21 ms·

Against All Applications

118 points by jdkee 4y ago

orangea 4y ago
The "selectopia" example is kind of how it already does work, or at least how it used to, in computer programming, where having an impressive Github account can help one get hired. But it has downsides: - People who want to get hired put low quality projects on their Github which are optimized to look impressive at a first glance. - People spam popular open source projects with low quality pull requests to buff their Github contribution metrics. - People who don't have the time to create software for free are put at a disadvantage. Also people who aren't passionate about programming enough to have side projects are at a disadvantage (not necessarily bad). I also suspect that this phenomenon is what motivates the development of a lot of the "leftpad" or "is-even" type libraries. Which could be interpreted as either good or bad.
- caldarons 4y ago
  I think that when it comes to projects on github the key is in distinguishing between the "I want to be hired" projects and the "I'm doing this because it's interesting and fun" projects. The latter tend to be much higher quality than the former and they're also more fun to work on (because you don't have the pressure of what a recuiter might think about it). Although, as you said, it's not always easy to tell which is which at a first glance.
- gyulai 4y ago
  This kind of frightens me. It likely leads towards some kind of ageism, as students and teenagers are comparatively time-rich and can more easily find the time to build up impressive GitHub profiles. As you get older, projects like building a house, raising children etc start taking up your free time and after many years as a software engineer, you do relate differently to your profession, compared to when you first started out. (You're less naive. Less capable of just having faith in some weird karma whereby hard/good work will be recognized and rewarded if you just do it). I guess other professions have similar things going: Lawyers might take on high-profile cases on a pro-bono basis to build a name for themseves, or contribute to academic publishing even when they are not on payroll in any academic capacity, etc. But they have a different culture to go with that. As a lawyer, I guess your X-hours work week will stay an X-hours work week and your non-billable hours Y are simply subtracted from X. But most jobs in the software engineering profession come with the expectation that you have an X-hours work week, and your employer usually does not allow you to use any of that time for personal professional status-building through open source or publishing etc. ...your only chance is to do it on weekends, which eats into your work-life balance.
  - qsort 4y ago
    It's true that the culture is different, but it's not my experience that employers are categorically against status-building, especially if it indirectly reflects well on the company. We recently got a paper accepted at a conference cooperating with our local university and my employer was more than happy to pay for that time. What's the real problem IMO is that studying, training, etc. is pushed to your time off. When you account for all of that, my 40-hour week is more like 50 hours.
    - gyulai 4y ago
      My previous employer (the one I have been with the longest, at 3,5 years) categorically rejected paying for conference participation etc. The company would frequently get requests from organizers of conferences, networking events and the like for the company to have a presence. The CEO would then post the speaking opportunities in the company-wide group chat laying down the rule that anyone could attend in the company's name if they wished, but he personally considered it a waste of time and we'd have to do it in our own time. I think people very seldomly took him up on the offer and if they did, I would guess there was a certain probability that he would read it as a negative signal along the lines of: This person is really going out of their way to do networking, so they're probably working on finding their next gig so they can leave the company. In one other company I worked at, the company was keen on conference participation, but the way it would work there, if you were the person doing the legwork it would be your boss presenting at the conference. So you couldn't really use it as an opportunity to make a name for yourself. You'd just make a name for your boss. I've also done extensive freelancing. If you run a low-risk freelancing strategy, clients pretty much expect you to work for them fulltime. It's already a tough sale to get them to give you a day off every quarter to do your own bookkeeping. And the hourly rates aren't high enough to allow you to spend several weeks or months in between freelancing gigs to work on status-building. ...now if you're using your status-building to get the most choice consulting opportunities where you have the bargaining power to do few hours at high rates that's a different story, but that's a different kind of freelancing altogether. (The "high-risk" kind which I'd distinguish from the low-risk kind that my personal experience is limited to).
  - deleted 4y ago
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  A Github profile doesn't have to be filled with side projects, it might as well be filled with main projects. Same goes for "for free", although here the job market doesn't offer too many opportunities yet.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    Right but having contributions in either open source or your current company's github ones will look better than you writing same amount of code for the company's internal repositories
    - rhn_mk1 4y ago
      Nothing I wrote is about private repostories.
quickthrower2 4y ago
I have had similar thoughts! Mine would be communitopia. Something I have seen almost done. The work slack is mostly public (not much at work is really that secret!) and interested devs chime in see what’s up and help out. Chuck a standard hourly rate their way, and if they seem real good, offer them a ticket to the intern island!
Destiner 4y ago
[flagged]
js8 4y ago
Well, Northcote Parkinson had a great satirical take on application process, but you have to look it up yourself, I won't try to spoil it.
- Joker_vD 4y ago
  "Salary payable every month but never yet claimed".
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Searching that phrase ... turns up only your HN comment.
    - Joker_vD 4y ago
