17 ms·

I don't hire unlucky people

529 points by arcatan 15y ago

wglb 15y ago
Nicely done. Lots of good things here. “I measure. Premature optimization is the—Oh, I get it!” where the lightbulb comes on. And lots of fun little bits like Mark Fidrych http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fidrych http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fidrych.
delinka 15y ago
Aside from the Sesame Street names, a fairly decent read. Many years ago, I decided to stop writing my résumé to each recipient and just let my List Of Things speak for itself. I don't want to work for someone caught up on details that are irrelevant to the jobs I'd be doing.
- aristus 15y ago
  "Bertie Wooster" is a character in the Jeeves books. Ernestine Anderson is a jazz & blues singer.
  - raganwald 15y ago
    “Bert and Ernie” are George Bailey’s best friends in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which is where Jim Henson drew his inspiration for names of the Muppet characters.
    - delinka 15y ago
      And all this must have led our author right to Oscar the Grouch for one more name in the narrative.
- brudgers 15y ago
  The concept of not hiring unlucky people reminded me of Larry Niven's Ringworld.
idan 15y ago
This is exactly what we've been thinking about for the last year while we've been building http://skillsapp.com http://skillsapp.com. Exactly. Love it when lucid, articulate writers take my mess of a brain and put the right words to it.
- pavel_lishin 15y ago
  How do you measure "passion" and "respect"? And how are the twitter tags determined?
  - mmcconnell1618 15y ago
    If I'm a job seeker I want to present myself in the best possible light. Allowing a 3rd party to rate my "passion" and "respect" without any knowledge of the algorithm would keep me from using the service. If you did publish the algorithm it will be gamed just like search engines in a matter of hours. You might want to consider suggesting tags and keywords and allowing job seekers to select the ones they believe apply. I would consider dropping the "passion" and "respect" part as they may open you to future legal action.
    - idan 15y ago
      Right now, we aren't doing any kind of indexing. If you apply for a position through our service, you give whatever information you want about yourself, and we check out your public data on those networks. If you don't want to share your twitter or stack overflow, leave those fields blank. We don't publish the details of the algorithm but in effects it would be fairly difficult to game. Either you have a solid history of consuming and contributing relevant content or you don't. If you are able to manufacture that fraudulently, well, chances are that you're somebody interesting to talk to.
      - pavel_lishin 15y ago
        I didn't actually see any way for me as a developer to use your service. Signing up for the beta looked like a way for an employer to sign up.
cousin_it 15y ago
So the most efficient interviewing process for the employer is also the nicest to candidates? What a curious coincidence. Are you sure there was no wishful thinking involved in writing this post?
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
  - cousin_it 15y ago
    I agree it sounds very reasonable. But the article mentions A/B tests. Did you actually do these tests? The heroine of your story has good reasons to believe that the described interviewing process is pretty good, but why do you believe that?
    - raganwald 15y ago
      Sorry, my first reply added zero bits of information. Yes, I have absolutely managed hiring ads exactly the same way one manages selling things online, right down to split testing different ads, managing keyword buys, the usual yadda yadda. It’s tough, because there is so little signal. It’s also harsh because the best source of good candidates are personal contacts, which violate just about everything in the post. Which suggests that the post is really only about one very specific thing, managing the inbound funnel generated by ads, cereers@yourcompany.com, and so on.
      - cousin_it 15y ago
        Thanks, and sorry for asking a harsh question :-) Your recommendations are sensible. It's curious that they seem to suggest that coding ability is close to a one-dimensional measurement of the candidate. Do you think we could measure the largest principal component of coding ability with a standardized exam, like IQ? That would save everyone the hassle of interviewing, and also ensure non-discrimination as a nice bonus.
        15y ago
DarkShikari 15y ago
This article is superb. We tried placing ads for ninjas, rock stars, and so on, but I discovered this was the cultural equivalent of advertising for white males who drink dry martinis. Not that white males who drink dry martinis can’t do the job, but there’s no real difference between advertising for a Ninja and throwing half your resumés away because you don’t like unlucky people. Either way, you end up with fewer resumés.” This is so true, so important, and so many startups (and even bigger companies!) miss this. Job ads provide cues, conscious and subconscious, to the people reading them. Not everyone reading the ad is identical to the person writing it, and a badly written job ad can easily send the message "this company isn't for you" to a large number of skilled potential applicants. This applies not just to categories like gender or race, but even to personality types and personal interests. Unless you really want a company of only extroverts, for example, don't write a job ad that scares off introverts. In the canonical example, if you constantly ask for "rock stars", you will turn off people to whom that doesn't appeal, including tons of good programmers. But it goes beyond that: don't assume that all your applicants are any particular kind of person with certain interests. A job ad should focus on what the job actually is, and things that are important to the job. The best programmers often have a lot of choice in where they work, and as many HNers know from experience, if they see a job ad that turns them off in some fashion, they will probably not even bother reading further: they know they have better options, so yours probably isn't worth their time. If the vast majority of skilled programmers skip over your resume, it's no wonder you only receive resumes from unqualified applicants. In short, when writing a job ad, you need to think from the perspective of people applying. Use your empathy, put yourself in their shoes, rather than just writing what you think looks cool.
- cookiecaper 15y ago
  Indeed. My ad scoring program deducts 5 points and transparently kills off ads that contain terms like "ninja" and "rock star" because to my mind they indicate a propensity for either abuse ("a rock star should be able to code this in three days!!") or fad-following ineptitude ("rock stars are the coolest kind of programmers, I must have them! also, we write EVERYTHING in Ruby, it's like the Mac of programming").
  - 15y ago
rubyrescue 15y ago
You belong here. We’ll do great things together inspiring!
free 15y ago
My takeaway from the article was that Ernestine wanted to hire a good programmer and she focussed on just that. She did not consider the established conventions on what to do in such a situation. Interestingly, I have observed this to be true in few other situations as well, where established conventions and processes are actually an hindrance rather than help.
maxcameron 15y ago
Sir Reginald Braithwaite is one of Toronto's best. Thanks for yet another fantastic article man.
mathetic 15y ago
The article summarizes the difference between British and American college entrance system as well. When you apply for CS in Britain (and I'm talking about Oxbridge), they care only about your experience with computers and mathematics. However, in HYPMS [1] the qualification is based on your irrelevant grades and your extracurriculars. You might be the most active guy and get a place but a poor programmer. [1] Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford
- karamazov 15y ago
  In the US, you don't apply to a school for CS - you just apply to the university as undergraduate. It's quite common for undergraduates to not know what they want to study as freshmen, and to change their minds over the course of university. That being said, HYPMS do want you to have good grades overall and solid extracurriculars, it's immensely helpful to be world-class in some activity; the particular activity doesn't matter as much.
  - swang 15y ago
    That is not true at all schools in the US. At least not when I applied around 10 years ago. A lot of schools, especially the top tier CS programs told me that I would not be allowed to go in undeclared and then transfer into their CS program. I had to declare as a CS or I wouldn't get in. I knew some people were able to get away with not declaring and transferring in but I didn't want to risk it.
    - ericd 15y ago
      When I applied around that time, CMU was the only one I applied to that required that I declare CS, MIT didn't, Harvard didn't, and I don't think CalTech did either.
    - msbarnett 15y ago
