6 ms·

A Limited Interest Article on Employer Value Prop and Hiring

85 points by nkurz 4y ago

hiurwbkjlfjo 4y ago
[dead]
Animats 4y ago
That's a great article. But it's so last-month. Read today's layoff articles.
- patleeman 4y ago
  It could also be early for the next cycle...
NHQ 4y ago
[flagged]
- TheRealNGenius 4y ago
  [dead]
darth_avocado 4y ago
False negative problem is so ridiculous. I work for a faang, I’ve worked at all kinds of “prestigious” companies, I have worked at all kinds of companies, I get paid more than most people will ever do in their lifetime, and most importantly I know my stuff. Yet there are companies out there rejecting me for job descriptions which are only 50% of my skill set because I couldn’t code this obscure hard algorithms problem in 45 mins. Makes absolutely no sense. I know “tech interviews are bad” has been discussed at nauseam,but I feel compelled to write this because it still doesn’t get fixed. PS: I am not salty. I’m one of those engineers who doesn’t care about company mission. I’ll work optimizing streaming at 4K for adult content websites if they pay me enough.
- xwolfi 4y ago
  And Im sure adult sites are full of non trivial interesting problems and could be managed relatively ethically. As for the interview problem you face, it's due to offer and demand. I work in an investment bank in Hong Kong, we need ideally super experts in everything who can do low latency, understand swaps, know other brokers, client systems, exchanges, FIX by heart and stuff like that. We start interviewing on those constraints and then if we find no one we lower the bar until we ask for a LinkedList implementation and find a guy doing it relatively ok. And the guy turns out to be great and useful most of the time and we have to teach him the gaps. If you cant get in the job you want it s prob because they find too many people already and can afford to select on absurd skills.
  - darth_avocado 4y ago
    It’s actually the other way around. Being on the other side of the interview panel quite a few times, I’ve seen great candidates get rejected for silly reasons, meanwhile the positions get filled with people not at all qualified to do that particular job because they interview well.
- gopalv 4y ago
  > Yet there are companies out there rejecting me for job descriptions which are only 50% of my skill set because I couldn’t code this obscure hard algorithms problem in 45 mins This is usually an odd thing that happens when you accidentally interview yourself a level below - there's a definite "I made a trade-off to do something else" that you hit at the boundary of senior+ engineer. I interviewed at a FAANG recently where they asked me when I committed my last patch. Not "when did you review a patch", but had to skip over all the +1s and to a patch I had authored. I knew immediately that the interviewer didn't care about whether I could talk to customers or get other teams to do dependency features or even if I could balance a tech-debt vs velocity decision. I knew I had missed on my leveling, because I didn't get worse at algorithms or writing patches because I couldn't, but because I was doing something else more relevant to shipping software in my organization. The next job conversation, I was interviewing for a Sr Principal and the VP I talked to could see how they could use the last 3 years of my "optimizing for results" better than the engineer who couldn't understand why I was doing management tasks as an IC & why that meant I didn't write patches, that I got them in into the releases in the right order across teams. They're rejecting you because you aren't a match for the job they have at hand. You should see mismatches as time saved on your part, not as rejections.
drewcoo 4y ago
> The man who figures out the false negative problem will rule the world Oh, give it a rest. Nobody understands how to hire, but everyone thinks they have special insight into the problem that nobody else does. And they're either trying to hoard their knowledge or boast about it and sell the rest of us something. It reminds me of gamblers and their magical strategies. They're obviously BS, but we're all temporarily embarrassed gazillionaires, so we are interested in hearing more. Just in case.
Zaheer 4y ago
Co-founder of Levels.fyi here. We think about this a lot and how to innovate in the hiring space. If you're an employer and generally interested in this topic, please reach out at my username at levels.fyi.
mlhpdx 4y ago
> Despite the abundance of companies that have trouble hiring good people, there just aren’t that many who care about it enough to respect the people they are trying to hire and give them a full picture of who they are and what they want to do. Having been an engineering leader in growing companies that didn’t (don’t) have a problem hiring enough good people, I’m a little sad the “secret” is out. Indeed, having genuine respect for people is magic.
davidABEL 4y ago
[flagged]
mdip 4y ago
What a great read -- I think this individual managed to summarize a mess of things I've been thinking for a while. The "False Negative" problem was one I made a dent in at a former employer. I was accidentally thrown into interviewing someone for a position on a development team that I wasn't a part of. After a spectacular interview, I was invited to participate in a few others and participate in selection. The selection meeting was one of the most difficult arguments I've ever won. There were 5 of us; all had dismissed the only candidate I liked, most were in favor of a candidate that was seriously over-stating his skill set. The other candidates I had no opinion on[0]. They'd dismissed the first guy because he had not had a CS degree and were grumbling that HR had not filtered that candidate out[1]. They were sitting in the room with two people who didn't have degrees and reported to a Director who didn't have one! I remember the "no-CS" guy really well as it had been the first interview I'd ever given. I was given no preparation, no notes, no resume, no "how to give an interview" pep talk -- I'd met the guy in the lobby where he was waiting to be let in the door ... I had taken apart the Kiosk used to do that, so I had to find the person he was looking for, which resulted in discovering that the main technical person he was to interview with was out sick and they needed to reschedule, "unless you want to do it." It sounded like fun. I'd read a lot on the topic and had been on the other side of the table several times, so I know what I liked, what I wished had been focused on and what I thought would be useful. It turned out he had a Github repo with no less than 30 projects, a few with a handful of stars. In my head, I'm thinking "just for laughs", I asked for his "ugliest" but it turned out to be a perfect way to go. We used it as a source to brainstorm refactoring and he didn't have to claim that the code he was showing me was "his best work" and be judged for every little problem. He was interviewing for conferencing, so mostly C/C++[2], and this guy -- on opening the first source file -- threw out tens of changes that were all appropriate. He could argue pros/cons for each approach, he even changed his mind a few times as his thinking evolved and then managed to explain how he'd redesign the entire thing if he had ever intended to "do it right." I don't even remember what it did. At the end of our "selection meeting", I think I said something like "I don't care if you hire any of these other people but if you don't hire this guy, you're making a mistake -- he's a better developer than I am[3] (or any other developer we have on staff)." They hired him. Within 3 months he was promoted and was the lead developer for most of the important things in conferencing[4]. [0] There was nothing particularly wrong with them or great with them and any would have been a good hire if we had that many positions open. The only problem I had was that they had no examples of anything they had written in the past to show me so I couldn't adequately judge their abilities. [1] Never mind that the job ad said "4-year degree or equivalent experience" which this gentleman had more than enough of. [2] I got really lucky. I hadn't touched the language in probably ten years prior to that year where I was put on a project that, unexpectedly, required me to deeply "brush up". It turned out the person who was interviewing him was a Java developer with no C/C++ background and was not looking forward to handling the technical interview for the position. [3] I specifically called myself out because two of the people in that room had more respect for my abilities than anyone could ever deserve and thought most of the developers on "in the development org" were terrible. I avoid confrontation (more than I should) but it plays in my favor when I do complain/advocate/go to bat for something -- people tend to listen. [4] There were people considered "owners" of an app, usually at least two, who signed off on anything going in and generally fleshed out the major design elements for those apps -- sometimes they were the only developer, too, but that team was much larger/more disciplined. I think they promoted him to Director over that org but he left shortly thereafter due to a desire to remain on the tech side of things.
a_c 4y ago
I always ask both myself and candidate how do you know that the thing you (want to) do is meaningful. That's the personal mission. When there is overlapping between the team you are hiring for and the candidate things work wonderfully well. IMO chasing after technology with no end in sight is not the way to go

