We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
blog.codinghorror.com
blog.codinghorror.com
It is utter voodoo.
I came up in the late 80s. Interviews were maybe 2 hours long. You might be handed a piece of paper with a problem to aggregate some information distributed in a few different arrays and print them out. You know, write some for loops and a few logic statements.
Then you talked about the job. This is the job. Do you want to do it? What do you have to bring to us? Do you have a lot of experience and want to lead, or not a lot and want to learn - we'll adjust position and salary.
And you put a team together. Some were great, some were okay, some needed to be let go. In total, all sw people had a job.
Contrast that with today's voodoo, where proxies are weighed more than on the job performance (the only thing that matters).
In the end, you put a team together. Some are great, some are okay, some need to be let go. In total, all sw people have a job.
It's all exactly the same, except the absurdity of interviewing by proxies. It's simple logic - he average of everything is average. Why have we abandoned logic?
So many things matter more than remembering red-black trees from your midterm (I'm 49. I TA'ed a graduate level algorithms class back in the day, but I don't happen to remember it. That's what books are for). Like being able to run a project. Being able to write documentation. Being able to enter a room with a combative and upset client and keep the business. Being able to mentor your colleagues. Taking ownership. Leading by example. Ability to learn. So many things that are not even discussed in the current interview environment.
I've watched companies spin their wheels for months, rejecting perfectly good people, looking for that mythical person with exactly the right, esoteric combination of skills, who, for some unknown reason, wants to stall their career and get hired into a position where they learn nothing because they are expected to know everything already. People that are eager to learn? No, sorry, not rock-star material. All these prior successes mean nothing, no one could possibly learn a technology or new algorithm, right? And, more than once I've had people get downright snide about it. I'm sorry that you misread my resume, contacted me, and I didn't have that absurdly specific combination of skills. My fault, right?
Y'all have lost your minds. :) Which is okay, we're an eccentric bunch, but jeez, let's inject some reason and introspection into it. The faces are different, but the talent is no different than the 70s and 80s. There's zero evidence that any of these interview techniques are reliable. There's tons of evidence that interview techniques are horribly biased in many ways. Just stop.
And again on the plane on the way home I said it to the pilot who was carrying a book into the cockpit.
And when my 18 year child went out driving for the first time on his own I handed him a book titled "How to drive".
There are also and other things that are in the periphery of what I need to know, but can look up easily when necessary. These include things like my mother in law's mailing address, my coworkers' phone numbers, my wife's phone number, the population of the US, how to rewire a plug socket, and the recipe for Belgian waffles.
Each of those things would be good to know, but we can effectively offload it to external memory.
They become annoyed during interviews when they are asked some concept and suggest "I'd just look it up on Google", which is fine for matters of programming syntax, but not fine where it reveals that a developer does not understand an important concept.
Yeah, all that stuff is stupid. Who the fuck cares what the capital city is for each of the 50 states? That's what atlases used to be good for, now it's an almost instant search in Wikipedia.
It's an at-will state so you can leave without notice and be laid off without notice. It seems that would cover the majority of circumstances and protect both employee and employer, for better or worse.
If you're a first level manager at BigCo, the risk of getting sued outweighs the benefit to your career of getting rid of someone who needs to go.
I suspect that's why you see healthy companies doing a lot of relatively small layoffs - when your manager tells you a person on your team needs to go, you'll lay off the one you might have already fired in 1980. The result is the same, but it's a lot harder to sue over staff reductions than a firing for cause.
Startups are different, of course, because a company with only a handful of employees might go out of business if it has to carry one as dead weight.
I've had a few folks that I've had to let go folks, including folks in .gov with union contracts and motivated defenders. It is doable.
End of the day, don't be a wuss. Setting up some hunger games "audition" is passive aggressive bs. If you're nervous, hire a contractor and get them on the payroll later. Or just hire the person, and give them a months severance. Problem solved.
The other reason is the company is not really looking to hire, just placate their current employees - "yes we know you are over worked, just hang in there while we hire someone to take off the load".
Which may be why people that are below par haven't been let go? A need to throw bodies at a problem rather than step back and give it some thought / work it out.
What disappointed me was, 3 of the interviewers had no idea about my background and weren't able to extract my strengths. Even though I am a new grad, I have interned for 2 years as an app dev and learned a great deal about design, code quality, testing and etc...
I have read Effective Java, Clean Code, and Head First Design Patterns. I'm reading Java 8 in Action now. I have not memorized them page-to-page and still need more experience to master them, but at least I know some of resources I can go to for more answers. I have participated in code reviews and enjoy them. I can implement LLRBT and many of the algorithms you can expect a new grad to know but I have not invested my time on hacker rank and uva.
I don't know what SV or big tech companies are looking for. I constantly hear interviewers say they want good engineers but fail to capture the essence of a potential good engineer well. What benefit is there in hazing anyone with problems many engineers don't deal with without the tools they use every day, and with an absurd time constraint. Kosaraju didn't come up with SCC in 30 minutes and he had a PHD. Sure I can spend hours studying for whiteboard questions but to what benefit. I am sure anyone of you can come up with a whiteboard problem you can't solve in 30 minutes, but what does that say about you.
Don't complain that interviewers haven't read your resume; it is your job to tell the interviewer about the relevant parts of your resume and why they matter for the job you are applying to.
I disagree. If you're going to interview me for an hour, the least you can do for both of us is to take 10 or 15 minutes ahead of time to familiarize yourself with my background.
it is your job to tell the interviewer about the relevant parts of your resume
Again, I disagree. A resume is only a very cursory overview. You can use it as a starting point to probe me about it, to at least determine if I've actually done what it says or if I'm just a buzzword bullshit artist.
IMO it's very shortsighted for someone to ignore a resume before conducting an interview.
The bigger point I'm trying to get at is the following: do not expect the interviewer to discover how brilliant you are on their own. Being smart, hard working, is not enough -- you also need to tell people about it.
I will be more proactive on my next interviews. I did have my github on my resume; I will add more projects to it and get involved in OSS.
The CEO of one of my past clients, a consulting company, always said: "You can teach everyone to be a great programmer". And he put his money where his mouth was: He hired people with no programming experience (even with no university education) and personally trained them for several months. Also, senior people in the company were encouraged to also help them and guid them.
He had to fire some of those people later, mostly because they were not a good fit for the company. But some of them became great programmers and software consultants.
"Hire only the best" is really only half of the battle. Give people an environment where learning is encouraged and failure is expected. And help them wherever you can. Most will learn and enjoy it.
OTOH, I recently had an interview at a company who have quite a bit of groth and scaling problems right now (but probably not Silicon Valley level), and they still said: "We constantly have to learn new things, so the most important thing a candidate has to have is they have to enjoy learning new things".
AND: there are quite a lot of companies who are in the stable / profitable / predictable growth category and could afford to train/develop their people - But don't.
Then again, a person with whom I went to college is a recognized expert on Oracle performance. I find it keenly interesting that such a role even exists.
I look at startup-ey, Webby looking job postings and it's like the qualified people drew to several consecutive inside straights just to have the right buzzwords on their resume. And it's a different set of inside straights than it was six months ago. And it's different yet from firm to firm.
See there how easy it is when you don't know what you're talking about? :)
I've worked from outside the hull speed of several teams and gotten into places where being diplomatic about the sheer propensity to failure was a lot of what I ended up doing. And, frankly, I've just dropped the mic and walked off more than once, once I'd established that the team ultimately just didn't want to perform or had some horrifying external constraint that made the death march inevitable.
Say it with me: "I am powerless over the fact that I suck." At least you can work on the self loathing and make progress.
But seriously - get your ego out of it and life gets better. Let your ego free only when you are alone. You can't fix 'em all.
We do have a college intern and hire program, but it's very rare for a new college hire to have the same ROI as my best experienced colleagues.
My big issue: Startup hiring kids to do work that should be in the hands of lawyers. I've seen interns redlining contracts and social media directors heading compliance teams. Some expertise cannot be developed in-house.
Is that true? Maybe for a subset of people, and (union) a subset of the skills. But one can surely improve their knowledge in an environment where there is nobody able to teach him. The environment must support a few failures, because they'll happen, but it is possible.
Most times, the premise of a start up is that 2-4 people with well developed non overlapping skills get together and build something with each being such an integral part that they are worth a good chunk of equity. Perhaps 5/6 is a CS person that you train as OPs / Dev on the side. But most companies don't have the time or man power until the team gets into the double digits.
On the other hand, if you want to build a pipeline to solve tomorrows hiring problems, go out and interview unskilled people that want to do the job you have. There's some wash out but generally you can make a pretty good batch of people. I've done this in a couple places and it can be very rewarding not to mention as they start to develop and move out to other teams they are often willing to spend some time giving back to the program that helped them up on the ladder. Which means that you have more eyes and hands helping develop people and more time for coffee.
People would rather hire someone who has made mistakes on someone else's dime (another word for it is "experience").
"Can you imagine if we train our employees and they leave?
Well, can you imagine if we don't train them and they stay?"
"You can teach everyone to be a great programmer"
You can train most people to do most tasks. With a modicum of natural inclination, competent. With a bit of interest, good. With a willingness to work hard, very good.
However, you can't ever train greatness. You can't make it by any method - only they can.
Your broader point is good though. The most predictably effective way to end up with top talent that works well in your structure is to help it develop.
You will not meet such people very often unless you are in a truly extraordinary situation, which means you may well never work with one.
My argument is that such people, whatever the field of endeavor, do not ever become great through training alone. You can only develop the conditions for people to reach their full potential, and hope that some (small number) of them truly become great.
You've not really solved the problem by stating that, all you've done is swap one subjective term (great) for another (better).
FWIW, I don't think everyone is naturally suited to programming, but I do know I've met a number of people, with a diverse range of backgrounds, who I am confident would be employable as programmers with the right guidance. The two biggest traits they all share is attention to detail and an openness to learn. I'd argue that's all you really need, everything else is just a matter of effort and experience.
But I believe you are being obtuse here. I've never met a large group of programmers who wouldn't have rough consensus on their "better" colleagues. Begrudgingly, perhaps, but it is there. Human beings naturally self-organize this way all of the time, the metrics are definitely imperfect but pretending they don't exist or are somehow meaningless is just perverse.