      10 years exactly, or a bit more than that? The reason I asked is that CS enrollment changed dramatically after the .com bubble burst. When I applied to CS a little more than 10 years ago the bubble was in full swing, and only the top 1/4 of applicants to the program had a hope of getting in. Transferring in was a no-go. 2 years later enrollment had dropped so low that the quotas were gone and transferring in was easy. Application numbers, as far as I know, still haven't recovered to bubble levels.
dustingetz 15y ago
i know a guy running a software shop. he's an active participant in the local meetup community, and he cares about people. it's no surpise that he has all sorts of talented people trying to work with him, and not enough funding to hire them all. (at least, i think that's why he hasn't hired me ;) i also know a few other people running software shops, who don't participate in the local meetup community. none of the best local developers even know who these other employers are. i'm sort of sick of hearing them complain about how hard it is to find talent. the flip side of this, is that if I as an engineer want to have a steady stream of future opportunities with the best employers, I need to make myself known to them, by, you guessed it! making myself visible in the meetup community, and internet community at large. ez game.
- robterrell 15y ago
  Isn't that just another filter for luck? You're filtering out candidates who don't know about the meetup, or have kids and can't make the meetup's evening hours, or prefer another meetup that happens to be at the same time elsewhere, etc.
  - lutorm 15y ago
    I thought the point was that people don't even apply because they didn't hear about the job. That's not filtering, that's just not casting an effective net in the first place.
  - terryk88a 15y ago
    I'd tend to agree since that (having kids) applies to me. There's clearly a filtering effect, probably eliminating more experienced people. However, he apparently has no shortage of suitable talent available when using this method.
  - softbuilder 15y ago
    Not at all. You're saying "yes" to something instead of "no". You may go to a meetup, you may meet people through friends of friends, and you may place an ad on Craigslist. All of these things open doors to more people. The filtering was closing doors.
BrainInAJar 15y ago
Good article, but I found the "hypothetical conversation" format a bit off-putting
BrainInAJar 15y ago
Good article, but I found the "hypothetical conversation" format a bit off-putting
cpeterso 15y ago
Slightly off-topic: in Larry Niven's Ringworld novels, an alien race (Pierson's Puppeteers) secretly influences human genetic selection to optimize for luck.
- raganwald 15y ago
  With severe unintended consequences for some of the protagonists, as I recall :-)
- tvon 15y ago
  In reading the article I was wondering if Teela Brown would be get a call or have her resume thrown out, I suspect the latter.
plinkplonk 15y ago
I agree with every point Reginald makes but (and I am being nitpicky here) the form of the story - the seeming overtailored parable nature of it, of the kind you'd find in the Reader's Digest or a religious tract - rubs me ever so slightly the wrong way. I could have done without all the fake (or seemingly fake anyway) dialogue between the Wooster/Oscar etc and would have preferred a straightforward "This is what I(Reginald) think" mode. Imagine pg writing his essays in the form of "Paul wrote an ecommerce site in Lisp while Peter used C++. When Paul met Peter's wife Rosa in a coffee shop he asked her why Peter was looking so haggard and she said 'he is working through the night fixing bugs and not getting enough sleep. Would you mind talking to him? ..' " Again, this is a very minor nitpick, just consider this feedback from one reader. I am probably considerably outnumbered by the people who like this "story" form better (and that is perfectly fine). Of course it is completely Reginald's prerogative to pick any style he wants.
- raganwald 15y ago
  Something like this? http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/02/naive-approach-to-hiring-people.html http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/02/naive-approach-to-hiring...
  - plinkplonk 15y ago
    yes, something like that. I find the style much more natural and less grating. The 'parable' format 'feels' (to me, purely subjectively etc etc) like chalk screeching on blackboard, obscuring the (very valid) substance of the argument. Or maybe it is just a matter of better technique. There may be a way of telling a story to make the same points without the reader being jerked out of his involvement with the material,and being made aware he is reading a story. I don't know.
- esmevane 15y ago
  I agree with you on the preference, but I'd like to add that sometimes a format preference exists only as a way of allowing the author to express their ideas succinctly. As much as I may dislike the storyteller format of the article, philosophically speaking, I have a practical inability to read other, drier essays. And then there are essays which have no reasonable usage of paragraphs and sentences to encapsulate or describe ideas, etc. Compared to those, I would pick a storyteller format.
jrockway 15y ago
Hiring managers quoting Knuth? I fail to suspend my disbelief :)
emmett 15y ago
This is the opposite of my experience. When we greatly narrowed the pool of applicants from "people who want to work on live video" to "people who want to work on live video for gaming", we saw a huge uptick in how many people were interested in working for us. TwitchTV is more attractive for programmers than Justin.tv ever was. There is something to be said for appealing to a smaller group of people more strongly.
- raganwald 15y ago
  Great comment. May I suggest for discussion the following proposition: There is a difference between narrowing the pool of applicants by being specific about things directly relevant for the job and narrowing the pool of applicants by being specific about things only indirectly related to the job. “We’re looking for Haskell Programmers” is not the same thing as, “We like to hire MIT Graduates."
  - k00kykelly 15y ago
    This is a HUGE difference. It makes the job ad go from we want "someone good" to we want "someone with skill X". If the manager of the project isn't competent enough to know what they are hiring for (skill X) then that is a red flag. If you need to filter the applicants more then ask them to answer a question on their approach to a common problem or provide a code sample whichever makes more sense for the particular scenario.
- roguecoder 15y ago
  That seems to be less a narrowing and more adding information to candidates about what the job actually will be. You've just added candidates who want to work for gaming and are able to do live video to the pool of people who can do live video and don't really care what kind of video it is. Providing accurate information about the company allows job seekers to self-select, increasing the signal, and offering an interesting application is far more likely to attract top talent than advertising for code monkeys.
stcredzero 15y ago
Just this morning, I was thinking about metrics. It should be possible to develop a set of metrics for code quality that would apply to apps using particular languages and libraries. These metrics would be general and very imperfect, but they would still have some utility. For example, it would be fairly easy to develop an automated metrics program to run on a given Ruby on Rails app. Things like depth of nesting in code, reported errors per statement, average lines of code per function. What if there was a website where you could download a metrics app, which would take the measurements, then upload the data to a web app, where someone could login and see how well their shop stacks up in comparison to the general population of shops using the same language and library? This would give hiring shops some way to quantify the maturity of the shops a prospective hire has worked.
- terryk88a 15y ago
  No No NO. There really Really REALLY has never been a satisfactory set of metrics for code quality. Not for COBOL and not for rails.
  - stcredzero 15y ago
    So the Rails community is free of deeply nested spaghetti logic and long run-on cut and paste methods? There are no Rails apps with overly deep class hierarchies? Metrics are not so much for code quality as to flag widespread code suckage. I still think this could benefit hiring.
- ilaksh 15y ago
  Probably really easy to go overboard with that but interesting idea. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclomatic_complexity#Correlation_to_number_of_defects http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclomatic_complexity#Correlati... Lower lines of code definitely correlates with lower defect count.
- deleted 15y ago
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terryk88a 15y ago
Heh. My wife was turned down for a product management position because she did not send a thank you note. She forgot because she was (we were) so excited about the position. The hiring manager went back to the recruiter asking for somebody else "just like" my wife. (Loved the conversational format. "Bertie Wooster" is an inspired choice for that style of hiring...)
- pavel_lishin 15y ago
  How did your wife find this out?
rizzom5000 15y ago
