5 ms·

workers could get what they are actually worth What if we can reduce job searching to an approximation of perfect competition? What if... 1. A central third

by seiji 14y ago

workers could get what they are actually worth What if we can reduce job searching to an approximation of perfect competition? What if... 1. A central third party certifies your "ability" or "smartness" in certain areas (this prevents dumb things like "can u implement merge sort? lol!" ten times over). The certification would be temporally limited to, say, 60 days. After 60 days you would have to re-certify if you are still job searching. 2. You interview a few places for cultural fit and specific technical issues, then multiple companies (time limited to a week or two) submit public offers for you (if you are as good as you think you are). 3. Employers bid against each other for you (standard "each bid extends the bidding by X time units" rules so you don't get sniped). 4. You take your pick of employers based on how you personally weigh comfort, responsibility, pay, distance, and cultural fit. Is that workable? What would the gross objections be?

louthy 14y ago
> 1. A central third party certifies your "ability" or "smartness" in certain areas I can see the strikes now...
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  It would be really great if someone could do that in a way that was trustworthy at high levels. The problem with those professional certifications is that they're targeted toward the middle of the bell-curve. Above the 95th percentile, it all comes to word of mouth and introductions. Which kills you if (a) you want to change cities or (b) you've been working 80+ hours per week on something and your networking has gone to shit. If someone could verify programming ability above the 95th percentile, that would be a huge service. Unfortunately, I can't just make people know how good I am by saying it. You can't either. No one can. And social proof (which is what drives most economic decisions) comes down to reputation politics rather than capability. I think open source is the best way for a person to do this, but how often does a company actually read someone's open-source contribs? The one startup I was at where I was actually involved in recruiting, people just checked to see whether the candidate's technology choices matched their language prejudices (there was a serious tech-stack war going on at the time).
  - rprospero 14y ago
    I think the problem with your service would be on the supply side. Businesses would obviously love to have these best of breed programmers, but the getting people to take your test will be trickier. To put it differently, how would you respond if I ran a business like this, you took my test, and I reported to companies that you're in the 40th percentile among programmers?
    - seiji 14y ago
      That would be awesome to know. I often don't know how good or bad I am. I often think I'm pretty inept until I look around. I'd love to know how inept I actually am so I can improve. Also, a lot of companies only need 40th percentile programmers. Everybody seems to want to hire I-Can-Create-Google-In-A-Weekend people. Sorry, but your online coffee ordering startup doesn't need me to waste an hour in pre-interviews rehashing sorting algorithms from undergrad. I've a library of work. Let's talk like humans, not machines requiring proof-of-work tests against each other.
      - rprospero 14y ago
        Honestly, I agree with you. My main concern is that I've known too many programmers with their self-esteem wrapped up in the idea that they're the world's greatest who would balk at any test that didn't end with being given a Turing award. Now, any business that can keep these guys out of your hiring pool is already a net positive, but it's also going to kill a disappointingly large part of your base. Also, while I agree that the coffee shop website doesn't require Donald Knuth, the hard part will be convincing the coffee shop owner that that's true. Especially with the meme that "A players hire A player; B players hire C players". It's just an issue of marketing. If your firm was promising a 40% programmer for $50k and mine was promising a 99.9% programmer for $25k, most of the hiring manager I've known would hire mine, despite my testing procedure obviously being crap.
        duaneb 14y ago
        Perhaps one that displayed rating with an average salary of that rating might fix this problem?
michaelochurch 14y ago
We should talk. I have an idea that would incorporate this. I doubt that I'll be able to get the resources and will probably be starting a regular day job instead (and I never go into a job intending to "hop") but discussing the idea would be useful. Assessing programmers is a good idea, but what I would really like to do is start measuring companies and managers for how they affect peoples' careers, so we can reward the faithful and punish defectors. If you look at salary trends, you're also picking up reputation, which corrupts measurement. Of course anyone leaving Google is going to be getting a bump. If you could asses actual skill and noticed that it wasn't doing much for the underlying (e.g. their actual capability growth) which will have more effect on their careers in the long term. Now, the problem with the auction site concept (not to say that it won't work; but you'll have to make the ability verification both very accurate and very respected) that you're talking about is the "ghetto" effect that most recruiting sites get. Good engineers are nervous about signing on because it's still stigmatized to be looking for work at all. Top-end employers are going to prefer word-of-mouth for similar reasons. It's really hard to make a job-searching site not a ghetto, and once it is one, trust-sparsity sets in and it's inferior to the (non-scalable and infuriatingly intermittent) word-of-mouth economy.
rprospero 14y ago
I think that the problem entirely rests with #1. First, consider that this central third party already exists: Universities. I have a PhD, so I should be hired over someone who has only a BS and we should both be hired over someone who never went to college. Except a large number people on HN who do hiring don't agree with this ranking (and rightly so - I'm only an average programmer). Therefore, we need a new organization to do this certification. We got that new organization. Microsoft did certifying with the MCSE. Of course, I've heard MCSE used more often as a punchline than as a job requirement, so that hasn't helped us too much, either. Thus, we move into the tests companies actually perform while hiring. Here, we still have the problem that no one agrees on the smartness test. On the one hand, puzzles that I've considered trivial logic puzzles that have been declared obscure memorization tests by people who are certainly more qualified than I am. On the other hand, I've seen programmers who literally couldn't tell a hard drive from a network card breeze through interviews on the basis of rote memorization. Even if we could find a good rubric for grading programmers, we'd need to sell the businesses on this test. I agree that hiring is completely broken and that outsourcing it to a company who makes it their expertise is pretty much the future of business. Honestly, the reason I've written so much here is because I've spent a lot of time thinking about this idea, too, and these are the issues I've run into. However, until problem #1 is solved, I don't see this going forward.
- seiji 14y ago
  Universities Sorry, but bollocks. I've passed a few chemistry courses over the years. I should not be allowed anywhere near any lab equipment these days. Course knowledge is transient. I've seen undergrad CS seniors write while(1){} loops in multithreaded programs because they forgot mutexes existed. I've seen CS PhDs copy/paste PHP code online to get a website together because their focus area was compiler register allocation. I go through periods of time where I use Python extensively. Then I don't use it for a year. It doesn't mean I "don't know" Python, but it takes a while to get the APIs and libraries loaded back into my head (especially if I've been using two or three or four other languages in the interim). By "certify ability" I don't mean anything as egregious as an MCSE or CCIE (or even a droll CCNA), but more a pre-level of interviews to weed out people who are literally a waste of time. The "certify" process would have different tracks depending on intended job target. A Programmer's Programmer would be get a heavily algorithm set of tasks/questions/live code tests while a devops person would have a practical set of questions with a few programming-ish things thrown in for completeness. A central, trusted, certification can weed out inept interviewers too. Everybody knows some interviewer who asks really obscure questions (or simple questions worded poorly) from the back of an algorithms textbook. Then, they use the confusion of the interviewee as an excuse to rate them lower in the post-interview team meeting. Crap like that is unacceptable.

