Hacker News Reader

Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

Why I Won't Work For You:

Because you are a dick.

Now who are you? What are you going to give me in return? Why should I tell you that I love my job and my career. Why should I tell you about my vision and plans? What are you really looking for in that.

The hiring should be a lot simpler:

- You have a problem. You need someone with the right skills, and hire him.

- I have a problem (need money). I pick a job that I have the skills for.

Thinking the way you do, accepting your daily bull-shit and philosophy (worse, making myself sound like I enjoy and I belong to it) is only a sign for me that you are the wrong person to work for.

View on HN

Why should I tell you about my vision and plans? What are you really looking for in that.

These 'where do you see yourself in 5 years' questions sound like straight from a 'HR for dummies' book. I would really appreciate if an interviewer reading this post explained me what such cliches are trying to test, other than BS skills. Cliche question => cliche response.

(This post is not defending the original article, just discussing this specific comment.)

Having never read an HR for Dummies book, and as a pure technical interviewer, I still frequently ask this question. The point is to not think of it as an adversarial question, like I'm going to mark you off for a bad answer.

It's simply to know how you want your career to proceed. Do you want to be an expert at some specific part of the programming world, an experienced generalist (consultant?), an architect, a manager or product lead, start your own startup, ... ?

This is a very important question for you and your manager to be on the same page about. It helps your manager know how to motivate you and what kinds of work will excite you to move your career forward. And it helps you evaluate via small experiences whether your vision matches up with your skills and what you actually enjoy.

I am glad that there are people like you for whom 'running your own company' isn't a bad answer. I think most people are afraid to tell the truth and choose the cliche path about climbing the ladder of success in company X, being afraid of rejection. And to be honest: how many companies out there want someone who tells them right away that experience and money obtained during their job is only to quit on the first moment they feel it's enough to run something on their own?

This is how I got hired. The manager talked with me for a while, and then looked me straight in the eye and said: in three years, you need to either be a technical lead or start your own company or you're going to be miserable. If you pick which of those paths you want, we'll help you get there through the work you do here.

So honestly, the question is: would you want to work for a company that wants you to lie to them? or a company that wants you to grow and roots for you when you do?

Clearly you met guys with an awesome attitude toward their potential co-workers.

I doubt most of interviewers who ask the cliche setup* do it because they hope the best for you and are glad they found the perfect match, probably they just brought it from their previous experience with job seeking, or have read them in an average HR manual.

- what was your biggest success in your field?

- what are your weaknesses?

- where do you see yourself in 5 years?

A long time ago a kind of douchebag asked me them while clicking checkboxes on the screen after every answer. Needless to say I had no motivation to even care to go further in the process. A few years later I've heard from girlfriends just after graduation (non-technical field), they got them on every single one of their interviews, mostly asked by HR managers with no particular work experience. The first one is exceptionally funny when the interviewee is a post-grad.

We would love to have someone like that for 3 years. I would then try to pitch them on how we might help them to accomplish that.

I am glad that there are people like you for whom 'running your own company' isn't a bad answer.

I answered this way in a recent interview (and got the job). The company owners response was "I think working with us will help you learn a lot about starting your own company." At that point I really wanted to work with them.

And to be honest: how many companies out there want someone who tells them right away that experience and money obtained during their job is only to quit on the first moment they feel it's enough to run something on their own?

Lots of people say it, few do it. It also depends on the job. A job at a small company/startup needs self starters, jack of all trades kind of people. These same people are often the ones who want to do their own thing one day.

These 'where do you see yourself in 5 years' questions sound like straight from a 'HR for dummies' book.

Many of these open ended questions came about from large companies hiring physiologist to help build and identify a profile of an individual that the company would like the hire. Organizations such as the FBI use similar strategies as well. The problem is that many smaller organizations that did not want to spend the money or simply did not know to spend the money on professionals started to emulate the larger companies, but they did not posses the answer keys once they had the answers they just left it up to the interviewer to divine whether it was the right answer or not. Read that last sentence again and then read the definition of a Cargo Cult. you will laugh at the mental image I promise. You see, these interviewing practices are simply the same mentality that created Cargo Cults, somewhere along the way they lost the intelligence and are just emulating the process in ritual and then divining the results.