While I enjoyed the article and its message, I found the spelling error on the resume example underwhelming. A professional's resume is the veneer they present to strangers. It's like the login page for your app. Do you want a spelling error there when it is so easy to avoid? It screams sloppy and lazy in the same sentence. Maybe the general quality of professional devs is so bad that sloppiness and laziness are better than the alternative... ?
- raganwald 15y ago
  What is the difference between a spelling mistake and failing to wear a tie to an interview? I suggest nothing except for cultural standards. Once upon a time, they were both punishable by immediate removal from the process. Today one is tolerated but the other not tolerated. they both signal the same thing: “I meticulously went over my presentation to ensure that it meets your expectations.” Let’s be clear: I think that everyone looking for a job should present the best possible face, including the appropriate spelling and grammar. It’s just that when hiring, I can easily overlook a spelling mistake if I think the candidate may be that one in one hundred. ANOTHER THOUGHT: To be fair, spelling mistakes are a lot closer to the line than cultural fit or politics or things like gender and race. You can’t change your race to suit the job. Things like your politics are changeable, but unless you have a strong ethical objection to the company’s line of business (I have declined to work on contract with a Tobacco company), it’s in society’s best interests for you to be able to keep your political views without being swayed by your employer. Spelling on a cover letter is a different matter. Most people don’t have a disability that prevents them from getting it right, and there is no greater benefit to society in forcing employers to ignore spelling. It’s a matter that is narrowly restricted to your interaction together, so it isn’t asking a great deal of a candidate to get the spelling correct. So, I guess I don’t have a violent objection to your point of view, even if I’m espousing a different one in this post.
  - dhugiaskmak 15y ago
    To me, writing a document without running it through a spell checker feels like checking in code without compiling it. I think I agree that it shouldn't automatically disqualify someone from a job, but it also feels like something you have to go out of your way not to do.
gwillis13 15y ago
I'm going to upvote this for just the Sesame Street names. Reading the piece with those names in mind, made this a lot more interesting of a read.
kaiyi 15y ago
TL;DR
- raganwald 15y ago
  http://raganwald.posterous.com/why-i-downvote-tldr-comments-on-hacker-news http://raganwald.posterous.com/why-i-downvote-tldr-comments-...
  - erikb 15y ago
    Thanks for telling me, so I could give this guy an upvote to counter :)
    - raganwald 15y ago
      Notice that I actually agree that my words were too long! I rarely actually downvote people, and almost never when they're criticizing me.
      - erikb 15y ago
        Was that agreement stated in another comment?
        raganwald 15y ago
        I consistently write long essays and I lack the patience to edit them to manageable length. More importantly, I lack the moral fibre to discard perfectly good points. Any fool can chop filler out of an essay. It takes an author of sterling character to discard perfectly good ideas in the interest of making what remains an even better essay. And I lack that character. Having written words about an idea I like, I find it very difficult to let go of them, and my writing suffers for it
        pg 15y ago
        Try footnotes.
JoelMcCracken 15y ago
Awesome article. I just came here to submit a note about style: If your text includes a large, multi-paragraph quote, it is common to elide the trailing quote between paragraphs. Including that trailing quote means that the second person in a two person conversation is now speaking. It just confused me at first, because I thought Oscar was the character to say "But it’s dangerous to confuse correlation with causation. And especially dangerous to...".
jack-r-abbit 15y ago
I'm not sure I agree with putting people who can't put together a resume without spelling/grammar mistakes into the same unlucky group that simply had their resumes tossed by chance. Having spelling and grammar mistakes on a resume is sloppy... not unlucky. At a minimum it indicates they may not pay attention to details when it really matters. But maybe that is just me. Or maybe it just doesn't matter on a resume anymore. I'll admit I've never had to whittle down a stack of 100 resumes... more like 10 so I would never just blindly throw half away. But as I skim them all, the ones with the spelling and grammar mistakes get set into the "second string" pile. I'll give them a second look if the deeper dive into the other pile still doesn't find The One. I've had it work both ways. Some times second string does have The One. And other times second string is never looked at again.
- civilian 15y ago
  No. One of my coworkers is a terrible speller, and especially so in IM. I haven't seen his resume, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is a mistake or two in it. And he's pretty scatterbrained. But when it comes to coding CSS or using javascript design patterns, he is awesome. I ask him tons of questions. He is incredibly valuable. I mean, it's okay for you to keep on doing what you're comfortable with. But do you understand what you're missing out on? You're missing out on great developers, and you're giving people like Reginald & I an advantage.
  - jack-r-abbit 15y ago
    I am a terrible speller as well. I just take that extra bit of time to correct things with that squiggly line under them. Technology allows me to hide my horrible spelling ability very easily. So it is not so much that potential candidates are bad at spelling (particularly since I am too) but more that they just didn't take the time to do it right. I think resumes are still pretty important documents. Maybe not as important as a patent application or the actual code being written. But if they didn't take the time to do the resume right... what else are they going to overlook when it is important? Just my feelings. And like I said, sometimes the second string does end up having the one. But if I already found the one in the first stack, then I'm still getting a great developer... just not the one with spelling mistakes. Plus, I'm not even a hiring manager. I review resumes of would-be peers.
deleted 15y ago
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erikb 15y ago
You simply can't "grill everybody hard" just to test for their success. The goal just can't be to knock out "luck" totally. The problem space is just too big to handle. If you can throw out 50 people out of 100 who are very likely (let's say 90%) to not include the one you are looking for, then your chances to find the one increased from 1% to 2.25%, which is more then double your chance with 100 people and also a lot less work.
siavosh 15y ago
After a couple years trying to hire developers I feel bad heuristics have a tendency to become institutionalized if for no other reason than: if I admit this is a crap heuristic, that means I've been doing it wrong for the last 10 years--no way! As a tangent, I find it astonishing that no one ever mentions that all these arguments are true for the guy or gal sitting across the table. She is using heuristics to find an employer based on much less information and in many cases is wrong in accepting an offer. This too has a real cost: low morale, productivity, and high turn over. I find this problem rarely discussed.
crasshopper 15y ago
I hoped this article would discuss how to advertise your position to increase the SNR (really, the appropriate-to-inappropriate-resume ratio). Some things are obvious: if you use words like "ninja" and "rockstar" you are communicating that you want young Rails programmers or something like that. Likewise if you posted flyers inside a museum, or hid a puzzle in a Superbowl TV ad, or wrote "Programmer needed!!! immediate openings!must be comfortable with WordPerfect" on Craigslist, each of those is going to signal something about your firm and attract a different type of person. Someday I would love to see something on HN that goes much deeper into those issues: how to pitch your culture appropriately and improve the resume stack before it even gets to you.
charlieok 15y ago
I do wonder why people advertise for “rock stars”. What is the thinking here? Is it to screen out people who have some self doubt? “Hmm, I think I'm pretty smart, but I don't know if I'm a rock star. I think I better avoid potential embarrassment and look elsewhere”. Is it code for “seeking brogrammers”?
- mindcruzer 15y ago
  I never really understood this either. Seems kind of childish to me.
- codeonfire 15y ago
  It is to find naive people who are prone to flattery and manipulation. The reason people want to hire people who respond to "rock star" is that they want to manipulate that person into accepting well below average pay and far above average hours. In reality it enrages developers who see right through the patronizing attitude.
deleted 15y ago
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joe_the_user 15y ago
