Should those of us who aren't top 5%/didn't go to a top school just find another industry, one where sub-perfect work doesn't actively make other people's jobs harder?
I obviously don't have any statistics, but I think I could imagine a situation where the top 95% of software people constitute the top 1% of the interviewing population. Also one where interviewers are terrible at math, but that's no surprise. Anyway, you're fine, just go for it. That fact that you are self-aware enough to worry about it puts you in good standing all by itself.
These companies aren't looking for top 1% people. They are looking for top 1% people who are in form currently.
The day you get unlucky and slip out of form, they don't want you.
Its basically the equivalent reducing the great people to Kleenex. Once used, they want to throw them. Then buy the next Kleenex box.
My goal is to not hire the bottom 50% of the workforce in a given discipline. IMO, you're better off building teams that make the average+ person more productive.
What's fun is that this isn't just a possibility, its likely! Despite the following being a clearly artificial argument, the general shape of it is true.
Let's say that you can rate employees 1-10 on each of technical skill and employability/soft-skills, and that both are equally sought by the market. Given how attractive your company is to work for and what you pay, its quite often true that you can allocate around 12 total points between the two categories. 13 point candidates have better offers from Google; 11 point candidates fail your interview process.
If you only hire people that strongly pass a strong technical interview, ensuring that their technical skill is at least an 8/10, then your employees will have at most 4/10 soft skills.
That of course works much better when everyone has their own office so the angry outbursts are only heard by the 2-3 closest neighbors.
Why most companies find it hard to find good sales engineers.
I'm pretty sure you're being hyperbolic, but that sounds hellish. I have GAD and dread interviewing so much that I'd forego unemployment and just work as a Task Rabbit or something.
To preempt the inevitable responses: Yes, I do have a family to support and, yes, I have worked as a Task Rabbit or done manual labor when faced with similar situations in the past.
I recently had to proof-read a job req for a lead dev role on our team. It was insane and the person it was targeted at 1) wouldn't work for the compensation we were offering 2) would likely be running their own business. When I gave my opinion to my manager he said "If we can get someone who can meet a third of those requirements and doesn't come off as an asshole, we'll give them an offer."
My husband is applying for jobs now and he says the same thing about senior positions he's come across. "This seems like it's a director's role, not a senior!" I tell him to apply anyway because they're just chest-puffing and won't find that ideal candidate before they make a desperation hire.
Those types of whacked out reqs are written by the employees who are exiting the role. They're likely exiting the role because they took on a bunch of extra responsibilities and weren't getting substantial raises or promotions. If you can do half the shit they did, you'll probably be fine. Although you'll eventually end up leaving that role for the same reasons the guy before you did.
Recently, I've been applying for web developer positions and am coming across applications with these sorts of questions:
- What's the coolest thing you've done both in life and at work?
- What are your dreams?
- Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
I certainly do have answers for these questions, but I can't tell if they're the ones that employers want to hear. And are these things for other random people to know?
There are things I've done that I think are cool, but that doesn't necessarily mean that most people will think they are cool. Honestly, there really isn't anything about my life that is conventionally cool, even by the standards of the nerdiest nerds. Should my life have been more unique and exciting by this point?
The same can basically be said of my dreams, although I do not aspire for big dreams. I haven't made enough money yet to even think about anything more grandiose than simply living comfortably. Do my dreams need to be more exciting? Should I be shooting the moon? I feel like any honest answer I give to the question will sound disappointing to any startup.
Should I see myself anywhere in particular in 10 years? Beyond making more money and taking on more responsibilities in my career, where should I be in 10 years? My field evolves so rapidly that I can't honestly predict that far ahead, let alone 5 years into the future. But maybe I'm not cut out for what I do if I can't see that far ahead?
I could very well be what's wrong in the picture, but it seems to me like we are culturally intolerant of "normal" people who have a skill and want to make a living. Everyone needs to have dreams, grand aspirations, and a little clairvoyance. I tend to have pretty high confidence, but seeing this kind of language when applying for jobs does stir up that feeling of imposterhood in me.