Nothing I said claims that diverse people cannot become perfectly competent programmers, this is certainly true.
The claim was more that "greatness" in part, at least, necessarily comes from within.
That goes into the whole nature vs. nurture debate, and you can probably find arguments for both. Playing Devil's Advocate, I'd suggest there are traits that help you become a great programmer, but those can be learned traits. For example, "thinking like a machine". You're a much more effective programmer after you can build a mental model of how the programs you write are working at a lower level of abstraction than the one you're programming in. That's something it's undeniably possible to learn, the main barrier for most people is a lack of interest. You have to be prepared to learn a bunch of supporting material that may not pay off in the near future, but will help you in the long run. That's my experience of what it takes to become good/great/better at nearly anything.
What's desired is that our company have the best talent, but that someone else develop it for us. We'll pay the maintenance fee at a high level but we won't actually invest in it.
This is a simple problem - we know the cost of everything but the value of nothing. And then we begin to redefine "best" down to make it easier to measure.
The best organizations "grow" their talent in addition to "finding" it.
Talent is not a resource which merely exists out in the wild like some kind of unicorn. Talent is DEVELOPED in the right environments with the right team and the right resources.
Large companies especially, need to take a bit more responsibility for cultivating talented people instead of merely project-managing "resources" ad-nauseum, and then finding increasingly elaborate ways to find and recruit talent.
Both ways (grow and manage), though, I find the notion of "find the best, set them free, done" is insufficient.
Most of the code I've written, even the best of it, is long gone. The company died, the system eventually got replaced, the business needs changed. I've debugged some epic problems through herculean efforts, but in retrospect most of those problems shouldn't have even existed; bad work process created bad results. I created some great system architectures, but technology advances so rapidly that the great solution of 10 years ago is now sadly out of date.
But getting some non-developer hooked on development? The shine on that doesn't wear off. Taking somebody who's struggling and helping them become a solid contributor? I'll always be proud of that.
Flat out dead wrong. If you hire "anyone" and try to teach them to be a programmer then you will probably fire them.
This is the sort of attitude that leads companies to outsource their development overseas: "Our programmers are people hitting keys. We'll get overseas people to hit keys and overseas people hit keys for less money.", cause, you know, anyone can do it.
Programming is VERY hard and it takes a huge amount of motivation and hard work to become any good at it. Sure you can learn how to do simple stuff without any serious interest, but to be beyond ordinary it takes enormous work and time and research and Joe Schlepp off the street is simply not going to do that.
If you want to hire people and teach them then you need to look for these things: enthusiasm for computers and programming, demonstrated willingness to learn, energy and effort. You should value energy and effort more highly than anything. Those are the raw ingredients for trainees, and people with those ingredients are far from "anyone".
If you choose to read my comment that way then you are choosing to hear the message that you want to hear, which is a reflection of you and your personal issues.
My comment in no way suggested that overseas developers are incompetent - in fact whether or not a developer is competent has little to do with where they live - although economic opportunity is part of the equation. Great programmers create themselves by hard work and that has nothing to do with location.
I do agree with you however in that there is a difference between greatness and adequacy
And we keep going around and shout that and other people believe it. And in turn we are being taken advantage of with long hours, unfair compensation for our contributions and the worse of it all? Ageism in our industry is rampant.
I look at physicians, surgeons, accountants, lawyers and others with envy, because in those professions, the older you get, the more esteemed and valuable you are. We peak at 30.
Note: government is not one of these industries. Developers are underpaid but the job security is real.
Do you mean something like "net value to company"? Then maybe. Another way to say that would be "you start to get paid what you're worth after 30 or 35."
For example, the lawyers I know are now making partner in firms, the business majors getting percentages based on sales and earnings.
I'm looking to become a consultant but the very idea of increasing pay with experience is foreign in the tech field, but standard in other professional trades. I believe offshoring, H1Bs, and lack of a professional association (AMA, bar, etc) is to blame.
At 30 I was just getting started. If you feel you peeked, find some new jobs and technologies that you'd like to have on your resume and find new jobs. How about java and distributed systems at a place like google or facebook, c++ on a major database? Look for those things.
The question is: you've been doing higher level work, but has your compensation flatlined?
I left one of the big internet superstars, and tried a startup. After a year I decided it wasn't going anywhere, so I went to a medium sized company that is really growing. I make slightly more in salary than i did at my internet superstar company, and more $ value in stock grants. My new company is growing so the stock should go up, but its less certain too. My job title looks good, so I will be able to use that in my 'next' job, if there is one; maybe I'll stay here forever. My goal is $400-$500k per year in salary and stock, over a 5 year average. Say you get about 200k in salary, and you get an initial 4 year stock grant, and each year they give you another 4 year one, so it takes several years of that to overlap.
I guess I can say I'm in Seattle.
I was more than 10 years at Microsoft, mostly IC and some lead work, and then back to being an IC at the internet giant, then lead at a startup, now mixed design and dev at the new company; i was hired on dev skills plus experience.
$150k in stock and salary is reasonable for an experienced dev, say 10 years. At the startup we paid mid career good devs 150k in salary, plus worthless options. A typical deal for devs with 10+ years who can do c++, java, distributed programming is 150-175k in salary, a couple 100k in stock, paid over 4 years, plus new grants each year. 2 years ago when twitter was doing better I got almost 200k in salary, plus double that in stock, payable over 4 years.
The unadorned "developer/engineer" role[1] -- that is to say, not CTO or even Lead Engineer -- itself seems to tap out after 8-10 years, in terms of both salary and respect.
That is, in the average case, anyway. There are of course companies which pay upper-tranche (in terms of salary and respect) for very highly talented programmers who aren't in leadership or crossover roles. But these are a comparatively rarified stratum; by and large -- for the great majority of companies out there -- the "Senior Developer / Engineer" role definitely seems to plateau within about that timeframe.
So if you don't find yourself drawn to that category of engineer (and to those kinds of companies -- many truly gifted programmers I've known still pull down decidedly average salaries) -- and you find yourself wanting more salary (or respect / responsibility) -- you better start thinking of something else.
[1] Leaving aside distinctions between "developer" and "engineer", as discussed elsewhere recently, for the sake of simplicity.
A critical problem that exaggerates the "ageism" is people who sit in the same corporation for 15-20 years, get laid off because companies change, and haven't refreshed their skills for many years. I saw my spouse go through this last year. She got laid off from the company where she'd worked in a variety of roles for 13 years. Her field toward the end was product management/ownership, and she liked it, but she didn't like Agile - she'd had bad experiences at her employer with careless engineers using "agile" as an excuse to have no process and no oversight. She had also spent many years developing deep domain experience in a narrow specialty (international e-commerce). She could find generic PM jobs easily enough, but they didn't exercise her domain experience and they didn't want to pay her what she'd been making just to be a generic PM. It took her six months to find a new job that uses her domain expertise (educating herself about Agile along the way).
For people less determined and hardworking than her, the problem can easily be much worse. If you've done nothing but Microfocus Cobol for the past 20 years and suddenly have to find a new job because you employer finally ditched that antique piece of crap, and you aren't interested in learning how to do something modern, you're in a world of hurt.
Some people stay in a job for 15-20 years. They are a programmer for maybe 10 of those, but over time they grow into a niche, the company grows, and that becomes a job title.
Maybe they get called a project manager, or a product owner, head of QA or engineering or lead architect. Either way they aren't a programmer any more and they mostly manage something instead of doing - manage people, contracts, processes, customers...
And that's why programming has a pay ceiling - careerist programmers become something else, and footloose programmers become consultants and contractors and leave the regular pay figures.
The value of a good programmer probably becomes diminishing returns after a certain point. The best programmer in the world can't raise the sales of your web app past a point - if they do what it takes to do that they become something else, like a product manager. That point depends on the technical difficulty of the task and the size of the opportunity, but most code needs a good coder, not a great one, and beyond that it's all product fit, sales and luck.
I'm footloose too, and I'm noticing as I get older that the people interviewing me have often been in their job a long time. They bet on the company and became less flexible in the general labor market in return for better opportunities internally.
Honestly, when I work for them, I'm usually surprised how many normal things they don't know. Maybe they've never seen proper unit testing, or don't know what ITIL is, or think linux is still an immature product and you should stay safe with a microsoft stack.
But they know why the code is the way it is. They know what was tried in the past, and how it failed. And their boss has seen what they do in a crisis, which is much better than trusting someone unpredictable.
My suggestion to someone young, if you have the temperament, is to stay for up to a decade and grow into a new, higher value role. Then learn that until you know it well enough to get a job elsewhere and move before you stagnate.
It's so rare to actually use something made by someone in their 20s, that it is a noteworthy event to mention their age.
Then in my 40s I went back to being a dev and learned a bunch of cool stuff at one of the amazons, googles, facebooks of the world. Now I'm 50 and have another great job, get tired of replying to recruiters.
Look for jobs that teach you great stuff, expand on the important tech skills you don't have, pay well, and look good on your resume.
My experience would support this. You need a mindset keen towards rigor, and motivation. Given those, and guidance, anyone can learn to program - at least in limited contexts.
Programming isn't just about writing the code itself; in many ways, that's the easiest part. It's about identifying and solving problems, many of which aren't actually your problems, meaning you have to have the ability to step outside your own frame of reference to understand the problem in the first place and continue doing so in order to work up a solution. Even for a junior developer, those skills can be a huge boon.
Learning, say, Wittgenstein's philosophy regarding grammar and language [1] gives an interesting insight into how humans express ourselves and delves directly into the heart of modern programming, IMHO. Rarely do we software developers write low level algorithms anymore, but writing consistent and complex API's is crucial and shares more in common with be conversant with large volumes of philosophical treatises.
Based on that, it makes sense many philosophy students would have successful careers – being able to reason and solve challenging problems is always key point in making good money. :)
Don't take things too literally. What he basically meant was "anyone with appropriate aptitude and intellectual maturity" -- like you yourself said later on, pretty much.
Which may or may not be entirely correct, but is far from "dead wrong."
BTW, please be careful about referring to foreigners, in any context, as "monkeys."
I just got back from an business trip spanning 3 cities and 5 flights. The self-loading cargo in the airports, jetways, and boarding the plane could easily have been described as monkeys. I was literally called a monkey by a colleague for absent-mindedly and needlessly blocking a sidewalk in the parking lot while waiting for someone to pay for parking. I took no offense, of course.
