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Comment by asark | Hacker News Reader

What's so friggin' different about hiring software developers that we've gotta get all weird about it and come up with some brand new thing? What's the hiring process like for other office workers? How about for other technical or specialist roles that are somewhat similar to software developer? Engineers of various sorts, maybe? Accountants? Hell, lawyers even? There's got to be some set of existing practices that'll fit this just fine. It's simply not. That. Special.

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My brother is a mechanical engineer, and his org hires by bringing in graduates on a low salary, moving the competent ones to roles that make use of their competencies, and moving the incompetent ones to roles that are pretty much the same as unskilled technicians. Sometimes the boss meets a candidate at a conference or over beers and fast-tracks them. They have literally no women in the entire engineering department.

I'm not defending whiteboarding the knapsack problem so much as I'm defending the difficulty of hiring skilled workers from different walks of life. Tech isn't special, hiring is just hard, and a lot of other industries are actually worse.

The software engineer analogue of this would be consulting. You hire everyone out of college. Start them off at a salary such that they are still net positive even if they only ever stay at the lowest possible billable rate. If you get good enough to command higher rates (or the effective rate through increasing the success rate of projects), you'll keep on getting commensurate raises.

Many things happen:

* You hire people who end up not being able to do the work (I hear my wife complain about this problem in accounting just about every three days)

* You end up needing more stringent certifications than exist in comp sci land (you mentioned lawyers, so that's one with bar exams, but also accounts with CPA exams, professional engineers, doctors, etc)

* You get proof of prior work

* You rely heavily on recommendations, with all the pros and cons there

> You hire people who end up not being able to do the work

Funnily enough, I've heard the same thing from some friends who worked at companies with algorithmic interviews.

> You end up needing more stringent certifications than exist in comp sci land

That sounds great. You just have to study up and take a very hard exam at the beginning of your career instead of having to study up and take a hard exam every few years.

> You get proof of prior work

And what about Github? Most employers want to see proof of prior work unless you've got a very good excuse.

> You rely heavily on recommendations, with all the pros and cons there

This may be the only decent argument against the accounting/engineering/medicine interview. Even with good performance, recommendations are a crap shoot (did you get along well w/your boss, are they pissed you're leaving, do they refuse to give out references to anyone like one contract employer I worked for for a year a long time ago).

But then again, puzzle interviews are also a crap shoot.

To be clear I wasn't arguing anything, just stating what happens. Things are different in some ways, but not all (recommendations and proof of work are common in programming too)

In my experience, recommendations aren't very common in programming, unless you're talking about referrals by former supervisors/colleagues to some job opening.

Have others had a different experience?

Recommendations really only come into play when you're talking about the best engineers. In which case, you're effectively no longer interviewing, just getting people in your network who say they must hire you or tell other people in their networks they must hire you.

I would consider those as more referrals, not recommendations (which implies the traditional job recommendation process).

GitHub can't be used in Graduate interview efficiently, and those one could be probably the most problematic. If a candidate has work experience, you can at least assess that he can do something

> Hell, lawyers even?

It's pretty terrible. There's no other profession that's quite as snobby as the legal profession. If you want to go work for a top firm you need to have gone to one of a handful of law schools. While there you need to have gotten good grades in your first years' classes so that when on campus recruiting happens at the start of the second year you get an interview. These OCI interviews are almost entirely what the tech industry would call culture fit, with all the implications of bias that implies. One a summer position is obtained, the job is yours to lose. Do reasonable work, don't get drunk and vomit on a partner's spouse or blow off your third year classes and you will probably get a job offer with the firm you summered for.

I don't think this is a process any other field should try to emulate. Whiteboard interviews may have their flaw but it's a lot better than:

  Did you go to Harvard Law &&
  Did you get top 1/3 grades as a 1L &&
  Do you remind the partner you are interviewing with of himself and/or his kid

I think other professions emphasise past experience and referrals more. That and official credentials, especially in certified professions (I.e. Medicine).

That said, I think all interviews have an element of silliness to them. I know a financial consultant who was quizzed over articles published in the days financial times newspaper. Also know one of our analysts makes candidates do long division on paper! Don't forget the infamous how many golf balls can you fit in a jumbo jet kind of thing.

It kind of is tho. Also you should research what kind of shit accountants have to go through to get hired at big 4 for instance. And lawyers have to pass bar.

Lawyers pass the bar once.

True, cle is mostly a joke lol

They pass it once, at most. Many take it many times.

A lot of fields are similar in pretty lame ways like consultants from MBAs, accountants, lawyers. For all of them. Getting into the tier 1, tier 2/good boutique place is a rigid crappy system. I can’t remember exactly how investment banking and other main MBA sort of jobs work but I think they are similar too.

Friends in more general office jobs like HR, managers, etc, it doesn’t seem much better. It’s different than how to get a software dev job, but to say it’s been better would be a bit much.

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