18 ms·

How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

599 points by chl 12y ago

bjterry 12y ago
Google cache since site is down: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bfmrmRKzUdEJ:www.noshortageofwork.com/pages/4063+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bfmrmRK...
- bbcbasic 12y ago
  Pastebin for posterity when case Google Cache expires: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=QtePMR26 http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=QtePMR26
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  And Coral Cache (it'll have to rely on the page coming back up at least briefly): http://brookeallen.com.nyud.net/pages/archives/1234 http://brookeallen.com.nyud.net/pages/archives/1234
deedubaya 12y ago
When you hire for a person, you find that personality traits are much more important than what an applicant has done in the past, including passion, drive, etc. When you hire to fill a position, all this goes out the window the applicant goes into the hiring lottery pool to maybe get an interview, and then the traditional "You could totally goog this IRL, but I'm going to hire you based off your memory" type of hiring.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- bbcbasic 12y ago
  I find that > 90% of interviews to be the latter, unfortunately. The ones where I got the job were the former! I am stronger at concepts than memory.
  - dccoolgai 12y ago
    The worst is when you have to go through one of those interviews with some smug hoser across from you whose face is contorted into a rictus grin because you couldn't recall, immediately from memory, some obscure Junior Year Computer Science thing. It's just amazing how bad the hiring situation is - It makes me a lot less likely to look around because I just don't want to go through that.
    - buckbova 12y ago
      This of course goes both ways. If you put on your resume that you have expert/mastery level experience in technology X, don't be surprised if I drill you on it.
      - midnightclubbed 12y ago
        Because a good percentage of those experts then surprise interviewers by not having even a basic level of understanding of the subject. Usually those resumes were 'edited' by an agency trying to get their 20%.
    - MichaelGG 12y ago
      Yet the number of interviewees with a CS degree that can't even explain a basic algorithm, like traversing linked lists or binary search, is staggering.
      - RandallBrown 12y ago
        It's amazing how the brain can totally blank in stressful situations.
        MichaelGG 12y ago
        Eh I doubt that explains it. In my experience, the response is shock. Not "oh hmm well, lemme think". It's " I've never written that code since school! That's a terrible thing to ask! Why would I ever write that? " Also, for trivial algorithms and data structures, mind blanking is a potentially bad sign. Like, if you cannot explain the idea of garbage collection (not necessarily implementation details), then I gotta question your understanding of your environment.
- humanrebar 12y ago
  > When you hire for a person, you find that personality traits are much more important than what an applicant has done in the past, including passion, drive, etc. For early- to mid-career developers, definitely. But I wouldn't hire a fixer-upper architect (or systems specialist) then turn him loose on business-critical parts of my system. That's not to say you can't hire an architect for her big upside, but you'd want someone to collaborate on important decisions until she's proven herself capable and trustworthy.
  - deedubaya 12y ago
    Agreed. However, saying personality traits are much more important doesn't reduce the value of past experiences.
- kyllo 12y ago
  This is a very wise observation.
Yhippa 12y ago
In the US are there legal reasons why employers generally are tight-lipped about why a candidate didn't get hired?
- sosuke 12y ago
  I've always thought so, and I figure it is a case of our sue-happy culture and a cover your ass tactic "anything you say can and will be used against you" kind of fear. I'd love to have reached out to some applicants in the past to offer help, but what if they don't want any?
  - tacostakohashi 12y ago
    It would be nice if, at the start of the application process, companies could ask you if you would like to agree not to sue them in exchange for open, honest feedback, e.g. notes from your interviewers. Sometimes its pretty clear if you are not a good match, but sometimes its really not, and it seems like it would be best for both parties if certain kind of feedback could be provided, e.g. you were close, please consider applying in a year or two with some more experience, or we have decided not to hire anybody due to a later hiring freeze, but otherwise we would hire you - or, you are a unlikely to ever work in this industry, don't waste anybody's time with further applications (maybe some suggestions for better fits). In general, more information leads to more efficient markets benefits all participants.
    - dustingetz 12y ago
      in my experience, if one understands and explicitly acknowledges their reasoning for not giving feedback, one can connect with their interviewers directly as a human and receive frank feedback. One just has to make it clear that they are not a risk.
      - halflings 12y ago
        Yeah, good luck with that. I've already had some extremely surprising interview results and tried really hard to get feedback from the recruiters. They would just keep repeating the same words: "Our policy is to refrain from giving feedback to the interviewees."
seagreen 12y ago
"So, here is my answer to the question, “What do we owe the people who we do not hire?” 1. Information on where they stand. 2. An explanation of what they are doing wrong. 3. Help improving." Nope! You don't owe them those things. Good for the author that they tried it and it worked out, but it's not a general rule. Everything works smoother in lots of different parts of life if all parties understand the concept of a Clean No. Not "You can say No but then you still owe me such and such". Just "No." Anything beyond that is a gift.
- slagfart 12y ago
  Works out smoother for who? The candidate? Hardly. You've short-changed them after you've wasted their time. Works out smoother for you? I think you're losing a great chance to build networks and keep potentially great resources in touch. I don't think that a modern hiring manager can afford to think this way, especially when tech wages are so high.
  - seagreen 12y ago
    Man, I wish we had better discussion tools than pure text:( The author (1) took an action in a specific situation, and (2) generalized that action out to a broader rule covering hiring in general. The author's actions in (1) were absolutely correct (especially after giving the applicants a three week course!). The author's generalization (2) is just wrong.
- blazespin 12y ago
  Legally, yes, morally no.
- protl 12y ago
  You've spent the time evaluating a candidate enough to make a decision not to hire them, you know why you aren't going to hire them, the only extra work is passing that information on to them.
  - bbcbasic 12y ago
JeremyMorgan 12y ago
The first time I got a front page link to my site on HN, it did this exact same thing, which prompted me to move away from Wordpress. Static HTML ever since. But to comment on the article, I think this is a fantastic idea. I do wonder though how he found so many enthusiastic people. Maybe it's just a new era, but I have a hard time finding people who even want to do a 1 hour coding challenge. He got these folks who were willing to learn something, and build and spend DAYS on it? It's awesome but it seems unlikely these days. Taking that kind of time to choose the right person, then helping the other people network with other APL folks... that just spreads good vibes all around. I would like to see the "care more" trend spread in our industry. Even now with a programmer shortage companies are still unicorn hunting and making people jump through stupid hoops for jobs.
- gkop 12y ago
  Fyi, the author is a man.
  - JeremyMorgan 12y ago
    Fixed, thanks
- vonmoltke 12y ago
  > Even now with a programmer shortage companies are still unicorn hunting and making people jump through stupid hoops for jobs. What's worse is the companies who try to defend their unicorn hunts when called on it.
  - notahacker 12y ago
    And arguably in some respects this was a unicorn hunt amounting to making people jump through even stupider than usual hoops (responding with a 500 page manual!) to prove their aptitude for learning. I'm surprised that, to the extent I can make it out from rather small pictures, the applicants don't appear to be in the sort of age bracket generally associated with unpaid internships... Difference is, it balanced an unusually onerous assessment with the unusual reward of a de facto guarantee that anyone persistent and smart enough to get through it all would get a job at the end. I hope it paid as well as they presumably thought it would. There are a few companies out there with a desire to build an ecosystem on obscure or unproven technology that could and probably should experiment with elements of this as a hiring strategy. Getting the class to vote on who gets the [first] jobs is particularly neat; it both selects the most effective team member(s) and leaves the rest with the impression they weren't ruled out of contention by the hiring manager and therefore shouldn't be deterred from reapplying in future
ChuckMcM 12y ago