      Okay, so the actual quote is: Wanted — An archaeologist with high academic qualifications willing to spend fifteen years in excavating the Inca tombs at Helsdump on the Alligator River. Knighthood or equivalent honor guaranteed. Pension payable but never yet claimed. Salary of £2000 (or $6000 U.S.) per year. Apply in triplicate to the Director of the Grubbenburrow Institute, Sickdale, Ill., U.S.A. And there is a job ad for a circus acrobat before this one in the book, so I've conflated the two together. And BTW, if you google just "pension payable but never yet claimed", this quote won't come up either. But googling for "pension payable but never yet claimed parkinson" works although only the first link is about the book and it leads to a Russian(?!) website of all things. Misteries of the Internet never cease to amaze me.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Speaking of which, the original Economist essay (1955): <http://www.economist.com/node/14116121 http://www.economist.com/node/14116121> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7879481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7879481>
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Is that in chapter 5 of his book (Parkinson's Law) by chance? If not, could you at least point to the source?
constantcrying 4y ago
I think the first question should be why applications play such a big part and why they take the form that they do. I think one part of the answer is administrative bloat, where "processes are implemented" and "guidelines need to be maintained". Especially for technical jobs it is hard to judge people from the perspective of HR, which is why you have "personal statements" and such, which only effectively measure your ability for coherent and flattering writing. Another part is the job market, both employer and employee side. As long as only reasonably qualified people apply and companies accept reasonably qualified people having multiple rounds of interviews is just a waste of everyones time. Personally I think "coding interviews" are just very insulting and speak of an awful state of the industry. Imagine giving an electrical engineer a 1st year undergrad assignment to make sure he really can calculate the properties of a basic circuit. Seems like a good reason to just walk out. The paranoia of tech companies speaks to me as a desperate attempt to filter out applicants who are completely unqualified, from the vast ammounts of people applying.
- pie_flavor 4y ago
  An awful state of the industry matched only by the number of applicants that fail them. I shouldn't assume 'they wouldn't waste company time on them if they weren't necessary', but they are, in fact, necessary.
- ilyt 4y ago
  > Another part is the job market, both employer and employee side. As long as only reasonably qualified people apply and companies accept reasonably qualified people having multiple rounds of interviews is just a waste of everyones time. Right but that doesn't happen. People throw their resume at any company without a second thought, and then outright lie on it. We have a rule that we only ask questions about stuff they write on resume or submit in questionnaire (that is basically "here are few things, judge in 1-5 scale how much you know them) and still some people say they are expert and fail basic non-curveball questions or topics. Going back to EE example it would be like writing you're an expert on amplifier design then not being able to recall equation for gain for noninverting operational amplifier
  - 4y ago
m0llusk 4y ago
A potentially interesting contrast: Why our generals were more successful in WWII than in Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq/Afghanistan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxZWxxZ2JGE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxZWxxZ2JGE Briefly, minimize the application process and aggressively review work. Any mistake or failure and you're fired, two weeks to prove competence or you're fired, six weeks until a significant accomplishment or you're fired. And no stigma against being fired, just keep trying until you find a fit.
- gyulai 4y ago
  That sounds like the "internesia" of the original article. The problem is that, in most countries, employment law will make it pretty difficult to do this. Also, with deliberate high turnover like that, you'll find it difficult to keep trade secrets and there will be a huge drain on resources for onboarding those people who are quickly come and gone.
  - Asooka 4y ago
    In Europe you usually have a 1-3 month probationary period that works more or less like "at-will" employment does in the USA. Either party can cancel the contract on the spot for any reason or no reason at all. There are also some limits on how much time off you can take at once and in total in that time.
    - iainmerrick 4y ago
      That’s standard, but as far as I know it’s very uncommon to actually make use of that and drop somebody during probation. And employers definitely do not interview less carefully because of it. (This is for software engineering jobs, at least. In other industries it might work differently.)
    - gyulai 4y ago
      Employment law is more like a grenade than a sharp-shooter rifle. It just deals out damage in all directions regardless of how it's used and where it's supposedly targeted. In a country like Germany, if you fire an employee and they walk away with a hurt ego and start talking to a lawyer, you will end up hurting in some way or another, so the game is to manage egos and make sure that, when a company parts ways with an employee, the employee feels that it was mutual. Actually, I think it would be a step in the right direction for both bosses and employees, if bosses could just say: Hey, I'm firing you because I just no longer want you here. You didn't do anything wrong. I just have other people who do the job better. The perverse incentive is that it's probably better for companies to single out individuals they want to get rid of and treat them badly until they leave of their own account, rather than do that.
ilyt 4y ago
> But if you had the God’s-eye view of all your applicants, you might find out that 75% of all of applicants were good hires! ... or 5%, and rest fails at basic litmus test of not too hard questions. People will apply anywhere regardless of their own (perceived or actual) skill level. And it is no wonder as the requirements will be half-lie or wishlist most of the time. So the one side throws resumes everywhere they can and the other just tries to best guess which one is worth spending time to even interview as there is too many to interview all. On other side, testing candidates puts a "homework requirement" on them, doing that online also makes cheating easy so you might bore/detract the good ones (they most likely already have decent job and don't care for few hours of homework on off chance they get thru the filter) while the less good will just find a way to check the box and pass anyway
nonrandomstring 4y ago
