22 ms·

I think it's time that we consider that the problem might not be that we're hiring people based on the wrong things, but that the simple indicators of future su

• cp9 11y ago
  >Maybe hire people with at least some demonstrated aptitude and invest in them instead how do you demonstrate this?
  • Swizec 11y ago
    The old mantra has been: released projects. Someone who can show their own past work, either open-source, side-project, launched projects, or work at somebody else's company ... well there is a high chance that they can at least code their way out of a wet paper bag. Probably more than that too. Another, perhaps better, approach is to just hire a few of the most promising candidates for a couple of days. Give them a small project. See if there's a fit.
    • jedmeyers 11y ago
      How will you verify the released projects if the person only worked in-house? I think that the issue is not only about predicting future success but about trust as well.
  • Zigurd 11y ago
    I ask potential hires to bring samples of their work and have them discuss it in depth.
    • anthony_d 11y ago
      I work in an industry that would fire then sue me for taking samples of my actual work.
      • genericuser 11y ago
        And others of us would be in jail.
      • Lawtonfogle 11y ago
        Many would reply with open source or personal projects, but I will head that off by saying that not everyone does open source (for some people, 50 hours programming a week is all they want to spend) and there are many who do open source in other areas and perhaps not with the same level of professionalism and expertise.
    • jerven 11y ago
      We deal with the issues brought up by others that most developers can't really do this, by asking them to bring a piece of public code that they like and give 10 minute presentation about it. The code that they select tells a lot and is a great starter for further discussion and finding out about how they think. It also demonstrates an essential skill, and that is evaluating other peoples work and how to work with it rather than against it.
  • lotsofmangos 11y ago
    Give them a small project to do, something that should take about 3-5 days.
    • dynamicdispatch 11y ago
      Ugh, this is acceptable, I guess, provided the company is willing to pay an hourly wage. I'm currently in the process of looking for a new gig, and there's nothing worse than being sent a coding challenge that should take about '2 hours' (4-5, more like), and then to get a canned rejection from the recruiter stating the code didn't pass muster. This is especially annoying with companies with DEEP pockets - at least do me the courtesy of paying an hourly wage OR have an engineer on the team go over the code and give some feedback.
    • gaius 11y ago
      No candidate that you would actually want to hire would jump through this hoop. Not even ones presently unemployed.
      • lotsofmangos 11y ago
        You'd pay them. You'd take something small that needs doing, outlay a much larger than usual slice of money to it and hand it out to all of the last line of candidates.
• ionforce 11y ago
  > simple indicators of future success just might not exist No one wants to admit this. We want to have control of the future! And prediction is one way to do that. I once read in an agile book somewhere that certain factors don't necessarily predict success but merely the maximum possible value. As in, if you don't do X, you cannot be successful. But if you DO do X, you have a probability of being successful, but you can still suck. So the possibility of sucking is ever present, but the maximum ceiling of possibility is controlled by the number of best practices you implement. So maybe there's something like that. Our factors aren't predictive, but they open up the landscape to find great people. Sucky people are evergreen.
• bkjelden 11y ago
  As an engineer on the other side of the table - I would much rather this be the case too. I would much rather join a company, devote myself to a problem, a team, and a product, and have the company reward me as such. Instead, engineers who are willing to jump are generally able to attain much higher compensation than those who stay put - so we're incentivized to do so, rather than investing ourselves in a company and having the company invest in us. As a result, engineers are forced to maintain two skillsets: one for interviewing, and one for actually building & shipping products.
  • flinty 11y ago
    Great points. The idea of having to switch companies to get any meaningful raise or using it as a threat is a misalignment of incentives that over the long term leads to bad culture
  • iamthepieman 11y ago
    I totally agree with this. I actively try to improve my job hunting skills just like I try to improve my technical skills. And except for the time I gave up government contracting to move to the middle of nowhere, I've always made much more by switching jobs than I would have by asking for a raise. That said, I've never switched jobs just because of the money. Either there was no more room for growth, the company was falling apart around me or I just wanted to take a different path in my career.