Money quote : "I started No Shortage of Work to encourage my unemployed friends to re-frame their status not as a disaster but as an opportunity to explore new vistas." This is something which people often forget, is that learning needs to happen life long, it isn't a 'did college, check that box.' kind of thing, its about always learning. Its the first thing I check for when I look at people to hire.
nostromo 12y ago
I have mixed feelings about this. It's easy to see what's to love: an open, honest, and collaborative hiring process with a boss willing to train employees. Awesome! But he also got about 30 people to spend four weeks building trading software for him. Collectively that's over two years of uncompensated work, the results of which the hiring manager may use for free. And from the perspective of the applicant, how many applications could they complete in a year if all were so time intensive? 12? 24? I suspect many top applicants would avoid this process entirely.
- jimbokun 12y ago
  But the interesting part is he found a way to help a lot of the people who didn't get the job benefit from the process, which is exceedingly rare. It was also interesting that there seemed to be a lot of collaboration among the applicants, even though they were all competing for one position.
- slantedview 12y ago
  I second this concern. The problem isn't the free work aspect of things - I don't mind working on things for free that I enjoy - it's the finite nature of time. I, and probably most good engineers, don't have this amount of time to spend on things such as this for a hiring that will probably not happen.
- spott 12y ago
  >But he also got about 30 people to spend four weeks building trading software for him. I don't think he did. He got 13 people to work on problems for 3 weeks. (I assume the rest of the 30 bailed at some point). They also weren't obligated to stick around (though it turned out valuable to them as well). And they picked up a new skill (APL programming). They also asked for it: "Twenty-seven of the applicants suggested I teach them all first and then make a hiring decision."
- ars 12y ago
  It didn't seem like that to me - the time wasn't spent building the software but rather learning APL. So it was valuable to the students.
- 12y ago
sekasi 12y ago
I've done a LOT of interviewing, recruiting and ultimately a lot of saying "no" to people. Over the years I've landed on a series of personal rules on how to do just that. 1. Always explain rationale around the No, to help them improve 2. Always let people down gently reinforcing positive notions as well, you never know what state of mind they are in. 3. Always respond to requests for more information This takes me a lot of time in my professional life, but it's making me a happier person. Ultimately, it's people's lives you're dealing with. You don't owe anyone anything, but life is about treating people well.
- humanrebar 12y ago
  > Always explain rationale around the No, to help them improve This is my inclination: "We liked your attitude, you seem intelligent, and well-spoken, but we have concerns about your knowledge of <some key area>, maybe start contributing to <open source project> or experiment in <technology> and reapply in a year or two." ...my concern is opening up my company for legal liabilities. Am I just being paranoid?
  - ghswa 12y ago
    If you're that worried why not cut it short to "We liked your attitude, you seem intelligent, and well-spoken, but we have concerns about your knowledge of <some key area>." There can't be any risk there, surely?
  - sekasi 12y ago
    I've never had any issues in years and years. I guess as long as you're being positive about it, and try to reinforce the shortcomings versus the positives it ends up being a good conversation. Always do it over the phone, email doesn't cut it.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - fecak 12y ago
    Based on what you wrote, you're probably being paranoid. I deliver lots of 'No' answers as well, and I don't see any issues with what you wrote. Legal liability tends to be around the generic responses where candidates may assume the worst (race, gender/orientation, age, etc.). A specific response that points to a lack of experience in a certain area seems a safer bet than 'not a fit' in most cases.
bbcbasic 12y ago
To generalize the point a bit: I don't think enough companies are doing enough to help the ecosystem. Like foresters chopping down the Amazon, or fishers taking the last fish from the ocean, they want to harvest good talent and then stick them in jobs where they can be a cog in the wheel it is hard to grow. They expect other companies to have given them the training or perfect relevant experience. And then we hear complaints there there is a shortage of hackers etc.!
- humanrebar 12y ago
  I completely agree. I would include supporting open source projects as another way to practice sustainable development. Many kinds of personalities wilt in corporate environments that could work (for relatively cheap wages) on open source projects that benefit everyone.
  - bbcbasic 12y ago
    I read Michael Church's blog and from reading that I am convinced that we are our own worst enemy. We spend our spare time writing open source code, which then businesses can profit from without having to pay any of their own staff. I think companies should allow staff to spend some time on open source. It could even benefit the company by having their name associated with it, making it seem like a cool place to work, and having CV's coming in the 'we're hiring' page begging for an interview instead of expensive agencies. But there you go.
    - kyllo 12y ago
      I think it's somewhat of a misconception that most OSS is written for free in professional programmers' spare time. For small projects yes, but corporations aren't using their code anyway. OSS projects that are prominent enough to achieve corporate adoption, often have a staff of core maintainers that are employed by a company that makes money selling support for that OSS software. Why? Because corporations are risk averse and using OSS without a support service contract is a risk they won't take. Unless they are a software company capable of directly supporting the OSS themselves, in which case you also get devs contributing to OSS projects on company time. I don't have statistics for this, but I can easily cite a lot of examples. On the other hand, there are also a lot of contributors that do it for free but they are not doing it purely out of the goodness of their own heart either. A lot of them are doing it either because they are heavy users of the project and/or to practice and build up their portfolio (read: Github profile) to help them get a job.
S4M 12y ago
This hiring process is great, but requires lots of time, for the applicants and especially for the hiring manager - I suspect the author was targeting unemployed people, so they would have time for this long application (he put his job advert on the New York Times). To be honest, that is what surprised me the most in this article: that someone who runs a statistical arbitrage desk has the time for all of this. I wonder if companies could collaborate to create this hiring process. It would save hiring manager's time, applicants' time since one application will count for different jobs, and then a system could be set for candidates to rank their employees, then the candidate who performs the best get his first wish, the second candidate gets is first wish if there is still room, otherwise he gets his second wish, and so on - a similar system is being used in France for students to chose in which universities they want to go after competitive exam entrance, basically lots of universities pool exams together. On one hand it would scale hiring process, on the other hand it's not flexible and offers have to be transparent (it's currently not the case but maybe that would be a good thing), and it would hurt the pride of companies who are ranked in the last position. In the case of the article, I am sure someone who is able to solve in a language he recently learn the non trivial software that are mentioned will be able to land a job at some point. It was written in 2004, maybe Github, Stackoverflow and Open Source in general are now contributing to that selection.
fecak 12y ago
I sometimes consult to clients on improving their hiring process. Candidate experience is now a topic that at least some companies consider. This isn't your typical candidate experience - applying for a vague job ad, being asked to answer 6 puzzle questions, invite to an open house, two days of free training and then left alone for three weeks, followed by a vote by the tribe to see who will get the job. It's definitely a plus that many of the students were hired elsewhere, but this is likely a method that would only appeal to the unemployed. I hear quite a bit of negative feelings towards companies that ask for extensive amounts of time commitment during the hiring process, and this is probably the highest level I remember. If most companies asked candidates to go through this process, I expect they would want (and feel entitled to) some explanation at the end of the process.
- courtf 12y ago
  Good points here. Some of those who left the process in the beginning may have simply had better things to spend the next month on, not because they were inferior candidates. I like the tone of the article in general, but it does smack of a certain entitlement on the employer's part whereby they feel justified in extracting many thousands of dollars of free work from unemployed job seekers. Despite the admirable intentions, the caveat that some of those who didn't receive a job immediately were later hired elsewhere is only meager consolation, as I'm sure there were significant contributors who were not proportionally compensated.