In many cases a solid needs-based JD exists and must be filled in a perfunctory fashion. But often companies don't really know what they want. Advertising a job becomes a way of seeing what's out there, and whether anyone can bring them some missing "magic". If we think of work as being about relationships then successful ones are slow, sometimes painful routes by which we find lasting partnership. It may involve many on-and-off dates, exploration of shared values and interests, introductions to family, and so on. OTOH, the idea of a "job market" in which human beings are rapidly traded as they "climb a career" is akin to a nightclub for picking up casual sex. Many companies experience nothing but a series of one night stands. Passionate embraces and big promises are followed by tempestuous exits. The cost of casualisation and rapid churn isn't really appreciated by either party, or society at large. Workers, forever "dressing to impress" never really develop deep skills that come from stability. Companies spend a fortune on HR, perpetual transformation, induction, on-boarding and reconfiguration around the latest hire. Little real work gets done and eventually it becomes mutually disrespectful, or even hostile. This gig economy is harmful in unseen ways. Now we have companies desperate for good people, but unable to recruit, and talented workers unable to find a happy workplace, because both are "playing hard-to-get" out of pride and restless, undirected ambition. Imho, it's a situation rooted in immaturity and something Adam Phillips touched on when he said "capitalism is for children".
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Of course it is hostile, because of the corporate structure and owners vs. workers. Workers work for “Me Inc. currently supplying services to big co.”. We often try to negotiate to make incentives align as much as we can, but they never quite do.
gyulai 4y ago
If you try to get ready-made talent from the outside you will face problems in the selection process and, as the article points out, there really is no good solution to those problems. ...so the alternative is to create your own talent and work hard to hold on to them. If you need a senior developer, take someone internal who has proven themselves as a junior developer and make them into a senior developer. If you need a junior developer, hire someone straight out of college and give them all the training and mentoring to make them productive. If you need a manager, look within your ranks for an individual contributor who wants to step up to manager, and give them a chance.
stared 4y ago
In classification models, there is a concept of precision (% of correct positives) and recall (how many positives are captured from the population). The author correctly points out that recall is very low in a typical recruitment process. As much as I agree with the sentiment, employer incentives are not to find ALL suitable candidates but to find just ONE suitable candidate. Everything beyond that is a waste of resources. For some positions (e.g. finding a co-founder or an artist with a unique style) - yes, low recall might be a limiting factor. It is just a market for most other roles - in particular, all that can be summarized with a job title.
Gatsky 4y ago
Things get even worse where the application process is completely unaccountable to the future success of the applicant. When you hire someone for a job, you get some feedback on how that person does at said job. In Medicine for example, this is not the case. Whether the person you admit to your university or residency program ends up being fantastic or a psychopathic murder is not even considered.
xg15 4y ago
I dunno, all those alternate worlds sound far more dystopic than the world we have today. Somehow OP was bothered with spending time to write applications and would prefer we wrap our entire lives around them instead. As a thought experiment, imagine how someone with jail history or with a small child and no spouse or with disabilities would cope in those worlds.
subroutine 4y ago
Trust Windfalls sound like a terrible idea. If you allow someone to give out cash and select the next person to give out cash, the money will concentrate within a friend group. At the very least, funding will disburse over much narrower set of research topics (I am most familiar with the work/people who research topics similar to my own). > Trust Windfalls are a Rorschach test for whether you trust people or not. I’m a guy on the internet going “hey give me a bunch of money and I’ll give it to my friends and it’ll be great!”... If you don’t know me and you’re a bit of a misanthrope, this sounds like the worst idea ever. Indeed, it does sound like the worst idea ever because I don't know you. That means there is zero chance of me getting the funding. And when you give the money to a friend, it's likely your friend will return the favor and give it back to you. Why nominate a person you know will not return the favor? And when they do, who is your next pick? Well, their wife needs funding, and so does your wife. So you go another round. Then who? Your cousin need funding, and so does your college roommate. You know who doesn't get funding - that person with a rival theory, and that person attempting to replicate your work. And if the money does happen to migrate to me, nothing against you, its just that if the money migrates out of my 'trusted network' it will likely not return for a long time. And my lab won't survive several years waiting for the funding to return.
- notafraudster 4y ago
  I'm not the author. I think you've hit on the main limitations, but I don't think it's fatal. If the lay of the land in a given field is such that there are well defined camps, then you allocate the money to each camp[0] and allow the camps to allocate the money internally. If the lay of the land is that it's diffuse and has very shifting structure, then you can't follow this strategy, but also it's maybe worth raising the possibility that it's not yet time to allocate money and the first thing the field should do is try to develop some structure. [0] Obviously the problem of what %age to give to each camp is an important second-order problem, but if you imagine a scenario like a university, I find it more likely the Provost's office can figure out how much to give to which Dean than they to be able to figure out how much to give to which lab. (I also think you're right to observe that even within a particular camp of a particular field there will be relationship-driven gladhanding that helps determine the flow of money, and that's a real concern, but it's just a more localized concern than I think you give it credit for. I'm also not entirely sold on it.)
pantulis 4y ago
I did quite a bit of interviews (on the hiring side) for almost a decade and I find the current recruitment processes to be basically stupid and over-complicated --both for the applicant and the employer is a huge waste of time. Look, if you are hiring an engineer, it's easier than it seems. Just sit an hour with them and have a good talk about his career on the business domain or the technical field. At the end of that hour you should have a non-100% accurate but solid perspective on these things: "Does this person communicate effectively? Would I want to work with this applicant?" And that's it.
- jonahbenton 4y ago
  True! Except that this process is discriminatory because people communicate best with people who are like themselves.
  - vt85 4y ago
    [dead]
