My hiring experience as a submarine sonar operator in the Norwegian Navy
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brautaset.org
My hearing is, for lack of a better word, fucked. I'm in my 20's and I have quite bad tinnitus from years of shooting rifles without proper hearing protection [1], using power tools without any hearing protection, and standing next to large speakers at nightclubs for 16 hours every weekend.
Recently I have actually started looking after my ears. I wear high quality earplugs any time I'm somewhere with loud noises.
Anyway, my hearing isn't exactly great, especially in higher frequencies. But I've still got an ear for sounds. Back when I was shooting I'd be able to tell different calibers apart. When listening to a song I'll be able to pick the different samples and instruments apart. I'm also fairly sensitive to how speakers or headphones have been EQed.
It's a bit of a curse really. I really struggle in nightclubs and at raves with poor quality speaker systems. I was at a nightclub a few weeks ago and I spent the whole night being bugged by how off the EQ was. If a club hasn't got its acoustics right and has sound bouncing off the back wall it really bugs me too.
[1] Even for a .22 you need hearing protection, even if your ears don't hurt, the high frequency impact will still damage your hearing. And for shooting hundreds of rounds with AR-15s, foam earplugs are not suitable.
So, there is a deep misconception about what it is to "hear", even among doctors; perhaps this can help you.
A quick primer on how the ear works, in an eli5 way: in order to have a large dynamic range, all inner ear cells are "tuned" to be responsive at different volumes. (The response curve of any one cell is like an S, which means it is exquisitely tuned to a very narrow volume range. Anything quieter than this and the response is 0, anything higher and it saturates). Your brain then ignores anything that is "saturated". This allows you to hear both a cricket and a person talking next to you, sounds that are about 1000 times louder/quieter.
And your ear has a _lot_ of these cells, which together cover the entire volume range, which for humans is many orders of magnitude.
Unfortunately, when hearing gets "damaged", what happens is that the cells tuned for higher volumes are permanently saturated, _so the brain ignores them_.
The worse the damage, the lower the volumes that are stuck "open".
So then imagine being in a loud restaurant. The cells that fire for the volume of conversation are "saturated" so the brain ignores them, and all sounds are perceived as being equally "loud"--the world sounds muddled.
The solution, paradoxically, is to lower the volume of _everything_ (by wearing earplugs), which puts the conversion volumes back in the area where you have dynamic range remaining.
If you don't believe me, try it out by just covering your ears with your fingers next time you are at a restaurant--the conversation should be clearer.
Sidenote: the problem with hearing tests is that they test "the lowest volume you can perceive"--assuming that if you can hear a quiet thing, you can hear a loud one. But this isn't how hearing loss manifests itself among most people; we can hear quiet, we can hear loud, we just can't tell them apart!
It can actually get fairly annoying because if for example I’m crashing at someone’s place and the inactive speakers have a very faint hum/buzz, I can pick that up but the person I’d tell it to thinks I’m mad and am imagining things.
I also echo the parent post in that I often hear people’s EQ being bad and it can be a mild effort to not be an elitist snob and correct it for them / tell them its wrong. Hell, often if they allow me to either EQ it to neutral or V-shaped they still dislike it to their own settings (which is cool and at that point I just let it be).
They reduce enough sound that I can stand in front of a festival speaker stack for 6 hours and my hearing will be fine. Their sound reproduction is really good too, it doesn't mute the highs or make you feel like you're listening to everything underwater.
They guys at the shop said that they're not ideal if you're a performing musician or a DJ, and I'd agree with them, but if you're just on the dance floor they're great.
They also come with a string and a case so you don't lose them.
[1] https://www.etymotic.com/consumer/hearing-protection/er20.ht...
I'm not sure why companies over-list. Some think it's so they'll have a defensible reason for saying no in subjective cases, others think they are just being lazy and listing every possible thing they would like to see in the candidate.
Unfortunately not everyone knows this, I've had many conversations with people looking for jobs who decline to apply because they don't feel they meet all the requirements. My advice to them is: "No one meets all the requirements, if you meet even 50% of them and want to learn the other ones, you should be applying. You don't have to be the perfect applicant, just the best person who happened to apply in the time-frame of the hiring pool."
-- having read the article now: I help write our job reqs, and I agree and use the author's "nice to have" section for non-critical "requirements".
Fresh out of university, I applied for a job as a lab rat/hardware designer at another university. The list of qualifications mostly made sense - electronics engineering, PCB design, SMT soldering skills, some assembly and C skills, swahili...
Swahili?
When coming to the interview, I walked past the door to a postgrad office liberally decorated with photos from East Africa. Bingo. They had already decided on who to hire; they just needed to make sure the hiring was legit, too.
It did make for an entertaining interview, though - at first they were more than a little embarrassed that their sham hiring process was outed, but once they realised I was OK with it, the mood lightened considerably and I was given a grand tour of their research facilities.
(I already had two other interviews for more relevant positions lined up, so I could appreciate the humour in failing a HW design interview due to deficient Swahili skills...)
(In fairness, they never got the chance - I did break the ice by observing that after walking past that office door down the hall, I realised why Swahili had been on the list of qualifications - so were they interested in looking at the work samples I'd brought along, or should I rather fail the Swahili test first?)