Can I call bullshit on the claim the 99% of people applying for a given programming are unqualified? Can I even call total bullshit? Perhaps I could suggest a further that all this 99% unqualified noise is mostly a bureaucrat ideology epiphany, based on intensifying the usual "I want a Perl-programmer with five years Rails experience who can start yesterday while riding a bicycle under water".
- raganwald 15y ago
  I’m pretty sure the empirical evidence backs up the statistic. The Fine Article links to Joel Spolsky’s explanation of the math: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html
  - joe_the_user 15y ago
    Dude! You know the link post debunks that canard rather than supporting? Edit: And you wrote the original blog post and you're always on hn. I would suggest reading closely the link you posted.
    - raganwald 15y ago
      We can’t possibly be reading the same thing. The post I linked explains that because there is deadwood that never gets hired but applies for every single programming job, every time you advertise for a programmer, you get two hundred applicants, one of whom is decent and 199 are the same 199 that apply for every job. Therefore, 1/2 of one percent of the applicants for every programming job are qualified and the rest are not. That doesn’t mean that 1/2 of one percent of working programmers are qualified or that you are being especially picky when you reject so many candidates, just that the dynamics of the market ensure that you get a lot of crap resumes when you advertise. Now, what did YOU think Joel’s article said?
fioll 15y ago
I was with this article until the very end. You can't judge a good developer via a tech interview. It is too short. Basically, you can't judge someone until they have the job. And that isn't possible, so... despite what you are trying to do, you are still hiring "lucky" people, and lucky CS grads at that. Have fun with that.
tferris 15y ago
People like the OP make many mistakes when dealing with people. They believe by using some kind of systems, techniques and tricks they can find "best talents" and avoid "miserable candidates". But the real problem lies somewhere else: People have the wrong expectation of people—expectations are always too high and aim for perfection. You can expect perfection from systems, programs, products, services but not from people and thus, you should treat them like this. Of course real talents often deliver this expected perfection but they are rare and usually if you got one it was a lucky hit.
liuming 15y ago
Hiring is hard. Try not to judge candidate's professional qualification with their personal lives. And try not to let' your indirect measurements to override your direct measurements.
ojosilva 15y ago
This is how I've been hiring in the last 3 years: I created a business by myself. As business grows, my goal is 1) to amplify and multiply my skills, which made this business possible. That way I can delegate work, be in many places at once and do things faster and better. 2) to patch and overcome my flaws, which I'm self-conscious enough to know, and fear that they could hurt business. So when I look through resumes and interview people, I look for signals that tell me this person can (or has the potential to) either emulate my most demanded virtues, or provide wished-for aptitudes onboard. So, if I read a resume with spelling mistakes, I think "I would never allow me to be this sloppy" -- I think it sends a message of carelessness that may put in question the quality of the work being done -- and I throw the resume away. On the other hand, when I meet a person that shows me a code sample with a well-organized and thoroughly commented api class hierarchy, I think "I wish I was like that!" -- and that's a keeper. Hence I don't agree with the article when it says to "ignore little theories". Since I believe there's no universally-accepted, truly objective way to effectively spot strangers that will make your enterprise succeed, I choose to clone myself: me who is undeniably the right person for the job, otherwise this company would never launched in the first place. Then, bit-by-bit, I "genetically engineer" the selection process to create this better super-self (the team) that will take us to the next level.
gnosis 15y ago
"but there’s no real difference between advertising for a Ninja and throwing half your resumés away because you don’t like unlucky people" This assumes getting hired by you was a lucky event in their life. In fact, it could very well be unlucky. Perhaps if they hadn't been hired by you, they would have gotten a much better job elsewhere. Or any number of other things in their life might have turned out better had they not landed this particular job. Or maybe they'll wind up hating the job, and wish they'd have gone to work somewhere else. Considering someone to be lucky to work for you is very self-centered. Perhaps it is you who are the lucky one to have someone like them working for you, and they the unlucky one.
DannoHung 15y ago
Political affiliation and views are not a protected class.
- raganwald 15y ago
  Ernestine works in Ontario. Or she would, if she were real.
SagelyGuru 15y ago
The comments are missing out what to me was the most insightful and central point of this post. Namely that finding the only candidate who can possibly do the job at all requires a very different approach to selection, compared to when it is sufficient to eliminate applicants any of whom could do the job well. Raising the talent bar tends to transform the latter situation to the former and thus the advice given in this article is right and valuable.
Tycho 15y ago
Does anyone else hate how every job advert says they need - excellent communication skills blablabla - 'team player' - able to work in a fast-paced environment - bunch of other generic 'skills' Of course those things are important to varying degrees in different jobs, but having on the ad is pointless since every other ad asks for the exact same thing. I find it off-putting straight away because it suggests the company is happy to stick to idiotic norms.
CubicleNinjas 15y ago
So, we should hire people who are so good they have spelling mistakes in their holiest-of-holy document, don't fit in with your core company culture (ninja or not), and hold back on research because it might bias your delicate sensibilities. This is garbage. Really. I can't imagine a quicker way to fill a room with B-players.
marajit 15y ago
Rehashing the famous story about Napoleon. http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080617215426AAzoHDY http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=2008061721542...
BobBobBobRob 15y ago
I've heard of the "unlucky resume' selection process" elsewhere. And you were doing good with it, but, sorry, the article runs on way beyond it's perceived point-of-purpose. Also, when Ernestine says "...I have a much lower signal-to-noise ratio?" She had it backwards, she actually has the HIGHER signal-to-noise ratio. Whereby the one guy has a large group of qualified candidates and can afford to throw some away, she has a one in a hundred group of qualified candidates, thus, she has the higher signal-to-noise ratio.
robbywashere 15y ago
FOR THE UNLUCKY FEW, I HAVE A SOLUTION! PLAY BETTER ODDZ. jobquery.hoverboardmagazine.com
janet236 15y ago
What if correlation is causation? What if discriminating against certain traits cuts the fat more efficiently? What if it's not just about relevance to the task, but about the bigger picture, does the person deserve to be hired, what would they be like to work with, would they fit in with the group.. Why not exclusion for its own sake, if it produces good results? We all discriminate every moment of our lives, down to the finest choices. It is a moral good.
Navarr 15y ago
The first ten times I saw this article I ignored it. Now I'm glad I didn't. From now on, I won't ignore unlucky headlines.
JimW 15y ago
I hope this encourages more like minded hiring managers out there.
opwernby 15y ago
There's a simple way to hire a good programmer: get a good programmer to interview the candidate. Real programmers recognize each other within seconds: it's like vampires. Something about a look in the eye and total arrogance. Hard to explain. But all the really good programmers I've hired over the years have had three-second interviews: it was just obvious. In my experience, if the interview needs to last any longer than that, you'll end up having a problem with the candidate.
opwernby 15y ago
If you want to hire a good programmer, get a good programmer to interview the candidate. The interview should take about three seconds: any longer than that, and your candidate's a bust. Real programmers recognize each other on the spot, like vampires. It has something to do with a look in the eye coupled with total arrogance: it's hard to explain, but over the course of my career (30 years) I've found that those programmers I've hired on instinct, just because I recognized what they were immediately, were the only ones who ended up being totally capable.
Fatman13 15y ago
This Oscar guy doesnt sound like too much of a nerd........
Fatman13 15y ago
This Oscar guy doesnt sound like too much of a nerd........
Stevil 14y ago
"So I gnore the little theories and go with what really matters." Spelling mistake. I threw this article in the trash.