  - UberMouse 12y ago
    >extracting many thousands of dollars of free work from unemployed job seekers I didn't get the impression that they provided any value to the person hiring them. To me it just seems like they got some interesting, hopefully fun training in APL over a couple weeks. If I was unemployed and had the spare time (Like I was a couple months ago) that sounds like something I would have loved to do.
- arenaninja 12y ago
  This is very true. I was invited for a company with pretty interesting problems. Here's their entire hiring process: * Initial phone screening, 30 minutes * One two-hour problem, via e-mail * One over-the-phone interview, one hour * One five-day problem (yes, five days) * One final in-person interview I had an offer already on the table, and when it was obvious that they were unwilling/unable to accelerate their process (e.g.: had to wait three days for the over-the-phone interview, meanwhile the clock is ticking on my live offer), I decided that it wasn't worth it; mostly because I always crash and burn on the in-person "let's see if we like you" interview (I'm not an asshole, I'm simply uninteresting to most people because I'm expected to share everything about me within 2 hours with people I've never met before). Ultimately, I went with the offer on the table. No regrets yet.
pg_is_a_butt 12y ago
"Internal Server Error" maybe you should have hired that website guy
smacktoward 12y ago
I wonder how much of this kind of thinking can be traced back to a persistent startup-culture problem: the delusion that the people who work for you are, or even should be, your friends. If that's the lens you're looking at candidates through -- as people auditioning to be your friend -- of course you'd feel you're obligated to help them through their job search! That's what friends do for each other. But the people who work for you -- and even more so, the people who have only applied to work for you -- are not your friends. You can (and should!) be friendly with them, of course; but you can't have a real, true friendship with them, because you have power over their lives that they don't have over yours. Moreover, if you try to just ignore that power differential and relate to your employees like they're your old dorm buddies, all you'll find is that the power differential poisons the relationship. They'll constantly be second-guessing their own reactions to you, out of fear of negative job consequences. You'll constantly be second-guessing your own reactions to them, out of fear of appearing to play favorites. And they'll all be second-guessing each others' reactions to you, out of fear of someone brown-nosing their way past them on the career ladder. It's the same reason why it's always a bad idea to date someone who reports to you -- you can never have the kind of relationship with them you have with someone outside the hierarchy you sit at the top of. Suspicion and jealousy and gamesmanship taint it from the moment it begins. The solution to all these problems is to learn, understand, and internalize the distinction between colleagues and friends -- two groups of people you owe very different things to -- and then act accordingly.
shortcircuit01 12y ago
This story reminds me of how broken software engineer interviewing is. Imagine if a company decided to hire software engineers by giving them five 6-sided dice. Then they have to come to the company building and roll each dice once every hour. And during that hour they have to dance and sing in front of someone while being recorded. If they roll all 6 on all 5 dice, their dancing and singing will be judged by the committee! And if the committee likes their performance they might get the job! The acceptance rate is 0.01%, the company is so elite. And this company is also complaining about a software engineer shortage. They wish they could find more good engineers! It's pretty obvious which company (or group of companies) I'm referring to. The interviewing process of these companies has done great harm to the software industry. And now they're trying to do further harm by using it as an excuse to get cheap foreign labor to reduce salaries.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- bvanslyke 12y ago
  Palantir?
  - selimthegrim 12y ago
    I believe he or she is talking about Google.
    - twright0 12y ago
      Google's acceptance rate is well above .01%, just using basic reasoning. Google employs tens of thousands of engineers, which means they would have had to reject hundreds of millions of candidates for the role of software engineer.
      - theatgrex 12y ago
soheil 12y ago
"Resource Limit Is Reached" this is how
BrookeTAllen 12y ago
Hi, this is Brooke, author of the original story. Wow, other than the grief I'm going to get from my ISP I'm so glad to see all this and when I get a chance over the next few days I'd like to add more. Some quickies: I've generalized this approach and talk about it in a Quartz article: http://qz.com/88168/how-to-hire-good-people-instead-of-nice-people/ http://qz.com/88168/how-to-hire-good-people-instead-of-nice-...
- bovermyer 12y ago
  You might want to look into Cloudflare to help protect your site from the HN/Digg effect. Free CDN FTW. Also, great story!
BrookeTAllen 12y ago
Hey, other then the grief I'm going to get from my ISP this is great that you're interested. While we figure out how to get my site working again, I wrote this in quartz: http://qz.com/88168/how-to-hire-good-people-instead-of-nice-people/ http://qz.com/88168/how-to-hire-good-people-instead-of-nice-... and this for Science Magazine: http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2007_11_16/caredit.a0700163 http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previou... And there is this Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/BrookeAllen1/brooke-allen-has-a-better-way-of-hiring http://www.slideshare.net/BrookeAllen1/brooke-allen-has-a-be...
jlukanta 12y ago
Google Cache mirror: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1tQlU00Ks7MJ:brookeallen.com/pages/archives/1234+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1tQlU00...
BrookeTAllen 12y ago
Hi, this is Brooke, the original hiring manager. I'm new to HN so please excuse me if I violate protocol. I agree, life is about treating people well. However, although I find hiring is probably the single most satisfying thing I did on my job, it was very hard emotionally because in the case of nearly everyone I don’t’ hire it is because they say “NO” to me, and boy, rejection hurts. But at least I have a job and my candidates usually don’t. More later but first… If my site is unresponsive there is this on slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/BrookeAllen1/brooke-allen-has-a-better-way-of-hiring http://www.slideshare.net/BrookeAllen1/brooke-allen-has-a-be... I've generalized my approach to hiring all sorts and describe it here: http://qz.com/88168/how-to-hire-good-people-instead-of-nice-people/ http://qz.com/88168/how-to-hire-good-people-instead-of-nice-... … When I'm lucky enough to talk to programmers I'll describe it this way... I don’t want to be stuck in Von Neumann’s bottleneck so rather than me processing candidates in series with the question “Who do I want to hire” I take an OO approach and send a different question, “Who wants to work for me?” to my candidates so they can work on it in parallel. Since hiring is an elimination process I let them eliminate me in the first rounds. I don’t say “no” but I have to take a lot of it, which can be hard on the ego, particularly if I judge people too early and start to want one person over another. Desire is at the root of suffering. (Any fans of the move The Tao of Steve? Formula for getting the girl: 1) Be desireless. 2) Be excellent in her presence, 3) Let her desire you.) I try to be the most flawed (e.g. honest) but-striving-to-be-excellent person I can be in front of my candidates and hope they will be the same for me (and magically they are). If we’re not going to be who we are before we start working together who do we plan on being afterward? Because eliminating candidates is the name of the game, I concentrate on the negatives and that way there are only positive surprised later. Arguably many of my “best” candidates might eliminate themselves, but I’m not looking for the best – I can never afford them anyway – I am looking for the most appropriate for my budget, which I state early on and is almost never subject to negotiation. You cannot increases your desirability to offer to work for less, and if you are worth more than I can afford than I’m sorry, but I cannot afford you. I want what I call hidden talent; those good at doing a job but bad at getting one. After all, the last thing I want you to be good at on my job is getting the next one. I'll help you find a better job before I hire you because afterward we've got to hunker down and get some friggin' work done. Because I form an intentional temporary community of my candidates, and task them with something hard but meaningful that benefits them (like learning a new skill and/or helping each other find work) then by the time I say “yes” to someone everyone else agrees with the decision. In fact, in 10 years only once did a person tell me he thought I had made a mistake by not hiring him and the other candidates were so outraged they jumped all over him and one – who happened to be a lawyer – offered to defend me pro bono if he tried any funny business. I never heard from him again but it is my great pleasure to say he is an exception in that regard and I count a few of the people I haven’t hired among my friends. This is a wonderful side-benefit because as I get older it is harder to make new friends, and it is certainly unwise to treat employees as friends as some do. I seldom tell individual candidates what they did wrong, not because I am shy, but because it can be hard to take and I’m fairly tactless. However, I will offer a class on how to find work in which I anonymize specifics enough so as to benefit those who can identify themselves. Also, most people don’t do anything seriously wrong other than be unqualified or unlucky; no shame in that. More later, if you’re interested. After 30 years I’ve retired from the capital markets and they will do fine without me, but the markets for human capital are severely broken. Because I’m not ready to die, stop working, or give up on having a life's purpose, if you would like me to help you crack this nut then please do not hesitate in contacting me.
