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If a recruiter goes after you, and didn't bother to Google your name and look at your GitHub/OS contributions etc. he's obviously cold calling and wasting your
by mseebach 15y ago
If a recruiter goes after you, and didn't bother to Google your name and look at your GitHub/OS contributions etc. he's obviously cold calling and wasting your time. He's the guy who asks DHH how much Rails experience he's got.
But, on the other hand, if you apply to a company, especially one that's more or less famous, puzzles are a very good way of separating the wheat from the chaff on a level playing field. Evaluating a strangers performance based on their solution to a common puzzle is very time efficient and allows the company to process large numbers of applicants fairly.
A common notion here is that great people can just pick up the phone, or will be actively courted by companies, so they don't need puzzles and recruiters. That is great for them (honestly, not a snark), but it's not scalable: Not everyone can know everyone, and there has to be a way for newcomers to enter into the network.
Case in point: Stripe - you want to work for them, but apparently you don't know anyone on the inside that can recommend you. And apparently you're not on their radar already. They do great stuff, they seem like an amazing bunch - so there are likely to be hundreds who want to work for them - and most of them, regrettably, are not qualified enough.
Do you really think it's fair to require Stripe to assign a member of their engineering team (that means you after they hire you) to review every strangers GitHub accounts, when you refuse to invest even a little time in signalling to them that you're the real deal (the puzzles aren't all multi-day endeavours)?
- luser001 15y ago> Do you really think it's fair to require Stripe to assign a member of their engineering team (that means you after they hire you) to review every strangers GitHub accounts, when you refuse to invest even a little time in signalling to them that you're the real deal (the puzzles aren't all multi-day endeavours)? Yes.
- ericd 15y agoThen you're being unrealistic, because the expected value of a random applicant's ability is not that high.
- weavejester 15y agoBut it works the other way around, too. The expected value of a random company is not that high unless the candidate considers themselves to have a good chance of success. Given how opaque the hiring process is from the point of view of an applicant, how do they know if it's worth spending their time solving a random puzzle? Investing time in open source software is a better use of time from the point of view of a candidate, as they can show the same code to many different companies. So it comes down to who is more in demand. Is your company so desirable that good programmers will invest a significant chunk of time just to have a chance with you? If the answer isn't an automatic 'Yes', maybe you should rethink your hiring strategy. It also doesn't seem particularly hard to automatically filter out candidates with no GitHub account, or a GitHub account but few contributions.
- ericd 15y agoSure, I didn't say anything about that, but in this scenario it's implied that you're applying to this company, so presumably you know something about it and like it. You likely know a lot more about the company than it knows about you. The Github filter is a bad one, though - lots of good programmers don't do the whole open source thing, and we need to stop this pretense of a good Github account being necessary for hiring. What started as a suggestion in some hiring blog posts has become overblown into dogma now.
- weavejester 15y agoAt some point an employer needs to see code that a candidate has written, so unless the candidate wants to write code specifically for each company they send a resume to, maintaining some open source software is surely the most efficient mechanism to do that. Artists maintain a portfolio of their work; why shouldn't programmers?
- ashray 15y agoArtists don't usually have to show what brushes or paints they used to make a particular work. Sometimes it's best to evaluate the work rather than what goes into it. Granted, this isn't always the case and can't be attributed to multi team environments, but I've often been asked for code when I have a large number of (successful) projects solely developed by me. Also, small code samples are fine but some employers are in the habit of asking for major work (demos) just to show off your coding chops. That's bad.
- eli_gottlieb 15y agoDo you really think it's fair to require Stripe to assign a member of their engineering team (that means you after they hire you) to review every strangers GitHub accounts, when you refuse to invest even a little time in signalling to them that you're the real deal (the puzzles aren't all multi-day endeavours)? There's no such thing as fairness in the job market. If Stripe can't find enough programmers to fill their needs, then yes, they need to allocate their own labor to recruiting. At some point, the business cycle will swing the other way, and it will become necessary for programmers to put our time into hunting for companies who want to hire even one programmer. C'est la vie.
- mseebach 15y ago> If Stripe can't find enough programmers to fill their needs... ... then allocating the programmers they have to sifting through a completely open "jobs" mailbox is still probably not a good idea. > At some point, the business cycle will swing the other way, and it will become necessary for programmers to put our time into hunting for companies who want to hire even one programmer. For the level of programmer competence we're talking about here, that hasn't happened yet.
- eli_gottlieb 15y agoFor the level of programmer competence we're talking about here, that hasn't happened yet. Define that level non-tautologically then, please.