  - zsoltkacsandi 4y ago
    Yeah, people who share similar values can communicate and work together better, but this isn't discrimination. On this basis the whole hiring field and each and every interview is discriminatory because the companies want to select who they want to work together with based on the candidates skills/values.
    - marcinzm 4y ago
      >Yeah, people who share similar values can communicate and work together better, but this isn't discrimination. This isn't really my experience. Similar people will have a better initial perception of each other as it takes less time to synchronize with each other however in most jobs that's of little importance. What matters is how they work together in the long term and most people don't need clones to work well with. If anything else having too many similar people is a problem for a team since you get overlapping blind spots which tends to cause serious issues over time.
notafraudster 4y ago
If you are not sure if your screening processes work, do an RCT. I have zero idea why the article raises this clearly provocative and correct approach and dismisses it immediately. Allocate a percentage of the positions you're hiring for to candidates that are hired at random. The empirical decision about what percentage depends on your primary concern: if you think your hiring process is completely useless, then you want to get this percentage close to 50% because this is what's optimal, experimentally. If you think your hiring process works OK and want to guard against downside risk on the random hires, get the percentage lower. This will cost you statistical power, but less than you expect. No one is saying "random" means "no standards at all". If you're a graduate pure math department you don't need to admit a grad student whose background is that they have a GED and worked as a welder for 5 years before getting a 135 on the GRE Math side. Instead, split your screening into two phases: one phase that is targeted to exclude people who absolutely positively do not meet requirements and could never work out, and one phase designed to pick the best feasible candidates among those who meet requirements. Do the RCT in the latter phase. If you have relatively continuous or regular hiring processes, you'll be well powered to assess your hiring screen in pretty short order. The larger your organization or the faster your overall turnover is the more robust you are to the risk of this going wrong. Not every company can do this -- academic departments that hire one person a year and sometimes have blown searches or people going back on the market within a year or two are clearly going to be a little risk averse. But if we're talking Deloitte hiring a cohort of 150 office admins, they can absolutely, positively make use of this strategy. The other thing I'd add is that a lot of people are under the mistaken belief that hiring is about determining the best candidates. In fact that is not true and it has never been true. It's about maximizing the probability that a candidate you offer a job to takes it and is good... or else maximizing the frontier of some function of probability the candidate accepts, is good, and how good they are. Hiring nothing but the best candidates will increase the likelihood of a blown search, increase the rate of attrition, etc. This makes almost all of the discussion around mErIt In HiRiNg a distraction from how hiring actually works. There are more narrowly tailored options. The more local you make the randomization, the less power and the less downside risk. Suppose you rank candidates from 1 (terrible) to 100 (ideal) and tend to hire candidates in the 80-90 range. Even a willingness to allocate some positions to candidates scored at 70-80 is going to give you lots information about whether your ranking system is useful at all. Do more RCTs!!! Please!
donatj 4y ago
> Harvard, for example, charges a $75 application fee And this is why I ended up going to a for-profit school. Circa 2003 I was a B level student who had taken a couple college level math courses. I applied to three colleges, all local, one of which my friend payed the application fee (thanks, Paul) and was rejected from all three. $50+ dollars is a lot of money to a 17 year old in a single income household whose parents are completely disinterested in their education. You know who didn’t charge an application fee? The for-profit college advertised on late night television.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Application fees for university, even $1, are an absurd concept, it should be illegal.
kshay 4y ago
> very fun jobs like musician and professional athlete pay subsistence wages Modulo a very small subset of top-tier performers, I think we’re already there!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
crazygringo 4y ago
> And you did pretty good: 75% good hires!... But if you had the God’s-eye view of all your applicants, you might find out that 75% of all of applicants were good hires! The author has clearly never been involved in hiring/selecting before, because the idea that application processes are as good as random is positively absurd. People will apply to all sorts of things they're not even remotely qualified for. Hell, I've certainly done it in the past. A resume screen is essential to eliminate the obvious unqualified, and a first round of interviews weeds out people who also clearly don't have what's needed for the role or who throw up a gigantic red flag. (And then after that it's about trying to find the best match, not just a barely sufficient one, since suitability for a role isn't binary but exists on a continuum.) Applying and then interviewing/screening is something we do because it's necessary. Obviously people are always looking for ways to improve the process, e.g. what types of signals actually correlate most with job performance? But the idea that the application is no better than random flies in the face of all evidence, as well as all common sense. This makes as much sense as saying that going on dates is useless -- just pick a partner at random and get married and be done with it, because the odds are just as good! (When of course the research shows that personality compatibility and chemistry compatibility are huge determinants of successful marriages.)
- feoren 4y ago
  > This makes as much sense as saying that going on dates is useless -- just pick a partner at random and get married and be done with it, because the odds are just as good! How sure are you this is false? I'm not completely convinced. Some people are very, very bad at picking compatible partners. Now I'm trying to figure out how we could ethically run this study, because I think the results might surprise you.
  - escapedmoose 4y ago
    You might be able to compare divorce/separation/unhappiness rates between arranged and non-arranged marriages, but culture differences would be a confounding factor… maybe study the average lifespan of relationships started on reality tv haha
  - 4y ago