midnightclubbed 12y ago
So unless I'm reading the cached text wrongly 38 people read the given manual and answered programming questions based on it. They then met informally. Lets say they burnt a day on this. 27 of those people then suggested being taught how to program in APL (after building a classroom). I'm assuming anyone who didnt want to attend got cut. 3 additional days spent. They were then given 3 weeks to solve some difficult problems. Estimating they spent 4 days solving those problems. They then re-met and were interviewed. Another day spent. So to get to the end a candidate had to spend best part of two work weeks doing nothing but learning and programming an obscure language. No time for interviewing elsewhere, earning a wage, or attending college classes. I would really hope he cared about the majority of the candidates who spent so much of their own time and money to be rejected with nothing to show for it. Most companies would have interviewed a couple of times, given a few hours of programming/aptitude testing and made a decision as to whether to hire the person (and teach them the job while paying them a fair wage). Feel free to vote down if I'm getting this all wrong or an being overly cynical.
- nathan-muir 12y ago
  Totally agree. They should have received a wage, as the learning program wouldn't result in a qualification, and was mostly a part of a hiring process. If there were a wage involved, potentially more of the original applicants could afford to go through the hiring process. At least the modern standard is to pay the potential hire as a contractor / consultant to do a few small projects, and then decide if you'd like to hire them on as an employee.
- pcthrowaway 12y ago
  I'd like to offer an alternative perspective. The author was both willing to hire people with no experience, and provided free training to candidates. I realize that APL isn't a skill in incredibly high demand, but I think the author may have helped these candidates out in the long term. The ones with the most aptitude for programming were able to discover that aptitude (and "a number" of them were hired because of their investment), and the less apt candidates got a little bit of training and possibly an indication that if they are interested in programming they would have to accept putting in a bit more effort than the more apt candidates.
grimmfang 12y ago
Google cache of this page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1tQlU00Ks7MJ:brookeallen.com/pages/archives/1234+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1tQlU00...
sunstone 12y ago
How bad can it get? Several years ago I had a Russian team lead at a software company who ate code for breakfast (clearly the top guy amongst over 100 coders) and had excellent leadership qualities. Later, when the financial crisis hit he was out of work and I found out that he was really bad at interviews. Ever since I've wondered if I was hiring would I be able the spot the diamond in the rough where evidently, very few companies/people can. I'm still not sure.
fogleman 12y ago
So, here is my answer to the question, "What do we owe the people who we do not hire?" - Information on where they stand. - An explanation of what they are doing wrong. - Help improving. Things you will never get from companies like Google.
alishan-l 12y ago
As a job seeker having recently completed a web dev bootcamp (with no prior experience), how might I go about getting my first tech job? Or, taking a step back, my first interview? I find it frustrating that entry-level positions seek people with years of experience.
- joshdotsmith 12y ago
  One thing to keep in mind is that "entry-level" means the most junior position with that company, not "entry-level" into the workforce at large. I found this equally frustrating in non-technical jobs after I graduated college (with a liberal arts degree). It's a rather encumbered naming convention.
spydum 12y ago
The real solution here is not to interview people, but to discover people OUTSIDE of a hiring scenario, and recruit them after you've determined they would be a great fit (inverting the game). It's just unfortunate that it is much more effort to invest as the employer, but it is essentially the best way for everybody involved.
skazka16 12y ago
I interviewed an engineer today. Probably a lot of companies would not hire him. He was not that great. I said "Yes" because I noticed a passion and a huge desire to learn and grow. We'll see if that was a mistake or not.
anon4 12y ago
Or "How my life improved once I started making friends"
jdudek 12y ago
This is quite similar to how we hire Ruby on Rails developers. We organise two-weeks long Bootcamp where we train people in Rails. At the end we offer some of them to join us as junior developers, with further training during next year. Those who are not hired still win—they receive two weeks of training which helps them find jobs elsewhere. We’ve had some fantastic hires this way over the past two years. This article made my think that maybe we can do better and provide more assistance to those we do not hire after Bootcamp. More details about our Bootcamps are available at http://pilot.co/bootcamp http://pilot.co/bootcamp.
edem 12y ago
Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 9961472) (tried to allocate 19456 bytes) in /home/quest15/public_html/brookeallen.com/pages/wp-includes/taxonomy.php on line 959
sonabinu 12y ago
brilliant!
normloman 12y ago
This sounds like the job search from hell. Let's break down this trainwreck: 1. The guy posts a vauge help-wanted ad that implies no experience is required. Then he's surprised that 300 people applied and none had relevant experience. 2. He asks applicants to read a 500 page manual, then solve some programming puzzles. With no pay. As if the applicants have nothing better to do. In the rest of the story, the guy does a nice thing for the remaining applicants. But why does he ask candidates to jump through so many hoops for this job, especially when, as he states in the ad, experience is not required. Not every unemployed person has the time to read a manual, waste time solving puzzles, or attending a class with no guarantee of employment. Some of them really need jobs. Some of them have bills to pay. Some of them have other opportunities, and can't afford to put their life on hold while you make up your mind.
ErikRogneby 12y ago
I attended a bootcamp at ArsDigita on building database backed web applications back in 1999. I don't recall now if it was two weeks or three, but the things I learned in that short time have been useful in almost every job I've had since. Just knowing my way around Oracle an PL/SQL landed me a position at a telecom. The bootcamp was free, and at the end of the bootcamp after a code review I was offered an interview. I declined because I didn't want to live in Boston. I realize that Philips motives weren't entirely altruistic but I am sincerely thankful that he took this approach to staffing up.
freework 12y ago
The best example I've seen for putting together a team comes from my high school football team. Instead of tryouts, they let anyone play who wants to play. The best players excel from day one, but the crappy players quit after a few days. The coach never says to a player "we've decided you aren't good enough, so you're off the team". It was each players decision that they came to themselves to leave the team. The guy in the article pretty takes the same approach. I've always felt the best way to interview engineers is to go over installing the company's development environment on their machine. In other words, there is no evaluation, just expectation of results.
vonnik 12y ago
FutureAdvisor's in-house recruiter here. I recently ran a hiring event in San Francisco with Brooke called Staffup Weekend. Brooke is one of the smartest, hardest-working and most generous people I know. I read the post linked to above last fall, and worked with him to bring jobseekers together to work on meaningful projects. The event was called Staffup Weekend, and it was held in the Chron building on Mission and 5th. Our hypothesis was: The only thing that correlates with performance is performance. Everything else -- degrees, pedigrees, buzzwords, interview skills -- are a waste of time. About 20 people worked through the weekend to create various apps. They made wonderful things: one was a Chrome extension that gives you the emails of the founders of the company web pages you visit. Another was a LinkedIn 2.0 for people who wanted to feature their work and themselves. We made 8 interview offers and one hire from the weekend, and I think everyone involved came away feeling like it was worth it. Write me if you're curious to learn more: chris.nicholson@futureadvisor.com

