Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

sytelus

You can do much more easier, automated filtering: Ask candidate to submit link to any of the followings:

1. Github a/c

2. StackOverflow a/c

3. Their blog

4. Anything they made online

If candidate fails to submit link for any of above then just don't interview them. I would guesstimate this simple check filters out 70% of the junk resume and probably 20% of the good resumes. It can scale like crazy and expanded even more (for example, use APIs to get their profile information and rank resumes).

View on HN

* 20+ years of development experience 15 of those professionally * published author of various books * worked in systems that most startups would shit their pants with the requirements * some of the big name companies have tried to poach me based on the products I've worked * used professionally: C, C++, F#, C#, Ruby(Rails), Swift, Obj-C, Kotlin, Haskell, Scala

I would never be called based on that criteria as I have no inclination to spend my free time doing stupid shit online for hipster new developers that think GitHub is the end-all.

ps: to be fair, I probably wouldn't want to work in a company that has this mentality, so maybe that really does work

So you're saying that the people who spend their free time developing projects that you most probably use in some form or another are doing “stupid shit”. I wouldn't hire you either.

No, I mean stupid shit for people that think looking at a GitHub page is all they need to know about a developer. I'm happy folks work on Open Source software and Github has helped a lot of these projects with visibility and infrastructure, but as the gp basically stated: "you either have a web presence or we don't interview you", then yeah, I don't care about that and having been on the interviewing side a lot, 95% of the github links in resumes (and yes, I check them) are crap and I can honestly said, done so they would have something to show and not because it had any real value (sorta like the 4043th JS framework, you do it because it brings you a bit of status, not because you are actually solving a problem or improving on a solution)

Well he did say that it would reject a fairly high amount of good candidates, but, given your attitude, I'd say it would get this one right.

Not sure why you've latched onto GitHub, he said it could be any one of the four. The principle is obviously just about demonstrating work that you've actually done. I'm pretty sure that's reasonable and not cause to go off on hipsters. Yes, there would be some qualified candidates that would not be able to show those things for various reasons, and that is probably the reason for the high estimate of false negatives, but presumably the decision-makers would be permitted to use common sense to make exceptions.

true that, no one has time to sit there all day and answer questions on StackOverflow to get a top rating. The checklist is a best way to weed out so many great developers.

I personally know many people who have similar profile as you. They are all very smart and absolutely worth interviewing but when you are designing a probabilistic system to classify something at scale (think 1000+ resumes flowing in every week), things needs to be automated, fast and there are going to be false negatives. You should always make data driven decision for your scenario, for example, collect resumes of all people who are working out great for your company and extract patterns from their resumes.

However there is another more stronger counterpoint that I've argued with people around me. As developera pretty much all of us have used StackOverflow to get answers, used someone's blog to learn something or looked in to GitHub repo for some code. It just feels natural and ethically responsible to me that we also return back something to the community from which we consuming so much. People who are sweating out these content without any expectations of financial gains or even fame are obviously sacrificing their free time to help others. Why can't you return the favor? The lack of any evidence of your contribution to community may not reflect deficiency in your skill set but it does put a question mark on self-initiatives that you might take in your job or your willingness to help your colleagues even if it doesn't benefit you or your drive to make others become better from your learnings. After certain stage in career, skill sets are given and what matters is your ability to multiply your impact by leveraging and empowering others. Your participation and contributions to community are good indicators in this area, however false negatives and edge cases always exists.

Anything with 20% false negatives is fine if you expect to have five or more hireable people apply every time you advertise. But if you are in a situation where you might get 200 people applying and perhaps one or sometimes two are actually worth hiring, a 20% false negative is crippling.

This point does not get addressed nearly enough. Aline (I think?) mentioned elsewhere in the thread that much of the conventional wisdom on hiring has come from Google and other companies with deep hiring pipelines. Google can afford high false positive rates because their pipeline still generates sufficient numbers of hires in spite of it. This fact seems to be lost on most of the small companies trying to cargo-cult their hiring practices.

Also I would ask them to create it as a pull request on Github push it to a branch in a private repo. Another 10% of candidates gone. (There might be overlap with the guys who don't have Github presence and anything online but you get my point.)

If candidate fails to submit link for any of above then just don't interview them.

Since when has every person worth hiring had their own blog?

Edit: sorry, your use of "any" was ambiguous, I read it as "if missing any of the above".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com