My point is that if you do not understand that programming is highly skilled work (and many companies think this) then you might think you can get anyone to do it for a similar outcome and therefore it is a commodity and therefore the only thing that matters is price.
Just that even analytical people tend to think "associationally" when they see certain keywords -- and one has to keep in mind that not too long ago, people in many of the countries that software development is frequently outsourced to were, in fact, thought of as monkeys, pretty much (or something on the human-monkey spectrum).
So whenever I see associations like that creeping into my own writing, I try to dial it down.
http://theconversation.com/the-ape-insult-a-short-history-of...
I'm not a 10x programmer by any means, but I was able to write and sell non-trivial software in middle school, with little more than a pirated copy of Delphi and a book.
Most of the difficulty that does exist has more to do with bad engineering practice and poor documentation than anything else.
They tried this during the dot-com boom of the late 90's... I don't think it worked out too well.
They hired just about anyone and paid crazy rates. You could point them out for showing up their first day carrying a "learn ASP in 24 hrs" book.
Fortunately, the dot-com bust weeded them out. Most of these people went back to sell cars or whatever they were doing before while we had to clean out their messes.
I don't think this proves your point. Just hiring someone to do a job does not equal teaching them. Teaching means not only practice, but also well constructed feedback and sufficient time and space to learn, and to learn from ones mistakes.
Kludging an ASP application together after reading "learn ASP in 24 hrs" does teach something, but there is so much noise that you need expert guidance to interpret the results correctly and point into things that need improving.
It's hard to even describe what a change in productivity all this stuff was. Using an ORM to get data from a database and dumping it into html tables, and there was a browser that could format it all for display with nothing but some tags that were generated on the fly? Amazing!
I taught myself html, because there wasn't anyone to teach me. I taught myself server-side includes and cgi - no one to teach me. I taught myself Java. Etc. And I still do this today! If someone can teach you how to do something, it's already mainstream.
"If someone can teach you how to do something, it's already mainstream."
I don't think collaborative learning should be undervalued, though. There are several colleagues without whose example and input I would be a much worse programmer. Not in technical details, but harder to define things, like attitude that leads to success and how to make designs simpler.
'Mainstream' does not mean obsolete. Reading and writing and Roman alphabet have been mainstream for centuries, yet people utilize them with an amazing variance of productivity and value.
And IT in general was much more slow-moving since then -- even companies with lots of technical staff couldn't (easily) find people to adapt to the crazy quilt of languages (and yes, paradigms) that burst onto the scene.
So if you had even the slightest idea how a website worked -- your were like a gift from high heaven, and treated as such.
These days -- especially in larger cities, near everyone has social contact with some of the programming persuasion; many have dabbled in some form of scripting, at least, themselves; and you can't walk into a coffeeshop or ride a subway train without being immersed in techspeak.
So things have changed quite a bit, and correspondingly, the bar has been raised.
Some people are not just hitting keys.
There are exceptions, where making it work is the hard part. Theranos is poised to fail because they can't make their medical test technology work. Cruise (YC 14) will fail if their autonomous driving doesn't stop crashing. Space-X lives or dies depending on how often their rockets blow up. Those companies need "the best".
Go down the current YC list.[1] Who has a hard problem?
Hard:
- 20n: A computational synthetic biology company
- Industrial Microbes: Upgrade natural gas to chemicals using synthetic biology
- Transcriptic: Access a fully automated cell and molecular biology laboratory, all from the comfort of your web browser
- Raven Tech: We are building the next generation OS (website sucks; all giant images, no info.)
Not hard to implement:
- Cleanly: Laundry & dry-cleaning delivered at the tap of a button
- GiveMeTap: Each bottle purchased gives a person in Africa clean drinking water for 5 years
- EquipmentShare: Rent high quality equipment at the lowest price, guaranteed
- Meadow: Buy medical cannabis delivered from local dispensaries
- Cinder: Notifications when food is done. All in a countertop electric grill.
If you're on the "not hard" list, you're probably better off hiring people who've done something similar but aren't superstars. Otherwise, you'll get overdesigned IT infrastructure, like Soylent. (Soylent does maybe two shopping cart transactions a minute, and boasts about how elaborate their systems are. They're bikeshedding. They're in the food business; IT is a support function.)
>This level of strictness always made me uncomfortable. I'm not going to lie, it starts with my own selfishness. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't get hired at big, famous companies with legendarily difficult technical interview processes because, you know, they only hire the best. I don't think I am one of the best. More like cranky, tenacious, and outspoken, to the point that I wake up most days not even wanting to work with myself.
Jeff Atwood has the self-security to say something like this publicly. It's really small-applause worthy in my book, since people will look for anything, especially anything unrelated to leadership, to tear a leader down[1]
As an aside, I think the political cost to admitting faults ties in roughly with the "Great Man Fallacy"[2] We're looking for an Iron Man to believe in, but when Tony Stark can't actually write a program to hack into a government mainframe in two hours, we get disappointed.
It reminds me very strongly of when Zuckerberg tried, for fun, to solve an engineering problem after two years of being the CEO of Facebook. He had a lot of trouble writing basic code; the engineers watching him struggle, who all thought Zuckerberg was this amazing super-genius who could do anything, ended up condescending him.[3]
[1] I do believe that plenty of so-called "leaders" are not actually good leaders. Rather that those people who grow to learn to be leaders, should not be detracted on certain details that are tangential to their business.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory
[3] There should be a specific term for "Gosh darn it, I may not have a billion dollars b-b-but at least I'm better at this thing in this particular way!"
It wasn't always a deal breaker, but it was very important that the team would be different after hiring someone. We hired quite a few non-CS grads, whether they came via a boot camp or were just self taught.
We ended up with a ragged team of misfits and it was awesome. I've never worked on a team that was so effective at challenging assumptions and biases and shipping features faster than anyone else. I'm convinced it wasn't through Herculean efforts by individuals, rather the product of clear communication and trust within the team.
Ive tried to explain why this worked. One observation: Very rarely did someone make implicit assumptions. Such assumptions are often wrong, but they happen because individuals are similar enough that extrapolation a partial understanding into a full one implicitly happens. We assume that since we got from A to B on the same path that the path from B to C is likely the same. On a team of misfits, you have to clearly communicate the entire sequence of events because everyone is on an entirely different page to start with. The result is that the final product is 100% on target, whereas normally there are a few deviations as the result of implicit assumptions.
"Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?" - from re:work
There's a great NYTimes article about it that looks at your hunch about the weirdness of the team members being the key to awesomeness. But Google ultimately realized that it wasn't so much about how different the backgrounds of the team members were, but was instead that that internal diversity could produce psychological safety.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learn...
Makes no sense to me. Why should the team need to be different? Why should the team need to be the same? This is Voodoo recruiting - some belief that a company has formed that really is meaningless but becomes an important part of the companies recruiting culture.
Will our team be different? Are they weird? Shake the chicken bones, dance around the fire and we'll get a good hiring decision.
The truth is, when it comes to building, maintaining, and supporting internal, line of business apps, management isn't even pretending to look for high end talent. They want predictability, reliability, and someone who will "fit".
I wonder how many people out there fit my profile. That is, they get excited by reading blog posts like these from some of the thought leaders, and desperately want to apply the thinking to their own workplaces, but then feel like we aren't really the target audience.
I've worked in traditionally boring industries that treated programmers as resources to be allocated (healthcare, logistics). Sometimes it's still possible to make a difference. For example the logistics job I had, we were often the only development resources our clients had, so when they wanted to run a promotion or do something like that, our execution could literally make or break their business.
It may be counter-intuitive, but I find it easier to apply these types of articles to my non-programming work. My wife and I own a gym, and we need to hire personal trainers from time to time. There's a certifying body for that, so it's easy to know if someone is trivially "qualified" for the job. Are we trying to hire the top 1% of trainers in the country? No, we're at best a medium-sized location for our area. Largely what we look for when hiring is how they will fit in with the existing coaching staff, how they will fit in with our existing clientele, and how likely they are to attract new clientele (or bring with them).
But don't take my career advice. I only really know what not to do at this point.
And I should mention that I've looked for other jobs in the area (trying to stay local because of family) - and almost no one pays as good as where I'm at. I'm making a bit above average according to Glassdoor (for my location).
And I was a developer but had to ask permission and make a case for every single program I wanted to install to help do my job, which isn't necessarily bad (there are understandable security concerns with downloaded software from the internet), except when Net Ops rates it a low priority and takes weeks to give you the permission. I eventually just stopped asking.
The atmosphere was also the most subdued environment I've ever been in. Most people not talking to or acknowledging each other unless their cubes were near, very few jokes, I almost got the feeling I'd get in trouble if I ever showed exuberance.
Not that I ever felt like it anyway. The lighting didn't help with that either, since we were in a room with very little natural light and soft florescent lighting that made it difficult for me to even stay awake there.
I did learn some new things there, and people were polite and friendly, so it wasn't all bad, but I'd never go back.
I know exactly what you mean! It is suffocating! Currently struggling with this right now. I can't stand it because it just feels so fake and phony. To me work is easier and more manageable when you are getting along with colleagues, not when it is overly formal, and corporate, etc.
Idk, that's just my perspective.
I don't even mind corporate necessarily, as long as it's relaxed. My current place people will talk about pretty much whatever, help each other out, tease each other about things, the boss will join us for lunch and talk about Star Wars and Deadpool, team leads are willing to admit that they can make mistakes, you feel like you can be more open and honest around your superiors, no one gasps or blinks an eye when you casually curse, etc.
And yet it's not quite no-holds-barred like a previous job that erupted into nerf gun battles and openly (but not seriously) insulting each other on an almost daily basis.
But I wonder who it is that sets the culture or tone of a workplace. Is it every employee in concert or more management / the team leads / bosses etc?
Why are they even called "consulting" firms? They are really just contracting agencies. And why are they so prevalent in the midwest and the insurance/banking/healthcare segments? Is it so that employers don't have to lay people off? Do they record the costs differently on their books versus full time employees? It just seems so obviously not in the interest of a company to use them with regards to culture, turnover, cost.
I also objected to the idea that someone who directly generates revenue was being labeled a cost center. I left, as did my junior consultant, and shortly after the company failed to gain ongoing contracts at the very large financial services corporation they were trying to break in to.