599 points by chl 12y ago

Google cache since site is down: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bfmrmRKzUdEJ:www.noshortageofwork.com/pages/4063+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bfmrmRK...

bbcbasic 12y ago
Pastebin for posterity when case Google Cache expires: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=QtePMR26 http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=QtePMR26
dredmorbius 12y ago
And Coral Cache (it'll have to rely on the page coming back up at least briefly): http://brookeallen.com.nyud.net/pages/archives/1234 http://brookeallen.com.nyud.net/pages/archives/1234

deedubaya 12y ago

When you hire for a person, you find that personality traits are much more important than what an applicant has done in the past, including passion, drive, etc. When you hire to fill a position, all this goes out the window the applicant goes into the hiring lottery pool to maybe get an interview, and then the traditional "You could totally goog this IRL, but I'm going to hire you based off your memory" type of hiring.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
bbcbasic 12y ago
I find that > 90% of interviews to be the latter, unfortunately. The ones where I got the job were the former! I am stronger at concepts than memory.
- dccoolgai 12y ago
  The worst is when you have to go through one of those interviews with some smug hoser across from you whose face is contorted into a rictus grin because you couldn't recall, immediately from memory, some obscure Junior Year Computer Science thing. It's just amazing how bad the hiring situation is - It makes me a lot less likely to look around because I just don't want to go through that.
  - buckbova 12y ago
    This of course goes both ways. If you put on your resume that you have expert/mastery level experience in technology X, don't be surprised if I drill you on it.
    - midnightclubbed 12y ago
      Because a good percentage of those experts then surprise interviewers by not having even a basic level of understanding of the subject. Usually those resumes were 'edited' by an agency trying to get their 20%.
  - MichaelGG 12y ago
    Yet the number of interviewees with a CS degree that can't even explain a basic algorithm, like traversing linked lists or binary search, is staggering.
    - RandallBrown 12y ago
      It's amazing how the brain can totally blank in stressful situations.
      - MichaelGG 12y ago
        Eh I doubt that explains it. In my experience, the response is shock. Not "oh hmm well, lemme think". It's " I've never written that code since school! That's a terrible thing to ask! Why would I ever write that? " Also, for trivial algorithms and data structures, mind blanking is a potentially bad sign. Like, if you cannot explain the idea of garbage collection (not necessarily implementation details), then I gotta question your understanding of your environment.
humanrebar 12y ago
> When you hire for a person, you find that personality traits are much more important than what an applicant has done in the past, including passion, drive, etc. For early- to mid-career developers, definitely. But I wouldn't hire a fixer-upper architect (or systems specialist) then turn him loose on business-critical parts of my system. That's not to say you can't hire an architect for her big upside, but you'd want someone to collaborate on important decisions until she's proven herself capable and trustworthy.
- deedubaya 12y ago
  Agreed. However, saying personality traits are much more important doesn't reduce the value of past experiences.
kyllo 12y ago
This is a very wise observation.

Yhippa 12y ago

In the US are there legal reasons why employers generally are tight-lipped about why a candidate didn't get hired?

sosuke 12y ago
I've always thought so, and I figure it is a case of our sue-happy culture and a cover your ass tactic "anything you say can and will be used against you" kind of fear. I'd love to have reached out to some applicants in the past to offer help, but what if they don't want any?
- tacostakohashi 12y ago
  It would be nice if, at the start of the application process, companies could ask you if you would like to agree not to sue them in exchange for open, honest feedback, e.g. notes from your interviewers. Sometimes its pretty clear if you are not a good match, but sometimes its really not, and it seems like it would be best for both parties if certain kind of feedback could be provided, e.g. you were close, please consider applying in a year or two with some more experience, or we have decided not to hire anybody due to a later hiring freeze, but otherwise we would hire you - or, you are a unlikely to ever work in this industry, don't waste anybody's time with further applications (maybe some suggestions for better fits). In general, more information leads to more efficient markets benefits all participants.
  - dustingetz 12y ago
    in my experience, if one understands and explicitly acknowledges their reasoning for not giving feedback, one can connect with their interviewers directly as a human and receive frank feedback. One just has to make it clear that they are not a risk.
    - halflings 12y ago
      Yeah, good luck with that. I've already had some extremely surprising interview results and tried really hard to get feedback from the recruiters. They would just keep repeating the same words: "Our policy is to refrain from giving feedback to the interviewees."

seagreen 12y ago

"So, here is my answer to the question, “What do we owe the people who we do not hire?” 1. Information on where they stand. 2. An explanation of what they are doing wrong. 3. Help improving." Nope! You don't owe them those things. Good for the author that they tried it and it worked out, but it's not a general rule. Everything works smoother in lots of different parts of life if all parties understand the concept of a Clean No. Not "You can say No but then you still owe me such and such". Just "No." Anything beyond that is a gift.

slagfart 12y ago
Works out smoother for who? The candidate? Hardly. You've short-changed them after you've wasted their time. Works out smoother for you? I think you're losing a great chance to build networks and keep potentially great resources in touch. I don't think that a modern hiring manager can afford to think this way, especially when tech wages are so high.
- seagreen 12y ago
  Man, I wish we had better discussion tools than pure text:( The author (1) took an action in a specific situation, and (2) generalized that action out to a broader rule covering hiring in general. The author's actions in (1) were absolutely correct (especially after giving the applicants a three week course!). The author's generalization (2) is just wrong.
blazespin 12y ago
Legally, yes, morally no.
protl 12y ago
You've spent the time evaluating a candidate enough to make a decision not to hire them, you know why you aren't going to hire them, the only extra work is passing that information on to them.
- bbcbasic 12y ago

JeremyMorgan 12y ago

The first time I got a front page link to my site on HN, it did this exact same thing, which prompted me to move away from Wordpress. Static HTML ever since. But to comment on the article, I think this is a fantastic idea. I do wonder though how he found so many enthusiastic people. Maybe it's just a new era, but I have a hard time finding people who even want to do a 1 hour coding challenge. He got these folks who were willing to learn something, and build and spend DAYS on it? It's awesome but it seems unlikely these days. Taking that kind of time to choose the right person, then helping the other people network with other APL folks... that just spreads good vibes all around. I would like to see the "care more" trend spread in our industry. Even now with a programmer shortage companies are still unicorn hunting and making people jump through stupid hoops for jobs.

gkop 12y ago
Fyi, the author is a man.
- JeremyMorgan 12y ago
  Fixed, thanks
vonmoltke 12y ago
> Even now with a programmer shortage companies are still unicorn hunting and making people jump through stupid hoops for jobs. What's worse is the companies who try to defend their unicorn hunts when called on it.
- notahacker 12y ago
  And arguably in some respects this was a unicorn hunt amounting to making people jump through even stupider than usual hoops (responding with a 500 page manual!) to prove their aptitude for learning. I'm surprised that, to the extent I can make it out from rather small pictures, the applicants don't appear to be in the sort of age bracket generally associated with unpaid internships... Difference is, it balanced an unusually onerous assessment with the unusual reward of a de facto guarantee that anyone persistent and smart enough to get through it all would get a job at the end. I hope it paid as well as they presumably thought it would. There are a few companies out there with a desire to build an ecosystem on obscure or unproven technology that could and probably should experiment with elements of this as a hiring strategy. Getting the class to vote on who gets the [first] jobs is particularly neat; it both selects the most effective team member(s) and leaves the rest with the impression they weren't ruled out of contention by the hiring manager and therefore shouldn't be deterred from reapplying in future