Hey, I ask a lot of these questions in consulting. What I’m looking for is to tell if a) you can communicate a point clearly b) if you can talk generally about your career and are growth oriented.
If you said that field evolves rapidly bit above that would be a good answer. If you span it as a joke “surely writing angular 25, the last web framework ever” even better.
I wouldn’t ask the dreams question, but the coolest question is loaded with coolest, I would say “tell me about a previous project you enjoyed working on” and see if you have had a good project you are passionate about.
A flip-side question is to ask about projects they worked on that failed. Failures rarely appear on resumes, and it can be an uncomfortable topic. But if you can get them going, you can learn a ton about how they handle adversity. Do they make excuses, or find scapegoats? Do they take responsibility? Do they give credit where credit is due for colleagues? Do they recognize the big-picture conditions that affected the situation?
That's a bad one, considering that everyone is supposed to be upbeat and positive in the face of adversity. You can't place blame on management and the environment that was in no way conducive to success because that's not culturally acceptable.
Are we supposed to prepare an answer for that question now as well because the true answer (unrealistic expectations from upper management and insufficient infrastructure) will make you fail the interview? What you could ask is what will make a team fail, and my answer would be autocratic management.
Nope. I don't want a prepared answer. I want an honest answer. Hence throwing them a rough, non-technical question that absolutely will not be on the resume, but has been part of the career of any experienced candidate.
"Autocratic management" isn't a good answer, because it's too general. What did autocratic management do? Were the requirements incomplete? The schedule unrealistic? Beaten by the competition? Depended on unproven technology? Sometimes, everyone does everything right, and a project fails anyway. There's still a reason it failed.
But when I hear a candidate talk about failure in the form of "I was a hero, but my idiot co-workers and malicious bosses ruined everything", I hear them finding someone to blame, rather than a problem that didn't get solved correctly. And that tells me a lot about what working with them will be like, when we have our inevitable failures.
There are tests where it doesn't matter - consider the blood glucose - the variability of capillary samples vs venous samples is well understood and the introduced error sufficiently small compared to reference range.
But Theranos also tried electrolyte panels, and there you have a problem because the concentrations of ions in blood plasma are very different from the concentrations of ions inside cells. Both are tightly controlled in the healthy body. Slightly less than 50 % of blood is cellular matter, and even small amounts of lysis are sufficient to distort the numbers to render them clinically meaningless. You inevitably have lysis in capillary samples. Carreyrou talks about that in his book.
Startuplandia has a way of attracting hucksters, unscrupulous businessmen and crazies with a firm disregard for what is physically possible. I notice that Ubeam was founded in 2011 and they are still around!
I once worked for an outfit where one founder was named party to an investor suit (he had awarded himself stock options after a clinical trial came out favourable) and the other was frankly incompetent and afflicted with cluster B personality disorders. It ended as well as one would have predicted. Failing startups because of founder personality and founder competence issues are unfortunately common, they are not corner cases at all, and for the person coming out of one the incidence is 100 %, but discussing such matters in an interview will torpedo your chances. No honesty for you, it's counterproductive for the jobseeker!
Seriously, Dave, if you were interviewing a candidate that had been working on the gluebot that Carreyrou mentioned in Bad Blood, how would he have to spin the story to get an offer out of you?
Hell, I've talked openly in interviews about the problems with a project that I got fired from, and blamed both management and the customer in no uncertain terms. I fault myself mostly for not walking out on it. I still get job offers when talking about how I got fired by incompetent management of an out-of-control project. But part of that is that my story leads somewhere - it leads to my lessons learned, conditions I will no longer tolerate in a workplace, #1 of which is the bottomless budget.
So I care less about how you screwed up, or who or what you blame, and more about what you learned from the failure. Tell me that, and you win my heart.
Conceptually, Theranos was very exciting. I hope someone actually pulls it off someday. I can understand the attraction for a scientist.
For example, "we made several governance mistakes on a project that meant we didn't have enough time to finish the project. On the next project, I made sure to be clearer with estimates and buffer time, so that the team etc. etc." and "Our management doesn't listen" can describe the same situation.
Again, definitely agree you are in the danger zone so its important to be thoughtful.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/employees-dont-leave-companie...
