14 ms·

Why You’re Not Hiring the Best and the Brightest

214 points by dfine 13y ago

kldavis4 13y ago
I have first hand experience with mentoring a junior dev and he is dead on about it not working remotely. In my experience it quickly devolves into the senior dev answering a continuous stream of emails or instant messages to help troubleshoot some simple issue. Interestingly, one of the biggest issues I have seen is an inability to succinctly communicate the facts around the issue that the individual iss struggling with. A lot of time is spent interrogating them for more info to find out what exactly the problem is. These are the kinds of situations where you really must be able to sit down next to the person to efficiently bring them along and not being able to quickly becomes an exercise in frustration for both parties.
- iamthepieman 13y ago
  I've found that it takes more preparation from both parties but is still doable. Each interaction should be treated like a mini presentation. I have a toolbox I use for this that includes: 1. screenshot software 2. screencast software 3. screensharing software 4. videoconferencing with an HD webcam 5. a whiteboard I can point my webcam at 6. note taking (I use evernote) 7. remote assistance software like logmein or teamviewer that lets me take control of the other persons PC or vice versa. it's not completely seamless, but if everyone is using the same toolbox and is capable of starting a video call, snapping screenshots and sharing them, switching to the whiteboard to brainstorm posting a quick video of the issue/prototype whatever in the shared space then it works pretty well. The biggest barrier to good remote teams or mentoring that I've found is when no one has the same tools or is willing/knows how to use them. Also, if either side has a resistance to learning knew remote processes or has a grudge against the remote person for being remote or for the need to hire remote (because of lack of talent in the local area) then there's more problems than just not being able to collaborate remotely.
  - Yunk 13y ago
    Wow, you go all out! I've mentored remotely and been mentored remotely with nothing beyond email, text chat and (rarely) phone. I'm not sure how that couldn't be sufficient given all of the open collaborations successfully occurring. Of course it helps if the junior developer also has a project (or any other tasks) matching their current skill set to work on so issues don't have to be solved in real-time to prevent idle+frustrated engineers. I've actually had more trouble with local mentoring. It is hard to get people thinking deeply about how something works and how to solve problems when they know an answer is a few grunts away.
    - iamthepieman 13y ago
      well I don't use all the tools all the time but I've certainly used all of them at one time or another. It's not so much having all the tools, but standardizing on a certain set of them and making sure everyone uses them and knows how to. Then if I say, "Let's collaborate on this, I'll send you the document link" my co-worker knows I'm talking about a google doc or a whatever we use. Sometimes you need feedback but it's not urgent. Could be for a problem your having or maybe just on a new interaction or UI element you're working on. That's an ideal case for grabbing a short video clip rather than trying to describe in an email, "The drop-down panel re-sizes the entire parent element to 100% but only when I . . .etc". Videoconferencing should really be the default for team interaction remotely. It's takes no additional work over a phone call but you can read the other person better. Over time this makes a big difference in team cohesion. I keep notes on my work process regardless of whether I plan to share them or not. Being able to share them and even collaboratively edit them is another big time and bandwidth saver as both of us can add debugging notes to a running log or brainstorm together on a new idea complete with screenshots of mockups or grabs from a similar webpage or app.
      - Yunk 13y ago
        Anything raising team cohesion without jet lag is definitely worth trying. Thanks!
- myth_drannon 13y ago
  What's even worse , is that your manager is not aware that you are spending the first hours of your day troubleshooting other's problems and answering questions. In the office environment the junior dev will come to your desk and everyone sees it, in the remote work he will ping you privately because he is too shy to ask it in the general chat... Allowing only public chats will not help but just pollute the general channel of communication.
  - kldavis4 13y ago
    If I get email questions from a junior dev, I try to cc my boss when I respond, just to keep them in the loop and make it clear that I am spending some cycles helping him or her.
- rhizome 13y ago
  Interestingly, one of the biggest issues I have seen is an inability to succinctly communicate the facts around the issue that the individual iss struggling with. A lot of time is spent interrogating them for more info to find out what exactly the problem is. Over 15 years helping people on IRC has taught me that dealing with this is a mentoring skill. There are lots of shortcuts that both get to the root of the problem and foster skills in the junior to suss things out for themselves, or at least formuate their problem better. Streamlining two-headed troubleshooting is a form of pairing and can totally be done remotely.
BossGrand 13y ago
In my experience having all local employees works well or having all remote employees works well. It becomes a logistical nightmare when you start to mix local and remote employees.
- iamthepieman 13y ago
  It depends on the culture. I'm one of 3 remote employees at my company and there's no support from management or recognition that remote is different. It makes it tough. I'm the only dev on my team that signs in to IM reliably.
  - BossGrand 13y ago
    That must be frustrating, have you tried bringing up your concerns with management? Sometimes they just don't realize you're having difficulties until there is a major issue.
    - iamthepieman 13y ago
      Yeah I've brought it up to management. The lead dev on my current assignment doesn't like to use Skype because it "slows his computer down" I tried to get a yammer site going but it died as well. My boss said that he prefers face-to-face interaction so I got a high-quality webcam but it's already enough of a pain to make sure he has his microphone plugged in.
      - BossGrand 13y ago
        -.- sounds like lazy management to me. It really shouldn't be that hard for you boss to be available on a video chat service when he knows he has remote workers. Have you tried using google hangouts?
        iamthepieman 13y ago
        it's more like management that's too busy working and not managing. that might sound ridiculous but the CEO is the lead PM on the biggest project we've ever taken on as a company. He's so busy going to planning and user meetings and managing the requirements that he doesn't have time to work on the company. I love the work and I live in the middle of nowhere which are two lame reasons I haven't seriously pursued other options.
jw2013 13y ago
It's a long article, so let me excerpt a few bullet points for those don't have enough time to read the whole article: 1) Don't just hire local talent, hire nationally, even globally. There are lots of successfully companies embracing working remotely. 2) Evaluate the value of a person's contribution based on how much they have done rather than how much time they showed up (what's done >> what to do). Some effective way to measure so is to track Github commits to see how many bugs they fix, etc. 3) When hiring, hire by audit. Pay the interviewees some hourly rate to finish a mini-project that is a part of your company's real work (e.g. add a feature), and let their performance in the mini-test be a large factor in deciding hire/no-hire decision. Also, try to hire from your tech community. 4) Effective communications for remote work: real-time chat, video chat, online bulletin board, weekly team status report. 5) Some big drawbacks of remote work are: brainstorming is hard + mentorship is hard. Luckily, some of the companies don't need brainstorming much. And for mentorship, don't hire people that need extensive mentoring.
- up_and_up 13y ago
  > And for mentorship, don't hire people that need extensive mentoring. So then forget interns and/or jr's devs? I have found code reviews via pull requests to be a good mentoring tool.
  - dmourati 13y ago
    I've been thinking about this issue lately. Jr developers, interns, fresh grads, etc all have some alluring properties: they are cheap(er), have few(er) bad habits, and are more open to being coached into their roles. Netflix, on the other hand, hires no folks like this. http://www.businessinsider.com/interns-banned-at-netflix-quora-2014-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/interns-banned-at-netflix-quo... My current company is comprised almost exclusively of newer engineers. It has put me in a strange position as someone with > 10 years experience in my field when that long ago, most were in high school. EDIT: fixed split infinitive and spelling
    - codinghorror 13y ago
binarytrees 13y ago
It's hard only hiring the best and brightest as I assume there is only x% of people who you qualify as best and brightest. How many other companies are you competing with to get this so called "best and brightest"?
- BrentOzar 13y ago
  > How many other companies are you competing with to get this so called "best and brightest"? If you're willing to hire remotely and hire from your online community as Jeff suggests, you're competing with surprisingly few companies. I'm part of a small Microsoft SQL Server consultancy, and competition for good database performance tuners is notoriously difficult. However, when we publish a blog post that we're hiring, we get overwhelmed with applicants. Most of our competitors require an onsite presence, make the employees show up in an office from 9 to 5, and hire in cities with high costs of living. We don't - so we don't end up with much competition for brilliant people who just happen to have family ties to smaller communities.
- hga 13y ago
  With so many companies infamously doing a bad job of hiring and managing people, if you're good at both, I don't see why it couldn't be achievable. Sure, plenty of those companies say, and maybe even think, they're "only hiring the best and brightest", but if they're wrong, or not good at retaining them....
- morganherlocker 13y ago
