How Coursera Competes for the Best Talent | Hacker News Reader

How Coursera Competes for the Best Talent

firstround.com

81 pointshenrik_w31 comments

So this guy invites people to interviews by saying: “You know what, I've really enjoyed this conversation. Is there any chance you have a couple hours in the next few days to come in and meet a few people on the team?”. Then, as stated under "PHASE 3", the process is not staying for a couple hours and meeting a few people on the team, but actually an interview lasting at least 50 minutes with hiring manager, a 90 minute session working on a problem, then a talk about culture, another technical interview and finally an interview about fit.

This might be an effective way to get people to accept the invitation, but it doesn't seem totally honest.

Yeah, I'd be pretty annoyed if I thought I was going to get a social introduction and a tour around an office and then unexpectedly had to do a full technical interview.

After the first time it happens, you know any invite to an office is a full on interview if it's related to a position.

If you're alone with a girl, it's a date.

"Coming to meet the team" is no different. You might expect a lighter grilling than if you initiated it.

"If you're alone with a girl, it's a date."

No, it is not. When you get older you will learn that women are people, just like you, and sometimes people just want to talk. Don't worry. Just talk to her like she was your sister or mother. After a while, it will become natural.

Assume a generous interpretation of lordnacho's comment.

In the real world, if you ask a girl you've been flirting with to get coffee together it's a date—even if you don't actually use the word "date."

Similarly, if an employer asks you to come meet a few people at the office, it's an interview—even if they didn't use the word "interview."

The point is that meeting a few people can be an "interview", which is really different than a hardcore structured technical interview.

In this analogy, its like showing up to that coffee and immediately start trying to make out with the person. Yeah, we both knew that might be where this is going, but that's not how the game was set up at this point.

>No, it is not. When you get older you will learn that women are people, just like you, and sometimes people just want to talk. Don't worry. Just talk to her like she was your sister or mother. After a while, it will become natural.

Of course I assume it isn't your sister or mother, or someone you can't date for whatever reason (you're married, she's married, seeing someone, homosexual, and so forth).

The fact is if you're in such a situation, there's always this question hanging over it. You (the two of you) can turn it to friendship if that's what you're after, but there's always this possibility, and you might as well acknowledge it and not question whether the situation allows it to become something else.

I don't think I've ever been misunderstood in such situations.

Anyway, the point is it's quite clear when you're being courted for a job. You might expect it to be slightly different when the proposer is not the usual one (if a girl asks you out, is it different? Yes.) Maybe slightly fewer of the trivial coding type questions.

There's no way a competent hiring manager would ask someone to come in for a "couple of hours" to meet the team, and then ambush them with a full-on technical interview. This would not lead to a successful outcome.

I think from the context of the entire article, you need to read between the lines and assume that it was obvious to both the candidate and the hiring manager that the next step was a full technical interview. The hiring manager was simply wording it in a way that sounded less intimidating.

Actually, this exact thing happened to me. I was asked to come in for a couple of hours to meet the team and see the office. When I arrived I was taken to a room where I was interviewed for 3 hours, by 3 different interview teams. Two of them were whiteboard interviews, then an interview with management.

Needless to say I rejected the offer, I was so unimpressed with the hiring process. Disgusted actually.

Did the disgust manifest after, or during, the 3 hour process? Curious to know whether there were other factors in play (perhaps curiosity?) that made you stay throughout the ordeal.

Afterwards. I was basically in shock at the start of it..

Wow, that's quite the misrepresentation. I can imagine it left a bad taste in the mouth.

Did you get the impression this was a deliberate strategy, or just an oversight?

That sucks.

I recently did some interviews which were described as "can you come meet with our engineering team in more depth". Which I read (correctly) as "technical interviews", but the description was certainly a bit coy.

I think people tend to use euphemistic language to try to preserve a "we're all buddies here" atmosphere, and out of sense of discomfort with the idea of interviewing.

(Though it's not such a huge deal, to me -- any time I'm talking to someone, if we're considering working together, it's fair game to get into technical questions, IMO.)

