Open The Beers And Wait To Be Showered With Job Applications
seatgeek.com
seatgeek.com
If you post a developer job on Monster, you're likely to get over 500 resumes. Over 95% of them (I'm using that number literally, not figuratively) are from people who shouldn't have applied if they'd read the job description carefully.
Reading through those resumes takes a vast amount of time. It makes it harder to identify the qualified applicants because they're more likely to get lost in the shuffle. It isn't fair to them. We have only three full-time developers at SeatGeek. There's a finite number of hours per week we can dedicate to reading resumes.
It isn't that I think people incapable of passing our test are "worthless", as samd says below, that's a gross mis-characterization. But we want to focus our hiring efforts on folks who are highly capable applicants, and if we read the resume of everyone who responded to a typical Monster post, then we wouldn't have the resources to do that.
What bothered me was that it sounded like you were mocking people for trying but failing to solve your puzzle, and relishing in the fact that you didn't have to consider their application. Trying is a good thing, even if it ends in failure, and it should be encouraged.
It might even turn out that the sort of person who spends an afternoon trying to solve a challenging puzzle makes a great employee after a bit of training.
I think it's the job of the future employer to "waste their time" finding and filtering people rather than getting applicants to waste their time applying. I've solved quite few puzzles in my day. What irked me was getting chosen for my solutions and then getting rejected for other, arbitrary criteria.
An employer generally has more leverage in a transaction like this, let them put in some effort in compensation.
How fucking pretentious can you get? Maybe they were busy, maybe they had kids to take care of, maybe they were documenting their steps vs. flailing around. Glad I don't work in the valley if this is the kind of attitudes "rockstar" employers have.
Edit: I see they are actually located in NYC.
In the end, IIRC it wasn't that hard a test for the sort of person who would be good at the job, so it seems like a reasonable filter. The only good reasons for not successfully completing it were 1) You didn't have time for it, or 2) You simply aren't ready at this point in your career.
2. Using time alone as a selection criteria borders on discrimination given that some users might have sight or other physical disabilities that require longer to complete the task.
3. Do you really want to work for someone that has that kind of attitude? Oh, you're worthless because you took a few hours longer than John over there. We're not even going to consider your other talents, abilities, capabilities, or creativity that you bring to the table.
Still, the challenge was fun and had a hint of the weebly job challenge to it (though that one was considerably tougher), to the point I was thinking about trying to come up with a series of these just as a weekly exercise to post on hn. Anyone else have ideas for this?
Like coderloop / the facebook puzzles but web application stuff
What a great attitude. People who work hard and challenge themselves are worthless, they don't even deserve the time it takes to reject their application. A person like that would never be of any value to your company. I mean, you can't expect people to learn new things and grow professionally while on the job. If they don't already know everything then they are idiots that you want nothing to do with.
But I've noticed a pattern, which is that folks who talk a lot about using these tests talk in this rather offensive way. It makes me think that companies that start off with these test have somewhat abusive attitude towards their employees - "we don't mind making you jump through hoops so we don't have to". Might not be a signal this is a great place to work.
Maybe the company could promise to solve a puzzle I submitted if I solved their puzzle? It might seem fairer.
Well, why should a startup want anything to do with someone who needs training? A startup needs to get as much as possible out of its resources, including individual employees and time. Given that, and all else being equal, it just makes more sense to hire the people with a decent understanding of HTTP for a position related to web development.
It might not have been the most tactful way to say it, but I don't disagree with their premise.
The attitude that I see coming through in that post is that they value what people already know more than what people can learn, which I think is backwards. On top of that they just came across sounding like assholes. I could be wrong though, it's hard to read people's intention through text.
You are given a plan or even a set of requirements and are given typically 15-30 minutes to complete/get as far as you can.
This is important because someone may speak well etc - but when it comes to actually completing work (which is typically done by billable hours) some people just wont have the speed or skill to produce the work product.
Sure, tests are very logical as a filter if people are just resources to be filtered. If you expect to have a personal relationship with me, as a person, though, starting that relationship with indication that I'm just a resource is not good.
This seems especially important in startup where you want to like your fellow teammates. Reciprocation is an important part of liking - psychologists say so!
One of the more fun ones which is still around is http://www.try2hack.nl/ so if you enjoyed the job application process you'll probably have fun with this.
There's a bunch of other sites too if you're into this stuff; Here's a starting list http://www.governmentsecurity.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=... and Google will find you plenty more.
Without giving it away and spoiling it... it does well at covering the general things you would want web devs to intuitively know.
I'm more interested in how you monitored this stuff... setting up the test would've been pretty trivial, but getting good data out must've been harder.
Are you recording failed attempts too? So that should someone fail on the last step but have succeeded at the prior 2 steps that you still have the ability to contact them if their CV is good enough too?
Great idea, I like it.
I didn't try this particular challenge, but it reminds me of Reddit's recent job postings (which I was able to complete in a couple minutes using Google and the command line on my Ubuntu machine) in spirit. Maybe the tone with which they communicated it was a little smug, but if you had your choice of people who spent as little as 7-8 minutes on this versus folks who needed to work on it for a whole afternoon, who would you choose to hire?
If you exclude black and white (and gray scale) you will normally have around 8-10 colors to work with if you don't want your wheel to look too Schizophrenic.
You can choose between:
Dark Blue Light Blue Dark Red Light Red Dark Yellow Light Yellow Dark Green Light Green Orange Violet Beige Brown Pink
You could also use textures (just like in the old IBM matrix printers did) to represent the variations.
I would though normally stay away from more then 5-6 color variations in a pie chart.
EDIT: Although I guess I have fallen prey to the temptation of having colors too close to each other. (see page 11 in this pdf http://000fff.org/uploads/LMG_Visual_Final.pdf )
In defense I would say that you could roll over the individual bars to see the name.
One of the best markers that I have found about a person and their ability to develop and conceive of creative solutions and business strategies, is their hobbies. Through a person's hobbies you can see their passion and their creativity. I look for developers who have hobbies that include antique car restoration, airplane building, hobbyist rockets, electronics embedded or otherwise, fine arts and other markers of creativity. I've found that these people, the creative types make the best developers.
Also, you apply your cheapest/most scalable filter when your volume is the highest. If you're worried about false negatives, you open it up a little wider and deal with the false positives at a later stage.
1) You are saying too much. Saying stuff about looking for the best is obviously your purpose, so no need to say that. Now, you are left defending yourself about being Jerk. For somethings, it is best just to give the facts.
2) Why aren't you hiring developers from your network?
3) You should try to come off as "We are awesome, and we want you to be awesome too.", not "We are awesome and you are not".