  The existence of articles like these seems to suggest that there really might not be that many people out there competing for the best and brightest (competing effectively anyway). If only 5% of companies are willing to pay top dollar, and only 5% of those are willing to allow remote, there may not be that much competition left over.
bowlofpetunias 13y ago
The dirty secret of remote working is that unless your company is located in the middle of nowhere, the pool of developers that have the discipline and skills to successfully work remotely on a permanent basis is even smaller than your average local pool of talent. Right now it's still an opportunity because the number of companies fishing in this pool is still relatively small, but that is changing rapidly. The scarcity we're dealing with is still mostly a scarcity of mature professionals, and with remote working anything less than that is not an option.
- hibikir 13y ago
  It's not really about scarcity of mature professionals, but of how hard it is to find the ones that are out there, and get them to apply. Take this large-ish city in middle America. I have worked with a few local developers I would call mature professionals: If I was starting a startup, I know where I'd call. But I only know their skillset through having worked with them over the years. How can someone that doesn't have a network find them? A few you can find in user groups and meetups. But that gets you one very specific brand of mature developers. Many in my list wouldn't go to one of those: They are often just sausagefests, with 25 to 35 year old males trying to impress others about how good they are. That and recruiters who tend to not know anything. Same thing by going with speakers in conferences: You get a few people, but those are probably not going to make your company their number one priority. It's more likely that you are an excuse to make money between other engagements. An ad in a recruiting site? The really good ones don't get jobs like that: They mention a friend they are unhappy in their workplace, and they quickly get recruited. I got my last job like that, without even an interview. So and so says you are great and would mesh very well here, so have an offer. Pestering recruiters? You can talk to those, but they can't tell the good from the bad. Also, the mature professional can't tell if your newfangled startup is good or bad. Will you want insane hours? Do you have a crazy idea, like mandating that all code is organized in tiny web services 100 lines of Clojure or less? Unless they are unhappy in their existing position, you have to find them and prove to them that you are a worthy employment option. And they might not even buy into your pitch. No, They might think that a web of tiny services doesn't really fix all the world's problems, or they might not want to do boring business analytics. So, more than the scarcity of professionals, the real problem is that you can't even contact them.
mschuster91 13y ago
I guess the problem many companies/startups have with international workforces is: how do I deal with local laws/taxes? Do I need to establish a branch in the country of the prospective employee? Do I need a bank account in the country or can I use one European bank account for all my European employees? Does anyone know of a company/startup which provides "remote employment as a service", including managing payroll, days off/holidays, local law/tax compliance and the whole slew of paperwork?
- codinghorror 13y ago
  This part is absolutely a pain. You are supposed to set up (or contract with) umbrella corporations that can handle local taxes, etc. Most reasonably large countries will have an agency willing to do this.. for a fee of course. If you get, say, Facebook or IBM or Microsoft large then you just have lots of regional offices to handle this.
- johansch 13y ago
  One big issue with providing a service like that is that in countries with strong employee rights it would have to take on quite a lot of risk. Another solution I have seen in real life is to ask the foreign "employee" to create a one-person company that bills the "employer".
- zura 13y ago
  Contracts. Really that simple. You just put images of your signature in some contract pdf and that's all...
- PeterisP 13y ago
  For me the simplest way to work for from EU to a USA company would be to register a mini-company for myself. I don't have one, but many freelancers do it just for local customers, because you can get a bit of tax savings that way. The process then is simply making a periodic invoice from my company to yours; the ongoing costs involved would be whatever an international money tranfer costs for you, + I'd pay something like $50/mth to a local accounting company to handle all the taxes&reporting for that. I don't know of any full "remote employment as a service", but there are a lot of outsourced accounting companies who'd do the taxes & paperwork - most local small businesses do it this way, since there's not enough work to have a full-time accountant/finance person on board. Actually executing payments and managing days off is a bit trickier, since the first requires full access to the company funds, and the second involves managing people, which is hard to outsource - you probably could get them to calculate 'what is owed to whom' by the local laws, but you'd have to pay salaries yourself & schedule vacations directly with the employees.
norswap 13y ago
Another (more worrying) problem is that most of us would be unable to recognize the best people if they stared you in the face.
- potatolicious 13y ago
  Of course we can't. Practice is critical in mastering a skill, and frankly as an industry we really don't practice the skill of recognizing the best people. At all. Hiring processes throughout the industry are entirely non-rigorous, and there is almost never any loop-closing when it comes to hiring signals and eventual job performance. We are spectacularly bad at recognizing talent because we've never sat down and rigorously connected signals to success and failure. Tech hiring is the ultimate cargo cult. It goes through fads (remember when logic puzzles where the thing?), and works primarily via arguments that sound logical but were never even remotely verified. It's monkey see monkey do at a mass level.
kabdib 13y ago
The "audition filter" here will eliminate those people who are (a) really good, and (b) can get a job without such nonsense. HN has thrashed this out before, but what the heck: - My current employee agreement may prohibit me from doing such work (this is definitely true of ALL of my employers up until now) - I'm pretty sure I can get a job at a great company without such a hoop, so I'm not going to bother with yours unless I really want to work at exactly your company [unlikely] You need to work on your ability to assess candidates without involving fear-based behavior on your part.
- logfromblammo 13y ago
  All things considered, I am more likely to apply to a company that makes starting the process quick and easy. I already have a job. When I search for other jobs, I do that in my free time. I really hate doing it. It is tedious and very unrewarding. So I want to maximize the number of leads I create per unit of time. When I see a code audition, I see many hours of useless bullshit done in my own free time that could create at most one lead. At that point, you pretty much have to pay me to apply for your job. So much gets said about the number of applicants per position, and how to filter those. Well, the converse is true. All those people are also applying to multiple job openings. They filter based on published requirements and ease of application. Not only do you want to hire the best applicants, but you also need to make sure that the best people become applicants in the first place. That won't happen if the very first thing you do is prove unequivocally that you do not value other people's time.
  - swampthing 13y ago
    If the applicant doesn't get anything out of it, then it would be a waste of their time. But as an applicant, wouldn't you also want to make sure that your potential future coworkers / managers are people you'd want to work with? You're evaluating the company just as much as they're evaluating you.
    - cwp 13y ago
      Agreed. But what an audition tells me about the company is that everybody there was willing to put up with it. Anybody who has lots of options probably didn't end up there. So maybe the company is so awesome that good people were willing to jump through hoops to get hired there, but even so it's a pretty safe bet that they don't have the the best and brightest working for them.
ignostic 13y ago
On the point of hiring the best and brightest wherever they live: I worked for a startup that hired from all over Europe and North America. We did hire some great people, but there are definitely considerations and downsides. Here are some of the cons I noticed: 1) It took a lot of effort to discourage cliques based on location. People from different countries or parts of the country bonded more easily. New hires would also quickly bond because they didn't know anyone, but together they felt excluded by the established groups. This was critical to their happiness because they didn't usually have friends outside of work. We managed, but it does require more effort to prevent internal politics. 2) This wasn't the sort of job where everyone could work remotely, so we regularly lost people who decided to go back home. That's why I left, and I was neither the first nor the last. People miss their families and friends, especially if they miss a large event. 3) Moving people can be expensive. Obvious, so I won't elaborate. 4) Recruiting from all over is also more expensive. You may or may not need to fly people out, but you also have a lower rate of interest for the same amount of effort. On job boards you'll get 500 resumes, out of which 100 people actually realized the position requires them to move. For the low-profile startup it just takes more effort and money to get the word out to the right people across the country. Was it worth it? Sometimes. In the end, you need to consider whether the position is really worth the extra time and cost of hiring or whether you can find local talent that will do as well. The issues I've raised above are obviously harder for positions where "telecommuting" doesn't work.
- PeterisP 13y ago
  The whole point of the article is explicitly on hiring people who aren't willing to relocate - those who are eager to move to SF already make up the current market. What are the positions where "telecommuting" doesn't work and reasons for that? The OP argues that for pretty much all development jobs that isn't the case, and gives examples of how successful companies have implemented this.
