'We only hire the best' - I don't believe you | Hacker News Reader

'We only hire the best' - I don't believe you

fragile.org.uk

31 pointsneiljohnson27 comments

This "we only hire the best in [city name]" truly frustrates me and frankly it is such a big turn off for me. I've interviewed with a few of these, and when it comes to salary negotiation they always give the reason: "we really want you, but the number you give us would create disparity/inequity between the current employees."

Alright, let's look at the word "best." Is there anything better than best? Maybe bestest or most best? Come on, you CANNOT have a team of people where everyone is "the best." If you decided to make an offer to me, that means I am the best then? Everyone's best is different, therefore salary needs to be different for each "best." If I am the best, then what's the problem with me getting what I asked? If you want to give off the hype that you're a "big boy" company then back it up with real big boy money! But oh no, if you work for us, then that means you can use our "awesome" brand to sell yourself later. Like Google or Facebook.

This is exactly like the usual situations: "I have a great idea, could you make this web app for me for free or for 2 small bags of peanuts? It will be the BEST addition to your portfolio." Remember those people?

I know, it is negative. But I get so enraged sometimes thinking about this kind of cliche and messaging some new "startups" are using. If you want to hire the best, then pay top money. You're not Google--get over it!

You shouldn't take a bad salary from Google just so you can say you've worked at Google either, imo. There is plenty of distinction to be had out there for non-Googlers.

There's definitely a hierarchy of bestness: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/monologues/14topgun.html

Hopefully that will calm the well-founded rage.

"I don't imagine you have any questions, so I won't even ask. Good luck, gentlemen. I'll see you in the air. Class dismissed. "

Awesome!

>and when it comes to salary negotiation they always give the reason

it is absolutely right check. People tend to say a lot of things until it is time to put money where their mouth is. If they don't pay the best [salary + bonus + RSU/options], then they don't hire the best - that applies to any company that has a real valuation (typically it'd be if company is past round A - i.e. at least some people bought into its valuation with real money)

"OK, so you should give my peers a raise..."

I'll definitely give that a try next time that excuse comes up.

I'm trying to think of what the phrase means to me:

"We only hire people with demonstrable (1) CS knowledge equivalent to a BS CS from a top5 school (2) a track record of productivity exceeding their peers in a challenging environment (name-brand internet co, vc-backed startup, etc)"

There are places that set the bar that high for some of their engineering groups (rarely all groups). I wonder what percentile this corresponds to.

Clarification edit: "CS knowledge equivalent" doesn't require actual degree.

"A BS CS from a top5 school" is not to be taken as a sign that the candidate can code his or her way out of a paper bag or solve trivial problems he or she has not encountered before.

I hear that. I've been doing a lot of interviewing lately and the typical caliber of your CS graduate is, um, abysmal, regardless of school.

One particularly alarming trend I've noticed: if you have a masters or PhD in CS as a straight-shot (i.e., no years working in between), odds are you have no idea how to code, and no amount of extremely advanced theoretical CS knowledge is going to save you when you can't put together a for loop in less than 5 minutes. The worst part is that some of them seem to have been under the expectation that their advanced degree would allow them to skip ahead on the track, and the best we're willing to give them is a junior position not much better than what we'd give to a fresh undergrad with no experience.

Being insanely smart is not at all correlated with being insanely capable, it would seem.

Being insanely smart is not at all correlated with being insanely capable, it would seem.

Sometimes, both seem to be correlated with being insane, strangely enough.

But seriously, all that's needed is about 50 tidbits of knowledge that could be given in one longish presentation, PLUS the ability to synthesize information and act on 2nd and 3rd order implications of the knowledge.

I once met a coder who had a PhD in Mathematics, and fancied herself a good Object Oriented coder. However, the module that she wrote had nothing but long class-side methods, entirely consisting of loops with multi-variable iterating indexes, recursively calling cut-and-paste slightly modified versions of themselves. (No, I am not making this up!) And, get this -- the multi-variable iteration, could be replaced with a short, simple loop putting judiciously written Objects into a Dictionary and taking them out again. (This was objectively demonstrated twice!)

IMHO once you have an undergraduate degree, experience is more valuable than more qualifications (at least, for the first few years - I imagine that a few years of experience and then an advanced qualification would be more valuable again?)

