Your “high bar” is wrecking your team | Hacker News Reader

Your “high bar” is wrecking your team

brandonhays.com

60 pointsbrhays35 comments

My boss just dropped the offer salary for a new candidate by 25% because they weren't from a top tier school...I really hope they still accept b/c I _really_ need the help! I know that's a bit different than what the article is talking about but still similar reasoning. They were the strongest performer on every metric we have and for no other reason than the name of the school they did their graduate work at, they are getting a significantly lower offer. Really makes you question the value of the metrics in the first place, doesn't it?!

Do you think may candidates would accept such a blatant bait and switch?

>dropped the offer salary for a new candidate

That’s disgusting. It also feels a little bit sabotage-y, especially as you need the help.

I’d be questioning why I still want to work for a company/people who would make those kinds of decisions...

> I _really_ need the help

No. What you need is to start looking for another job.

I always assumed A player meant worked 60-100 hrs per week, but they expected you(not directly) to write 40-50 on your times sheet. And only paid for 30. But, don't worry your changing the world.

> But, don't worry your changing the world

By creating a new innovative way to deliver ads to consumers.

Like it or not, economy needs ads.

Economy has functioned by word-of-mouth for millennia. Ads as an industry are relatively new (maybe 300 years).

(Sure, word-of-mouth is a form of advertisement, but OP clearly refers to the ad industry, so I'm going with that meaning.)

How much are you willing to pay for every advertising supported site you use?

Apparently there was a study related to this this recently.

http://timharford.com/2018/05/how-much-would-i-have-to-pay-y...

Those millennia world was mostly in Malthusian trap.

I agree wholeheartedly. My guess would be one of:

- reverse causation fallacy: People who change the world (scientists, big entrepreneurs, politicians) often work a lot of overtime. Since I work overtime, I must be changing the world.

- cognitive dissonance: Surely I wouldn't be working overtime if my work weren't important!

That seems like overly 'business' thinking. People as numbers. While necessary on some level. I've found the best performers don't work any specific number of hours, but actually employ a 'chop smarter, not harder' mentality.

Some of my best people work a 30 solid ( dense ) hour week. Those are heads down, no distraction hours. No Facebook, no podcasts, just technical design and code. I don't enforce it, they just do it on their own. As long as they deliver, I want them out of the office, into the gym, outside, whatever the fuck they want, so they don't burn out.

And I'm happy with it because they always stretch and deliver, on time. And their code is tight, thoughtful and consequently maintainable.

As for finding people who exhibit those qualities. I ask them to solve a problem and see how their mind works. If it's thorough, thinking about error handling, documentation, etc., then that's a winner. I then use their Github code to determine seniority and go from there.

Ironically those with the most hunger and passion to learn and excel did not go to top-tier schools. It doesn't take much to figure out why.

I respect every part of your approach, except the GitHub bit. Not all devs code on the side.

It's also hard to judge anything from GitHub code when lacking necessary context. Most of repos on my profile are from 48 hour game jams, so their code quality hardly matches anything written professionally.

Yes, and most my (All?) professionally written code are proprietary and belongs to the company I work for.

Our best devs are consistently people who don’t have CS degrees and have good creativity, patience, curiosity, and who have some code to show that isn’t buzzword-chasing nonsense.

I think it's even less than that. I think the critical element is interest. I think even an average individual can have valuable contributions to a codebase if: a) the requirements, what needs to be achieved and standards of quality are clear b) they are interested in contributing.

That's it. I think the bar for software development is pretty low at the time being (but I'm not in the SF area, so maybe my outlook is myopic and limited to the local scene) and you can improve things noticeably if you just... care... and think things through. A feat quite hard in our days. Heck, some days, I can't make myself care,and sometimes I don't feel like pushing and doing things right no matter how much I wish I could. I _know_ I'm capable, I've done it before, had high focus spurts where I did stuff nobody else could. But I simply don't feel in lately. Sometimes it's hard to even push myself to do usefull things, and I'm pretty severe regarding my performance.

So, caring about the end result, in our days, I think, is in pretty short supply. Much shorter than most people think.

> [...] you can improve things noticeably if you just... care... and think things through [...]

This. Also: What the blogpost highlights well in this regard is that since the "bar" is orthogonal to real world skills and/or motivation, not only will you reject great developers who do (or would) care, there's also some chance you gather others who don't instead.