My main problem with that job however, was that they recruited me as a greenfield .NET developer, but then had me analysing some 800 columns over dozens of tables looking for software errors that were causing incorrect results in the 401k accounts for which our client was the steward.
I've seen two reasons why mega insurance company inc brings in "consultants." One is the consultant is specialized in an area of tech that is completely outside of the companies expertise. I did some of this being in a niche area of enterprise security. While those contracts still suck they suck a little less because you are at least advising the company and getting them up to speed on something. The other type, and the most common type is the "staff augmentation". I've been on those projects too and its exactly how they seem. The company has some in house knowledge (say a manager of infrastructure and maybe one full time employee for that tech) but the rest is really about throwing bodies at a project. From the client's perspective its all about workforce flexibility and not having the expense of a full time employee on the books. Even at like 100/hr its cheaper I guess for them vs having a full time employee. Plus its not their "core business" although in 2016 I'd argue if you are running a company it's insane not to think of tech as part of your "core business."
Overall, between the unsteady work, travel, etc being an enterprise consultant sucks. Most people that I know go into it because the potential to make a bit more money vs a traditional job at mega insurance company inc is there and they don't like the idea of working for mega insurance company inc for years. However, I've been on contracts where the project is like two years long so you might as well be working for mega insurance company inc anyway.
For instance, you can be a "contractor" as a software engineer, where you sign an employment contract to work for 6 or 12 months at a client site, working through an employment agency. At the end of that term, either your contract is renewed or it is not and you're now unemployed.
Or, in the defense industry, you can work as a "contractor" where you're a full-time employee of some company (called a "defense contractor"). That company signs a contract with the government to do some work for them somehow, and you're assigned to do this work. Your work does not have a defined end date (like the 6-month contract you might get to work at some big commercial company), you're just a regular full-time employee, but you still have to track your time (so it can be billed to that government contract), and if something goes wrong with the contract (like it runs out of money), then you can suddenly, with little warning, be furloughed without any pay.
Of course, there's many other kinds of "contractors" too, like the guy you hire to replace your house's roof. And there's all the people who are full-time workers, but are given 1099 forms as classified as "independent contractors" so their employer doesn't have to pay FICA and unemployment insurance for them.
Now, as for "consultants", that usually seems to be pretty much what I described in the part about defense contracting: you're a regular W-2 employee of some corporation, but you're sent out to client sites to do work for them, though there's no fixed-term contract with the client usually.
By using such automated tests, companies want to identify top talent by taking a shortcut and not investing any time on their side.
Nope, we aren't even going to ask you anything about that, or let you open up your iPad and show us, here's a whiteboard, start writing up a recursive permutation algorithm (only ever had to do this in programming interviews) because we want to prove you know how to do recursive stuff (and then tell us why you should almost never use recursive solutions in our apps), oh, and how about a red-black tree (algorithms class ran out of time to cover, unneeded since), or how about coding this specific sort (heap, merge, whatever) that you'd almost never use in actuality because there are tried and true libraries that are already more efficient than you'd ever be doing it from scratch?
Ugh. Fine, you can do your test, but please don't ignore my prior experience or act like you haven't even given a cursory glance at my resume, or even worse, make a dismissive comment when I talk about it during the interview. It really is insulting. And yet half the interviews I've been in have been like this.
I took one of these recently, and botched one of the tests. Within 10 minutes after the timer was up, I had restarted my solution with a successful answer and was iterating on it.
The idea that the pressure is the same doesn't seem to apply to all applicants. Doing work under pressure within set times has been a strength of mine(ex. playing chess against higher rated players or when timer is low). I've noticed, however, that my skills fall apart during interviews. Once again, totally different contexts where you're being tested.
I am so tired of hearing the refrain that "we want to see how you work under pressure". Anybody who thinks that all pressure or stress is the same and that you can translate performance in one stressful situation into any and every other one has no business being near a hiring decision.
People who can't code, compile, and run a fizzbuzz in an hour are probably not fit to be hired.
Asking someone to implement a proper Diffie-Hellman over Hackerrank is ludicrous, on the other hand. Interviewers should err on the side of stupidly simple problems. A surprising number of people can't code a loop in the languages on their resumes.
I guess you can reach two conclusions from that:
1) A surprising number of applicants are totally misrepresenting their abilities – either through deceit or wild ignorance.
2) Something about your interview process makes a surprising number of people unable to perform at their normal level – from nervousness, unrealistic and artificial constraints, etc.
Certainly many of those applicants fall into the first bucket, but I'm betting a large portion fall into the second. So, you might reconsider whether the false negatives and highly unpleasant experience for many interviewees are worth the perceived value. Maybe there's a better way to get the same insights.
But then at the end of the interview I was given a coding challenge to do at home over the next few days. PHP and MySQL have good online documentation so I was able to knock it out quickly and I got the job. So, yes I misrepresented my skills, but I also knew I could live up to what I was claiming I could do.
Employer: First job out of school pay, requires four years of experience in our exact tech stack.
Candidate: Sure I'm willing to take first job out of school pay (BTW, just graduated in May). Yeah, totally have 4 years of experience, and what do you know, it covers exactly your tech stack!
Edit: exactly the point shawn-furyan is making.
https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=11224427&goto=item%3Fi...
I've worked with people who crashed and burned during the interview during nervousness and then went on to do okay afterwards.
I'm a believer in trying to make the interview process as close an analog of day to day work as possible and as low key as possible.
That means real, actually encountered problems (no fizzbuzz), and a progressive ramping up of the difficulty so that candidates with confidence problems can have a few easy problems to get over their anxiety with before getting into something meaty.
People that suspect they're in category (2) could come to an interview with some code samples. Personally, I'd even be OK if a (2) contacted me after the phone screen with some code samples and an explanation about what happened. Maybe we could set up another phone call and find another way to assess technical abilities.
Good development requires good communication and someone with the maturity to overcome that sort of problem will fit in well somewhere, maybe even on my team.
(That being said, I'm horrible at doing interviews so take my advice with an even bigger grain of salt.)
I often use CSV parsing, where I specify a function that involves a simple string and I want some natural parsing of that in your favorite language. A bonus point for starting with the observation we should use a library, then do it yourself. From there I can pivot into discussing what the correct output data structure is (especially if the rows do not all have the same size or the same data types), converting text into better types, whether or not you understand unambiguously encoding text ("how can you include a comma in your field?", and I'm not worried about whether it's a "standard" answer), UTF8 and other text encoding issues, computational complexity a bit (and while small, it's a very practical, day-to-day bit) and questions of memory efficiency, the question of streaming if the dataset is too big. I can also easily pivot into outputting this CSV file into an HTML table in your favorite language, getting into HTML template issues, security issues that can arise from that, dumping the CSV into a database, and I'm probably even forgetting some of the pivots I've done. (And the point here is that I can choose, not that I ever cover all of these in one interview.) This question template scales from intern level ("can you get this string into an array of array of strings?") to senior engineer ("alas, the text encoding is varying from field to field, now what?") quite easily.
I've phone screened with this in a shared doc, too, since I can copy & paste in the problem pretty easily.
You're clearly getting a better caliber of candidate than those people are. That's great! And clearly, if that's the case, you should adjust accordingly. I think the lesson there is to tailor your process to the people you get.
I know to get away from those companies and never come back. If our values differ so much at the interview stage, it won't get any better a few months from now.
However, what I cannot condone is wasting the time of 100 applicants. It takes the employer ten minutes to "sort by best" and start calling down the list.
You are 100% right about their time investment. They are saying their time is more important than yours. It is another layer that muddies the process.
The utterly meaningless "top 1%" metric always makes me laugh. By definition then 99 of every 100 engineers don't make that cut, which means, again by definition, your team has very few if any of them, no matter what hiring practices you employ.
Plus I've found that very often management uses the "oh we hired the wrong people" as an easy cover for its own failings.
Instead of spending money on needlessly complicated hiring processes, with back and forth phone calls, panel Skype interviews, foolish interactive coding exams, multiple on-sites, etc., you can spend that money on severance.
Use a cheaper and more straightforward hiring process. Talk to people, dig into their background and preferred working style a little. If they appear to be competent, then just hire them. If they are not qualified for the job or they are not a cultural fit later, just fire them.
Because you will have explained to them that their first month on the job is still part of the overall fit assessment, and that you value the risk they are taking by offering them severance to re-engage in a job search if it turns out you made a mistake by hiring them, you are not doing a disservice to the new hire. You're merely letting both parties gather more evidence about goodness of fit.
This is money well spent, and for most companies, 6 months of salary is easily affordable for severance. In fact, an unwillingness to offer at least that much to each new hire would be a huge red flag.
Automattic does something interesting from what I've read. They have you work there as a trial for 1-2 months while keeping your full time job. This is probably pretty stressful but you get the ability to work with the candidate while not asking them to sacrifice their livelihood if things don't work out. Needless to say, it seems a lot of people don't get hired after the trial.
Maybe, maybe not. If they are already on the job market, then they probably don't mind looking for a job. If they feel that taking your job and getting fired still leaves them financially covered for an additional 6 months of searching, then they may not care too much.
If that company becomes known for this, then being "fired" from them won't really be a bad signal on your resume (if you even want to list it on your resume at all, depending on how long of a stint it is).
I don't think my idea is perfect. No hiring method is perfect. But I think that businesses should take a perspective that's fundamentally more about investing in getting to know and support someone as they are on-boarded, instead of Spanish Inquisitioning them and if they don't run away screaming then rationalizing that you've hired the best possible person (who, surprise, leaves after 18 months anyway because you didn't assess their fit or how their aptitudes really match up with job needs, you just whiteboard hazed them).
It probably depends on lots of factors, but I do like the consulting idea better.
This is already caused as much by companies as it is by candidates who are job hoppers. When I see a resume with short stints, it basically has no effect on me any more. If the person is good and I do my job to make them happy to stay, that's the best I can hope for. Pretending like either I can predict who the job hoppers are in advance, or that I should only hire people who magically have some intrinsic desire to work for me no matter how I treat them are both fantasies.
It's only that, if one is on that position, there won't be much downside to take your offer. But if one currently has a stable job, there is.
