Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses
benjiweber.co.uk
benjiweber.co.uk
There are also a lot of smaller but specialized longstanding loops like front-end, AI... and one off “reqs” for special roles that teams need.
The world of hiring is very fascinating :)
This is not quite how it works. I was a hiring manager at Facebook for several years. It is made very clear to EMs that team selection is not a second interview or extension of the hiring process. We do not consider team selection part of hiring.
Now, obviously there is a degree of self selection. And if you have multiple engineers coming from boot camp you can, of course, choose an engineer you feel would be more successful. That’s OK.
But I couldn’t turn an engineer down because I felt they wouldn’t be a good ‘fit’ on my team: they’d already been through the hiring process. Conversely, it absolutely can and does happen that people go through the specialist interview loops and end up in a completely different role. For example, you could have spent your entire career writing iOS client code and join a backend server team, no problem.
That’s the theory, in practice of course for some people it does turn into a second phase of hiring, which is very much not the intention.
In fact, I'd say at least some of top tech companies are doing frontend interviews like this. Can confirm with firsthand experience for Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Uber. Go a tier (or more) lower and it seems it's still just leetcode interviews though, barely any different from a general or backend track.
"implement a custom event emitter class in JavaScript" or "implement an image carousel component"...
...instead of something like "invert a binary tree".
Plus you'd get 2-3 rounds of these questions in lieu of the leetcode DS&A rounds. The (usually single) system design round would remain the same (albeit being something like implementing a UI component at a high and holistic level).
As a hiring manager I find it much better to think in terms of a skill mesh. I'm always looking to bring the collective whole forward. A candidate can do that by bringing new skills to the table, by being awesome at existing skills, or some mix of all of the above.
[0]“The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.”
https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2014/Fr... (00:20:40 up to 00:21:10)
The best coders can demand the highest salary. If you can afford to pay the highest salary you are in an advanced position position to get the best coders. FAANG can afford to pay the highest salary.
Anecdotal evidence to the contrary does not cancel this mechanism.
Not really. This is one of those things that sounds correct but when you actually sit down and examine the claim not only is there sparse evidence to support it but it's not entirely clear what the claim even means.
I'd argue the people at FAANGs are the people who are best at hitting the requirements of a FAANG. That's still a competition and they'll brain drain from smaller companies, but it creates arbitrage on unrecognised ability and other opportunities may exploit that (e.g. starting your own venture relies much more on genuine ability than where you stand on a FAANG progression matrix).
I was contributing to an open-source FAANG project recently and the oversights they'd made in the codebase were surprising to me. There were very basic errors and mistakes and the people managing the codebase didn't understand what some of the functions were even supposed to do. The API wasn't consistent. Tests were testing behaviour that was outright wrong (and, somehow, passing). Feature prioritization was way off. There were half-hearted implementations of some features that were bad enough that they weren't useful. They weren't talking to other departments working on the same basic area (who are also open-source, and hold the state of the art), so there were important features that weren't ported. The project was small, too (but not unimportant).
I don't have high market value, but I was fixing some of these bugs in minutes. The guys managing that project are obviously a lot better than me overall, but I think it betrays a flaw in the institutional structure. Those weaknesses in the codebase would be cheap to fix, the problem is the FAANG standards are such that they are able to go unrecognised.
But they do. You see that happening every time a big company fails. It just takes a while longer because of the inertia the company has built (for example by having made more good than bad hiring decisions in the past).
I understand that good people fly under the radar all the time. Also I understand that there are startups that certainly have a higher skill level than Google does (anything else would be shocking, considering Googles immense work force).
Not all hiring decisions are good. Maybe most aren't. There's just no reason to believe that Google would be any worse at it than Random Small Company, considering that more money and expertise certainly helps when trying to hire the best talent.
As a community are we still stuck pretending that being the real deal will be better for your career than being able to convince other people you are the real deal?
How would you confirm this with data?
Tons of people remain at jobs they enjoy/companies they like even if they suspect they could probably get a better offer elsewhere. There are plenty of people elsewhere in the country who aren't interested in moving to Silicon Valley and working for one of the large firms.
More generally there's probably some relation between quality (which is an elusive variable to measure and can be dependent on managers/teams/etc.) and salary--but it's far from a perfect correlation.
I'm skeptical about the couple dozen. There are a bunch of reasons someone may choose not to work for Facebook or Google. But all the anecdotal information I see--including the migration of people from and to jobs--suggests to me that it's hard for most companies to outbid FAANG (and probably a few other smaller companies) in general.
