Why hunting for unicorns is bullshit | Hacker News Reader

Why hunting for unicorns is bullshit

blog.landing.jobs

28 pointspauloteixeira14 comments

"Design a challenge to evaluate the selected candidates’ skills. Good professionals love challenges. If the candidate refuses to do a challenge, consider this a red flag about their future commitment."

To me a bigger red flag is if someone has the time and desperation to put up with this kind of bullshit. Good professionals love money and respect.

Edit: IMHO the "unicorn" is someone who is both competent and spineless, which to me sounds like the candidate this article is asking you to find.

> both competent and spineless

In 90% of the positions I have ever been in, an employer has needed/wanted just that.

> To me a bigger red flag is if someone has the time and desperation to put up with this kind of bullshit. Good professionals love money and respect.

Ouch, the cynicism here is astounding. Speaking for myself, I would love to delve into a challenge, like, cracking a small program [1], even if it gets me nothing because this, in itself, is so exciting.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8331381

I think that we're talking about two different things.

This challenge seems great to get some, as the link refers to "part-time CS student" employees.

I read the original article as aimed at an employer who is trying to find an alternative to just seeking out "miracle" employees, for these people part timers with no experience are probably not what they need.

If you need someone with experience who's likely already working in the field, taking time and concentration energy away from current work/personal projects/family/life is a much harder sell.

I like a challenge as much as the next guy, but I'm only willing to undertake them to a certain point -- unless it is incredibly interesting I won't put more than an hour into it. It might be useful as an applicant filter, but you can't entice great engineers away from their current jobs by throwing barriers in their way.

"After selecting a winner in the challenge phase, try to work with the candidate in a small project before hiring him. Pay for the hours spent on the project, of course!"

It would be difficult to find a winning candidate who is unemployed, or who is employed and has the bandwidth to come in during office hours and work on a project with your team. That being said, performance on a paid "evening hours" consulting project would be a very good hiring metric that I think more companies should use.

> It would be difficult to find a winning candidate who is unemployed, or who is employed and has the bandwidth to come in during office hours and work on a project with your team.

Yes - please stop asking candidates to do this. I mean it's great that this particular company will offer to pay you for your time - but I've seen some companies require a candidate to come in and work for free for a day.

The last job application I was asked to take a 3 hour phone interview back-to-back (remote job). It just seems disrespectful that you would ask someone to be on the phone for half the day just for the possibility that they might get the job. I don't know about you guys - but if I disappeared for 3 hours from my job someone might be a little annoyed. I'm not saying to interview people - but break it out into smaller chunks throughout the week. Could I have asked this company to do that? Probably - but there were other red flags that suggested I stay away.

> It just seems disrespectful that you would ask someone to be on the phone for half the day just for the possibility that they might get the job.

The vast majority of jobs require coming in for a half-day or day of interviews for the possibility of getting a job. I agree with your point about doing projects for free but a block of interviews is pretty normal. If they're by phone anyway, sure they could be spread out but most companies will have at least some interviews in-person.

These processes are inconsistent. The company can be picky but so can the candidate if they are good. More often than not, companies are approaching the good software engineers to work for them and not the other way around.

You end up with this bizarre recruiting process, which I have seen many times, where some company approaches me about working for them because I am one of the best and most experienced in my field, and once I agree to talk to them they treat me like some idiot developer who rolled in off the street. The idea that they would waste a bunch of my time "challenging" me, paid or not, is just bizarre.

I can see it for developers with little experience. But no sane person wants to build a team with nothing but inexperienced developers which means you need to learn how to recruit highly skilled software engineers. The outlined process is a recipe for annoying them.

I thought the whole point of the term "unicorn" was to indicate that you are referring to a class of employees/companies who just plain do not exist, but are nonetheless the objects of immense amounts of fantasizing.

It was, but the problem is that the term has been picked up by clueless masses who are unable to realize that searching for a unicorn is by definition a doomed process, much like how "Born in the U.S.A." is now obliviously played at rallies by political candidates to clueless to realize it's a song about how ordinary people get screwed over by politicians.

It's a buzzword shift. You can probably just ignore anyone who says it.

I'm not sure exactly what it's replacing, because those words are equally meaningless. As Humpty Dumpty would put it, it means exactly what the speaker wants it to mean, no more, no less. Just add it to the list:

  - *unicorn*
  - rockstar
  - ninja
  - diamond
  - 10X
  - 6-sigma
  - Jedi
  - guru
  - wizard
  - unobtainium
  ...

Excessive focus on supernatural employees reveals that the company, for lack of a better term, fervently believes in magic. By hiring the chosen one, as revealed by the hidden UV-fluorescent birthmark and 10 trials of worthiness, the company will fulfill the founders' prophecy, defeat the competitors, and pay out on all the options. And everyone lives happily ever after.

The article this industry needs is one on how to build an above-median team from near-median employees without wasting any time on bullshit HR fantasies.

> Excessive focus on supernatural employees reveals that the company, for lack of a better term, fervently believes in magic. By hiring the chosen one, as revealed by the hidden UV-fluorescent birthmark and 10 trials of worthiness, the company will fulfill the founders' prophecy, defeat the competitors, and pay out on all the options. And everyone lives happily ever after.

I vote that every time we meet anyone who talks as if they think this way, we take out our smartphones and call up the My Little Pony song on YouTube until they learn to stop that shit.

Great, glad we can agree. Now let's stop talking about them completely.

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