mbesto 13y ago
I live in SF and operate a startup in the US but almost exclusively work with resources outside of the US. I believe this model, with it's challenges, does work and can work for many business. I also believe that many talented people (right now many of them coming from Eastern Europe and South America) lack the ability to get exposure to opportunities from well funded US (mainly SV) based companies. That being said, if anyone (mainly front-end UX/UI, iOS, android, rails/django, node, and various MVVC js frameworks) who feel you are talented but aren't getting the right opportunities to work on cool, well-funded projects in the US, feel free to get in touch.
- Axsuul 13y ago
  Same here, been working exclusively with devs from Eastern Europe and it's been working great. Also want to plug that we're always looking for capable Rails devs so hit me up if you're interested!
Aloisius 13y ago
I'd much rather hire very good and local to the best and remote. Someone who comes into the office adds so much more to the company besides the work they produce. They attract other very good people just by virtue of being there. They contribute to things outside their specific job description in ways that a remote person can't (company policies, culture, company direction, leads on customers, etc - often serendipitously). They are frankly worth more in an acquisition scenario because they are more likely to stay with the company. They can grow into senior or leadership roles in a way that a remote person simply can't. Frankly, I think the best and the brightest is kind of a mythical unicorn anyway. If you keep chasing them, you'll end up passing on a lot of great people.
- hga 13y ago
  This is one of the first really good points I've seen against remote workers, at least for smaller companies. E.g. just because I'm that way, bought my first DECtape in 1978 (sic), backup my home systems on LTO-4 today, I almost always ended up being the guy who did the company's backups at the startups I joined. Especially if you can't afford a tape library, you've got to be there to do that, to make damned sure it gets done. Or someone asks me, a couple of decades ago, "we're dissatisfied with our ISP, you know any good ones?" and I say "well, I've been personally using DIGEX for a few years and they have their act together." Etc. All outside the scope of my official work as a programmer. Or even more obscure, one of the things my family back home back then did was real estate and I picked up a lot of things by osmosis, and later reassured several sets of small company management that the clock cycle of that field was much, much slower than ours, and they didn't necessarily have to be concerned by how long it was taking to get new office space etc. Again, something I'd not be able to contribute without being there to hear them grumbling about the issue. Also, if someone wants to politically trash you, being remote puts you at a terrible disadvantage. I had that happen when I mostly "dissapeared" for 6 weeks to produce a MVP a potential client challenged us to make, because I had a much faster machine at home and didn't have an office mate who's job it was to talk a lot on the phone (yeah, the company didn't get several things). Completely gratuitous, the guy was of ill intent, left the company taking our biggest customer which probably doomed it. But it, well both of those, set up the conditions for my getting constructively terminated as soon as I finished V1.0 with my team, and with the guy I'd mentored on what was almost his first job into a good software engineer, leaving soon after, removing all knowledge of the system's backend from the company, that product died.
forgottenpass 13y ago
Ideally, your audition project should be a regular consulting gig with an hourly rate and a clearly defined mission statement. Select a small project that can be done in a few days, maybe at most a week or two. Let the candidate choose to come into the office or work remotely. So, only hire people that can afford to quit their current job for an interview? Or at least blow all their vacation time on you?
- megablast 13y ago
  Just like IT projects, there is no silver bullet to interviewing, and you have rightly brought up some good points about why this will not work. Despite producing over 60 apps for the iOs app store, a new employer wanted me to whip up an app with a tableview that is sortable and searchable. I told them to stop wasting my time.
Jemaclus 13y ago
I agree with most of the article. My problem with the "Hire by Audition" section is a little more robust. I currently have a job. If I'm looking for a job, then I'm doing that in my free time. If I'm looking for a full time job, I'm not looking for a contract job. Now imagine that I've applied to five companies. Each of those five companies has given me an "audition," something that I can take a week to do. I necessarily have to do this in my free time -- I can't very well do it at my current job! -- and not only do I have to solve your problem, but I generally have to do it within some sort of constraint that you normally have, whether that's your codebase or your language or whatever. I'm going to spend a significant portion of that time simply getting up to speed with that constraint. Maybe I have to install Ruby or I have to install Symfony or I have to study the documentation for Twilio. Who knows? I've never yet had an "audition" like this that didn't require me to sign an NDA, then install that company's codebase and work within that codebase. And I've rarely been able to do this in one or two nights of work. Usually one night of work is spent simply installing it, the second night studying what's going on, and then the third, fourth, and possibly fifth nights actually fixing the problem, testing it, and making sure it's good enough to submit. It's a lot of work to ask me to do, even if you're paying me as a contractor, because again, I'm not looking to be a contractor. I'm looking to be a full-time employee. I want to solve your real-world problems much more than I want to answer academic questions, but at the same time, you have to respect my time as well. I don't want to waste your time by not giving you enough data to make an educated decision about hiring me, but you should also not waste my time by giving me a task that takes up my entire free time for a week. There's a happy medium here. I don't know what it is, exactly, other than letting me solve the problem my own way with my own code and my own tools, but if I do that, then it's not "something you would give your employees right now if they weren't so busy," right? Maybe. The rest of it is fairly spot on, I guess. Just my two cents.
- johnjlocke 12y ago
  If you are happy with your current job, then there is no need to apply to a different job, so this scenario would never come up for you.
- nswanberg 13y ago
  At this point in Jeff's company he is looking for someone who wants to get paid to work on Discourse, not simply have a job. Someone who wants that would not think much of following the easy instructions to get Discourse, install it, and be able to make a small contribution to the project (not sure about contributing but the download and install process is extremely easy and is sort of a fizz-buzz test in itself). I don't know if this good advice for everyone looking to hire but it seems like filtering for both ability and motivation is a good idea for young, growing companies. The problem with any discussion here on HN is that, judging by replies, many commenters feel insecure whenever an idea is proposed that they feel could exclude them from a job, even though typically these ideas do not spread, and most people need only one full-time job at a time (writing about interviewing has the same problem. See the first few paragraphs of http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-google.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...). I agree that if every company started this practice in the same way, applying for five jobs at the same time while currently working at one would be difficult. But it seems very unlikely that would happen in practice.
bri3d 13y ago
I see a lot of drawbacks to the consulting project: 1) Anti-moonlighting clauses 2) Time commitment from both parties 3) Tax/thought overhead to signing agreements and getting paid. This way I'm a 1099 everywhere I interview. There's a reason I'm not an independent consultant full-time. 4) Different challenges. How do you objectively, fairly evaluate candidates when they're given a different issue to fix or different feature to implement? But I agree that work-samples are essential to good hiring. A staged, small-challenge approach (like Thomas Ptacek / Matasano use) seems better to me from the standpoint of an interviewee for a few reasons: 1) Less overall time commitment. 2) Fail-fast. If I blow the first hour(s?) long screen, I'm done. No weeks of work involved. 3) Consistent, fair evaluation. Presumably a set of "canned" challenges are used and the time taken and quality of output can be evaluated directly against the performance of others.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Speaking of moonlighting clauses, can you imagine the legal shitstorm if you were to moonlight for a direct competitor? There's no angle in which that doesn't look bad.
  - Jemaclus 13y ago
    My company's direct competitor contacts me on a weekly basis to try and poach me. I'm super, super highly qualified for that job, and I could probably leverage a massive raise... but I would feel so, so dirty for doing that. It's nice to know I still have morals. ;)
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      It's fine to go to a direct competitor, I think. I'm just saying working for both at the same time would be... well, probably career-ruining in my line of work. I believe our little industry has an unwritten rule of 2-week minimum cooldown when switching companies.
Aloha 13y ago
I'd rather hire people who are good, and can do the job, rather than snag the all-stars. Driven people with practical applicable experience are all the more worthwhile to me than folks who while smarter and brighter, often need an external source of motivation beyond a paycheck.
kemiller 13y ago