By these other companies, I mean more established ones like Linked In or pre-IPO like Slack/Stripe. There are quite a few of them and they are indeed competing with FAANGs for talent. But the FAANGs are going to have larger national spread.
My point is, if someone lives in a 2nd tier tech hub they should have a handful options to make dramatically more than average from one of these companies; but the interviews are tough and whether or not they want to have a conversation in the first place are gating factors.
I think the popularity of untyped languages is one example of that. Clearly worse, you're removing an entire class of embedded test and nuking your ability to refactor safely, but huge chunks of the industry don't see that as a bad thing. I'm a worse programmer because I've spent so much time in Python.
Google cancels so many things, so much work and code tossed, and with entire projects, the point of entire projects axed, how can anyone there feel there's a point to their work?
Lmao we're not particles in a simulation. Not everybody optimizes for earnings. I optimize for not giving a fuck, so I'll never work at a FAANG. Not everybody wants to trade ten years of their life span for... a modest home in the tri valley and a horrible commute.
Maybe your language isn’t so “brilliant” if some of the smartest programmers in the world still can’t figure it out.
I do notice a substantial difference in average quality between them and less successful Bay Area companies, which does suggest that they are doing a reasonably good job at getting pretty good people in the door.
Even if at the end of the day, it's still a job, I don't think you can get into these companies unless you dedicate a way-above-average amount of time and effort to do so.
Ignore all of the above if you are a natural leetcode wizard; yes I know there are some people like that.
I can't say how true this is or not, but I know there are plenty that _want_ to get in exactly so they can clock in & out without doing much
That being said, I think that it was that they (used to) hire people with drive, give them autonomy and a choice of what to work on from the large set of hard problems, and watch the money roll in.
I would have thought that was obvious? Why would you hire someone unless you had a need for their talents?
I guess I'm probably thinking small-business. At the biggest companies, they probably just hire and hope to fit them in because hiring for exact needs doesn't really scale.
And then priorities shift again before they start. Leaving you not knowing what they'll be working on, but also certain you'll need extra hands on something sooner rather than later...
AND SO: "give me a smart generalist that specialized in these 8 technologies that make up the entirety of our product" becomes the only viable hire.
I mean, unless you were going to fire this person when the project you got head count for is finished, that's pretty much what you should have hired for anyways?
And this is a sort of natural trap, since the skills we're best at judging are things we're already good at. I suspect these biases can happen at large and small companies. It's constantly on my mind that the signal we use for my interviews are too closely aligned with my own preconceptions, especially when it's a problem space I've spent alot of time in, and may be foreign to the candidate.
Each step of the pipeline, the responsible has to optimize for what the team needs. In practice, each one is evaluated by what the layer above thinks. HR optimizes for CVs the leader likes, leader optimizes for profiles the manager likes.
Specially at large corporations, managers are removed from the daily needs and don’t have the context to evaluate if the person is the optimal fit for their future tasks, so they concern themselves with evaluating “raw talent” (obviously in a very subjective and biased way). Same thing happens with HR doing the screening.
So “talent” is defining both at the beginning and the end of the pipeline, it’s no surprise the end result is an inconsistent hiring pipeline.
Sounds good in theory but in practice people aren't actually programs/cogs and stacks are messy?
If you have an opportunity to hire someone with stellar talents, even if it isn't directly aligned with your business, hire them anyway.
Modify your business plan to capitalize (!) on those special talents. Even if you don't, there is the opportunity for unexpected synergy.
After all, I've applied many things I learned designing gearboxes to the D programming language.
I'm curious about what are some of those things :- )
(embedded software for gearboxes? Or physical design things that were translatable to software?)
https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b39.html https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b40.html
which I learned from mechanical design at Boeing.
Another aspect is making it impossible to assemble parts any way but the correct way. For example, you can write C code like this:
for (i = 0; i < 10; ++i);
do_something();
But in D, I didn't make it a warning. I made in an error. A ; cannot be used to create an empty statement, that can only be done with { }. I still can't believe C/C++ have never made that an error.
Another one is:
if (a < b < c) ...
D is better because so many unnecessary things in C and C++ are minefields, and instead of warning the user, they're just illegal. (All have ways of doing the equivalent if one really needs to.)
