7 ms·

A smart company is constantly raising its hiring bar (or over time it will not survive). So by nature it’s aiming to hire better than 50% in the role/level. So

by tmsh 3y ago

A smart company is constantly raising its hiring bar (or over time it will not survive). So by nature it’s aiming to hire better than 50% in the role/level. So by definition a new hire should be paid more than someone at the median for that role/level. This is the root reason.

jamestimmins 3y ago
"constantly raising its hiring bar" is a nice idea I often hear repeated but rarely see in practice. In fact, when companies are incredibly successful based on early 10x employees, you're almost guaranteed to see the hiring bar go down over time.
- tmsh 3y ago
  A 10x engineer does not stay in the same role/level as a company grows. They’re very important though. And it’s a good reminder that roles/levels don’t necessarily matter compared to the relevant work. All FAANG and other smart companies hire at better than 50% at the role/level in order to constantly evolve.
  - Infinitesimus 3y ago
    No they don't. They _say_ they do (really mainly Amazon) and the rumor develops legs and gets repeated. To actually do this, you need an objective measure that is repeatable over many different kinds of products, domains and people and they is a very hard problem no one has cracked. Career ladders and some calibrations help to do this but it'd never perfect and people slip through the cracks. If you're at a big company, you've seen people get a rating that seemed misaligned to their work because an arbitrary curve is enforced or a project has high visibility by sheet luck because an exec was adamant that the project be on the roadmap.
  - neilv 3y ago
    > All FAANG and other smart companies hire at better than 50% at the role/level in order to constantly evolve. Do you mean that they keep hiring people better than 50% of the current people in that role/level? That's not my impression from Big Tech. All the chatter I hear is that, until very recently, they kept hiring more and more people, and over time have been getting lower capability, and more towards worker grunt drones. (Though I've often heard that the better people already at the company couldn't pass or do as well at the Leetcode-like interview metrics performance as the current candidates often do, because they have huge masses of people training for the metrics specifically.) Have I heard wrong, or do I misunderstand?
ta_1138 3y ago
I've seen that attempted: I worked at a very well known SV company as it was growing. When we looked at what we were asking to even get an interview, we saw that most of our best workers could never have a prayer of passing our resume requirements when we hired them. But we had so many people applying, we could really ask for the moon and still get enough resumes. But the fact that on paper we were getting better candidates didn't ever lead to better performance: Past a certain point, not hard to reach if you pay relatively well, the correlation between interview performance, resume and actual performance on the job is basically random. Hell, I've seen a team change managers, and seen the stack rank be basically opposite for both: One guy wanted to give a large bonus to the guy the other one wanted to put on a PiP. Thinking that, on the interview, your candidate is magically better than your average coworker takes a lot of optimism, or a lot of pessimism about your coworkers.

by tmsh 3y ago

jamestimmins 3y ago

"constantly raising its hiring bar" is a nice idea I often hear repeated but rarely see in practice. In fact, when companies are incredibly successful based on early 10x employees, you're almost guaranteed to see the hiring bar go down over time.

tmsh 3y ago
A 10x engineer does not stay in the same role/level as a company grows. They’re very important though. And it’s a good reminder that roles/levels don’t necessarily matter compared to the relevant work. All FAANG and other smart companies hire at better than 50% at the role/level in order to constantly evolve.
- Infinitesimus 3y ago
  No they don't. They _say_ they do (really mainly Amazon) and the rumor develops legs and gets repeated. To actually do this, you need an objective measure that is repeatable over many different kinds of products, domains and people and they is a very hard problem no one has cracked. Career ladders and some calibrations help to do this but it'd never perfect and people slip through the cracks. If you're at a big company, you've seen people get a rating that seemed misaligned to their work because an arbitrary curve is enforced or a project has high visibility by sheet luck because an exec was adamant that the project be on the roadmap.
- neilv 3y ago
  > All FAANG and other smart companies hire at better than 50% at the role/level in order to constantly evolve. Do you mean that they keep hiring people better than 50% of the current people in that role/level? That's not my impression from Big Tech. All the chatter I hear is that, until very recently, they kept hiring more and more people, and over time have been getting lower capability, and more towards worker grunt drones. (Though I've often heard that the better people already at the company couldn't pass or do as well at the Leetcode-like interview metrics performance as the current candidates often do, because they have huge masses of people training for the metrics specifically.) Have I heard wrong, or do I misunderstand?

ta_1138 3y ago

I've seen that attempted: I worked at a very well known SV company as it was growing. When we looked at what we were asking to even get an interview, we saw that most of our best workers could never have a prayer of passing our resume requirements when we hired them. But we had so many people applying, we could really ask for the moon and still get enough resumes. But the fact that on paper we were getting better candidates didn't ever lead to better performance: Past a certain point, not hard to reach if you pay relatively well, the correlation between interview performance, resume and actual performance on the job is basically random. Hell, I've seen a team change managers, and seen the stack rank be basically opposite for both: One guy wanted to give a large bonus to the guy the other one wanted to put on a PiP. Thinking that, on the interview, your candidate is magically better than your average coworker takes a lot of optimism, or a lot of pessimism about your coworkers.