If I am very good at this assessment, then this may work. However, if I trust my skills to assess someone accurately, I am unlikely to have a complicated hiring process.
If I am a company owner (or manager!) who is not good at assessing people this way, then wouldn't substituting my process with this proposal make me spend a lot of money twice?
1) Paying salary to more people than open positions (Because I don't spend money on a hiring process and rely on my assessment skills, I may end up with many not-so-best-fits)
2) Severance package to let them go
I am not sure I believe this. First, if you are aware that you're not good at assessing it, then have someone else in your company do the assessment, or hire someone who can (possibly on the advice of your investors or something).
If you can't do either of those, I am afraid your business just isn't going to work out.
So, almost by definition, the person doing the assessment is reasonably good at it. For otherwise, you won't be around very long regardless.
Also, if you find that you're hiring a lot of people who seem good, but ultimately are fired, maybe look in the mirror. Maybe it is that your expectations are unrealistic, or maybe you expect people to adhere to "culture" standards that do not support human flourishing.
Unless the tech problem you need to solve involves lasering in on a fleetingly tiny population of candidates (most don't), then a sequence of looked-competent-but-needed-to-fire people is probably more a reflection on the company than the candidate stream. It's unlikely that all of them were elaborate fakers.
The costs of (1) should be low unless there's a fundamental problem with the company (in which case the costs of (1) are way cheaper than hiring a management consultant to help you not fix it).
(2) is a real cost, and yes, some companies can't afford it (so maybe they scale back to 3 months severance? Maybe they add continued health coverage. Maybe they let you pick a foosball table to keep) ... but it is just the cost of getting useful information about an employee, instead of the not-very-useful info that most hiring processes generate.
If you don't have the skills for that assessment, how do you know your complicated hiring process works?
If it'll be good or bad depends on the actual risk balance you create between those two processes. But if the idea that the hyper strict hiring process does not help selecting great candidates, a moderate increase on nominal risk on the hiring process will actually improve your odds there, and you'll gain both ways.
This is the entire problem with the inability to hire the "best"; It's dangerous to try and fail with lawsuits, unemployment, etc. I personally prefer to work for companies that don't hold on to poor employees and have quit companies that do the opposite. If you want to "hire the best" you have to "fire the worst". I accept the risk that comes with this of course (and many others may not).
The costs of sustaining a job search after being fired are a bit different than the costs of living while you have a reliable income stream. The grossing-up part is meant to reflect a nominal amount of money to cover those kinds of costs, not just a virtual continuation of the salary-less-taxes you'd been living on while employed.
In my experience, severance and sign on bonuses are often grossed up, as are payments made for relocation expenses.
But there's no reason to be hung up on that part. It's perfectly fine to just offer a regular severance benefit without grossing it up.
If I pay relocation expenses, I require receipts (at which point, it's non-taxable for most situations, so doesn't need grossing up). It's not that I disbelieve the new hire, but rather that I have to make it accountable in order to make it non-taxable.
If I pay cash comp (whether as a signing bonus, periodic bonus, commission, in contemplation of on-going employment, or as part of a termination agreement), they're wages in my book and I've never seen them grossed up (unless more of the character of the gift card or Christmas ham variety).
This might be a deal breaker for me if I was interviewing with someone. It's not that I care about the accountability part, it's more that a ton of relocation costs are unforeseen incidentals, or are private expenses (like first month's rent ... it's not your business what I choose to pay in rent), that should be covered by just paying cash to the new hire. Making them track down receipts for all of it might work out to be more costly, in terms of time lost, than just bearing the taxes, and certainly might involve requiring knowledge of expenses the employee may rightfully prefer to keep private.
Usually, I expect that the company will handle almost all aspects of relocation on their own (e.g. buying plane tickets and hotel rental for housing visit, calling up and hiring the moving company to pack and ship belongings). The part that would be paid as cash would be the cost of rental fees, deposit, and first month's rent, as well as some small amount for incidentals, which should be grossed up.
On the other stuff I guess we just disagree. I don't view sign-on bonus or severance pay as wage pay, even if they are pegged to wage level. For the other stuff, I agree, it's just part of regular income and the employee should bear the tax. But for sign on bonuses and severance, I think it's fair for the employer to bear the tax in light of the purposes of those payments.
Sign on bonuses are very different in this discussion though, since not everyone provides them and the amounts can vary a lot and for low amounts grossing up can matter significantly, while for larger amounts, employees are usually happy to bear the tax cost themselves. I'm not so worried about what an employer's policy is for these.
It would matter to me to negotiate a specific value paid for severance, though, rather than "6 months' salary" which will then have taxes taken out. If an employer was put off by this, it could be a problem, depending on all the other aspects of the job. One way to avoid this is that if secretly what I want is 6 months severance grossed up, then I'll try to negotiate 9 months severance, without mentioning the grossing up part. It's less off-putting to the counterparty, even if it would be nicer if I could just speak plainly.
I'm just speaking from my experience as a candidate in previous roles. I'm sure everyone has different experiences.
I (and I assume most hiring managers) have broad discretion on the amount of a signing bonus. For an engineer I want, I will never care about the difference between a $5K and a $10K signing bonus (or if we're talking about bonus in lieu of relo, the difference between $15K and $25K). It's a one-time expense to me, comes out of a different budget, and yet candidates seem to really value them seemingly out of proportion to the economic benefit.
Some firms offer > $30k signing bonuses (some more than double that) independently of relocation. It's rare, but not exceedingly rare.
In interviewing discussions in places like HN, there is enough pushback against this idea, which is a bit surprising to me. I thought a few hours work was reasonable when I was interviewing. But my point is that just this small bit of work seems already too big for many people, let alone working 10-20 hours a week moonlighting. It's cool that they pay for it, but that pay is pretty insignificant in the overall scheme of things. (Also, now you're not really interviewing, you're doing client work. Different relationship.)
When I have tried moonlighting in the past I found the stress incommensurate with the additional income. So I don't think I would do it as an interview, personally.
It sucks that companies take a risk during hiring. But I'm not really interested in making that my problem, as a job seeker.
If I do one two hour project, and either get an offer letter or polite refusal in response, I'd do it in a heartbeat. But no one does that. They would be fools if they did.
Would I want my kids to spend their careers being put through the wringer of multiple high-stakes interviews or be forced to moonlight in order to get jobs, something that gets progressively harder as people reach their thirties and gain extra responsibilities? No. Rather stay away from the field entirely and look for a more stable career.
I am a 2nd year CS student looking for a web-dev job to get experience and learn new stuff and every ad I see requires a couple of years in the industry + knowledge of a huge amount of frameworks. From my viewpoint, there is no real need for beginner devs. Companies are looking for really experienced AND cheap programmers.
That's my inbox. Not too appealing.
No. Now, okay, if you are doing absolutely fantastic, ground-breaking work, and I'd be rubbing elbows with industry leaders, and I am not otherwise in the market or trying to do eleventy seven other things simultaneously maybe I'll carve some time out for your project to prove myself worthy. But, you know, most jobs are jobs. If I play the interview game I can have a handful of job offers in a week (maybe not jobs I want to do, but that's a different story). Your team might be doing it right, but do I have optics into that? Probably not.
If everything I've done in my life is not enough to convince you (generic you, not draw_down you) that I can program and solve your pedestrian problem, then I don't view me as being the problem here.
So, if your take home thing is a 2 hour project, and is in lieu of a whiteboard grilling, then fine, sounds appealing to me. But only in context, because it suggests that you don't actually have any interest in measuring my skills, which go far beyond writing for loops. So, probably not a job for me, no harm, but you know, not appealing. Sell me, I'm not a supplicant. We'll figure out if we are a good match or not, no biggie.
The reality is that the take home things are usually just yet one more requirement, one more hurdle, yet more time out of my life. And you do a few, it goes into a black hole, no one even responds, or you get a one sentence email from HR telling you piss off in the nicest way possible, and the motivation to do another goes into the toilet.
Or the reverse happens. You do really well, they bring you in, throw some brain teaser programming problem on a whiteboard, your mind goes blorp, and suddenly everyone is being aggressive and scowling, or staring at their phones, instead of talking to you. Oy vey. I'm sure it happens, but I have never had take home go well, where I didn't end up feeling like a piece of meat being graded by the USDA.
And I never thought, once, "this is a really good measure of me - good performance on this reflects my on the job performance". Yes, I can write for loops, and fix bugs, but if that all the job is it must be really boring. What do you do? Why should I want to do it? How can I help? How can I grow? How can I help you grow? I have some ideas, are you interested in them? Let's build something!
Nope, just for loops, and then iterate over this structure that should be recursed over (or vice versa) on a white board.
I program. I get jobs done, every time. The code is maintainable. I try to up the bar, not maintain the status quo. I can talk to you about all of this, and if you have a medium IQ you can tell I am not bullshitting you. What more do you reasonably want?
8 weeks of contracting. Burn your vacation. Don't talk to your kids or wife, I'm trying to get rich here off your back. Work for me! Moonlight, and risk getting fired! Prove yourself worthy, because I have no judgement, and I'm terrified of making a decision! I'll string you along for months when you have all these other options.
Nah.
I prefer at least having a phone interview upfront, which suggests that the company is willing to put in some effort.
If I have to spend two hours doing made-up homework for you before you will even talk to me, I expect that you will then spend an equivalent amount of effort proving to me that your company is somewhere that I would like to work. If you are not willing to invest that amount of time, the whole point of the interview is to reach an arrangement wherein I give you time and you give me money, so you could pay me for those 2 hours instead.
While I don't necessarily walk away from interviews that turn me off, every warning flag does add to the minimum offer amount I would be willing to accept from the employer. If you don't treat me with professional courtesy and respect during the interview, I am silently adding numbers in my head. If you act like I am the one wasting your time, I am probably adding $20000/year to my salary expectations.
I would much rather moonlight for a few hours every week, while getting paid to do actual work, than spend even one hour doing a stupid toy homework problem that ends up being a great signal for the employer and a very poor one for me. It isn't a matter of whether the pay is significant for me, but whether the employer is making and demonstrating an effort to make the process an exchange between equals rather than a superior-inferior relationship.
So in order to work on an audition project, I'd have to be unemployed already.
But specifically if you were taking an interview rather than working a side job you could make the argument that the clause didn't apply in any case.