529 points by arcatan 15y ago

wglb 15y ago

Nicely done. Lots of good things here. “I measure. Premature optimization is the—Oh, I get it!” where the lightbulb comes on. And lots of fun little bits like Mark Fidrych http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fidrych http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fidrych.

delinka 15y ago

Aside from the Sesame Street names, a fairly decent read. Many years ago, I decided to stop writing my résumé to each recipient and just let my List Of Things speak for itself. I don't want to work for someone caught up on details that are irrelevant to the jobs I'd be doing.

aristus 15y ago
"Bertie Wooster" is a character in the Jeeves books. Ernestine Anderson is a jazz & blues singer.
- raganwald 15y ago
  “Bert and Ernie” are George Bailey’s best friends in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which is where Jim Henson drew his inspiration for names of the Muppet characters.
  - delinka 15y ago
    And all this must have led our author right to Oscar the Grouch for one more name in the narrative.
brudgers 15y ago
The concept of not hiring unlucky people reminded me of Larry Niven's Ringworld.

idan 15y ago

This is exactly what we've been thinking about for the last year while we've been building http://skillsapp.com http://skillsapp.com. Exactly. Love it when lucid, articulate writers take my mess of a brain and put the right words to it.

pavel_lishin 15y ago
How do you measure "passion" and "respect"? And how are the twitter tags determined?
- mmcconnell1618 15y ago
  If I'm a job seeker I want to present myself in the best possible light. Allowing a 3rd party to rate my "passion" and "respect" without any knowledge of the algorithm would keep me from using the service. If you did publish the algorithm it will be gamed just like search engines in a matter of hours. You might want to consider suggesting tags and keywords and allowing job seekers to select the ones they believe apply. I would consider dropping the "passion" and "respect" part as they may open you to future legal action.
  - idan 15y ago
    Right now, we aren't doing any kind of indexing. If you apply for a position through our service, you give whatever information you want about yourself, and we check out your public data on those networks. If you don't want to share your twitter or stack overflow, leave those fields blank. We don't publish the details of the algorithm but in effects it would be fairly difficult to game. Either you have a solid history of consuming and contributing relevant content or you don't. If you are able to manufacture that fraudulently, well, chances are that you're somebody interesting to talk to.
    - pavel_lishin 15y ago
      I didn't actually see any way for me as a developer to use your service. Signing up for the beta looked like a way for an employer to sign up.

cousin_it 15y ago

So the most efficient interviewing process for the employer is also the nicest to candidates? What a curious coincidence. Are you sure there was no wishful thinking involved in writing this post?

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
- cousin_it 15y ago
  I agree it sounds very reasonable. But the article mentions A/B tests. Did you actually do these tests? The heroine of your story has good reasons to believe that the described interviewing process is pretty good, but why do you believe that?
  - raganwald 15y ago
    Sorry, my first reply added zero bits of information. Yes, I have absolutely managed hiring ads exactly the same way one manages selling things online, right down to split testing different ads, managing keyword buys, the usual yadda yadda. It’s tough, because there is so little signal. It’s also harsh because the best source of good candidates are personal contacts, which violate just about everything in the post. Which suggests that the post is really only about one very specific thing, managing the inbound funnel generated by ads, cereers@yourcompany.com, and so on.
    - cousin_it 15y ago
      Thanks, and sorry for asking a harsh question :-) Your recommendations are sensible. It's curious that they seem to suggest that coding ability is close to a one-dimensional measurement of the candidate. Do you think we could measure the largest principal component of coding ability with a standardized exam, like IQ? That would save everyone the hassle of interviewing, and also ensure non-discrimination as a nice bonus.
      - 15y ago

DarkShikari 15y ago

This article is superb. We tried placing ads for ninjas, rock stars, and so on, but I discovered this was the cultural equivalent of advertising for white males who drink dry martinis. Not that white males who drink dry martinis can’t do the job, but there’s no real difference between advertising for a Ninja and throwing half your resumés away because you don’t like unlucky people. Either way, you end up with fewer resumés.” This is so true, so important, and so many startups (and even bigger companies!) miss this. Job ads provide cues, conscious and subconscious, to the people reading them. Not everyone reading the ad is identical to the person writing it, and a badly written job ad can easily send the message "this company isn't for you" to a large number of skilled potential applicants. This applies not just to categories like gender or race, but even to personality types and personal interests. Unless you really want a company of only extroverts, for example, don't write a job ad that scares off introverts. In the canonical example, if you constantly ask for "rock stars", you will turn off people to whom that doesn't appeal, including tons of good programmers. But it goes beyond that: don't assume that all your applicants are any particular kind of person with certain interests. A job ad should focus on what the job actually is, and things that are important to the job. The best programmers often have a lot of choice in where they work, and as many HNers know from experience, if they see a job ad that turns them off in some fashion, they will probably not even bother reading further: they know they have better options, so yours probably isn't worth their time. If the vast majority of skilled programmers skip over your resume, it's no wonder you only receive resumes from unqualified applicants. In short, when writing a job ad, you need to think from the perspective of people applying. Use your empathy, put yourself in their shoes, rather than just writing what you think looks cool.

cookiecaper 15y ago
Indeed. My ad scoring program deducts 5 points and transparently kills off ads that contain terms like "ninja" and "rock star" because to my mind they indicate a propensity for either abuse ("a rock star should be able to code this in three days!!") or fad-following ineptitude ("rock stars are the coolest kind of programmers, I must have them! also, we write EVERYTHING in Ruby, it's like the Mac of programming").
- 15y ago

rubyrescue 15y ago

You belong here. We’ll do great things together inspiring!

free 15y ago

My takeaway from the article was that Ernestine wanted to hire a good programmer and she focussed on just that. She did not consider the established conventions on what to do in such a situation. Interestingly, I have observed this to be true in few other situations as well, where established conventions and processes are actually an hindrance rather than help.

maxcameron 15y ago

Sir Reginald Braithwaite is one of Toronto's best. Thanks for yet another fantastic article man.

mathetic 15y ago

The article summarizes the difference between British and American college entrance system as well. When you apply for CS in Britain (and I'm talking about Oxbridge), they care only about your experience with computers and mathematics. However, in HYPMS [1] the qualification is based on your irrelevant grades and your extracurriculars. You might be the most active guy and get a place but a poor programmer. [1] Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford

karamazov 15y ago
In the US, you don't apply to a school for CS - you just apply to the university as undergraduate. It's quite common for undergraduates to not know what they want to study as freshmen, and to change their minds over the course of university. That being said, HYPMS do want you to have good grades overall and solid extracurriculars, it's immensely helpful to be world-class in some activity; the particular activity doesn't matter as much.
- swang 15y ago
  That is not true at all schools in the US. At least not when I applied around 10 years ago. A lot of schools, especially the top tier CS programs told me that I would not be allowed to go in undeclared and then transfer into their CS program. I had to declare as a CS or I wouldn't get in. I knew some people were able to get away with not declaring and transferring in but I didn't want to risk it.
  - ericd 15y ago
    When I applied around that time, CMU was the only one I applied to that required that I declare CS, MIT didn't, Harvard didn't, and I don't think CalTech did either.
  - msbarnett 15y ago
    10 years exactly, or a bit more than that? The reason I asked is that CS enrollment changed dramatically after the .com bubble burst. When I applied to CS a little more than 10 years ago the bubble was in full swing, and only the top 1/4 of applicants to the program had a hope of getting in. Transferring in was a no-go. 2 years later enrollment had dropped so low that the quotas were gone and transferring in was easy. Application numbers, as far as I know, still haven't recovered to bubble levels.

