Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

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However, I don't think there's a conclusion to be made about the actual method used here. I suspect that it worked because it was different, not because it carried a fundamentally strong signal. If everyone did this, project descriptions would be gamed even more than resumes—it would select for people who prepared for the selection process² more than anything else.

I find myself almost irresistably drawn towards the conclusion that people will game the hiring process, because it is a game. It has winners and losers. Everybody is trying to make themselves look better than everybody else, even to the point of making themselves look better than they really are: Job candidates, employers, internal and external recruiters, everybody who is selling a hiring product, etc. Everybody is trying to emphasize their positives and hide their negatives, while searching for the negatives of the others.

A drawback to "do your own thing" is that it is enormously inefficient for candidates, and the results may turn out to be based on the luck of a particular candidate guessing a particular employer's game is, or being generally better at games.

I don't know a solution. What strikes me is that as broken as the system seems, we still manage to hire good people most of the time.

The process being broken isn't a deal-breaker for companies, which can still hire from the 90% that can deal with the broken system. It's a deal-breaker for the 10% that are bad at playing the game / jumping hoops / resume writing / interviews, because they can't get a job.

It's not so rosy for companies. The situation is akin to the one in large companies and bureaucracies where all numbers and estimates in all communications become "padded" and largely fictionalized -- precisely because "everyone is doing it." In such broken games, signals lose their meaning, and everyone ultimately loses.

In academia, someone observed this: "The revolutionary idea of one generation becomes just the stuff you say to get tenure in the next generation."

It's also a golden opportunity for anybody able to hire those 10%.

Maybe most companies shouldn't be different. But there's plenty of value in not being like everybody else.

Yup -- I'm excited for the Starfighter CTF by patio11, tptacek, et al.

Except many of those companies are simultaneously bitching about "lack of talent".

I am biased, but I think that if it was possible in America to graduate with virtually zero student debt and 20-24 months of industry experience in a five-year bachelor's program, despite having little to no savings prior to starting college, leading software companies wouldn't need to import developers and engineers on H1Bs and TNs. Immigration lawyers are expensive, you know.

> I don't know a solution. What strikes me is that as broken as the system seems, we still manage to hire good people most of the time.

Interestingly, the simplest conclusion would be that everyone is good, most of the time. So if we throw hiring out the windows and pick employee randomly, we might still get to the same result.

Which actually isn't too outrageous, since if we have 10% unemployment, wouldn't it mean 90% of people (or more, actually) have to be value added?

Worked for the Ancient Greeks! "Pick someone at random for the job" was the actual, original meaning of "democracy." Elections are a weak imitation.

True, but the costs (both direct and ancillary) of making a bad hire are so high that anything we can do avoid making the wrong hire would be worthwhile.

You might be right that randomly picking candidates might be just as efficient, but I can't imagine anyone taking that risk.

> True, but the costs (both direct and ancillary) of making a bad hire are so high that anything we can do avoid making the wrong hire would be worthwhile.

That's a load of highly-enriched equine fertilizer. I have had this discussion here before. I asked for information. I didn't get much. Some worst-case hypotheticals that, to my knowledge, have never happened anywhere. A buttload of management failures surrounding bad hires where management was responsible for the vast majority of the costs, not the hire. A couple legitimate bad hires where the costs were significant, but not in the same ballpark as people like you parrot.

Also ignored in this conversation: what is the cost of keeping your req open? How much money are you losing, directly or indirectly, by not having someone in that role? Why do you think someone can't grow into the role?

I actually agree that the biggest cost of a bad employee is a management failure to either create an environment that the employee can thrive or is too "nice" to confront reality and get rid of them quickly. I can't speak to your experiences and I never said bad hires were costly due to the employee vs. Management screwups. The simple reality is that every day a bad hire is in place, is a day that a much more productive employee is not in place, which costs could be astronomical.

The bottom line is that "slow to hire and fast to fire" as difficult as it is, is very sound advice!

Without knowing you and jumping to a conclusion based on your comment, I assume you don't appreciate that employee boss relationships are adversarial by nature and there is often considerations management makes that might seem bad but are really a product of their understanding of whats possible and realistic within limiting circumstances...

I used to complain with my friends about all the things we would change in our boss and the company we worked for and now after many years I realize that at the time I had no flipping clue about anything.

What are the costs associated with a bad hire? Is there a way to minimize the potential damage and allow for a wider net to cast?

Could the on boarding process be more akin to a mentor-apprentice relationship and utilize open source as the avenue, with the burden of work placed on the apprentice. Your company has both closed and open source projects that many of your engineer's contribute to and manage. An apprentice level candidate works on and applies a patch with the feedback from the mentor level engineers. At some sufficient level of acceptance based on performance the apprentice is brought in for a culture fit type interview and potentially offered a position.

From the view of the apprentice this may seem like MORE work then writing resumes and prepping for technical interviews. But from my point of view as an apprentice I'd be learning skills that seem more useful than gaming resumes, screening and technical interviews, and adding to my portfolio that may never get glanced at. Skills like communication and coordination with a team, Real world coding experience and pushing to production. From the viewpoint of the mentor, I see candidates that have already been introduced to the internal workflow and show the communication necessary to work with my engineering team.

I think the European practice of having a candidate on a 3 month evaluation period(when it is easy to fire) and then having a job security afterwards seems a reasonable balance between employer and employee needs.

It is hard to pull wool over someone's eyes for 3 months especially in a results oriented field like programming.

Bad hires are certainly a concern. I think this is the reason why people buy screening products such as personality tests. Paying $100 for a screening test that promises to prevent the $100k cost of a bad hire seems like a pretty good bargain. It reminds me of Pascal's Wager, where you give a little bit to the church in order to avoid the infinite risk of hell.

The test seemingly has to be 0.1% effective, to pay for itself. The thing that's hard to imagine is that the test is even less than 0.1% effective, because it's a scam. This is also how things are sold like a $5 extended warranty for a flash drive.

And, as always, lets pretend false positives do not exist.

Do you know what's even more expensive than a bad hire? It's letting an extraordinary hire go away because your snake-oil test did not work. But that loss won't make onto a spreadsheet, then, who cares?

Why do you say that? In the USA employment is at will and is for the first two years in the UK.

Could you actually quantify these costs a good agency will ofter refunds if a candidate is let go shortly after hiring.

Would that completely backfire once everyone knows the selection process is random?

It's just a thought experiment, random definitely doesn't work since specialization does exist. But otherwise, what do you think would backfire?

The funny part is, in good old game theory fashion, the prime motivator for hiding your negatives and trumping up your positives is everyone else is doing it, so you must as well just to keep up.

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