It all comes down to how much you pissed off your ex-employer by leaving, and how much they want revenge. No-one is going to gain anything from suing you after you've moved jobs.
But my current work contract has an anti-moonlighting clause that could also be a problem. It states that I can't have other demands on my time that would interfere with my day job. Now, I interpret that as meaning I can do side projects that have no deadline and just be luxuriously slow and lazy at making progress on them. But for an audition project I probably wouldn't be able to take it that slow.
While there's always some bias, I think it shifts quite a bit once you move from an artificial "interview environment" to a work environment.
Plus as has been said, since they candidates are working with the people they would be working if hired and that relationship doesn't work out, then maybe it's better to keep looking for someone else.
In my past of applying for jobs as a designer, I had companies that would ask for take home tests. I always refused and of course didn't get the job. Conversely, other companies I worked for offered freelance positions (probation) before settling onto full time which I thought was far more effective and fair method at evaluating me as a long term candidate.
If they have neither, then it's absolutely fair to ask them to do a small audition project first. Otherwise how can you be sure they're competent?
Keep in mind this idea doesn't exist just in recruitment. It's basically recruitment's version of what's called a "proof of concept", which is proof that the party that is pitching/asserting something (i.e. their skill) can actually deliver.
If the project is a couple hours, then sure, I have no problem with it. When it's an entire real project for the company, you're just donating a week's work to someone in the hope of getting an offer letter.
A word to the hiring managers out there, look to the future, cast the vision, and onboard people who want to go there with you.
When someone says "We Hire The Best", ask them to quantify precisely what "The Best" means. They can't. They weasel around and avoid answering. And that is because they can't define in a tangible way what "The Best" is. And if you can't define it then how do you know you found it?
Assuming you can define "The Best", an even bigger problem is working out a provable mechanism for measuring - in a quantifiable way - whether someone meets the criteria for being "The Best".
And the final absolute ripper problem is that the more you strive for "The Best", the less likely tou are to find anyone so you'll spend months interviewing and hiring no-one until the boss decides to pull the budget for that position because you didn't hire someone and anyway the commercial opportunity that validated the hire is now evaporated because we couldn't get the code written.
My term for this is "Voodoo Recruiting" in which there are rituals and dances and songs and meetings and processes and tests but it's all just a magic show because in the end the decision is not scientific, it's a magical outcome based just on personal likes and biases. In Voodoo Recruiting a company forms a set of beliefs about its recruiting processes and practices that become sacred and magical - such as "everyone has to do our test, and it actually tells us something meaningful about the candidates and we know how to interpret the results in a meaningful way".
Here's a few posts I wrote on the topic:
I sent one of the best developers I know to a job interview, he was rejected. http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/i-sent-one-of-...
Employers don't want great developers, they want what they want. http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/employers-dont...
Is your developer recruiting process just stroking your company ego? http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/is-your-poor-d...
And employers want what they think they want. I've been forced to (inadvertently) undermine the Great Developer too many places to think otherwise.
Lest ye think otherwise, I'm not that good. I'm just rigorous but I can switch modes and hack like a shameless... hacker.
My current company doesn't hire the best, but instead focuses on people who enjoy making impact in a small team, share the same vision and have a bit of an entrepreneur in them. We don't quiz people or give them tests. We just sit down with them and start talking tech. The results are really amazing and make for a great place to work because everyone feels like the project they work on is their baby.
There is no definition for "the best" beside a "well balanced human being"...
I have been researching this exact space for the past few months (www.developersjourney.info) and am now more and more convinced that once you reach a technical-threshold, in order to close onto "better-developers", you need to hunt for the 3-C-values: create, care and criticize. A balanced team should be a patchwork of cultures, backgrounds, desires and skills. But I think the drive toward those 3-Cs isn't optional...
Plug: This is very much an ongoing thoughts-process for me. If you have further input for my DevJourney Project and/or want to appear on my podcast on this subject, please contact me!
From the perspective of a subordinate doing hiring, raising the bar makes perfect sense. You don't want to get blamed for a risky hire going bad, so you optimize for making your choice defensible rather than good. Non-hiring is also risky - it's just risky in a way that damages the company rather than the person doing the hiring.
"What do you pay?"
"Market Rate."
"We hire only the best"
"What do you pay?"
"Between 10 and 30 million USD per year"
(I know, I know, it was a terrible joke.)
There are three attributes you need to select for to identify performing employees in intellectual fields.
- General mental ability (Are they generally smart)
- Work sample test (NOT HAZING! As close as possible to the actual work they'd be doing).
- Integrity (The first two won't matter if the candidate is a sociopath).
I don't want to work in Sillicon Valley, even if the work is interesting. I live in Scandinavia and for me scandinavian countries are the best to live in the world.
You're used to that, and in a "measurable" way, it's semi-objectively true but it's not for everybody. I think it mainly was that I missed the sheer insanity of America where it is insane. It's something akin to codependency.
And given all that, I'd rather live in a Scandinavian country than SiVa.
Sweden for example has more billionaires per capita then the US. Norway have so much money in their oil-fund that they could pay every Norwegian 1 million NOK and still have money left. We're safe from any storms, earthquakes and basically all natural catastrophes. The most dangerous animal is pretty much the moose. Environmental issues will hit Scandinavian countries very late compared with the US.
1. The study about blind interviews in orchestras mentioned in the article. Think about it, most people in symphonic orchestras have a university education, and often with more years of education than your average engineer, they learned all about critical thinking etc... They are artists, whom are usually considered more open minded (ok debatable). But, they as a group, were able to acknowledge that they have strong biases to the point of trying (and eventually adopting) blind interviews. This, tells me that these people have a strong sense of the fact that they are aware that they biased, and able to admit it, and aware that it might influence their interview process, yet, the experiment showed that they were not able to see passed gender! This has seriously made me rethink about my beliefs about being conscious of my own biases.
2. I have worked for company A, which hired only the best (besides me I guess ;-) ) pretty much as described in the article, I have recommended people I had worked with previously and whom I knew were amazing, but they didn't get hired. I was seriously surprised, but you know the "it's better not to hire one of the best than err and make one bad hire". Ok.
3. I then worked for company B. I recommended somebody who was hired at company A. That person was not a friend, but somebody who passed all interviews with flying colours at company A. I worked with that person and they are extremely smart. Everybody at company A was amazed how smart that person was, even after seeing them fly though all the oh-so-though interviews. Working for close to a year with that person, and everybody was still positive about how smart and good that person was, so they aren't just good at interviewing. That person was turned down at company B.
PS: Yeah, maybe I just need to stop recommending people, I now realise I'm the common thread in people not getting hired in my story!
Now you've got to spend time optimizing your interviewing team. What if one guy just says yes to everything? He might as well not be there but he's still a weight in that decision. What about the opposite where he says No every time? When do you decide he is actually going to say No every time and not worth being part of that decision process?
The more people you put on this decision table, the lower the chances that any one candidate will make it through. But there's an opportunity cost of time/money to that, so you've got another thing to balance.
I think it would be really, really hard for one person to simultaneously impress 10 people beyond a doubt just because of how many people have to reach consensus. And can you imagine the stress of knowing one dude with a nitpicky attitude (that none of the others know about yet) could sink your chances?
I've worked with people who were A players, hired into a new firm, and quickly spun out. Other people were C players, found a new job, and quickly became A players.
If you're a company who's great at training people, you can hire for energy and eagerness to learn. If you expect people to know everything on day one, hire for experience. The same people who succeed in one of those companies will fail in the other. A big part of hiring is knowing yourself and knowing what makes people successful.
"The most significant shift we’ve made is requiring every final candidate to work with us for three to eight weeks on a contract basis. Candidates do real tasks alongside the people they would actually be working with if they had the job. They can work at night or on weekends, so they don’t have to leave their current jobs; most spend 10 to 20 hours a week working with Automattic, although that’s flexible. (Some people take a week’s vacation in order to focus on the tryout, which is another viable option.) The goal is not to have them finish a product or do a set amount of work; it’s to allow us to quickly and efficiently assess whether this would be a mutually beneficial relationship."
The people who will go through this either a) really want to work at your particular company (in which case, great, but unlikely), or b) are desperate for a job because they've been turned down several times.
And... Interviews are awful. Seeing how someone work is even better. This is one reason why employee referrals are so important, and audition or temp-projects a good second-best method.
In the end I think it's a Fools Game though - someone who is best in one environment may not be that great for the next. Managing people post-hire is something that can't be avoided.
Every startup needs a few of the best. You should definitely seek out and pay for those few. After that, even a startup has jobs that don't require the best. Hire for potential, attitude, chemistry. Hire for special knowledge when you have to (though you should try to avoid it). But don't demand that every hire be among the proven elite.
The absolutely best employees I've seen haven't been frequent job hoppers. At most it's every 3-5 years. I'm thinking of an unscientific sample size of 5 or 6 people who have had sustained outstanding technical performance of 10-25 years. Companies don't let people like them go. And they tend to be loyal to the mission if treated fairly.
Now a company with $1mm of seed money that's supposed to last 12-18 months can't afford to hire 5 people like that. There's not enough cash or equity to go around.
Thanks for sharing.
I'm finally sitting down to read Peopleware, and from what I can tell, this is what they recommended back in 99 or 87 or whatever. Alongside portfolios of work. I need to find a 2013 edition, to see if they mention GitHub portfolios at all.
It seems like a colossally bad idea almost all-around. I mean, would Automattic tolerate an employee working contract gigs for a potential future employer if Automattic were to be made aware that's what the employee was doing?
Weird.
Haven't heard so much from Joel these days - sad :(
I thought that the increase was largely attributed to more women being willing to audition anonymously?
> if that describes you, and you have serious Linux, Ruby, and JavaScript chops, perhaps you should email me
I don't know why, but I always thought the Atwood was 100% invested in Microsoft technologies. Not that it matters, it just surprised me.
Speaking of Atwood, has anybody ever used one of his keyboards? Any opinions?
Claudia Goldin was one of the authors of this study: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/aer.90.4.715
She was able to attribute 25% of the increase in hiring of women by orchestras was due to the blind auditions. She also found that there was an explosion of auditions when orchestras adopted the blind format.
So it had an effect, just not as large as I thought.
Honestly, if you're a straight guy, why wouldn't you want pretty young women working with you?