When asked the stock question "What is your biggest weakness?" I have actually answered it with "Answering standard interview questions."

And I still got the job.

haha, exactly. Mostly that's why I fail to treat these HR questions seriously. In our branch a similar cult would be companies blindly going social - without proper expertise and assets, not knowing what value exactly they want to bring, but it must be social, because everyone big does social. And in the end - they count followers and likes, but are clueless which data and how affects their business.

I ask this question to better understand whether we can provide an environment that will be right for the candidate in 5 years. I dont want to hire someone that wont have a shot at achieving their long term goals with us because it wouldnt be fair to them.

On the flip side, I just hired a new finance person. I wanted someone who can eventually become a controller then CFO. I have no idea if they are really capable of it, but I want them to at least want it and to have demonstrated some activities to have tried working towards it.

I'm not from HR, but my guess is that a question like that is for learning whether the candidate is goal-oriented or just goes by living day-to-day. I agree that it's a cliche question, and could be phrased more originally and/or specifically in most cases, but it is not _totallt_ useless.

Well, I think it's a bit of loaded question.

What do I say? If I reach to high I endanger my own prospects at being hired. A buddy of mine answered the "see yourself in 5 years" question with "Probably working at Google". Needless to say he wasn't hired.

If I reach too low I sound like a deadbeat. If I answer with something like "Working at the position you are hiring me for" I sound like I have no vision and no drive.

There isn't a right answer to this question. Because the only right answer is "cliche".

That's funny, I gave similar answer when interviewing with my current company, and I got hired. Turns out it's been the best company I've ever worked for.

The question is a test for you, but the answer you give, is also a test for the employer.

It's a great question and I ask that question all the time. However, unlike the blog writer, I am looking to weed out those that are looking to become managers soon. If you are looking to get a development job as a stepping stone to a management position in 3 years, then you're probably not a software engineer I am looking for. (One of many factors, of course...)

This is what I fear. I fear that some hiring manager is going to make a career choice for me. I chose to interview with his company for a specific position, my choice of career path.

I had the exact same response from reading this article. Thank you for articulating it. Hopefully the author see's this and responds.

- You have a problem. You need someone with the right skills, and hire him. - I have a problem (need money). I pick a job that I have the skills for.

If you were hiring someone to dig a hole for you, this may be true.

But software is a team sport and you do need an element of interviewing for personality, goals, and attitude as well as skills and aptitude.

But software is a team sport and you do need an element of interviewing for personality, goals, and attitude as well as skills and aptitude.

Seriously, you figure that from a 2 hour interview? I fall in love with a girl which I thought/seemed/was told was a very good one. Turns out she's a complete slut. Knew that only after 2 weeks getting out with her.

Get the person to work with you for few weeks or may be a couple of months. Scan his history (blog, projects, education, work history, github...) and figure out if he'll match your team ethics and he really know what he does.

I think there's a business opportunity here, insulating companies from the risks of hiring in order to give them more time to judge the candidate. For example, a recruiter offers the company a skilled, vetted employee, with the promise of paying their salary for the first year. If the company doesn't like them, lay off the worker, risk free. If they like the employee, the pay back the recruiter twice the first year's salary. I think paying twice first year's salary is a pretty good deal for eliminating a huge portion of risk from the hiring process. And you get to learn about the candidate by working with them for a year, instead of asking meaningless questions for a few hours.

Right there is no substitute for a dating period. People should know this, if you think you have the right candidate but have some reservations tell them, give them 2 weeks to prove themselves and you may be surprised at how much talent you where missing. As well, use it with all candidates, remember that person that was a star in the interview but turned out to be a flop? yeah the 2 weeks works for them as well, you can send them packing in the two weeks once you realize your error.

Exactly. Anyone who thinks they're smart enough to know if a candidate will be a perfect fit after a couple of hour-long interviews, a skills tests and even consensus amongst the team has obviously been promoted to their own special level of incompetence where a quick glance at their own job title is enough to reassure them that they are right and everyone else is wrong. I love those people, as they are easily fooled.

Why I Won't Work For You:

Because you are a dick.