It's hard to gauge te quality of advice in general in this article. These are the things that he thinks are important but in the end it's his intuition that probably drives most of his decision making process. Thus things that within his context might feed his subconsciousness with valid data end up being worthless to anyone else. You can't teach hard skills piecemeal. I'm sure getting mentored by this guy would improve ones skill in hiring but an arbitrary collection of probing questions are quite worthless. Unless one is being interviewed by him, of course :)

Taken out of context most of the advice sound questionable as rules of thumb -Especially "The right candidate owns the content of their job. If they're talking about a current project, you should be able to ask them any question related to it and get an answer. If their response is, “Oh someone else works on that part,” ... that's a huge red flag, Ciancutti says. You want to hire people who are so passionate about their work that they know and understand everything about it"

I could interpret that you only want to hire people whos current job is technically so undemanding that they have the time to figure out everything else in the system - or, even worse, who think they understand the whole system and gloss over the important details - these sort of guys can cause real damage in long term profitability as they gloss over important technical details.

There is a bunch of other 'only hire the hot people' type advice. Like “Are they enthusiastic? Excited? If they're unhappy where they are, that's a bad sign. They should be happy where they are.". But these people are also looking for another job, and part of that reason is probably because they don't like where they are. If they are happy where they are, then why would they move? You also filter out low affect / foreign / shy type people when you do this, when they can be some of the best engineers you can have.

With happy people, if your going offer them something market rate and they already make market rate, then moving is even less attractive. If they've worked at a start up for a few years, they probably know how the entire equity compensation game works and will probably ask for something more than your company is willing to part with. And the reason why is because it has to beat the EV of working at Google.

Actually, hiring people who are 'passionate' about the field would be a one way hire them with lower costs rather than people who are just very good in their chosen career. As a pathological example game programmers generally are not well paid because they are so eager to work in games that employers can use this as a leverage for lower pay.

An employee can still be very passionate about their career, but don't like specific things about their workplace. Like I can like living in a city, but not like the surprise loud noises that happen at 4am in my new apartment, and I cannot get the police to stop them. I still really hate where I live and want to move as a result, and it was a surprise, but I don't want to move out of my town.

If this works, then people are very gullible. It starts with fakery, as the email can't be plain that it is the start of a standard recruitment process, but says "...to tell you more about what we're up to" in a mock-casual way. But of course they'd never tell you something that isn't ready for public announcement because at that stage no you do not have a special relationship with the company and might even have a stronger relationship with a competitor.

Every company making cold calls to candidates pulls these sorts of tricks. If you want to make yourself stand out enormously, and seem incredibly different from every other company approaching candidates over email, LinkedIn, StackOverflow, etc, then something you could do is look into the candidate's public material enough that you can start by telling them the offer you want to make ($xxx,xxx), assuming there is a cultural fit.

For a lot of engineers there is a bucket load of the stuff out there. Tech talks on YouTube, even from the smallest local meetups these days. More code on github than you could get them to do in a thousand technical interviews. If they did a PhD, or even an honours dissertations, it is probably on the web and will tell you in great detail what they're interested in and how they went about solving a tough problem.

If your email started with the fact that you're interested in hiring them, here's the things you've already looked through, and so this is the offer you'd like to make if there's a cultural fit, that will make a candidate feel like you really have done your homework.

You say it's deceptive, but surely anyone who is contacted in this manner can read between the lines and see it is about recruitment - what other goal would the business have in mind?

And as for the suggestion of making an offer up front, I feel that is jumping the gun. I'm sure the business would already have a good idea of what figure to offer, but if you discuss that before anything else I see several scenarios playing out.

1. Candidate declines. A good outcome, quick and painless 2. Candidate accepts offer. Bad situation - do you really want a candidate that doesn't try to sell themself or get a better offer? 3. The conversation is hijacked by discussing the offer and terms rather than the position. This is not productive, and the candidate has all the leverage. May or may not end with an agreement 4. After more talks you decide the candidate is not a good fit. You retract the offer, and candidate leaves with a bitter impression of the business, feeling he was lured with an impressive offer.