I'm also under the impression that "not caring" in this sense contributes largely to problems as those discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17164728

(i.e. just ship what the customer/boss wants, don't bother understanding the problems or think things through)

Another engineer at my company and I realized that most absurdly good engineers we know have art backgrounds (or just consider themselves artistic / creative).

Our theory is that artists are used to working with the limitations of their medium and enjoying the challenge.

Speaking quite selfishly to be sure: please don't make the opposite mistake by biasing against folks with CS degrees! I agree with all of the positive attributes you mention, but lots of people who studied CS also display those traits.

I mean, someone with a CS degree that has good creativity, patience and curiosity is likely to perform well too. These days, the degree gives you a common language and some foundational stuff (algorithms and data structures). 99% of the people I work with have CS degrees, but the other 1% aren't defined by their lack of a degree, they are defined by their ability to learn the language on their own time and that's valuable.

It's good to have a high bar.

But it's dumb to use someone's academic achievements alone to measure whether they meet the bar or not.

> it's dumb to use someone's academic achievements alone

I'm sure they don't - the author just seems a little touchy because he doesn't have a degree. I understand - I have a CS degree with a good GPA, but the school isn't all that impressive. I know it's cost me jobs (because they've told me). However, it's a pipe dream to think that there will ever come a time when degrees are irrelevant - unless human civilization changes a _lot_, academic credentials are going to get more important for programming work, not less, just as they are for every other field. As long as programming pays well and is the sort of work you can do sitting down in an air conditioned office while drinking coffee, it's going to attract a lot of applicants, and screeners are going to have to screen them. Love it or hate it, the easiest things a screener can look at that yield the best signal-to-noise ratio are academic pedigree and reputation of past employers. Since false positives are riskier than false negatives, they're being logical and reasonable.

Are they riskier? The company risks, say, a month of trial time...

They are riskier for recruiters who are enforcing artificial scarcity.

If someone does not have any domain knowledge they default to looking for: A) an authority or B) a demonstration/display.

authority = school, newspaper, official, parent, etc...

demonstration = performance, app, book, video, etc...

A demonstration is often a very very good indicator even if you have a lot of domain knowledge. When a candidate shows me something they've built I can gain a lot of perspective into how they think and work by asking questions about it.

Good article.

I've been coding circles around and teaching Stanford CS undergrad and graduate students for years.

Feels good since I'm self taught.

I tell them I'm a 'street coder'. They're valuable to me ( the CS students ) because they help me put words to CS concepts I have built in my own mind from experience.

Nothing frustrates me more than the scenario outlined in the article. The business folks can and will always say whatever they want that suits the business. That's their thing.

As the leader of the team and domain expert, you should be able to hire whom you deem most qualified. And they biz folks can make up whatever BS they want as long as you're delivering.

That said, I am self-employed in SF. So I don't particularly have to worry about managers. Except for convincing them to hire me, without the fancy degree. Fortunately I think it filters out a lot of the pretentious companies I would not be happy to work with.

In my experience this is often fueled by people who have the least understanding of their "high bar" criteria: management and HR who never worked at the companies that they think it is really important to hire from or got the degrees they scan for on a resume. The "high bar" mentality often creates mono-cultures, which can be effective, but usually not resilient, and sometimes toxic.

I want a high bar for my team, but a high bar that matters to what the business needs.

I want - passion, compassion, drive, curiosity, etc. That's where principles are always important for a company to show what is important as a high bar to your company. The goal is to hire the best people to accelerate your team not your ego which I think is the point of the article. In other words I agree.

Because we as humans will never escape the subconscious constraints and biases of a pack ordered society, it's woven into our very being.

Beware of casting a float to a boolean. Yes, every group of humans has some degree of toxic competition and hierarchy, but some much more than others. It makes sense to look at the ones that have less, and ask what they are doing right and how to emulate it.

> Beware of casting a float to a boolean

That is a great expression and I'm stealing it!

Sometimes it feels like most of my life is spent trying to teach others to cast booleans to floats. :)

Thanks! Credit where it's due: I got it from a post here a while back, though I forget who wrote it or what the thread topic was.

plain and simple: formal education gives a shitload of knowledge you rarely get otherwise (because students devote lot of time getting familiar with that knowledge in an environment that supports learning). a good dev with proper education is better than a equally capable person without the education. that said, BS degree is bs if you ask me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com