ChuckMcM 12y ago

Money quote : "I started No Shortage of Work to encourage my unemployed friends to re-frame their status not as a disaster but as an opportunity to explore new vistas." This is something which people often forget, is that learning needs to happen life long, it isn't a 'did college, check that box.' kind of thing, its about always learning. Its the first thing I check for when I look at people to hire.

nostromo 12y ago

I have mixed feelings about this. It's easy to see what's to love: an open, honest, and collaborative hiring process with a boss willing to train employees. Awesome! But he also got about 30 people to spend four weeks building trading software for him. Collectively that's over two years of uncompensated work, the results of which the hiring manager may use for free. And from the perspective of the applicant, how many applications could they complete in a year if all were so time intensive? 12? 24? I suspect many top applicants would avoid this process entirely.

jimbokun 12y ago
But the interesting part is he found a way to help a lot of the people who didn't get the job benefit from the process, which is exceedingly rare. It was also interesting that there seemed to be a lot of collaboration among the applicants, even though they were all competing for one position.
slantedview 12y ago
I second this concern. The problem isn't the free work aspect of things - I don't mind working on things for free that I enjoy - it's the finite nature of time. I, and probably most good engineers, don't have this amount of time to spend on things such as this for a hiring that will probably not happen.
spott 12y ago
>But he also got about 30 people to spend four weeks building trading software for him. I don't think he did. He got 13 people to work on problems for 3 weeks. (I assume the rest of the 30 bailed at some point). They also weren't obligated to stick around (though it turned out valuable to them as well). And they picked up a new skill (APL programming). They also asked for it: "Twenty-seven of the applicants suggested I teach them all first and then make a hiring decision."
ars 12y ago
It didn't seem like that to me - the time wasn't spent building the software but rather learning APL. So it was valuable to the students.
12y ago

sekasi 12y ago

I've done a LOT of interviewing, recruiting and ultimately a lot of saying "no" to people. Over the years I've landed on a series of personal rules on how to do just that. 1. Always explain rationale around the No, to help them improve 2. Always let people down gently reinforcing positive notions as well, you never know what state of mind they are in. 3. Always respond to requests for more information This takes me a lot of time in my professional life, but it's making me a happier person. Ultimately, it's people's lives you're dealing with. You don't owe anyone anything, but life is about treating people well.

humanrebar 12y ago
> Always explain rationale around the No, to help them improve This is my inclination: "We liked your attitude, you seem intelligent, and well-spoken, but we have concerns about your knowledge of <some key area>, maybe start contributing to <open source project> or experiment in <technology> and reapply in a year or two." ...my concern is opening up my company for legal liabilities. Am I just being paranoid?
- ghswa 12y ago
  If you're that worried why not cut it short to "We liked your attitude, you seem intelligent, and well-spoken, but we have concerns about your knowledge of <some key area>." There can't be any risk there, surely?
- sekasi 12y ago
  I've never had any issues in years and years. I guess as long as you're being positive about it, and try to reinforce the shortcomings versus the positives it ends up being a good conversation. Always do it over the phone, email doesn't cut it.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- fecak 12y ago
  Based on what you wrote, you're probably being paranoid. I deliver lots of 'No' answers as well, and I don't see any issues with what you wrote. Legal liability tends to be around the generic responses where candidates may assume the worst (race, gender/orientation, age, etc.). A specific response that points to a lack of experience in a certain area seems a safer bet than 'not a fit' in most cases.

bbcbasic 12y ago

To generalize the point a bit: I don't think enough companies are doing enough to help the ecosystem. Like foresters chopping down the Amazon, or fishers taking the last fish from the ocean, they want to harvest good talent and then stick them in jobs where they can be a cog in the wheel it is hard to grow. They expect other companies to have given them the training or perfect relevant experience. And then we hear complaints there there is a shortage of hackers etc.!

humanrebar 12y ago
I completely agree. I would include supporting open source projects as another way to practice sustainable development. Many kinds of personalities wilt in corporate environments that could work (for relatively cheap wages) on open source projects that benefit everyone.
- bbcbasic 12y ago
  I read Michael Church's blog and from reading that I am convinced that we are our own worst enemy. We spend our spare time writing open source code, which then businesses can profit from without having to pay any of their own staff. I think companies should allow staff to spend some time on open source. It could even benefit the company by having their name associated with it, making it seem like a cool place to work, and having CV's coming in the 'we're hiring' page begging for an interview instead of expensive agencies. But there you go.
  - kyllo 12y ago
    I think it's somewhat of a misconception that most OSS is written for free in professional programmers' spare time. For small projects yes, but corporations aren't using their code anyway. OSS projects that are prominent enough to achieve corporate adoption, often have a staff of core maintainers that are employed by a company that makes money selling support for that OSS software. Why? Because corporations are risk averse and using OSS without a support service contract is a risk they won't take. Unless they are a software company capable of directly supporting the OSS themselves, in which case you also get devs contributing to OSS projects on company time. I don't have statistics for this, but I can easily cite a lot of examples. On the other hand, there are also a lot of contributors that do it for free but they are not doing it purely out of the goodness of their own heart either. A lot of them are doing it either because they are heavy users of the project and/or to practice and build up their portfolio (read: Github profile) to help them get a job.

S4M 12y ago

This hiring process is great, but requires lots of time, for the applicants and especially for the hiring manager - I suspect the author was targeting unemployed people, so they would have time for this long application (he put his job advert on the New York Times). To be honest, that is what surprised me the most in this article: that someone who runs a statistical arbitrage desk has the time for all of this. I wonder if companies could collaborate to create this hiring process. It would save hiring manager's time, applicants' time since one application will count for different jobs, and then a system could be set for candidates to rank their employees, then the candidate who performs the best get his first wish, the second candidate gets is first wish if there is still room, otherwise he gets his second wish, and so on - a similar system is being used in France for students to chose in which universities they want to go after competitive exam entrance, basically lots of universities pool exams together. On one hand it would scale hiring process, on the other hand it's not flexible and offers have to be transparent (it's currently not the case but maybe that would be a good thing), and it would hurt the pride of companies who are ranked in the last position. In the case of the article, I am sure someone who is able to solve in a language he recently learn the non trivial software that are mentioned will be able to land a job at some point. It was written in 2004, maybe Github, Stackoverflow and Open Source in general are now contributing to that selection.

fecak 12y ago

I sometimes consult to clients on improving their hiring process. Candidate experience is now a topic that at least some companies consider. This isn't your typical candidate experience - applying for a vague job ad, being asked to answer 6 puzzle questions, invite to an open house, two days of free training and then left alone for three weeks, followed by a vote by the tribe to see who will get the job. It's definitely a plus that many of the students were hired elsewhere, but this is likely a method that would only appeal to the unemployed. I hear quite a bit of negative feelings towards companies that ask for extensive amounts of time commitment during the hiring process, and this is probably the highest level I remember. If most companies asked candidates to go through this process, I expect they would want (and feel entitled to) some explanation at the end of the process.