118 points by jdkee 4y ago

The "selectopia" example is kind of how it already does work, or at least how it used to, in computer programming, where having an impressive Github account can help one get hired. But it has downsides: - People who want to get hired put low quality projects on their Github which are optimized to look impressive at a first glance. - People spam popular open source projects with low quality pull requests to buff their Github contribution metrics. - People who don't have the time to create software for free are put at a disadvantage. Also people who aren't passionate about programming enough to have side projects are at a disadvantage (not necessarily bad). I also suspect that this phenomenon is what motivates the development of a lot of the "leftpad" or "is-even" type libraries. Which could be interpreted as either good or bad.

caldarons 4y ago
I think that when it comes to projects on github the key is in distinguishing between the "I want to be hired" projects and the "I'm doing this because it's interesting and fun" projects. The latter tend to be much higher quality than the former and they're also more fun to work on (because you don't have the pressure of what a recuiter might think about it). Although, as you said, it's not always easy to tell which is which at a first glance.
gyulai 4y ago
This kind of frightens me. It likely leads towards some kind of ageism, as students and teenagers are comparatively time-rich and can more easily find the time to build up impressive GitHub profiles. As you get older, projects like building a house, raising children etc start taking up your free time and after many years as a software engineer, you do relate differently to your profession, compared to when you first started out. (You're less naive. Less capable of just having faith in some weird karma whereby hard/good work will be recognized and rewarded if you just do it). I guess other professions have similar things going: Lawyers might take on high-profile cases on a pro-bono basis to build a name for themseves, or contribute to academic publishing even when they are not on payroll in any academic capacity, etc. But they have a different culture to go with that. As a lawyer, I guess your X-hours work week will stay an X-hours work week and your non-billable hours Y are simply subtracted from X. But most jobs in the software engineering profession come with the expectation that you have an X-hours work week, and your employer usually does not allow you to use any of that time for personal professional status-building through open source or publishing etc. ...your only chance is to do it on weekends, which eats into your work-life balance.
- qsort 4y ago
  It's true that the culture is different, but it's not my experience that employers are categorically against status-building, especially if it indirectly reflects well on the company. We recently got a paper accepted at a conference cooperating with our local university and my employer was more than happy to pay for that time. What's the real problem IMO is that studying, training, etc. is pushed to your time off. When you account for all of that, my 40-hour week is more like 50 hours.
  - gyulai 4y ago
    My previous employer (the one I have been with the longest, at 3,5 years) categorically rejected paying for conference participation etc. The company would frequently get requests from organizers of conferences, networking events and the like for the company to have a presence. The CEO would then post the speaking opportunities in the company-wide group chat laying down the rule that anyone could attend in the company's name if they wished, but he personally considered it a waste of time and we'd have to do it in our own time. I think people very seldomly took him up on the offer and if they did, I would guess there was a certain probability that he would read it as a negative signal along the lines of: This person is really going out of their way to do networking, so they're probably working on finding their next gig so they can leave the company. In one other company I worked at, the company was keen on conference participation, but the way it would work there, if you were the person doing the legwork it would be your boss presenting at the conference. So you couldn't really use it as an opportunity to make a name for yourself. You'd just make a name for your boss. I've also done extensive freelancing. If you run a low-risk freelancing strategy, clients pretty much expect you to work for them fulltime. It's already a tough sale to get them to give you a day off every quarter to do your own bookkeeping. And the hourly rates aren't high enough to allow you to spend several weeks or months in between freelancing gigs to work on status-building. ...now if you're using your status-building to get the most choice consulting opportunities where you have the bargaining power to do few hours at high rates that's a different story, but that's a different kind of freelancing altogether. (The "high-risk" kind which I'd distinguish from the low-risk kind that my personal experience is limited to).
- deleted 4y ago
rhn_mk1 4y ago
A Github profile doesn't have to be filled with side projects, it might as well be filled with main projects. Same goes for "for free", although here the job market doesn't offer too many opportunities yet.
- ilyt 4y ago
  Right but having contributions in either open source or your current company's github ones will look better than you writing same amount of code for the company's internal repositories
  - rhn_mk1 4y ago
    Nothing I wrote is about private repostories.

quickthrower2 4y ago

I have had similar thoughts! Mine would be communitopia. Something I have seen almost done. The work slack is mostly public (not much at work is really that secret!) and interested devs chime in see what’s up and help out. Chuck a standard hourly rate their way, and if they seem real good, offer them a ticket to the intern island!

Destiner 4y ago

[flagged]

js8 4y ago

Well, Northcote Parkinson had a great satirical take on application process, but you have to look it up yourself, I won't try to spoil it.