The reality is, there are not enough "best people" to go around. And, for that matter, it's probably arrogant to think that your idea is so hot that you need Google/Apple/Facebook-level talent. You are much better off figuring out which imperfections you can live with, ditching any lazy elitism ("only top schools") and looking in places that are not quite so over-fished.
crimsonalucard 13y ago
Studies show proximity is just as important as talent.
- lucisferre 13y ago
  Which studies? Seriously I'm interested, but also why would you just state this without referencing at least one?
  - walshemj 13y ago
    Rapid development by McConnell has loads of examples of where co-located teams are by far the best solution - And my several decades of experience I woudl also agree.
    - lucisferre 13y ago
      Thanks. My gut tells me there are advantages for both, but that it's at least somewhat situational. How do you feel about the fact that the book is quite dated. I mean our ability to be integrated into the team, information and workflow while working remotely has improved by leaps and bounds since 1996. He's referencing a time before, DVCS, team chats (IRC I suppose), shared work boards like Trello/Pivotal, DropBox, Google Docs, Github, screen sharing. The list really goes on and on.
      - walshemj 13y ago
        MM all promoted by sales men who want to sell you something. Video conferencing is never as good as face to face and I have used pro level video conferencing gear at BT not some 20$ webcam and crap mic. Its a bit like thin client computing which is one idea that keep coming around and around.
pacofvf 13y ago
You want the best and brightest?, just pay more money, word will spread out, the best and brightest will come to you.
- mattgreenrocks 13y ago
  Additionally, have interesting work. Don't complain about not finding the best engineers if you're not an engineering-centric company; by definition, you don't need the best, you just need good enough. There's nothing wrong with this.
  - jrs235 13y ago
    Exactly. Interesting work goes a long ways. Some [boring] things you can't pay me enough to keep doing.
- jrs235 13y ago
  No, those motivated by money will come to you.
- crpatino 13y ago
  You will get maybe 2x more needles out of +10x more haystack. Not that it does not work, but you will need to get very good at filtering.
relet 13y ago
One problem I personally have with most remote jobs is they don't give me the same social security as I have in my own country, and don't allow me to pay my taxes locally. I want to support the community I am living in, and know that community to have my back.
dsugarman 13y ago
wow first time I have heard real sense on this topic from a SV VC. the other option beyond remote work is to physically locate your company out of SF and near the engineers (like we did!)
microjesus 13y ago
Interesting points all around. As someone working as a remote consultant; rarely if ever meeting the clients in-person: I dig this. It's interesting this culture culture where the masses have these obnoxious, noisy, single room shared workspaces where they invite employees to "collaborate". Working on-site as a requirement simply has to go.
gomox 13y ago
> Always hire the best people… who are willing to live in San Francisco ... and are allowed to do so.
lucisferre 13y ago
For some reason I can't quite articulate, I find just about all "how to hire" advice is mostly a mix of platitudes, anecdotal evidence, weighed down heavily by personal opinion. In short I don't find much if it useful in actual practice. I suppose this is true of most entrepreneurial advice.
sesqu 13y ago
The mostly unrelated world population density map [1] really distracted me, partly because of how entirely wrong it is. The map is actually of the populations of countries, not of world population density as claimed in the caption, and it's pretty aggressively thresholded, too. A density map would look something like [2], which is so dissimilar as to undermine any conclusion the reader might have drawn. [1] http://frcs3.s3.amazonaws.com.global.prod.fastly.net/library/rowImage/map1.jpg http://frcs3.s3.amazonaws.com.global.prod.fastly.net/library... [2] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/World_population_density_1994.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/World_pop...
gargarplex 13y ago
.. you're also not hiring the best and the brightest because you aren't paying enough. Top talent knows what it's worth and enjoys those rewards .. finding them through consulting, banking, or entrepreneurship. Only the mediocre are going to settle for $160k/yr + options at some "me too" A16Z startup.
- walshemj 13y ago
  Depends if that start up is a 10 min to walk to work and you say have a wife and newborn child to support some times you will take any job. And some one really good might take a CTO role at a me to start-up to tick that box make your mistakes where it doesn't matter then move on to bigger and better things after 18 months 2 years.
  - gargarplex 13y ago
    I'm gonna just say it. The really good people know their worth and consequently have very premeditated family planning.
WWLink 13y ago
I don't think I have the guts to call myself the best and brightest lol. Does that mean I'm never going to find a job? Seems like every company insists on hiring the best and brightest, and everyone here thinks they're the best and brightest.
- collyw 13y ago
  I feel about the same. Looking around me I see I am maybe top 25%. There are a couple of really smart people, and a fair few that I would classify as below average.
phazmatis 13y ago
No don't tell them this. I like being mediocre but in-demand.
imroot 13y ago
I've taken a different approach to the audition -- I have something that would take a developer 8 hours to do: something that we do in the core product, but, in an entirely different context. For example: "At LowBudget Brands, we provide reservations, customer support, front desk software, and backend support for property owners who want to own a successful hotel brand. A large portion of our travelers may not know which television station to turn to or have their smartphone or other device know set to the local weather, so, LBB wants to build a solution that: -> Provides Hotel managers to create an account that allows them to set their property number and zip code -> Queries Weather Underground to determine the three and five day forecast for that zip code -> Generates a single page .pdf file with that content -> Mails the hotel the day's weather at 3 in the morning. " If you've gone through the interview process, we know that you have experience with API's, background tasks, and PDF generation...or two of the three. I pay a flat rate of $200 for this task, and then we throw it away once they're either hired or we decline. We provide a Vagrant file and an amazon t1.micro instance if that's easier, and that's proven to suit our needs rather well...
- monksy 13y ago
  I like your approach for a few reasons. 1. Its realistic. It has a customer and it has needs. 2. You're prepared with the resources needed. [You've thought about this before] 3. You're willing to put your money where your mouth is. I get the feeling that many of the lengthy coding tests or auditions are nothing but timewasters for punishing a new applicant. 4. It sounds like a weekend project/take home exercise.
jmzbond 13y ago
Hiring the best and brightest presumes that you, the employer are the best and most successful. On both sides of the table, society constantly pushes us to think we're number 1 when we're really not. Non-top-tier companies and top-tier companies shouldn't have the same hiring practices. Nor should non-top-tier applicants and top-tier applicants have the same recruiting strategies. Can we all stop pretending to be something we're not? The world operates on a normal curve and not everyone can be the 1%. That said, if you are the top employer, I think a great metric is simply to gauge the time an audition takes. A technical problem for the best and brightest might take a couple of hours, whereas for someone less qualified it takes much longer. And this exercise should come with suggested timing to weed out people who know they're not able to crack it in the allotted period. I think this could be a way to not have long term auditions, because what you've done is focused on creating a quality-assessment (difficulty of problem) as opposed to a quantity-assessment (length of time). I disagree with what other commenters have said; having anything but long term auditions will not sufficiently gauge fit with corporate culture. But hey if you're going around the world to hire remote workers, culture is probably not your top priority anyways.
merrua 13y ago
"I’m talking about a real world, honest-to-God unit of work that you need done right now today on your actual product." This bit sounds unethical. Your asking someone to do work for you without paying them.
- MisterBastahrd 13y ago
  Exactly what happened to me. I interviewed with a company from a position of weakness (I had been out of school for several years and worked as a recruiter then Katrina hit, so I was flat broke and out of a job for a year) and I was looking for my first real programming job. They had me build something for them that they decided they needed but that no candidate had been able to create so far. I built the tool in a couple of hours, learning the language along the way. They turned around and used the tool in production without compensation.
jokoon 13y ago
I hate the hiring process. I've been unemployed all my life, and an interview feels like pop idol. Everything is about the looks, the communication, what are you flaws, what do you like, why do you want to work here, etc. Maybe it's because I live in france and that employers can't easily fire people, maybe I'm not the "best and brightest", maybe I'm bad at communication, maybe I can't manage to sell myself properly, maybe I have issues. It feels like buying somebody to be a friend in a club, not paying him to do some work. I think employers like to hire people "they can trust", and I find it stupid. It's normal at first, but I wonder why there aren't any company trying to hire people who are not likable and finding ways to make the company work. I mean a company is not a group a friend doing chores and having coffee, of course you need people to behave a little, but I don't understand why it can boil down to simply exclude elements that can create "awkward situations that can put the company in danger".
lifeisstillgood 13y ago
Does anyone else have an issue with the world population map claiming the Russian steppes have a population density on a par with the South East of England? Or am I bad at reading keys on maps?