by seiji 14y ago

louthy 14y ago

> 1. A central third party certifies your "ability" or "smartness" in certain areas I can see the strikes now...

michaelochurch 14y ago
It would be really great if someone could do that in a way that was trustworthy at high levels. The problem with those professional certifications is that they're targeted toward the middle of the bell-curve. Above the 95th percentile, it all comes to word of mouth and introductions. Which kills you if (a) you want to change cities or (b) you've been working 80+ hours per week on something and your networking has gone to shit. If someone could verify programming ability above the 95th percentile, that would be a huge service. Unfortunately, I can't just make people know how good I am by saying it. You can't either. No one can. And social proof (which is what drives most economic decisions) comes down to reputation politics rather than capability. I think open source is the best way for a person to do this, but how often does a company actually read someone's open-source contribs? The one startup I was at where I was actually involved in recruiting, people just checked to see whether the candidate's technology choices matched their language prejudices (there was a serious tech-stack war going on at the time).
- rprospero 14y ago
  I think the problem with your service would be on the supply side. Businesses would obviously love to have these best of breed programmers, but the getting people to take your test will be trickier. To put it differently, how would you respond if I ran a business like this, you took my test, and I reported to companies that you're in the 40th percentile among programmers?
  - seiji 14y ago
    That would be awesome to know. I often don't know how good or bad I am. I often think I'm pretty inept until I look around. I'd love to know how inept I actually am so I can improve. Also, a lot of companies only need 40th percentile programmers. Everybody seems to want to hire I-Can-Create-Google-In-A-Weekend people. Sorry, but your online coffee ordering startup doesn't need me to waste an hour in pre-interviews rehashing sorting algorithms from undergrad. I've a library of work. Let's talk like humans, not machines requiring proof-of-work tests against each other.
    - rprospero 14y ago
      Honestly, I agree with you. My main concern is that I've known too many programmers with their self-esteem wrapped up in the idea that they're the world's greatest who would balk at any test that didn't end with being given a Turing award. Now, any business that can keep these guys out of your hiring pool is already a net positive, but it's also going to kill a disappointingly large part of your base. Also, while I agree that the coffee shop website doesn't require Donald Knuth, the hard part will be convincing the coffee shop owner that that's true. Especially with the meme that "A players hire A player; B players hire C players". It's just an issue of marketing. If your firm was promising a 40% programmer for $50k and mine was promising a 99.9% programmer for $25k, most of the hiring manager I've known would hire mine, despite my testing procedure obviously being crap.
      - duaneb 14y ago
        Perhaps one that displayed rating with an average salary of that rating might fix this problem?

