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Comment by sergiosgc | Hacker News Reader

I know I am not going to change your modus operandi, but I must publicly point out that I fully, absolutely, disagree with how you execute your hiring. If you were working for me, you'd soon be working for someone else.

Your approach is a minimal-effort Pareto principle based hiring. By eschewing any and all candidate information sources other than the market leader professional social network, you get access to a pool of 80% of the candidates with minimal effort. For you, it's great. For your company, it's passable. For the candidates, it's disgusting.

I know many professionals, top of their class, that do not maintain their LinkedIn profile. Some don't even have one (usually out of principle). You absentmindedly dismiss these 95th percentile professionals in the "junior, shady or clueless" category. It reeks of profiling, smells like laziness and must be called out as bad practice.

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> For you, it's great. For your company, it's passable. For the candidates, it's disgusting.

Not the OP and playing a bit of devil's advocate but why do I care what's best for candidates? If I'm able to hire the people I need then I don't really care if there's a group of developers that I'll never find.

That's a choice you make when you take your principled stand.

It's not central to the argument, because the OP's position is obviously suboptimal for the company. However, yours is an interesting view, and a point in my argument that does require clarification.

Current good management practices envision managing as optimizing company behavior for all company stakeholders. In past times, management optimized for shareholder profit. Optimizing for shareholder profit alone has been repeatedly proven not sustainable. It usually leads to very spectacular failures, which themselves cause the public notion that all management is still shareholder-oriented. Not all companies are managed like this. Successful ones manage their relationship with all stakeholders. It is in this view that caring for candidates is important.

In this view, in order to maximize long term profit, you should aim to create positive effects on every individual or organization that somehow interfaces with your company. This is obviously theoretical, and impractical. Sometimes it is just not possible, and anyhow you have to give higher importance to central stakeholders (shareholders, customers, employees). However, when the cost is not too high, you should strive for positive impacts.

In hiring, the cost of reviewing non-standard resumes is not relevant. The cost of causing a bad impression on the random important candidate that you decline, or the cost of missing an excellent hire, is relevant. The OP's position is fundamentally wrong.

Unfortunately, the OP's position is held, in varying forms, by many in this industry. How many have said they won't hire someone without a Github profile? Without Open Source contributions? Without a direct personal network connection? If they spent too long at $BIG_STODGY_COMPANY? I have come to the conclusion that most companies don't give a shit about candidates as long as they are getting enough. Hell, even some companies that bitch and moan about "talent shortages" seem to have their own Pareto principle bullshit getting in their way.

Well yes, all of those criteria are bad business, if taken as absolutes. They can all be factors, for sure. But as absolute requirements, they just weed out good candidates.

> I have come to the conclusion that most companies don't give a shit about candidates as long as they are getting enough. Hell, even some companies that bitch and moan about "talent shortages" seem to have their own Pareto principle bullshit getting in their way.

It sounds like a lot of the companies you've encountered have embraced irrational business practices. That can definitely happen. I'm not convinced it's the norm, though. And I'm sure that it shouldn't be.

Lets not forget about the companies who create incredibly lengthy "tests" to test their potential hires.

I don't mind short coding examples. Thats cool. However when a company asks for web applications... come on. Not everyone is jobless and has time to jump through that many hoops.

What am I asking for? Learn how to identify talent... have people master that skill. The insecurity about "would this guy be good?" lets make him/her jump through a billion hoops just to work here is irritating.

If I'm able to hire the people I need then I don't really care if there's a group of developers that I'll never find.

Homogenising for efficiency carries long term risk. If you don't have several primary sources for hiring, then not only are you artificially narrowing your available pool, but you are also introducing a single point of failure. To borrow a phrase, if something goes badly wrong, Linkedin can remain irrational for longer than you can remain solvent.

No, at different levels it is the approach everybody takes. The concept of search cost[1] always existed in economy. You can think that an answer to your question is in some obscure web site but if that web site is in the #1000 position in Google, very few people will find it.

Regarding LinkedIn, I think if you want to increase the probability of being hired in US (and other countries where LinkedIn is popular) you must be there. You can argue against it like I argue about needing to have a Skype, or a PayPal account to receive payments: everybody is there, network effects, etc.

- [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_cost

But it's not a binary choice between a) excluding everyone without LinkedIn and b) spending an infinite amount on search. Surely, there are affordable ways to evaluate engineering candidates other than their LinkedIn profiles. For example, looking at resumes alone is often sufficient to exclude 90% of applicants, simply because 90% of applicants list no relevant skills or experience.

I agree and I experienced some few exceptions to seldo thinking. For example, friends who are incredible capable and extremely focused on their field. It works for them because they are known from conferences and specific software groups.

I'm shocked to learn that having a LinkedIn profile is a requirement for working at npm, Inc. (where seldo works).

That is contrary to the stereotype I have of organizations like that.

Hiring managers need to filter out somehow. I know a guy who gives explicit - but not difficult - instructions for applicants. Anything not following the instructions gets circular filed. Another silicon valley exec was famous here, recently, for trashing applicants who like country music.

Funny, I've seen the argument made that developers target iOS first or sometimes exclusively because you make way more money there then on Android and it's much easier to maintain vs the huge ecosystem that is Andriod. By doing that you're screwing over an even large percentage of people, in this case users, but rarely have I heard anyone here complain nearly as much about it. How is this much different?

Not working for people who chose a specific brand of operating system cannot be reasonably called 'screwing over' those people, whichever that OS is, especially if those people won't pay for the work.

Luckily for him, he's working for himself. I can find that out with a couple of Google queries and a LinkedIn profile.

But I have no idea whether you work for yourself, for someone else, or whether you're a hiring manager.

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