fsk

42 ms·

361.
by fsk 12y ago
Your statistic (good hires / total hires), using the jargon from your link, is precision or positive predictive value (PPV). Using the math from that link, if you decrease FN, then PPV increases.
362.
by fsk 12y ago
How do you know they were underperforming? Maybe the board just realized they could get a lot of extra money by looking for an excuse to get rid of them?
363.
by fsk 12y ago
I think they clawed back unvested options from many employees, who had unvested options with substantial value. That breaks the implied social contract of a startup. If the company is wildly successful, they'll try to claw back your
364.
by fsk 12y ago
If the options aren't that far in-the-money, and he doesn't need the cash now, it's actually better to wait to exercise. If he exercises now, he only gets the raw value (current price - strike). If he waits to exercise, he ge
365.
by fsk 12y ago
You aren't using statisics correctly. FP = probability, given a bad candidate, you will hire him FN = probability, given a good candidate, you will pass Suppose 100 bad candidates, 10 good candidates FP=10%, FN=10% You make 10 bad hire
366.
by fsk 12y ago
My sister used to be a FourSquare addict. They took away mayors and badges, all the fun stuff. Now she doesn't use it.
367.
by fsk 12y ago
If you increase FN and FP stays the same, you are more likely to make a bad hire. Do you understand this?
368.
by fsk 12y ago
No, because 1. You can't normally short sell mutual funds. As a retail investor, short selling is hard. Plus, short selling has fees, even for institutional investors. 2. Even if a fund gets lucky (or unlucky), its future returns are
369.
by fsk 12y ago
Survivor bias doesn't really matter here, because we're looking at only the best. In order to properly correct for survivor bias, you'd have to count the # of funds that were created in the past 40 years, and then figure out
370.
by fsk 12y ago
I see what you're saying. I was pointing out the dangers of false negatives, but he responded that he hires 10% of the people he invites for an onsite interview. Even if you hire 10% of the candidates you on-site interview, that says
371.
by fsk 12y ago
But it's inhumane to your other employees to keep someone unqualified around.
372.
by fsk 12y ago
I've had job offers revoked, but that happened when I was unemployed at the time. If they're disorganized or unethical, that increases the chance they will fail in 3-12 months. It also increases the chance that you might feel the
373.
by fsk 12y ago
If you really want to join YCombinator, your best chance probably is to join as a technical co-founder on another project.
374.
by fsk 12y ago
Hiring rate of 10%? You mean you hire 10% of all people who submit a resume? Or 10% of all people who come in for an on-site interview? Those are two different things. Why should it take 2 years to fire someone? That sounds like a corpo
375.
by fsk 12y ago
Or pick a strongly-typed language, so you can find errors at compile-time instead of a couple months later when some weird hard-to-reproduce bug shows up.
376.
by fsk 12y ago
If your hiring based on referrals and references and networking, you're hiring for a different skill set than programming ability. Based on my experience, most employers don't hire better than "Pick a candidate at random&quot
377.
by fsk 12y ago
To me, that sounds like a convincing argument that your specialty is not worth learning. I'd rather work someplace that wants to invest in their employees, rather than expecting them to already be experts in some obscure techniques. A
378.
by fsk 12y ago
The problem is that programming skill is not normally distributed. There are some big outliers at the brilliant end, and some big outliers at the toxic end. So "average" is not really a meaningful term. I mean "average prog
379.
by fsk 12y ago
It's my crude estimate based on the places I've worked over the years, and the people I've seen come in when my employers were interviewing. If I was the boss and had a "toxic" employee, I'd just dump them rath
380.
by fsk 12y ago
I'm still not sure how giving employees a book to read and then testing them on it is a good process. If I'm going to spend a couple months of free time learning something, I'd pick something like Python or Android developme
381.
by fsk 12y ago
I was polite and stayed until the end. It was through a headhunter, so I decided to be polite. I knew that was a no-go interview after 1 minute, when I saw that everyone working there was Indian.
382.
by fsk 12y ago
Even if you set the "good" percentage to 10%, too high a false positive rate will still ruin your results. Based on the people I've worked with over the years, I say that the actual skill distribution is: 5% toxic - These are
383.
by fsk 12y ago
If someone was playing emotional tricks on me during an interview, such as telling me I'm wrong when I'm right, I'd lose interest in the opportunity. One interviewer tried yelling at me for no reason, just to see if I would r
384.
by fsk 12y ago
Also, what makes this mistake common is the feedback you get. When you make a false negative, you never find out that you passed on someone amazing. When you make a false positive, it's professional embarrassment for the boss when he&#
385.
by fsk 12y ago
Actually, it happens as long as your "stricter hiring practices" increase your false negative percentage by a lot more than they decrease your false positive percentage. Try it out with some numbers. 10100 candidates, 100 are &quo
386.
by fsk 12y ago
Yeah, I know, angular.js is MVVM and not MVC. It still sucked. The boss chose angular because he wanted to pad his resume with angular.js experience, and not because it was the right tool. That startup is still stumbling along, but wasn&
387.
by fsk 12y ago
>If not, What is the correct answer that will prevent me from getting COMPLETELY EXPOSED (in your words) if you ask me this MVC question in an interview? Every interviewer has their own pet question that the candidate is COMPLETELY UNQUA
388.
by fsk 12y ago
False negatives are a lot worse than most interviewers think. (False negative = you pass on a good candidate, false positive = you hire someone who turned out to be unqualified) If a "good" candidate is a 1-in-100 find, then each
389.
by fsk 12y ago
That's the problem with every "We're fixing hiring!" website. There's no reason for candidates to join unless a lot of employers join. There's no reason for employers to join unless a lot of candidates join.
390.
by fsk 12y ago
Insulting to cite 2048 as "making something people want", considering it's an inferior copy of threes.

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