The GitHub hiring experience
github.com
github.com
I wonder how much of the work of screening candidates is done "for free" for Github tech hires, since most of the techs Github would want to hire are also users of the site.
It's something we want to improve, but then again, we don't want to improve it too much... hiring's something that does benefit from waiting and thinking about someone before bringing them on.
Related: I got an email on something like a Monday, interviewed Wednesday, and got hired 45 minutes into the interview. We don't want to make that mistake again.
I recently had an absolutely excruciating experience after a startup on HN made an offer literally 0 days after meeting with me. We met for a sandwich and 2 hours later I had an offer. Three days go by and the hotshot young founder has now found a new muse, we have a falling out for an absolutely contrived reason, and I'm out on the street with no job in a new state with no health insurance and having to break the rental lease.
Thankfully the next weekend, once again I clicked on the "Ask HN: Who is hiring? " thread and landed a new job, but this company took 50 days and a ton of coding interviews.
Better safe than sorry.
What made you accept the offer on such short notice? I get that startups move faster than other companies, but if someone wanted to hire me right now or not at all, I'd take it as a serious warning sign. Most likely it means they're hard-ass negotiators who are manipulating you or that they're genuine but too focused on the short term--either way, a red flag.
I got a tentative offer for my current job just as I was starting a one-year sabbatical backpacking trip through South-East Asia. They had something time sensitive they needed me for as soon as possible. Despite that, they were totally understanding, reassuring me that they still wanted to work with me whenever I was ready.
I was the first hire with good equity...so I guess I was just plain greedy and not thinking straight. Or maybe it was the boredom that comes from working at a safe job in a bank...I was plain ecstatic to get back into a startup.Mostly my greed and idiocy. Am never going to be so trusting again.
If they're worried about not landing someone, having to extend multiple offers and possibly overshooting their hiring goals then they should be up-front about that. I would also worry about their hiring bar.
To compare with other companies: Google communicates in a more traditional way with possible candidates so it is visibly PR speak and don't try to hide it.
Facebook had a nice shot recently with a fake negative view. That was cool and did not smell the strong fragrance of PR speak.
Github here has a middle ground I would love to love but...
- "Valuable people deserve a bespoke hiring experience"
- "Hiring good people is one of the most critical activities we do as a company"
etc.
Maybe it is not exactly raw PR speak, maybe it is just empty sentences ballooned with good will and "think positive" attitude, written there in the hope that potential candidate will read them and apply. What worries me is that it looks like genuine and sincere, but it is not.
It's like artificial marple syrup stuffed in a natural marple syrup bottle. And if I have the choice I prefer natural syrup in natural syrup bottle and artificial syrup in artificial syrup bottle over what we have here.
If you want the straight dope — or maple syrup, in your case — here it is: hiring good people is the most important thing we do, and we don't fuck around with that. We fly people in, get them to meet people, and show them how we work because we care about this process. More importantly, we want this relaxed atmosphere so we can see if someone actually would fit in with us. It's a big deal. We have a pretty wildly different culture than most companies, and we want our hiring process to reflect that.
Why would you not spend time on this? Why would you not care? It's literally the most important part of your business.
It sounds like you aren't neglecting it.
It just sounded like the author was really surprised that you weren't neglecting him.
Perhaps I've just had good interview experiences, but I've rarely felt like the company I was interviewing at didn't devote resources and energy to hiring. I was more surprised about the little ways they failed than the big ways they succeeded.
Has your experience been different?
Yes, I want it, and I think most readers want it too.
> We have a pretty wildly different culture than most companies
I think you have a pre-convinced audience here, but maybe you might agree that the OP was not the best proof of this very different culture, and was on the side of diluted and PR-tampered dope full of "nice", "mostly", and other marks.
Note that I would not even notice this PR speak if it was not Github. High expectations.
First, the circumstances dictate a glowing review, which makes it less believable. Since it appears to be from the official GitHub blog, it's hard to imagine that serious criticism could be aired here. I know there's already selection bias because the author took the job, but taking a job doesn't imply that the interview was well-conducted - I once took a job in which the interview was pretty shoddily conducted. (It was a good place to work, they just weren't great at interviews.)
Second, the author seems to be really excited and delighted about things that aren't that uncommon. Now, that may be a great way to go through life, but I think it hurts the author's credibility a bit. He sounds sort of like the boy who cried wolf, only he the professional who blogged praise. Here are some wordings that I found odd:
+ "I had no idea if they were hiring or not, but a day or two after deciding to send Kyle an email to introduce myself, I was amazed to be chatting to him directly on Skype."
Getting a call back after a cold job email isn't amazing to me.
+ "It was also very much a two-way conversation—Kyle answered all my questions and shared interesting insights into the company as we were talking. It didn’t feel like a typical interview, and it was far from being an adversarial, pressure-filled encounter."
This sound like a typical part of most interviews to me.
+ "We hope skipping the initial paperwork-based screening process makes it clear to the candidate that we’re not playing games—that we’re genuinely interested in them."
Very few of the screening processes I've been through, especially at small companies, were paperwork-based.
+ "Valuable people deserve a bespoke hiring experience, so we go to great lengths to work around interviewees’ existing commitments and schedules, or where people have families to take care of—a little flexibility goes a long way."
I'm not sure exactly what this means, but it sounds a bit like "I can't come in this week, is next week good for you?" "Yes, that'll work. We'll get you the airplane ticket right away", which doesn't sound special or unusual to me (in software).
+ "When anyone joins the GitHub team, we fly them back to San Francisco to spend their first week going through our on-boarding process."
That sounds to me like what it means to be hired by a company that offers relocation benefits - they fly you out, you are the new guy/gal for a week.
I don't mean to imply that the whole thing was overenthusiastic - some of the things he raves about I would have found nice (4 day turnarounds, chauffeurs at the airport). I just thought that, overall, it was a bit overenthusiastic to be read as a non-advert.
Maybe I've just been blessed with good interview experiences, or the author has been cursed with bad ones. It could also be the cultural standards where we're from - he said he was in Australia. I'm from the U.S.
It's nice that this strategy works for them, but I wonder why everyone isn't doing it if it is so successful?
With Valve, GitHub et al we see organisations that are trying to encourage novelty and creativity in their workforce. Many organisations are more interested in repeatability in their workforce. By which I mean many of their workers are basically following a workflow of some sort that requires just enough human judgement so as they cannot yet be replaced by a robot.
So I think you're right, not all organisations can work this way and some probably don't even want to. But I entertain myself sometimes wondering how they could. My personal favourite is thinking about how one might manage to get a government department to work like Valve/GitHub.
Well, I may live in a different country to you, so any department I describe may not be familiar to you. But without getting too specific, my first starting observation is that the hiring practices of most public organisations are terrible. They're not stringent enough and they don't encourage self motivated workers. So that would be the first thing I'd want to try and fix. Self motivation within the workforce would seem to be one of - if not the most - important ingredients to get the Valve/GitHub style culture working.
Size of the organisation also would seem to be important. I have seen it discussed here before as to just how large an organisation this kind of flat strucutre would scale out to. I obviously don't know the answer. But again I think it would largely come back to how well the hiring process is managed.
And how such a essentially anarchistic department would interface with the rest of the government and/or the public would also be a interesting experiment.
Mostly I'm just disappointed because it seems like an awesome place to work.
Is this prioritization common (or key?) at exceptional workplaces?
Hire people who show enthusiasm (and of course talent) instead of those who have memorized interview questions from glassdoor.com
Working at github is sortof a personal fantasy.