Curious, what jurisdictions would these be? Nice idea I guess but I don't see how it could possibly be enforceable.
It is a nice idea, but in practice it basically means the system will be gamed like I experienced in the cases where they already have a candidate lined up.
Closely tailored requirements to pick the candidate already in mind are definitely a thing that still happens, though. It annoys me as it wastes the time of everyone from the hiring manager through to the unsuccessful candidates, but alas we're all slaves to HR :( Lol at the Swahili thing, I've not seen it so blatant before!
The one type is going to fit right in and be ready to contribute quickly. The other has the drive to get up to speed and further. Both are much desired people.
It’s a (senior) programming job, why are you here if you have barely 2 months of experience...?
My current job was listed as full time (Entry/mid level) but I'm a student and in my phone interview told them that - guess they wanted me anyway. My biggest value IMO is that I've dabbled with a lot of stuff. Okay I haven't worked on a personal project in Django, but I'm at the point where the exact language/framework is semi-irrelavant. I was confident I could, and was able to be semi-fluent with Django for example in a few weeks (only 25 hours a week).
My point is that what GP is trying to say is more about "Oh we listed postgres but they've only used mysql" if the person is motivated they should have no issues picking up postgres
Jusging by what you are saying you’d probably have a problem telling the two apart, while they will have many differences when run at scale.
You can use a serious database like Postgres or SQL Server or Oracle for 5 years or more and still not see more than a fraction of it or its surrounding ecosystem. MongoDB sure, you can know everything you need to know in a day.
The tricks applied still allow that, but they produce a clearer paper trail.
My theory falls apart outside of the tech industry, but I'll list it here anyway:
Manager: We want to hire a good programmer
HR: Sure - What decides that
Manager: uh....
HR: Do they need to know a particular language or framework?
Manager: Well, that's nice, but actually any good programmer can pick this up, knowing it in advance doesn't mean much, particularly if they pre-know a style that is different than ours.
HR: How about length of experience?
Manager: No, that doesn't really map to how good that experience is. [ Editor: I'm lying here. They always want Senior devs that can hit the ground running. And more often than not get no one for a long time. ] .
HR: I have 5 million hits on Linked In for Resumes that cover "programmer"...I need something to narrow this down.
Cycle a few times on those criteria and you end up with the unnecessary requirements. The fact of the matter is that experience and skill ( or talent and promise) are important, but we have no way to quantify them. So they over require and they can pick someone that meets some of their criteria that makes them happy. That they reject good matches is regrettable, but they represent (they assume) only a small portion of the total filtered out applicants.
Those that have more rigorous requirements ( govt or govt contractors, for example) just shift the over-requirements from "required" to "preferred".
We want good so we will ask for great. If we ask for good we will get lots of mediocre.
https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless...
What I've learned is, apply if it sounds cool. Worst case, you hear nothing. A relatively close second, you get an interview, and that's the meat.
Sure, you may not know X when you're hired, and it's not a hard requirement as you may learn it as you go, but it's on the list for a reason - you will need to know and use X on the job, you'll be evaluated on X during your semi-annual review, so X matters for the hiring ad / job description as if you don't fancy the idea of learning X and doing it for half of your working day, then I'd rather prefer if you know about the need for X before you choose to apply or not.
Sometimes companies over list job requirements because they don't understand the position's actual requirements and other times they want a purple unicorn.
It's not companies, it's the individuals.
Consider this: in a corporate environment, a person that is responsible for hiring but that is not a stakeholder in the success of any particular project, is incentivized to prove that:
- she or he made an effort ("I've posted N ads on top ten websites")
- she or he didn't cause any particularly bad hires
The second incentive favors over-specifying requirements, in the hopes that no particularly bad hire will be made and then blamed on the requirements / ad author.
Suppose for a second a hiring manager or HR specialist were told by project stakeholders "certification X and skill Y are requirements", but figured out they aren't actually key to success - perhaps learning on the job would work out just fine in this case. So our brave hiring manager or HR specialist puts the certification and the skill in the "nice to have" section instead. Now suppose a candidate hired without the certification or skill ended up disappointing and underachieving. The manager or HR specialist would shoulder the blame for not filtering the hires well enough. Thus they play it safe and over-specify.
It doesn't help that there's a persistent, lingering narrative in the press that pretty much all the skilled specialists are in high demand and in very short supply on the job market. This provides a cover for anybody who failed to attract candidates due to over-specified requirements - "the specialists are in short supply anyway".
Source: having been doing guerilla-style hiring for a long while, with repeatably good results.
Yup, same guy. Guess there aren't that many former Norwegian submariners in the tech world!
If you can frame these questions right and practice this skill over time, you can minimize passing up great candidates who don't look good on paper but are jackpots in disguise.
And from a fellow submariner: pound a few at the Periscope Hut for me, and keep a zero bubble.
https://web.archive.org/web/20181121181539/https://www.braut...
If the feds look into some of these startup hiring practices, they have an excuse that the candidate didn’t meet all requirements. But that kind of defeats the spirit of the law.