Seriously, what kind of straight man only wants to be around men all day long, and then (assuming he's married) come home every day to the same woman, and never get to socialize with any other women? Maybe a religious fundamentalist, but not any normal man.
1. Why should women be judged on attractiveness? Men are not generally judged on this standard to join orchestras or do office work. It also, perversely, punishes women for being experienced while men benefit from it, handicapping their lifetime earning power. Professional women probably do not want to spend their lives judged as eye candy.
2. Because of the first point you will still end up with a strong male bias on top of whatever natural one training creates; after all, we're looking at men of any age versus young women, for the most part, in this scenario.
3. The numbers clearly do not bear out the assertion you're making in the first place, since blind auditions significantly increase the likelihood of women being hired after auditioning. It seems your "self-evident" reasoning does not fit the facts.
4. I do not think it is true that all men want to spend more time socializing with women. I don't see how the logic you're positing works unless sexual harassment is just outright permitted. If you're not convinced that sexual harassment is bad then I guess you're operating on a different plane than most of us.
I'll go backwards: 4. So you think that most men would prefer to not have any women around them most of the time, and only want to socialize with other men? I don't know if that's true or not, but it certainly isn't the case with me. I don't really want to work in a monastery-like atmosphere devoid of females (attractive or not).
3. Maybe, but that's what I'm asking about: why would straight men only want to be around other men? Seriously, I really don't understand this at all. Are most men repressed gays or something? I actually like being in mixed environments, even if I'm not attracted to most or even any of the women. Am I weird that way?
1-2. You seem to be claiming that men aren't also judged on attractiveness, and this seems wrong. I'm quite sure a lot of studies have shown that men are indeed judged on attractiveness, though the standard is somewhat different than for men (it doesn't disfavor older men as much). Just go find a short guy (or worse, a short fat guy) and ask him how his life is going and if he perceives any discrimination.
Anyway, my point all along has not been that only young pretty women should be hired, as you seem to think, my point was that I don't understand why men would discriminate against women in hiring, because to do so would mean you're surrounding yourself with a bunch of dudes, and as I said above, I don't know about other men, but I for one do not enjoy "sausagefests"; I like mixed environments.
The reason I get the idea that you're advocating sexual harassment is that you keep casting this in sexual terms -- why would you want to be surrounded by men, unless you're gay? Work is not a sexual environment (let's ignore the exceptions for this conversation); why is sexual orientation relevant? Saying "hey, aren't you heterosexual? Then why don't you hire women?" manages to promote a progressive cause with regressive reasoning.
I will concede that men, too, are judged by appearance, but I think that the standard is far more lenient and, as you said, tolerant of age.
In any event, the auditions are meant to judge skill. The conclusion I reach from the success of blind auditions is that evaluators perceive playing as less skillful when they know it is done by a woman.
So you think that if I'm not actively looking for sex from women, that I should be perfectly happy to live a life completely devoid of any kind of female contact whatsoever?
That seems extremely disturbing to me.
Does that also mean that if I'm not actively looking to have a sex partner of a different race/ethnicity, then I should be perfectly happy to never have any kind of contact with people from other ethnic groups?
Wow, I guess on HN I'm just a real weirdo because I don't want to be surrounded by white males and be completely cut off from contact with other kinds of people.
This is what you wrote. So, no, I think you're just trying to walk away from the implications of what you wrote because you are embarrassed. How do you propose interpreting that without any sexual bent?
The best programmers are Internet savvy, therefore able to effectively collaborate across time zones.
One of these things is not like the others.
Any one who is hard worker (can learn etc) and has open mind to discussing design pros and cons is a good hire for 80% of software.
I guess that's another, more polite, way of saying that 'we require that you don't need any kind of work permit sponsorship'.
A successful sports team should hire the best, even if that's what everyone else is trying to do too.
Yes, but sports teams recognize "the best" is dependent on the other pieces in the organization. Teams that try to stack their rosters with "the best" in objective measure typically crash and burn. Teams that recognize "the best" is whomever fits the team's scheme and current players the best succeed. Too many software companies want the first sense instead of the second.
No, this can't work at e.g. the NFL. There is a $155 million per year hard salary cap. There are 53 players which much be paid under this cap. Which means the average salary is just under $3 million.
One of "the best" quarterbacks gets paid $20 million."The best" at various other key positions such as left tackle and defensive end and at cornerback can easily get paid $10 million each.
Even if you forget about special teams, you can't afford to pay 11 offensive players $10 million each plus 11 defensive players $10 million each.
Which means that you pay a few superstars at $10 million or more, some more good players $5 million, a bunch of OK players $3 million, and a bunch of rookies and scrubs under $1 million each.
Nobody can afford to hire the best at everything. I'm sure that's just as true in business as it is in sports.
So why bother interviewing? The goal is not "we only hire the best". Hiring is only half the battle and a short term goal at most. The long term goal should be "we only retain the best". Sometimes that means firing people, but more often it means going to the mat to keep the people who work best: Treating people like human beings and, most importantly, paying them. Pay well and the good people will not leave. Actually fire those who don't work out in the long term and even they will do nearly anything to stay.
Or do what most startups do. Pay next to nothing. Treat everyone like widgets in a great machine. Fire only those whose admit having a life outside of work. And hire only those who share similar opinions on ultimate frisbee because culture!
Someone who has 20 years of knowledge in a dozen different languages doesn't matter as much if you just need someone with 2 years of very deep knowledge in one very specific language. On paper the former is "better" (even if one can learn/adapt), but in context someone who fits the latter is a better fit.
People can also learn. I'll take a junior developer over a senior developer who's an asshole any time. In a team, over time, the junior developer can more easily become an asset than the senior can change his/her ways.
Totally agree that retaining is the other side of the story. We actively encourage people to tell about their life outside of work and celebrate the diversity in cultures.
The article also talks about geographic diversity which I think is a great help in getting good people to apply, we have people in 4 continents now. If we only had to hire in the bay area we can't have been as selective as we're now.
What happened that makes you this bitter?
Well, sure, but from the employer's perspective different people have differing amounts of potential productivity. You definitely want to at least limit your hiring to people who at least have the potential to be star performers.
Are you fucking kidding me? What am I going to tell my current employer while I "audition" for the mere possibility of a next job?
Most working adults in the US don't even get three to eight weeks of discretionary vacation that they aren't already using to spend time with family or, you know, recharge after working the salt mines for meager scraps.
This is the wrong approach for anyone except - maybe - very junior candidates. Fresh out of college, zero responsibility, wide open prospects. Those people could actually use 3-8 weeks of paid auditioning. Those of us who have families simply can not afford to do this.
When did it become ok to treat people like shit and humiliate them with these ridiculous "interviews". Seems like we keep coming up one worse idea after another.
Shame on everyone who thinks its ok to humiliate people with your idiotic algorithm/whiteboard/big O interviews.
This is getting so out of hand. Can we bring some humility and kindness to tech interviews.
What is the purpose of an interview? To see if someone's a good fit and works well with you. Interviews don't tell you that. Working with the people fixes that.
At least these are paid contracts. It's one thing if they were unpaid, then sure, yes it sucks. But it's the equivalent of doing a freelance gig for a couple of weeks to see not only if they like you, but if YOU like working at that company.
You can evaluate working at a company, get paid to do it, and find out all the pitfalls BEFORE you leave your existing job. What could possibly be so damn disgusting to you about this?
The salary negotiation is itself about trading getting the employer to basically take care of you (especially in Japanese corporations, as patio11 often mentions) so you can reduce your risk. The infantile mentality inculcated in people receiving conditional welfare is present in FTE -- pg's essay about schools and jails would be applicable here. One can even argue that our education system has been designed to prepare the majority for being obedient and loyal FTE workers.
http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
I'd rather society replaced all this with an UNCONDITIONAL basic income for everyone and everyone would be free from any age to work as a self employed contractor. That would effectively abolish the minimum wage and let people learn through doing projects where they are treated with respect, not as animals in a zoo.
I think libertarians talking about philosophical freedoms should take a serious look at actual personal freedom as defined by the range of options each person has.
Maybe my experience isn't representative, but at my job there is actually work to do: you know, hard problems that take time to think through and solve.
> The infantile mentality inculcated in people receiving conditional welfare is present in FTE
Substitute "conditional welfare" with "earned compensation".
How is it infantile to voluntarily negotiate compensation with someone for whom you will be providing value (ie. your employer) and yet not infantile to demand unconditional welfare from society as a whole?
And this is similar to the threat of losing your steady paycheck if you don't behave, as is evidenced in part by the great grandparent comment. There is a lot of dysfunctional politics and dynamics that comes from being in that sort of situation and environment, which pg's essay "why nerds are unpopular" describes at length. Incidentally, pg is also very anti FTE personally, likening it to eating roadkill.
Look at it like this -- can you work on your own awesome project that will change the world? Not if your employer wouldnt be pleased. Maybe you'll sneak around like a kid does. If you work for a bank, can you take a position as a CFO at a startup? I have heard people say they can't do this, or that, because their employer wouldnt like it. I've seen tons of people sitting around and pretending to work, because their employer was covering the risk, but they are afraid of losing their job. It's a conditional paycheck that by definition demands your full time for whatever odd job comes up once you're there. And they even try to make you work longer hours without valuing them as they would with a contractor.
I don't mean to say that there are absolutely no fulfilling, productive fulltime jobs. Just that the vast majority of people experience many of the downsides of FTE including the infantile mentality. Plus many of those people believe their own jobs are not productive and can be eliminated:
When I work as an independent contractor I do so knowing that I am paying significantly higher taxes on that income, paying for my own health insurance, and managing my time in such a way that I can stay sane. I charge accordingly.
Is this company going to pay me the hourly rate they charge their clients during this "trial" period? Are they going to pay me extra because I'm working 40 hours a week and then doing this work overtime?
Because if not they are eventually going to find themselves on the wrong end of a lawsuit where they must designate these people as part time employees.
I've done an "interview" like this before, but it was 3 months not 3 weeks and they paid me my agreed upon contract rate up front for 15 hours a week work from home. They made a decision not to hire full time after the second month and let me know, but used my additional month of work. I was able to use the time and money to find a full time position during this period that was a good fit. That's fair.
They are fun. So company ends with a lot of people who can implement red-black trees and so on, especially under high stress. That could be good in some case. I can't see it that good in general.