courtf 12y ago
Good points here. Some of those who left the process in the beginning may have simply had better things to spend the next month on, not because they were inferior candidates. I like the tone of the article in general, but it does smack of a certain entitlement on the employer's part whereby they feel justified in extracting many thousands of dollars of free work from unemployed job seekers. Despite the admirable intentions, the caveat that some of those who didn't receive a job immediately were later hired elsewhere is only meager consolation, as I'm sure there were significant contributors who were not proportionally compensated.
- UberMouse 12y ago
  >extracting many thousands of dollars of free work from unemployed job seekers I didn't get the impression that they provided any value to the person hiring them. To me it just seems like they got some interesting, hopefully fun training in APL over a couple weeks. If I was unemployed and had the spare time (Like I was a couple months ago) that sounds like something I would have loved to do.
arenaninja 12y ago
This is very true. I was invited for a company with pretty interesting problems. Here's their entire hiring process: * Initial phone screening, 30 minutes * One two-hour problem, via e-mail * One over-the-phone interview, one hour * One five-day problem (yes, five days) * One final in-person interview I had an offer already on the table, and when it was obvious that they were unwilling/unable to accelerate their process (e.g.: had to wait three days for the over-the-phone interview, meanwhile the clock is ticking on my live offer), I decided that it wasn't worth it; mostly because I always crash and burn on the in-person "let's see if we like you" interview (I'm not an asshole, I'm simply uninteresting to most people because I'm expected to share everything about me within 2 hours with people I've never met before). Ultimately, I went with the offer on the table. No regrets yet.

pg_is_a_butt 12y ago

"Internal Server Error" maybe you should have hired that website guy

smacktoward 12y ago

I wonder how much of this kind of thinking can be traced back to a persistent startup-culture problem: the delusion that the people who work for you are, or even should be, your friends. If that's the lens you're looking at candidates through -- as people auditioning to be your friend -- of course you'd feel you're obligated to help them through their job search! That's what friends do for each other. But the people who work for you -- and even more so, the people who have only applied to work for you -- are not your friends. You can (and should!) be friendly with them, of course; but you can't have a real, true friendship with them, because you have power over their lives that they don't have over yours. Moreover, if you try to just ignore that power differential and relate to your employees like they're your old dorm buddies, all you'll find is that the power differential poisons the relationship. They'll constantly be second-guessing their own reactions to you, out of fear of negative job consequences. You'll constantly be second-guessing your own reactions to them, out of fear of appearing to play favorites. And they'll all be second-guessing each others' reactions to you, out of fear of someone brown-nosing their way past them on the career ladder. It's the same reason why it's always a bad idea to date someone who reports to you -- you can never have the kind of relationship with them you have with someone outside the hierarchy you sit at the top of. Suspicion and jealousy and gamesmanship taint it from the moment it begins. The solution to all these problems is to learn, understand, and internalize the distinction between colleagues and friends -- two groups of people you owe very different things to -- and then act accordingly.

shortcircuit01 12y ago

This story reminds me of how broken software engineer interviewing is. Imagine if a company decided to hire software engineers by giving them five 6-sided dice. Then they have to come to the company building and roll each dice once every hour. And during that hour they have to dance and sing in front of someone while being recorded. If they roll all 6 on all 5 dice, their dancing and singing will be judged by the committee! And if the committee likes their performance they might get the job! The acceptance rate is 0.01%, the company is so elite. And this company is also complaining about a software engineer shortage. They wish they could find more good engineers! It's pretty obvious which company (or group of companies) I'm referring to. The interviewing process of these companies has done great harm to the software industry. And now they're trying to do further harm by using it as an excuse to get cheap foreign labor to reduce salaries.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
bvanslyke 12y ago
Palantir?
- selimthegrim 12y ago
  I believe he or she is talking about Google.
  - twright0 12y ago
    Google's acceptance rate is well above .01%, just using basic reasoning. Google employs tens of thousands of engineers, which means they would have had to reject hundreds of millions of candidates for the role of software engineer.
    - theatgrex 12y ago

soheil 12y ago

"Resource Limit Is Reached" this is how

BrookeTAllen 12y ago

Hi, this is Brooke, author of the original story. Wow, other than the grief I'm going to get from my ISP I'm so glad to see all this and when I get a chance over the next few days I'd like to add more. Some quickies: I've generalized this approach and talk about it in a Quartz article: http://qz.com/88168/how-to-hire-good-people-instead-of-nice-people/ http://qz.com/88168/how-to-hire-good-people-instead-of-nice-...

bovermyer 12y ago
You might want to look into Cloudflare to help protect your site from the HN/Digg effect. Free CDN FTW. Also, great story!

BrookeTAllen 12y ago

Hey, other then the grief I'm going to get from my ISP this is great that you're interested. While we figure out how to get my site working again, I wrote this in quartz: http://qz.com/88168/how-to-hire-good-people-instead-of-nice-people/ http://qz.com/88168/how-to-hire-good-people-instead-of-nice-... and this for Science Magazine: http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2007_11_16/caredit.a0700163 http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previou... And there is this Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/BrookeAllen1/brooke-allen-has-a-better-way-of-hiring http://www.slideshare.net/BrookeAllen1/brooke-allen-has-a-be...

jlukanta 12y ago

Google Cache mirror: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1tQlU00Ks7MJ:brookeallen.com/pages/archives/1234+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1tQlU00...

BrookeTAllen 12y ago

Hi, this is Brooke, the original hiring manager. I'm new to HN so please excuse me if I violate protocol. I agree, life is about treating people well. However, although I find hiring is probably the single most satisfying thing I did on my job, it was very hard emotionally because in the case of nearly everyone I don’t’ hire it is because they say “NO” to me, and boy, rejection hurts. But at least I have a job and my candidates usually don’t. More later but first… If my site is unresponsive there is this on slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/BrookeAllen1/brooke-allen-has-a-better-way-of-hiring http://www.slideshare.net/BrookeAllen1/brooke-allen-has-a-be... I've generalized my approach to hiring all sorts and describe it here: http://qz.com/88168/how-to-hire-good-people-instead-of-nice-people/ http://qz.com/88168/how-to-hire-good-people-instead-of-nice-... … When I'm lucky enough to talk to programmers I'll describe it this way... I don’t want to be stuck in Von Neumann’s bottleneck so rather than me processing candidates in series with the question “Who do I want to hire” I take an OO approach and send a different question, “Who wants to work for me?” to my candidates so they can work on it in parallel. Since hiring is an elimination process I let them eliminate me in the first rounds. I don’t say “no” but I have to take a lot of it, which can be hard on the ego, particularly if I judge people too early and start to want one person over another. Desire is at the root of suffering. (Any fans of the move The Tao of Steve? Formula for getting the girl: 1) Be desireless. 2) Be excellent in her presence, 3) Let her desire you.) I try to be the most flawed (e.g. honest) but-striving-to-be-excellent person I can be in front of my candidates and hope they will be the same for me (and magically they are). If we’re not going to be who we are before we start working together who do we plan on being afterward? Because eliminating candidates is the name of the game, I concentrate on the negatives and that way there are only positive surprised later. Arguably many of my “best” candidates might eliminate themselves, but I’m not looking for the best – I can never afford them anyway – I am looking for the most appropriate for my budget, which I state early on and is almost never subject to negotiation. You cannot increases your desirability to offer to work for less, and if you are worth more than I can afford than I’m sorry, but I cannot afford you. I want what I call hidden talent; those good at doing a job but bad at getting one. After all, the last thing I want you to be good at on my job is getting the next one. I'll help you find a better job before I hire you because afterward we've got to hunker down and get some friggin' work done. Because I form an intentional temporary community of my candidates, and task them with something hard but meaningful that benefits them (like learning a new skill and/or helping each other find work) then by the time I say “yes” to someone everyone else agrees with the decision. In fact, in 10 years only once did a person tell me he thought I had made a mistake by not hiring him and the other candidates were so outraged they jumped all over him and one – who happened to be a lawyer – offered to defend me pro bono if he tried any funny business. I never heard from him again but it is my great pleasure to say he is an exception in that regard and I count a few of the people I haven’t hired among my friends. This is a wonderful side-benefit because as I get older it is harder to make new friends, and it is certainly unwise to treat employees as friends as some do. I seldom tell individual candidates what they did wrong, not because I am shy, but because it can be hard to take and I’m fairly tactless. However, I will offer a class on how to find work in which I anonymize specifics enough so as to benefit those who can identify themselves. Also, most people don’t do anything seriously wrong other than be unqualified or unlucky; no shame in that. More later, if you’re interested. After 30 years I’ve retired from the capital markets and they will do fine without me, but the markets for human capital are severely broken. Because I’m not ready to die, stop working, or give up on having a life's purpose, if you would like me to help you crack this nut then please do not hesitate in contacting me.