Joker_vD 4y ago
"Salary payable every month but never yet claimed".
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Searching that phrase ... turns up only your HN comment.
  - Joker_vD 4y ago
    Okay, so the actual quote is: Wanted — An archaeologist with high academic qualifications willing to spend fifteen years in excavating the Inca tombs at Helsdump on the Alligator River. Knighthood or equivalent honor guaranteed. Pension payable but never yet claimed. Salary of £2000 (or $6000 U.S.) per year. Apply in triplicate to the Director of the Grubbenburrow Institute, Sickdale, Ill., U.S.A. And there is a job ad for a circus acrobat before this one in the book, so I've conflated the two together. And BTW, if you google just "pension payable but never yet claimed", this quote won't come up either. But googling for "pension payable but never yet claimed parkinson" works although only the first link is about the book and it leads to a Russian(?!) website of all things. Misteries of the Internet never cease to amaze me.
dredmorbius 4y ago
Speaking of which, the original Economist essay (1955): <http://www.economist.com/node/14116121 http://www.economist.com/node/14116121> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7879481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7879481>
dredmorbius 4y ago
Is that in chapter 5 of his book (Parkinson's Law) by chance? If not, could you at least point to the source?

constantcrying 4y ago

I think the first question should be why applications play such a big part and why they take the form that they do. I think one part of the answer is administrative bloat, where "processes are implemented" and "guidelines need to be maintained". Especially for technical jobs it is hard to judge people from the perspective of HR, which is why you have "personal statements" and such, which only effectively measure your ability for coherent and flattering writing. Another part is the job market, both employer and employee side. As long as only reasonably qualified people apply and companies accept reasonably qualified people having multiple rounds of interviews is just a waste of everyones time. Personally I think "coding interviews" are just very insulting and speak of an awful state of the industry. Imagine giving an electrical engineer a 1st year undergrad assignment to make sure he really can calculate the properties of a basic circuit. Seems like a good reason to just walk out. The paranoia of tech companies speaks to me as a desperate attempt to filter out applicants who are completely unqualified, from the vast ammounts of people applying.

pie_flavor 4y ago
An awful state of the industry matched only by the number of applicants that fail them. I shouldn't assume 'they wouldn't waste company time on them if they weren't necessary', but they are, in fact, necessary.
ilyt 4y ago
> Another part is the job market, both employer and employee side. As long as only reasonably qualified people apply and companies accept reasonably qualified people having multiple rounds of interviews is just a waste of everyones time. Right but that doesn't happen. People throw their resume at any company without a second thought, and then outright lie on it. We have a rule that we only ask questions about stuff they write on resume or submit in questionnaire (that is basically "here are few things, judge in 1-5 scale how much you know them) and still some people say they are expert and fail basic non-curveball questions or topics. Going back to EE example it would be like writing you're an expert on amplifier design then not being able to recall equation for gain for noninverting operational amplifier
- 4y ago

m0llusk 4y ago

A potentially interesting contrast: Why our generals were more successful in WWII than in Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq/Afghanistan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxZWxxZ2JGE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxZWxxZ2JGE Briefly, minimize the application process and aggressively review work. Any mistake or failure and you're fired, two weeks to prove competence or you're fired, six weeks until a significant accomplishment or you're fired. And no stigma against being fired, just keep trying until you find a fit.

gyulai 4y ago
That sounds like the "internesia" of the original article. The problem is that, in most countries, employment law will make it pretty difficult to do this. Also, with deliberate high turnover like that, you'll find it difficult to keep trade secrets and there will be a huge drain on resources for onboarding those people who are quickly come and gone.
- Asooka 4y ago
  In Europe you usually have a 1-3 month probationary period that works more or less like "at-will" employment does in the USA. Either party can cancel the contract on the spot for any reason or no reason at all. There are also some limits on how much time off you can take at once and in total in that time.
  - iainmerrick 4y ago
    That’s standard, but as far as I know it’s very uncommon to actually make use of that and drop somebody during probation. And employers definitely do not interview less carefully because of it. (This is for software engineering jobs, at least. In other industries it might work differently.)
  - gyulai 4y ago
    Employment law is more like a grenade than a sharp-shooter rifle. It just deals out damage in all directions regardless of how it's used and where it's supposedly targeted. In a country like Germany, if you fire an employee and they walk away with a hurt ego and start talking to a lawyer, you will end up hurting in some way or another, so the game is to manage egos and make sure that, when a company parts ways with an employee, the employee feels that it was mutual. Actually, I think it would be a step in the right direction for both bosses and employees, if bosses could just say: Hey, I'm firing you because I just no longer want you here. You didn't do anything wrong. I just have other people who do the job better. The perverse incentive is that it's probably better for companies to single out individuals they want to get rid of and treat them badly until they leave of their own account, rather than do that.

ilyt 4y ago

> But if you had the God’s-eye view of all your applicants, you might find out that 75% of all of applicants were good hires! ... or 5%, and rest fails at basic litmus test of not too hard questions. People will apply anywhere regardless of their own (perceived or actual) skill level. And it is no wonder as the requirements will be half-lie or wishlist most of the time. So the one side throws resumes everywhere they can and the other just tries to best guess which one is worth spending time to even interview as there is too many to interview all. On other side, testing candidates puts a "homework requirement" on them, doing that online also makes cheating easy so you might bore/detract the good ones (they most likely already have decent job and don't care for few hours of homework on off chance they get thru the filter) while the less good will just find a way to check the box and pass anyway