Oh it took a while until I noticed the extra ';' :- ) It'd likely have slipped past code review o.O
> impossible to assemble parts any way but the correct way
Hmm make me think about database constraints & foreign keys :- )
> As time went on, this warning became commonplace in other compilers
Nice that different languages can help each other become better :- )
> D is better because so many unnecessary things in C and C++ are minefields
I remember long ago when coding C++, we had to add a bunch of macros in each C++ class, to remove dangerous-by-default C++ auto generated things (like the copy constructor that copied pointers). I guess you know a lot about such things. D and Rust seems nice :- )
> Dual Path
Hmm there's something similar in the SRS book by Google, they call it "failure domains" (I haven't read all of it though).
> Monitors: If the output is outside some preset bounds, the system is shut down
Maybe in software, becoming read-only can be a similar good idea, when something looks weird
> Deadman: A deadman is a hardware timer switch added to a computer system that shuts it down if it isn’t regularly reset.
This is something I'm planning to add to the software I'm developing :- )
It's forum / blog-comments software, and, in case the admins have been away for too long (maybe vacation for some weeks), the forum would become read-only, maybe even retroactively hide some risky comments & discussions, until they're back — so there's always humans around that can remove toxic troll comments and such things.
> Safe Systems from Unreliable Parts https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b39.html
> Improving the quality of that component by a factor of 10 will get us there, but at a cost explosion of 10 times the price. But suppose we add in a backup component B, that also has a 10% failure rate. The odds of A and B both simultaneously failing are 10% of 10%, or 1%. This is achieved by a mere doubling of the cost instead of an order of magnitude increase
I think it's interesting that this at the same time, doubles the attack surface, for hackers? Although the failure risk gets down to 1%, now the hackers can try to break in into both A and B? Hmm. I wonder if there're any ways to avoid this tradeoff, ... Maybe there aren't, in the same way as it's going to be 2 x expensive, too
Skills that aren't tech are rarely valued by tech companies despite the fact companies need developers with those skills in order to deliver the best tech. Sometimes the best hire for the team is the second best developer but the best person-who-can-explain-things or person-who-can-run-meetings if explaining things or running meetings is holding the team back.
Because they need tech expert and not PO?
> passionate about user value
Lmao, this is such a vague and useless statement that it is barely worth commenting.
What the hell is "passion", how do quantify it and how do you use it? What happens when person you hired for "passion" loses it?
> Sometimes the best hire for the team is the second best developer but the best person-who-can-explain-things or person-who-can-run-meetings if explaining things or running meetings is holding the team back.
You test for that during interview. Do you think algo challenge, system design are just writing some stuff on the whiteboard and you're done? You need to explain stuff in such a way that interview wants to hire you.
Hiring developers who are amazing at algorithms but terrible at everything else has huge, far-reaching consequences for everything a business does. Being a good developer is about so much more than writing good code.
You're describing common sense, not sprint planning.
> Hiring developers who are amazing at algorithms but terrible at everything else has huge
I like this argument from every anti-algo advocate. Because if they're good at algos they're certainly bad at everything else, like you need to sacrifice one to get another.
> Being a good developer is about so much more than writing good code.
Indeed, writing good code is a basis. You can't be good without writing good code, and you can't write good code without knowing basics of algorithmic design and thinking.
It's harder to quantify than 'expert in typescript' and maybe ill described and abused, but there are a diverse set of needs when it comes to engineering, it's not just deeply technical, it's also broadly technical with strong planning, entrepreneurial thought process etc.. my, perhaps naive view is the world definitely needs both of these so keep and open mind and stay respectful.. 'lmao' I'm certain you wouldn't do in person, debate is good but cmon, always put the extra effort in to understand and communicate your own gut reactions
But I've not been exposed to that kind of corporate environment. Is it really that important? It reeks of corporate buzzwords to me.
To me, that sounds like you think of weakness in terms of "Oh, our UI sucks, let's hire a javascript developer." But is that really what the article means? Could weaknesses be more abstract things like "low trust", "failure to speak up", "inability to change according to market needs"? Do you know many teams that really know their core problems and actually try to solve them?
On the other hand, if you can work with them it’s good to get people who will contribute things outside the job description.
I said to the person "not sure IM the right person, I'm male and have zero interest in fashion". To which she replied "That's great because I've got plenty of that fit, I want someone that looks at this more as a business than personal interest"
I never interviewed as they salary was low, but I really liked that approach. I find that 'must love and be passionate about our company products' a little overdone, especially in the US. Its healthy to have people with different points of view, and staff that use alternatives and can discuss why.
