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Comment by mavelikara | Hacker News Reader

"Our job is to stop you getting hired. If we get 100 people applying for the job, then our job is to not employ at least 99. So we are looking for anything that identifies you as being one of the 99."

If you have only position to fill and 100 people applied for that position, yes, your position makes sense. But if you have 100 positions to fill, will you still insist that you must interview 10000 people to fill those positions?

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If you're hiring 100 people, you still only get the same number of applicants. If you get 100 applicants, you're not going to fill your 100 positions. (Note the "at least 99" in my post)

If I'm desperate to hire 100 people and I can't get 100 qualified applicants, that's when I start looking to people who could be the right people in very quick order. I've done that and ended up with some true super stars. But that was a three month investment that could have failed. I'd rather hire someone who already has the skills I need.

Whether you're hiring 1 person or 100, you're still looking for reasons to cull them.

I think this reveals some of the root of the problem. The interviewers have no incentive for hiring good or great people ("superstars"), but absolutely cannot let crappy applicants inside, under no circumstances, under the risk of losing their jobs.

So they just don't care if you are good at what you do, if you can learn fast, etc -- all they care if whether you are not shit and can certainly fulfill the specific requirements for the job they were instructed to fulfill.

How to change this? Well, one way would be to get people interested in the applicant's abilities and long term capacity and commitment. It's good to find this kind of people inside a company which are not in the higher ups. Another alternative would be to attach the long term success of the applicant to the ones responsible for hiring somehow. Those are all very difficult problems, but ones that can be managed with good will and commitment from the guys inside the company.

"Not shit" is the way we get rid of 90% of people. "Superstar" is how we hire from the remaining.

We absolutely cannot bring in someone crap. Our job is to hire, so if we're hiring crap people, we're crap at our job.

See my comments elsewhere in this thread regarding learning fast, but basically I'm going to hire someone who can learn fast. But primarily I'm going to hire someone who doesn't need to learn the 'right now' skill.

I'd love to see a system that tied each of my hire's success to my success. It happens for the first three months: "Hey lessnonymous: this guy is brilliant! Good job!".

But I want to see a system where each pay-rise or promotion the engineer ever gets is recorded against my success too.

"We see your hires got a salary increase of 10% on average. Here's your 10% increase." (It would need to be waaaay more complex than that to look at churn, promotions, firings etc.)

There is the option of NOT changing it but switching to a better job than tech

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