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Hiring - Must be godlike to apply

tomcreighton.com

34 pointstomcreighton23 comments

That sounds like another one of those If You Qualify, Why Aren't You Starting Your Own Company? situations.

If the four people (actually five, I agree with Tom that number four is really two people) they're looking for got together on their own, they could start a killer startup of their own, and just hire a biz dev guy as a non-founder.

I'd love to know what this startup is, and what value the existing founders bring to the table.

Hint - they post their jobs page to Hacker News regularly, and you can apply via API.

Parse, sounds like a company for only backend guys, and front end people should avoid.

I saw that ad, thought about applying, but decided not to.

Here is why:

-- A list of common languages is something that pushes me away. Why? Because it tells me (by experience) that they want someone who can do it all (impossible). Its fine to list 2-3 languages or frameworks, but more than that just makes me very suspicious.

-- A bachelor's degree. I don't have one, I will not get one. Why ask for one when a lot of CS graduates can't program?

-- Experience? Sure, lots. But when you get older (I'm 32+), everything looks the same: just data sets, and problems to be solved. There is a blurry line between languages/frameworks/etc. Everything is just more of the same (I do, however, enjoy it!). Ask for experience in engineering, and not for experience in the latest dohicketydo.

A bachelor's degree. I don't have one, I will not get one. Why ask for one when a lot of CS graduates can't program?

This is logically flawed. It is entirely possible that by removing the barrier of bachelor's degree, they will receive even more applicants who cannot program (percentage-wise).

I have no grounds on which to claim this is the case, but it seems entirely feasible and you have simply skipped over it.

Note that I am not taking issue with your personal choices regarding a degree. It is your choice to make, and I respect that.

  > This is logically flawed. It is entirely possible that by
  > removing the barrier of bachelor's degree, they will
  > receive even more applicants who cannot program
  > (percentage-wise).

While certainly true, this line of reasoning works a lot better for big companies than small-ish start-ups. Remember: requiring a CS degree acts as a filter with a certain probabilistic efficacy given that CS degree and engineering ability are correlated but distinct.

If you get 10,000 applications a year (as enterprises like Google, Facebook, and Apple do), you don't really have to give a damn about your false negative rate. Go ahead and install severe formal requirements (e.g., needs CS PhD) -- you're still going to get a number of applications that is sufficiently large to statistically guarantee multiple highly suitable candidates, and you'll save tons of money and time in the process.

Non-behemoths can't really afford many false negatives because the applicant pool is far more limited. False positives at the CV/formalism stage are relatively easily filtered at the interview stage due to, again, smaller volume.

This is a good distinction, thank you.

Yes, good point.

Plus, if you are google/facebook/apple material[1], then a degree is just icing on the cake for them.

Building something that gets a lot of attention is also very attractive to these types of companies.

[1]Whatever that is.

Maybe. But they certainly filter out some candidates that can program. If the aim is to find the best possible candidate (And from the postings it sounds like they aim high), filtering out good candidates is probably a bad strategy.

Exactly.

When there are so few good hacker out there, why take a chance to miss out on one?

You do make a valid and important point. It does, however, point to a flaw in their recruiting process. They should expect portfolios, and not degrees.

Heck, I know two CS graduates who work at a local fast food restaurant.

> A list of common languages is something that pushes me away.

In this job posting across all four roles the most per job role is 3, i.e. Ruby, ObjC (presumably IOS) and/or Java (presumably Android). I'm curious which part you specifically take issue with as everything listed seems pretty vanilla to me.

I'm usually wary of postings that say things like "we use Python, Node.js, Ruby, Haskell, ObjC", but for different reasons because this seems to indicate they don't know how to select the best technologies for the job to minimize complexity and rather just choose everything that is in vogue.

> they want someone who can do it all

I'm not sure if you're implying "all at the same time", or just _can_ do it all. Great programmers can do most anything you throw at them (and I've come across a few like this).

Most anything you throw at them != doing it all.

You talk in technical terms, they do in business terms.

They want one hacker to solve all their problems.

My comment about the list of languages is not aimed at that specific posting, but about postings in general.