  • 7Figures2Commas 11y ago
    > Instead, engineers who are willing to jump are generally able to attain much higher compensation than those who stay put - so we're incentivized to do so, rather than investing ourselves in a company and having the company invest in us. Notwithstanding the fact there are companies that under-invest in their employees, you make it sound like engineers are being forced to try to maximize compensation. The reality is that compensation varies, and the differences can be quite pronounced in the technology industry. A startup with minimal revenue and $1 million in funding probably isn't going to be able to compete with Facebook or Google on salary and benefits. Expecting it to is like trying to get blood from a stone. There is nothing wrong with trying to maximize your compensation at the cost of everything else, but if that's your approach, you need to live with the fact that you will almost always have better opportunities somewhere else. Constantly lamenting the fact that your current employer can't pay you as much as another employer can is no way to live life. Incidentally, in my experience, a lot of people who allow their job satisfaction to be based entirely on a perception of relative compensation are never happy no matter how much they make. They constantly find ways to convince themselves that they could and should be making more.
• sown 11y ago
  > Maybe hire people with at least some demonstrated aptitude and invest in them instead. This is all a loser like me has. I can't whiteboard too well, I cant talk so great some times (other times I'm great at it). I can work hard, though, and for longer hours. I'm currently doing temp work at a startup now but it feels like they are constantly thinking of letting me go.
• Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  You gotta try a few MMPI style tests first.
• ffn 11y ago
  Hiring managers, big companies, and schools aside, how do you tell for yourself if you yourself are a good engineer or not? For all the metrics such as load times, conversion rates, income, bounces, etc. to measure our machines, what metrics do we have to measure our professional selves for our own personal growth? Is it how many side-projects I've shipped? How many users / downloads I have? How well I can grok complex systems? How well I can solve specific and difficult programming challenges? How many javascript frameworks I can code HelloWorld in? If we had a choice (we don't), how do we decide if we should invest in ourselves or not?
• spaghetti 11y ago
  Convincing yourself that future success isn't predictable is actually pretty easy. Regardless of how technically awesome someone is, there's a random variable that can dramatically affect one's future success: the candidate's co-workers. Anyone with a few months experience at a big company knows that a new hire's coworkers are, for the most part, selected randomly. When the co-workers match, everything can work out, even if the candidate isn't technically strong. If the co-workers don't match, for whatever reason, the working relationship can easily fall apart. I don't know what the ultimate solution is. Even work trials aren't perfect since company and team structure change. Accepting the unpredictability of future co-worker relationships makes it easy to see there's no magical solution. Understanding this might help things move in the right direction.
  • thaumasiotes 11y ago
    > If the co-workers don't match, for whatever reason, the working relationship can easily fall apart. > I don't know what the ultimate solution is. Two approaches to this problem that might make sense are: (1) hire based on your current employees' recommendations; or (2) hire entire existing teams all at once. Based on what I read, both of those are fairly popular approaches already.
• meatysnapper 11y ago
  The massive gap between interview skills + coding skills + software engineering skill is always a point of mirth/sadness between myself and my friends in software. It seems like most of our employers pass up on people we know are qualified BECAUSE WE'VE WORKED WITH THEM ON HARD SHIT, to hire people who can whiteboard but something but are miserable engineers. Or, at one recent employer, desperation to hire a certain flavor of mobile engineer, only to interview them with graph theory questions and reject them on the basis of that. Or, there's another, nastier possibility. Code quality + stability is not valued nowadays, just getting shit done, no matter how buggy it is later. Management and teams will probably churn before the product collapses into itself, so nobody loses.
• BadassFractal 11y ago
  Admittedly I suck at hiring and haven't been doing it for longer than a couple of years, but everything I've experienced so far has confirmed for me that there are simply too many variables at play for me to be able to predict someone's long term success at my company. I'd tend to agree with your conclusion too. It's possible I'll change my mind in 5-10 years, but for now that's where I stand.
  • rustynails 11y ago
    I've hired quite a few people over the years and had an excellent success rate. I look for a few things, 1. Cultural compatibility. Ego generally not good. Wanting to work with others - good. I've knocked back "stars" because they'd try to derail a good team 2. Basic competency in the areas needed. If I need real-time knowledge or distributed systems, show me enough that you know the traps. 3. Ambition/commitment. If they're too ambitious they won't last. If they lack commitment, they won't strive. Ultimately, it's about creating the culture where willing and capable people will fit. Someone mentioned about their wife being an expert and not being hired despite HR recommendation. I've seen this on several levels before, "I like this person so they should be hired". However, HR do not understand culture of teams, relevant skills, etc - although they will tell you that they do. "When I said they need to be able to program machine language, I didn't mean stacking vending machines". My example is flippant (I'm tired, not thinking), but the idea is there. HR don't have the knowledge in most organisations I've worked for.