midnightclubbed 12y ago

So unless I'm reading the cached text wrongly 38 people read the given manual and answered programming questions based on it. They then met informally. Lets say they burnt a day on this. 27 of those people then suggested being taught how to program in APL (after building a classroom). I'm assuming anyone who didnt want to attend got cut. 3 additional days spent. They were then given 3 weeks to solve some difficult problems. Estimating they spent 4 days solving those problems. They then re-met and were interviewed. Another day spent. So to get to the end a candidate had to spend best part of two work weeks doing nothing but learning and programming an obscure language. No time for interviewing elsewhere, earning a wage, or attending college classes. I would really hope he cared about the majority of the candidates who spent so much of their own time and money to be rejected with nothing to show for it. Most companies would have interviewed a couple of times, given a few hours of programming/aptitude testing and made a decision as to whether to hire the person (and teach them the job while paying them a fair wage). Feel free to vote down if I'm getting this all wrong or an being overly cynical.

nathan-muir 12y ago
Totally agree. They should have received a wage, as the learning program wouldn't result in a qualification, and was mostly a part of a hiring process. If there were a wage involved, potentially more of the original applicants could afford to go through the hiring process. At least the modern standard is to pay the potential hire as a contractor / consultant to do a few small projects, and then decide if you'd like to hire them on as an employee.
pcthrowaway 12y ago
I'd like to offer an alternative perspective. The author was both willing to hire people with no experience, and provided free training to candidates. I realize that APL isn't a skill in incredibly high demand, but I think the author may have helped these candidates out in the long term. The ones with the most aptitude for programming were able to discover that aptitude (and "a number" of them were hired because of their investment), and the less apt candidates got a little bit of training and possibly an indication that if they are interested in programming they would have to accept putting in a bit more effort than the more apt candidates.

grimmfang 12y ago

Google cache of this page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1tQlU00Ks7MJ:brookeallen.com/pages/archives/1234+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1tQlU00...

sunstone 12y ago

How bad can it get? Several years ago I had a Russian team lead at a software company who ate code for breakfast (clearly the top guy amongst over 100 coders) and had excellent leadership qualities. Later, when the financial crisis hit he was out of work and I found out that he was really bad at interviews. Ever since I've wondered if I was hiring would I be able the spot the diamond in the rough where evidently, very few companies/people can. I'm still not sure.

fogleman 12y ago

So, here is my answer to the question, "What do we owe the people who we do not hire?" - Information on where they stand. - An explanation of what they are doing wrong. - Help improving. Things you will never get from companies like Google.

alishan-l 12y ago

As a job seeker having recently completed a web dev bootcamp (with no prior experience), how might I go about getting my first tech job? Or, taking a step back, my first interview? I find it frustrating that entry-level positions seek people with years of experience.

joshdotsmith 12y ago
One thing to keep in mind is that "entry-level" means the most junior position with that company, not "entry-level" into the workforce at large. I found this equally frustrating in non-technical jobs after I graduated college (with a liberal arts degree). It's a rather encumbered naming convention.

spydum 12y ago

The real solution here is not to interview people, but to discover people OUTSIDE of a hiring scenario, and recruit them after you've determined they would be a great fit (inverting the game). It's just unfortunate that it is much more effort to invest as the employer, but it is essentially the best way for everybody involved.

skazka16 12y ago

I interviewed an engineer today. Probably a lot of companies would not hire him. He was not that great. I said "Yes" because I noticed a passion and a huge desire to learn and grow. We'll see if that was a mistake or not.

anon4 12y ago

Or "How my life improved once I started making friends"

jdudek 12y ago

This is quite similar to how we hire Ruby on Rails developers. We organise two-weeks long Bootcamp where we train people in Rails. At the end we offer some of them to join us as junior developers, with further training during next year. Those who are not hired still win—they receive two weeks of training which helps them find jobs elsewhere. We’ve had some fantastic hires this way over the past two years. This article made my think that maybe we can do better and provide more assistance to those we do not hire after Bootcamp. More details about our Bootcamps are available at http://pilot.co/bootcamp http://pilot.co/bootcamp.

edem 12y ago

Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 9961472) (tried to allocate 19456 bytes) in /home/quest15/public_html/brookeallen.com/pages/wp-includes/taxonomy.php on line 959

sonabinu 12y ago

brilliant!

normloman 12y ago

This sounds like the job search from hell. Let's break down this trainwreck: 1. The guy posts a vauge help-wanted ad that implies no experience is required. Then he's surprised that 300 people applied and none had relevant experience. 2. He asks applicants to read a 500 page manual, then solve some programming puzzles. With no pay. As if the applicants have nothing better to do. In the rest of the story, the guy does a nice thing for the remaining applicants. But why does he ask candidates to jump through so many hoops for this job, especially when, as he states in the ad, experience is not required. Not every unemployed person has the time to read a manual, waste time solving puzzles, or attending a class with no guarantee of employment. Some of them really need jobs. Some of them have bills to pay. Some of them have other opportunities, and can't afford to put their life on hold while you make up your mind.

ErikRogneby 12y ago

I attended a bootcamp at ArsDigita on building database backed web applications back in 1999. I don't recall now if it was two weeks or three, but the things I learned in that short time have been useful in almost every job I've had since. Just knowing my way around Oracle an PL/SQL landed me a position at a telecom. The bootcamp was free, and at the end of the bootcamp after a code review I was offered an interview. I declined because I didn't want to live in Boston. I realize that Philips motives weren't entirely altruistic but I am sincerely thankful that he took this approach to staffing up.

freework 12y ago

The best example I've seen for putting together a team comes from my high school football team. Instead of tryouts, they let anyone play who wants to play. The best players excel from day one, but the crappy players quit after a few days. The coach never says to a player "we've decided you aren't good enough, so you're off the team". It was each players decision that they came to themselves to leave the team. The guy in the article pretty takes the same approach. I've always felt the best way to interview engineers is to go over installing the company's development environment on their machine. In other words, there is no evaluation, just expectation of results.

vonnik 12y ago

FutureAdvisor's in-house recruiter here. I recently ran a hiring event in San Francisco with Brooke called Staffup Weekend. Brooke is one of the smartest, hardest-working and most generous people I know. I read the post linked to above last fall, and worked with him to bring jobseekers together to work on meaningful projects. The event was called Staffup Weekend, and it was held in the Chron building on Mission and 5th. Our hypothesis was: The only thing that correlates with performance is performance. Everything else -- degrees, pedigrees, buzzwords, interview skills -- are a waste of time. About 20 people worked through the weekend to create various apps. They made wonderful things: one was a Chrome extension that gives you the emails of the founders of the company web pages you visit. Another was a LinkedIn 2.0 for people who wanted to feature their work and themselves. We made 8 interview offers and one hire from the weekend, and I think everyone involved came away feeling like it was worth it. Write me if you're curious to learn more: chris.nicholson@futureadvisor.com