You do realise that you're being just as confrontational as the post's author?

It's funny that I had the reverse response. Your post makes you sound like a dick and he sounds like someone who is being totally reasonable. He's looking for excellent people that will fit in well with his team (i.e. won't waste time, has sufficient energy and passion, thinks clearly, communicates well and doesn't sit around loathing their career). Technical skills are important, but putting together a successful team takes more than that. And even if it didn't, it only makes sense, given a pile of resumes with roughly equivalent skills, to filter out the people you don't like to be around. Sucks if you need the job and you're not that type of person, but that's life.

Then talk to me about the advantages of working for you. If I'm to work for you for the money, then state that you are offering $200K/year. If I'm interested in health care, then you should have some health insurance package. A good one probably.

I'm skilled, you can see that from the projects I did, worked on, my blog, Github and source code.

Then hire me for a couple of months and see how I fit in the team. Certainly, you should apply your hiring skills to figure out if I'll be a right fit, otherwise you'll waste lots of time hiring/firing/figuring.

Hiring someone for a couple of months just to see how they fit in the team seems the very definition of "wasting lots of time". Nice for you, you get a few months work. Totally sucks for everyone around you if it doesn't work out.

And yet that very thing is done all the time.

This works when you've narrowed down the candidates to single digits. When you have a pool of dozens, however, you need some way to screen them. He is sharing his screening methods, not his methods of attracting talent (eg, salary, health care, etc). That is an entirely different matter.

csomar's response is, IMHO, the right reaction to the blog post author's rambling.

What I've found out by experience is that usually recruiters with such restricting requirements aren't ready to back up said requests with the appropriate money. He wants top notch, highly motivated talent. How much is he willing to pay? That's definitely a part of the equation but he's not even mentioning it. If he offers 200-300% the market price then he's right to ask that much skill and dedication, otherwise his pretenses are absolutely unjustified.

A couple of points:

- I don't get that he's asking for the moon. He just wants competent people who have a reason to work beyond money and aren't going to be a PITA to him and his team. That seems pretty fundamental to me. Why should it command double or triple an average salary? I don't get it.

- The market will decide. If what he's looking for is rare, he'll have to pay more to get it. If it's not, he'll pay the going rate. Uninformed speculation about what he may or may not be spending on talent seems pointless.

No. He is being an ass in the way he is stating it.

- You send me a stupidly long resume

- forget it. You have annoyed me

- More likely, I will ignore the whole thing

- If you can’t nail it in one sentence, do I really want to look forward to your rambling emails every day?

WOW. Okay Sir. Something else? Now there is nothing wrong with what he is asking for. Can you tell that politely

- Please send me a short and concise resume. Include x, y, and z. That's what matter for me.

- Long emails won't be read fully, because I'm short on time. I might not answer your email because I get lot of them, and I just can't answer them all.

- This doesn't mean your email is not important. It is. Please send it. We'll be in touch.

I think you are missing the point that this is simply intended to provide insight into what is going on inside the head of the person who is doing the hiring. They might be excruciatingly polite in what they say to you directly and personally, but in their mind they are thinking "Why is this fool wasting my time with this stupidly long resume." He's telling the world in blunt terms the reality of what it takes to get hired and how people are going to see you. He's not composing a personal letter to you.

The article's author is just breathing "I'm a dick." There's no need to word the things like he does. "You've annoyed me." Really? Sounds like a drama queen. He should smoke a bowl and get laid once in awhile.

If you want to hire talented people who will carry your company to the top, tone is important. It's not what you say, it's how you say it.

This title could have been written in inverted form: "Why I Will Hire You". Whether someone uses exclusionary or inclusionary principles says a lot about their character to me. It's always good to look out for yourself, and I don't advocate hiring incompetent people, but I'm really thrilled with the people that work around me, and I would never talk to them like this guy does. Never.

well if he wants people who "aren't going to be a PITA to him and his team" He (and I bet its a he) is going to have to stop presenting as such a PITA to work for.

More often than not programmers, even the very good ones, have never learn how to sell themselves. So, they end up working for a fraction of their real value. If this guy ever found someone good via this method, it's almost certainly one of that kind.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com