I can't count how many companies I've seen post jobs in the past month that use this bromide. It's getting a bit timeworn now. Do these companies really feel that using this phrase improves the quality of their hires?

I've been getting hit up by companies lately, and it's been a little bit of a put-off for me when they say things like that. Not because I think it's something bad for a company to want, but because I suffer from Impostor Syndrome sometimes, especially during interviews with recently-funded startups (despite the fact that people I have worked with tell me I am a very good coder).

It probably has something to do with the fact that on paper I know I look like a terrible candidate (not only am I not a Stanford graduate, I'm a high school dropout).

The problem is there isn't really a good way to quickly pre-screen candidates other than by looking at their credentials. Experience counts, but education seems to be more heavily-weighted in startups. You can pretty reliably tell if a candidate is good or not by going through their Github account, but it might be asking a lot to expect hiring managers to go through all of them.

Sounds like a business opportunity!

"You can pretty reliably tell if a candidate is good or not by going through their Github account, but it might be asking a lot to expect hiring managers to go through all of them."

Well, a hiring manager's job is to find strong (best?) candidates to fulfill the company's needs. I suspect for development positions reviewing public code (github, sf, etc) when possible is going to yield better results than looking at what, if any, university someone went to.

"Well, not everyone has the ability to contribute to public projects!". Boo hoo - not everyone can afford to go to fancy universities either. Why is that a better criteria than reviewing the work of people who've made their work available for review? Because filtering based on university and stated experience is easier on the hiring manager? You're optimizing for the wrong results then.

I think it's become a typical part of the corporate mantra to repeat it; possibly it snuck in via recruiters in the same way as "dynamic" and "passionate". I'm not sure that they really feel that it increases the quality of hires so much as it being something that they feel they have to do.

There must be an awful lot of money to be made by hiring slightly below average programmers and putting them to work doing not-especially-difficult tasks for a slightly-below-average salary. I'm tempted to start a company that does just that.

"Are you brilliant? Go do some cutting-edge work somewhere else then! We're doing some random Ruby-on-Rails database-based crap, it's not that difficult!"

"Are you a genius? Google, Facebook, and Apple beckon, but this company is for the rest of you."

Using a "weird" language like Ruby on Rails is going to make it hard for you to hire below the 80th percentile. At the 40th, you're talking about people who learned one language in college and haven't learned a new one since then.

From a post for a Senior Java Engineer:

Life at REDACTED is not for everyone. Many apply, but few are chosen. We are a culture of competitive A Players that love to win. We value courageous exploration, relentlessly pursuing excellence and being personally accountable for our performance and the success of our team. As such, we work interactively to encourage goal setting and excellence in both our personal and professional lives.

For A Players who share our values, REDACTED isn’t just a job; it is a community made up of skilled teammates that you respect and clients that you love, working together to deliver win – win results for the company and our customers… all while having fun and being rewarded for performance.

I looked up this company and on their website they have a "Staff Testimonial" video. A "Solutions Consultant", a "VP of Operations", a "Development Manager" and a "Team Lead of Professional Services" explain what they like about their work place. They all have high opinions about their colleagues - one of them even uses the "A players" phrase to describe them.

I find it amusing that not a single one of those A-player engineers were shown in a video they cut, probably with outside professional help. This, mind you, is a company whose primary product is a software/hardware system. I might be too hasty in forming an opinion, but I have my doubts about the "A-players" claim.

A graders hire A graders, B graders hire C graders.

Apparently nobody hires B graders, so this can't be a problem.

The argument behind this statement is that "A players" are secure in their ability and want equal peers they can learn from, so they hire people as good as they are, while "B players" are fundamentally insecure and will hire "C players" who aren't really a challenge to them.

There are a million problems with this logic, but first among them is that A and B players know what they are and that their level of security (or insecurity) is equal to their actual ability. It's not really true.

If you have to say that you're hiring the best, you're not. Programmers may be less social than most, but word still gets around. If you're truly the best, you won't need to advertise that fact, programmers in the area will already know and will be beating a path to your door.

Anyone using worn-out catch phrases in interviews is not "the best". Which means, they didn't hire "the best" recruiters to do their supposed hiring of "the best" for all other types of employees. Which means, they're liars.

Agreed. The "best" is relative... likely based on perceived capability and anticipated compatibility within the existing culture of an organization.

I'm curious to know what assumptions are made that define "best". To me, I look for team dynamic as an indicator.

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