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Comment by xavor | Hacker News Reader

How do you filter out hiring managers that can't hire?

Promoting people to management randomly might get you the best results anyway. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/nov/01/random-pro...

I read an analogy years ago about how stupid the logic behind most promotions in software are. Think about a sports team..

"That guy is our best player! He scores more points than anyone else in the team by far! Quick! Let's pull him out of the game and make him the coach!"

Why not keep him in the game and just look for someone who can be a good coach?

Difference is that on a sports team, you are under contract to be a player and there's not really any chance to just be promoted to being a coach.

If you have a high performing dev who wants to be a team lead and you hire someone else for that role, you risk demoralizing them and causing them to look elsewhere.

Morale is important. Promotions, real promotions with more responsibility, are important

How do you filter out pilots that cannot fly?

It doesn't always make sense to compare two occupations with each other and pretend they can use the same approach for hiring people.

Pilots have licenses and documented flying time. Perhaps there's something to be learned from that profession?

I can just see the posts on HN now: "Senior devs. Is anyone else insulted by the coding exams required for the dev license?". Or even better, have to log a certain amount of hours every year to keep that license.

What pilots do can be automated. I mean, it's not easy, but then again, planes nowadays can land themselves by themselves. As the automation gets better, you need pilots more and more just for emergencies, and maybe if you only use pilots for those cases, then a) your pilots don't gain the experience they need to be useful in emergencies, and b) you under-utilize them. And maybe that means you can't really automate pilots after all. But still, what pilots do is very machine-like.

What devs and mgrs do is less machine-like, and it follows that what works for "making sure you have pilots who can fly" doesn't quite translate to "making sure that you have managers who can manage".

I said there are things we can learn, not that we should adopt their pattern fully.

Actuaries, accountants, doctors, lawyers, even hair stylists all have qualifications that are required to do the job that says they can perform the basic tasks safely. What's so special about ours that we can't do the same? I hate needing to prove that I can fizzbuzz to each company individually.

>How do you filter out pilots that cannot fly?

Piloting specifically requires a qualification like being a doctor etc. These qualifications are recognized and remove the need for assessment of a skill during an interview.

However there is no standard international qualification for software development like these other professions that are restricted -- you simply can't call yourself a doctor as these professions are regulated. Anyone can call themselves a software developer. Do we really want to regulate the software dev profession?

We collect post interview feedback for hires and non-hires, and measure candidate NPS on the hiring process.

If some hiring manager or interviewer scores badly, well, he may end up not interviewing anymore.

We want even our non-hires to have a good experience interviewing with us.

NPS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_promoter_score?

Yeah. We adapt the concept of customer satisfaction to interviewee satisfaction in this case.

Thankfully, I've never had to deal with this problem.

I learned that I don't want to get better at management, so I am no longer a manager.

I assume that managers have ways to evaluate managers, but I don't know the gruesome details.

This is the question. To me it appears that hiring managers are incapable of filtering without exams -making the hiring managers skills questionable.

There is nothing wrong with a hiring manager recognising that an exam helps them make a hiring decision. What you really need to worry about are hiring managers are incapable of filtering without exams and not using exams.

What's the alternative? As a Hiring Manager, do I need to spend multiple hours with 20 candidates to get a really valuable insight into who they are really like or should I just screen them with a basic exam so I only need to interview the 4 who can do it?

What insults me is when someone wants to be paid more than a doctor based on no qualifications and the fact that they tell me they are worth it. If you cannot do the exam but can discuss it with the company who accept your argument then great, if you can't then you probably don't want to work for them anyway so just chalk it up to experience and move on.

> As a Hiring Manager, do I need to spend multiple hours with 20 candidates to get a really valuable insight into who they are really like or should I just screen them with a basic exam so I only need to interview the 4 who can do it?

Why is your time more valuable than mine? Why should I invest my personal time in to your hiring process when you can't bother to spend the same amount of your on the job time, to hire someone whos going to add far more value to your company than your company is going to add to their profile?

What’s your hiring process?

> Why is your time more valuable than mine?

No one is forcing anyone to apply for a job at any company. As the seller of labor, you get to choose how much to invest in any one opportunity. Just like someone selling apples can choose to open a roadside stand, try to get into a grocery store, or sell direct to consumer.

The buyer, of course, gets to choose the process by which they evaluate the labor (or the apples). If you don't like how the buyer evaluates what you are selling, find another buyer.

How often does a candidate interview, maybe 1–3 companies every 2–5 years? My manager probably has a hundred candidates every year because someone in the org is always hiring.

Contact some references? Surely a good candidate would have some previous managers that could speak to their job performance.

I would never give out references without a contingent offer that I intend to accept. I don't want 10 different hiring managers harassing my former co-workers.

I would much rather take a short coding exam.

> What insults me is when someone wants to be paid more than a doctor based on no qualifications

What's stopping you from selectively removing exams from people who actually do have the qualifications?

> If you cannot do the exam but can discuss it with the company who accept your argument then great

I could flip it around and say, if you cannot hire strong engineers without exams, discuss with your company to make someone else the hiring manager.

If I was your employee and I saw positions remain open for years (burdening existing employees), I would question your ability to set good processes.

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