I would wager that at least half of candidates are just good humble team players. Your approach optimises for egotistical braggarts at the expense of normal people.
I often have a hard time putting my accomplishments into context (indeed, even seeing them as "accomplishments," because they're simply what I'm supposed to do).
(Incidentally, I hate the word "ownership" in this context. You don't own anything you can't take with you. Try taking work you did for a company with you when you leave.)
It's hard for a lot of people to speak well of themselves, which makes the whole interviewing process difficult much of the time. We're trained to a beat-down that gets called humility, but it's not. Asking about successes is a way past that - it's giving them permission to say something good about themselves.
But to be fair, a lot of what I'm after is inflated claims on a resume, which are common as dirt, because people are much more comfortable deceptively bragging on paper than they are in person.
It's different from being a good talker, which can be entertaining, but isn't really two-way.
That type of culture is unbearable to those that don’t perfectly fit your monoculture.
My opinion is uninteresting people are just fine for coworkers, you're interviewing for an employee, not a drinking buddy.
A big part of the hiring process, at least at big companies, is taking a pile of 100 resumes and reducing it to a pile of 10 resumes, because there's no way you're interviewing 100 candidates. So 90% are eliminated before ever meeting, and bias is huge there.
But the bias starts even before that. The pipeline itself is biased. There are more men than women, more whites than non-whites (proportional to society as a whole). This is a problem that needs to be addressed at the society level, not the interview level, but it affects the interview level, because candidates who are "different" lead to unconscious bias.
For older technical people... well, I'm one of them. I'm 53, which means a lot of my social group is the same age. I freely job-hop and don't struggle to find work. I've never felt that my age was a bias against me. What I do see, and I see this a lot, is people my age who worked at the same company for 10-20 years and then lost their job, for whatever reason (usually reorgs or dying companies). Their skill set has become largely about intra-company specialization rather than broad industry skills. I watched my spouse go through this. She lost her job of 13 years in a buyout, and it took her six months to find something else. She had gotten deep in a narrow business field (international e-commerce analyst), and there just weren't many jobs for her, even in our busy town. We didn't want to move to the Bay area or New York, and while she could do generic business analysis or project management, without industry-specific skills, she's not much better than someone barely past entry level. Eventually she found a job that suited her long-built skills, but it took a while. And this story is common as dirt, it's happened to a lot of my friends.
That's how age bias works. It's not discrimination, it's just being unprepared for the job market after too many years in one place. Keep your skills up to date and switch jobs regularly, and age is just a number.
So when you talk about monoculturing and bias at the interview point... nah, that's not the problem point. The problems of bias prevent the interview from happening in the first place.
- Anyone who skips those questions are rejected outright. If you're not willing to put in a little time you're not interested enough to be considered. You'd be surprised how many people skip these questions.
- If you've done something crazy cool or interesting it's a plus but if not it isn't a negative.
- Can you communicate something that's a bit abstract?
- Relevant jokes are usually seen as a plus.
Yep, same here.
> Anyone who skips those questions are rejected outright.
Any company using these questions is rejected outright. I'm looking for someone who is willing to give me money for code, not a wife.
Please don't take this the wrong way but "presenting" in this way at an interview is not helping you.
Let me elaborate a little.
My dreams are none of an interviewer's bloody business. I'm here to work not share the things that give me hope in my darkest moments or the aspirations that shaped my adulthood. I find this question very creepy and extremely unprofessional.
I could maybe figure out a "lesser dream" to share, but then what's the point of this question? To find out the most intimate thing that I'd be willing to share?
Where I see myself in ten years is a meaningless question to ask after I've had, what, fifteen minutes of exposure to a company's culture? Maybe I'm the kind of person who sees themselves in management over ten years, but you've got such an amazing working culture that you could convince the most ambitious career builder to stick to engineering instead. Or vice-versa. Or do you really want to hire the kind of people who get an idea in their head, and then do it, even if it takes them ten years and it's really, really, really bad idea?