214 points by dfine 13y ago

I have first hand experience with mentoring a junior dev and he is dead on about it not working remotely. In my experience it quickly devolves into the senior dev answering a continuous stream of emails or instant messages to help troubleshoot some simple issue. Interestingly, one of the biggest issues I have seen is an inability to succinctly communicate the facts around the issue that the individual iss struggling with. A lot of time is spent interrogating them for more info to find out what exactly the problem is. These are the kinds of situations where you really must be able to sit down next to the person to efficiently bring them along and not being able to quickly becomes an exercise in frustration for both parties.

iamthepieman 13y ago
I've found that it takes more preparation from both parties but is still doable. Each interaction should be treated like a mini presentation. I have a toolbox I use for this that includes: 1. screenshot software 2. screencast software 3. screensharing software 4. videoconferencing with an HD webcam 5. a whiteboard I can point my webcam at 6. note taking (I use evernote) 7. remote assistance software like logmein or teamviewer that lets me take control of the other persons PC or vice versa. it's not completely seamless, but if everyone is using the same toolbox and is capable of starting a video call, snapping screenshots and sharing them, switching to the whiteboard to brainstorm posting a quick video of the issue/prototype whatever in the shared space then it works pretty well. The biggest barrier to good remote teams or mentoring that I've found is when no one has the same tools or is willing/knows how to use them. Also, if either side has a resistance to learning knew remote processes or has a grudge against the remote person for being remote or for the need to hire remote (because of lack of talent in the local area) then there's more problems than just not being able to collaborate remotely.
- Yunk 13y ago
  Wow, you go all out! I've mentored remotely and been mentored remotely with nothing beyond email, text chat and (rarely) phone. I'm not sure how that couldn't be sufficient given all of the open collaborations successfully occurring. Of course it helps if the junior developer also has a project (or any other tasks) matching their current skill set to work on so issues don't have to be solved in real-time to prevent idle+frustrated engineers. I've actually had more trouble with local mentoring. It is hard to get people thinking deeply about how something works and how to solve problems when they know an answer is a few grunts away.
  - iamthepieman 13y ago
    well I don't use all the tools all the time but I've certainly used all of them at one time or another. It's not so much having all the tools, but standardizing on a certain set of them and making sure everyone uses them and knows how to. Then if I say, "Let's collaborate on this, I'll send you the document link" my co-worker knows I'm talking about a google doc or a whatever we use. Sometimes you need feedback but it's not urgent. Could be for a problem your having or maybe just on a new interaction or UI element you're working on. That's an ideal case for grabbing a short video clip rather than trying to describe in an email, "The drop-down panel re-sizes the entire parent element to 100% but only when I . . .etc". Videoconferencing should really be the default for team interaction remotely. It's takes no additional work over a phone call but you can read the other person better. Over time this makes a big difference in team cohesion. I keep notes on my work process regardless of whether I plan to share them or not. Being able to share them and even collaboratively edit them is another big time and bandwidth saver as both of us can add debugging notes to a running log or brainstorm together on a new idea complete with screenshots of mockups or grabs from a similar webpage or app.
    - Yunk 13y ago
      Anything raising team cohesion without jet lag is definitely worth trying. Thanks!
myth_drannon 13y ago
What's even worse , is that your manager is not aware that you are spending the first hours of your day troubleshooting other's problems and answering questions. In the office environment the junior dev will come to your desk and everyone sees it, in the remote work he will ping you privately because he is too shy to ask it in the general chat... Allowing only public chats will not help but just pollute the general channel of communication.
- kldavis4 13y ago
  If I get email questions from a junior dev, I try to cc my boss when I respond, just to keep them in the loop and make it clear that I am spending some cycles helping him or her.
rhizome 13y ago
Interestingly, one of the biggest issues I have seen is an inability to succinctly communicate the facts around the issue that the individual iss struggling with. A lot of time is spent interrogating them for more info to find out what exactly the problem is. Over 15 years helping people on IRC has taught me that dealing with this is a mentoring skill. There are lots of shortcuts that both get to the root of the problem and foster skills in the junior to suss things out for themselves, or at least formuate their problem better. Streamlining two-headed troubleshooting is a form of pairing and can totally be done remotely.

BossGrand 13y ago

In my experience having all local employees works well or having all remote employees works well. It becomes a logistical nightmare when you start to mix local and remote employees.

iamthepieman 13y ago
It depends on the culture. I'm one of 3 remote employees at my company and there's no support from management or recognition that remote is different. It makes it tough. I'm the only dev on my team that signs in to IM reliably.
- BossGrand 13y ago
  That must be frustrating, have you tried bringing up your concerns with management? Sometimes they just don't realize you're having difficulties until there is a major issue.
  - iamthepieman 13y ago
    Yeah I've brought it up to management. The lead dev on my current assignment doesn't like to use Skype because it "slows his computer down" I tried to get a yammer site going but it died as well. My boss said that he prefers face-to-face interaction so I got a high-quality webcam but it's already enough of a pain to make sure he has his microphone plugged in.
    - BossGrand 13y ago
      -.- sounds like lazy management to me. It really shouldn't be that hard for you boss to be available on a video chat service when he knows he has remote workers. Have you tried using google hangouts?
      - iamthepieman 13y ago
        it's more like management that's too busy working and not managing. that might sound ridiculous but the CEO is the lead PM on the biggest project we've ever taken on as a company. He's so busy going to planning and user meetings and managing the requirements that he doesn't have time to work on the company. I love the work and I live in the middle of nowhere which are two lame reasons I haven't seriously pursued other options.

jw2013 13y ago

It's a long article, so let me excerpt a few bullet points for those don't have enough time to read the whole article: 1) Don't just hire local talent, hire nationally, even globally. There are lots of successfully companies embracing working remotely. 2) Evaluate the value of a person's contribution based on how much they have done rather than how much time they showed up (what's done >> what to do). Some effective way to measure so is to track Github commits to see how many bugs they fix, etc. 3) When hiring, hire by audit. Pay the interviewees some hourly rate to finish a mini-project that is a part of your company's real work (e.g. add a feature), and let their performance in the mini-test be a large factor in deciding hire/no-hire decision. Also, try to hire from your tech community. 4) Effective communications for remote work: real-time chat, video chat, online bulletin board, weekly team status report. 5) Some big drawbacks of remote work are: brainstorming is hard + mentorship is hard. Luckily, some of the companies don't need brainstorming much. And for mentorship, don't hire people that need extensive mentoring.

up_and_up 13y ago
> And for mentorship, don't hire people that need extensive mentoring. So then forget interns and/or jr's devs? I have found code reviews via pull requests to be a good mentoring tool.
- dmourati 13y ago
  I've been thinking about this issue lately. Jr developers, interns, fresh grads, etc all have some alluring properties: they are cheap(er), have few(er) bad habits, and are more open to being coached into their roles. Netflix, on the other hand, hires no folks like this. http://www.businessinsider.com/interns-banned-at-netflix-quora-2014-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/interns-banned-at-netflix-quo... My current company is comprised almost exclusively of newer engineers. It has put me in a strange position as someone with > 10 years experience in my field when that long ago, most were in high school. EDIT: fixed split infinitive and spelling
  - codinghorror 13y ago

binarytrees 13y ago

It's hard only hiring the best and brightest as I assume there is only x% of people who you qualify as best and brightest. How many other companies are you competing with to get this so called "best and brightest"?