I stopped reading job ads because it made me feel unqualified to do anything. I have a lot of experience. I've solved a lot of hard problems. I've built a lot of enterprise software that a lot of people actually use. But of course, that's not good enough these days. You have to be a real genius to get a job. I'm not a genius unfortunately so I'll stick with trying to do start my own company and hire geniuses.

If you match half the qualifications, ignore that and apply. You probably have lots of unlisted skills they are looking for, too, and you can probably pick up new things if nobody is filling the role.

They are looking to meet a bunch of needs. You have an idea what the needs are and think you can meet many of them. So apply. It's unlikely to be set in stone that the needs have to be met by hiring the exact roles listed in the job posting.

I'd say that the point is more on the company's perspective.

Even if some people realize <what you said> and know to just go for it, the job description scares away some people who could otherwise be qualified.

And a new startup probably can't afford to scare away potential hires.

It's really hard to convey what you want to in a job listing, especially one that lists specific roles, like job seekers expect. And I'll agree that this one may not be very effective.

But it's a really hard problem. One suggestion I would have is to have a really clear list of things you're looking for that's separate from your individual job postings. Part of the goal with job postings is to get all the skills you're looking for listed somewhere on the posting site, because you want to make sure if someone with that skill sees your site, it registers with them. Need someone familiar with A/B testing but can't fit it into the well-defined roles people are looking for? Put it in a paragraph above all the roles.

I agree that a new startup doesn't have a lot of room to scare away potential hires, but they also don't have a lot of room to waste time looking into everyone that spams their resume to anything it matches.

In some respects a tradeoff needs to be made here, and I'd rather select for people who are willing to dive into something that looks a bit above their head than select for people who are looking to apply to jobs they are already perfectly capable of.

Agreed and the same thing goes for 'years of experience' when I applied right out of college this summer I just ignored those completely -- I got rejected a lot, but honestly that is to be expected.

For me, when I see postings like that it is far more telling about the maturity of the company and as such, I wouldn't want to even apply.

With me, these kinds of complaints by designers conjure up an image of an ivory tower artist that is offended by being asked to take notice of some practical obstacle to his artistic plans. "Take me as I am, on my conditions; I don't care for what the world wants: I am an artíste" (read with French accent)

A job posting for a "project leader/lead developer" will ask for "an excellent project manager, team leader and software engineer, with the skills to communicate with clients and programmers", with some some technologies and methodologies thrown in. Every full-time manager can tell you that managing complex projects or teams is an art in itself. You can spend a lifetime excelling in only that. They could equally well argue it is ridiculous to ask that someone is an excellent software engineer as well. However, they don't: it is perfectly acceptable that one should be skilled in both project management and programming. That one should have people skills and technical skills, even though each of those could be a specialization in it's own right.

The exact same holds for design. If you are offended by people look for a designer/front-end programmer, but not by people looking for a project leader/software engineer, than you are suffering from a delusion of grandeur about the importance of 'design'. There are precious few companies that can use excellent 'pure' designers. All the others are perfectly content to hire someone with adequate design skills and a set of additional adequate skills that make him useful to fulfill several roles. If that is offensive to your, you need to leave your artist-ego at the door when you go looking for a job.

The two examples here are basically the same - a position so top-heavy with requirements and areas of expertise that they'll both be equally difficult to fill.

The fact that it's a design position in this case is not the problem - I would have railed just as hard against an overloaded dev position.

I'm a programmer that does more front-end (html5/js) than back-end, and perhaps 'adequate' design skills (I don't do graphics, but can make decent-looking prototypes with enough css).

When looking at the description for the designer job in the OP, its not the design/technical combination that seems over-the-top, but those two jobs and a third job doing A/B and conversion rate testing. That needs to be delegated to somebody else, either a separate designer, a Quality-Assurance person, or the project lead.

Job ads like that are a HUGE sign that the company does not value Front End Engineers, and should be avoided (they are a backend company)

And a link to a great article about how to actually hire Front End Engineers http://allenc.com/2012/01/how-to-get-front-end-developers/

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