracted by `contains(string, substring)` vs `string.contains(substring)` than what the actual operations to achieve it might be. And also, "surely this problem is already solved, optimally" aligns with one of the 3 great programmer virtues: A Great Programmer is Lazy. 30 minutes is unfortunately exactly the wrong amount of time if somebody has fallen into this trap. Anyway, I guess it depends what compute layer you're interviewing for, but it doesn't necessarily sound like your interview process is broken, exactly. Like, it could be testing for the right thing, but in the absence of that thing, maybe you just need to find another thing that is substitutable.
• itsoktocry 4y ago
  >It's just business for crying out loud. Umm...there's some administrative and legal overhead related to hiring, firing or otherwise replacing an employee you seem to be overlooking.
  • VancouverMan 4y ago
    Pretty much all of that is completely artificial, and only exists because it's imposed by government. Things would function just fine, if not a lot better, without such unnecessary burdens being forced on employers and employees.
    • emiliobumachar 4y ago
      So true, but the government is a fact. Walk-in hiring got unintentionally killed off when we intentionally killed GTFO firing.
      • hunter2_ 4y ago
        I guess as long as abending of interviews is still legit, it's as viable to take walk-ins as to take electronic applications. Just be sure to act on any GTFO needs before the start date. The interview process is longer to accommodate those legal protections, but those don't start until hiring (or something that isn't the first conversations), right? Long story short: I think we can lengthen the interview period to accommodate those legal time sinks without killing off the (now a bit of a novelty) meatspace first impression. Unless you're talking about blind selection, where the candidate's likeness (name, etc.) is redacted for DEI. In that case, I can see how witnessing the candidate's skin, gender, etc. could be problematic. TFA even explicitly included the types of things we try to leave unspoken these days: excellent health, 5'4"?!
    • stepanhruda 4y ago
      This is such a terrible take worthy of not making it past Econ 101. Yes in theory a completely free labor market is cool. In practice, centuries of labor exploitation and history of workers’ right show that this will quickly devolve in employer’s favor.
• eigenhombre 4y ago
  We had a fellow just out of college walk in off the street, maybe 2015 or 2016. "I heard you guys do Clojure programming here, is that right?" We said yes. He said I'd like to interview. We interviewed him that week and hired him. We were a small-ish startup and he had done his homework, showed interest, and could write code to our standards. He stayed for a year or two and then moved on.
• yieldcrv 4y ago
  Entertainers still have that capability in many places Offbrand for this site but I’ve seen women audition and work and get paid the same day, this year Is what it is They sign all forms and its W-2 employment some places as well I agree we should reduce friction to that level for more kinds of work, some people are working on that
  • jimhi 4y ago
    Can you clarify, are you talking about modeling, standup, acting? What role exactly?
    • yieldcrv 4y ago
      all of the above the main point is how it is in direct contrast to how other sectors will interview for weeks and months, before any resolution at all, then require negotiating an offer, just to get to a two-week notice at a minimum and then require another 2 weeks to a month to get paid, with deposits taking several more business days (up to 5 actual days) to be available paid instantly when you realized you might need it, versus paid 4 months from now hoping you planned and forecasted correctly
      • hunter2_ 4y ago
        I wouldn't call entertainment work (even the craziest corners of that world) nearly as off-brand as suggesting that women dominate it. I have no idea how far from 49/49 the makeup might be, but I do know that I'm a guy who's done plenty of entertainment industry gigs (music production, fwiw) where the pay is quite reliably received before going home, and that's the important distinction here.
        • yieldcrv 4y ago
          yeah, we agree I was referring to women dominated crazy corners and I don't have lived experience with man's equivalent job pursuit to say so I didn't speak about them
• nonethewiser 4y ago
  > In warehouse and construction work, if someone shows up at 7:30 AM on a Monday morning, odds are quite good that the foreman will have something for them to do. Maybe not that day, but maybe tomorrow, or maybe someone on the list above them won't show up that week and they'll get called. That's hard to do when there are so many strings attached to employing someone. It's a double edged sword which makes the decision to hire someone a lot bigger." Yeah, I have stuff I need help with right now" is not enough.
• tomcam 4y ago
  This question makes me wish I hadn't retired. It would be a totally cool experiment if I still had my own company.
• poorbutdebtfree 4y ago
  "Workers' rights" makes hiring and particularly firing very expensive. The same thing with "tenants' rights." I would rent to anyone with bad credit and a sob story if I could simply evict them within days for non-payment. But because of these rights now everybody has to have an 800 credit score and six figure W2.
  • rablackburn 4y ago
    While I’m not doubting you would personally do as you say, I would point out that as someone living somewhere with quite lax tenants rights and a nationally recognised housing emergency (Australia), landlords not renting to people because tenants rights are too onerous doesn’t seem to have a particularly large impact on housing availability. Whereas some tenants rights seems to have a pretty large positive impact - ie all the positive effects of secure housing. Of course ymmv in your local housing market.
  • bestcoder69 4y ago
    You would gladly take in someone with a history of non-payment, on the sole condition that you can evict them for non-payment? In that case, one benefit of public housing is that it slims the pool of “sob story”-havers that you can evict for sport!