dustingetz 15y ago

i know a guy running a software shop. he's an active participant in the local meetup community, and he cares about people. it's no surpise that he has all sorts of talented people trying to work with him, and not enough funding to hire them all. (at least, i think that's why he hasn't hired me ;) i also know a few other people running software shops, who don't participate in the local meetup community. none of the best local developers even know who these other employers are. i'm sort of sick of hearing them complain about how hard it is to find talent. the flip side of this, is that if I as an engineer want to have a steady stream of future opportunities with the best employers, I need to make myself known to them, by, you guessed it! making myself visible in the meetup community, and internet community at large. ez game.

robterrell 15y ago
Isn't that just another filter for luck? You're filtering out candidates who don't know about the meetup, or have kids and can't make the meetup's evening hours, or prefer another meetup that happens to be at the same time elsewhere, etc.
- lutorm 15y ago
  I thought the point was that people don't even apply because they didn't hear about the job. That's not filtering, that's just not casting an effective net in the first place.
- terryk88a 15y ago
  I'd tend to agree since that (having kids) applies to me. There's clearly a filtering effect, probably eliminating more experienced people. However, he apparently has no shortage of suitable talent available when using this method.
- softbuilder 15y ago
  Not at all. You're saying "yes" to something instead of "no". You may go to a meetup, you may meet people through friends of friends, and you may place an ad on Craigslist. All of these things open doors to more people. The filtering was closing doors.

BrainInAJar 15y ago

Good article, but I found the "hypothetical conversation" format a bit off-putting

BrainInAJar 15y ago

Good article, but I found the "hypothetical conversation" format a bit off-putting

cpeterso 15y ago

Slightly off-topic: in Larry Niven's Ringworld novels, an alien race (Pierson's Puppeteers) secretly influences human genetic selection to optimize for luck.

raganwald 15y ago
With severe unintended consequences for some of the protagonists, as I recall :-)
tvon 15y ago
In reading the article I was wondering if Teela Brown would be get a call or have her resume thrown out, I suspect the latter.

plinkplonk 15y ago

I agree with every point Reginald makes but (and I am being nitpicky here) the form of the story - the seeming overtailored parable nature of it, of the kind you'd find in the Reader's Digest or a religious tract - rubs me ever so slightly the wrong way. I could have done without all the fake (or seemingly fake anyway) dialogue between the Wooster/Oscar etc and would have preferred a straightforward "This is what I(Reginald) think" mode. Imagine pg writing his essays in the form of "Paul wrote an ecommerce site in Lisp while Peter used C++. When Paul met Peter's wife Rosa in a coffee shop he asked her why Peter was looking so haggard and she said 'he is working through the night fixing bugs and not getting enough sleep. Would you mind talking to him? ..' " Again, this is a very minor nitpick, just consider this feedback from one reader. I am probably considerably outnumbered by the people who like this "story" form better (and that is perfectly fine). Of course it is completely Reginald's prerogative to pick any style he wants.

raganwald 15y ago
Something like this? http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/02/naive-approach-to-hiring-people.html http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/02/naive-approach-to-hiring...
- plinkplonk 15y ago
  yes, something like that. I find the style much more natural and less grating. The 'parable' format 'feels' (to me, purely subjectively etc etc) like chalk screeching on blackboard, obscuring the (very valid) substance of the argument. Or maybe it is just a matter of better technique. There may be a way of telling a story to make the same points without the reader being jerked out of his involvement with the material,and being made aware he is reading a story. I don't know.
esmevane 15y ago
I agree with you on the preference, but I'd like to add that sometimes a format preference exists only as a way of allowing the author to express their ideas succinctly. As much as I may dislike the storyteller format of the article, philosophically speaking, I have a practical inability to read other, drier essays. And then there are essays which have no reasonable usage of paragraphs and sentences to encapsulate or describe ideas, etc. Compared to those, I would pick a storyteller format.

jrockway 15y ago

Hiring managers quoting Knuth? I fail to suspend my disbelief :)

emmett 15y ago

This is the opposite of my experience. When we greatly narrowed the pool of applicants from "people who want to work on live video" to "people who want to work on live video for gaming", we saw a huge uptick in how many people were interested in working for us. TwitchTV is more attractive for programmers than Justin.tv ever was. There is something to be said for appealing to a smaller group of people more strongly.

raganwald 15y ago
Great comment. May I suggest for discussion the following proposition: There is a difference between narrowing the pool of applicants by being specific about things directly relevant for the job and narrowing the pool of applicants by being specific about things only indirectly related to the job. “We’re looking for Haskell Programmers” is not the same thing as, “We like to hire MIT Graduates."
- k00kykelly 15y ago
  This is a HUGE difference. It makes the job ad go from we want "someone good" to we want "someone with skill X". If the manager of the project isn't competent enough to know what they are hiring for (skill X) then that is a red flag. If you need to filter the applicants more then ask them to answer a question on their approach to a common problem or provide a code sample whichever makes more sense for the particular scenario.
roguecoder 15y ago
That seems to be less a narrowing and more adding information to candidates about what the job actually will be. You've just added candidates who want to work for gaming and are able to do live video to the pool of people who can do live video and don't really care what kind of video it is. Providing accurate information about the company allows job seekers to self-select, increasing the signal, and offering an interesting application is far more likely to attract top talent than advertising for code monkeys.

stcredzero 15y ago

Just this morning, I was thinking about metrics. It should be possible to develop a set of metrics for code quality that would apply to apps using particular languages and libraries. These metrics would be general and very imperfect, but they would still have some utility. For example, it would be fairly easy to develop an automated metrics program to run on a given Ruby on Rails app. Things like depth of nesting in code, reported errors per statement, average lines of code per function. What if there was a website where you could download a metrics app, which would take the measurements, then upload the data to a web app, where someone could login and see how well their shop stacks up in comparison to the general population of shops using the same language and library? This would give hiring shops some way to quantify the maturity of the shops a prospective hire has worked.

terryk88a 15y ago
No No NO. There really Really REALLY has never been a satisfactory set of metrics for code quality. Not for COBOL and not for rails.
- stcredzero 15y ago
  So the Rails community is free of deeply nested spaghetti logic and long run-on cut and paste methods? There are no Rails apps with overly deep class hierarchies? Metrics are not so much for code quality as to flag widespread code suckage. I still think this could benefit hiring.
ilaksh 15y ago
Probably really easy to go overboard with that but interesting idea. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclomatic_complexity#Correlation_to_number_of_defects http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclomatic_complexity#Correlati... Lower lines of code definitely correlates with lower defect count.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

terryk88a 15y ago

Heh. My wife was turned down for a product management position because she did not send a thank you note. She forgot because she was (we were) so excited about the position. The hiring manager went back to the recruiter asking for somebody else "just like" my wife. (Loved the conversational format. "Bertie Wooster" is an inspired choice for that style of hiring...)

pavel_lishin 15y ago
How did your wife find this out?