85 points by nkurz 4y ago

hiurwbkjlfjo 4y ago

[dead]

Animats 4y ago

That's a great article. But it's so last-month. Read today's layoff articles.

patleeman 4y ago
It could also be early for the next cycle...

NHQ 4y ago

[flagged]

TheRealNGenius 4y ago
[dead]

darth_avocado 4y ago

False negative problem is so ridiculous. I work for a faang, I’ve worked at all kinds of “prestigious” companies, I have worked at all kinds of companies, I get paid more than most people will ever do in their lifetime, and most importantly I know my stuff. Yet there are companies out there rejecting me for job descriptions which are only 50% of my skill set because I couldn’t code this obscure hard algorithms problem in 45 mins. Makes absolutely no sense. I know “tech interviews are bad” has been discussed at nauseam,but I feel compelled to write this because it still doesn’t get fixed. PS: I am not salty. I’m one of those engineers who doesn’t care about company mission. I’ll work optimizing streaming at 4K for adult content websites if they pay me enough.

xwolfi 4y ago
And Im sure adult sites are full of non trivial interesting problems and could be managed relatively ethically. As for the interview problem you face, it's due to offer and demand. I work in an investment bank in Hong Kong, we need ideally super experts in everything who can do low latency, understand swaps, know other brokers, client systems, exchanges, FIX by heart and stuff like that. We start interviewing on those constraints and then if we find no one we lower the bar until we ask for a LinkedList implementation and find a guy doing it relatively ok. And the guy turns out to be great and useful most of the time and we have to teach him the gaps. If you cant get in the job you want it s prob because they find too many people already and can afford to select on absurd skills.
- darth_avocado 4y ago
  It’s actually the other way around. Being on the other side of the interview panel quite a few times, I’ve seen great candidates get rejected for silly reasons, meanwhile the positions get filled with people not at all qualified to do that particular job because they interview well.
gopalv 4y ago
> Yet there are companies out there rejecting me for job descriptions which are only 50% of my skill set because I couldn’t code this obscure hard algorithms problem in 45 mins This is usually an odd thing that happens when you accidentally interview yourself a level below - there's a definite "I made a trade-off to do something else" that you hit at the boundary of senior+ engineer. I interviewed at a FAANG recently where they asked me when I committed my last patch. Not "when did you review a patch", but had to skip over all the +1s and to a patch I had authored. I knew immediately that the interviewer didn't care about whether I could talk to customers or get other teams to do dependency features or even if I could balance a tech-debt vs velocity decision. I knew I had missed on my leveling, because I didn't get worse at algorithms or writing patches because I couldn't, but because I was doing something else more relevant to shipping software in my organization. The next job conversation, I was interviewing for a Sr Principal and the VP I talked to could see how they could use the last 3 years of my "optimizing for results" better than the engineer who couldn't understand why I was doing management tasks as an IC & why that meant I didn't write patches, that I got them in into the releases in the right order across teams. They're rejecting you because you aren't a match for the job they have at hand. You should see mismatches as time saved on your part, not as rejections.