"So customer reports server keeps restarting every Thursday, can you take a look?"
"I am not sure how to do it, but I can invert a binary tree in under 10 minutes though, would you like to see that?"
Most ppl completely forget how to invert a binary tree in about 1 week after the interview. Which makes the whole interview process based on that stuff even more absurd.
My misgiving about these interviews is that they are really exams, without the examiner/examinee accord that I think slowly evolved over time, in institutions that are exam-heavy, to provide balance and fairness to both sides. Think about exams at a university: most (but not all) of the time, formal exams come with a number of rights for the person taking the test. It must be consistent, it must be graded fairly, it can't be capricious, it must be related to the coursework, if you fail, you have the right to know why you didn't pass, you get feedback, you get a lasting credential, you have a "study path", and you have a grievance process if you feel things were biased, unfair, or inappropriate.
I understand that companies are tight lipped because of liability issues, this means applicants take a high stress five hour exam, but with nearly no feedback. Supposedly there are numerical scores in a database about candidates, but they are not allowed to know what those scores are.
Unfortunately, I do think this amounts to an exam without the rights that evolved over time to make sure the process wasn't excessively abusive to people who sit for exams.
Lastly - I tend to agree that a company is free to set up what hiring process it likes, within limits. If a month long paid audition/consulting gig is how they'd like to do this, and they accept that this means they will lose out on people with stable jobs (often people with children or other dependents), that's fine. But what do you think about companies that do this but then start complaining to congress that there is a terrible shortage of workers? Should we take them seriously?
Any stress where I'm "tested" somehow where the "correct" solution is to amaze the interlocutor with my fantastic analytic skills? It's like I've had a brain surgery. That stuff is just not accessible. I don't feel terribly troubled by such situation but my brain apparently does.
The same does not happen with working in actual products where people are concerned in finishing a product on time and not evaluating me. Pressure is way higher in those situations but the pressure is to get the work done and not impress anyone by trying to outguess which theoretical approach is most dear to them.
For this reason Fizzbuzz is the most technically demanding task I would demand of anyone if I were to lead an interview. For fresh graduates? Look at their grades. More seasoned folk? Have they got stuff done and do they appear smart? I would emphasize this "getting stuff done part".
The follow up argument is of course, feel free to insert exaggerated hysteria here: "what if everyone moves to this model"? There are worse things in the world then getting paid to interview with someone.
And don't give me xyz about how hard it is to fire someone. Owners with people working for them in other professions don't seem to have this problem and they lay people off at will.
I know that owners and funders are trying to reduce risk as much as possible and this is one way they feel like they can. However, as the article even states, startups fail for all sorts of reasons. Newsflash, staring and running a company is a risky thing to do! Thats why if you succeed there is a large reward!
I don't think it's great necessarily, and certainly not great for everyone (some people really have very little free time outside of work, kids, and other responsibilities) but I also don't think that's bad. I actually wouldn't mind the side income from such an endeavor right now.
There is also the potential legal problem of people working under contracts that don't let them do side work, which is also a legitimate argument against this approach.
Personally, I don't think there is anything wrong with this as long as they understand their bias. Sometimes it's more important to pass on potentially great hires in order to weed out bad hires.
For what it's worth, I would never do this. I'm not going to quit my current job to take this kind of risk. I also don't have "free" time. I have several time consuming hobbies / commitments outside of work that I'm not willing to break for 3-8 weeks.
The process seems to strongly favor young and single folks. Then again maybe that's fully intended. The tech industry has a huge ageism problem after all.
For example, if you look over 40 and not a tech lead/manager and haven't been one, you won't be hired, as you will be seen as having a lack of career trajectory. The entire 'career trajectory' premise is inherently ageist.
Then again, maybe it's time to stop looking for a one size fits all solution and acknowledge that (in an ideal world) we might want to have different processes for different candidates, depending on their life situation and/or individual priorities?
If anyone asked me to do an "audition" contract job on nights and weekends, screwing up my family life and my professional job that I'm still obliged to perform, I would laugh heartily before hanging up. Even in a unemployment situation, I'd get stuck with a more complicated tax return, and be faced with a future of similarly douchey behaviors to follow.
Are there any cases of people working on some open source project on nights/weekends and have their employer swoop in later and claim copyright because of their employment contract? Has it ever stood up to legal scrutiny?
Whatever happened to just hiring someone on a contingency basis? Sure it will cost more if the person ends up being a bad fit since you'll be paying unemployment and they'll be out of a job entirely, but it's far more schedule friendly and less sketchy than this "pretend to be a moonlighting contractor" bit.
Becoming good at firing is one way to triumph despite interview problems. Sometimes the employee is quite aware that they aren't working out. Even if they aren't, their coworkers probably can see the disaster unfolding. Done well, there's no morale hit.
More specifically, this is another way for an employer to move the risk of hiring back onto the employee. It's the employee who is going to need to leave their current position for an 'audition'. This is going to put the employee at a disadvantage during negotiations because the employee will likely not have as strong a position compared to have an existing job to fall back on.
So unless the 'best' are already unemployed, then this helps the employer reduce their risk, and improve their bargaining power during offer negotiations.
As a thought experiment, if you were trying to hire one of the 'best', during negotiations would you prefer if that person was currently employed or currently unemployed? As an employee, I'm glad that generally my BATNA includes staying at my current position (at a minimum).
Privilege is working both ways here: the developer has their pick of the crop and so does a highly successful and desirable employer.
Edit: I want to point out that I think it's only acceptable in a region where the developers have the market advantage.
For example; The test to get hired with my fire department was 2 hours long. 1800+ people took the test: 400 passed.
Then you have to pass a Physical test: 250 passed.
Then there are two formal interviews: 150 passed.
Then the final selection of 50.
After the selection, the candidate is required to pass a 22 week academy. The attrition rate in the academy is roughly 30%
So out of the 50 that start the academy ~35 graduate.
Then you are on probation for 1 full year, where maybe 5 or so are fired for various reasons. That is, once you get past the interviews, the real training and evaluation begins. There is no guarantee that you will have a job until you complete probation.
This is the equivalent of getting into the school you want, not a job interview.
I love how egalitarian software development and engineering is but I think the root of the problem is I as a hiring manager don't trust you can do the things you say you can do. So I'm going to use a test/trail period/white-boarding session to find that out. While making it a little less open an industry wide certificate would at least certify a minimal skill set level for everyone.
It mostly categorically excludes anyone who has market desirability and doesn't have to put up with it.
I suppose it could work in parts of the country/world where the supply of engineers vastly exceeds the number of jobs, but it likely fails spectacularly in anything resembling a tech hub.
This strikes me as the stronger/more extreme version of take-home interview projects, which while being good at filtering for quality, also simultaneously selects only for people who are willing/forced to put up with it.
I suppose if your strategy is "hire the best of the desperates", this works for you.
I asked a friend who hires for his start-up why they do it. And their answer was exactly what you suggested -- to find desperate people and it also requires minimum investment of their time to start with. The rationale is because in the end they'd have to invest a significant amount of their time during the delivery crunch, that ends up selecting for that trait pretty well.
He spoke as a friend, and will probably never say or admit it in public to the outside. But yeah it is something that happens. I imagine they are not the only ones who came up with that realization.
Luckily I had many other interviews to go to, I didn't waste my time on their project. I'm sure a lot of people in Albuquerque would have though.
This theory makes intuitive sense, but some evidence contradicts it. Several studies have found that men and women discriminate against women equally, or even that women are harder on other women than men are:
* Steinpreis, Anders, and Ritzke (1999) http://www.cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Diversity_Studies/Stein... ; Moss-Racusin et al. (2012) http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full ; and Reuben, Sapienza, and Zingales (2014) http://www.pnas.org/content/111/12/4403.abstract found that men and women were equally biased against hypothetical academic job candidates in a study based on reviewing resumes with male or female names.
* Nosek, Banaji, and Greenwald (2002) http://projectimplicit.net/nosek/papers/harvesting.GroupDyna... found that in implicit association tests, women show slightly stronger implicit biases towards traditional gender roles in the "Gender-science" and "Gender-career" tests.
* Of course, there's Terrell et al. (2016) https://peerj.com/preprints/1733/ (the GitHub gender bias study that was discussed on Hacker News the other day) in which the authors found that women are harder on other women than they are on men but decided not to mention this in the paper https://peerj.com/questions/2002-do-you-have-data-on-the-gen... .
On the other hand, I also found some studies that concluded that men have stronger gender biases than women:
* Bowles, Babcock, and Lai (2005) http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=779506 found that male managers penalize women who attempt to negotiate salary more than female managers do.
* Uhlmann and Cohen (2005) http://www.socialjudgments.com/docs/Uhlmann%20and%20Cohen%20... found that men exhibited a stronger gender bias than women did in rating hypothetical applicants for a job as a police chief.
This is just what I dug up in an hour of searching; I'd be interested in finding more research on this. Does anyone know of a review paper on this subject?
Then don't take the job? Your life choices (Children, wife, loan payments) aren't the fault or social responsibility of your prospective employer.
Why get so uppity about a job you aren't even going to apply for?
Are they not though? Aren't you consciously choosing engage in this optional activity when you decide to have kids.
Have a family, it's the end of your career, because you engaged in productivity limiting 'optional activities'. Yes, the tech sector IS that toxic.
If you have a family it's more important than your career. If you don't feel your family is more important, you may abandon it or never have one to begin with. Just because you have a different stack of priorities than another doesn't mean you can blame them for ranking theirs differently than yours.
Analogy is; you wouldn't protest at the Buddhist temple door because you feel that your time availably is less to become a full fledge Buddhist monk because you have a family.
It has nothing to do with women in tech, try and keep on topic please.
The gender gap is not going to get better while these attitudes are accepted. Women avoid tech to a large degree because it is rational to do so. The entire sector is so immersed in brogrammer culture that half the participants aren't even aware of it.
Regardless of how right you are, how wrong someone else is, and how big of a problem the industry has, all commenters on HN need to follow the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Looks like the HN mods are also part of the problem. Please hellban me, and enjoy your echo chamber.
Users frequently express views similar to yours without violating the site guidelines, so I don't think the moderation question has anything to do with subject matter.
Please don't be uncivil.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11224877 and marked it off-topic.