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I'm not sure if you're saying I'm lying, all I can say is I've spent plenty of time interviewing on the hiring side. If you don't believe me then what are we ev

I'm not sure if you're saying I'm lying, all I can say is I've spent plenty of time interviewing on the hiring side. If you don't believe me then what are we even talking about? I agree that tech interviews are first about meeting a minimum standard and second about being one of the best choices among other applicants who also met that standard. I originally said I was "rejected after the tech screen" which matches your take, it's other posters who responded with "not passing" or "bombing." So you are disagreeing with them, not me. As for "obvious," you implied that public code on GitHub or elsewhere would make it obvious. The fact that no one bothers to look doesn't change that, it just proves my point that employers aren't desperate to hire, otherwise they would make that effort. It's also interesting to consider how much of a boost a candidate gets from having FAANG or other high-status items on their resume. Simply saying "JavaScript developer at Google" is demonstrably a stronger signal than "JavaScript developer at No-Name Corp" even though all your points about brief descriptions and team support theoretically hold true in both cases. Or, if the candidate went to a famous school, that would extend a halo effect even to the No-Name Corp entry. Quality is apparently more obvious in these cases, so your explanation isn't the whole story.

hnfong 4y ago
For the record I'm not saying you're lying (and I don't think you are). It's kind of analogous to what I said about self-reported past experience in the sense that I would expect (maybe expectation misplaced?) that somebody who has plenty of experience on the hiring side would better understand what happens on that side of the process. I think your claim that employers are "not desperate" is probably true to some extent, but if you're screening for say 30 candidates, the cost-benefit analysis of spending an hour each looking at their github profiles might not work out unless in the "most desperate" of cases (and if they're desperate to the point where if they can't hire a superstar they'd go out of business, then you wouldn't want to work there anyway). TBH my belief is that some FAANG or famous school is a better signal than self-reported experience on a CV. You might disagree (and there are reasonable arguments on that side), but at least whether one worked at a particular company or went to a particular school is an objective fact, while things like "built a well-received service with millions of users" can mean very different things. The supposedly rigorous hiring/admission process of FAANG and famous schools can be a useful thing to know because the hiring process could be quite similar, and thus a useful predictor whether a candidate is likely to do well on the hiring game at hand (not necessarily a good employee, that's another question). I don't think work quality is obvious for those halo effects you mentioned. There's just some fuzzy correlation (about being in FAANG and interviewing performance) that lazy interviewers/managers tend to mistakenly conflate with employment suitability. There are many reasons why hiring tends to be broken, which I'm not going into because it would be a book length thesis in itself, I'm just saying there's no way code quality of your past work would be "obvious" unless somebody actually spent a couple hours reviewing your code. Nobody would do that unless there's some other signal indicating that that might be the case (and in 99% of the cases they wouldn't do it even if the signals are there). So my point is that if you proceeded with the assumption that it should be obvious to employers that you're employable... maybe that's not a great assumption. I definitely agree that most of the time companies aren't "desperate" to hire -- and TBH you don't want your future employers to be so desperate. If you're not getting offers (and you want to), maybe you'd have to spend a bit more effort advertising yourself instead of relying on potential employers' desperation.
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  TBH my belief is that some FAANG or famous school is a better signal than self-reported experience on a CV Regardless of actual merit, it's definitely true in practice. Just like the old "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" adage, hiring the MIT or FAANG candidate is going to be pretty safe in the eyes of your manager. So my point is that if you proceeded with the assumption that it should be obvious to employers that you're employable... maybe that's not a great assumption Are you saying that OP isn't trying hard enough to sell/present themselves? Or are you saying that engineers without fancy schools or FAANG-level experience just aren't very hireable?
  - hnfong 4y ago
    > Are you saying that OP isn't trying hard enough to sell/present themselves? It seemed from their wording "various parts of my portfolio it should be obvious I can deliver high-quality code and complete reasonably complex projects" that they might be assuming his positive qualities are obvious to interviewers. That's all I was trying to say.
    - anon50118810 4y ago
      You'll just need to accept my self-assessment, or not. "Desperate" is a funny word. In another comment I compared this to buying milk when you need it. Maybe some people wouldn't call that desperate. This all highlights the differences between being able to do the job, signaling that you can do the job, and being able to get hired to do the job.

hnfong 4y ago

For the record I'm not saying you're lying (and I don't think you are). It's kind of analogous to what I said about self-reported past experience in the sense that I would expect (maybe expectation misplaced?) that somebody who has plenty of experience on the hiring side would better understand what happens on that side of the process. I think your claim that employers are "not desperate" is probably true to some extent, but if you're screening for say 30 candidates, the cost-benefit analysis of spending an hour each looking at their github profiles might not work out unless in the "most desperate" of cases (and if they're desperate to the point where if they can't hire a superstar they'd go out of business, then you wouldn't want to work there anyway). TBH my belief is that some FAANG or famous school is a better signal than self-reported experience on a CV. You might disagree (and there are reasonable arguments on that side), but at least whether one worked at a particular company or went to a particular school is an objective fact, while things like "built a well-received service with millions of users" can mean very different things. The supposedly rigorous hiring/admission process of FAANG and famous schools can be a useful thing to know because the hiring process could be quite similar, and thus a useful predictor whether a candidate is likely to do well on the hiring game at hand (not necessarily a good employee, that's another question). I don't think work quality is obvious for those halo effects you mentioned. There's just some fuzzy correlation (about being in FAANG and interviewing performance) that lazy interviewers/managers tend to mistakenly conflate with employment suitability. There are many reasons why hiring tends to be broken, which I'm not going into because it would be a book length thesis in itself, I'm just saying there's no way code quality of your past work would be "obvious" unless somebody actually spent a couple hours reviewing your code. Nobody would do that unless there's some other signal indicating that that might be the case (and in 99% of the cases they wouldn't do it even if the signals are there). So my point is that if you proceeded with the assumption that it should be obvious to employers that you're employable... maybe that's not a great assumption. I definitely agree that most of the time companies aren't "desperate" to hire -- and TBH you don't want your future employers to be so desperate. If you're not getting offers (and you want to), maybe you'd have to spend a bit more effort advertising yourself instead of relying on potential employers' desperation.

JohnBooty 4y ago
TBH my belief is that some FAANG or famous school is a better signal than self-reported experience on a CV Regardless of actual merit, it's definitely true in practice. Just like the old "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" adage, hiring the MIT or FAANG candidate is going to be pretty safe in the eyes of your manager. So my point is that if you proceeded with the assumption that it should be obvious to employers that you're employable... maybe that's not a great assumption Are you saying that OP isn't trying hard enough to sell/present themselves? Or are you saying that engineers without fancy schools or FAANG-level experience just aren't very hireable?
- hnfong 4y ago
  > Are you saying that OP isn't trying hard enough to sell/present themselves? It seemed from their wording "various parts of my portfolio it should be obvious I can deliver high-quality code and complete reasonably complex projects" that they might be assuming his positive qualities are obvious to interviewers. That's all I was trying to say.
  - anon50118810 4y ago
    You'll just need to accept my self-assessment, or not. "Desperate" is a funny word. In another comment I compared this to buying milk when you need it. Maybe some people wouldn't call that desperate. This all highlights the differences between being able to do the job, signaling that you can do the job, and being able to get hired to do the job.