Management consulting
- you want to be perceived as hiring the best
- project work that is not known in advance, you need very versatile people
- looking for demonstrated desire to jump through the hoops and do the marginal work that makes you the "top"
Software Engineering
- some overlap with the reasons above
- adds to the moat: if they're happy working for FAANG et al, competitors are priced out of getting the best
- the economics of many technologies are now defined by whether they can return enough to pay people competitively vs big tech. E.g. there are lots of cool deep learning applications that are tougher to try when you need to pay 300k / year for someone really good to run with them
- I'm interested in the sibling post referencing moneyball, this would be very cool to see applied to software engineers
a) You don't need really good unless you're doing cutting edge work at massive scales. There's lots of deep learning talent floating around that is good but not aligned with the FAANG interview process.
b) If you interview process is a clone of FAANG then, well, you're not going to have a good time. See previous point and also you probably don't need a FAANG interview process unless you're at FAANG scale.
c) If the company has other issues then, again, you're not going to have a good time but that's not due to how much you're paying but everything else.
They weren't identical but much much closer to each other than the interviews I got from startups.
This is not really a problem when all four of the companies in your industry use the same short list of universities for hiring. The reality would be even less of a problem with a broader selection of universities but the system works fine for the companies involved.
> Software Engineering ... - the economics of many technologies are now defined by whether they can return enough to pay people competitively vs big tech. E.g. there are lots of cool deep learning applications that are tougher to try when you need to pay 300k / year for someone really good to run with them
Why the hell are you insisting on someone really good to even start? The pool of people in any given domain with even hobbyist level expertise in ML/DL/AI and some domain knowledge is not usually shallow but non-existent.
Don't you need the team to be versatile instead of individuals?
Only idiots perceive that consultancies hire "the best" - the best are off doing other things.
> project work that is not known in advance, you need very versatile people
No, you need a load of dimwits you can throw at a project and make some apparent effect.
Hiring as Cultural Matching: The Case of Elite Professional Service Firms Lauren A. Rivera
This article presents culture as a vehicle of labor market sorting. Providing a case study of hiring in elite professional service firms, I investigate the often suggested but heretofore empirically unexamined hypothesis that cultural similarities between employers and job candidates matter for employers’ hiring decisions. Drawing from 120 interviews with employers as well as participant observation of a hiring committee, I argue that hiring is more than just a process of skills sorting; it is also a process of cultural matching between candidates, evaluators, and firms. Employers sought candidates who were not only competent but also culturally similar to themselves in terms of leisure pursuits, experiences, and self-presentation styles. Concerns about shared culture were highly salient to employers and often outweighed concerns about absolute productivity. I unpack the interpersonal processes through which cultural similarities affected candidate evaluation in elite firms and provide the first empirical demonstration that shared culture—particularly in the form of lifestyle markers—matters for employer hiring. I conclude by discussing the implications for scholarship on culture, inequality, and labor markets.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/000312241246321...
The book
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691155623/pe...
> Drawing on scores of in-depth interviews as well as firsthand observation of hiring practices at some of America’s most prestigious firms, Lauren Rivera shows how, at every step of the hiring process, the ways that employers define and evaluate merit are strongly skewed to favor job applicants from economically privileged backgrounds. She reveals how decision makers draw from ideas about talent—what it is, what best signals it, and who does (and does not) have it—that are deeply rooted in social class. Displaying the “right stuff” that elite employers are looking for entails considerable amounts of economic, social, and cultural resources on the part of the applicants and their parents.
I've only been asked for grades once in the previous 12 years where at which point I withdrew my application.
If you recruit at Brown, you’re going to get a different candidate than some CUNY school. They all tested well in high school or have parents with good networks, and they tend to look and quack alike.
HR from my company has explicitly told all interviewers not to use "culture fit" as a reason to disqualify a candidate presumably to avoid potential lawsuits.
