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Comment by sker | Hacker News Reader

One thing to note is that he was hired by one of the co-founders. He would have never made it through HR or a middle manager.

Over the 7 years I've been working as a software developer, I've had many similar experiences. Not once have I been even close to get a project when talking to HR or middle managers. Every project I've landed was because I talked to the technical people in charge or to the owner of the company, even without the necessary credentials.

Middle managers and HR will always apply the "no one got fired for buying IBM" technique to people. CEOs and owners are far more likely to take a chance on you.

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This is not necessarily a good thing. As a "middle manager" I had to ditch 80% of all the developers my bosses and company founders had hired before me because they were pretty much incompetent. I found exactly one "diamond in the rough" amongst the people they hired. (And by "rough" I mean the guy landed himself in jail twice while he worked here...).

We could function with a third of the head count in competent people. And by function I mean be more productive, make better products and have more fun doing it.

Taking a chance, sure, but in my experience CEOs and founders are not particularly great at hiring. Even technical founders are often too young and inexperienced to get it right.

Also, if they hire middle managers and HR people that only play it safe, that is pretty much part of the same pattern.

This is one of the greatest advantages startups have over "regular" businesses. They have access to a large talent pool that the regulars have no way of reaching. Its like reaching out and pulling in talent from another dimension while the bigcos fight over the only talent they can "see".

This is the key - a company this size is going to probably be able to review every applicant. A company like HireArt, which is focused on the hiring process (and asking questions of applicants by design, it seems), will probably eat their own dog food at least in terms of the hiring process.

This guy mentions his background, but does not mention what the requirements were for the job. Customer service experience? I'd say retail and waiting tables give you the customer service side of things in most cases, and you just need to learn about the company's product and how users use the product.

This seems like an ad for a method of hiring without focusing on resumes, which I also do support 100% as a practice.

Bingo, ding ding ding. This is true of almost any business process. Large companies have large problems, hiring is but one of them. As soon as a problem exceeds the ability of one person or small team to handle, a process must be implemented. And humans are generally very poor and creating effective large-scale processes. See All Of Enterprise Software.

Quality = Process Control = Effective Management. Large companies fail at quality because they degrade on the other 2. This includes hiring. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming needs a comeback in the western world!

Large companies can get these startup benefits as long as they have good truth-based management practices, which enable good business process control, and enable high quality results. But Western management is about individual reward/punishment and independence, which creates human-limited processes, which creates poor quality throughout the business. Hence the poor hiring decisions, and everything spirals in a vicious cycle until we get the top-down idiocy that is the traditional American corporation.

If you run a company—even a startup—don't go down that road. Learn about Deming, learn psychology and the science behind management, build consistency of purpose and continuous improvement, and put your business on a road to self-reinforced success instead of fighting the spiral of death.

It's very difficult to achieve what you mentioned, though I agree with you. Organization that can easily scale and keep itself stay at organic growth status? I don't see any example existing yet. Do you have some cases like this to share?

We also haven't put a man on mars, but we know almost exactly how we might do it.

There are a lot of barriers to this, most of them cultural and influential. Otherwise it is not difficult, just difficult to change our essential belifs about people and how they operate in a system, instead of as flawed individuals whom we can game and blame for our own advantage.

For companies who do this, the place to look would be Japanese companies influenced by Deming. In tech, many companies take on some of these ideas, but I haven't seen many that do all of them well. Also look at the Deming prize, which was given to companies who used his methods successfully: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deming_Prize

This article sums up my thoughts on the matter: http://www.examiner.com/article/what-happened-to-the-deming-...

Thank you for your information. It seems we come from different perspectives but with similar conclusions, which is actually people perceive the same thing from slightly different angles. The last place I updated my theory regarding organization is complexity theory. If you are interested to have a look at it, this article on Wiki could be a good start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity_theory_and_organizat.... Human beings are interesting creatures. Hope a different way for understanding provides something new to think of. I guess the evolution of organization in terms of how it is structured is closely connected with how people perceive the world and their value system. While this part keeps changing, there could be structures we are not able to imagine now. So the attributes of the fundamental elements, people, of an organization seem to be the thing to limit what an organization can achieve, just like you mentioned. Thanks for the discussion. I think I just got new ideas on this topic through the discussion.