nonrandomstring 4y ago

In many cases a solid needs-based JD exists and must be filled in a perfunctory fashion. But often companies don't really know what they want. Advertising a job becomes a way of seeing what's out there, and whether anyone can bring them some missing "magic". If we think of work as being about relationships then successful ones are slow, sometimes painful routes by which we find lasting partnership. It may involve many on-and-off dates, exploration of shared values and interests, introductions to family, and so on. OTOH, the idea of a "job market" in which human beings are rapidly traded as they "climb a career" is akin to a nightclub for picking up casual sex. Many companies experience nothing but a series of one night stands. Passionate embraces and big promises are followed by tempestuous exits. The cost of casualisation and rapid churn isn't really appreciated by either party, or society at large. Workers, forever "dressing to impress" never really develop deep skills that come from stability. Companies spend a fortune on HR, perpetual transformation, induction, on-boarding and reconfiguration around the latest hire. Little real work gets done and eventually it becomes mutually disrespectful, or even hostile. This gig economy is harmful in unseen ways. Now we have companies desperate for good people, but unable to recruit, and talented workers unable to find a happy workplace, because both are "playing hard-to-get" out of pride and restless, undirected ambition. Imho, it's a situation rooted in immaturity and something Adam Phillips touched on when he said "capitalism is for children".

quickthrower2 4y ago
Of course it is hostile, because of the corporate structure and owners vs. workers. Workers work for “Me Inc. currently supplying services to big co.”. We often try to negotiate to make incentives align as much as we can, but they never quite do.

gyulai 4y ago

If you try to get ready-made talent from the outside you will face problems in the selection process and, as the article points out, there really is no good solution to those problems. ...so the alternative is to create your own talent and work hard to hold on to them. If you need a senior developer, take someone internal who has proven themselves as a junior developer and make them into a senior developer. If you need a junior developer, hire someone straight out of college and give them all the training and mentoring to make them productive. If you need a manager, look within your ranks for an individual contributor who wants to step up to manager, and give them a chance.

stared 4y ago

In classification models, there is a concept of precision (% of correct positives) and recall (how many positives are captured from the population). The author correctly points out that recall is very low in a typical recruitment process. As much as I agree with the sentiment, employer incentives are not to find ALL suitable candidates but to find just ONE suitable candidate. Everything beyond that is a waste of resources. For some positions (e.g. finding a co-founder or an artist with a unique style) - yes, low recall might be a limiting factor. It is just a market for most other roles - in particular, all that can be summarized with a job title.

Gatsky 4y ago

Things get even worse where the application process is completely unaccountable to the future success of the applicant. When you hire someone for a job, you get some feedback on how that person does at said job. In Medicine for example, this is not the case. Whether the person you admit to your university or residency program ends up being fantastic or a psychopathic murder is not even considered.

xg15 4y ago

I dunno, all those alternate worlds sound far more dystopic than the world we have today. Somehow OP was bothered with spending time to write applications and would prefer we wrap our entire lives around them instead. As a thought experiment, imagine how someone with jail history or with a small child and no spouse or with disabilities would cope in those worlds.

subroutine 4y ago

Trust Windfalls sound like a terrible idea. If you allow someone to give out cash and select the next person to give out cash, the money will concentrate within a friend group. At the very least, funding will disburse over much narrower set of research topics (I am most familiar with the work/people who research topics similar to my own). > Trust Windfalls are a Rorschach test for whether you trust people or not. I’m a guy on the internet going “hey give me a bunch of money and I’ll give it to my friends and it’ll be great!”... If you don’t know me and you’re a bit of a misanthrope, this sounds like the worst idea ever. Indeed, it does sound like the worst idea ever because I don't know you. That means there is zero chance of me getting the funding. And when you give the money to a friend, it's likely your friend will return the favor and give it back to you. Why nominate a person you know will not return the favor? And when they do, who is your next pick? Well, their wife needs funding, and so does your wife. So you go another round. Then who? Your cousin need funding, and so does your college roommate. You know who doesn't get funding - that person with a rival theory, and that person attempting to replicate your work. And if the money does happen to migrate to me, nothing against you, its just that if the money migrates out of my 'trusted network' it will likely not return for a long time. And my lab won't survive several years waiting for the funding to return.

notafraudster 4y ago
I'm not the author. I think you've hit on the main limitations, but I don't think it's fatal. If the lay of the land in a given field is such that there are well defined camps, then you allocate the money to each camp[0] and allow the camps to allocate the money internally. If the lay of the land is that it's diffuse and has very shifting structure, then you can't follow this strategy, but also it's maybe worth raising the possibility that it's not yet time to allocate money and the first thing the field should do is try to develop some structure. [0] Obviously the problem of what %age to give to each camp is an important second-order problem, but if you imagine a scenario like a university, I find it more likely the Provost's office can figure out how much to give to which Dean than they to be able to figure out how much to give to which lab. (I also think you're right to observe that even within a particular camp of a particular field there will be relationship-driven gladhanding that helps determine the flow of money, and that's a real concern, but it's just a more localized concern than I think you give it credit for. I'm also not entirely sold on it.)

pantulis 4y ago

I did quite a bit of interviews (on the hiring side) for almost a decade and I find the current recruitment processes to be basically stupid and over-complicated --both for the applicant and the employer is a huge waste of time. Look, if you are hiring an engineer, it's easier than it seems. Just sit an hour with them and have a good talk about his career on the business domain or the technical field. At the end of that hour you should have a non-100% accurate but solid perspective on these things: "Does this person communicate effectively? Would I want to work with this applicant?" And that's it.