FWIW, the most effective colleagues I've worked with all scored really high on standardized tests. They're a great predictor imo
likewise, new grads with a story of upward trajectory & energy > new grads who coast on what their parents/school setup
the bet being made is they'll put in the hard work and achieve the personal growth to progress quickly, and they'll roll with the uncertainties of startups. grades do hint at the hard work, and youth suggests dealing with uncertainty, but not as well as succeeding at difficult and fuzzily-defined projects. if they've done that before, better chance they'll do it again.
outside of startups, priorities change. big orgs need people who won't risk the cash cow. consultancies need people with better credentials than their customers. etc.
most good cs programs have significant project components, and students not putting in their project time there are often doing so elsewhere.
if not, they may have the potential to be good at projects, but tbd. without other strong signals, probably fewer startups are in a good position to take that bet.
also, going beyond students, the top programmers I've worked with have a history of great public and private projects - papers, $100B companies, top frameworks, launched top products, record breaking results, news articles around their impact, etc. The main exceptions are 'lifer at apple' types and 'works at secret bank', but most hop jobs enough that it's not an issue. A top group I see that really struggle a lot are 'lifer at secret gov agency x', which gets many of them stuck in the defense contractor round door.
we may have different experiences for what top means and what they help achieve. Who is this silent majority of top 1% programmers that don't have any referenceable projects? And more to the point, top intern candidates?
if they don't have impressive projects.. maybe not so good?
when i think of the best cs ugrads i've known, and would be great at startups:
* cool projects outside of classes, especially self-initiated, like doing their own startups
* cool libraries or algs that got popular or, not quite as good, published
* hardcore mode attempts at class projects, e.g., well beyond extra mile for OS's + graphics, or took grad-level courses for the same (=> w/ accompanying projecs), or new to CS and are proud at winning some class competitions despite that
it changes outside of cs
lol, you realize that for I'd say almost all projects the interesting part/core is small % of the whole, meanwhile the rest is just boring code that needs to be done?
ofc it's not the nicest thing that you arent completing your side projects and just doing the interesting stuff, but you may have experience in industry, so you know how to do that boring ass stuff anyway
Startup conditions are chaotic and every new person takes management + training overhead. Internship applicants who have well-done and challenging projects have shown the energy, self-management, know-how, & self-learning to get projects done in mini-versions of these conditions. So every hour spent on them goes a lot further, and both sides benefit more.
Conversely, if someone can't get their projects done, the projects are too low quality for where it matters, or their skill are on too-different of a thing, at best, it's non-evidence. So you'll have to fall back to evaluating weaker signals like grades. At worst, lacking or failing at projects is a red flag that they'll struggle on the adult-sized projects as well.
For 'interestingness', probably more relevant is 'tied to the mission', but I think being youthful covers 80% of that for intern-level folks.
Failure to figure out fit may mean everyone loses. Interns are more about recruitment pipeline for companies, and I'm not sure that's the wisest way to solve that for a lot of startups if that's the goal. Likewise, startups not ready to invest in their interns (management overhead, training, etc.), or fail to screen for a good match in skills, can easily be a bad experience and opportunity cost for the students, who may have had a more pleasant, productive, and rewarding experience at a more mature company.
people who were the best at my year were mostly focused on jobs / real world software development and just wanted to get degree, so just pass the exams and projects effortlessly
but I've been studying at weekends, so I may be biased.
Don't hire recent grads.
These phrases are mainly intended to flatter the employees, to make them grateful for being "chosen", and maybe to increase trust and confidence among them.
Choosing who to hire (once basic requirements are met), is much less important than the morale and attitudes among employees. Much better to say "top talent" than "randomly picked".
But, the hiring process is a huge factor in the perception of the identity of the employees.
You have your basic financial needs covered when you're a decent coder, even boring projects can have great and interesting implementations, it all drops down to people who you are working with.
Also, not just in IT, true masters tend to be interesting people in my experience. More often than not, they have humility and curiosity that allowed them to get that far.
But of course it often tends to be an empty phrase. If they do hire top talent you are more likely to hear specific names rather than this phrase.
1. smarter / more experienced / more knowledgeable / sometimes even having your level of expertise but coming from a different background
I was going to chime in on all the terrible thoughts here, but that is rather pointless. High grade performers can earn quite a bit.
For example I currently work with a team with a lot of very hard working technical people but not enough concern for questions like "what's valuable for us to work on?". So I need to hire people who will ask those questions.
On the other hand, if my team was full of big picture pontificators, I'd be looking for someone who's shut up and code for a change.
Whatever you need, work on that.
Maybe do away with the mindset of people as off-the-shelf products and think about them more as raw resources and focus more on upskilling. Universities are hopeless on this so the responsibility must fall on to someone.