Cheers! Thank you as well for the thoughts.

I've been working in tech for 20 years. The key to getting decent gigs/clients is to avoid tournament situations (i.e. a conventional job application/interview process).

Exactly.

Conventional application/review processes can easily turn into "beauty contests": hiring decisions made primarily (or even solely) on the basis of who looks good on paper, who gives a good interview, or who comes across as the most likable and personable on the day of their interview.

Beauty contests have spotty track records for predicting on-the-job performance, but they're often the norm.

How else should one predict on-the-job performance if not the conventional application/review process?

Ex coworkers. Last time I got a job traditionally and walked in cold to a job where I didn't know anyone there was in 1994 or 1995 don't remember exactly. Ever since then its all been "Yeah (fill in the blank) who worked with you at (fill in the blank) mentioned your name and the work you did with (fill in the blank) so I figured I'd give you a call and ..."

I predict I'd be freaked out to walk into a new job and not know anyone. I haven't done that in twenty years. I think I'd be lonely for awhile? I have some respect for people who do that, its gotta be very stressful.

Even noobs can kind of apply this via school classmates and to a much more limited extent physical meatspace users group meetings. Locally a makerspace is slowly bootstrapping itself and once its further along, I'll join and meet some interesting people soon (the pioneers of the group only meet while I'm busy at work, so occasional mailing list interaction is possible, although not in person).

One hardware job interview a long time ago involved pulling circuit boards of stuff I designed and built at home out of my suit pockets during the interview. The HR lady was stunned, and I was also stunned to hear that she was stunned. Admittedly I was bringing analog to a digital gunfight but still... they're looking for a hardware dude, and I got interviewed because I know a guy, but none of the guys you selected by yourselves personally own a soldering iron, and you're hiring for a HARDWARE guy? If HR screws up that badly, which happens often enough, if you can find any way at all to get in, you'll basically be the only candidate. There are probably ways for HR to do this with software, maybe HR ends up only providing java candidates but they actually need a Ruby guy and you're a Ruby guy and via an old friend you get interviewed, well, I guess you win.

I can't imagine going to work somewhere I do already know people. In the first 9.5 years of my career, spent at a defense contractor, literally everyone I worked with is either still there or retired. Many have not even moved offices since my original program moved to its current location 9 years ago.

So moral is networking.

The definition of networking is nebulous. Linkedin spam isn't going to do it. A salesguy where I work now, was a salesguy at our mutual previous employer, and I made his customer happy, which made his commission check happy, which makes him remember me favorably, which is how he ended up a reference on my custom resume for my current employer. Doesn't mean we're personally networked or linked or even rise to the level of acquaintance, but I do have at least some kind of reputation. I had a lot of people on the inside like that for my current job.

In a way, this makes it easier to get a job at a big company after you're been around awhile. At a tiny startup, its statistically likely no one would know me... at a local 500 person office, I am certain to know at least five current employees, even if by nothing more than reputation.

HR people usually know their dept policies are dumb as a group, but are individually smart enough to get excited for a "real" reference from a current employee.

...and if you solve this one be sure to write it up and let us know won't you.

For what it's worth in my experience on both sides of the interview panel you've basically made an 80-90% decision on a candidate in less than 5 minutes (probably less than 1 in most cases). Everything that follows is gathering information to support that decision and maybe, just maybe push on that 10-20%.

+1 even though you forgot the </sarcasm> tag.

I wonder if this can be applied to the dating world as well...

Dating coworkers / ex-coworkers? My wife and I worked together although by the time we were seriously dating we both had moved in to other jobs.

Another option is the obvious getting set up blind date style.

The coworker thing seems to work very well if everyone involved can keep drama out of the workplace, which is pretty easy if its actually ex- coworkers not current coworkers. The "set up by friends" thing seems to work only slightly better than "met at a bar".

Probably.

But it's hard to find the people, who don't participate in the "Dating-Tournament".

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