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> Folks who have moved from cancelled project to cancelled project will find it harder as interviewers will be unconsciously biased against applicants who have
by yodsanklai 4y ago
> Folks who have moved from cancelled project to cancelled project will find it harder as interviewers will be unconsciously biased against applicants who have never worked on a successful project/product.
Interviewers don't know whether your projects were successful or not (and often don't care, I don't remember ever being asked this type of questions, SWE interviewing has always been mainly technical for me).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cuteboy19 4y agoWould you hire a stadia employee or a search employee?
- CydeWeys 4y agoI'd hire whichever one did better on the interview. Stadia had excellent engineers working on it and the product itself was technically amazing.
- plorkyeran 4y agoYes? I'm not sure how that's even a question. Passing on someone that seems like a good hire because they worked on a technically impressive thing which had some major non-technical problems would be really stupid. Both of those are things which would make me more interested in bringing them in for an interview, not less.
- cuteboy19 4y agoI suppose I should have worded it differently to follow up on the "unconscious bias of recruiters" angle
- pb7 4y agoStadia was an incredibly impressive technical product. It failed because of terrible product and business vision, not its engineering.
- ChuckMcM 4y agoAt least in the SF Bay Area, I'd be careful with this assumption: "Interviewers don't know whether your projects were successful or not ..." The number of degrees of freedom between any two people is remarkably small. As someone who has interviewed and hired perhaps two or three hundred people over my career, it was rare that as an interviewer I didn't know more about the interviewer than their resume stated. Later in my career, the depth of information in "ATS" (Applicant Tracking Systems) applications at companies has only gotten deeper. Social media posts, comments on HN :-), peer analysis from others hired from the same company, Etc. What is more, from Google's perspective, a lot of their hiring teams who used these systems to screen candidates were contractors and have often been laid off when Google needed to make better numbers. They didn't just "forget" everything they knew, a number of them with whom I worked, contacted me post Google employment after setting up their own business as recruiters. Not saying its good or bad, just that it is important that a lot of information exists that "follows you" around. The longer you work, the more senior you become, the more it fills with a ratio of "haters/meh/supporters" info. The thing that always annoyed me and I had to ASK recruiters to send me candidates that matched but their "whisper network" suggested they were problems/losers. Sometimes just getting past that screen is really tough for someone. EDIT: sometimes the wording is tricky.
- nvarsj 4y agoDid you just say Google is indexing HN comments with applicants? Can you provide more info?
- ChuckMcM 4y agoGoogle uses all available information in its hiring and screening tools.
- yodsanklai 4y agoI think I only ever interviewed and worked in big tech companies that recruits candidates at global scale. When interviewing a candidate, we try to avoid bias and pick objective signals. Whether their past projects got canceled is the type of things we actively don't want to know about. But now I suppose that in companies with smaller pools of local candidates, this type of information can make a difference.