rizzom5000 15y ago

While I enjoyed the article and its message, I found the spelling error on the resume example underwhelming. A professional's resume is the veneer they present to strangers. It's like the login page for your app. Do you want a spelling error there when it is so easy to avoid? It screams sloppy and lazy in the same sentence. Maybe the general quality of professional devs is so bad that sloppiness and laziness are better than the alternative... ?

raganwald 15y ago
What is the difference between a spelling mistake and failing to wear a tie to an interview? I suggest nothing except for cultural standards. Once upon a time, they were both punishable by immediate removal from the process. Today one is tolerated but the other not tolerated. they both signal the same thing: “I meticulously went over my presentation to ensure that it meets your expectations.” Let’s be clear: I think that everyone looking for a job should present the best possible face, including the appropriate spelling and grammar. It’s just that when hiring, I can easily overlook a spelling mistake if I think the candidate may be that one in one hundred. ANOTHER THOUGHT: To be fair, spelling mistakes are a lot closer to the line than cultural fit or politics or things like gender and race. You can’t change your race to suit the job. Things like your politics are changeable, but unless you have a strong ethical objection to the company’s line of business (I have declined to work on contract with a Tobacco company), it’s in society’s best interests for you to be able to keep your political views without being swayed by your employer. Spelling on a cover letter is a different matter. Most people don’t have a disability that prevents them from getting it right, and there is no greater benefit to society in forcing employers to ignore spelling. It’s a matter that is narrowly restricted to your interaction together, so it isn’t asking a great deal of a candidate to get the spelling correct. So, I guess I don’t have a violent objection to your point of view, even if I’m espousing a different one in this post.
- dhugiaskmak 15y ago
  To me, writing a document without running it through a spell checker feels like checking in code without compiling it. I think I agree that it shouldn't automatically disqualify someone from a job, but it also feels like something you have to go out of your way not to do.

gwillis13 15y ago

I'm going to upvote this for just the Sesame Street names. Reading the piece with those names in mind, made this a lot more interesting of a read.

kaiyi 15y ago

TL;DR

raganwald 15y ago
http://raganwald.posterous.com/why-i-downvote-tldr-comments-on-hacker-news http://raganwald.posterous.com/why-i-downvote-tldr-comments-...
- erikb 15y ago
  Thanks for telling me, so I could give this guy an upvote to counter :)
  - raganwald 15y ago
    Notice that I actually agree that my words were too long! I rarely actually downvote people, and almost never when they're criticizing me.
    - erikb 15y ago
      Was that agreement stated in another comment?
      - raganwald 15y ago
        I consistently write long essays and I lack the patience to edit them to manageable length. More importantly, I lack the moral fibre to discard perfectly good points. Any fool can chop filler out of an essay. It takes an author of sterling character to discard perfectly good ideas in the interest of making what remains an even better essay. And I lack that character. Having written words about an idea I like, I find it very difficult to let go of them, and my writing suffers for it
        pg 15y ago
        Try footnotes.

JoelMcCracken 15y ago

Awesome article. I just came here to submit a note about style: If your text includes a large, multi-paragraph quote, it is common to elide the trailing quote between paragraphs. Including that trailing quote means that the second person in a two person conversation is now speaking. It just confused me at first, because I thought Oscar was the character to say "But it’s dangerous to confuse correlation with causation. And especially dangerous to...".

jack-r-abbit 15y ago

I'm not sure I agree with putting people who can't put together a resume without spelling/grammar mistakes into the same unlucky group that simply had their resumes tossed by chance. Having spelling and grammar mistakes on a resume is sloppy... not unlucky. At a minimum it indicates they may not pay attention to details when it really matters. But maybe that is just me. Or maybe it just doesn't matter on a resume anymore. I'll admit I've never had to whittle down a stack of 100 resumes... more like 10 so I would never just blindly throw half away. But as I skim them all, the ones with the spelling and grammar mistakes get set into the "second string" pile. I'll give them a second look if the deeper dive into the other pile still doesn't find The One. I've had it work both ways. Some times second string does have The One. And other times second string is never looked at again.

civilian 15y ago
No. One of my coworkers is a terrible speller, and especially so in IM. I haven't seen his resume, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is a mistake or two in it. And he's pretty scatterbrained. But when it comes to coding CSS or using javascript design patterns, he is awesome. I ask him tons of questions. He is incredibly valuable. I mean, it's okay for you to keep on doing what you're comfortable with. But do you understand what you're missing out on? You're missing out on great developers, and you're giving people like Reginald & I an advantage.
- jack-r-abbit 15y ago
  I am a terrible speller as well. I just take that extra bit of time to correct things with that squiggly line under them. Technology allows me to hide my horrible spelling ability very easily. So it is not so much that potential candidates are bad at spelling (particularly since I am too) but more that they just didn't take the time to do it right. I think resumes are still pretty important documents. Maybe not as important as a patent application or the actual code being written. But if they didn't take the time to do the resume right... what else are they going to overlook when it is important? Just my feelings. And like I said, sometimes the second string does end up having the one. But if I already found the one in the first stack, then I'm still getting a great developer... just not the one with spelling mistakes. Plus, I'm not even a hiring manager. I review resumes of would-be peers.

deleted 15y ago

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erikb 15y ago

You simply can't "grill everybody hard" just to test for their success. The goal just can't be to knock out "luck" totally. The problem space is just too big to handle. If you can throw out 50 people out of 100 who are very likely (let's say 90%) to not include the one you are looking for, then your chances to find the one increased from 1% to 2.25%, which is more then double your chance with 100 people and also a lot less work.

siavosh 15y ago

After a couple years trying to hire developers I feel bad heuristics have a tendency to become institutionalized if for no other reason than: if I admit this is a crap heuristic, that means I've been doing it wrong for the last 10 years--no way! As a tangent, I find it astonishing that no one ever mentions that all these arguments are true for the guy or gal sitting across the table. She is using heuristics to find an employer based on much less information and in many cases is wrong in accepting an offer. This too has a real cost: low morale, productivity, and high turn over. I find this problem rarely discussed.

crasshopper 15y ago

I hoped this article would discuss how to advertise your position to increase the SNR (really, the appropriate-to-inappropriate-resume ratio). Some things are obvious: if you use words like "ninja" and "rockstar" you are communicating that you want young Rails programmers or something like that. Likewise if you posted flyers inside a museum, or hid a puzzle in a Superbowl TV ad, or wrote "Programmer needed!!! immediate openings!must be comfortable with WordPerfect" on Craigslist, each of those is going to signal something about your firm and attract a different type of person. Someday I would love to see something on HN that goes much deeper into those issues: how to pitch your culture appropriately and improve the resume stack before it even gets to you.

charlieok 15y ago

I do wonder why people advertise for “rock stars”. What is the thinking here? Is it to screen out people who have some self doubt? “Hmm, I think I'm pretty smart, but I don't know if I'm a rock star. I think I better avoid potential embarrassment and look elsewhere”. Is it code for “seeking brogrammers”?

mindcruzer 15y ago
I never really understood this either. Seems kind of childish to me.
codeonfire 15y ago
It is to find naive people who are prone to flattery and manipulation. The reason people want to hire people who respond to "rock star" is that they want to manipulate that person into accepting well below average pay and far above average hours. In reality it enrages developers who see right through the patronizing attitude.