Difficulty in hiring people who know your stack is also a good reason to choose the simplest and most common tech to run on rather than something niche you feel is technically better.
Most hires I see are either out of desperation or because the recruiter had a good chemistry with the candidate. A 1h interview means 0,3% of the time I will work with that person in one year. Talk about a small sample size.
(shameless plug): I built this for figuring out the candidate personality: https://freyasense.com/recruiting/
You would care more about your team members having a wide variety of results, rather than the qualitative interpretation of the results themselves.
The punchline being, after filling in a bunch of such personality tests "I accepted a position with a company that had a sane, speedy hiring process."
Asking candidates to fill in data in a format to fit your funnel will just scare away top talent.
I'm a founder of a rectech startup. I see four big problems in most companies:
1. Turtle speed. The hiring process takes 45 days, and most of the best candidates get hired by someone else, usually before the hiring manager gets around to interviewing the candidates.
2. Arbitrary process. Candidates get a completely different set of questions, completely different interviewers and completely different resume screenings as different recruiters and hiring managers do things completely differently.
3. Overscreening. Screened by the job board (knockout questions). Screened by the AI in the ATS. Screened by the recruiter. Screened by the hiring manager. Then a phone screen. Then a first interview (which is really another screening). Only then can we try to hire the half-of-a-candidate that made it through the process. Most of this screening isn't cultural, it's people trying to read between the lines on a resume to figure out why Lucy left a job six years ago after being there for four months.
4. Assessments applied after steps 1-3 to confirm executive bias instead of early in the process where the data from assessments could actually be used, you know, as data to compare and fit candidates.
We only worked with founders that are involved in the recruiting process. 2, maybe 3 "dates" and you should be able to decide with clarity.
We get so much more pop out of job ad spend when we limit the job ad to about 150 words and just say what the job is, and what really matters to you. "Software developer with proven track record of building web and mobile apps with React. You must have at least two years of professional development experience and be able to pass a Javascript coding test." Describe pay and benefits (about a 20% boost in applications for including pay). Done.
My own experience shows that hiring for your team's weaknesses can make it more effective. In 2013, I went from an operations-heavy role to a new team with little operations experience. Our TL designed and coded a new service. He was not happy with the feedback I gave through the design & code review process. Before deploying the new service to production, we met with one of the company's top engineers (Sanjay Ghemawat) for a "production readiness review". The reviewer was impressed and found only a couple of minor issues. He said that it was rare for him to review a service and find no major issues. Many of the questions he asked during the review were things that I had brought up earlier and convinced our TL to fix. Although I had not written any code on the service, I contributed operational knowledge and filled a weakness of the team.
Our TL did not acknowledge my contribution and even gave me a bad review, costing me about $80k in compensation. Now, years later, I believe that he did that to get me to leave the team. I had often pushed to fix the major problems in our project. I think he wanted to keep control and continue working on fun things and ignore the problems. Our manager went along with him, building his own empire. I left and the person who took my place had the same problem and left as soon as they could. Honesty and respectfulness are important qualities of teams and team members because they develop trust. Trust makes teams more productive. An internal study at Google concluded that teams with members who trust each other are much more productive than teams with high technical ability and low trust [0]. Lack of trust is a team weakness that we can hire to improve. We can also intentionally train and practice skills that improve team trust.
I want a systematic way to identify the strengths and weaknesses of myself, my teammates, and potential teammates. I want a questionnaire like the one in Essential Enneagram which was tested in a study with 1,000 participants [1].
I wish the large tech companies would invest in this kind of work and publish it.
[0] https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/
There are those mythical people for whom "if you interview they will 'make' a position so they can hire you" is said to be true. In my experience, people who are hired because they seem like super stars rather than for a particular role, do not do as well. Why? Because it usually automatically puts them in conflict with the person who is already doing that role, and second, what they should be doing isn't immediately apparent leading to some meandering around which is perceived by upper management as being 'non-productive.'
And I think the same goes for talent development, too. Career ladders, carelessly applied, incentivize everyone to do all the same things to check the boxes for the next level. This can lead to a lot of mediocre impact.
I would suggest that we really want is well rounded teams, where individuals are playing to their strengths. It takes a more nuanced approach to evaluation, because not everyone is doing the same things in the same way.
The question this article is posing is the wrong one, it’s neither a nor b. Companies need to hire based on what they need most, sometimes it’s profit, sometimes value, sometimes all of the above.