I've heard all sorts of ways to justify these things. That it's a way to see if a candidate can relate to you and evaluate their empathy -- if anything, this will say more about an interviewer's biases than about anything else. To see if a candidate can communicate about abstract matters -- as if there are not countless questions about ethics, aesthetics and epistemology in our profession that you need to start prying into personal things. That it's a way to see if they're "career-oriented", whatever that means, as if someone who writes amazing code but wouldn't hustle for a promotion is a bad hire.
So far, it hasn't turned out to be a bad idea.
Yup - that's all it is. And you're going to have a certain envelope of negatives (usually far worse than this) in any environment.
So while it does make the flag a bit bless verdant... to call it a "red flag" seems to be a bit of a stretch.
(And as for the substance: agreed, and a capable interviewee should know how to work around those questions and similarly silly ones, like "what's your greatest weakness?". It's a two-way street. And while it's not a positive datapoint, it's hardly a KO-criterion. (viridescent? aquamarine? turquoise? :) )
If you don't have any work-safe dreams, you might want to see a psychiatrist. Again, though, you've misinterpreted the question - They're looking for you to express your spark of passion. It doesn't even have to be for the job. People like people who can talk about something passionately.
That's the charitable reading. The adversarial reading is that they're looking for the emotional buttons to push to maximize your output while minimizing their investment in you.
There's so much zero sum game thinking here when it comes to job relations ...
To me these are two entirely different classes of questions. The first is open ended and meaningless, while the second is directly connected to your career and thus highly relevant for both you and the company. I know where I want to be in 10 years career wise and thus I want to know if this job can help me get there. Equally the company probably knows where it wants to be in 10 years and as such wants to know if you can help it get there.
and
> I'm not looking for a particular answer just an honest one.
are contradictory one to another.
Talk about something that you can sound excited/relatable talking about. Friends, family, volunteer work, that all works.
It's not hard to find relevant examples these days though. Thankfully, ninja is no longer acceptable.
Makes me imagine they literally are not looking for someone. It's got to be a scam of some sort. I heard these types are posts are put up so firms can bank off of some sort of "lack of experience" in their area tax break or something. Rumor, read on internet. I don't know. Never understood it.
I think that's what I heard back in the day.
It just sucks that kids these days are judging themselves off these bullshit advertisements. Now they're getting mental issues where they don't have a good self-image in their skill sets.
Jesus...it's like the fashion industry for young girls...
I got my first tech job out of the local news paper btw
If so, back then we all just thought the HR posting the job was retarded. If I saw something stupid, the person was stupid. It never hurt me.
Nowadays the whole imposter syndrome is becoming a bigger issue. People are becoming more and more inadequate in their own skin. It’s all just getting offended by stuff seen, no matter how small.
I grew up on, “Do they not like you? Fuck them. Move on.”
Just saying that, I feel like a “back in my day” old man. And I’m only 31.
Now kids are taking the most random things to heart. And it’s sad. Really is. And I don’t have a solution for that other than they’re to just ignore the garbage and plow on. Maybe one day I can figure that out. But as it sits, this over artificial world is poisoning from all directions.
You know that movie Interns with the wow actor going to Google. The two older guys had to convince the kids that their lives haven’t even started yet, even though they thought it was going to end if they don’t get into Google? I use to think that movie was silly. But the tech industry is grooming kids to believe this. These ridiculous job interviews. Ridiculous expectations. Tight crunch times and shit hours. All to think they’re making the world a better place. But let’s face it. There’s no difference between big oil and big tech. They’re the same machine spitting out a different product.
Maybe I’m just the last gen that sees it and shows up to meetings drunk.
Begs the question.. "What is society rewarding ? "
I even have to combat the random feelings that "I should be working" instead of just taking time off for me.
That's just corporate America spewing their usual trash talk. Most people you'd meet on the street are totally fine with people having non-productive hobbies. Just as long as you're still able to make a 9-5 job, though.
EDIT: What I'm trying to say is that people care that you have a day job. After that, any decent human being wouldn't care what you do with your free time. That's yours and yours alone.
My point was it's demonized and there's like a stigma to it. Like masturbating. I just always feel like whenever I talk to random new people about wood working, it's almost like I'm talking about masturbating to them with they way they act about it. Since it's not money producing. It's not like I give a shit. I had a supremely bad burn out years ago and different hobbies have kept me from ever going back to that burn out mental state.