BrentOzar 13y ago
> How many other companies are you competing with to get this so called "best and brightest"? If you're willing to hire remotely and hire from your online community as Jeff suggests, you're competing with surprisingly few companies. I'm part of a small Microsoft SQL Server consultancy, and competition for good database performance tuners is notoriously difficult. However, when we publish a blog post that we're hiring, we get overwhelmed with applicants. Most of our competitors require an onsite presence, make the employees show up in an office from 9 to 5, and hire in cities with high costs of living. We don't - so we don't end up with much competition for brilliant people who just happen to have family ties to smaller communities.
hga 13y ago
With so many companies infamously doing a bad job of hiring and managing people, if you're good at both, I don't see why it couldn't be achievable. Sure, plenty of those companies say, and maybe even think, they're "only hiring the best and brightest", but if they're wrong, or not good at retaining them....
morganherlocker 13y ago
The existence of articles like these seems to suggest that there really might not be that many people out there competing for the best and brightest (competing effectively anyway). If only 5% of companies are willing to pay top dollar, and only 5% of those are willing to allow remote, there may not be that much competition left over.

bowlofpetunias 13y ago

The dirty secret of remote working is that unless your company is located in the middle of nowhere, the pool of developers that have the discipline and skills to successfully work remotely on a permanent basis is even smaller than your average local pool of talent. Right now it's still an opportunity because the number of companies fishing in this pool is still relatively small, but that is changing rapidly. The scarcity we're dealing with is still mostly a scarcity of mature professionals, and with remote working anything less than that is not an option.

hibikir 13y ago
It's not really about scarcity of mature professionals, but of how hard it is to find the ones that are out there, and get them to apply. Take this large-ish city in middle America. I have worked with a few local developers I would call mature professionals: If I was starting a startup, I know where I'd call. But I only know their skillset through having worked with them over the years. How can someone that doesn't have a network find them? A few you can find in user groups and meetups. But that gets you one very specific brand of mature developers. Many in my list wouldn't go to one of those: They are often just sausagefests, with 25 to 35 year old males trying to impress others about how good they are. That and recruiters who tend to not know anything. Same thing by going with speakers in conferences: You get a few people, but those are probably not going to make your company their number one priority. It's more likely that you are an excuse to make money between other engagements. An ad in a recruiting site? The really good ones don't get jobs like that: They mention a friend they are unhappy in their workplace, and they quickly get recruited. I got my last job like that, without even an interview. So and so says you are great and would mesh very well here, so have an offer. Pestering recruiters? You can talk to those, but they can't tell the good from the bad. Also, the mature professional can't tell if your newfangled startup is good or bad. Will you want insane hours? Do you have a crazy idea, like mandating that all code is organized in tiny web services 100 lines of Clojure or less? Unless they are unhappy in their existing position, you have to find them and prove to them that you are a worthy employment option. And they might not even buy into your pitch. No, They might think that a web of tiny services doesn't really fix all the world's problems, or they might not want to do boring business analytics. So, more than the scarcity of professionals, the real problem is that you can't even contact them.

mschuster91 13y ago

I guess the problem many companies/startups have with international workforces is: how do I deal with local laws/taxes? Do I need to establish a branch in the country of the prospective employee? Do I need a bank account in the country or can I use one European bank account for all my European employees? Does anyone know of a company/startup which provides "remote employment as a service", including managing payroll, days off/holidays, local law/tax compliance and the whole slew of paperwork?

codinghorror 13y ago
This part is absolutely a pain. You are supposed to set up (or contract with) umbrella corporations that can handle local taxes, etc. Most reasonably large countries will have an agency willing to do this.. for a fee of course. If you get, say, Facebook or IBM or Microsoft large then you just have lots of regional offices to handle this.
johansch 13y ago
One big issue with providing a service like that is that in countries with strong employee rights it would have to take on quite a lot of risk. Another solution I have seen in real life is to ask the foreign "employee" to create a one-person company that bills the "employer".
zura 13y ago
Contracts. Really that simple. You just put images of your signature in some contract pdf and that's all...
PeterisP 13y ago
For me the simplest way to work for from EU to a USA company would be to register a mini-company for myself. I don't have one, but many freelancers do it just for local customers, because you can get a bit of tax savings that way. The process then is simply making a periodic invoice from my company to yours; the ongoing costs involved would be whatever an international money tranfer costs for you, + I'd pay something like $50/mth to a local accounting company to handle all the taxes&reporting for that. I don't know of any full "remote employment as a service", but there are a lot of outsourced accounting companies who'd do the taxes & paperwork - most local small businesses do it this way, since there's not enough work to have a full-time accountant/finance person on board. Actually executing payments and managing days off is a bit trickier, since the first requires full access to the company funds, and the second involves managing people, which is hard to outsource - you probably could get them to calculate 'what is owed to whom' by the local laws, but you'd have to pay salaries yourself & schedule vacations directly with the employees.

norswap 13y ago

Another (more worrying) problem is that most of us would be unable to recognize the best people if they stared you in the face.

potatolicious 13y ago
Of course we can't. Practice is critical in mastering a skill, and frankly as an industry we really don't practice the skill of recognizing the best people. At all. Hiring processes throughout the industry are entirely non-rigorous, and there is almost never any loop-closing when it comes to hiring signals and eventual job performance. We are spectacularly bad at recognizing talent because we've never sat down and rigorously connected signals to success and failure. Tech hiring is the ultimate cargo cult. It goes through fads (remember when logic puzzles where the thing?), and works primarily via arguments that sound logical but were never even remotely verified. It's monkey see monkey do at a mass level.

kabdib 13y ago

The "audition filter" here will eliminate those people who are (a) really good, and (b) can get a job without such nonsense. HN has thrashed this out before, but what the heck: - My current employee agreement may prohibit me from doing such work (this is definitely true of ALL of my employers up until now) - I'm pretty sure I can get a job at a great company without such a hoop, so I'm not going to bother with yours unless I really want to work at exactly your company [unlikely] You need to work on your ability to assess candidates without involving fear-based behavior on your part.

logfromblammo 13y ago
All things considered, I am more likely to apply to a company that makes starting the process quick and easy. I already have a job. When I search for other jobs, I do that in my free time. I really hate doing it. It is tedious and very unrewarding. So I want to maximize the number of leads I create per unit of time. When I see a code audition, I see many hours of useless bullshit done in my own free time that could create at most one lead. At that point, you pretty much have to pay me to apply for your job. So much gets said about the number of applicants per position, and how to filter those. Well, the converse is true. All those people are also applying to multiple job openings. They filter based on published requirements and ease of application. Not only do you want to hire the best applicants, but you also need to make sure that the best people become applicants in the first place. That won't happen if the very first thing you do is prove unequivocally that you do not value other people's time.
- swampthing 13y ago
  If the applicant doesn't get anything out of it, then it would be a waste of their time. But as an applicant, wouldn't you also want to make sure that your potential future coworkers / managers are people you'd want to work with? You're evaluating the company just as much as they're evaluating you.
  - cwp 13y ago
    Agreed. But what an audition tells me about the company is that everybody there was willing to put up with it. Anybody who has lots of options probably didn't end up there. So maybe the company is so awesome that good people were willing to jump through hoops to get hired there, but even so it's a pretty safe bet that they don't have the the best and brightest working for them.

ignostic 13y ago

On the point of hiring the best and brightest wherever they live: I worked for a startup that hired from all over Europe and North America. We did hire some great people, but there are definitely considerations and downsides. Here are some of the cons I noticed: 1) It took a lot of effort to discourage cliques based on location. People from different countries or parts of the country bonded more easily. New hires would also quickly bond because they didn't know anyone, but together they felt excluded by the established groups. This was critical to their happiness because they didn't usually have friends outside of work. We managed, but it does require more effort to prevent internal politics. 2) This wasn't the sort of job where everyone could work remotely, so we regularly lost people who decided to go back home. That's why I left, and I was neither the first nor the last. People miss their families and friends, especially if they miss a large event. 3) Moving people can be expensive. Obvious, so I won't elaborate. 4) Recruiting from all over is also more expensive. You may or may not need to fly people out, but you also have a lower rate of interest for the same amount of effort. On job boards you'll get 500 resumes, out of which 100 people actually realized the position requires them to move. For the low-profile startup it just takes more effort and money to get the word out to the right people across the country. Was it worth it? Sometimes. In the end, you need to consider whether the position is really worth the extra time and cost of hiring or whether you can find local talent that will do as well. The issues I've raised above are obviously harder for positions where "telecommuting" doesn't work.