• ryanmarsh 11y ago
  This. I doubt anybody could have predicted my success. All indicators were that I would amount to nothing. Every adult seemed to think so. If they were to have looked closely, seen the potential and invested in me I think they would have been richly rewarded. I've generated wealth for people who didn't invest in me (to the tune that I'm jealous of it). For revenue generation I've escaped the labels I was given: lazy, undisciplined, uneducated. Those factors turned out to be poor indicators of my potential to create value for future employers. If only I could figure out how to keep more of it for myself, but alas I'm lazy and undisciplined. ;-)
• burnte 11y ago
  My wife is an Industrial/Organizational psychologist. It's a thing I didn't even know existed until I met her. In her years of grad school education, she learned all about memory, learning, human interactions, workplace management, etc, everything relating to how human psychology affects work. Part of that was how to hire the right people. It turns out there ARE things that can strongly indicate employee competence and success, but nearly no one uses them. People like her get hired, and then management promptly ignores their suggestions. On one of her job interviews, while waiting for a manager to come in for the interview, she got to talking shop with the HR rep who was co-conducting the interview. They talked a little bit socially afterwards too, and the HR rep agreed with my wife that the interview went terribly because it didn't focus on anything of real substance. The HR rep said to my wife, "we've been looking for someone like you for months, and we've seen a few as qualified as you, but not many, and we've never made an offer to folks like you because they won't listen to me, I keep getting overruled, and we're still without that position filled." They can't fill the job because they keep ignoring the advice they're paying for. One example is the interview. It turns out the interview as we do it is actually one of the WORST ways to hire people, because it rewards all the wrong behaviors over the real needed skills. Simply scanning a resume isn't great either, you need to engage with the person on theoretical tasks, like an audition, rather than simply conversation and crazy questions. TL;DR We know how t hire people, experts have it worked out, but we don't want to listen to their advice.
  • 1123581321 11y ago
    What are the things that can strongly indicate employee competence and success? I am sure it is a big topic, so a link to an article your wife would agree with would be as good as an answer. It's troubling to think that something is being done backwards, but it happens in so many areas that it seems nearly inevitable that it is also done in hiring.
    • gergles 11y ago
      IQ tests, but those have legal problems, so instead: Work sample tests. Schmidt & Hunter, 1998: http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...
• smil 11y ago
  Indeed, all the "scientific" hiring processes are hinged on the idea that it is possible to accurately predict an individuals future performance. A child knows that predicting the future is impossible.
  • EliRivers 11y ago
    Yet if someone throws me a ball, I can catch it.
• lstrope 11y ago
  I don't have much value to add... but I have felt this since I arrived in SV 5 years ago. It has only gotten worse. I don't have a degree from a prestigious school. I do have a bachelors in Computer Information Systems though. What this means is I have hands on practical experience in what to do and how to do it - but I don't have the deep theory tutelage that everyone in SV seems to require. Unfortunately I was duped in to thinking you build a career and build ontop of what you have done. In SV - nobody even bothers to look at my resume. I've never been asked about my experience. I've only been shown a whiteboard and told to jump through hoops. It is B.S. because the white-boarding ability has no bearing on how good of a colleague you are. How much you contribute, and whether or not you are a good engineer. IMO all it does is validate that you went to a top tier school - and allows for the the hiring company to add 1 more million onto their valuation on exit. Case and point: a few years ago I interviewed at a company that wanted to build a Learning Management System focused on re-educating senior-citizens. I had 4 years of relevant experience in that industry, which included working for the top two companies in that verical. I happened to be a Rails engineer which they wanted to leverage. It seemed like a perfect fit and they were on the cusp of giving me an offer - but they passed me up to hire someone from MIT that had never worked for a company and had never touched ruby. His MIT degree was more valuable to them. If merrit was a thing in silicon valley - that would not have happened.
  • gaius 11y ago
    it does is validate that you went to a top tier school Even a graduate of a top-tier school will struggle with that whiteboard stuff after 10-20 years on the job. A real working programmer just doesn't use this stuff day-to-day. The real purpose of it is as an age filter.
    • lstrope 11y ago
      I agree.
• PhantomGremlin 11y ago
  simple indicators of future success just might not exist There's another domain that struggles with this. Professional sports. I'm more familiar with the NFL, but this applies to the NBA as well. There are countless "can't miss" 1st overall draft picks that are busts; there are undrafted players that make it into the hall of fame. hire people with at least some demonstrated aptitude and invest in them instead Certainly pro sports tries to do this, but some players are just more coach-able than others. Also, especially at the pro level, there's a certain very intangible "thing" that separates the merely good from the great. How do you coach for that?