I think hobbies are a highly underrated form of keeping good, solid mental health.
I'm not saying 100%, but playing with that idea. If you grow up your whole life on stories of teens making millions and you're a loser if you don't. What else is there for you?
I grew up that making bank like that was rare. Super rare. You work for it. Some way, some how. Through connections or through ideas. But it's not "normal". Thus, don't think it is. It does seem on social media and the filth, that being stupid rich is normal and you're a loser if you're not.
I can understand that if you grow up seeing that, a majority of your developing life... yea... I'd probably have a mental breakdown too. What else is there? You think, well, your life is over. It's too late to "become rich" or important.
In some respects, the hipster movement is a slightly interesting counter culture to that problem. Looking back to the old ways. I think they take it too far and are dumb about it sometimes. But, at this moment while writing this, I can respect it. What we have now is not normal. It's easy to deal with if you remember a day when no one had cell phones. You ran around outside doing dumbshit. No one cried if you called them an asshole, they just hit you in the mouth and the day was done. Hell, if I had a kid in school now, I'd be scared that they might call someone a boy or girl and end up on the news because of it. That's an irrational fear on my own right. But, yea, I seem to have it.
I don't know. I don't feel like this is well thought out. It's just a weird thing that I understand that there is an inherent problem with people growing up nowadays and mental illness is a bad result of it. Exactly what, I don't know.
Imagine the entire Internet landing on you instead of just your classmates ?
As far as I can tell, society is rewarding burning people out. The tech industry is actually MUCH better than most other industries. Check out assistant managers in most any franchise. We had an article on here(?) yesterday(?) about how everything in sales was "hustle" - even when it didn't need to be. Example after example. It's not new, but that doesn't mean it's not getting worse, and it doesn't mean we can't push back.
It's funny how being an entrepreneur use to mean freedom from being a cog in a machine. Now it's turned into just being all the cogs in a machine. You ditch one slavery for another.
Who's the guy who talks about a 4 hour work week? I mean, it seemed silly at first. But to be honest, I think he was the closest to getting it all correct.
Work as efficient as possible so you don't have to work too much. Enjoy your life outside of work.
Sounds like a goddamn madman lol. Enjoy life. Only work as much as you need to. Crazy person.
There's a great podcast with Jocko, of him being candid about his own life and burn out/suicide attempt due to his Phd. What essentially started the whole 4-hour thingy.
Tim Ferriss, that guy. Here's a link to that podcast. Worth a listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsxydhFqXug
But as a caveat, there's nothing wrong with busting ass when you need to. There was a project I got contracted for on doing a surveillance trailer from scratch. I barely slept for 2 weeks getting parts, learning/welding, wiring and configuring a mobile surveillance system for stadiums. Got paid for the prototype and vacationed for a month, because I could. That last part is the important part. Nothing wrong with hustling or running your self into the ground, sometimes. Just not ALL the time.
Maybe just keep that and learn to be a little more obnoxious in the self-assessments you give to others?
Do people apply to these places? I don't. Ever. Not that I feel bad about myself, but I don't ever ever want to work for a manager who approves this type of job ad.
Is that what we're calling co-working spaces these days? I can get on board with that.
It's at least what we where calling them in most of Europe long before the term "co-working space" was invented.
What is the big deal here? If you believe you can do it, then who cares what the job description says; just apply. If you don't believe you can do it, apply anyway. There is literally no drawback to applying for a job and there is little draw back to lying about it. When I was finally offered the job, I told the HR person that I had lied on my resume, and he said that he admired by chutzpah.
No one is going to fire you for coming clean after being given a promise of employment. And, if they do decide not to offer the job to you, you still haven't lost anything.
The top 5, 10, 20 out even 50% rarely hit the open market, inbound recruitment process. They get poached or go where former coworkers are
Of course, I spent the first 14 of those years in Dallas and the first 9.5 of those at a poor choice of company. I spent years having applications ignored. I sometimes wonder if thinking like this had something to do with that.