jonahbenton 4y ago
True! Except that this process is discriminatory because people communicate best with people who are like themselves.
- vt85 4y ago
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- zsoltkacsandi 4y ago
  Yeah, people who share similar values can communicate and work together better, but this isn't discrimination. On this basis the whole hiring field and each and every interview is discriminatory because the companies want to select who they want to work together with based on the candidates skills/values.
  - marcinzm 4y ago
    >Yeah, people who share similar values can communicate and work together better, but this isn't discrimination. This isn't really my experience. Similar people will have a better initial perception of each other as it takes less time to synchronize with each other however in most jobs that's of little importance. What matters is how they work together in the long term and most people don't need clones to work well with. If anything else having too many similar people is a problem for a team since you get overlapping blind spots which tends to cause serious issues over time.

notafraudster 4y ago

If you are not sure if your screening processes work, do an RCT. I have zero idea why the article raises this clearly provocative and correct approach and dismisses it immediately. Allocate a percentage of the positions you're hiring for to candidates that are hired at random. The empirical decision about what percentage depends on your primary concern: if you think your hiring process is completely useless, then you want to get this percentage close to 50% because this is what's optimal, experimentally. If you think your hiring process works OK and want to guard against downside risk on the random hires, get the percentage lower. This will cost you statistical power, but less than you expect. No one is saying "random" means "no standards at all". If you're a graduate pure math department you don't need to admit a grad student whose background is that they have a GED and worked as a welder for 5 years before getting a 135 on the GRE Math side. Instead, split your screening into two phases: one phase that is targeted to exclude people who absolutely positively do not meet requirements and could never work out, and one phase designed to pick the best feasible candidates among those who meet requirements. Do the RCT in the latter phase. If you have relatively continuous or regular hiring processes, you'll be well powered to assess your hiring screen in pretty short order. The larger your organization or the faster your overall turnover is the more robust you are to the risk of this going wrong. Not every company can do this -- academic departments that hire one person a year and sometimes have blown searches or people going back on the market within a year or two are clearly going to be a little risk averse. But if we're talking Deloitte hiring a cohort of 150 office admins, they can absolutely, positively make use of this strategy. The other thing I'd add is that a lot of people are under the mistaken belief that hiring is about determining the best candidates. In fact that is not true and it has never been true. It's about maximizing the probability that a candidate you offer a job to takes it and is good... or else maximizing the frontier of some function of probability the candidate accepts, is good, and how good they are. Hiring nothing but the best candidates will increase the likelihood of a blown search, increase the rate of attrition, etc. This makes almost all of the discussion around mErIt In HiRiNg a distraction from how hiring actually works. There are more narrowly tailored options. The more local you make the randomization, the less power and the less downside risk. Suppose you rank candidates from 1 (terrible) to 100 (ideal) and tend to hire candidates in the 80-90 range. Even a willingness to allocate some positions to candidates scored at 70-80 is going to give you lots information about whether your ranking system is useful at all. Do more RCTs!!! Please!

donatj 4y ago

> Harvard, for example, charges a $75 application fee And this is why I ended up going to a for-profit school. Circa 2003 I was a B level student who had taken a couple college level math courses. I applied to three colleges, all local, one of which my friend payed the application fee (thanks, Paul) and was rejected from all three. $50+ dollars is a lot of money to a 17 year old in a single income household whose parents are completely disinterested in their education. You know who didn’t charge an application fee? The for-profit college advertised on late night television.

quickthrower2 4y ago
Application fees for university, even $1, are an absurd concept, it should be illegal.

kshay 4y ago

> very fun jobs like musician and professional athlete pay subsistence wages Modulo a very small subset of top-tier performers, I think we’re already there!

deleted 4y ago

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crazygringo 4y ago

> And you did pretty good: 75% good hires!... But if you had the God’s-eye view of all your applicants, you might find out that 75% of all of applicants were good hires! The author has clearly never been involved in hiring/selecting before, because the idea that application processes are as good as random is positively absurd. People will apply to all sorts of things they're not even remotely qualified for. Hell, I've certainly done it in the past. A resume screen is essential to eliminate the obvious unqualified, and a first round of interviews weeds out people who also clearly don't have what's needed for the role or who throw up a gigantic red flag. (And then after that it's about trying to find the best match, not just a barely sufficient one, since suitability for a role isn't binary but exists on a continuum.) Applying and then interviewing/screening is something we do because it's necessary. Obviously people are always looking for ways to improve the process, e.g. what types of signals actually correlate most with job performance? But the idea that the application is no better than random flies in the face of all evidence, as well as all common sense. This makes as much sense as saying that going on dates is useless -- just pick a partner at random and get married and be done with it, because the odds are just as good! (When of course the research shows that personality compatibility and chemistry compatibility are huge determinants of successful marriages.)

feoren 4y ago
> This makes as much sense as saying that going on dates is useless -- just pick a partner at random and get married and be done with it, because the odds are just as good! How sure are you this is false? I'm not completely convinced. Some people are very, very bad at picking compatible partners. Now I'm trying to figure out how we could ethically run this study, because I think the results might surprise you.
- escapedmoose 4y ago
  You might be able to compare divorce/separation/unhappiness rates between arranged and non-arranged marriages, but culture differences would be a confounding factor… maybe study the average lifespan of relationships started on reality tv haha
- 4y ago