This article feels like it’s based on a strawman.
In smaller companies (or teams within big companies) the points in the article are absolutely correct though.
That's the point.
In other words, you don't hire candidates whose strengths match your weaknesses, you hire candidates whose weaknesses you care about less than the competition does. Like, the best example from the movie was the pitcher with an effective but highly unconventional delivery mechanism.
In many cases most parts of the company just have to be "good enough". If you have a great marketing team and 90% of the market already then you don't need a world beating tech team.
Even when you are competing against equal and similar companies there are areas there are points of differentiation. One Company's product might be cheaper a easy to setup, Another is good at Enterprise Sales, a third has great tech and features.
They expect to be able to ask 4+ questions about every job from the past ten years. But I will happily ramble for 20 minutes about minutia for each of them. It was wonderful
It's a little funny, because the alternative phrasing also includes that already.
One hires the best of the best without specifying the best of <what>.
"The best people will solve all the problems!" without any inclination about what the problems are.
Doesn't that imply that one doesn't actually know one's own problems and hopes that if one can just hire a people smarter than oneself, they will figure it out for you?
Spice it up a little! Why not throw in some real work that no one in your company wants to do? You can even ask the applicant to read your organizations repo code and write technical reports on it. That way, later if you do decide to hire them (unlikely) it will reduce your on-boarding costs... and if not... then fuck it, tbh. This isn't about making people feel good. It's about making sure you do what everyone else does. 'We've found that the assessment task is a good signal.'
Speaking of signals, how about you ignore the whole resume and focus on what matters. We both know resumes are largely a waste of time and people only get moved up in interviews for making plenty of eye contact. So make sure to fail everyone who doesn't stare at you the whole time. This is how to assess technical skills the most accurate way possible and its known the vast majority of managers fail people in interviews for not staring at them enough (staring increases productivity.)
Finally, you don't want to forget the computer science tests. At least four years in school and tons of debt is a lot to stomach compared to people who learned practical skills in their own time at a cost of almost nothing. Though chances are almost zero you use computer science knowledge in your job it's best to make sure you fail every self-taught developer who can't immediately balance a binary dick tree. It shouldn't concern you how many developers are self-taught and won't fit in your talent pipe line after doing this. Your hour long algorithm interviews are sure to make sure that only people who want to feel smart get hired.
If you put these measures into place you're sure to build the most mediocre organization possible. But there are other ways to improve the process. Experiment with calling your company 'remote' but only hire from certain timezones; Make sure the interviews happen in person. Hold as many meetings as possible. If there's one thing engineers love it's meetings that break up focused concentration time in their day. Even better if the meetings are only done at certain times in the day as that will be as hostile as possible to a remote working environment.
I want to make sure you don't have any funny ideas in your head about remote working. It might seem to offer flexible time management but people are ultimately children and its up to you to put in place measures to prevent this. If you do this right you can even manage to exclude people with chronic illnesses that would have otherwise been able to fit in your talent pipeline through remote work which I think is really something.
I hope this post has been helpful to other recruiters and hiring managers out there. Peace
It seems that the majority of voting users browsing HN throughout the duration of this posts existence do indeed love this bs.
Every time you add a person to the team who is more stupid than you, it pushes you further up the stack rank.
Why hire people with loyalty when you can hire people who can't quit because they can't find their way out of the building?
Don't waste money on high salaries, just find people too dumb to realize you are paying them in Monopoly money.
Soon you will be the top performer by a huge margin, and it's bonus city, baby!
I've worked for a couple of low-mid tier companies and their core was always mediocre talent who is there because it's the top of the world for them. Top talent will always gravitate towards money, prestige. Sure there are some outliers that will work for food and change world, but if you can earn more why wouldn't you?
Not that I know much about rockets, just that there are key talented people that push the world forward. You need the worker bees. But someone at the top has to be the visionary genius.
If was the manager of a soccer team that came in last in the League. One way of improving would be to replace my weakest players. And the team would probably marginally improve. But it doesn't usually happen that way. Chances are your best players are not talented enough either, and you should replace those too. Or Perhaps, trading two of your good players for one more talented. Which is typically what happens.
So not sure if I would agree with the premise of the article.
Also, If I was building a stock portfolio, one not terrible way of doing it would probably be around how many PhDs the companies have on the payroll.
What do you think are Elon Musks talents that push his SpaceX program forward?
In which area do you think that you could make a valuable contribution to the world?