deleted 15y ago

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joe_the_user 15y ago

Can I call bullshit on the claim the 99% of people applying for a given programming are unqualified? Can I even call total bullshit? Perhaps I could suggest a further that all this 99% unqualified noise is mostly a bureaucrat ideology epiphany, based on intensifying the usual "I want a Perl-programmer with five years Rails experience who can start yesterday while riding a bicycle under water".

raganwald 15y ago
I’m pretty sure the empirical evidence backs up the statistic. The Fine Article links to Joel Spolsky’s explanation of the math: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html
- joe_the_user 15y ago
  Dude! You know the link post debunks that canard rather than supporting? Edit: And you wrote the original blog post and you're always on hn. I would suggest reading closely the link you posted.
  - raganwald 15y ago
    We can’t possibly be reading the same thing. The post I linked explains that because there is deadwood that never gets hired but applies for every single programming job, every time you advertise for a programmer, you get two hundred applicants, one of whom is decent and 199 are the same 199 that apply for every job. Therefore, 1/2 of one percent of the applicants for every programming job are qualified and the rest are not. That doesn’t mean that 1/2 of one percent of working programmers are qualified or that you are being especially picky when you reject so many candidates, just that the dynamics of the market ensure that you get a lot of crap resumes when you advertise. Now, what did YOU think Joel’s article said?

fioll 15y ago

I was with this article until the very end. You can't judge a good developer via a tech interview. It is too short. Basically, you can't judge someone until they have the job. And that isn't possible, so... despite what you are trying to do, you are still hiring "lucky" people, and lucky CS grads at that. Have fun with that.

tferris 15y ago

People like the OP make many mistakes when dealing with people. They believe by using some kind of systems, techniques and tricks they can find "best talents" and avoid "miserable candidates". But the real problem lies somewhere else: People have the wrong expectation of people—expectations are always too high and aim for perfection. You can expect perfection from systems, programs, products, services but not from people and thus, you should treat them like this. Of course real talents often deliver this expected perfection but they are rare and usually if you got one it was a lucky hit.

liuming 15y ago

Hiring is hard. Try not to judge candidate's professional qualification with their personal lives. And try not to let' your indirect measurements to override your direct measurements.

ojosilva 15y ago

This is how I've been hiring in the last 3 years: I created a business by myself. As business grows, my goal is 1) to amplify and multiply my skills, which made this business possible. That way I can delegate work, be in many places at once and do things faster and better. 2) to patch and overcome my flaws, which I'm self-conscious enough to know, and fear that they could hurt business. So when I look through resumes and interview people, I look for signals that tell me this person can (or has the potential to) either emulate my most demanded virtues, or provide wished-for aptitudes onboard. So, if I read a resume with spelling mistakes, I think "I would never allow me to be this sloppy" -- I think it sends a message of carelessness that may put in question the quality of the work being done -- and I throw the resume away. On the other hand, when I meet a person that shows me a code sample with a well-organized and thoroughly commented api class hierarchy, I think "I wish I was like that!" -- and that's a keeper. Hence I don't agree with the article when it says to "ignore little theories". Since I believe there's no universally-accepted, truly objective way to effectively spot strangers that will make your enterprise succeed, I choose to clone myself: me who is undeniably the right person for the job, otherwise this company would never launched in the first place. Then, bit-by-bit, I "genetically engineer" the selection process to create this better super-self (the team) that will take us to the next level.

gnosis 15y ago

"but there’s no real difference between advertising for a Ninja and throwing half your resumés away because you don’t like unlucky people" This assumes getting hired by you was a lucky event in their life. In fact, it could very well be unlucky. Perhaps if they hadn't been hired by you, they would have gotten a much better job elsewhere. Or any number of other things in their life might have turned out better had they not landed this particular job. Or maybe they'll wind up hating the job, and wish they'd have gone to work somewhere else. Considering someone to be lucky to work for you is very self-centered. Perhaps it is you who are the lucky one to have someone like them working for you, and they the unlucky one.

DannoHung 15y ago

Political affiliation and views are not a protected class.

raganwald 15y ago
Ernestine works in Ontario. Or she would, if she were real.

SagelyGuru 15y ago

The comments are missing out what to me was the most insightful and central point of this post. Namely that finding the only candidate who can possibly do the job at all requires a very different approach to selection, compared to when it is sufficient to eliminate applicants any of whom could do the job well. Raising the talent bar tends to transform the latter situation to the former and thus the advice given in this article is right and valuable.

Tycho 15y ago

Does anyone else hate how every job advert says they need - excellent communication skills blablabla - 'team player' - able to work in a fast-paced environment - bunch of other generic 'skills' Of course those things are important to varying degrees in different jobs, but having on the ad is pointless since every other ad asks for the exact same thing. I find it off-putting straight away because it suggests the company is happy to stick to idiotic norms.

CubicleNinjas 15y ago

So, we should hire people who are so good they have spelling mistakes in their holiest-of-holy document, don't fit in with your core company culture (ninja or not), and hold back on research because it might bias your delicate sensibilities. This is garbage. Really. I can't imagine a quicker way to fill a room with B-players.

marajit 15y ago

Rehashing the famous story about Napoleon. http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080617215426AAzoHDY http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=2008061721542...

BobBobBobRob 15y ago

I've heard of the "unlucky resume' selection process" elsewhere. And you were doing good with it, but, sorry, the article runs on way beyond it's perceived point-of-purpose. Also, when Ernestine says "...I have a much lower signal-to-noise ratio?" She had it backwards, she actually has the HIGHER signal-to-noise ratio. Whereby the one guy has a large group of qualified candidates and can afford to throw some away, she has a one in a hundred group of qualified candidates, thus, she has the higher signal-to-noise ratio.

robbywashere 15y ago

FOR THE UNLUCKY FEW, I HAVE A SOLUTION! PLAY BETTER ODDZ. jobquery.hoverboardmagazine.com

janet236 15y ago

What if correlation is causation? What if discriminating against certain traits cuts the fat more efficiently? What if it's not just about relevance to the task, but about the bigger picture, does the person deserve to be hired, what would they be like to work with, would they fit in with the group.. Why not exclusion for its own sake, if it produces good results? We all discriminate every moment of our lives, down to the finest choices. It is a moral good.

Navarr 15y ago

The first ten times I saw this article I ignored it. Now I'm glad I didn't. From now on, I won't ignore unlucky headlines.

JimW 15y ago

I hope this encourages more like minded hiring managers out there.

opwernby 15y ago

There's a simple way to hire a good programmer: get a good programmer to interview the candidate. Real programmers recognize each other within seconds: it's like vampires. Something about a look in the eye and total arrogance. Hard to explain. But all the really good programmers I've hired over the years have had three-second interviews: it was just obvious. In my experience, if the interview needs to last any longer than that, you'll end up having a problem with the candidate.

opwernby 15y ago

If you want to hire a good programmer, get a good programmer to interview the candidate. The interview should take about three seconds: any longer than that, and your candidate's a bust. Real programmers recognize each other on the spot, like vampires. It has something to do with a look in the eye coupled with total arrogance: it's hard to explain, but over the course of my career (30 years) I've found that those programmers I've hired on instinct, just because I recognized what they were immediately, were the only ones who ended up being totally capable.

Fatman13 15y ago

This Oscar guy doesnt sound like too much of a nerd........

Fatman13 15y ago

This Oscar guy doesnt sound like too much of a nerd........

Stevil 14y ago

"So I gnore the little theories and go with what really matters." Spelling mistake. I threw this article in the trash.