I agree that the business could be (should be??) more upfront, however an immediate offer is not the way. Perhaps instead give a realistic ballpark and go from there.

I think a bunch of these tips have a bunch of 'filter out people who haven't interviewed much yet' flavor to them. Lets say someone interviews with 10 different places. The first few interviews they may make several mistakes such as be too negative about their previous work place, be too anxious, not seem enthusiastic enough in some area, not acting like this is the only place you want to work at, do not negotiate compensation in a sensitive manor or do badly in an interview question type. After these negative experiences, they will look up what they did wrong and if they did the interview again, probably do better after a few of these experiences.

Since interviews tend to have repeating forms of questions, by interview #8 vs interview #2, they will do much better, and they will pass most of these tips. The thing is although, they will perform identically on the actual job, so what are you actually filtering for?

I feel like 'tell me what you don't like about your previous work place' or the reverse 'what do you like the best about your workplace' feels like the new 'what is your greatest weakness' interview question. All your doing is filtering out for is some sort of quickly learned social inexperience.

To see how common the mistakes I mentioned are, go see here: http://workplace.stackexchange.com/

I think this is a more accurate way of thinking about hiring engineers: http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/

I have asked some similar questions as listed in the article in the OP, but my motivation is different from necessarily finding out something new - it is more to understand where the candidate is coming from, and to hear them out.

My goal as a hirer is to get a wholesome picture of the candidate, how his/her experiences have shaped him/her, and how sharp the person is. I don't even walk into the room for a candidate's in-person interview with a set of questions - I use cues in our conversation to get details that shapes what technical questions I ask. While I need to efficiently get a certain set of information about candidates, I also am respectful of their time and that they have options - I take a more humanistic approach to the interview process with candidates, which helps ease people in. I will tell candidates straight up that I don't care about perfection for [insert technical question], but that I want candidates to step through a problem and figure out a solid way to solve it (potentially with help), then retroactively optimize if they get hung up with trying to get the best solution off the bat due to typical interview pressures. In a way, solving the technical questions themselves are not the important part when I ask them (mostly) - it is the ability to walk through the problem and collaborate that I care about.

Easing in the candidate is important to me when I interview - I want the candidate to feel comfortable with the team, and be more willing to volunteer important information for our evaluation. You cannot evaluate a candidate properly otherwise, since you might miss important cues that affect the evaluation.

It's incomprehensible how no one seems to get that things that can be quickly learned or faked are bad interview questions.

I'm interested in the spreadsheet in the background. Anyone got info on that?

From the article:

"Before you speak with the person, get them a spreadsheet breaking down your offer, and be accurate. Show what percentage equity they can expect to get in the company. Show them your current valuation. Lay out the case for whatever your expected multiple is. If you think the company will 20x from $50 million in the next four years, don't just leave it at that, say why.

On the same spreadsheet, include information you have on the other companies they are considering. If they're looking at Dropbox or Snapchat or whatever it is, put the expected upside right next to yours. Build formulas into the spreadsheet so the candidate can play around with them and calculate for themselves what they think will happen at each place"

I'd be curious to see the specific numbers on that spreadsheet as well. Where is the data sourced from? Is it one engineer that conducted multiple interviews or do they pertain to statistical averages.

Does anybody happen to have a copy of the spreadsheet from the top photo?

I believe one of the key metrics for startup success is how efficient a company is at getting together a great team. There's such a balance between the time you need to spend here and the results you get, but if you maximize the results and score an awesome team, that'll make all of the difference in the world.

Mu first though was: How can Coursera afford 80 engineers!??? What's their business model?

why don't they send that first coding test to people to do at home

Because they might cheat or have someone else do it for them.

It's definitely happened before. When we caught the candidate and asked them why, they said, "I figured once I got in here I'd impress you with my personality even though I can't code."

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