michaelochurch 14y ago

We should talk. I have an idea that would incorporate this. I doubt that I'll be able to get the resources and will probably be starting a regular day job instead (and I never go into a job intending to "hop") but discussing the idea would be useful. Assessing programmers is a good idea, but what I would really like to do is start measuring companies and managers for how they affect peoples' careers, so we can reward the faithful and punish defectors. If you look at salary trends, you're also picking up reputation, which corrupts measurement. Of course anyone leaving Google is going to be getting a bump. If you could asses actual skill and noticed that it wasn't doing much for the underlying (e.g. their actual capability growth) which will have more effect on their careers in the long term. Now, the problem with the auction site concept (not to say that it won't work; but you'll have to make the ability verification both very accurate and very respected) that you're talking about is the "ghetto" effect that most recruiting sites get. Good engineers are nervous about signing on because it's still stigmatized to be looking for work at all. Top-end employers are going to prefer word-of-mouth for similar reasons. It's really hard to make a job-searching site not a ghetto, and once it is one, trust-sparsity sets in and it's inferior to the (non-scalable and infuriatingly intermittent) word-of-mouth economy.

rprospero 14y ago

I think that the problem entirely rests with #1. First, consider that this central third party already exists: Universities. I have a PhD, so I should be hired over someone who has only a BS and we should both be hired over someone who never went to college. Except a large number people on HN who do hiring don't agree with this ranking (and rightly so - I'm only an average programmer). Therefore, we need a new organization to do this certification. We got that new organization. Microsoft did certifying with the MCSE. Of course, I've heard MCSE used more often as a punchline than as a job requirement, so that hasn't helped us too much, either. Thus, we move into the tests companies actually perform while hiring. Here, we still have the problem that no one agrees on the smartness test. On the one hand, puzzles that I've considered trivial logic puzzles that have been declared obscure memorization tests by people who are certainly more qualified than I am. On the other hand, I've seen programmers who literally couldn't tell a hard drive from a network card breeze through interviews on the basis of rote memorization. Even if we could find a good rubric for grading programmers, we'd need to sell the businesses on this test. I agree that hiring is completely broken and that outsourcing it to a company who makes it their expertise is pretty much the future of business. Honestly, the reason I've written so much here is because I've spent a lot of time thinking about this idea, too, and these are the issues I've run into. However, until problem #1 is solved, I don't see this going forward.

seiji 14y ago
Universities Sorry, but bollocks. I've passed a few chemistry courses over the years. I should not be allowed anywhere near any lab equipment these days. Course knowledge is transient. I've seen undergrad CS seniors write while(1){} loops in multithreaded programs because they forgot mutexes existed. I've seen CS PhDs copy/paste PHP code online to get a website together because their focus area was compiler register allocation. I go through periods of time where I use Python extensively. Then I don't use it for a year. It doesn't mean I "don't know" Python, but it takes a while to get the APIs and libraries loaded back into my head (especially if I've been using two or three or four other languages in the interim). By "certify ability" I don't mean anything as egregious as an MCSE or CCIE (or even a droll CCNA), but more a pre-level of interviews to weed out people who are literally a waste of time. The "certify" process would have different tracks depending on intended job target. A Programmer's Programmer would be get a heavily algorithm set of tasks/questions/live code tests while a devops person would have a practical set of questions with a few programming-ish things thrown in for completeness. A central, trusted, certification can weed out inept interviewers too. Everybody knows some interviewer who asks really obscure questions (or simple questions worded poorly) from the back of an algorithms textbook. Then, they use the confusion of the interviewee as an excuse to rate them lower in the post-interview team meeting. Crap like that is unacceptable.