PeterisP 13y ago
The whole point of the article is explicitly on hiring people who aren't willing to relocate - those who are eager to move to SF already make up the current market. What are the positions where "telecommuting" doesn't work and reasons for that? The OP argues that for pretty much all development jobs that isn't the case, and gives examples of how successful companies have implemented this.

mbesto 13y ago

I live in SF and operate a startup in the US but almost exclusively work with resources outside of the US. I believe this model, with it's challenges, does work and can work for many business. I also believe that many talented people (right now many of them coming from Eastern Europe and South America) lack the ability to get exposure to opportunities from well funded US (mainly SV) based companies. That being said, if anyone (mainly front-end UX/UI, iOS, android, rails/django, node, and various MVVC js frameworks) who feel you are talented but aren't getting the right opportunities to work on cool, well-funded projects in the US, feel free to get in touch.

Axsuul 13y ago
Same here, been working exclusively with devs from Eastern Europe and it's been working great. Also want to plug that we're always looking for capable Rails devs so hit me up if you're interested!

Aloisius 13y ago

I'd much rather hire very good and local to the best and remote. Someone who comes into the office adds so much more to the company besides the work they produce. They attract other very good people just by virtue of being there. They contribute to things outside their specific job description in ways that a remote person can't (company policies, culture, company direction, leads on customers, etc - often serendipitously). They are frankly worth more in an acquisition scenario because they are more likely to stay with the company. They can grow into senior or leadership roles in a way that a remote person simply can't. Frankly, I think the best and the brightest is kind of a mythical unicorn anyway. If you keep chasing them, you'll end up passing on a lot of great people.

hga 13y ago
This is one of the first really good points I've seen against remote workers, at least for smaller companies. E.g. just because I'm that way, bought my first DECtape in 1978 (sic), backup my home systems on LTO-4 today, I almost always ended up being the guy who did the company's backups at the startups I joined. Especially if you can't afford a tape library, you've got to be there to do that, to make damned sure it gets done. Or someone asks me, a couple of decades ago, "we're dissatisfied with our ISP, you know any good ones?" and I say "well, I've been personally using DIGEX for a few years and they have their act together." Etc. All outside the scope of my official work as a programmer. Or even more obscure, one of the things my family back home back then did was real estate and I picked up a lot of things by osmosis, and later reassured several sets of small company management that the clock cycle of that field was much, much slower than ours, and they didn't necessarily have to be concerned by how long it was taking to get new office space etc. Again, something I'd not be able to contribute without being there to hear them grumbling about the issue. Also, if someone wants to politically trash you, being remote puts you at a terrible disadvantage. I had that happen when I mostly "dissapeared" for 6 weeks to produce a MVP a potential client challenged us to make, because I had a much faster machine at home and didn't have an office mate who's job it was to talk a lot on the phone (yeah, the company didn't get several things). Completely gratuitous, the guy was of ill intent, left the company taking our biggest customer which probably doomed it. But it, well both of those, set up the conditions for my getting constructively terminated as soon as I finished V1.0 with my team, and with the guy I'd mentored on what was almost his first job into a good software engineer, leaving soon after, removing all knowledge of the system's backend from the company, that product died.

forgottenpass 13y ago

Ideally, your audition project should be a regular consulting gig with an hourly rate and a clearly defined mission statement. Select a small project that can be done in a few days, maybe at most a week or two. Let the candidate choose to come into the office or work remotely. So, only hire people that can afford to quit their current job for an interview? Or at least blow all their vacation time on you?

megablast 13y ago
Just like IT projects, there is no silver bullet to interviewing, and you have rightly brought up some good points about why this will not work. Despite producing over 60 apps for the iOs app store, a new employer wanted me to whip up an app with a tableview that is sortable and searchable. I told them to stop wasting my time.

Jemaclus 13y ago

I agree with most of the article. My problem with the "Hire by Audition" section is a little more robust. I currently have a job. If I'm looking for a job, then I'm doing that in my free time. If I'm looking for a full time job, I'm not looking for a contract job. Now imagine that I've applied to five companies. Each of those five companies has given me an "audition," something that I can take a week to do. I necessarily have to do this in my free time -- I can't very well do it at my current job! -- and not only do I have to solve your problem, but I generally have to do it within some sort of constraint that you normally have, whether that's your codebase or your language or whatever. I'm going to spend a significant portion of that time simply getting up to speed with that constraint. Maybe I have to install Ruby or I have to install Symfony or I have to study the documentation for Twilio. Who knows? I've never yet had an "audition" like this that didn't require me to sign an NDA, then install that company's codebase and work within that codebase. And I've rarely been able to do this in one or two nights of work. Usually one night of work is spent simply installing it, the second night studying what's going on, and then the third, fourth, and possibly fifth nights actually fixing the problem, testing it, and making sure it's good enough to submit. It's a lot of work to ask me to do, even if you're paying me as a contractor, because again, I'm not looking to be a contractor. I'm looking to be a full-time employee. I want to solve your real-world problems much more than I want to answer academic questions, but at the same time, you have to respect my time as well. I don't want to waste your time by not giving you enough data to make an educated decision about hiring me, but you should also not waste my time by giving me a task that takes up my entire free time for a week. There's a happy medium here. I don't know what it is, exactly, other than letting me solve the problem my own way with my own code and my own tools, but if I do that, then it's not "something you would give your employees right now if they weren't so busy," right? Maybe. The rest of it is fairly spot on, I guess. Just my two cents.

johnjlocke 12y ago
If you are happy with your current job, then there is no need to apply to a different job, so this scenario would never come up for you.
nswanberg 13y ago
At this point in Jeff's company he is looking for someone who wants to get paid to work on Discourse, not simply have a job. Someone who wants that would not think much of following the easy instructions to get Discourse, install it, and be able to make a small contribution to the project (not sure about contributing but the download and install process is extremely easy and is sort of a fizz-buzz test in itself). I don't know if this good advice for everyone looking to hire but it seems like filtering for both ability and motivation is a good idea for young, growing companies. The problem with any discussion here on HN is that, judging by replies, many commenters feel insecure whenever an idea is proposed that they feel could exclude them from a job, even though typically these ideas do not spread, and most people need only one full-time job at a time (writing about interviewing has the same problem. See the first few paragraphs of http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-google.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...). I agree that if every company started this practice in the same way, applying for five jobs at the same time while currently working at one would be difficult. But it seems very unlikely that would happen in practice.

bri3d 13y ago

I see a lot of drawbacks to the consulting project: 1) Anti-moonlighting clauses 2) Time commitment from both parties 3) Tax/thought overhead to signing agreements and getting paid. This way I'm a 1099 everywhere I interview. There's a reason I'm not an independent consultant full-time. 4) Different challenges. How do you objectively, fairly evaluate candidates when they're given a different issue to fix or different feature to implement? But I agree that work-samples are essential to good hiring. A staged, small-challenge approach (like Thomas Ptacek / Matasano use) seems better to me from the standpoint of an interviewee for a few reasons: 1) Less overall time commitment. 2) Fail-fast. If I blow the first hour(s?) long screen, I'm done. No weeks of work involved. 3) Consistent, fair evaluation. Presumably a set of "canned" challenges are used and the time taken and quality of output can be evaluated directly against the performance of others.

sliverstorm 13y ago
Speaking of moonlighting clauses, can you imagine the legal shitstorm if you were to moonlight for a direct competitor? There's no angle in which that doesn't look bad.
- Jemaclus 13y ago
  My company's direct competitor contacts me on a weekly basis to try and poach me. I'm super, super highly qualified for that job, and I could probably leverage a massive raise... but I would feel so, so dirty for doing that. It's nice to know I still have morals. ;)
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    It's fine to go to a direct competitor, I think. I'm just saying working for both at the same time would be... well, probably career-ruining in my line of work. I believe our little industry has an unwritten rule of 2-week minimum cooldown when switching companies.