drewcoo 4y ago

> The man who figures out the false negative problem will rule the world Oh, give it a rest. Nobody understands how to hire, but everyone thinks they have special insight into the problem that nobody else does. And they're either trying to hoard their knowledge or boast about it and sell the rest of us something. It reminds me of gamblers and their magical strategies. They're obviously BS, but we're all temporarily embarrassed gazillionaires, so we are interested in hearing more. Just in case.

Zaheer 4y ago

Co-founder of Levels.fyi here. We think about this a lot and how to innovate in the hiring space. If you're an employer and generally interested in this topic, please reach out at my username at levels.fyi.

mlhpdx 4y ago

> Despite the abundance of companies that have trouble hiring good people, there just aren’t that many who care about it enough to respect the people they are trying to hire and give them a full picture of who they are and what they want to do. Having been an engineering leader in growing companies that didn’t (don’t) have a problem hiring enough good people, I’m a little sad the “secret” is out. Indeed, having genuine respect for people is magic.

davidABEL 4y ago

[flagged]

mdip 4y ago

What a great read -- I think this individual managed to summarize a mess of things I've been thinking for a while. The "False Negative" problem was one I made a dent in at a former employer. I was accidentally thrown into interviewing someone for a position on a development team that I wasn't a part of. After a spectacular interview, I was invited to participate in a few others and participate in selection. The selection meeting was one of the most difficult arguments I've ever won. There were 5 of us; all had dismissed the only candidate I liked, most were in favor of a candidate that was seriously over-stating his skill set. The other candidates I had no opinion on[0]. They'd dismissed the first guy because he had not had a CS degree and were grumbling that HR had not filtered that candidate out[1]. They were sitting in the room with two people who didn't have degrees and reported to a Director who didn't have one! I remember the "no-CS" guy really well as it had been the first interview I'd ever given. I was given no preparation, no notes, no resume, no "how to give an interview" pep talk -- I'd met the guy in the lobby where he was waiting to be let in the door ... I had taken apart the Kiosk used to do that, so I had to find the person he was looking for, which resulted in discovering that the main technical person he was to interview with was out sick and they needed to reschedule, "unless you want to do it." It sounded like fun. I'd read a lot on the topic and had been on the other side of the table several times, so I know what I liked, what I wished had been focused on and what I thought would be useful. It turned out he had a Github repo with no less than 30 projects, a few with a handful of stars. In my head, I'm thinking "just for laughs", I asked for his "ugliest" but it turned out to be a perfect way to go. We used it as a source to brainstorm refactoring and he didn't have to claim that the code he was showing me was "his best work" and be judged for every little problem. He was interviewing for conferencing, so mostly C/C++[2], and this guy -- on opening the first source file -- threw out tens of changes that were all appropriate. He could argue pros/cons for each approach, he even changed his mind a few times as his thinking evolved and then managed to explain how he'd redesign the entire thing if he had ever intended to "do it right." I don't even remember what it did. At the end of our "selection meeting", I think I said something like "I don't care if you hire any of these other people but if you don't hire this guy, you're making a mistake -- he's a better developer than I am[3] (or any other developer we have on staff)." They hired him. Within 3 months he was promoted and was the lead developer for most of the important things in conferencing[4]. [0] There was nothing particularly wrong with them or great with them and any would have been a good hire if we had that many positions open. The only problem I had was that they had no examples of anything they had written in the past to show me so I couldn't adequately judge their abilities. [1] Never mind that the job ad said "4-year degree or equivalent experience" which this gentleman had more than enough of. [2] I got really lucky. I hadn't touched the language in probably ten years prior to that year where I was put on a project that, unexpectedly, required me to deeply "brush up". It turned out the person who was interviewing him was a Java developer with no C/C++ background and was not looking forward to handling the technical interview for the position. [3] I specifically called myself out because two of the people in that room had more respect for my abilities than anyone could ever deserve and thought most of the developers on "in the development org" were terrible. I avoid confrontation (more than I should) but it plays in my favor when I do complain/advocate/go to bat for something -- people tend to listen. [4] There were people considered "owners" of an app, usually at least two, who signed off on anything going in and generally fleshed out the major design elements for those apps -- sometimes they were the only developer, too, but that team was much larger/more disciplined. I think they promoted him to Director over that org but he left shortly thereafter due to a desire to remain on the tech side of things.

a_c 4y ago

I always ask both myself and candidate how do you know that the thing you (want to) do is meaningful. That's the personal mission. When there is overlapping between the team you are hiring for and the candidate things work wonderfully well. IMO chasing after technology with no end in sight is not the way to go