Aloha 13y ago

I'd rather hire people who are good, and can do the job, rather than snag the all-stars. Driven people with practical applicable experience are all the more worthwhile to me than folks who while smarter and brighter, often need an external source of motivation beyond a paycheck.

kemiller 13y ago

The reality is, there are not enough "best people" to go around. And, for that matter, it's probably arrogant to think that your idea is so hot that you need Google/Apple/Facebook-level talent. You are much better off figuring out which imperfections you can live with, ditching any lazy elitism ("only top schools") and looking in places that are not quite so over-fished.

crimsonalucard 13y ago

Studies show proximity is just as important as talent.

lucisferre 13y ago
Which studies? Seriously I'm interested, but also why would you just state this without referencing at least one?
- walshemj 13y ago
  Rapid development by McConnell has loads of examples of where co-located teams are by far the best solution - And my several decades of experience I woudl also agree.
  - lucisferre 13y ago
    Thanks. My gut tells me there are advantages for both, but that it's at least somewhat situational. How do you feel about the fact that the book is quite dated. I mean our ability to be integrated into the team, information and workflow while working remotely has improved by leaps and bounds since 1996. He's referencing a time before, DVCS, team chats (IRC I suppose), shared work boards like Trello/Pivotal, DropBox, Google Docs, Github, screen sharing. The list really goes on and on.
    - walshemj 13y ago
      MM all promoted by sales men who want to sell you something. Video conferencing is never as good as face to face and I have used pro level video conferencing gear at BT not some 20$ webcam and crap mic. Its a bit like thin client computing which is one idea that keep coming around and around.

pacofvf 13y ago

You want the best and brightest?, just pay more money, word will spread out, the best and brightest will come to you.

mattgreenrocks 13y ago
Additionally, have interesting work. Don't complain about not finding the best engineers if you're not an engineering-centric company; by definition, you don't need the best, you just need good enough. There's nothing wrong with this.
- jrs235 13y ago
  Exactly. Interesting work goes a long ways. Some [boring] things you can't pay me enough to keep doing.
jrs235 13y ago
No, those motivated by money will come to you.
crpatino 13y ago
You will get maybe 2x more needles out of +10x more haystack. Not that it does not work, but you will need to get very good at filtering.

relet 13y ago

One problem I personally have with most remote jobs is they don't give me the same social security as I have in my own country, and don't allow me to pay my taxes locally. I want to support the community I am living in, and know that community to have my back.

dsugarman 13y ago

wow first time I have heard real sense on this topic from a SV VC. the other option beyond remote work is to physically locate your company out of SF and near the engineers (like we did!)

microjesus 13y ago

Interesting points all around. As someone working as a remote consultant; rarely if ever meeting the clients in-person: I dig this. It's interesting this culture culture where the masses have these obnoxious, noisy, single room shared workspaces where they invite employees to "collaborate". Working on-site as a requirement simply has to go.

gomox 13y ago

> Always hire the best people… who are willing to live in San Francisco ... and are allowed to do so.

lucisferre 13y ago

For some reason I can't quite articulate, I find just about all "how to hire" advice is mostly a mix of platitudes, anecdotal evidence, weighed down heavily by personal opinion. In short I don't find much if it useful in actual practice. I suppose this is true of most entrepreneurial advice.

sesqu 13y ago

The mostly unrelated world population density map [1] really distracted me, partly because of how entirely wrong it is. The map is actually of the populations of countries, not of world population density as claimed in the caption, and it's pretty aggressively thresholded, too. A density map would look something like [2], which is so dissimilar as to undermine any conclusion the reader might have drawn. [1] http://frcs3.s3.amazonaws.com.global.prod.fastly.net/library/rowImage/map1.jpg http://frcs3.s3.amazonaws.com.global.prod.fastly.net/library... [2] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/World_population_density_1994.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/World_pop...

gargarplex 13y ago

.. you're also not hiring the best and the brightest because you aren't paying enough. Top talent knows what it's worth and enjoys those rewards .. finding them through consulting, banking, or entrepreneurship. Only the mediocre are going to settle for $160k/yr + options at some "me too" A16Z startup.

walshemj 13y ago
Depends if that start up is a 10 min to walk to work and you say have a wife and newborn child to support some times you will take any job. And some one really good might take a CTO role at a me to start-up to tick that box make your mistakes where it doesn't matter then move on to bigger and better things after 18 months 2 years.
- gargarplex 13y ago
  I'm gonna just say it. The really good people know their worth and consequently have very premeditated family planning.

WWLink 13y ago

I don't think I have the guts to call myself the best and brightest lol. Does that mean I'm never going to find a job? Seems like every company insists on hiring the best and brightest, and everyone here thinks they're the best and brightest.

collyw 13y ago
I feel about the same. Looking around me I see I am maybe top 25%. There are a couple of really smart people, and a fair few that I would classify as below average.

phazmatis 13y ago

No don't tell them this. I like being mediocre but in-demand.

imroot 13y ago

I've taken a different approach to the audition -- I have something that would take a developer 8 hours to do: something that we do in the core product, but, in an entirely different context. For example: "At LowBudget Brands, we provide reservations, customer support, front desk software, and backend support for property owners who want to own a successful hotel brand. A large portion of our travelers may not know which television station to turn to or have their smartphone or other device know set to the local weather, so, LBB wants to build a solution that: -> Provides Hotel managers to create an account that allows them to set their property number and zip code -> Queries Weather Underground to determine the three and five day forecast for that zip code -> Generates a single page .pdf file with that content -> Mails the hotel the day's weather at 3 in the morning. " If you've gone through the interview process, we know that you have experience with API's, background tasks, and PDF generation...or two of the three. I pay a flat rate of $200 for this task, and then we throw it away once they're either hired or we decline. We provide a Vagrant file and an amazon t1.micro instance if that's easier, and that's proven to suit our needs rather well...

monksy 13y ago
I like your approach for a few reasons. 1. Its realistic. It has a customer and it has needs. 2. You're prepared with the resources needed. [You've thought about this before] 3. You're willing to put your money where your mouth is. I get the feeling that many of the lengthy coding tests or auditions are nothing but timewasters for punishing a new applicant. 4. It sounds like a weekend project/take home exercise.

jmzbond 13y ago

Hiring the best and brightest presumes that you, the employer are the best and most successful. On both sides of the table, society constantly pushes us to think we're number 1 when we're really not. Non-top-tier companies and top-tier companies shouldn't have the same hiring practices. Nor should non-top-tier applicants and top-tier applicants have the same recruiting strategies. Can we all stop pretending to be something we're not? The world operates on a normal curve and not everyone can be the 1%. That said, if you are the top employer, I think a great metric is simply to gauge the time an audition takes. A technical problem for the best and brightest might take a couple of hours, whereas for someone less qualified it takes much longer. And this exercise should come with suggested timing to weed out people who know they're not able to crack it in the allotted period. I think this could be a way to not have long term auditions, because what you've done is focused on creating a quality-assessment (difficulty of problem) as opposed to a quantity-assessment (length of time). I disagree with what other commenters have said; having anything but long term auditions will not sufficiently gauge fit with corporate culture. But hey if you're going around the world to hire remote workers, culture is probably not your top priority anyways.

merrua 13y ago

"I’m talking about a real world, honest-to-God unit of work that you need done right now today on your actual product." This bit sounds unethical. Your asking someone to do work for you without paying them.

MisterBastahrd 13y ago
Exactly what happened to me. I interviewed with a company from a position of weakness (I had been out of school for several years and worked as a recruiter then Katrina hit, so I was flat broke and out of a job for a year) and I was looking for my first real programming job. They had me build something for them that they decided they needed but that no candidate had been able to create so far. I built the tool in a couple of hours, learning the language along the way. They turned around and used the tool in production without compensation.

jokoon 13y ago

I hate the hiring process. I've been unemployed all my life, and an interview feels like pop idol. Everything is about the looks, the communication, what are you flaws, what do you like, why do you want to work here, etc. Maybe it's because I live in france and that employers can't easily fire people, maybe I'm not the "best and brightest", maybe I'm bad at communication, maybe I can't manage to sell myself properly, maybe I have issues. It feels like buying somebody to be a friend in a club, not paying him to do some work. I think employers like to hire people "they can trust", and I find it stupid. It's normal at first, but I wonder why there aren't any company trying to hire people who are not likable and finding ways to make the company work. I mean a company is not a group a friend doing chores and having coffee, of course you need people to behave a little, but I don't understand why it can boil down to simply exclude elements that can create "awkward situations that can put the company in danger".

lifeisstillgood 13y ago

Does anyone else have an issue with the world population map claiming the Russian steppes have a population density on a par with the South East of England? Or am I bad at reading keys on maps?